Restoring Justice: Was Stevens The Exception Or The Rule?
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With the dismissal of the Stevens’ indictment, AG Holder signaled loudly that there would be a return to evidentiary fundamentals within the DOJ. The lassez faire management stylings of Gonzales and Mukasey were to be a thing of the past.
But will they be? It certainly will not be instantaneous.
As Judge Sullivan made plain yesterday during Stevens’ hearing:
Recalling the Supreme Court description of a prosecution’s proper role — "not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done" — he drew a link between the Stevens debacle and the Justice Department’s most prominent recent abuse of power. The government’s obligations to the accused, he said, apply whether it’s "a public official, a private citizen or a Guantanamo Bay detainee." When the judge heard that Stevens’s attorneys sent three letters about prosecutorial misconduct to former attorney general Michael Mukasey but received no response, he called it "shocking — but not surprising."
The judge’s references to Mukasey and Gitmo pointed to the central irony in the botched prosecution of Stevens: The longest-serving Senate Republican had become an unlikely victim of the overreach of George W. Bush’s Justice Department.
Young lawyers who came of age in their DOJ practice during the last few years will have to unlearn improper machinations taught during the years of Bush/Cheney Justice. That will take time and work.
This is all of a piece: disrespect for the rule of law, contempt for limitations on the reaches of executive power, an ends justifies whatever means we can get away with mentality? It spreads from the top down. And rots everything beneath it as it lurches the nation forward in its fetid wake.
A former Stevens and Cheney aide was quoted leaving the courtroom, musing "Imagine what it’s like for people who don’t have any money." Indeed.
Imagine being held without access to counsel, without charge, and without recourse for years at a time.
Imagine being thrown in a cell as a "material witness" but not told why or for how long. Imagine being served a national security letter demanding library records for every patron who has ever graced your door, with no judicial oversight, no legal means of challenging such a broad sweeping intrusion.
Imagine using the nation’s NSA to spy on Americans illegally, secretly, while refusing to comply with the laws you are breaking in the process, and refusing to even acknowledge that the other equal branches of government have any right to ask you a question about your lawbreaking.
Imagine making secret laws regarding torture which violate the very principles your nation formerly championed being written into the Geneva Conventions, and then questioning the patriotism of anyone who dared say that you were wrong. Imagine cutting anyone out of the process who might have called your actions into question, including top-level lawyers at the DOJ and within the military’s JAG corps leadership. Imagine seeding various governmental agencies with people whose focus was to disrupt, change or dismantle that agency’s stated mission. And I could keep on going.
Can you imagine all of that happening at once by sheer coincidence? Because I can’t.
This sort of rot happens from the top down. And it requires the cooperation and silence along the way of the underlings who push things forward, the media who fail to muckrake about the dangers but instead become cheerleaders, enablers and sycophants, and the public who do not speak up about fundamental rights at the time the nation’s need for liberties is most at risk.
Was the Stevens trial the exception or the rule? I’m afraid we are all about to find out in the days ahead.
There are decent, honorable, hard-working people in government, who have tried throughout to not allow their department to be gutted from within, to uphold and maintain the rule of law, the mission of their particular agency, and the spirit in which the laws, rules, and regs were enacted by Congress. A Congress elected for and by the people, whose will was was flouted by the imperial ambitions of those who trumpeted the supremacy of the "unilateral executive."
We must restore justice, integrity and fairness to the legal system, through all the agencies of government and beyond. And more: the American public has to accept its own responsibility for oversight of those it elects.
Justice must be restored. For that to happen we have to know the whole truth about what has been done in our names.
Do you think Don Seigelman will benefit from this?