The American Bar Association Shows a Spine

As this story in Harpers indicates, Chimperator Bush has received an unprecidented condemnation from the legal profession:

The LawyersYesterday meeting in San Francisco, the organized legal profession in the United States — the American Bar Association — took a firm stand on the president’s order, denouncing it as unlawful and calling upon Congress to override it. Of the more than five hundred delegates present and voting, one single delegate sided with the administration—the most devastating defeat ever suffered by any U.S. administration on what was essentially a vote of condemnation. Even the ABA committees that represent government lawyers involved in national security organizations and retired military officers led the charge in assailing the Bush order’s legality.

The Los Angeles Times reports: The first resolution dealt with an executive order adopted by the Bush Administration less than a month ago that Barbara Berger Opotowsky, president of the New York City Bar Association, said was clearly “inconsistent with U.S. obligations” under Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which requires humane treatment of detainees.

“The use of official cruelty has repeatedly been shown to be far from the best means of extracting truthful information,” said Opotowsky, who proposed the resolution. She noted that a U.S. Army field manual on intelligence interrogations issued last September barred the controversial interrogation techniques that will be available to the CIA. “Unfortunately, the executive order sets a lower standard for the CIA,” she said.

Memphis, Tenn., lawyer Albert Harvey, a retired Marine major general, also spoke in favor of the resolution, which passed by voice vote with only a single “nay” registering in the large meeting hall at the Moscone Center here. “When we put our troops in harm’s way, we expect other countries to treat our soldiers humanely. We can do no less,” said Harvey, who heads the ABA’s Standing Committee on Law and National Security. Like Opotowsky, Harvey quoted an article recently published by P.X. Kelley, a former Marine commandant, and Robert Turner, of the University’s Center on Law and National Security, who in the past have been supportive of the administration’s war on terror. In this instance, however, the duo wrote that they could not “in good conscience” support the executive order, saying it affords the CIA “carte blanche to engage in ‘willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse.’ “

By passing this resolution, the ABA has now committed itself and its resources to oppose the Bush Administration in court proceedings and in Congress. It also established an opinion within the profession that the executive order itself is unlawful. The ability of CIA officials and others to rely on the order in taking action and claim immunity based on that reliance has been strongly eroded by this action. And from this point, the view advanced by a small handful of “loyal Bushie” lawyers that the techniques themselves are lawful has to be understood as the perspective of of a tiny insular minority within the legal profession, a view which has now been forcefully denounced by the profession as a whole.

I continue to hope that Americans are finally waking up to what this regime has truly done. Soon the American Psychological Association may deliver a similar rebuke. For the full story see: http://harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90000899