Ok, so despite the claims of "dismantling the constitution" in response to Bush's aggressive surveillance (claims you seem to agree with), . . . the 4th Amendment is one you can do without?

Typical. So very typical of the liberal mind-set. Continually shifting values and principles.

The law can be blind to this, but no lawyer HAS to take any particular case. To use the Kevorkian example, is a lawyer who believes euthanasia is immoral, but legal, _obligated_ to offer to defend Kevorkian?

No way! Especially when there are others willing to do it. It might be an interesting intellectual exercise to contemplate the hypothetical where literally nobody was willing to defend the guy, then maybe it would be the right thing to do, but c'mon. Lawyers are people too, and come with opinions and prejudices of their own, and this absolutely effects which cases they take, which in turn says something about what kind of person they are.

I reiterate - Holder should in no way be criticized for taking the case. That's up to him. But the AG is a POLITICAL appointment, and so symbolism is important. I don't see the problem with judging the guy's record, which includes the cases he decided to take, when deciding whether or not you support the appointment.

From the interview with Major General Thomas Romig (TJAG for the Army 2001-2005) in Torturing Democracy (http://torturingdemocracy.org):

We trained our troops to treat everybody by the Geneva Convention because particularly when you capture somebody you don't know what kind of -- whether it's a lawful -- unlawful combatant -- a civilian. So you treat everybody consistent with the Geneva Convention, and -- and then consistent with that if you have an issue you do an Article 5 Tribunal and determine their status. So at the very minimum would have been Common Article 3 but really we treated people at a higher level than Common Article 3.

[...]

Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention lays out, basically says there is a due process minimum treatment level that all people should be treated. You don't abuse them, you don't mistreat them, you don't torture them, obviously. They call it Common Article 3 because it's found in all four of the Geneva Conventions and it talks about the conflicts of a non-international character. And it was an attempt by the drafters of the Geneva Convention to establish a baseline that nobody went below, because the Geneva Conventions are written by parties for international armed conflicts. So this level was to be underneath that as the absolute baseline.

And the US military had abided by that for 50 years?

Absolutely.

Later in interview on subject of proximity to September 11th:

The defense for some of these decisions is that one has to understand the times, that the US had been attacked, that the people in positions of responsibility were terrified that we were going to be attacked again. How do you react to that defense?

Well, first off, lawyers are the ones that need to be called in the eye of the storm and advising their clients on what the legal parameters are, and not allow as passion to get involved in providing -- in other words, don't politicize the legal advice. We've had these situations before after other events that have occurred to the United States, and we didn't throw everything out the window. There were a number of things that people were ready to jettison because these were different times. But that's a dangerous thing because, then you can, always have the excuse to jettison the law, the procedures, the due process, the conventions, whatever you want, when it's convenient.

There was a lot of fear, there was a lot of emotion, but leaders need to be the ones that don't allow the emotion to overtake their thought process and their decision-making. I saw some very senior people being very emotional and saying things about "taking the gloves off" and this kind of stuff -- are very dangerous things when they're talking around subordinates.

Because that opens the door for all sorts of -- if you tell a subordinate, "okay, it's time to take the gloves off", what are you communicating? You're communicating you can do things you weren't allowed to do before.

It was a very difficult time. That sort of replicated itself to a certain extent when I got on the job in 2001, because there were three out of the three general counsels that were very much in the mode of trying to reign back the JAGs. The one that wasn't was the Navy General Counsel, who took a much more, I thought, professional approach to his relationship with the -- with the uniform.

(the Navy General Counsel he was talking about was Mora).

Granted, the military lawyers, especially someone like Romig, who did Article 5 tribunals in Vietnam, might be more immune to the legal panic at that time. His comment about the general counsels shows a bit of that. But I think his comment at the beginning, that the lawyers need to be dispassionate and calm in the eye of the storm, and what happens if they are not, bears some thinking about.

The proper question to Eric Holder at the confirmation hearing about it would be how he would act in the next catastrophe, does he think he'd understand better what to do, and is he willing to, by example and in his public speech, inform the American people on what is the right thing to do under the rule of law.

I'm surprised by the numbers of people, GG included apparently, who believe that what a man said to the American public directly after 9/11 should simply be discounted and get a pass.

Bad idea, really. The test of any nation, of any principle, of any individual person comes when facing extreme fire -- and if you toss out your values, beliefs and humanity then, under those conditions, what good were they anyway? As AG, Holder may have to make decisions under similar conditions and I'd like to believe he wouldn't get caught up in some kind of mass hysteria of grief but follow clear principles of law.

I still don't know enough about Holder to know if he compromised his positions after 9/11, or if he always held those positions. But he certainly should be held accountable for them and should be asked, even now, for clarification on them.

I have long supported Obama and want to see an administration of the best and the brightest -- Holder is clearly among the brightest, but I'm still holding out to see if he's one of the best.