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AROUND THE WEB
Village Voice
June 18, 2002
James Ridgeway
A Small Cartel of Conservative Lawyers Rewrites the American Rule
Behind the Bush Administration's attack on civil rights in the name of war lurks the network of attorneys crafting laws for a new America.
Their hodgepodge of rules and statutes either now or soon will remake the nation, providing local police with sweeping federal authority, pushing the military and CIA directly into everyday domestic politics, and sanctioning indefinite detention without a charge or even a court hearing. Immigration policy already has disintegrated into the random search and arrest of anyone with dark skin. College students are to be singled out on the basis of ethnic background and required to carry special identity papers. In the rather near future, all citizens will be registered in a national database that includes criminal records, welfare payments, delinquent loans, credit card debt, and so on. Committees of local vigilantes are on the way to being sanctioned as legitimate militias assigned to root out terrorists, just as the Ku Klux Klan was after the Civil War.
These are not distant ideas out of George Orwell, but real laws and practices about to be put in place.
The underpinnings of this new America rest in the hands of a fairly small group of conservative lawyers in Washington...These intense, smart ideologues hail from the right-wing revolutionary movement, which believes it's past time to take America back from the crummy, weak- kneed liberal elites. Their moment has finally arrived...
...These...lawyers are at the vanguard of the legal attack, but they are scarcely by themselves. Rather, they're part of a loose, extensive team of conservative lawyers who have collected here over the years. Some have clerked for justices Scalia and Thomas. Some learn about liberals by working in their midst as "counter clerks."...Just about everybody seems to have some attachment to the Federalist Society and, when it comes to policy matters, the Heritage Foundation, whose links to the administration and conservative lawmakers are preeminent...
...Of all the Federalist members, perhaps the best known is Solicitor General Olson. An assistant attorney general under Reagan, Olson has popped up at just about every event in D.C. since then, defending convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, representing Starr, advising Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky, and supposedly taking part in the infamous Arkansas Project, which tried to link Clinton to mob dope runs from Central America into Mena, Arkansas. Olson has denied any connection. He is perhaps most famous for this statement: "There are lots of different situations when the government has legitimate reasons to give out false information."
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