Ashcroft -- Bad Lawyer or Anti-American?
"I am refusing to disclose these memos because I believe it is essential to the operation of the executive branch that the president have the opportunity to get information from (his) attorney general that is confidential,'' Ashcroft declared.
Ashcroft insisted it was "not in the best interest'' of the nation to "advertise'' legal arguments behind authorized interrogation techniques because captured terror suspects might learn how to resist.
Okay, this is just too much. At first I thought Ashcroft was asserting attorney client privilege when he said this. But, I thought, isn't the Attorney General appointed to represent the people of the United States? Doesn't that make us the client and not the president, who is elected (or, in this case, not) to represent us as well? But, in the end we would be the clients and entitled to all this information.
Then I read it more carefully and realized what was being asserted here was executive privilege. That's where the president says he doesn't think he could get good advice if the people who give it to him could be held accountable for it. Anyone else have the problem with this that I have? Doesn't common sense tell you that people will try harder to give you good advice if they know there could be consequences for giving bad advice? And by bad I mean by not getting their facts straight, not analyzing the facts carefully, or just plain telling the president to do something that's illegal. What common sense tells me is that the kind of advice he's not going to get if the advisers know what they tell him may be disclosed is advice on how to do the things he wants to do that are not in the best interests of the people of the United States, but are in the best interest of the people giving the advice or the best interest of the president. So if Ashcroft is asserting this privilege, don't you have to wonder just what kind of advice he has been giving to Bush?
And I have to say I have a problem with these privileges for another reason. There's the unstated assumption that these people know better than we do, are wiser than we are and they're not telling us these things for our own good. Boy, do I resent that. The people that don't want to know these things will do everything in their power not to know these things -- and boy, do they have a lot of power. Those of us who are actually paying attention, though, and want to know these things, may actually be able to make better decisions on who we want to represent us.
You think maybe they think there are more of us than we think there are?