American Lawyers and Evil.

The title "American Lawyers and Evil' may seem redundant. However, two recent books offer disturbing and convincing evidence of a unique ethical malaise in America's current legal profession and politics. These are not merely the familiar examples of lawyers stealing from client security funds (Mr. Garcia?), but far greater New Jersey-like evils resulting from shocking corruption at all levels of the system.

American lawyers have rationalized and justified what amounts to torture, mass murders, warfare targeting civilians with robot bombs and the dismantling of the system of international human rights law.

The men and women doing these things are so-called "educated" persons, presumably persons with some sense of right and wrong, every bit as clever as the persons arguing against me at these on-line sites and/or seeking to suppress my writings.

True, to many of these "elite lawyers" members of the lower orders -- especially when they are from a different ethnic or religious group, gentiles perhaps -- are sub-humans or "inferiors" and unworthy of concern. To Mr. Rabner and Ms. Poritz, for example, I am an "inferior" individual and (like Palestinian Arabs, maybe) "unfit to receive the recognition of legal or moral rights" to which (I believe) all persons are entitled. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")

Rapes, thefts, censorship and threats against me are permissible for such distinguished American judges provided that victims are sufficiently insignificant or poverty striken, which may amount to the same thing. ("Stuart Rabner and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")

Iraqui children and millions of innocent persons in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Libya as well as Syria, allegedly, are said to be "sub-humans" also who may be tortured and killed with impunity. The reason that lawyers are able to dissociate themselves from these hideous policies that they help to formulate, articulate, and effectuate is ideology. ("Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?")

The training of lawyers undermines commitment to legal ethics by instilling a sense in students that winning is everything and professional success -- i.e., money -- is all that matters while being a good person is nothing by comparison. ("Duncan Kennedy and Peter Gable on Critical Legal Studies" and "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory" then "Law and Ethics in the Soprano State.")

Morality or ethical concerns are "subjective"; whereas success and a federal judgeship, perhaps, are "objective." It's a "no brainer" -- as they say at Harvard Law School -- like Mr. Weiner's "sexting" habits. The result is bloodshed on our hands: Close to two million deaths resulting from disease, destruction, devastation in Iraq, including over 500,000 murdered children (so far) in our "war for democracy." The reaction of a former U.S. Secretary of State responsible for supervising lawyers at the State Department is revealing:

"In her memoir, published in 2003, Madeleine Albright, was still trying to undo the damage from her comment on 60 Minutes in 1996. Lesley Stahl noted that some half-a-million children had died and asked if the price was worth it; Albright responded that it was. Years later she was still trying to explain her way out of her failure to respond more effectively to what she described as our public relations problem."

Joy Gordon, Invisible Wars: the United States and the Iraq Sanctions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 200 (emphasis added). (Would Ms. Albright feel the same if these had been American children?)

The point of a humanitarian crisis -- whether with regard to torture or allegations of genocide by Americans in Iraq and throughout the world -- is not only how we will be perceived by others, but what we have become when we can say, within one century of the Holocaust, that non-state actors are not entitled to human rights because they are "evil" sub-humans.

Many pro-torture officials, strangely, are Jews -- like Mr. Wolfowitz and persons associated with The New Republic, or Cuban-Americans in Miami's lunatic anti-Castro fringe:

" ... recourse to CIA psychological torture has corrupted U.S. intelligence" -- also the Constitution -- "and compromised America's international standing."

Alfred W. McCoy, "The CIA's Pursuit of Psychological Torture," in The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse (New York & London: NYU Press, 2011), p. 43. (Discussing hypnosis in interrogational torture and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")