The Candidate Shrugs

From Saturday's New York Times:

"The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties. . . .

"The same point appeared Friday on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, where Robert L. Pollock, a member of the newspaper’s editorial board, cited the list of law firms and quoted an unnamed 'senior U.S. official' as saying, 'Corporate C.E.O.’s seeing this should ask firms to choose between lucrative retainers and representing terrorists.'"

A rare public expression of the Administration's confident expectation that corporate America will join it in suppressing any undue exercise of Constitutional liberties, in this case the right to counsel and the presumption of innocence.

Not surprising, perhaps, but chilling nonetheless.