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FBI & CIA Tried To Get American Lawyer To Betray Arab & Muslim Clients
by Sherwood Ross
Federal agents from the FBI and CIA/FBI Joint Terrorist Task Force tried to get a distinguished international lawyer to inform on his Arab and Muslim clients in violation of their Constitutional rights to attorney-client privilege, this reporter has learned. When the lawyer refused, he said the FBI placed him on a “terrorist watch list.”
Law professor Francis Boyle gave a chilling account of how, in the summer of 2004, two agents showed up at his office (at the University of Illinois, Champaign,) “unannounced, misrepresented who they were and what they were about to my secretary, gained access to my office, interrogated me for about one hour, and repeatedly tried to get me to become their informant on my Arab and Muslim clients.”
“This would have violated their (clients) Constitutional rights and my ethical obligations as an Attorney,” Boyle explained. “I refused. So they put me on all of the United States government’s ‘terrorist watch’ lists.”
Boyle said his own lawyer found “there are about five or six different terrorist watch lists, and as far as he could determine, I am on all of them.” Despite a legal appeal to get his name removed, Boyle said, “I will remain on all of these terrorist watch lists for the rest of my life or until the two Agencies who put me on there remove my name, which is highly unlikely.”
“Whatever people might think about lawyers, we are the canary-birds of democracy. When the government goes after your lawyer soon they will be going after you,” Boyle warned. “Indeed,” he added, “the government goes after your lawyer in order to get to you, which is what happened to me. This is what the so-called ‘war against terrorism’ is really all about. It is a war against the United States Constitution.”
Boyle is a leading American professor and practitioner of international law. He holds doctorates in both law (cum laude) and Political Science from Harvard and has more than two decades of experience representing pacifist anti-war resisters, suspects in the so-called “War on Terror” and foreign governments such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is the author of numerous books, including “Protesting Power,” (Rowman & Littlefield), “Biowarfare and Terrorism,”(Clarity) and “Destroying World Order”(Clarity).
Writing of the attorney-client privilege, the American Bar Association has defined it as “the right of clients to refuse to disclose confidential communications with their lawyers, or to allow their lawyers to disclose them.” It further states the privilege “is viewed as fundamental to preserve the constitutionally based right to effective assistance of legal counsel, in that lawyers cannot function effectively on behalf of their clients without the ability communicate with them in confidence.”
The attempt by the government to destroy the Constitutional right of privileged communication between lawyer and client began in earnest after 9/11 when the Justice Department initiated a wave of such illegal actions. According to an article in “Criminal Justice Magazine,” Summer, 2002, “Immediately following the September 11 terrorist attacks, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a controversial order that permits the government to monitor all communications between a client and an attorney when there is ‘reasonable suspicion’ to ‘believe that a particular inmate may use communications with attorneys or their agents to further or facilitate acts of violence or terrorism.” That order “raises a wide range of constitutional concerns under the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments,” authors Paul Rice and Benjamin Saul wrote.
As if to mock the very concept of attorney-client privilege, military interrogators at Guantanamo prison posed as “lawyers” to trick illegally held suspects into providing them with information, according to a report in “The Catholic Worker” newspaper.
And “Newsday,” the Long Island, N.Y., daily, reported a wholesale invasion of lawyer-client privilege, as when lawyers at Guantanamo are forced to turn over their interview notes to guards, who send them on to the Pentagon facility in Virginia that is the only place lawyers can go to write their motions and where the Pentagon attempts to edit out detainees’ claims of mistreatment from the public record. What’s more, “Newsday” reported, “The military has set up a system that delays legal correspondence (between lawyers and prisoners) for weeks,” adding that “Detainees have alleged that interrogators have tried to turn them against their lawyers.”
According to “Newsday,” guards and interrogators peruse prisoners’ private legal papers and warn them that prisoners who have lawyers will wait longer to get out! Tom Wilner, a lawyer for 12 Kuwaiti detainees, said an interrogator asked one of his clients, “Did you know your lawyers are Jews?”
The U.S. government is “not only trying to deny counsel to the prisoners, but is actively trying to remove Guantanamo from any scrutiny, legal or otherwise” as well as “marginalizing the lawyers representing the prisoners,” “The Catholic Worker” said.
Placing attorney Boyle on the Terrorist Watch List is a form of punishment that is being ever more widely applied. According to “USA Today” the list grew from 288,000 names in 2005 to 1-million in March, 2009, according to an article of March 10th of that year. “People put on the watch list…can be blocked from flying, stopped at borders or subjected to other scrutiny,” reporter Peter Eisler wrote.
The attorney-client privilege is the oldest such privilege enshrined in Anglo-Saxon law and was commonly respected even under the British crown during the reign of Queen Elizabeth 1. That it is being flouted by the U.S. government today when a constitutional lawyer occupies the White House represents an incredible stain on what remains of the fabric of American democracy.
About the Writer: Sherwood Ross is a publicist for good causes and Director of the Anti-War News Service of Miami, Florida. To comment or contribute, reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com
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Short URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/?p=126254
Posted by Sherwood Ross on Jul 29 2011, With 0 Reads, Filed under Corruption, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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Excellent web site. Lots of useful information here. I am sending it to several friends ans also sharing in delicious. And of course, thanks for your effort!
Thanks , I’ve just been searching for information about this topic for ages and yours is the greatest I’ve discovered till now. But, what about the bottom line? Are you sure about the source?
Dear Nathaniel: Thanks for your kind words. What it comes down to is that police states have no scruples about kicking their enemies when they’re down. The individual has no rights in the police state. In their world, the State comes first; the individual comes last. That’s the exact opposite of a democracy, which is what we once had in America. Trying to get Boyle to rat out his clients, in violation of the lawyer-client relationship, is not that different from having their spies masquerade as court-appointed lawyers at Guantanamo and lie to the prisoners there that they were sent to help them, which is what the Pentagon did there—-besides torturing the prisoners after illegally arresting them in the first place. — Sherwood
fbi work for the jews
Thanks for your comments. Will major media pick up on this story? We’ll see. Somebody in Congress ought to call for an explanation from the CIA and FBI about this kind of tactic.— Sherwood
I would like to see your piece on Boyle. Thanks. Major media never focuses on good people like Mr Boyle.
I’ve known Francis Boyle as a reliable and honest source of information on the Middle East for many years. I am not surprised that the FBI/CIA (in behalf of Israel) would try to intimidate him, nor that he has the courage to challenge their corrupting efforts. I can write a significant piece on Boyle’s work for anyone who asks it of me. – George Beres, 541-521-5929 geolsilberes@q/com
Boyle is great to listen to. He knows what he is talking about.