Nation Topics - Attorney | The Nation

The article looks at the issue of protecting reporters' sources and the public's need to know in light of the investigation being led by special prosector into the leaking of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame to the media. What's with these special prosecutors anyway? Kenneth Starr is hired to investigate an obscure land deal and ends up impeaching the President for not coming clean about his sex life. And now Patrick Fitzgerald, the US Attorney from Chicago appointed to find out who violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by leaking to conservative columnist Robert Novak the identity of a covert CIA employee, ends up sending to prison a New York Times reporter who never wrote about the case. Since much of the case is still shrouded in secrecy, determining the motives of the prosecutor is a mug's game. But understanding the forces in play and the issues at stake would seem to be critical to anyone who cares about the ability of the press to gather and publish the information a democracy requires. We still don't know whether Novak was actually called and what he did. In any event, the statute criminalizes leakers rather than leakees unless the leakees are engaged in "a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents." Thus far, the actions of both the special prosecutor and those he has summoned to testify have raised almost as many questions as they have answered.

Comments on the trial of Lynne Stewart, an activist attorney charged with being a terrorist. Representation of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, now serving time for conspiring to blow up Manhattan bridges, by Stewart; Violation of an administrative agreement with the sheik by Stewart, which would normally lead to disciplinary charges before the bar in the most extraordinary case but led to the charge that Stewart aided terrorist activity instead; Use of fearmongering, guilt by association, and evidence on terrorism completely unrelated to Stewart to win a conviction.

Addresses statements made by prominent Washington D.C. attorney Nathan Lewin that the families of Palestinian suicide bombers should be executed as a deterrent against such attacks. Reactions by attorney Alan Dershowitz and national director of the Anti-Defamation League Abraham Foxman; Opinion that the same result could be garnered by leveling the villages of suicide bombers; Examples in the Bible cited by Lewin, including the destruction of the tribe of Amalek.

The article presents information on socio-political developments related to Detroit attorney James P. Hoffa. It was 1995 and Hoffa had just declared his candidacy for Teamsters president, a position then occupied by Ron Carey, who'd been elected in 1991 with help from Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). Nevertheless, endowed with his father's famous name and instant media attention, he was the ideal front for old guard Teamsters officials trying to regain control of the union. Hoffa was turned away by the Teamsters in attendance, but not before getting into a shouting match with several female strikers from Diamond Walnut.

The article presents information on the film "Enemy of the State." The film has actor Will Smith, playing the role of Washington attorney Robert Dean. The film is directed by Tony Scott. For a gentleman of Smith's elongation and self-assertive charm, the status of cursor is conspicuously inappropriate. Yet here he is, having unwillingly attracted the attention of the National Security Administration, fleeing the bad guys by foot power, ferry boat, ambulance and jalopy and though the latter may burst into flames for scenic effect, the character in it remains strangely immobile, as if stuck in a claustrophobic Flatland.

This editorial highlights some of the social and political issues in the U.S. Over the next few months, two Social Security debates will occur. As the election approaches, Democrats will try to use Social Security as ammunition against the Republicans. House Republicans have advocated using the budget surplus for a massive tax cut and Democrats are hankering to accuse the Republicans of raiding Social Security for a handout to the rich. By the time you read this, if the leaks were accurate, legislator Monica Lewinsky will have testified before Kenneth Stan's grand jury that she and the U.S. President Bill Clinton had sexual relations. And despite the Administration's recent setbacks in court, presidency still has its privileges. When Clinton finally takes his own closed-circuit turn before Starr's grand jury on August 17,1998 he will by agreement with Starr's office testify in the company of his attorney.

This article discusses several television programs. The TV program "Dharma and Greg," is a lukewarm sitcom that unites a second-generation hippie chick in wedlock with a tenth-generation blue-blood attorney. The most unexpectedly contrarian offering of the bunch, the new drama "Nothing Sacred," owes its existence to last year's fad for prime-time religious uplift even as it takes the genre to a more exalted place. Night after night, men of a certain age face down their own crises of certainty in the hope that enough agonizing can stop millennial chaos from taking their position nearly from them.

A little over a year ago, Immigration and Naturalization Service officials in New York City arrested Nasser Ahmed, a 37-year-old Egyptian man, claiming that he was a security risk because of his ties to Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who had been convicted in October 1995 on charges of seditious conspiracy to commit terrorist bombings. The two most troubling provisions of the Antiterrorism Act authorize the government to deport immigrants based on secret evidence not disclosed to the immigrant or his attorney, and to impose criminal and immigration sanctions on those who provide humanitarian aid to a foreign organization labeled "terrorist" by the Secretary of State. A man innocent of any crime is to be deported to almost certain torture and denied asylum because of his political associations, under a procedure that deprived him of access to the evidence against him, limited the judge deciding his case to a single viewing of the classified evidence and did not even disclose the name of the group with which he is alleged to be associated.

This article presents brief information on various socio-political developments during the month of June in the U.S. and from around the world. One of them is the Anti-Antiterrorism Forum, "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act-Impact on Political Expression and Association, Immigrants and Prisoners" to be held on June 27, 1996. The speakers include: Abdeen Jabara, attorney; Marzook Defense Committee; and Irish-American activist. Another being a exhibition by "Straight From the Heart, a Life-in-Art project of Gay Men's Health Crisis," which is a group of artists with H.I.V. to be held at the East/West Gallery, Manhattan, from May 27 to June 21, 1996.

The article presents news from the U.S. as of February 20, 1995. There's nothing that so horrifies the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (F.C.C.) as freedom of speech, unless backed by the millions now usually required to exercise that right on the airwaves. "This opens up such a can of worms," spluttered an F.C.C. attorney, David Silberman, on January 20, 1995. In late January that one Wilderness Society official was faxing the journal "The Nation," a note saying "we're busting our butts" to protect the environment, another official was scurrying to undo an emergency injunction, recently won by the Wilderness Society, stopping all logging, road building, mining and ranching in six national forests in central Idaho. The injunction had outraged not only right-wingers in Idaho's Congressional delegation but also the Wilderness Society's Idaho representative, Craig Gehrke.