Where There’s Sentelle There’s Stink

The foul stench of Right Wing judicial sleaze David Sentelle has permeated yet another high profile court case. This time, Sentelle, in concert with another right wing appellate judge, A. Raymond Randolph, issued an opinion which refused to accept briefs filed by seven retired federal judges who oppose Bush's torture/anti-habeas corpus law - merely because the authors of the briefs identified themselves in their filing as "judges." AP reports In a 2 to 1 decision yesterday, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said it would not accept the judges' brief on a legal technicality, saying the title "judge" should not be used to describe former judges in legal proceedings. The court is examining whether "enemy combatants" should be allowed to challenge their detention in U.S. courts. (…) The appeals panel's more conservative judges, David B. Sentelle and A. Raymond Randolph, issued the opinion, with Judge Judith W. Rogers, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, dissenting. For those unfamiliar, Sentelle led the the three-judge panel which in 1994 appointed Ken Starr to replace Robert B. Fiske in the blatantly Kafkaesque Whitewater fishing expedition. The appointment was made right after Sentelle, and froth-at-the-mouth Clinton haters Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth, had a lunch meeting wherein the conversation just "may" - according to Sentelle himself - have happened to include the topic of the upcoming independent counsel appointment. Before that, in 1990 also with the D.C. Court of Appeals, Sentelle voted to overturn the Iran/contra convictions of Oliver North and John Poindexter, along with Judge Laurence Silberman. In the North case, the ruling was based on the premise that the chief witness against North - his ex-boss Robert McFarlane - had potentially been influenced in his courtroom testimony by the congressional Iran/contra hearings, in which North had been given immunity, never mind that Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh had been exceedingly careful to ensure his case was based on testimony which was guaranteed untainted. Moreover, Sentelle and Silberman both rather conveniently ignored the monumental conflict of interest attending the fact that the witness McFarlane and the judge Silberman were close associates, who in 1980 worked for the Ronald Reagan presidential election campaign. Silberman, McFarlane and a third Reagan staffer, Richard Allen, had a meeting October 2, with an Iranian agent at the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel on behalf of Reagan - about which they failed to properly notify the State Department. This meeting gave rise to the unproven allegations of an October Surprise conspiracy, allegedly orchestrated between Reagan and the Iranians, to foil at the last minute the hostage release negotiated by President Carter. The negotiations collapsed suddenly, dealing a serious blow to Carter's chances for reelection. And the hostages just happened to gain their release at the precise moment of Reagan's inauguration. Regardless of whether or not any conspiracy existed, Silberman was pals with McFarlane, and he plainly should have recused himself from the North case. Walsh appealed to the Supreme Court, but review was declined. In the Independent Counsel petition to the Court, Walsh stated that "the dangers of abuse and manipulation are magnified by the court of appeals' view, expressed in North, that a witness inclined to assist the defense may become disqualified from testifying at trial by the simple expedient of soaking himself in the defendant's immunized statements." When he needs the vote to support his opinion, Sentelle's code of ethics recognizes no problem whatsoever with an associate on the bench being closely allied with a principle in a case, for whom he wants to find favor. But Sentelle displays a terminally cynical willingness to find the most feeble excuse imaginable to prevent compelling authoritative opinion from entering the record when it conflicts with the right wing agenda of his ideological friends.