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Thursday, April 15, 2004
Oregon My Emerald
COMMENTARY
Editor in Chief:
Brad Schmidt
Managing Editor
Jan Tobias Montry
Editorial Editor
Travis Willse
EDITORIAL.
Law students
earn praise
for pro bono
contributions
Lawyers have long held (and have many times deserved)
a sour reputation in Western culture as thieves, charlatans
and deceivers — the stuff that earns one-way tickets to
Malebolge, the Eighth Circle of Dante's Inferno.
Will Rogers once pithily witted, "Make crime pay. Be
come a lawyer."
University law students, though, are bucking those
stereotypes in big ways. Some 70 law students deserve
praise, in fact, for setting their books aside for a few hours
to volunteer for 11 area nonprofit organizations on April 3.
On this Public Service Day, some students volunteered
at Spencer Butte's Cascades Raptor Center, an animal hos
pital and nature center. Others painted walls at the Boys
and Girls Club of Emerald Valley. Others still composted
for the Northwest Youth Corps' organic garden.
These selfless undertakings, among others, are part of
the new Oregon Law's Public Interest Public Service Pro
gram, and have earned law students well-earned apprecia
tion.
"Having the law students here is a huge help," explained
the Cascades Raptors Center's Laurin Coggins. "We have a
volunteer staff organization, so we get a lot done when we
have extra help."
Since PIPS' inception, the number of reported pro bono
hours donated by University law students has laudably
ballooned from 4,680 to 11,214. As a result, University stu
dents won Oregon's State Bar's Pro Bono Challenge for the
third consecutive year. Those 11,214 hours, donated by 112
law students, make up 71.5 percent of the state total of
15,686 donated hours.
Take for example the tireless efforts of graduating law
student Sarah Drescher, who recently received the law
school's Outstanding Service Impact Award.
Drescher has spent most of her estimated 200 pro bono
hours working with the American Civil Uberties Union to
relieve overcrowding in the Jackson County Jail. Thanks in
part to her efforts, the jail settled with the ACLU and
agreed to get enough beds for all prisoners.
Its impact on the community, not to mention the sheer
number of hours of community service donated by
Drescher and her peers, certainly make PIPS one of the
best University programs created in recent memory, and
program leaders have their sights set higher.
"Ultimately, we want to act as a clearinghouse where all
of the students can go through us for their community
service needs," said Lauren Sommers, service program sec
retary and first-year law student.
If the lawyers of tomorrow are anything like the Univer
sity's law student volunteers of today, stereotypes of
lawyers as manipulative, greedy, self-interested criminals
might be as passe as trial by battle.
EDITORIAL POLICY
This editorial represents the opinion of the Emerald
editorial board. Responses can be sent to letters
@dailyemerald.com. Letters to the editor and guest
commentaries are encouraged. Letters are limited
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Authors are limited to one submission per calendar
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to edit for space, grammar and style.
EDITORIAL BOARD
Brad Schmidt
Editor in Chief
Jan Tobias Montry
Managing Editor
Travis Willse
Editorial Editor
Jennifer Sudick
Freelance Editor
Ayisha Yahya
News Editor
Steve Baggs Illustrator
Permanent vacation
Allow me to paint you a picture: Presi
dent Bush had been in office for six
months when he decided to vacation for a
month at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, the
so-called Western White House. He left on
Aug. 4,2001.
It was unprecedented at the time.
Newspapers across the country ran stories
pointing out that the average American
only gets 13 days of vacation time a year.
Richard Nixon held the record for the
longest presidential vacation (30 days)
with Reagan a close second. Them Re
publicans love a vacation.
Today we have become so accustomed
to seeing Bush on his ranch that we hard
ly notice it anymore. This Easter week
end, while Iraq was spiraling into chaos
and the Sept. 11 commission was grilling
National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice, President Bush was vacationing on
his ranch for the 33rd time since his in
auguration.
Let's do the math together: According to
CBS news, Bush has spent 233 days in
Crawford; add to that his visits to Camp
David and Kennebunkport and that
equals 500 days, or more than 40 percent
of his presidency. The administration calls
them "working vacations." Who knew that
president of the United States of America
was a work-ffom-home profession? He is
quite literally phoning it in.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that
Bush's excessive vacationing caused Sept.
11. Sure, Bush admits that he wasn't suffi
ciently concerned about terrorism. And
when you vacation two weeks a month, go
to bed at 10 p.m. every night regardless of
the state of the country and take naps dur
ing the day, according to Hie Guardian, it
is hard to muster up concern about any
thing. But being asleep isn't the same as
being asleep at the wheel.
It suffices to say that while terrorists
were planning a devastating attack on
American soil the leader of the free
world was playing cowboys and Indians
in Texas.
On day three of Bush's August 2001 va
cation, he received the now-infamous
Presidential Daily Briefing entitled "Bin
Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." He
reads it (or rather has it read to him) and
then goes back to ranching. Thanks to
pressure from the Sept. 11 commission,
the controversial briefing has now been
declassified and made public. This memo
is not the smoking gun conspiracy theo
rists hoped it would be. But it does reveal
one important fact: Condoleezza Rice has
clearly misrepresented the contents and
spirit of the memo while under oath.
David Jagernauth
Critical mass
Nine months after the terrorist attacks,
she called a news conference in which she
described the briefing as "an analytic re
port that talked about (bin Laden's)
methods of operation, talked about what
he had done historically."
She has repeated the claim that it was
a "historical document" several times.
And the first part of the memo is histori
cal. But then the memo says, "(Bin
Laden) prepares operations years in ad
vance." In other words, all that histori
cal stuff is important for stopping terror
ism today.
The memo then switches to mostly
present tense: "Al Qaida members — in
cluding some who are U.S. citizens —
have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for
years, and the group apparently main
tains a support structure that could aid
attacks."
This certainly doesn't jive with Rice's
claim that there was "nothing about the
threat of attack in the US" in the memo.
That is what I like to call a lie. That is Rice
committing the crime of perjury.
The memo also contains this juicy bit:
"FBI information since that time indi
cates patterns of suspicious activity in this
country consistent with preparations for
hijackings or other types of attacks, in
cluding recent surveillance of federal
buildings in New York."
Surely that was enough to warrant
concern. Apparently not. On March 22, -
Rice said, "Despite what some have sug
gested, we received no intelligence that
terrorists were preparing to attack the
homeland using airplanes as missiles,
though some analysts speculated that
terrorists might hijack airplanes to try to
free U.S.-held terrorists."
I don't understand this excuse. Isn't the
important piece of information the hi
jacking? Who cares what the terrorists
planned to do once they hijacked the
planes? How about stopping the hijack
ing in the first place?
Bush himself is now making excuses
and trying to avoid responsibility. "I never
saw any intelligence that indicated there
was going to be an attack on America — at
a time and a place," he said. You mean the
terrorists didn't send you a copy of their
itinerary? Well, no wonder we couldn't
stop them.
This is exactly the kind of president
that Paul O'Neill describes in his book:
Bush is disengaged and is being dragged
around from meeting to meeting like a
pet on a leash. He is on a permanent
mental vacation. Bush never thought to
follow up on the memo or ask questions
of the FBI. He didn't know enough to un
derstand what he was being told. Why
else would Bush and Cheney meet with
the Sept. 11 commission together? No
body else needed Cheney to chaperone
them, why did our president?
Put simply, Bush is the exact opposite of
a leader.
How many misrepresentations (i.e. lies)
will it take before the American people fi
nally muster up any sort of outrage? How
many examples of presidential incompe
tence must we witness before somebody is
held accountable? Bush does not deserve
the dignity of being voted out of office. He
deserves to be led out in handcuffs.
Contact the columnist
at davidjagemauth@dailyemerald.com.
His opinions do not necessarily
represent those of the Emerald.