Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE This Coogler Shall Remain Homeless I write as counsel to Deborah Mashibini to inquire when it is that she will receive her Coogler Award ("The Worst Books of the Year," TAS, March...
...technology despite Soviet dominance in every clandestine domain from warheads to poison gases and despite U.S...
...But conservative values alone will not intercept SS-18s or identify and kill terrorists...
...The standards are designed to encourage people . . . to contribute their time to government work," says Stephen Gillers, professor of legal ethics at New York University...
...Who reviewed the lease agreement for Southern Air...
...After all, the model rules bind lawyers and law firms equally in forbidding them to take adverse interests to former clients or use protected information...
...The telex copies on file with the FAA show dates that might be critical in establishing how use of the planes came about...
...despairing of the future of freedom because we lose archaic battles for useless land around the world while rapidly winning the people of China...
...I am informed that airplane registration is a profitable side business for many Oklahoma City law firms, because the Federal Aviation Administration maintains its nationwide aircraft registration records in that city...
...Conservative values make possible the triumph of technology and give it meaning and worth...
...If we want to preserve economic growth and avoid a wrenching recession, we need to bring the capital gains rate down to 15 percent...
...It is likely, though, that neither Lawrence Walsh nor Richard C. Ford, the Crowe & Dunlevy partner who runs the Oklahoma City branch of the independent counsel's office for the Iran-contra investigation, personally performed any of this work, which seems from Mr...
...Rahn is right in pointing out that fate doesn't cause recessions, misguided policies do...
...It received little attention in the national press and was generally downplayed by those who chose to follow up on the reports...
...But the most serious questions are raised by documents that concern a lease agreement between Southern Air Transport and a firm called Safair Freighters...
...Jerry Bohnen News Director, KTOK Radio Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Charlotte Low replies: Mr...
...First, the law firm attempted to help speed the actual registration and purchase of the 707s from Kuwaiti Airlines...
...She makes no mention, however, of any potential conflicts of interest regarding Mr...
...By imputation, then, it can be said that the entire independent counsel's office retains a connection with Crowe & Dunlevy...
...None of this is meant to impugn Mr...
...But I believe it certainly gives one pause to wonder...
...fearing immigrants in the loony belief that they will contaminate American culture, when the problem, friends—look around you, glom that TV, check out those candidates, native-born all—is in ourselves...
...However, the geographic and political Cuba is as highly troublesome as heavily armed, and so are their Soviet colleagues in my neighborhood...
...And taxing capital gains at a higher rate than income is one of the most misguided policies around...
...It has nothing to do with trivial gadgetry...
...Walsh might not have known of the business relationship that existed between the law firm and Southern Air Transport...
...CORRESPONDENCE This Coogler Shall Remain Homeless I write as counsel to Deborah Mashibini to inquire when it is that she will receive her Coogler Award ("The Worst Books of the Year," TAS, March 1988...
...At the same time, it obsoletes the pursuit of territory, slaves, and secrecy...
...Upheld by leading conservative philosophers with an aristocratic bent and disdain for "men in (continued on page 47) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 9 CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 9) trade," by the Pope and other leading Catholics with a ridiculous nostalgia for medieval "communalism," and by many on the right who have been gulled by Marx to fear science as somehow against us, this death wish is nearly as lethal as the liberal death wish that palsies our intellectual and moral culture...
...It is likely that Southern Air Transport hired Crowe & Dunlevy—at the high hourlyrates a well-regarded firm like Crowe & Dunlevy undoubtedly commands—to handle the registration of its 707s because Southern Air's management thought Crowe & Dunlevy had the expertise to do the job quickly and efficiently...
...They were unrelated matters that were long ago and closed...
...Walsh's integrity or character...
...It is highly likely that Walsh's staff has looked into Southern Air's activities, both on the Mideast missile shipment end and the contra re-supply end...
...He continues as a partner with the firm and is volunteering his time with Walsh from Oklahoma City...
...It is a powerful force of creative destruction that entirely obsoletes all brands of leftism...
...Finally, no one would seriously argue that reviewing a lease agreement is not legal work...
...But it presents us nonetheless with some rather interesting questions...
...The bulk of the serious counts in the 101-page indictment Walsh filed against the Iran-Contra Four on March 16 revolves around activities in which Southern Air was intimately involved...
...Conflicts are not always won on Gross National Products with cellular phones...
...Walsh and Ford might be home free on this question were it not for the anomaly that Ford (unlike Walsh) has never completely severed his ties with Crowe & Dun-levy...
...truckling to Gorbachev and his "great" gulag of slaves while smearing the Japanese, Koreans, and other Asians who are the central asset of world capitalism...
...Rah Rah Rahn Three cheers to Richard Rahn ("Recession Prevention," TAS, March 1988), especially for encouraging Congress to cut the tax rate on capital gains...
...The answer of most ethicists and the ABA model rules would ordinarily be, no problem, if we can assume the special prosecutor did not handle the former client's work personally and has left the firm...
...I enjoy TAS as much now as I did when you published it as The Alternative years ago...
...Is there a conflict of interest that should disqualify the lawyer for the government work...
...I have a bill before the Senate now that takes this step...
...But it is clear that Ford and, by implication, Walsh have access to Crowe & Dunlevy's closed Southern Air Transport files...
...Telex copies indicate that in late 1985 the law firm encouraged the Federal Aviation Administration to hasten the process...
...They have a right to expect that their communications will remain confidential and that the lawyer will not suddenly switch sides...
...That takes new and constantly improving technology, and it takes a society that celebrates the disciplines and creators of new technology, including the Japanese, and trusts the values of freedom and openness that have given us the technology we have...
...As the American Bar Association's Model Rules of Professional Conduct say, "Loyalty is an essential element in the lawyer's relationship to a client...
...Yet a recent trend, on its pages and elsewhere, is disconcerting and typified by a remark by Mr...
...President Reagan recently endorsed it, and it's great to have Richard Rahn's estimable intellectual fire power on our side...
...Yet, further investigation revealed some very interesting questions regarding the Oklahoma City law firm where Mr...
...Southern Air Transport leased a handful of Lockheed L-100s from Safair, planes reportedly usedby SAT in the re-supply effort of the contras in Nicaragua...
...The problem is that the conservative death wish tries to foist these same Soviet obsessions on America: controlling, sequestering, and classifying U.S...
...Walsh was "of counsel" and its relations with Southern Air Transport (SAT), the air cargo firm that handled the transfer of TOW missiles from Texas to the Middle East...
...BUDDY BOYS: WHEN GOOD COPS TURN BAD...
...Queries relayed to Walsh went unanswered...
...Furthermore, he added, he had known nothing of the work performed for Southern Air Transport...
...When we interviewed him, Mr...
...United States Senate Washington, D.C...
...According to court records, Southern Air has said that it was asked to participate in the Iran weapons sale by Secord, and in the contra re-supply by North...
...Walsh denied any possible conflict of interest, explaining the aircraft registration performed by Crowe & Dunlevy was similar to handling a title search for purchase of a home...
...This is old news," he says...
...and as in all our history, immigrants must be our salvation...
...Law firms are subject to the same constraints as individual lawyers, and lawyers who are "of counsel" (on a part-time consulting basis) to a firm, as Lawrence Walsh was to Crowe & Dunlevy, are treated the same in the ethics rules as full-time members of the firm...
...Did his law firm unknowingly play a role in the transfer of missiles...
...But should they hire a lawyer to do a job, they certainly have a right to assume that they have set up an attorney-client relationship with that lawyer...
...America's main creative asset today is technology...
...seeking out the worst snake pits of the Third World to fight the socialist snakes in their own lair, under the public kibitzing of puff-adder politicians...
...Several days after our interview, we were able to review additional records maintained at the Federal Aviation Administration documents center in Oklahoma City and discovered still more interesting information about the business relationship between Crowe & Dunlevy and SAT...
...As conservatives we should embrace it with all our hearts...
...The FAA records show that SAT asked Crowe & Dunlevy to review the lease agreement and that the firm responded with an approval of the agreement...
...Nonetheless, American nerds, wonks, and boat people, working 70-hour weeks and disdaining the claims of jaded high culture and effete politics, have given us an incomparable glory: a science that overthrows the deadly superstitions of Newtonian materialism and a technology that not only ascends the highest spires of human genius and art but also inherently favors the forces of freedom and faith...
...How has his probe dealt with Southern Air Transport...
...We are sure it will be at least as tasteful and useful as your writings...
...Robert Hayes Coalition for the Homeless New York, New York Lawrence Walsh and Southern Air In Charlotte Low's recent article "Lawrence Walsh's Holy War" (TAS, March 1988), she makes reference to potential conflicts of interest among lawyers on his staff...
...Much legal work, from a no-asset divorce to evicting a tenant for nonpayment of rent, is of such a routine nature that litigants often do it themselves to save the attorney fees...
...In effect, he said no true attorney-client relationship existed...
...The consensus seems to be that it is sophistic to argue that work performed by a law firm is not "legal work" just because it is simple and routine...
...I can't help but wonder if many of us, wowed by technology and tangled in the worldwide ganglion of silicon electronics that Mr...
...Gilder is always good reading, and he should keep faith in American ingenuity and keep blasting at backward economists, but lest he go overboard he should perhaps tear himself away from the Radio Shack catalogue and spend a week in Russell Kirk's library...
...Robert W Kasten, Jr...
...Without radical advances in technology we cannot even save America...
...Two of the planes were confirmed as those used in the missile transfer...
...Arguing [in his article, "The Message of the Microcosm"l that technology has rendered geography meaningless, he notes that all the important parts of Cuba are now found in Miami...
...Forget Afghanistan...
...Pondering Gilder in Peshawar Belated congratulations on your twentieth anniversary [TAS, December 1987], as news travels slowly to the Khyber Pass...
...As for sending telexes to the FAA asking the agency to hurry along the process, well, that's advocacy, which is what lawyers do for a living...
...But first we must comprehend it as our own and see its larger meanings...
...It appears the relationship was more than a passing "title search...
...Thank God that this technological advance is well under way...
...Made in the image of our creator, we are creators ourselves or we decline and fall...
...Bohnen's letter prompted me to call several legal ethicists at major law schools to see what their answers might be to the questions he raises...
...With respect to former clients, the rules say that a lawyer cannot represent anyone with a "materially adverse interest" to the former client in the same or a substantially related matter without the former client's consent and cannot "use information relating to the representation to the disadvantage of the former client...
...Yet Spartan armies won...
...Crowe & Dun-levy...
...Cuban socialism and militarism are not Cuban...
...In late April 1987, freelance reporter Tony Kimery and I were able to report that the law firm, Crowe & Dunlevy of Oklahoma City, had handled the aircraft registration of three 707s purchased by SAT from Kuwaiti Airlines...
...The next question is: What are the ethical obligations to his firm's former clients of a lawyer who forsakes private practice to carry on a government investigation such as a special prosecution that arguably touches on the very activities for which the client hired the firm to do legal work...
...We are not doing very much in the way of replenishing Kirk's library: in general, our current literature is dominated by Coogler laureates and Pulitzer panders, our philosophy is petty and obscurantist, our religion is led by a clerisy of socialist poseurs, our art and music are mostly either infantile or pornographic, our leading universities are temples of secular ignorance and nihilism, and our politics are chiefly an auction of influence peddlers catering to the greed of sloths...
...they are merely evil...
...Stephen J. Masty, Editor Humanitarian News Service Peshawar, Pakistan George Gilder replies: Masty's letter is trenchant and powerful and I salute him for his current work on the frontiers...
...One suspects that plenty of high-tech Athenians sneered at backward Sparta as bereft of art, culture, and invention, and only interested in armies...
...Nonetheless, his resistance to the message from the microcosm conceals the canker of a conservative death wish...
...This is a situation so unusual that it does not come up for specific discussion in the ABA model rules or their copious commentary, but one well-regarded ethicist says, "There could be some problems...
...The utter bankruptcy of socialism is that it is impotent to create...
...America's key strategic asset is the stupid and evil belief of the Soviets that they can enhance their power by enslaving territories such as Angola, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Afghanistan, and by nationalizing and sequestering scientists and engineers...
...Bohnen's description to be of the type normally done by junior associates or even paralegals...
...true if by important he means nice...
...George Gilder (which I reconstructed from memory, having lent my copy to some mujahedeen...
...Walsh himself...
...it can only steal and destroy...
...Last spring, a colleague and I revealed a potential conflict of interest involving the special prosecutor...
...Gilder describes, haven't taken a Whiggish turn and landed in what could be called illogical positivism...
...Questioned about possible conflict of interest, Ford's response is a flat denial thatany problem exists...
...dominance in the still wide-open realms of microelectronics...
...And it does not mean he knew of any business relationship between Crowe & Dunlevy and those involved in the missile transactions...
...glorifying revolutionary scum such as Ortega by treating him as a threat and by conducting a five-year debate about him with a Congress and press amplifying every new Communist lie...
Vol. 21 • May 1988 • No. 5
