Attorney General John Ashcroft has harvested the first fruits of the crop of weeds he sowed in the frantic days following the September 11th awakening of America. He has secured the indictment of an Attorney for the content of her communications with her client. That the client is a despicable and indefensible international criminal serving life plus 65 years for his role in the 1963 bombing of the World Trade Center gives me little comfort as I speak to a convicted client of lesser notoriety. I was appointed to represent him on a post-judgment petition. I am required to go and sit with him at the jail and interview him in order to determine if there is any basis for his claims. Must I warn my client that our conversation may be monitored?

This is not an idle question. My client, who is of mixed American and Filipino descent, has lately returned to the United States from a lengthy stay in his other native country, a country that is another theatre of operations in the amorphous War on Terror. It is true that my client is not charged with a significant crime. He was convicted of driving while his Illinois driving privileges were suspended. Yet those facts do not immunize him from the effect of the Patriot Act. Nor do those facts afford to his lawyer any modicum of protection. May his jailers listen to our conversation, what ever it may be, to detect some coded message he may send out of confinement?

According to the Attorney General the conversations that are the basis of the indictment were conducted through a translator, presumably because the Attorney does not understand the client's language. The Attorney General complained that the Attorney spoke loudly about extraneous matters while the translator and the client spoke. The 1998 conversations that were monitored occurred prior to the passage of the Patriot Act and, according to the Attorney General the Attorney agreed to the monitoring and that she would only discuss legal matters with the client. Would asking about the client's health violate that agreement?

The right of a client to confidential communication with his attorney has been the law of the land longer than there have been the United States. It has been a cornerstone of the Anglo-American legal system for centuries. It is axiomatic that the right to confidentiality belongs to the client and cannot be given up by the Attorney - no matter what agreement the attorney was compelled to sign in order to gain access to the client. It is a right that the attorney is bound to respect and protect. Only a clear expression of an actual intent to commit a new crime may be revealed. An attorney who violates that principle is risking disbarment.

We look to the Department of Justice and the Attorney General of the United States to protect our rights under the Constitution. It is his duty. It is his highest duty for those rights are the core of what sets us apart from the rest of the nations marking us as a nation of free citizens. The rights guaranteed us are the foundation of our liberty. If the government no longer respects those rights then the whole structure of our liberty crumbles. Attorney General Ashcroft said this today, ""Sheik Rahman is determined to exploit the rights guaranteed to him under the United States system of justice. But the United States cannot and will not stand by and allow this to happen."
Whose rights, whose liberty, whose freedom is at hazard in these days? Yours, mine and those of our children and our grandchildren are on the table. Who threatens them? No foreign enemy, nor terrorist. We are the threat to our own freedom.