Lying to the public is all right, says Washington’s chief liar, errr, lawyer. Roundly criticized during pre-confirmation public debate as dishonest and unethical, Solicitor-General Theodore Olsen didn’t take long after appointment to show his true stripes, ‘…telling the US Supreme Court that misleading statements are sometimes needed to protect foreign policy interests.

“It’s easy to imagine an infinite number of situations where the government might legitimately give out false information…” Olson was arguing in the Jennifer Harbury case. Harbury is a US attorney whose Guatemalan rebel leader husband died in 1993 after a year in Guatemalan army custody during which US officials lied to her to conceal CIA involvement in his torture and murder. Sydney Morning Herald Although the events occurred years before, the court case’s most immediate relevance is to current dysadministration arguments regarding how much they can conceal from the American public in the interest of the War-on-Terrorism®.

Adam [thanks…] scanned in and sent me an excerpt from a recent New Yorker review of David Brock’s Blinded by the Right which bears similarly on Olson’s bona fides:

[Brock needs an authoritative voice to keep R. Emmett

Tyrrell, editor of The American Spectator, from

publishing lies about the death of Vincent Foster, a

Clinton White House aide who committed suicide]

…”For help, Brock turned to Ted Olson, an informal

but influential adviser to the Spectator. Olson had

been Reagan’s private lawyer; he was a sachem of the

Federalist Society, an association of conservative

lawyers and jurists whose membership included future

Justices of the Supreme Court; and he was a close

friend and former law partner of Kenneth Starr’s.

Olson, Brock thought, was ‘the model of a sober,

careful lawyer with impeccable judgment.’ Brock faxed

him the piece. Olson’s response was evidently not

what he was expecting. Olson, Brock writes, “told me

bluntly, in a tone of voice that I had never heard him

use before, that while he believed, as Starr

apparently did, that Foster had committed suicide,

raising questions about the death was a way of turning

up the heat on the administration until another

scandal was shaken loose, which was the Spectator‘s

mission.”