Chickens. Home. Roost.

It appears that William Haynes is probably getting familiar with those words – since it was announced today that the National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Bay Chapter (NLGSF) filed a complaint with the California State Bar against former Department of Defense General Counsel William Haynes. The complaint against Haynes, who now works for the Chevron Corporation in San Ramon, states that he "breached his duty as a lawyer and advocated for harsh tactics amounting to torture in violation of U.S. and international law … advocacy that directly lead to detainee abuses at the Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib facilities." The complaint seeks to have Haynes held accountable for advising his clients (the Department of Defense) to take unlawful actions by engaging in torture by having his status as a "Registered In House Counsel" revoked – costing him his job as Chevron's deputy in-house counsel. And this is just the first wave – there is a real chance that Haynes will be called before Senator Patrick Leahy's burgeoning "Truth Commission," which could be America's very own Nuremberg trial to deal with the aftermath of the Bush wars.

This is hugely embarrassing for everyone at Chevron – but particularly for Charles James, Haynes' Bush-administration buddy who is Chevron's general counsel. James was the guy who hired Haynes when Haynes was radioactive after leaving the DoD under a cloud because of his torture connections. James made (another!) horrible judgment call in hiring Haynes, a potential war criminal, just as Chevron was facing a rising tide of human rights problems (Nigeria, Ecuador, Burma, now Cambodia) around the world. And like so many of James' other recent calls, this one is leaving him with egg on his face. It's pretty easy to imagine that the P.R. department over at Chevron is pretty pissed at James right about now for dragging their company into the same sentence as "torture" and "war criminal."

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Lay Down With Dogs and You Get Fleas

As the saying goes, good help is hard to find – so Chevron has found some bad help, and that help may be causing the company some problems in the days to come. We've already written about the controversial and ill-conceived hiring of William Haynes by Chevron (who was just described in a NY Times article as radioactive- the paper described him as searching for a job for more than a year before Chevron agreed to take him in). The Amazon Defense Coalition named a high-level public relations gun-for-hire, James Craig, who has been hired by Chevron to manipulate, delay, and obstruct the trial in Ecuador, calling Craig a "hit man" working for the corporation. According to the organization's press release:

James Craig, an American public relations official with Chevron affiliated with the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, for undermining a long-running environmental trial in Ecuador where the oil giant faces a $27 billion liability for dumping toxic waste into the rainforest.

"Chevron is using James Craig as a hit man to sabotage a trial in Ecuador because it expects to lose and be on the hook for billions of dollars," said Luis Yanza, a representative for the dozens of communities and indigenous groups that brought the lawsuit.

"James Craig's behavior is unethical and shows a profound disregard for the law," added Yanza, a recent winner of the Goldman Environmental Award, considered the "Nobel" prize of the environmental movement.

The interesting thing is that Mr. Craig is apparently no stranger to working for reckless and controversial companies – a quick Google search found that Craig's last position as a p.r. mercenary was with the infamous Refco, a financial trading company that collapsed in October 2005 costing investors hundreds of millions of dollars, long before imploding financial institutions was chic. James Craig helmed the public relations ship throughout Refco's collapse, working to hide the truth from investors and leading to the massive losses.

When you add in the Darth Vader-esque hiring of William Haynes, you've got an interesting human resources strategy - apparently Chevron tries to hire the most controversial guys around, hoping that their wealth of knowledge of the seedy underside of the world will help Chevron intervene in the trial.

But is hiring these mercenaries worth it? The Amazon Defense Coalition has indicated that complaints are being filed against Craig for interfering in Ecuador's judicial process. Haynes' "War On Terror" excesses inside of the Department of Defense may have him drawn up before Senator Leahy's burgeoning "Truth Commission" committee, and have him branded as a war criminal at home and abroad (better cancel that European vacation, Mr. Haynes…). And all of this gets imputed onto Chevron, damaging their public image, forcing the company to defend these employees, and making it harder for the company to work moving forward – these rogue operators may be causing more problems than they're solving.

I guess Chevron is probably used to having to deal with the fallout of hiring the radioactive and controversial – after all, as the saying goes, if you lay with dogs, you get fleas.

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William J. Haynes: What Was Chevron Thinking?

John Geluardi - author of The Snitch blog over at SF Weekly - put out a post last week about William Haynes, calling him "Chevron's Prince of Darkness". Apparently Haynes – who was recently hired by Chevron to serve as their chief corporate counsel - was just called out in a Senate Arms Services Committee (SASC) bipartisan investigation that found Haynes' actions while working for the Pentagon reviewing and approving of torture "deeply disturbing". Geluardi describes the hiring:

The Chevron Corporation has exposed its pestilent underbelly by hiring William J. Haynes II, a Department of Defense attorney who compiled lists of violent interrogation techniques for shadowy U.S. detention centers… In 2002 Haynes recommended a menu of 15 dehumanizing interrogation techniques to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that included stress positions, removal of clothing, light deprivation and exploitation of phobias such as the "Arab fear of dogs." Rumsfeld eagerly signed off on Haynes' recommendations and dispatched a memo to Guantanamo Bay and other detention centers so they could be used on "enemy combatants," according to the senate investigative report.

The brass of nearly every branch of the U.S. Military vigorously opposed Haynes' ghoulish techniques. The opposition was so great, the list in part spurred Bush Administration lawyers to justify certain techniques by redefining the definition of torture so the CIA would be free to use nasty little methods such as waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning. The method was invented by the syphilitic fiends who conceived the Spanish Inquisition (waterboarding was not on Haynes' list).

(More after the jump)

And it's not just Geluardi. Andrew S. Ross of the San Francisco Chronicle covered the story, in an article entitled "Report rips ex-Defense counsel, now at Chevron". Ross noted that the bipartisan report was signed by prominent Senators from both parties (including John McCain) and that when asked, Haynes defended his recommendations regarding torture. Editorials were run by the New York Times and the Miami Herald calling Haynes' advocacy of torture "deeply harmful" to the U.S.' image and urging that Haynes and the others who authorized the torture to be held accountable.

And all of this leads to the inevitable question: given all of Chevron's human rights problems around the world, why in the world would they hire William Haynes when he was so radioactive? For a company embarking in a multi-million dollar "human energy" public relations campaign, you would think they would have more sense than to hire one of the only lawyers in America who is under potential threat of facing charges as a war criminal.

But maybe they just don't care – or maybe they even see Haynes' willingness to advocate torturing prisoners as a plus. As Dugan over at Oil Watchdog stated, "with Chevron embroiled in human-rights lawsuits over oilfield pollution in Ecuador, and facing possible appeal of its exoneration in a Nigerian shooting case, Haynes (who walked straight into Chevron after leaving government in February), seems suited to the job."

Still, it seems unbelievable that Chevron really went out and paid big money to hire a guy under investigation by the Senate for human rights violations. After all, there had to be hundreds of highly competent corporate counsels around who wouldn't be putting "advocated and designed torture" as their "previous experience".

So what was Chevron thinking? Was it just that Darth Vader was unavailable?

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