Committee grillings a side show: attorney. (Business Briefs).

It's clear to a noted attorney who has defended clients like President Clinton, Enron Corp. and cabinet members that the standard of fair play and decorum that business executives can expect from Congress has deteriorated badly.

Speaking at a recent forum on executive ethics at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and later interviewed separately, attorney Robert Bennett said, "I warn clients that too often these hearings are preordained. They play out like a Broadway script, but the auditions are for parts you don't want.

"The rush to judgment is too fast, witnesses are pre-assigned their roles; someone will wear a white hat, someone will wear a black hat," he says. "One person gets chosen to hurt another, The distinctions are very simplistic, the nuances and gray areas are lost. Look at the questions given to [whistle-blower] Sherron Watkins of Enron. If there were any tough ones, I missed them, yet there are plenty of tough ones that could have been posed."

There are professionals seeking to get to the core of an issue in a fair manner, he allows, citing among them Senators Paul Sarbanes (D-Md.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) But those are exceptions. Bennett, a partner with the firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Florn, brings the perspective of a former outside counsel for the Senate Ethics Committee, working investigations such as Abscam and the Keating Five. He notes that "during Keating, senators deferred to my awareness of the details and let me take the lead, refraining from questions until I was finished."

That would be a rare event today. "Congress simply can't meaningfully have 25 or 30 people asking questions for 10 minutes each in a House hearing," says Bennett.

"There's seldom coordination, the questions are duplicates -- it's an enormous waste of time. There's little thoughtful follow-through, and a lot of the questions are not questions -- they're just set-ups for the media to convey sound bites to the hometown.

"If committee members were acting with the priorities of legislators, not prosecutors, fewer witnesses would assert the 5th [amendment]," Bennett contends.

"But sometimes, the 5th is exactly what some committee members want, and they push a witness into that corner, because it makes for a terrific photo op. pleading the 5th before a committee. This sort of strategy is just wrong."