Justice Department Political Appointees Were Lawyers For Al Qaeda

How do yo think democrats would react if George Bush had appointed a lawyer who represented the KKK or Neo Nazi groups as head of the Civil Rights Division? If former mob lawyers ran the organized crime section? If Bush had appointed a coal company lawyer to head the EPA?

Do you think democrats and liberals would have been blathering about the duty of lawyers to represent the unpopular and how it was McCarthyism to criticize or even question the appropriateness of their running govenment legal policy in areas directly related to their legal work for their unpopular clients?

Doubtful. We have repeatedly seen liberals try to destroy conservative lawyers for simply doing their jobs. Now , incredibly, it comes to light that Obama's Justice Department, run by serial screwup Eric Holder, has at least nine former lawyers for terrorists making policy. The administration is stonewalling who they are and what they do, but bits are coming to light. The Washington Post has launched a full scale offensive on their behalf, slandering Liz Cheney for her efforts to shed light on this scandal. To their credit, they did publish a counter opinion piece.

*******************************

The 'al-Qaeda seven' and selective McCarthyism

By Marc A. Thiessen
Monday, March 8, 2010; 11:22 AM

Would most Americans want to know if the Justice Department had hired a bunch of mob lawyers and put them in charge of mob cases? Or a group of drug cartel lawyers and put them in charge of drug cases? Would they want their elected representatives to find out who these lawyers were, which mob bosses and drug lords they had worked for, and what roles they were now playing at the Justice Department? Of course they would -- and rightly so.

Yet Attorney General Eric Holder hired former al-Qaeda lawyers to serve in the Justice Department and resisted providing Congress this basic information. In November, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee sent Holder a letter requesting that he identify officials who represented terrorists or worked for organizations advocating on their behalf, the cases and projects they worked on before coming to the Justice Department, the cases and projects they've worked on since joining the administration, and a list of officials who have recused themselves because of prior work on behalf of terrorist detainees.

Holder stonewalled for nearly three months. Finally, two weeks ago, he admitted that nine political appointees in the Justice Department had represented or advocated for terrorist detainees, but he failed to identify seven whose names were not publicly known or to directly answer other questions the senators posed. So Keep America Safe, a group headed by Liz Cheney, posted a Web ad demanding that Holder identify the "al-Qaeda seven," and a subsequent Fox News investigation unearthed the names. Only under this public pressure did the Justice Department confirm their identities -- but Holder still refuses to disclose their roles in detention policy.

Americans have a right to this information. One lawyer in the National Security Division of Holder's Justice Department, Jennifer Daskal, has written that any terrorist not charged with a crime "should be released from Guantanamo's system of indefinite detention" even though "at least some of these men may ... join the battlefield to fight U.S. soldiers and our allies another day." Should a lawyer who advocates setting terrorists free, knowing they may go on to kill Americans, have any role in setting U.S. detention policy? My hunch is that most Americans would say no.

Do other lawyers in question hold similarly radical and dangerous views? Without the information Holder is withholding, we cannot know if such lawyers are affecting detainee policy.

Yet for raising questions, Cheney and the Republican senators have been vilified. Former Clinton Justice Department official Walter Dellinger decried the "shameful" personal attacks on "these fine lawyers," while numerous commentators leveled charges of "McCarthyism."

Where was the moral outrage when fine lawyers like John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Jim Haynes, Steve Bradbury and others came under vicious personal attack? Their critics did not demand simple transparency; they demanded heads. They called these individuals "war criminals" and sought to have them fired, disbarred, impeached and even jailed. Where were the defenders of the "al-Qaeda seven" when a Spanish judge tried to indict the "Bush six"? Philippe Sands, author of the "Torture Team," crowed: "This is the end of these people's professional reputations!" I don't recall anyone accusing him of "shameful" personal attacks.

The standard today seems to be that you can say or do anything when it comes to the Bush lawyers who defended America against the terrorists. But if you publish an Internet ad or ask legitimate questions about Obama administration lawyers who defended America's terrorist enemies, you are engaged in a McCarthyite witch hunt.

Some defenders say al-Qaeda lawyers are simply following a great American tradition, in which everyone gets a lawyer and their day in court. Not so, says Andy McCarthy, the former assistant U.S. attorney who put Omar Abdel Rahman, the "blind sheik," behind bars for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. "We need to be clear about what the American tradition is," McCarthy told me. "The Sixth Amendment guarantees the accused -- that means somebody who has been indicted or otherwise charged with a crime -- a right to counsel. But that right only exists if you are accused, which means you are someone who the government has brought into the civilian criminal justice system." The habeas lawyers were not doing their constitutional duty to defend unpopular criminal defendants. They were using the federal courts as a tool to undermine our military's ability to keep dangerous enemy combatants off the battlefield in a time of war.

If lawyers who once sought to free captured terrorists are now setting U.S. policy when it comes to the release of Guantanamo detainees, moving terrorists to the United States, trying senior al-Qaeda leaders in civilian courts, and whether to give captured terrorists Miranda rights, then, as Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) put it, the public has "a right to know who advises the attorney general and the president on these critical matters." Only when this information is public can members of Congress judge whether these individuals have properly recused themselves or whether they should be involved in detainee matters at all. The charge of McCarthyism is intended to intimidate those raising legitimate questions into silence. But asking such questions is not McCarthyism. It's oversight.

Marc Thiessen is the author of Courting Disaster and writes a weekly column for The Post.

 

My view is that I would not have objected to the equivalent under Bush, with the possible exception of mafia lawyers. I'd have to think about that scenario, it gives me the willies.

 

Maddow fact-checks the bullshit.

<object width="420" height="245" id="msnbc2348a5"><param name="movie" value="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640" classid="clsid><param name="FlashVars" value="launch=35718576&width=420&height=245"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="wmode" value="opaque" /><embed name="msnbc2348a5" src="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640" width="420" height="245" FlashVars="launch=35718576&width=420&height=245" allowscriptaccess="always" allowFullScreen="true" wmode="opaque" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"></embed></object><p style="font-size:11px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #999; margin-top: 5px; background: transparent; text-align: center; width: 420px;">Visit msnbc.com for <a style="text-decoration:none !important; border-bottom: 1px dotted #999 !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px; color:#5799DB !important;" href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com">breaking news</a>, <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032507" style="text-decoration:none !important; border-bottom: 1px dotted #999 !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px; color:#5799DB !important;">world news</a>, and <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032072" style="text-decoration:none !important; border-bottom: 1px dotted #999 !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px; color:#5799DB !important;">news about the economy</a></p>

 

Meet the Justice Department lawyers who tirelessly advocated to free terrorists. Don't forget, a lot of this work was done pro bono, which is supposed to mean "for good."

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/meet-doj-lawyers-who-defended-terrorist-detainees

 

Thank you, Keep America Safe
By Michelle Malkin • March 8, 2010 11:24 AM

If not for the vigilant work of Keep America Safe, the corruptocrat Attorney General Eric Holder’s national security stone wall on DOJ’s terror lawyers would still be standing.

Asking politely, in respectful tones with bowed heads and stooped spines, did not get the DOJ to cough up the names.

It took relentless pressure and synergistic conservative media scrutiny, which reached a tipping point when Keep America Safe ran a hard-hitting ad about the “al Qaeda 7,” to uncover the names. (Thomas Joscelyn has your must-read backgrounder here. Power Line has an intense debate over the fairness of the ad (see here and here.)

Now, instead of asking why the most transparent administration ever didn’t just disclose the identities of those lawyers for the American public and instead of getting to the bottom of why Holder sought to protect them from exposure, Keep America Safe is under attack by the ACLU, some Bush administration lawyers, and the ABA for being too “divisive.”

Well, hell, yes, the planned Gitmo closure, civilian trials for high-value jihadi suspects, and transparency-undermining Eric Holder’s interest-conflicted DOJ are “divisive” topics.

If we’ve learned anything from the last year, it’s that you won’t get anywhere with the hardball Chicagoans-on-the-Potomac through conciliation and mooooderation. This is an ideological battle that requires fierceness and fortitude — the willingness to combat the Left’s reckless ideas and underhanded tactics instead of capitulating to them whenever the civility mavens start whining about “tone.”

The DOJ terror lawyers’ defenders complain that it is unfair to question their motives and loyalty. There wouldn’t have been so many questions in the first place had Eric Holder simply divulged the names when Sen. Grassley asked him to do so months ago.

The predictable cries of “McCarthyism” are rising. The demand for public disclosure is now being characterized as a “witch hunt.” Exactly as the Obama White House would have it: Demonize dissent. Freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.

Thank you, Keep America Safe, for taking the flak, keeping watch, and keeping American informed

 

We know that any time liberals start attacking conservatives, there will be some "moderate" republicans who will rush to form a circular firing squad and denounce their colleagues, perhaps hoping to catch some slight break from the liberal media. In that tradition, a group of spineless lawyers have attacked Cheney. See http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34050.html

Too bad they didn't feel the same need to defend the Bush Justice Department lawyers who were viciously attacked by obama's henchmen.

 

Will Holder find a spot for "Jihad Jane"? I think they would work well together, birds of a feather and all that.

 

No, but she'll probably get some high-priced big firm lawyer representing her for free. For some reason liberals see honor in helping terrorists kill us.

 

Anyone see Jon Stewart destroy this fat fuck "Thiessen?"