I'm sure many of you have already seen this from Last Night's Countdown, but it bares repeating and rewatching - Kenneth Starr, the former Independent Counsel who hounded President Clinton to the brink of Impeachment has come forward to Defend seven Obama Depart of Justice Lawyers who had formerly had clients in Guantanamo.
Starr Correctly points out that the tradition of advocating for the fair imposition of the law, regardless of your prejudice about who the client may be is a cornerstone of our nation that goes back even to before it's actual founding in the Boston Massacre Case.
Starr makes this case in response to this:
Hiolder: We're going to be looking for those people who share (progressive) values (Dramatic Music Starts!)
What's amazing about this to me is that the big tag line is "Values" - Progressive Values.
Clearly these are "appeasing al Qeada supporting and sympathisizing values" - Traitorous Values.
Not that you can possibly get Liz Cheney to admit that high pitched sound is really a Paranoid Dog Whistle it in plain English.
HOLMES: Liz, good morning. So you released a fairly provocative ad, I have to say. And you ask the question "whose values" [does] Eric Holder share? In your view, whose values does he share?
CHENEY: Well, what the ad does — and actually it doesn’t question anybody’s loyalty. What the ad does is it says that there are nine lawyers in the Justice Department who used to represent al Qaeda terrorists and the Attorney General will only tell us who two of them are and we want the American people to have the right to know who the others are.
Doesn't question anyones loyalty? Why do the American people Need to know this information so desperately, why does it matter? And what's up with the "Department of Jihad" sign? How's that NOT an assault on someone's loyalty?
In the text area for that video Cheney's Keep America Safe posts this:
For more visit www.keepamericasafe.com. Call Eric Holder today 202-514-2000 and tell him advocates for terrorist detainees do not Keep America Safe.
The message is clear: people who defend Terrorist Scum ARE Terrorist Scum. They don't deserve defending. They don't deserve the protection of our laws and Constitution. They don't deserve to LIVE, simply because We Say So, we don't need a court, or a judge and a Jury to know that - we all know that, right?
Wrong.
Frequent Countdown Guest Eugene Robinson echoes Starr
Liz Cheney is not ignorant, and neither are the other co-chairs of her group, advocate Debra Burlingame and pundit William Kristol, who writes a monthly column for The Post. Presumably they know that "the American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients is at least as old as John Adams' representation of the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre" -- in other words, older than the nation itself.
That quote is from a letter by a group of conservative lawyers -- including several former high-ranking officials of the Bush-Cheney administration, legal scholars who have supported draconian detention and interrogation policies, and even Kenneth W. Starr -- that blasts the "shameful series of attacks" in which Liz Cheney has been the principal mouthpiece. Among the signers are Larry Thompson, who was deputy attorney general under John Ashcroft; Peter Keisler, who was acting attorney general for a time during George W. Bush's second term; and Bradford Berenson, who was an associate White House counsel during Bush's first term.
"To suggest that the Justice Department should not employ talented lawyers who have advocated on behalf of detainees maligns the patriotism of people who have taken honorable positions on contested questions," the letter states.
I actually think this is far worse than McCarthyism, it's a Lynch Mob Mentality. String 'em up, let God sort out the guilty and the less guilty.
What makes this even more clear is when Torture Apologist Marc Thiessen gets into the act.
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.
See, they're just like Mob Lawyers - Consiglier to al Qeada. They ARE Al Qeada. And this point shouldn't be dismissed as simply a way to smear the Obama administration, it goes far deeper than that, Thiessen - when discussing his book on Harsh Interrogation before the Heritage Foundation last week - argued that we shouldn't even have trials - Military trials - at GITMO for these people because some of the evidence presented in the trail might have come from sensitive intelligence sources and the Lawyers might be able to leak that information back to al Qeada.
Call me silly, but I think leaking classified information to our enemy is generally called Treason.
This skip logic also ignores the fact that most of the attorneys at Gitmo were JAG Officers, even the defense attorney - and he's suggesting here that even U.S. Solders Can't be Trust with the Truth.
Soldiers like Lt Cmd. Swift who successfully defended Salim Hamdan's Habeaus petition before the Supreme Court. If we can't trust out military with military secrets, who can we trust with them - Scooter Libby?
Swift: What the Court said is that even the President has to follow the Law
What's even worse about Cheney, Theissen and their ilk is statements and arguments like this:
Thiessen: 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.
It's a dangerous and radical view that Due Process and the Fourth Amendment trumps Rabid Paranoia? It just so happens that in the Hamdan/Swift case the Supreme Court essentially made exactly that point when the effectively voided President Bush end-run around Habeaus, and summarily restored wrongly-withheld Geneva protections to all detainees.
What's dangerous and radical is having a view like Cheney's and Thiessen's when the facts are very clear that many of those captured and abused at Gitmo were completely innocent of connections to terrorism, and worse, much of the evidence against them is in a complete shambles as explained here by former Gitmo Prosecutor Lt. Col Darrell Vandevelt.
The issue of due process and habeus isn't just an abstract legal issue - it's a question of whether you have the correct person in custody or not.
When you short-circuit this process, it becomes more and more likely that innocent people will be caught in this net - and that these types of illegal techniques might be used on them, as it appears it was used against Whistle-blowers who were working undercover with the FBI to reveal contractor malfeasance in Iraq.
So even though Gitmo doesn't work, and the Torture Advocates have already LOST THIS ARGUMENT before the Supreme Court,and Dick Cheney Lost This Argument within the Bush Administration after the CiA inspector Generals Report revealed in 2004 that the EIT techniques being employed in the Black Sites were very likely "Illegal and ineffective", and FBI Director Meuller has stated "No Terrorist Attacks were thwarted using EITs", and both General Colin Powell and General David Petreas have supported the Obama Administration handling of Terror Suspect - they still continue on.
Everything they have is FAIL - and fear, which is why Thiessen resorts to disgusting arguments such as these.
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 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"?
They called them "War Criminals" because their "advocacy" very likely led to violations of 18 USC 2441 - the War Crimes Act which makes "Grave Breaches of Geneva a CRIME". Remember Geneva, the thing that the Supreme Court re-instated for detainees? People didn't say those things to be "mean" - they were applying the law. A law that still applies and can still be enforced by the Special Counsel Holder already assigned to the case. Even if Marc and Liz fail to remember what a Special Counsel is like, I know Ken Starr does.
The standard today seems to be that you can say or do anything when it comes to the Bush lawyers who defended America against 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.
See what little Marky Marc did there? He's turned one set of attorneys whose decisions really may have directly lead to the deaths of as many as 100 Detainees, including 34 suspected homicides - and tried make them into the Victims of a "Witchhunt", while other lawyers like Lt. Commander Swift and Lt. Col Vandevelt who simply did their jobs should be facing "legitimate questions" which aren't based on facts, aren't based on the law, and aren't based on the Constitution.
These "questions" are simply based on the groundless paranoid simperings of a pack of cowards, who all may have sworn an Oath to "Defend the Constitution" but clearly don't know the first thing about it, or the true VALUES that this country was founded on when General George Washington Himself - Banned The Torture of Enemy Captives.
Somehow "Mass Murderers" simply doesn't cut it. What these people are doing is intimidation with the intent to foster Vicious Illegal Totalitarian policies. It's blatant, naked Fear-mongering in support of American Terrorism - and it has to be called out as such.
Vyan