Coming from the crew that turned the Department of Justice into a political arm of the Republican party, replete with loyalty oaths and politically motivated hirings and firings--remember the prosecutor purge that brought down Alberto Gonzales?--this is all the more despicable.
Liz Cheney's group Keep America Safe, which has led the resurgent Republican attacks on President Obama's national security policies, is releasing a video this morning that questions the loyalties of Justice Department lawyers who advocated for detained terror suspects during the Bush Administration.
The group has been hammering Attorney General Eric Holder for months on the issue, which has drawn increasing attention from Senate Republicans. Senator Charles Grassley last month pushed Holder to identify any lawyers who had represented detainees, and the Department said last month that nine Justice Department appointees filled that category -- but he refused to name those whose work hadn't been previously reported. Conservatives view the partial disclosure as another Holder misstep, and in a new video, the group is going on offense.
Adam Sewer has a must-read article on this effort--taken up by Andrew McCarthy at National Review.
In the aftermath of September 11, the Bush administration tried to set up a military-commissions system to try suspected terrorists. The commissions offered few due process rights, denied the accused access to the evidence against them, and allowed the admission of hearsay -- and even evidence gained through coercion or abuse. The Bush administration also sought to prevent detainees from challenging their detention in court. Conservatives argued that the nature of the war on terrorism justified the assertion of greater executive power. In case after case, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the administration's critics.
"These lawyers were advocating on behalf of our Constitution and our laws. The detention policies of the Bush administration were unconstitutional and illegal, and no higher a legal authority than the Supreme Court of the United States agreed," says Ken Gude, a human-rights expert with the Center for American Progress, of the recent assault on the Justice Department. "The disgusting logic of these attacks is that the Supreme Court is in league with al-Qaeda."
The attorneys who challenged the Bush administration's national-security policies saw themselves as fulfilling their legal obligations by fighting an unconstitutional power grab. At heart, this was a disagreement over process: Should people accused of terrorism be afforded the same human rights and due process protections as anyone else in American custody? But rather than portray the dispute as a conflict over what is and isn't within constitutional bounds, conservatives argue that anyone who opposed the Bush administration's policies is a traitor set to undermine America's safety from within the Justice Department.
Apparently the Supreme Court justices are terrorist sympathizers as well. It's not just "leftist" human rights and constitutional defenders who are appalled at this attack; American military personnel joining in the defense of the DOJ.
Rushing to their defense is retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor of the Cheneys’ beloved military commissions, who told me the attacks are “outrageous.”
“Neal in particular was and is one of the sharpest and hardest-working attorneys I’ve known in the 27 years I’ve been practicing law,” said Davis, who supervised prosecutions at Guantanamo from 2005 to 2007. “It is absolutely outrageous for the Cheney-Grassley crowd to try to tar and feather Neal and Jennifer and insinuate they are al-Qaeda supporters. You don’t hear anyone refer to John Adams as a turncoat for representing the Brits in the Boston Massacre trial....
“If you zealously represent a client, there’s nothing shameful about that,” said the retired Air Force colonel. “That’s the American way.”
And where are Congressional Dems? Thus far, nowhere to be seen. Too much of the worst of the Bush administration abuses happened with the acquiescence of Congressional Dems. At the very least, they need to defend the administration and Holder's DOJ against these attacks now.