ANDREW McCARTHY DEBATES THE AD SUPPORTING THE ALQAEDA 7..SEE NOTE PLEASE
THE AD IS IN ITALICS AND ANDREW McCARTHY’S COGENT RESPONSE IS IN BOLD UNDERLINED…AND P.S. KRISTOL WHO IS RIGHT ON THIS ISSUE SHOULD RECONSIDER HIS DISGUSTING BASHING OF GEERT WILDERS…..RSK
Our view on ‘The al-Qaeda 7’: Yes, even accused terrorists should have access to lawyers
Attack on Guantanamo attorneys insults proud U.S. legal tradition.
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One of America’s proudest traditions is that everyone, no matter how reviled, has a right to be represented in court and that there are always courageous lawyers willing to do the job. It’s one of the things — like the legal system itself — that separates the United States from its enemies, deterring persecution of the innocent and shoddy police work alike.
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When British soldiers shot into a taunting Boston crowd in 1770, killing five, John Adams, later the nation’s second president, represented the soldiers at their trials. When an American Nazi group sought to march in a heavily Jewish suburb of Chicago in 1977, an ACLU lawyer represented the group to uphold the guarantee of freedom of speech. In recent years, more than 500 lawyers have kept that tradition alive by defending terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
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Apparently having no use for this tradition of protecting individual liberty, a conservative group called Keep America Safe put out an Internet ad that smears a group of those lawyers who now work at the Justice Department. The ad dubs them the “al-Qaeda 7,” portrays the Justice Department as the “Department of Jihad?” and asks darkly, “Whose values do they share?”
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Well, Keep America Safe got an unexpected answer this week. Not only liberals but also a who’s who of conservative lawyers, including many top Bush administration officials, decried the ad as “shameful.” Bush solicitor general Ted Olson, whose wife was killed on 9/11 in the jetliner that slammed into the Pentagon, told Newsweek the lawyers’ work was in “the finest traditions” of the profession.
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If Olson believes it’s honorable for lawyers to defend detainees, then maybe Keep America Safe’s leaders — conservative activist Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice president — ought to take a look at their tactics, their values and the facts.
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The fact is that many of those whom Liz Cheney is quick to brand as terrorists have been released from Guantanamo — including about 530 by the Bush administration, which admitted many posed no long-term threat.
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In her attack, Cheney pointed specifically to Osama bin Laden’s driver, Salim Hamdan, who was represented by Neal Katyal, now a top Justice official. In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Katyal’s argument and ruled 5-3 that military commissions then being used did not offer detainees sufficient protections. Does Cheney want to question the patriotism of those five justices?
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Cheney suggests that the work these lawyers did disqualifies them from making detainee policy at Justice. It doesn’t. Representing a detainee disqualifies a lawyer from taking part in any government case involving that person, and Justice lawyers have recused themselves from many cases. By Cheney’s standard, no one who had ever been a criminal defense lawyer could work at Justice, probably disqualifying several attorneys general and the current head of the FBI.
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Cheney’s campaign looks like payback for calls from the left to prosecute two former Bush Justice Department lawyers who signed off on legal memos justifying waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects. That demand, too, was inappropriate.
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Late last year, Attorney General Eric Holder might have defused the situation by releasing the names of the Guantanamo lawyers when several Republican senators asked for them. Instead, he stonewalled, making it appear there was something to hide.
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None of this, however, justifies Keep America Safe’s exercise in character assassination. Far from keeping America safe, such tactics disgrace the nation’s history and violate its values.
(Internet ad by Keep America Safe)
Posted at 12:22 AM/ET, March 12, 2010 in USA TODAY editorial | Permalink
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Opposing view: ‘No right to counsel’
Of all the causes to volunteer for, these lawyers chose our enemies.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2010/03/opposing-view-no-right-to-counsel.html#more
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It is absurd for critics of Keep America Safe to proclaim an American legal tradition of representing alien enemy combatants. There is none. To mask this inconvenient fact, critics speak in gobbledygook about representing “pariahs” or “the unpopular.” Our actual tradition is to represent accused defendants, no matter how unsavory. The al-Qaeda detainees at issue are not accused defendants. They are plaintiffs filing offensive lawsuits (habeas corpus claims) against the American people during wartime. Unpopular American inmates must represent themselves in such suits because there is no right to counsel.
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The relevant American tradition is that victory in war is our highest national imperative. Therefore, all citizens — including lawyers — are obliged to help defeat the enemy, not aid the enemy. And there is no doubt that these enemy lawsuits harm the war effort.
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The Supreme Court recognized as much in the 1950 Eisentrager case, involving Nazi enemy combatants captured overseas conducting offensive operations against the U.S. They sought to challenge their detention and trial by military commission. In rejecting their claim, the justices explained that “(i)t would be difficult to devise more effective fettering of a field commander than to allow the very enemies he is ordered to reduce to submission to call him to account in his own civil courts and divert his efforts and attention from the military offensive abroad to the legal defensive at home.”
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Yes, America’s left-wing legal profession has convinced the liberal bloc of a sharply divided Supreme Court to permit such suits. That doesn’t make them any less harmful, nor did it vest the detainees with a right to counsel.
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The Justice Department lawyers who represented al-Qaeda were volunteers. Of all the causes to which they could have donated their services, they chose our enemies. They are no doubt sincere in claiming they sought to vindicate principles, not terrorists. But the other stubborn fact is that, since they took the helm at Justice, counterterrorism policy has become much more terrorist friendly.
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Keep America Safe is not trying to destroy or disqualify Justice’s al-Qaeda lawyers, as the Obama Justice Department has tried to do to Bush lawyers. The group sought accountability from the self-proclaimed “most transparent administration in history.” What is shameful is that that should be controversial.
Keep America Safe declined the opportunity to provide an opposing view. Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, wrote at the group’s request.
Posted at 12:21 AM/ET, March 12, 2010 in USA TODAY editorial | Permalink
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