Cheney and the Torturing Neocons- The Best Defense is a Good Offense
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: [SpinLyme] Cheney and the Torturing Neocons- The Best Defense
is a Good Offense
Date: Mar 10, 2010 11:04 AM
Like the Head-Bashing and Little-Boy
Penisbiting DCF, and the IDSA who
http://www.actionlyme.org/andersonpenisbiterin.htm
deployed their 2006 *AND* their 2000
http://www.actionlyme.org/080430_RICO_CABAL_CAVES.htm
"guidelines" on "Lyme Disease" as a
http://www.actionlyme.org/Donta.htm
Defense against prosecution for falsifying
the diagnostic standard in order to falsify
the outcomes of their "vaccines" OspA/Pam3Cys,
http://www.actionlyme.org/GARY_WORMSER_SUED.htm
Cheney and his Cabal deploy the likes of
Bill Kristol and his daughter to attack
lawyers who defend Guantanamo "detainees"
not for "political" reasons, but because
the War On Terror and the "Right to Hot
Pursuit"
http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm
-kidnap, torture, and rendition for
torture is an internationally
recognized war crime.
It's not "political." It's an attaack
as defense.
"Political" means "before the indictments"
anyway.
Just to be clear.
Blame the Victim.
Attack the Whistleblower.
It's a well-known formulary deployed
only by COWARDS.
It was also deployed by Stanley Fish
yesterday, for which the pundits drew
blood over the cowardly ass attempt
http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2010/03/wow-thats-some-thoroughgoing-research.html
to once again state that Americans who
resent the country being hijacked by
CEO Tards and their henchmen... is cause
for...
Calling All Rebels (UN-COWARDS):
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/08-2
Kathleen M. Dickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
=============================
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/us/politics/10lawyers.html?hp
March 9, 2010
Attacks on Detainee Lawyers Split Conservatives
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
A conservative advocacy organization in Washington, Keep America Safe,
kicked up a storm last week when it released a video that questioned
the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers who worked in the past on
behalf of detained terrorism suspects.
But beyond the expected liberal outrage, the tactics of the group,
which is run by Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president,
have also split the tightly knit world of conservative legal scholars.
Many conservatives, including members of the Federalist Society, the
quarter-century-old policy group devoted to conservative and
libertarian legal ideals, have vehemently criticized Ms. Cheney’s
video, and say it violates the American legal principle that even
unpopular defendants deserve a lawyer.
“There’s something truly bizarre about this,” said Richard A. Epstein,
a University of Chicago law professor and a revered figure among many
members of the society. “Liz Cheney is a former student of mine — I
don’t know what moves her on this thing,” he said.
On Sunday, the Brookings Institution issued a letter criticizing the
“shameful series of attacks” on government lawyers, which it said were
“unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt
to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications.”
The letter was signed by a Who’s Who of former Republican
administration officials and conservative legal figures, including
Kenneth W. Starr, the former special prosecutor, and Charles D.
Stimson, who resigned from the second Bush administration after
suggesting that businesses might think twice before hiring law firms
that had represented detainees. Other Bush administration figures who
signed include Peter D. Keisler, a former acting attorney general, and
Larry D. Thompson, a former deputy attorney general.
The letter cited “the American tradition of zealous representation of
unpopular clients,” including the defense by John Adams of British
soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre, and noted that some detainee
advocates, who worked pro bono, have made arguments that swayed the
Supreme Court.
Ms. Cheney’s video referred to the lawyers as the “Al Qaeda Seven,”
and accused the Justice Department of concealing their names, which
were later revealed by Fox News.
David B. Rivkin Jr., the co-chairman of the Center for Law and
Counterterrorism in Washington, is a member of the Federalist Society
and signed the Brookings letter; he said the attack was unfortunate.
“I appreciate the partisan advantage to be gained here,” Mr. Rivkin
said, but “it’s not the right way to proceed.” He said he preferred
“principled ways for debating where this administration is wrong —
there’s no reason to resort to ad hominem attacks.”
John C. Yoo, the former Justice official whose memorandums on torture
and presidential power were used to justify some of the most
controversial policies of the Bush administration, said he had not
seen the material from Ms. Cheney’s group. But Professor Yoo, who now
teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and is active in
the Federalist Society, said the debate about lawyers who once
represented detainees at the American prison in Guantánamo Bay serving
in the Justice Department was overheated.
“What’s the big whoop?” he asked. “The Constitution makes the
president the chief law enforcement officer. We had an election.
President Obama has softer policies on terror than his predecessor.”
He said, “He can and should put people into office who share his
views.” Once the American people know who the policy makers are, he
said, “they can decide whether they agree with him or not.”
Professor Epstein, however, said he found it “appalling” to see people
equating work on detainee cases with a dearth of patriotism. He was a
co-author of a brief in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court case
argued by Neal Katyal, now the principal deputy solicitor general and
a lawyer under scrutiny from Ms. Cheney’s group. The court ruled that
the Bush administration’s initial plans for military commissions to
try detainees violated the law.
“You don’t want to give the impression that because you oppose the
government on this thing, that means you’re just one of those lefties
— which I am not,” he said.
For David M. McIntosh, a former member of Congress and a founder of
the Federalist Society, the split among conservatives is not
necessarily ideological, but may have to do with experience in the day-
to-day world of legal practice. Those in the profession, Mr. McIntosh
said, are more likely to argue that a lawyer should not be judged by
his clients, though he said it was legitimate to examine the agenda of
the lawyers.
“Was the person acting merely as an attorney doing their best to
represent a client’s case,” he asked, “or did they seek out the
opportunity to represent them or write an amicus brief because they
have a political or personal agenda that made them more interested in
participating in those cases?” If the commitment to the cases is
ideological, he said, it is reasonable to ask, “Is that the best
attorney for the Justice Department?”
Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, said accusations that
the administration had been secretive or had dragged its feet in
responding to the inquiry were untrue. But Mr. Miller said the
department would not participate “in an attempt to drag people’s names
through the mud for political purposes.”
In a letter sent to Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, the
Justice Department said in February that the lawyers understood that
they had to take different positions while working for the United
States than they did as private lawyers, and that in any case they
would recuse themselves from matters in which they had participated
earlier.
A Keep America Safe spokesman responded to a request for comment by
passing along links to essays by supporters like Marc A. Thiessen, a
columnist for The Washington Post, who wrote on Monday that the
detainees did not deserve the same level of representation as criminal
defendants.
The lawyers, Mr. Thiessen wrote, “were not doing their constitutional
duty to defend unpopular criminal defendants.” He said, “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.”
David Remes, a lawyer who represents 18 detainees, said in a telephone
interview from Guantánamo that the deeper point of the attack on the
lawyers was political.
The goal, Mr. Remes suggested, “was to make the Obama administration
and the Justice Department even more gun-shy than they are on
Guantánamo issues.”
"[Real] scientists are *fiercely* independent. That's the good
news."-- NIH's Top Fool, Anthony Fauci
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