United Liberty

Several prominent Republican lawyers are speaking up against the efforts by Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol to smear attorneys who previously represented Guantanamo detainees:

A group that includes leading conservative lawyers and policy experts, former Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and several senior officials of the last Bush administration is denouncing as “shameful” Republican attacks on lawyers who came to the Obama Justice Department after representing suspected terrorists.

Senate Republicans have demanded details of the lawyers’ past work and Liz Cheney’s group “Keep America Safe” has questioned their “values.” A drumbeat of Republican criticism forced the Justice Department reluctantly to identify seven of them last week. But the harshness of the criticism – Keep America Safe labeled a group of them the “Al Qaeda Seven” — has provoked a backlash from across the legal establishment.

“We consider these attacks both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications,” wrote the 19 lawyers whose names were attached to the statement as of early Monday.

The statement cited John Adams’s defense of British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre to argue that “zealous representation of unpopular clients” is an important American tradition.

The attacks on the lawyers “undermine the Justice system more broadly,” they wrote, by “delegitimizing” any system in which accused terrorists have lawyers, whether civilian courts of military tribunals.

The letter’s signers include some of the top officials of a Bush Justice Department that wrestled at length with the legal questions surrounding terrorist detentions.

(…)

The men in this video were held at Guantánamo for years without charge and denied any meaningful opportunity to challenge the legality of their detention. But now they are finally free. This is their story.

There is a lot of rhetoric being bantered about by political partisans from all parties over what to do about detainees at our naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Republicans are outraged that President Barack Obama would dare think about allowing any of them to come to the United States. Let’s face it, right now, the fear is the only card Republicans have against Democrats, who have felt the heat andrejected funding to close the facilities at Gitmo.

Let me tell you something, there are already terrorists imprisoned in the United States who have committed or were planning to commit acts of terrorism, including several al-Qaeda members, both before and after 9/11.

The rhetoric from the right is dishonest and it plays on the short-term memory of the electorate who may not remember what happened to Ramzi Yousef or Richard Reid or any other terrorist responsible for killing or plotting to kill Americans.

Below are the names of more than 20 terrorists currently imprisoned at ADX Florence, a supermax prison in Colorado:

No doubt President Obama will ignore this:

CARACAS, Venezuela (CNN) — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says he would be willing to accept prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay detention center, which U.S. President Barack Obama has said he will close, the Venezuelan government said Thursday.

Nevertheless it is worth noting what an awful idea this would be if it were to go through. A bunch of prisoners who were held indefinitely by the United States granted asylum in a raucusly anti-American state? That’s just a recipe for disaster.

Of course there are worse places they could end up, like Sudan, Iran or Saudi Arabia. The best place for them right now is a courtroom.

As widely expected, soon after reciting the Presidential Oath (again…), President Barack Obama made good on his commitment to begin the promised transition away from the nation’s current policy of rejecting due process to those the executive administration believe may be involved with terrorist operations against the United States or its allies. The New York Times reports—

In the first hours of his presidency, President Obama directed an immediate halt to the Bush administration’s military commissions system for prosecuting detainees at the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.