These attorneys have volunteered to defend GITMO scum. Fox News identified them; Eric Holder intially verified the first two, and finally acknowleged the other seven.
1. Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal. Katyal won the Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, challenging the legality of President Bush’s military commissions
2. National Security Division Attorney Jennifer Daskal, who worked for Human Rights Watch.
3. Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department’s Civil Division Beth Brinkmann who as an attorney with Morrison & Foerster worked on a Supreme Court brief on behalf of former federal judges that called for further protection of detainees’ rights;
4. Office of Legal Counsel attorney Jonathan Cedarbaum who as an attorney at WimlerHale was part of a “firm-wide effort” representing six Bosnian-Algerian detainees that led to the Supreme Court case Boumediene v. Bush. (A former assistant to the Solicitor General in the Bush administration, Pratik Shah, was also on the WilmerHale Boumediene v. Bush legal team);
5. Senior Counsel in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General Eric Columbus, a former WilmerHale attorney who also was on that Boumediene v. Bush legal team;
6. Office of the Attorney General official Tali Farhadian who as an attorney with Debevoise & Plimpton helped file a brief urging an appeals court to hear the case of Ali al-Marri;
7. Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Joseph Guerra who as an attorney with Sidley Austin helped three civil liberties groups, including a conservative organization, file a brief urging the Supreme Court to hear the case of Jose Padilla;
8. Office of Legal Counsel official Karl Thompson, who as an attorney at O’Melveny & Myers was on a team of seven attorneys representing Omar Khadr;
9. Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Civil Division Tony West who as an attorney with Morrison & Foerster’s represented John Walker Lindh.
http://liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/03/03/exclusive-unknown-doj-lawyers-identified/
Leftards had aneurisms over the disclosure and Liz Cheney’s ad demanding that the Justice Department divulge the names.
Via Andrew C. McCarthy at the WSJ:
……Until a couple of weeks ago, this was not a controversial proposition. It is now because of a television ad aired by a conservative group, Keep America Safe. The spot pressured the Obama administration, which has famously promised unprecedented transparency, to disclose the names of seven Justice Department political appointees who, while in private practice, voluntarily represented detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The Justice Department had stonewalled Republican lawmakers on this information for months. Then the Keep America Safe ad riveted public attention with the succinct but explosive question: “Who are the al Qaeda Seven?”
The Department of Justice folded, providing the names to the media. But the Obama administration also drummed up support from the legal profession’s leading lights. Twenty-two of them, including Kenneth Starr and other well-respected Republican lawyers, fired off a letter denouncing the ad as “shameful.” The Gitmo lawyers now working at the DOJ had acted in the “American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients,” the letter intoned. It even claimed that taking up the terrorists’ cause was comparable to John Adams’s defense of British soldiers prosecuted for the Boston Massacre. The left-leaning press chimed in, directing its wrath at a favorite target, the word “Cheney”—in this case, Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and co-director of Keep America Safe. The ad was portrayed as a right-wing smear of attorneys who had performed an honorable service, an assertion said to be proved by the fact that Gitmo lawyers had prevailed in some important Supreme Court cases.
The fictional premise of these wayward complaints is that the Justice Department’s al Qaeda lawyers stand in the same shoes as criminal-defense lawyers. The latter must represent even unsavory characters because the Constitution guarantees counsel to those charged with crimes.
To the contrary, the Justice Department’s al Qaeda lawyers were volunteers, just as Mr. Holder volunteered in the Heller case. Unlike the British soldiers represented by John Adams, the Gitmo detainees are not entitled to counsel. They are not criminal defendants. They are plaintiffs in offensive lawsuits, filed under the rubric of habeas corpus, challenging their detention as war prisoners. The nation is at war, and the detainees are unprivileged alien enemy combatants. By contrast, the United States was not at war with England at the time of the Boston Massacre, and the British soldiers were lawful police, not nonuniformed terrorists.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704131404575117613313731980.html
Lawyers for the terrorists have been known to pull a Lynn Stewart and smuggle brochures into GITMO, published by Amnesty International in the United Kingdom. The printed material portrayed America and its allies as waging a ‘campaign of torture against Muslims around the globe’.
An investigation by JTF-GTMO personnel revealed that Julia Tarver Mason, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, had sent it to Al Joudi and eight of the firm’s other detainee clients through “legal mail”—a designation for privileged lawyer-client communications that are exempt from screening by security personnel. Worse, the investigation showed that Ms. Mason’s clients passed it to other detainees not represented by Paul, Weiss lawyers. In all, more than a dozen detainees received a copy.
At Guantanamo, “legal mail” is strictly limited to correspondence between counsel and a detainee that is related to representation of the detainee, privileged documents and publicly filed legal documents. But even “legal mail,” according to the rules mandated by Judge Joyce Hens Green in a 2004 protective order, prohibits lawyers from giving detainees information relating to military operations, intelligence, arrests, political news and current events, and the names of U.S. government personnel.
The Amnesty International brochure, handed out at a human rights conference in London, was a political advocacy screed in clear violation of that order, which was formulated to protect force security. Maj. Gen. Hood made a command decision. He banned the Paul, Weiss lawyers from access to Guantanamo. The DOJ notified the firm.
Paul, Weiss immediately went on the offensive, backed by what one former Defense Department official, who requested anonymity, called “an armada of habeas attorneys.” They sued the government, demanding that it defend the decision to eject lawyers from Gitmo, making the straight-faced claim that the Amnesty International brochure was a legitimate “report” that was “directly related” to their clients’ defense. But their bottom line argument amounted to this: A military commander at a secure overseas military facility in a time of war couldn’t remove disruptive lawyers who were inciting captured enemy detainees and endangering the safety and security of military personnel unless he first got permission from a federal judge.
……Maj. Gen. Hood did not equivocate when it came to the Amnesty International pamphlet. “The very nature of this document gives tremendous moral support to those who would strike out against our country,” he stated. “It is not a factual report. Instead it is filled with second and third hand accounts, photos of protests that were staged, inflammatory photos from Iraq and provocative story captions.”
Maj. Gen. Hood noted that many of the captured al Qaeda terrorists held at the camp had been “specifically trained on the Manchester Manual [an al Qaeda training manual discovered at a safe house in Britain],” which “encourages detainees to claim torture and abuse.” He warned that “[e]xamples and vignettes of alleged abuse of other detainees” could be used “to fabricate their own claims of abuse and torture.”
In fact, from al Qaeda’s perspective, the Amnesty International brochure was better than the Manchester Manual. It cued detainees that the abuses at Abu Ghraib “were not an aberration.” The brochure told them that images from the Iraqi prison were consistent with “numerous allegations of torture and ill-treatment reported from detention centres in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay.”
Not only have GITMO lawyers passed incendiary propaganda to their clients, but they’ve also manipulated the tactics involved in hunger strikes to help Islamic terrorist thugs look like ‘victims’.
In one case, a lawyer sent one of the terrorists a transcript of a rabid anti-American speech that compared military physicians to Joseph Mengele, (the Nazi doctor of Auschwitz) and claimed “abuses carried out by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib . . . could involve the President in the commission of war crimes.”
Other incidents include:
……a lawyer who was caught in the act of making a hand-drawn map of a detention camp’s layout, including guard towers; a lawyer who sent a letter to his detainee client telling him that “we cannot depend on the military to do the right thing” and conveying his message of support to other detainees who were not his clients; lawyers who posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet; lawyers who provided news outlets with “interviews” of their clients using questions provided in advance by the news organization; and a lawyer who gave his client a list of all the detainees.
And taking pictures of CIA interrogators and passing them on to their terrorist clients.
……Last August, the Washington Post reported that three lawyers defending Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his 9/11 co-conspirators showed their clients photographs of covert CIA officers in an attempt to identify the individuals who interrogated them after they were captured overseas. Lawyers working for the John Adams Project, formed to support the legal team representing KSM and his cohorts, provided the defense attorneys with the photographs, according to the Post. None of the attorneys under investigation were identified in the Post report.
The Paul, Weiss firm is so proud of its acomplishments:
……On Feb. 20, 2007, a post on the Paul, Weiss Web site proudly announced “Paul, Weiss achieves more victories for Guantanamo detainees.” Two detainees were released from Gitmo to their home in Saudi Arabia. One was Majeed Abdullah Al Joudi, a recipient of the Amnesty International “report.” The Web site needs an update. The Pentagon has identified Al Joudi as a “confirmed” recidivist who is “directly involved” with the facilitation of “terrorist activities.”
Yousef Al Shehri, the detainee who led his cell block in the feeding tube rebellion, was also released in November 2007. In early 2009 he was listed on the Saudi Kingdom’s list of 85 “most wanted” extremists. Yousef was killed last October during a shootout with Saudi security forces on his way to a martyrdom operation. He and another jihadist, disguised as women and wearing suicide vests, killed a security officer in the clash. Yousef’s brother-in-law, Said Al Shehri, also released from Gitmo, is currently the second in command of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the branch that launched the Christmas Day airline attack last year.
More: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704131404575117611125872740.html
The Bush administration Department of Justice fought the subversion by leftwing activist GITMO lawyers.
Under Obama, Holder’s DOJ has no problem colluding with Islamic terrorists and their sycophantic legal representatives.
Americans have the right to know the names as well as the political stance government lawyers have taken. By the looks of the group, they are very sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
Related articles:
http://article.nationalreview.com/427318/why-the-al-qaeda-seven-matter/andrew-c-mccarthy
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704869304575110352558895376.html