A group of 19 prominent Bush administration officials and other lawyers launched an offensive Monday, attacking Liz Cheney for a recent ad by her group, Keep America Safe, that questioned the loyalties of Department of Justice lawyers that had…
Politics
Bush Official Defends DOJ Lawyers against Cheney Attacks
So we have to rely on Bush administration officials to strenuoulsy defend Obama DOJ appointees against the McCarthyite smears coming from the Cheney crowd.
A former Justice Department official who led the Bush administration’s courtroom defense against lawsuits filed by Guantanamo detainees is denouncing attacks on Obama administration appointees who previously helped such prisoners challenge their indefinite detention without trial.
Peter D. Keisler, who was assistant attorney general for the civil division in the Bush administration, said in an interview that it was “wrong” to attack lawyers who volunteered to help such lawsuits before joining the Justice Department.
“There is a longstanding and very honorable tradition of lawyers representing unpopular or controversial clients,” Mr. Keisler said. “The fact that someone has acted within that tradition, as many lawyers, civilian and military, have done with respect to people who are accused of terrorism – that should never be a basis for suggesting that they are unfit in any way to serve in the Department of Justice.”
….
This week, the conservative group Keep American Safe, which is led in part by Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, and by Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard, had released a political video attacking the Obama administration for concealing the identity of those it called the “Al Qaeda Seven.”
“Whose values do they share?” a voice asks over images of seven silhouettes superimposed on Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. “Americans have a right to know the identities of the Al Qaeda Seven.”
The Keep America Safe video led to widespread discussion in the blogosphere, with some critics likening it to McCarthyism. Mr. Keisler did not use that term. But he strongly defended the lawyers who were once his opponents in litigation.
As volunteer lawyers for the detainees, he said, “they were asserting the position that there should be more judicial review of the circumstances of that detention – a position the Supreme Court ultimately agreed with. And it’s wrong to suggest that people who took that position are somehow sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”
We are still not seeing significant pushback from any elected Dems on this. The lack of a massive fight back against this crap from the Cheneyites just generates more crap, as documented by Glenn:
The last thing I would ordinarily do is watch a Wolf Blitzer broadcast, but I knew that this was going to be a heinously illustrative episode in modern political journalism — at best the vile campaign was going to be presented in the standard “each-side-says” format which defines modern journalistic “objectivity” — but it was far, far worse than even I expected. Blitzer first teased the segment as this on-screen logo appeared, taken directly from the Cheney/Kristol ad: “HAPPENING NOW: DEPT. OF JIHAD?”
The next time he teased the story, CNN flashed this logo — “Al Qaeda 7?” — also taken directly from the Cheney/Kristol ad, as Blitzer explained that numerous Justice Department lawyers have been “accused of disloyalty” by a national security organization headed by Liz Cheney. The final Blitzer tease came as these words were flashed on the screen: “Are Justice Dept. lawyers disloyal?”
So Liz Cheney gets to get on TV any time she feels like and spew her vile McCarthyism, calling Obama officials traitors to America because of their efforts to uphold the constitution. Who is going to start answering it?
Politics
Those “Torture Worked” Memos of Cheney’s
Via Jason Linkins at HuffPo, Michael Isikoff had a critical article this weekend, following the release of the OPR report.
A crucial CIA memo that has been cited by former Vice President Dick Cheney and other former Bush administration officials as justifying the effectiveness of waterboarding contained “plainly inaccurate information” that undermined its conclusions, according to Justice Department investigators.
Cheney has publicly called for the release of the CIA’s still classified memo and another document, insisting their disclosure will bolster his claim that the rough interrogation tactics he vigorously pushed for while in the White House yielded actionable intelligence that foiled terrorist plots against the United States.
But a just released report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility into the lawyers who approved the CIA’s interrogation program could prove awkward for Cheney and his supporters. The report provides new information about the contents of one of the never released agency memos, concluding that it significantly misstated the timing of the capture of one Al Qaeda suspect in order to make a claim that seems to have been patently false.
…One key claim in the agency memo was that the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogations of Zubaydah led to the capture of suspected “dirty bomb’ plotter Jose Padilla. “Abu Zubaydah provided significant information on two operatives, Jose Padilla and Binyam Mohammed, who planned to build and detonate a ‘dirty bomb’ in the Washington DC area,” the CIA memo stated, according to the OPR report. “Zubaydah’s reporting led to the arrest of Padilla on his arrival in Chicago in May 2003 [sic].”
But as the Justice report points out, this was wrong. “In fact, Padilla was arrested in May 2002, not 2003 … The information ‘[leading] to the arrest of Padilla’ could not have been obtained through the authorized use of EITs.” (The use of enhanced interrogations was not authorized until Aug. 1, 2002 and Zubaydah was not waterboarded until later that month.) “ Yet Bradbury relied upon this plainly inaccurate information” in two OLC memos that contained direct citations from the CIA Effectiveness Memo about the interrogations of Zubaydah, the Justice report states.
Greg Sargent discusses this, too and ask a key question. There was wall-to-wall media coverage last spring of Cheney’s claims that these memos would show that torture worked. Will there be wall-to-wall media coverage of the fact that the memo was “plainly inaccurate” and that Cheney was, and is, full of shit?
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