Hentoff and Ralph Nader, another left-winger who spoke out for Terri, remind us that it isn't WHO says it, it's WHAT THEY SAY. Our goal is to get at the truth. It doesn't matter who contributes to that end or where they are on the political spectrum. The only question is, "Is what they say true?"
To fix on "who" says it is the logical fallacy known as "ad hominem." The fallacy is simply that it's a diversion to discuss the messenger instead of the message. "Who" said it is irrelevant.
For instance, some of the WPPFF folks are amazingly fixated on Dr. Hammesfahr. The party line is that he wasn't really nominated for a Nobel Prize. The answer to that is, "So what?" It has absolutely nothing to do with Terri's case. It's just ad hominem, a diversion away from the questions at hand.
Not one of the doctors who decreed death for Terri spent as much as one full hour with her. Dr. Hammesfahr spent ten hours with her over three days and wrote up extensive and wonderfully clear notes on his testing. Unlike the others, he knew he was interacting with a human being, with a naturally shy young woman. He was friendly to her, he took time to get to know her, so Terri responded much better to him than she did to brusque, unsympathetic strangers like Dr. Cranford.
In other words, the death doctors botched their job and made Terri pay with her life for their own mistakes. They probably went in there with a preconceived idea that Terri was PVS. They treated her like a vegetable and surprise! she didn't respond well. So they wrote that she was PVS.
But Terri responded well to Dr. Hammesfahr, who took the trouble to treat her as a person.
The judge didn't judge. They held the line.