Gitmo's Indefensible Lawyers

That's the title of of a mind-blowing op-ed by Debra Burlingame and Tom Joscelyn in Monday's Wall Street Journal. Debra and Tom make mince-meat of the hallucination that casts the Gitmo Bar as modern John Adamses. The essay recounts, among other things:

The Gitmo Bar — in gross violation of the conditions of access to the enemy combatants — provided al Qaeda detainees with a propaganda brochure that instructed them on how falsely to claim that they had been tortured and abused. As the Gitmo commander put it, "The very nature of this document gives tremendous moral support to those who would strike out against our country.... 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."

The Gitmo Bar fomented a detainee hunger strike that disrupted security at the camp and set the stage for fabricated reports that the detainees were being tortured and force-fed.

The Gitmo Bar provided the detainees with virulently anti-American rhetoric that compared military physicians to Nazi Josef Mengele, labeled DOJ lawyers "desk torturers," and informed the detainees about the Abu Ghraib abuses and the potential for framing President Bush as a war criminal.

The Gitmo Bar provided the enemy combatant terrorists with a hand-drawn map of the detention camp's lay-out, including guard towers.

The Gtimo Bar posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet in a transparent effort to identify U.S. security personnel.

The Gitmo Bar facilitated enemy combatants in communicating messages and interviews to their confederates and the outside world.

The Gitmo Bar provided a detainee with a list identifying all the other detainees in custody.

The Gitmo Bar provided the detainees with news accounts about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, including reports that U.S. forces were sustaining devastating casualities from IED attacks. (Again, it was a court-ordered condition of the lawyers' access to these war prisoners that they not be given information relating to military operations, intelligence, arrests, political news and current events, and the names of U.S. government personnel.)

The Gitmo Bar provided KSM and the 9/11 plotters — i.e., the murderers of 3000 Americans — with photographs of covert CIA officers in an effort to identify them as interrogators. (Leftist lawyers are attempting to have these interrogators indicted for torture and war crimes.)

The Gitmo Bar brags about its role in the release of enemy combatants who have returned to the jihad against American troops and the American people.

Interesting...I just finished reading it in my normal course of browsing, and came back here to see you posted this.

Excellent article, and Debra Burlingame is ALWAYS worth paying attention to.

This was the money quote from the entire article: "The attorney general has the right to select whomever he chooses to work in his department, and to set policy as he sees fit. He does not, however, have the right to do it in the dark. The policies he advances must face the scrutiny of the American people, his No. 1 client."

Bravo Ms. Burlingame!

Attorney General’s Duplicity Overlooked by Media Cheerleaders
By Jim Kouri Sunday, March 14, 2010

In 1999, Eric Holder helped arrange Bill Clinton pardons for 16 unrepentant members of FALN who had been convicted of “a variety of charges that included conspiracy, sedition, violation of the Hobbes Act (extortion by force, violence or fear), armed robbery and illegal possession of weapons and explosives—including large quantities of C-4 plastic explosive, dynamite and huge caches of ammunition.”

More and more Americans are discovering that the Obama Administration’s definition of transparency is more Clintonian and semantic than it is honest and encouraging.
The latest embarrassment for the Obama White House is the discovery that Attorney General Eric Holder has been less than forthcoming about his activities prior to being appointed U.S. Attorney General.
Justice Department officials have admitted that when members of the U.S. Senate—including Judiciary Committee members—were considering the nomination of Eric Holder as President Obama’s attorney general last year, he failed to disclose all of the legal briefs he had written or signed from his time in private practice especially those briefs that are pertinent to his current positions and views during the so-called war on terrorism.
“Holder has now decided to be open and transparent with the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding his lapse remembering to turn over copies of his legal filings, including Amicus briefs on behalf of detained terrorists and enemy combatants,” said Mike Baker, political strategist and private practice attorney.

“Holder also used the oldest trick in the book: he made his official statement on a Friday afternoon during a busy news cycle,” Baker said.

“As part of Holder’s confirmation process, a list of legal briefs to the committee was turned over to senate staffers,” he said. And the list turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee did not include filings in about seven cases.

The issue of Holder’s past legal papers came up after some Republicans asked why lawyers who had previously done legal work for terror detainees now had jobs in the Justice Department, something President Barack Obama successfully avoided discussing, and something conveniently overlooked by a Justice Department now saturated with Holder colleagues whose work records show they defended terrorism suspects and ‘Gitmo’ detainees.

excerpt

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/20965

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