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Cheney Wants Names Named
Byby Chris Bodenner
Liz Cheney ratchets up the disgusting campaign led by Senator Chuck Grassley to impugn DOJ appointees who represented Gitmo detainees. Ackerman:
You know, [the lawyers who] provided the representation that the Rehnquist and Roberts Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled those detainees are entitled? And which even the military commissions provide for? Instead, there’s this McCarthyite tactic of calling Justice Department lawyers the “Gitmo Nine,” a name that oh-so-cleverly suggests that those lawyers were themselves detained at Guantanamo.
Of course the "Gitmo Nine" isn't devious enough for Cheney, so she goes with the "Al-Qaeda Seven." Not only does she presume that all suspected terrorists are guilty before due process, but she ignores the reality that only a fraction of the detainees held at Gitmo were even accused of Al-Qaeda ties in the first place. Ackerman has more:
Grassley knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s taking one of the strengths of the American justice system the fact that everyone is entitled to legal representation and implying that it’s unseemly. It’s a testament to the weakness of his character that he will never forthrightly accuse these attorneys of what he’s implying sympathy with accused terrorists in a way that they could refute. What a pathetic excuse for a man. Those of us in the media have an obligation to call this smear campaign what it is.
Think Progress rounds up more McCarthyite smears from the far right:
– The American Spectator escalates the number of potential terrorist “abettors” in the Department of Justice from 9 to “as many as 13 to 16.”
– David Davenport, a researcher at the conservative Hoover Institution, wrote in an editorial for the San Francisco Chronicle, “The Department of Justice is supposed to be prosecuting terrorists, not coddling them.”
– The Investor’s Business Daily headlines its editorial: “DOJ: Department of Jihad?” “Just whose side are they on?” IBD asks.
– “It’s like they’re bringing al Qaeda lawyers inside the Department of Justice,” said Debra Burlingame, who lost her brother on 9/11 and a board member of Liz Cheney’s group Keep America Safe.
