The McCarthyism Of McCarthy, Ctd

Friedersdorf notes how the distinction between a terror suspect and a terrorist does not seem to have occurred to the pro-torture right:

In his latest posts at The Corner, Andrew McCarthy continues to write as though every detainee ever held at Guantanamo Bay is a member of al Qaeda. Nowhere does he acknowledge that some people designated as enemy combatants by the Bush Administration were actually innocent, or that some of the lawyers he is maligning deserve credit for helping to free innocent men.

Had Mr. McCarthy’s preferred policies remained in effect, these innocent men would still be rotting in a Gitmo prison cell today. In that way, he transgresses against the core American principle that all men are endowed by their creator with an inalienable right to liberty. Mr. McCarthy’s writing on detainee issues would be far more intellectually honest if he acknowledged rather than elided the existence of these innocent people.

Instead he is escalating his attacks on lawyers who represent detainees both innocent and guilty, going so far to write at The Corner that “Islam and the Left are not perfectly aligned, but they are substantially aligned, much more so than most people realize… the issue isn’t so much whether, in a vacuum, Leftist lawyers are pro-al Qaeda or pro-Islamist. It is where their sympathies lie as between two opponents: the United States as it is and Islamism.”