Legal News

Gitmo Lawyers Ratchet up Rhetoric on Liz Cheney

By Ashby Jones

We’ve written a few posts on the controversy that sprang up recently involving Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick and leader of Keep America Safe, a conservative advocacy group. (Click here, here and here).

But, frankly, we’ve yet really to hear from any of the lawyers who’ve done work for Guantanamo detainees or terrorist suspects. Now we have. Writing in the Chicago Tribune today, Harry Schneider and Thomas Sullivan weigh in with one of the more sharply worded pieces yet attacking Cheney’s position.

As faithful LBers will no doubt recall, Liz Cheney’s organization recently aired a video calling for more information about — and questioning the motives of — Justice Department lawyers who, before arriving at the department, represented Guantanamo detainees while in private practice. Pundits on either side of the aisle attacked and defended Cheney’s assertions.

Enter Schneider and Sullivan. Schneider, a litigation partner at Perkins Coie in Seattle, represented Osama bin Laden’s former driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the first person tried before a military commission at Guantanamo. Hamdan was acquitted. Jenner & Block’s Sullivan, the former U.S. attorney in Chicago, has represented Guantanamo prisoners as well. The duo’s editorial reads:

Cheney . . . should know better. She is a law school graduate and former practicing attorney. Her video contradicts more than 200 years of legal tradition, whereby American attorneys have served as counsel for unpopular clients, often without fee, in order to ensure that our country remains a place where there is “justice for all” - even those deemed our enemies.

Now, here comes the tough stuff. A former editor of ours once told us that you can tell that a heated argument or debate has reached its apex (or nadir, depending on your perspective), when someone in the argument mentions Hitler. Here’s another name that tends to either stop discussion or blow it to smithereens: Joseph McCarthy. And Schneider and Sullivan go there. Yes they do:

[Cheney] asks: “Whose values do they share?”

It is hard to imagine a more reckless charge. Well, on second thought, we can think of one. Her video is reminiscent of similar tactics used during one of the darker episodes in American history, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy charged that those who insisted on due process for anyone he accused must be a Communist sympathizer or a closet enemy of the U.S. In the summer of 1954, during a highly publicized investigation into whether the Army was infiltrated by supporters of Communism, McCarthy met his match in the special counsel for the Army, Joseph N. Welch, who courageously stood up to McCarthy’s bullying tactics. . . .

We believe history will judge Cheney’s behavior as the equivalent of McCarthy’s.

Schneider and Sullivan finish up by praising those DOJ lawyers who did, in fact, represent detainees once upon a time:

The lawyers at the Department of Justice who appeared on behalf of Guantanamo prisoners deserve our admiration and respect, as our country tries to resolve the difficult issues of how we will dispense justice to those considered to be our enemies. They certainly do not deserve to be called “al-Qaida lawyers,” be labeled disloyal and unpatriotic or be disqualified from government service.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 17, 2010 (boomark / email).