Julian Sanchez makes a wonderful observation about the Guantanamo lawyers:
Charles Katz really was involved in illegal gambling, but it’s his case that established a Fourth Amendment right to be free from warrantless wiretaps. Klansman Clarence Brandenburg really was advocating “revengeance” against Jews and African Americans (though in the latter case I’m paraphrasing)—but I owe him my right to express radical political views as long as I’m not directly inciting violence. Crucial Fourth Amendment cases protecting the sanctity of the home involved cocaine smuggling rings, marijuana growers, and thieves.
Many of them were, to put it mildly, unsympathetic characters whose “values” I would not want to be “shared” by high-ranking attorneys in the Justice Department. Fortunately, competent attorneys argued both sides of those cases, not because of their personal feelings about the defendants, but because the legal questions at the hearts of those cases had larger implications for the kind of country we’re going to live in.
I’m sure the FDL Lawfare Crew can add much to this, but I saw Ken Starr, of all people, making the case on ‘Countdown’ that we want to “encourage young lawyers” to follow in the tradition of defending controversial clients like the Guantanamo detainees. Marc Thiessen, upholding his deeply-felt commitment to embarrassing himself and the Washington Post, responds that there was no such backlash among lawyers to the cruel slights visited upon John Yoo and David Addington and Jay Bybee for creating legal pretexts for torture. Well, yes: Lawyers tend to like it when their colleagues uphold the law rather than figure out how to evade it.
A digression on Thiessen, because his piece is indicative of a juvenile conservative persecution complex. Yoo et. al., at the behest of Bush/Cheney/Tenet et. al., create a circumstance whereby U.S. personnel violate the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture, ratified by the U.S. Senate; place U.S. servicemembers under greater likelihood of being tortured themselves if captured by an enemy force; and place CIA operatives, officials and contractors in legal jeopardy, as they are now; and, of course, set the conditions for fellow human beings to be brutalized. And the problem, as Thiessen sees it, is that people are too mean to John Yoo.
Tags: al-qaeda seven, Countdown, Guantanamo, Guantanamo Lawyers, John Yoo, Julian Sanchez, Ken Starr, Marc Thiessen, Washington Post
