{"id":466100,"date":"2010-03-24T08:27:58","date_gmt":"2010-03-24T12:27:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/opiniojuris.org\/?p=11688"},"modified":"2010-03-24T08:27:58","modified_gmt":"2010-03-24T12:27:58","slug":"benjamin-wittes-on-the-aq7-ad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/466100","title":{"rendered":"Benjamin Wittes on the AQ7 Ad"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Kenneth Anderson <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The excitement over the AQ7 ad put out by Liz Cheney’s organization has died down, but Ben Wittes has this piece up in The New Republic<\/a> extending the letter that he drafted, and to which I earlier linked, signed by a group of conservative and centrist folks criticizing it. \u00a0I was one of the signers, and wound up sticking up by own very lengthy comment about it over at Volokh. \u00a0I didn’t link here at the time, as I thought the tone a little waspish for OJ, but with Ben’s article in TNR, I’ll change my mind and link to it (it’s long and the title is “No Righteous Gentile Award, Please”<\/a>).<\/p>\n

I suppose the key point for Ben and me, in somewhat different ways, is that we have each received much praise from folks on the left for defending Obama lawyers such as Neal Katyal or Jen Daskal. \u00a0No one objects to praise, or at least I don’t, but much of it was a little misplaced. \u00a0The praise tended to be as though, in order to defend the Obama lawyers, we had somehow changed our minds about the Bush lawyers. \u00a0Whereas, for Ben and for me, each in somewhat different ways, the issue was the same. \u00a0We defended Katyal and Daskal because we had defended the Bush lawyers and thought the same principle applied. \u00a0I also followed up with an response to conservatives such as Andy McCarthy who attacked the Wittes letter; it too was fairly waspish in tone. \u00a0What with health care reform, and lots of other things on the agenda, the discussion is moving on, but it has been an important one, and at least among conservatives, a clarifying one.<\/p>\n

From the opening of Ben Wittes’s essay:<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The attacks on the Justice Department lawyers who had represented Guantanamo detainees angered me for several distinct reasons. They typified a growing culture of incivility in the politics of national security and law that I have always loathed and have spoken against repeatedly. They sought to delegitimize the legal defense of politically unpopular clients and to impose a kind of ideological litmus test on Justice Department service. They were also, at least in part, about friends and professional acquaintances. And they reminded me painfully of other friends during the Bush administration who had been similarly slimed and for whom the bar had failed to stand up.<\/p>\n

The criticism had been simmering for some time in newspaper columns and editorials, but it exploded in the public arena with the\u00a0now-infamous web ad<\/a> by a group called Keep America Safe. The video, ostensibly about the Justice Department\u2019s unwillingness to release the names of all of the lawyers who had worked on Gitmo, brands the unknown ones as the \u201cAl Qaeda 7\u201d and wonders \u201cWhy the secrecy\u201d behind them? \u201cWhose values do they share?\u201d The two lawyers whose identities were already public\u2014Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal and an official in the department\u2019s National Security Division named Jennifer Daskal\u2014saw individual articles blasting them. Citing their service,\u00a0The<\/em> New York Post<\/em>asked in a January editorial<\/a>, \u201cWhose side is the Justice Department on: America’s\u2014or the terrorists’?\u201d When the latest video appeared, I typed out a simple statement and began circulating it among colleagues for signatures.<\/p>\n

I am a peculiar choice to organize what\u00a0The<\/em> New York Times<\/em> later\u00a0called<\/a> \u201ca Who\u2019s Who of former Republican administration officials and conservative legal figures\u201d\u2014not being a former GOP official, a conservative, or even a lawyer. I occupy a strange place in the current debate over law and terror, sympathetic to important arguments made by both right and left. I have fiercely criticized both the Bush administration\u2019s counterterrorism policies and the Obama administration\u2019s\u2014and fiercely defended both as well.<\/p>\n

Yet as the attacks mounted, I wondered whether centrist and conservative lawyers, some of whom had suffered similar attacks themselves, would take a strong stand in defense of the Obama Justice Department lawyers. The answer, it turns out, was as encouraging as the attacks themselves were dispiriting. These lawyers responded with an outpouring of enthusiasm, resulting in a powerful rebuke to the political operatives who had launched the attacks.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Kenneth Anderson The excitement over the AQ7 ad put out by Liz Cheney’s organization has died down, but Ben Wittes has this piece up in The New Republic extending the letter that he drafted, and to which I earlier linked, signed by a group of conservative and centrist folks criticizing it. \u00a0I was one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-466100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}