Keep American Safe

A backlash continues to build over attacks launched by Sen. Grassley and a conservative organization on Department of Justice attorneys who represented Guantanamo Bay detainees. Politico, Slate and The Blog of Legal Times all have stories on the dust-up over the YouTube video produced by a group affiliated with Liz Cheney (pictured) and Bill Kristol, Keep America Safe, which questions the loyalty of the DOJ attorneys, dubbing them "The Al Qaeda Seven." As noted last week on ACSblog, a growing chorus of conservatives is questioning the organization's tactics. Now "leading conservative lawyers and policy experts, [and] former Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr," have issued a statement blasting the attacks on the DOJ lawyers as "shameful." Politico has the entire statement here. (Also signing the letter was Charles "Cully" Stimson, a senior Pentagon official who resigned his post in 2007 after he sharply criticized U.S. law firms that had represented military detainees.)

In an article for Slate, Dahlia Lithwick says the methods used by Cheney and Kristol are beyond being over-the-top. Their attacks, especially Liz Cheney's, are part of the "ever-expanding war on the Bill of Rights." Lithwick maintains that the DOJ attorneys who represented the Guantanamo Bay detainees were doing so on justified grounds.

She writes:

They were defending the U.S. Constitution - the great whomping chunks of the Bill of Rights that Cheney and her friends are so eager to write out of existence. They did it because - as Spencer Ackerman points out - the Military Commissions Act of 2006 expressly provided that detainees get defense lawyers. And they did it, as Jay Bookman notes, for the same reason John Adams agreed to represent British soldiers charged with killing civilians during the Boston Massacre in 1770. Because long before Liz Cheney was born and long after she's gone, the Bill of Rights requires serious people to take it seriously.

Attorneys at leading national law firms are also joining the fray, as the Legal Times blog reports. Brian Brooks, managing partner of O'Melveny & Myers' Washington Office tells the Legal Times, "From the perspective of our firm, providing representation for unpopular causes is a long and noble tradition in the law, and that kind of criticism is not going to affect our firm's commitment to that cause. If the private bar doesn't step up and show that kind of courage, then I think our whole system of justice is in question."