Between the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, the New Black Panther Party case, and the hubbub of repealing birthright citizenship, the furor over the so-called Gitmo Nine or Al-Qaeda Seven -- lawyers in the Justice Department who had represented suspected terror detainees and were being accused by conservatives of being traitors -- must seem pretty distant. How many trumped up "scandals" have there been since then? There are similarities between that matter and the one over the Park51 project, though, in that they both involve conservatives arguing that disagreeing with their views on national security is evidence of sinister motives or terrorist sympathies.
As I've pointed out before, that argument, already dumb on its face, gets dumber when you consider that a number of the attorneys who defended Gitmo detainees were observant, even Zionist Jews. Today the Philly Inquirer takes another look at some of the attorneys currently representing Gitmo detainees in Habeas cases:
As a military intelligence officer in the Mekong River Delta region of Vietnam in the late 1960s, where U.S. forces battled both the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong, Chris Walters had no trouble identifying enemy soldiers.
They were the ones who were shooting at you.
It was Walters' job to find out where the enemy stored munitions, what they had in the way of defenses, and what their battlefield plans were. The people Walters interrogated had been picked up following shoot-outs or had been pulled out of bunkers stuffed with weapons.
So when the opportunity emerged a few years ago for Walters, by then a senior litigator at Reed Smith, to represent Guantanamo detainees, he and a handful of other lawyers with military backgrounds jumped at the chance.
Because many of the detainees had not been picked up on the battlefield, but rather on information from paid informants, the basis for the confinement of at least some of them was questionable, Walters reasoned.
Right. That's always what the fight over Guantanamo was about -- whether or not the executive alone could simply designate someone a terrorist without court review and then imprison them indefinitely just on their say-so.
The piece concludes, "For these lawyers, it is a concept that has nothing to do with politics and ideology -- and everything to do with the law." I think that's a bit naive -- in the United States today, supporting the rule of law is a matter of politics and ideology, otherwise the Gitmo Nine or the Al-Qaeda Seven would never have been seen as controversial.
