Last August, Charlie Savage reported that the Justice Department had begun investigating whether three military defense attorneys working on behalf of suspected terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay had broken any laws by compromising the identities of CIA Interrogators. The three attorneys had shown their clients pictures of who they believe might have tortured their clients, although they didn't give them their names. The identities of the interrogators had been discovered through the efforts of the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, who say they pieced them together through "open-source information," but they also hired private investigators. The Washington Post went into some detail of how they did it:
Tracking international CIA-chartered flights, researchers have identified hotels in Europe where CIA personnel or contractors stayed. In some cases, through hotel phone records, they have been able to identify agency employees who jeopardized their cover by dialing numbers in the United States. Working from these lists, some of which include up to 45 names, researchers photographed agency workers and obtained other photos from public records, the sources said.
The client in question, according to Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, appears to be Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, who is accused of financing the 9/11 attacks. Anthony Romero, the head of the ACLU, told Savage at the time that “identifying who tortured our clients and what they did to them and when is an essential part of defending their interests in these sham proceedings."
Yesterday, Hosenball and Isikoff reported that Attorney General Eric Holder has assigned U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to find out whether any laws were broken. It's good politics for Holder: Having taken down both Scooter Libby and dethroned Rod Blagojevich, Republicans can't accuse Holder of not taking the matter seriously. At the same time Fitzgerald isn't a partisan crusader, and he won't simply prosecute out of some wingnut grudge.
This has been brewing in the fever swamps of the right for a while, where they've tried to portray the Justice Department as reluctant to investigate--as The Washington Times puts it--"legal supporters of Islamist terrorists." That's how the Times refers to the military attorneys assigned to defend Guantanamo Bay detainees, not just civilian lawyers. Keep America Safe is writing the style book over there now. This investigation has been underway for months though--more likely the various organs of the conservative media were looking to provide Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee with talking points to use against Holder in a hearing that was originally scheduled for today but was postponed by the health-care bill signing.
Whatever the outcome in this case, Keep America Safe will attempt to conflate the attorneys under investigation with anyone who ever represented a detainee in order to reinforce the notion that granting someone accused of being a terrorist legal representation is tantamount to signing up with al-Qaeda.
-- A. Serwer
