Ryan J. Reilly notes that Assistant Attorney General Tony West's stint as a defense attorney for "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh was among the most high-profile moves of his career. Yet despite the fact that Judiciary Committee Republicans have been framing the presence of former Justice Department lawyers who worked on behalf of suspected terror detainees as some sort of sinister cover-up, West's involvement with the Walker case was so well known that the first sentence of his profile on WhoRunsGov reads, "Pundits speculated that Derek Anthony 'Tony' West’s political career ended when he took on 'American Taliban' John Walker Lindh as a client."
With one exception, every single Republican on the Judiciary Committee voted to approve West as head of the Civil Division in April of last year.
At the time, the right-wing media had yet to begin floating in earnest the notion that having done work on behalf of detainees revealed "terrorist sympathies." So it hadn't yet occurred to the Republicans on the committee they should make political hay out of the issue. Why would they? Thirty of the country's 54 top law firms did work on behalf of detainees, precisely because defending those whom no one wants to defend is seen as honorable in the legal profession. The Bush administration itself hired three attorneys who formerly did work for detainees.
As Reilly notes, Sen. Chuck Grassley, who was the first Judiciary Committee Republican who demanded Attorney General Eric Holder release the names of the so-called "Gitmo Nine," voted to confirm West.
Sen. Jon Kyl, who read aloud from Andrew McCarthy's National Review op-ed accusing Justice Department lawyers of being al-Qaeda sympathizers during a Senate hearing last November, didn't even show up to vote. All the rest of the Republicans on the committee voted to confirm.
-- A. Serwer
