Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey has an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal taking the Ted Olson view that criticism of the Justice Department lawyers smeared as terrorist sympathizers and criticism of John Yoo and Jay Bybee are somehow equivalent.
This is all of a piece, and what it is a piece of is something both shoddy and dangerous. A lawyer who represents a party in a contested matter has an ethical obligation to make any and all tenable legal arguments that will help that party. A lawyer in public service, particularly one dealing with sensitive matters of national security, has the obligation to authorize any step or practice the law permits in order to keep the nation and its citizens safe. And a lawyer who undertakes to represent someone whom his neighbors--perhaps rightly--revile as a threat to the public welfare is obligated to bring his talents to bear just as forcefully in favor of that client as he would if he were representing Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, the French artillery officer who in 1895 was found guilty of treason and sent to Devil's Island for little more than being Jewish.
There's simply no comparison between Justice Department lawyers who worked to ensure the integrity of our system of Justice and the torture lawyers who worked to circumvent it, in the process narrowly avoiding professional sanction for their approval of methods of interrogation that violate domestic and international laws against torture.
I originally wrote that I thought the Keep America Safe ads were an attempt to rescue the reputations of Yoo and Bybee in the aftermath of the release of the OPR report. In doing so, they would be "validating" the lawless policies of the prior administration. Some of the conservative defenders of the smeared DoJ lawyers clearly have a similar goal in mind. The irony is that, at this point even John Yoo himself has criticized the ad.
In addition to Mukasey and Yoo, yesterday Sen. Lindsey Graham called the ad accusing the Justice Department lawyers who did work on behalf of terror detainees of being terrorist sympathizers "shameful" and Sen. Jeff Sessions called the ad "over the top and unjustified," while nevertheless agreeing with the idea that the reason the Obama Justice Department has continued the policies of the Bush Justice Department is because of the smeared DoJ attorneys.
Greg Sargent thinks all the attention paid to this makes Cheney the winner. I think there's a tipping point where bad publicity stops being "publicity" and actually starts to become simply bad, and I wouldn't know how to exactly determine that point but I think it's around the time when Jeff "the NAACP is communist inspired" Sessions says you've gone too far, a Jewish Republican former attorney general starts invoking the Dreyfus affair, and the guy who rubber-stamped waterboarding is asking, "What's the big whoop?"
-- A. Serwer
