The 'al Qaeda Seven' - The Anti-Anti-Terror Left and Legal Standards

From the Wall Street Journal, "The 'al Qaeda Seven': The anti-antiterror left and legal standards":

When partisans of the left and right trade charges of "McCarthyism" and "assisting the enemy," it's a good bet that both sides are wrong—which means that each side also has a point. That's the way it looks to us in the dispute over the Justice Department's employment of lawyers who represented terrorist detainees while in private practice.

At a November oversight hearing, Senator Charles Grassley asked Attorney General Eric Holder to provide a list of such lawyers and information about possible conflicts of interest. Last month Mr. Holder replied to the Iowa Republican, assuring him that the lawyers were complying with the Department's ethics rules. Mr. Holder wrote that nine of his employees represented detainees while in private practice, but he named only two: Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, who successfully argued the 2006 Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and Jennifer Daskal, who formerly worked for Human Rights Watch.

Mr. Grassley wasn't satisfied. Neither was Liz Cheney, daughter of the former Vice President, who now heads an organization called Keep America Safe. Ms. Cheney's group produced an online advertisement demanding to know "Who Are the al Qaeda Seven?" and "Whose values do they share?" The names of the seven were soon provided by Fox News.

It isn't merely the usual liberal suspects who have since objected to the Keep America Safe ad. Ted Olson, who was George W. Bush's Solicitor General when his wife, Barbara, was killed in the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, said that lawyers who represented Guantanamo detainees acted "consistent with the finest traditions of the legal profession." Charles "Cully" Stimpson, who was in charge of detainee affairs at the Pentagon and once urged a boycott of law firms representing detainees, said the ad left him "disgusted."

Mr. Stimpson is one of more than 20 lawyers, including many veterans of Republican administrations, who signed a letter that declared: "To suggest that the Justice Department should not employ talented lawyers who have advocated on behalf of detainees maligns the patriotism of people who have taken honorable positions on contested questions and demands a uniformity of background and view in government service from which no administration would benefit."

One might add that some detainee lawyers, including Mr. Katyal, were successful in arguing their cases before the Supreme Court. We think the holding in Hamdan damaged both executive power and U.S. security, but it's strange to suggest that a successful pleading before the High Court raises questions about a lawyer's loyalty to America.

Yet while the tone of Ms. Cheney's ad is unfortunate, the call for transparency is entirely reasonable. The public has a right to know the identities and records of the lawyers Mr. Holder has hired to serve it. Ms. Daskal, for example, argued that detainees who have not been charged with a crime should be set free, even though "some of these men may cross the border and join the battlefield to fight U.S. soldiers and our allies."

She made this case in a 2008 Human Rights Watch report—which is to say that she was representing not a client but her own opinion. The Administration is entitled to employ people who hold such views, but it has no right to do so in secret.

The rest is here.