Cocktailhag, the blog

Yesterday LA Times crack reporter Rick Serrano published a story that was straight off the Republican Noise Machine, willfully deceptive about the nature of our legal system, and, well, old.  To do so and make it plausible, he “interviewed” such heavyweights as Sen. Jeff Sessions, a bunch of anonymous Republicans, and carefully pored over a McCarthyite scare commercial from Liz Cheney’s front group, the inaptly named “Keep America Safe.”  In the interest of being Fair and Balanced, he quoted a weeks-old letter from the Justice Department.

When I wrote to him and rather intemperately criticized his dangerously ignorant and shoddy work, he promptly wrote back, basically telling me to go Cheney myself, then evidently went right back to Fox News to “research” his next article.  You see, the justice department lawyers Cheney and co. were smearing as the “Al Qeada Seven” had been named, after Serrano had implied that the Justice Department was hiding something sinister, so he busily typed up FOX’s “breaking” story, and submitted it without attribution (h/t sysprog).  Along the way he left out quite a bit, as you’ll see. (h/t Jim Montague for the Fox link.)

Reporting from Washington – The Justice Department identified seven additional political appointees Wednesday who had done prior legal work on behalf of captives in the war on terrorism, after GOP lawmakers accused the Obama administration of stacking the department with top officials sympathetic to “enemy combatants.”

Now, I’m not “reporting from Washington,” but even if these lawyers were, in fact, “sympathetic” to enemy combatants (itself a made-up term), I think that seven lawyers would make a pretty small stack in that sprawling department.

Matthew Miller, a senior spokesman at the Justice Department, said the names were not released earlier because “we will not participate in an attempt to drag people’s names through the mud for political purposes.”

No, leave that to Liz Cheney and the LA Times.

In recent weeks, Republican lawmakers have voiced strong concerns about conflicts of interest for Justice Department officials who previously represented detainees. But Miller insisted that the political appointees with experience working for captives at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will recuse themselves if a conflict surfaces. Some Justice Department officials during the George W. Bush administration also had done legal work for detainees.

My attempts to explain to Serrano the difference between defending criminal suspects and “sympathizing” with them clearly failed to sink in, as you see.

Jonathan Cedarbaum, in the Office of Legal Counsel, and Eric Columbus, who works under the deputy attorney general, were part of a legal defense team for Bosnian Algerian detainees and brought a case to the Supreme Court that resulted in the right of captives to challenge their detention.

What?  He won the case?  Maybe the Supreme Court is a bunch of terrorist sympathizers, too.

Karl Thompson, now in the Office of Legal Counsel, helped represent Omar Khadr, a youth captured after a firefight in Afghanistan in which a soldier was killed by a hand grenade.

Little Omar was of course about nine years old at the time, and imprisoned without trial until he was old enough to drink in a bar, but Serrano didn’t think that that, or the fact that he was never convicted, was worth including here.

Joseph Guerra, principal deputy associate attorney general, worked on legal briefs on behalf of Jose Padilla, accused of plotting a “dirty-bomb” attack.

Never mind that Padilla was an American citizen, and the charges were laughed out of court until he was finally nailed on some lesser charge.

Tali Farhadian, who works in Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr.’s office, contributed to appellate briefs for Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, a Qatari student designated an enemy combatant when he was about to go trial on fraud charges in Illinois.

Ooh, he was “designated” something?  Sounds weighty, although the term appears nowhere in any law book I’ve read.  And “contribut(ing) to appellate briefs” is practically the same thing as strapping on his suicide bomb and dropping him off at the day care center.

Beth Brinkmann, a deputy assistant attorney general, collaborated on Supreme Court briefs for detainees and advocated more protection of detainees’ rights.

Well, that hippie chick is clearly anti-American….  She thinks “detainees,” (another made-up extralegal term) ought to have rights.  Maybe she’s worried about those freedoms they hate us for.

Tony West, an assistant attorney general who heads the Civil Division, served on the legal team for John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban who was captured in Afghanistan.

Both Fox and Serrano skip over the fact that the Lindh case was discussed at length during West’s confirmation hearing, and West was repeatedly grilled by Serrano’s “sources,” no less.

Earlier identified were Neal Katyal, principle deputy solicitor general, who won a Supreme Court victory for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, former driver and bodyguard for Osama bin Laden; and Jennifer Daskla, former senior counsel for Human Rights Watch, who now serves as an attorney in the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

Clearly, the lesson here is that lawyers who win cases before the Supreme Court ought to be passed over in favor of losers, to Keep America Safe.

McJoan has more about this controversy, and the Justice Department’s flaccid response, over at DKos, and If I know Glenn Greenwald, I bet he’ll be writing more about it, too.  Reading the LA Times, though, seems like something of a waste of time, since they were scooped by FOX.