This morning, Glenn Greenwald had an excellent post about the despicable fear-mongering ad Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol had slapped together to smear not just the Obama DOJ, but basically the entire tradition of western jurisprudence, the evenhandedness of which seems to offend vermin like them.  Watching the ad and considering its source, I didn’t really give it much more thought; surely such spurious McCarthyite smears have long passed their due date, and surely no non-Fox journalist would ever take them seriously.  Well, no they haven’t, and yes they would, and stop calling the Los Angeles Times Shirley.

Behold:
Reporting from Washington – Nine top political appointees at the Justice Department previously worked as lawyers or advocates for “enemy combatants” confined at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prompting new questions from Congress and conservative critics about the integrity of the administration’s handling of detainees.

Ooh, sounds scary, and “new,” to boot.

The Justice Department insists that the officials have not involved themselves in matters dealing with enemy combatants. But the department has revealed the names of only two of the nine appointees, making it difficult to independently assess the claim. And one of the named officials — Jennifer Daskal, a lawyer in the national security division — sits on a task force weighing the future of Guantanamo prisoners. She is a former senior counsel for Human Rights Watch, which worked on behalf of ensuring constitutional rights for detainees during the George W. Bush presidency.

Since everybody knows that only people with a demonstrated desire to kill all Arabs indiscriminately should ever be allowed to work at the Justice (!) Department.

The other named official is Neal Katyal, the principal deputy solicitor general, who argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of Salim Ahmed Hamdan and won a 2006 ruling that Bush’s military tribunal system violated the rules of military justice and the Geneva Conventions. Hamdan, a former bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden, later was released and returned to Yemen.

According to congressional sources, one of the other seven appointees is Tony West, an assistant attorney general who heads the civil division. In 2002, he was part of the California-based legal team that represented John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban.

I have a list of names, said the drunken sociopath from Wisconsin….

These kinds of backgrounds and connections “raise serious questions about who is providing advice on detainee matters,” a group of Republican senators told Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. last week.

“Some say.”  Can you believe this?  Who?  Michelle Malkin?

One of the sharpest critics is a group called Keep America Safe, run in part by Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney. It has derided the unidentified appointees as the “Al Qaeda 7,” and in a video on its website Tuesday asked, “Whose values do they share?”

Ah, finally a disinterested observer willing to go on the record.  It gets worse, though, when the pussies at DOJ, instead of calling such fascist propaganda what it was and giving this un-American cabal a little needed history lesson, this lame capitulation comes forth:

In a Feb. 18 letter to the senators, Ronald Welch, an assistant attorney general, said five Justice Department lawyers provided legal counsel to detainees and four filed friend-of-the-court legal papers on behalf of detainees or advocated on their behalf. He identified them only as working in Holder’s office, for the deputy attorney general and in other top positions at the department.

“To the best of our knowledge,” Welch wrote, “during their employment prior to joining the government, only five of the lawyers who serve as political appointees represented detainees, and four others either contributed to amicus briefs in detainee-related cases or were otherwise involved in advocacy on behalf of detainees.”

Others, he said, “came to the department from law firms where other lawyers represented detainees.”

In naming Katyal and Daskal, Welch said both appointees had been careful not to overstep rules governing professional conduct.

He said Katyal, after joining the Justice Department, had “participated in litigation involving detainees who continue to be detained” at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. He said Katyal also has participated in litigation involving Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who was arrested in Illinois and accused of being an Al Qaeda sleeper cell agent.

Welch said Daskal had “generally worked on policy issues related to detainees” but that “her detainee-related work has been fully consistent with advice she received from career department officials regarding her obligations.”

In referring to all of the political appointees, Welch said that none “would permit or has permitted any prior affiliation to interfere with the vital task of protecting national security, and any suggestion to the contrary is absolutely false.”

Wait a minute.  Did one or more shriveled but still rule of law supporting gonad actually threaten to descend?  Quick, bring in somebody else….

In addition, Tracy Schmaler, a department spokeswoman, said Tuesday that “department attorneys are subject to ethics and disclosure rules as required under both department guidelines and the administration’s own ethics rules, which are the strongest in history.” She added that “it should be clear that fighting terrorism and keeping the American people safe is our No. 1 priority.”

That’s more like it.  Naturally, the right-wing nutjobs who dreamed up this little putsch couldn’t have been more delighted, or more theatrically outraged, at a pathetically weak response as that, and went on, and on.

Nevertheless, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, said the Justice Department had not given a full accounting of who and how many top appointees might have conflicts.

Sessions said the issue was whether “the attorney general believes that treating terrorists like civilians enhances or damages our ability to gather crucial intelligence.” He said that issue could not be answered until the other seven names were released.

“It’s time for these policies to meet the light of day — and for the public to get the answers they deserve,” Sessions said.

Good job, LATimes.  And always give the last word to the scariest neoconfederate sore loser in the Senate, those types always have a lot to contribute to an informative discussion of human rights and such.  This genius article was typed by:

richard.serrano@ latimes.com

I think I ought to pour a little something and write to him.

UPDATE: (whatever unlikely replies will be eagerly appended….)

Dear Mr. Serrano,
Have you ever read the Constitution?  What about the Magna Carta?
Heck, did you ever watch Sesame Street?  Considering what you wrote
today about the flagrantly un-American attacks a discredited
neofascist like Liz Cheney made on not just the Obama DOJ, but the
entire idea of western jurisprudence, I can only conclude not.
I’ll type slowly for you…  We have, in those parts of the world that
are nominal democracies, what’s known as an adversarial system of
justice.  All alleged (do you know what that word means?) criminals
are entitled to legal representation, whether or not they are
citizens, and whether or not some chickenhawk nutjob has
extrajudicially pronounced them guilty.  This is kind of a big thing
and has been since 1215 or so, but  maybe you’ve been busy with other
things.
I know that those of you in the withered shell of our media are
desperately afraid of being called “liberal,” but when “liberal” means
not accepting medieval despotism, it would be sort of your duty as an
American to go ahead and risk the scarlet letter.  Who knows?  If such
a thing caught on, people might start reading newspapers again.
It’s worth a try, since the way you’re going about it is having the
opposite effect.
I only want to help.

Cocktailhag

Portland, Oregon

Reply

Serrano, Richard to me

show details 2:58 PM (3 minutes ago)

Cocktailhag,
You say you will type slowly for me. Why don’t you not type at all.

Regards
Rick.

Boy, did he show me, I tell you.  I’m so glad I get to call him Rick.

If President Lincoln had had a crystal ball, when told the South was seceding, he’d have said, “Woo hoo!”  Lord, I wish he had. Especially today.  Setting aside the thousands dead, cities destroyed, and money wasted, as decisions go, it was like parents who guiltily decided, once again, to take in their delinquent, worthless offspring, subsidize them forever, only to see their house later blown up by the meth lab the miserable ingrates built in the basement.  Today we were reminded again of that in the US Senate.

Senator (!) Jeff Sessions of Alabama is just the sort of “American” we wouldn’t have to have around had Lincoln been more prescient.  From the party that thought they could move heaven and earth with their candidate Sarah Palin, out slithers the vile and clueless Sessions, reminding us why the South doesn’t belong in a purportedly civilized Democracy and beating us over the head, for the thousandth time, for our arrogance and stupidity in thinking such creatures could ever be assimilated.  Nurtured in the fever swamps of racism and rebellion, grown fat and angry under a deluge of misguided federal subsidies, these icons of the land of trailers and cousin-breeding stepped forth today to once again embarrass us all for the very act of being white Americans.

You can’t blame Sessions, really.  It’s how he was raised, in a racist, third world hellhole that, due to liberal “empathy” and a willful blindness to evil, now arrogates to itself the status, always one-sidedly revocable, of a member of the United States.  His state, Alabama, along with its benighted Confederate neighbors, helped along by their appallingly dismal education levels, have become a immobile, angry, and disturbingly vocal impediment to human progress that nearly a century of lavish indulgences haven’t begun to erase.  The “War of Northern Aggression,” as its creepy, embittered losers still universally call it, still plague the rest of us with their prosperity-destroying “Right to Work” laws, their proud willingness to destroy the natural environment, and their openly racist bloodlust for people at home and abroad, set the stage for the disgusting spectacle we’re now forced to watch, which, adding insult to injury,  we all paid for.

Had it not been for the many expensive yet unsuccessful efforts to buy off these irredeemable descendants of traitors, we would never again have to listen to such antediluvian horseshit at all…  We’d have an impoverished, undeveloped nation below us, welded to its hate and superstitions, that Haiti would look down on.  Instead, we have “Senators,” and “Governors” so comically corrupt ruling a population so dimwitted and poisoned, physically and mentally, that they would matter about as much to the civlized world as the ravings of, say, their favorite daughter Britney Spears, picking and choosing who “belongs” on the Supreme court.  Nice “victory.”

Instead, vainly attempting to bring them on board, we made costly and counterproductive “investments” like the TVA and the many military installations which have now made these anti-government zealots, racists, and plain old trash the angriest, ugliest, freeloaders on the planet.  Are refunds available?  We brought these people out of the muck, and now they run around telling everyone there was never any muck to begin with.  They take federal money while they bite the hand that feeds them, and they defy the laws of the country that has treated them so well; suppressing minority votes, vilifying their supposed countrymen from up north, and threatening to secede yet again on a fairly regular basis, even as their leaders eagerly indulge themselves in the “sins” of which they accuse everyone else.  Nice work if you can get it.

It’s far too late to go back to the 1860′s and get rid of these vipers in the nest unilaterally, but couldn’t complete disinvestment accomplish the same goal?

No more military bases or contracts, no more subsidies, and above all, no more treating southern “leaders” like anything other than what they are, and so proudly call everyone else..  Traitors.  G’Bye.

At least then it wouldn’t be so embarrassing to watch C-Span.

Update:  Now, I really have been dreadfully remiss in how I went ahead and skipped over the “wise Latina” quote the righties  have gone so cuckoo over her of late.  In context, Sotomayor is merely saying that a different perspective, somewhat more scandalously closely related to the other side of the case than the one, the two, three, or eight other white guys talking about the matter.  What’s “Duh?” in Puerto Rican, Senator Sessions?

The fact that a documented, lifelong racist is allowed to spout such drivel unchallenged is a searing indictment of, not bigoted scum like Sen. Sessions himself, but by our shamelessly corrupt and amoral media, who pretend such a person’s opinions are worthy of public discourse.