The LAW & LAWYERS Blog

Both sides of the aisle are upset over a recent video by a Right Wing Group that claims the lawyers working for the Obama administration are connected to terrorist groups.

Keep America Safe, which is run by former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney, released a video that questions the patriotic values of lawyers that legally represented suspected terrorists while they were detained in Guantanamo Bay. The video plays on complicated feelings with regard to the American standard of fair legal practices and how that applies to people accused of attacking the country.

While the video has garnered attention for the fledgling group, it may not be the type of attention Cheney was looking for.

Describing the Democratic Party as weak on national security has long been a bash tactic used by the GOP, but Keep America Safe’s latest effort to shine negative light on the Obama administration has drawn strong denouncements from prominent conservative lawyers such as Kenneth Starr.

Starr, who served as solicitor general under George W. Bush’s administration and garnered notoriety as the lawyer who went after Bill Clinton for dishonesty about his affair with Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s, signed a letter with several other conservative attorneys describing Keep America Safe’s efforts as “shameful,” according to the Associated Press.

Other former Bush administration lawyers signed the letter alongside Starr, including former deputy general Larry Thompson and Viet Dinh, the attorney who drafted the original Patriot Act.

One of the more surprising signers of the letter was former deputy assistant defense secretary for detainee affairs Charles “Cully” Stimson. Stimson resigned from the Bush administration back in 2007 after he came under attack for saying that it was shocking to him that U.S. lawyers would be willing to represent Guantanamo detainees accused of terrorist acts, according to the AP.

“The American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients is at least as old as John Adams’ representation of the British soldiers charged in the Boston massacre,” the letter read. “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” and “demands a uniformity of background and view in government service from which no administration would benefit.”

Deborah Burlingame, another co- founder of Keep America Safe, said the organization’s goal is to get clarity from Obama’s staff on how they make decisions about Guantanamo detainees.

“This isn’t an attack on lawyers for being lawyers,” said Burlingame, a former lawyer.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 10:32 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.