Another lie from the McCarthyites at Keep America Safe

This week Keep America Safe released a video broadly impugning the loyalty of several lawyers hired by Obama’s Justice Department. The lawyers had represented or otherwise contributed to court filings on behalf of several prisoners held at Gitmo. Keep America Safe, led by Liz Cheney and William Kristol, demanded that DOJ release their names and dubbed them ‘the al Qaeda 7’. The video asked “Just whose side are they on?”, implying clearly that the lawyers cannot be trusted to place the interest of the US above those of the ‘terrorists’ they once advocated for. Said KAS spokesman Michael Goldfarb:

“They have propagandized on behalf of our enemies, engaging in a worldwide smear campaign against the CIA, the U.S. military and the United States itself while we are at war.”

After this crude smear campaign by KAS caused widespread revulsion, another spokesman, Aaron Harison, and Cheney herself tried to deny that the ad “question(s) anybody’s loyalty”. But of course McCarthyism is exactly the game that KAS is up to. Harison drove that point home today by adding a shiny new lie to the gross innuendo and fear-mongering that KAS specializes in.

The DOJ lawyers in question, Harison said, had chosen to defend “terrorists, many of whom killed Americans”. No matter how you look at it, that allegation is false.

The DOJ lawyers represented or contributed to filings for various Guantanamo prisoners, but none of them have been convicted of killing anybody.

Only one of those prisoners, Omar Khadr, even faces such an allegation. But Khadr hasn’t been proven to be a terrorist – and he’s certainly not “many” terrorists. The allegation is that while a boy he killed a single US soldier, not multiple “Americans”. Furthermore, the unproven allegation is based on flimsy evidence and a seemingly coerced confession.

So even if you assume that each and every Gitmo prisoner is indisputably and most definitely a terrorist and that all allegations are true (as Dick Cheney and his brood have tried to train us to do), you still can’t back up the claim that “many” of the men represented by these DOJ lawyers “killed Americans”. It’s a lie.

Not a simple lie. There’s nothing simple about the elaborate smear campaign that KAS is orchestrating. Just a damned lie.

crossposted at unbossed.com