Lies are awkward things

Now that many prominent Republicans are denouncing the McCarthyite smear campaign against DOJ attorneys being orchestrated by Keep America Safe, Liz Cheney and William Kristol are scrambling to recast themselves as innocuous good-government types. Indeed. Their attacks were simply misunderstood, they say. KAS never meant to impugn the loyalty or “values” of the lawyers hired by the Obama administration, its leaders began to claim late last week. Instead they just wanted DOJ to release the lawyers names. Later, when the names had been released, it turned out that they just wanted DOJ to explain whether those attorneys were working on any issues related to Guantanamo prisoners. It’s just a call for transparency, you see, not at all a political hatchet job - as Kristol helpfully explained in his characteristically dismissive tone:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned that another left-wing advocacy group, Human Rights Watch, is circulating a letter condemning what the letter describes as “a shameful series of attacks on attorneys in the Department of Justice who, in previous legal practice, either represented Guantanamo detainees or advocated for changes to detention policy.” The Human Rights Watch letter mischaracterizes the “attacks” as saying “that the Justice Department should not employ talented lawyers who have advocated on behalf of detainees.” In fact, the main issues in the debate have been whether Congress and the public are simply entitled to know who these lawyers are, and the question of whether former pro bono lawyers for terrorists should be working on detainee policy for the Justice Department.

In other words, Cheney and Kristol hope to wriggle free of the McCarthyism charge because the KAS ad smeared the DOJ attorneys with innuendo, which is after all subject to interpretation. Unfortunately for KAS, however, its campaign also dealt in deliberate lies as I pointed out last Thursday here. At the time I emailed KAS spokesman Aaron Harison asking him to explain the assertion in question. Though he’s a veteran of John McCain’s rapid-response team from the 2008 election, Harison still has not responded to my query more than three days after I sent it to him.

Lies must be awkward things to walk back.

The lie, boldly stated by Harison last week, is that the DOJ attorneys under attack had represented “terrorists, many of whom killed Americans”. As I explained here, that is utterly false.

I sent Harison an email at KAS asking for an explanation of that comment: "Which terrorists specifically are you referring to, and which DOJ lawyers represented them?" No response has been forthcoming.

Little wonder. The lie is not incidental. It’s a bald-faced lie. It is a gross escalation of the campaign by Keep America Safe to evoke public fear and loathing of the DOJ attorneys. And it has nothing to do with transparency, or what issues these attorneys are working on, or whatever other plausible sounding rationales that KAS might dream up in the future to try to justify its egregious attack. KAS won’t address this lie because it cannot and maintain the fiction that it has been misunderstood.

Lies are very awkward things.

crossposted at unbossed.com

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