WASHINGTON, March 8 (UPI) -- A few lawyers, including conservative attorneys and policy experts, panned Republican rips on U.S. Justice Department lawyers who represented terror suspects.
Senate Republicans have demanded details of the lawyers' pre-Justice Department employment, and the group Keep America Safe -- run by former Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter, Liz Cheney -- questioned their values, Politico reported Monday. The Republican criticism forced the Justice Department to identify several lawyers last week, and Keep America Safe's calling seven of them the "al-Qaida Seven" drew withering criticism from the legal establishment.
"We consider these attacks both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counter-terrorism adjudications," the 19 signatories said.
The derogatory remarks against the lawyers "undermine the Justice system more broadly," the attorneys wrote, by "delegitimizing" any system in which accused terrorists have lawyers.
Among the signatories are some heavy-hitters from the George W. Bush administration, including former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, John Ashcroft's second in command, and Peter Keisler, who was acting attorney general during Bush's second term, and Philip Zelikow and John Bellinger III, top advisers to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Liz Cheney's partner in Keep America Safe, Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, dismissed the charge that the group attacked the lawyers. His aim, he wrote Sunday, was to push for Justice to release the names and to raise "the question of whether former pro bono lawyers for terrorists should be working on detainee policy for the Justice Department."
