Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Should Enemy Combatant Lawyers Serve in the DOJ and At The Highest Levels? Tony West Is

I wrote about Tony West, the attorney for John Walker Lindh, known as The American Taliban, in April 2012 when it came to notice that West was already high-profile inside the Department of Justice. Today he is officially No. 3 at the DOJ, and is in charge of Guantanamo Bay prisoners (Gitmo) Someone has to defend these people but when they do, should they ever end up inside the Department of Justice? West has a long history of defending enemies of the state, and said numerous times that Lindh was not a terrorist. Here' a rehash from my previous post answering the question: should these attorneys be inside the DOJ?

Tony West

It's always startling to see a defense attorney defending an egregious criminal against all that we know is right and honorable, but someone has to do it. It's the American way. Has been the way we do things at least since John Adams defended British soldiers. I remember Mike Huckabee saying it's easier to defend cannibalizing gay murderer, "Jeffrey Dahmer, than it is to defend Charlie Rangel's ethics." So how are we to think about the U.S. attorneys tasked with trying to set Islamic terrorists free? Or set free an American citizen turned Taliban and al-Qaeda who was captured on the battlefield and  involved in the deaths of Americans? Tony West defended John Walker Lindh and is now the No. 3 man in the U.S. Department of Justice, and he will oversee the remaining Gitmo detainees.
This extremist will be the number three man with access to highly classified documents and information. He will be in charge of highly sensitive security matters though he has already shown his support for our enemies. He has fought hard for habeas corpus for detainees. His controversial past makes him unfit to oversee GITMO and he will now be in charge of military who will be litigating the very people he supports.
There is something not right about those defending Muslims, who believe lying in any circumstance, if it defeats infidels, is sanctioned by his/her religious beliefs. There is something not right about the defense attorneys who knowingly take the lies and run with them. And something is definitely not right when that defense attorney ends up at the highest levels of Justice in this country, as has Tony West.

What do we do about this? We have al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorist who need defending (because this is America). Can we keep the defending attorney's from serving at the Department of Justice?

Here is where my own question gets answered by J. Christian Adams who quit the DOJ, where he worked in the Civil Rights Division, after the New Black Panthers Philadelphia Voter Intimidation case was dismissed by Eric Holder:
In any other Justice Department, in any other administration, representing the enemies of the United States would have been a disqualifier for a job inside DOJ setting detainee policy,” said J. Christian Adams, a former DOJ official in the department’s civil rights division. “But in [Attorney General] Eric Holder’s DOJ, it seems to be the chief prerequisite.” ... 
According to various reports and those familiar with the Lindh case, West went far beyond a lawyer’s call of duty by accepting the case pro bono and maintaining to this day that Lindh “is not a terrorist.” 
West signed on to Lindh’s defense in 2002, when he was a member of Morrison & Foerster, a San Francisco based law firm with a record of providing legal aid to enemy combatants, at least one of whom later admitted to conspiring with al Qaeda. 
From the outset, West emerged as one of Lindh’s most vocal proponents. 
“He is not a terrorist,” West said of Lindh in 2002, during a conversation with the Washington Post. “He did not go to Afghanistan to kill Americans.” 
Lindh, however, was convicted of supplying services to the Taliban and transporting explosives on the terror group’s behalf. Source: The Free Beacon - a long and interesting look at Tony West's career.
The truth is, Lindh was claiming charges of torture against the U.S. Military, who photographed him san clothing, restrained on a gurney. Lindh was wounded with a gunshot to the thigh about a week before he was apprehended. He was given narcotics to ease the pain, he confessed, and his DOJ attorney claimed the confession was under duress. So, he was given a plea bargain which resulted in a sentence of 20 years, rather than the 3 life sentences he faced.

 Pamela Geller, publisher of Atlas Shrugs, writing at American Thinker, received documents from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) which shows the depth of the Islamic invasion into our Department of Justice - and I do not use the word "invasion" glibly:
Specifically, I asked for "records relating to the meeting of the 'Monthly Outreach Meeting' with Muslim and Arab groups at the Civil Rights Division. Specifically, include lists of attendees at each monthly meeting, the agenda of each meeting and any minutes or summary prepared subsequent to each meeting. Please also specifically note the meetings at which theAttorney General of the United States attended." 
...Hundreds and hundreds of pages of emails, documenting nearly daily friendly contact, consultation, cooperation and collaboration between the DOJ and Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood groups. One thing is clear, the Muslim Brotherhood has fully infiltrated command and control at the Department of Justice civil rights division... 
Going through the first batch, what struck me almost immediately was the casual familiarity between ISNA, the ADC, and senior officials of the Department of Justice, all the way up to Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez. They discuss lunch, vacations, job changes -- always with the Muslim Brotherhood groups pushing their narrative, even in these casual exchanges. 
Even more striking was the servile demeanor of the Civil Rights Division official Eric Treene, Special Counsel for the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, and the demanding condescension of Muslim Brotherhood operatives. Muslim and Arab operatives treat Treene and Co. like an errand boy, asking them for email addresses of other contacts and setting them to perform the most menial gofer duties.  The DOJ even takes lunch orders and picks up the tab, and in some cases asks them how much money they need for a little soiree they're holding. It is astonishing. 
In a rational society, these Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups would be marginalized. Instead, the DOJ is playing Stepin Fetchit for them. They're using the DOJ as their legal arm.
What if the defense attorney is a Muslim himself? What then? He can also lie without discretion, according to his/her "faith." I'm not suggesting Tony West is Muslim. Not suggesting it at all. I don't know what he is. But don't we know, one day, probably in the not too distant future we will face that possibility - or maybe it has happened already.

 A quick look at this page titled Muslim Advocates, and searching for the words "Department of Justice," you'll see several who have or are working at the DOJ. Are they Muslims or just Muslim advocates? I don't know. Note that these Muslim advocates work closely with numerous Democrat members of Congress.

There are 7 U.S. attorneys who have defended Islamic terrorists, known as the Al Qaeda 7. Andrew McCarthy writing at the National Review has a article on these 7 attorneys - here's a snippet:
The Left is embarrassed. It senses that the public is no longer buying its bogus narrative about the Gitmo Bar: that they are noble attorneys answering the Constitution’s call in order to protect “our values.” Many of the detainees represented by these volunteers have returned to the jihad against America. Some of them have already committed more mass murders. Others are now in top positions, planning operations against our troops and our homeland. With that in mind, preaching about “the rule of law” — by which they mean “the rule of lawyers” — doesn’t seem like the best strategy for progressives at the moment....
McCarthy's conclusion:
That doesn’t make any lawyer unfit to serve. It does, however, show us the fault line in the defining debate of our lifetime, the debate about what type of society we shall have. And that political context makes everyone’s record fair game. If lawyers choose to volunteer their services to the enemy in wartime, they are on the wrong side of that fault line, and no one should feel reluctant to say so.
West is an Obama bundler and was a finance co-chair during the 2008 elections. Payback is cool.

End April 2012 post. One of the most unmanageable problems with Muslims is their Koranic right to lie.

by Maggie @ Maggie's Notebook

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