Reagan's solicitor general: Why Liz Cheney is wrong

The many defense lawyers who helped bring about the criminal-procedure revolution of the ‘60s are treated as heroes of the rule of law. They are not heroes, but they were doing their job defending their clients and deserve praise for their persistence, ingenuity, and skill. The blame for the crippled and irrational system we now “enjoy” is surely not theirs but that of the brutal and dishonest law-enforcement officers that provoked these decisions and of the lower state courts that could have controlled them by more usual means. The same is exactly true of the lawyers who advocated for the Guantanamo detainees. They worked diligently and—unlike Lynne Stewart, the defense attorney in the first WTC bombing now rightly serving a prison term for assisting her client to continue his terrorist activity—scrupulously within the law. Now come Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol, and others to urge that those hardworking and ingenious lawyers who have landed jobs in the Obama Department of Justice be “outed” for doing lawyers’ work, suggesting that they were unfit for government service. They go so far as to issue the McCarthyite taunt of calling them the “Al Qaeda 7,” thereby committing the unforgivable sin of associating the attorney with the wickedness of his client. One might as well call a Nazi collaborator the brave officer Kenneth Royall—later the last Secretary of War—who was appointed to defend the Nazi saboteurs before a military commission (that’s right, a military commission), or call the lawyers defending Enron or Bernie Madoff securities thieves.