Militant Islam Monitor > Articles > Holder Stonewall Continues - Effort to Shield Lefty Al-Qaeda Defense Bar
Holder Stonewall Continues - Effort to Shield Lefty Al-Qaeda Defense Bar
April 12, 2010
Administration's anti-American Streak Runs Deep
April 12, 2010 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Front and center in this simmering controversy is the disingenuously named John Adams Project, an arm of the leftist ACLU.
Through the efforts of attorneys from this group, CIA personnel have been outed with, unbelievably, their identities having been revealed to GITMO terrorists. In response to this effort we find the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, doing everything in his official capacity to prevent additional disclosure of this serious breach of national security protocols - a classic stonewall.
As terror authority Andy McCarthy [the former federal prosecutor who busted the "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman, implicated in a plot connected with the first bombing of the World Trade Center] characterizes it:
"...we now know a good deal about several of these volunteer lawyers. To take just a few examples, they provided al Qaeda detainees with a brochure that instructed them on how to claim falsely that they had been tortured; fomented a detainee hunger strike that disrupted security and precipitated fabricated reports that prisoners had been tortured and force-fed; provided the detainees with other virulently anti-American propaganda (for example, informing them about the Abu Ghraib scandal, comparing U.S. military physicians to Josef Mengele, and labeling DOJ lawyers "desk torturers"); gave the enemy-combatant terrorists a hand-drawn map of Gitmo's layout, including guard towers; helped the enemy combatants communicate messages to the outside world; informed the detainees of the identities of other detainees in U.S. custody; and posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet in a transparent effort to identify U.S. security personnel."[source, Representing al-Qaeda, http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.5858/pub_detail.asp]
Why would Holder apparently countenance such reprehensible actions?
Easy, he is in full ideological agreement with these attorneys who have as a group become known as the "al-Qaeda defense bar." Witness a speech he made during the summer of 2008 when he was a top advisor to then candidate Obama:
"Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution."
[source, Nadler Again Calls on Holder to Appoint a Special Counsel to Probe Torture, http://pubrecord.org/torture/3247/nadler-again-calls-holder-appoint/]
It is no longer a secret that members of the al-Qaeda bar are now working in top positions at the Obama/Holder DOJ. Mr. Holder is their boss, consider the following March 3 piece:
Two DOJ attorneys had already been identified. The seven are: Jonathan Cedarbaum - Office of Legal Counsel, Karl Thompson - Office of Legal Counsel, Joseph Guerra - Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General at the Justice Department, Tali Farhadian - Office of the Attorney General, Beth Brinkmann - Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department's Civil Division, Tony West - Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department's Civil Division, Eric Columbus - Sr. Counsel, Office of the Deputy Attorney General.
Previously outed include: Neal Katyal - Principal Deputy Solicitor General and Jennifer Daskal - National Security Division Attorney The stonewalling DOJ has admitted the information is correct, but refuses to identify anyone else in the department who is linked to terrorist defense and refuses to say whether or not any of the above individuals are currently working on matters which might be a conflict of interest..""Team Obama was hit hard this afternoon by a major revelation by Fox News [see, http://liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/03/03/exclusive-unknown-doj-lawyers-identified] which has determined the identity of 7 of the attorneys currently working for DOJ who either represented accused terrorists, filed amicus briefs on their behalf or worked for firms who represented these clients, usually pro-bono.
[source, Terror Soft Eric Holder Busted - Identity of Al-Qaeda 7 Revealed by Fox News ]
As investigative journalists at National Review have disclosed,
President Bush "will go down in history as the torture president," Daskal told the Associated Press in March 2008. "The Bush administration continues to insist that CIA and other nonmilitary interrogators are not bound by the military rules and has reportedly given CIA interrogators the green light to use a range of so-called 'enhanced' interrogation techniques, including prolonged sleep deprivation, painful stress positions, and exposure to extreme cold," Daskal added."Gertz [Bill Gertz, Washington Times national security writer] attributes the Justice Department's reticence to particular lawyers within the department who are "sympathetic to the John Adams Project." One Justice Department lawyer who is clearly sympathetic is Jennifer Daskal, who previously worked for Human Rights Watch and was appointed by Holder to the Justice Department's Detainee Policy Task Force last year. Prior to joining the government, Daskal was an outspoken critic of the CIA and the interrogation techniques authorized by the Bush administration.
[source, Stalking the CIA, http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/stalking-cia]
Extending public knowledge of this matter, in today's edition of the Washington Times, Gertz writes:
However, the Defense Department is holding off on a full committee briefing on the CIA-Justice Department probe into lawyers who provided photographs of CIA interrogators to terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, congressional aides said.""The Pentagon will conduct a briefing this week for two senior House Armed Services Committee members on the investigation into whether defense attorneys for al Qaeda members endangered the lives of CIA interrogators.
[source, Pentagon to brief 2 lawmakers on risk to CIA by Al Qaeda defense counsel, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/12/pentagon-to-brief-2-lawmakers-on-cia-risk/print/]
As we have maintained, this administration has substantially and to a certain degree irreparably damaged the national security of the United States [see, http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=nukereview4.8.10%2Ehtm Modification of U.S. Nuke Retaliation Policy - Perhaps the Worst National Security Decision in American History] where we wrote, "Bringing this full circle to the matter at hand we assert that the most effective way to prevent and defend against such an almost unimaginable threat is through deterrence. Since the closing days of World War II the United States' nuclear arsenal has served as the supreme guarantor that this country [and the West by extension] can counter almost any imaginable external threat. Despite this reality, the amateurs in this administration have apparently now just precluded that possibility. Team Obama, by taking the option of a nuclear response against non-nuclear states entirely off the table, has placed this country at a level of risk that is historically unprecedented. "
Unfortunately with each passing day additional and similar transgressions come to the surface, ferreted out by a select few writers who still represent what is left of the free press. When this administration is finally called to account, the true depth of damage to American security will be revealed and the transgressions of team Obama will face the kind of scrutiny that is largely missing now.
Until then all we can do is chronicle these developments and wait until this regime is removed from office.
2010 PipeLineNews.org LLC. All rights reserved.
http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=holder4.12.10%2Ehtm
Printer-friendly version 
Email this item to a friend