Tue Feb 14 2012
Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president, is setting off a new round of McCarthyism by publicly attacking lawyers working in the Justice Department who in private practice represented terrorist detainees in court.
A lawyer, she should know better and we think the American Bar Association should get involved in this debate. In our system of justice, everyone deserves the right to legal counsel; the lawyers who represented the detainees were doing what they take an oath to do when admitted to practice of law.
The attorneys Cheney is attacking, along with her cohorts in the Keep America Safe movement, were doing nothing more than upholding the standards of their profession. An attorney representing an accused murderer is not condoning his client's actions, but is acting in a capacity necessary for the client to receive justice in the courts. The same holds for those representing accused terrorists.
John Adams, who followed George Washington as the nation's second president, incurred similar rebuke from the people of Boston when, as a young lawyer, he represented the British soldiers who fired on his fellow countrymen, who were protesting the presence of British troops in the city to enforce Parliament's onerous Stamp Act. Adams realized the accused British soldiers had to be given vigorous legal counsel to uphold the idea of a nation of laws and courageously undertook the task.
Cheney views mirror those of her father, who has come to believe executive power trumps nearly everything else. She and Dick Cheney both need to be taken on by the American Bar Association and quickly. Attorneys who served under President George W. Bush, to their credit, have already confronted her. Even the conservative Ken Starr, the lawyer who doggedly prosecuted former President Bill Clinton leading to his impeachment in the Monica Lewinsky affair, has criticized Cheney whose views, he says, undermine the rule of law.
Attorneys who sleep through this battle of ideas do so at their peril and that of the country, too.
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