For those of you who think it's "unAmerican" to give terrorists legal representation, Liz Cheney is on your side.

But a whole bunch of prominent GOP lawyers are not.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34050.html

Quote:
A group that includes leading conservative lawyers and policy experts, former Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and several senior officials of the last Bush administration is denouncing as “shameful” Republican attacks on lawyers who came to the Obama Justice Department after representing suspected terrorists.

Senate Republicans have demanded details of the lawyers' past work and Liz Cheney’s group “Keep America Safe” has questioned their “values." A drumbeat of Republican criticism forced the Justice Department reluctantly to identify seven of them last week. But the harshness of the criticism – Keep America Safe labeled a group of them the “Al Qaeda Seven” — has provoked a backlash from across the legal establishment.
The money quote:

Quote:
The statement cited John Adams’s defense of British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre to argue that “zealous representation of unpopular clients” is an important American tradition.

The attacks on the lawyers “undermine the Justice system more broadly,” they wrote, by “delegitimizing” any system in which accused terrorists have lawyers, whether civilian courts of military tribunals.

The letter’s signers include some of the top officials of a Bush Justice Department that wrestled at length with the legal questions surrounding terrorist detentions.
We give terrorists lawyers because that is what a free people governed by rights and the rule of law does. Good to see that at least some conservatives get that.

Here's the full text of the statement put out by the lawyers:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories...050_Page3.html