Andy McCarthy is one of the good guys. He was the U.S. Attorney who prosecuted Ramsi Yousef after the first World Trade Center bombing and has been in (his words, not mine) the ‘gas-bagging’ business since.
But on Mark Levin’s show yesterday, McCarthy said he was ready to get back in uniform – so to speak – and defend anyone hauled before Congress or ultimately prosecuted. He also said that there was an army of like-minded lawyers gathering – including Levin himself.
Where do I sign up?
But of greater interest to me was the connection they discussed between Eric Holder, Sen. Leahy, Rep. Conyers and the ACLU, which has been actively defending the Gitmo detainees and now apparently has a direct line to all three. As Levin observed, Holder’s old law firm, Covington & Burling, actively represents these miscreants:
The firm represents 17 Yemeni nationals and one Pakistani citizen held at Guantánamo Bay. The Supreme Court will soon review the D.C. Circuit’s ruling that ordered the dismissal of a number of habeas petitions filed by Guantánamo detainees; some of our clients are petitioners in the Supreme Court case. We expect to play a substantial role in the briefing. We also plan to petition the Supreme Court to hear our Pakistani client’s appeal from the D.C. Circuit’s order dismissing his case. Further, we are pursuing relief in the D.C. Circuit under the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 for all of our clients. On a separate front, we filed amicus briefs and coordinated the amicus effort in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in which the Supreme Court in the summer of 2006 invalidated President Bush’s military commissions and in which we have obtained favorable rulings that our clients have rights under the Fifth Amendment and the Geneva Conventions.
The firm includes extreme radicals like David Remes, who dropped his trousers at a press conference in Yemen to gather attention for his client, and Marc Falkoff, who published a book of detainee poetry. In the book’s introduction, Falkoff compared detainees to Jews held in concentration camps and Japanese Americans held in internment camps during WWII. One of Falkoff’s charges was released and later blew himself up in a Mosul truck bombing, killing 13 Iraqi army soldiers and wounding 42 others. Both attorneys are ACLU devotees – avidly so.
So, let’s put two and two together, shall we? We have the very lawyers who’ve defended our country’s enemies, now on the ‘inside’ advocating the prosecution of the people who’ve opposed them in court over the detainee issue.
As Levin said, this is all going to be very interesting. Whoever defends former administration members could have a field day deposing Holder himself, and the very members of Congress – like Leahy and Conyers – who are demanding these mens’ heads on a platter.
When all the documents are laid out and the testimony taken, the American people are going to hate the ACLU – and Leahy and Conyers – even more than they do now.
H/T to Michelle Malkin on the details of the Covington & Burling lawyers.
