Mar 15 Gitmo's Indefensible Lawyers: A Case Study

Early on in the Bush administration, the enemy combatants detained by the United States at Guantanamo Bay became a cause of the left. In particular, they became a cause of the American bar, which is itself a subset of the institutional left. From the American Bar Association, to the elite law firms, to the American Civil Liberties Union, to the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild and others, the advancement of the rights of Islamist terrorists became a celebrated cause.

I saw the phenomenon with my own eyes when I spoke on a panel with Lynne Stewart at the 2003 national convention of the National Lawyers Guild in Minneapolis. I wrote about the experience at the time in "Face to face with Lynne Stewart."

Why the alliance between Islamist terrorists and the institutional left? The left has no interest in the promotion of Sharia law per se, or jihad, or the subordination of women, or the suppression of homosexual conduct. The terrorists couldn't care less about "human rights" or socialism or the nationalization of the health care system. There is no doctrinal alliance between the left and Islamist terrorists.

Rather, in my view, the alliance is a marriage of convenience. It is an alliance is based on mutual hatred of the United States. The Islamist terrorists and the left share a peculiar animus that overcomes their other differences for limited purposes.

Debra Burlingame and Thomas Joscelyn adduce evidence bearing on the alliance in "Gitmo's indefensible lawyers" and Andrew McCarthy adds a footnote in "What's a modern John Adams to do?" McCarthy links to Bill Gertz's Washington Times article "Justice, CIA clash over probe of interrogator IDs." (McCarthy also makes necessary distinctions among the attorneys representing Guantanamo detainees in this post.)

Cross-posted at Power Line.