Liz Cheney’s group called Keep America Safe has gone on You Tube with a video asking the Justice Department to identify their attorneys who previously represented detainees. Cheney and her colleagues are usin McCarthy guilt by association methods to connect Justice Department lawyers with the their clients who were charged with terrorist activities. In fact many of the lawyers who have represented detainees are prominent Republicans active in party politics and who were appointees in the Bush and Reagan administrations.

But that’s what lawyers are supposed to do. Defendants have a Six Amendment right to representation regardless of their politics and regardless of the charged crime. They not only have a right to representation but they have a right to zealous representation. Bush Solicitor General Ted Olson stated that those who represent Guantanamo detainees represent the best in the American values.

What would Cheney have said about John Adams who represented British soldiers accused of killing demonstrators in the Boston Massacre or Atticus Finch who represented an African American accused of raping a white woman in Alabama during the 1930′s in Harper Lee’s novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

In an October 23, 2001 memo Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and Special Counsel Robert J. Delahunty stated that not only could he military be used to arrest terrorists in the United States but that they did not have to comply with Fourth Amendment requirements regarding the use of search warrants. In a September 25, 2002 memo Yoo justified amending the law to allow warrantless searches in the United States to obtain intelligence.

Also in the October 23, 2001 memo Yoo stated that, “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo wrote, in another memo: “The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”

A cardinal rule of statutory interpretation is that when the language of the statute (or the Constitutional amendment) is clear the plain language supersedes other interpretations. The Fourth Amendment states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

It has no exception for terrorists or for al-Qaeda or for the whims of George Bush and John Yoo. As Benjamin Franklin said,

They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.

As Edward R. Morrow said,

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home

As Abraham Lincoln said,

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.

The memos point out the need for Senator Patrick Leahy’s Truth Commission. Such a commission would investigate torture, illegal wiretaps, and other violations of human rights.

For it is clear that if we violate our own rights we cannot cry when others violate rights.

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