When Joe Biden was sworn in as Vice President on Jan. 20, 2009, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s eight years of constitutionally questionable practices finally came to an end. Unfortunately, the American people still have to put up with his and his family’s shenanigans. Cheney has criticized and undermined President Barack Obama at every turn, referring to him frequently as a “one-term president.” Meanwhile, and more disturbingly, Cheney’s daughter Liz has launched a smear campaign against the so-called “al-Qaeda Seven,” a group of lawyers at the Department of Justice. The views put forth in Ms. Cheney and Bill Kristol’s despicable “Keep America Safe” website, as well as in torture apologist Marc Thiessen’s recent book Courting Disaster, are offensive to the diligent, highly trained individuals who defend American ideals every day.
The Cheneys’ attitude towards the Guantanamo detainees themselves is terrible; they believe that as long as the prisoners are not charged with crimes, they can be held indefinitely as “enemy combatants.” The Keep America Safe website has links on its homepage to a petition aiming to “keep Gitmo open and keep terrorists off American soil!” Both ex-Vice President Cheney and Liz Cheney have been adamant defenders of this legal purgatory for years, with the younger Cheney even having written her senior college thesis on “The Evolution of Presidential War Powers.” Along with other conservative activists such as Thiessen, they have also advocated for the use of “enhanced interrogation methods,” a euphemism for torture. This attitude towards the treatment of foreign detainees flies in the face of established doctrines such as the Sixth Amendment and the Geneva Conventions.
However, Ms. Cheney’s new crusade against the detainees’ legal defenders is, if possible, even more repugnant. The video on the Keep America Safe website asks viewers to call Attorney General Eric Holder to demand that he release the names of seven Department of Justice lawyers, claiming that he has only made two names accessible to the public. It also refers to the DOJ as the “Department of Jihad.” There is nothing wrong with transparency, and indeed, the names are already available for anyone who cares to find them. But by referring to these lawyers as the “al-Qaeda Seven,” Ms. Cheney equates hardworking employees of the American government to terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, which should be offensive to liberals and conservatives alike. American patriotism must not be understood to mean the defeat of America’s military adversaries at any cost. Rather, true patriots defend their country’s ideals and values, as well as its security. The DOJ lawyers, depicted in ominous shadowy form in Ms. Cheney’s video, are certainly not undermining the nation’s security or aiding terrorists in their goals. They are, in fact, strengthening America’s reputation as a land of justice and fairness, where everyone has a chance at a fair trial, and thereby laying the groundwork for a more stable long-term future.
In the first years of the American Revolution, future president John Adams agreed to defend the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre. He successfully won the soldiers an appeal. Despite his long and distinguished career as a statesman, Adams later described his involvement in the case as “one of the best pieces of service I have ever rendered my country.” Adams’ passionate belief that everyone deserves a defense in court became an integral feature of the government he helped make possible. Ms. Cheney and her supporters purport to be defending America by vilifying these lawyers as terrorist sympathizers. However, if their McCarthyesque campaign succeeds, the real question is whether American ideals will still be worth defending.
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