Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol And Andy McCarthy Are Actually The Ones Who Are Un-American

Un-American is as un-American does.

“Un-American” definition here:

Un-American is a pejorative term of US political discourse which is applied to people or institutions in the United States seen as deviating from US norms.

Now pair the definition of un-American with with these key graphs from Adam Serwer’s sober take-down of Cheney, Kristol and McCarthy’s whacked out beliefs:

The “Gitmo Nine” aren’t terrorists. They weren’t captured fighting for the Taliban. They’ve made no attempts to kill Americans. They haven’t declared war on the United States, nor have they joined any group that has. The Gitmo Nine are lawyers working in the Department of Justice who fought the Bush administration’s treatment of suspected terrorists as unconstitutional. Now, conservatives are portraying them as agents of the enemy.

In the aftermath of September 11, the Bush administration tried to set up a military-commissions system to try suspected terrorists. The commissions offered few due process rights, denied the accused access to the evidence against them, and allowed the admission of hearsay — and even evidence gained through coercion or abuse. The Bush administration also sought to prevent detainees from challenging their detention in court. Conservatives argued that the nature of the war on terrorism justified the assertion of greater executive power. In case after case, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the administration’s critics.

“These lawyers were advocating on behalf of our Constitution and our laws. The detention policies of the Bush administration were unconstitutional and illegal, and no higher a legal authority than the Supreme Court of the United States agreed,” says Ken Gude, a human-rights expert with the Center for American Progress, of the recent assault on the Justice Department. “The disgusting logic of these attacks is that the Supreme Court is in league with al-Qaeda.”

The attorneys who challenged the Bush administration’s national-security policies saw themselves as fulfilling their legal obligations by fighting an unconstitutional power grab. At heart, this was a disagreement over process: Should people accused of terrorism be afforded the same human rights and due process protections as anyone else in American custody? But rather than portray the dispute as a conflict over what is and isn’t within constitutional bounds, conservatives argue that anyone who opposed the Bush administration’s policies is a traitor set to undermine America’s safety from within the Justice Department.

“Terrorist sympathizers,” wrote National Review’s Andrew McCarthy in September, “have assumed positions throughout the Obama administration.”

Since Obama took office, the question of detention procedure has been reintroduced and more deeply politicized. The Bush-era military commissions turned out to be woefully ineffectual and were widely seen as skewed against the defendants. Yet they produced only three convictions during the entire administration, in part because the U.S. Supreme Court kept knocking them down for failing to meet minimal due process standards. Meanwhile, civilian courts tried more than a hundred terrorism cases. But much to the disappointment of human-rights advocates, the Obama administration, while choosing to try the alleged September 11 plotters in civilian court, has opted to continue many Bush-era policies, including reformed military commissions.

Nevertheless, McCarthy, a former assistant U.S. attorney, blamed the “al-Qaeda bar” — the attorneys who secured due process rights for detainees — for Bush-era setbacks. “The principal reason there were so few military trials is the tireless campaign conducted by leftist lawyers to derail military tribunals by challenging them in the courts,” McCarthy wrote in November. “Many of those lawyers are now working for the Obama Justice Department.” In December, an unsigned National Review editorial referred to the series of “pro-terrorist” rulings by the courts that affirmed rights for individuals accused of terrorism.

Justice Department lawyers aren’t the only ones who have represented accused terrorists. American military personnel have as well, often successfully. Major Eric Montalvo (retired), who acted as a defense counsel in the Guantanamo Bay military commissions, said that the accusation that lawyers who fought the Bush administration’s policies were “terrorist sympathizers” was absurd. “That’s not sympathy for a terrorist — that’s sympathy for the rule of law, the American way of doing business.”

I agree with the Major.

But that’s not Cheney, Kristol and McCarthy’s way of doing business.

Which is why those three are really the ones who are un-American.