Tim Sumner

9/11, al Qaeda, Barack Obama, detainees, USS Cole, War on Terror

Meet Obama DOJ nominee Dawn Johnsen ‘culture-war agitator’

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In his ‘Lawyer’s Lawyer, Radical’s Radical’ commentary today for the National Review, Andrew McCarthy writes of Office of Legal Council nominee Dawn Johnsen. She would inform President Barack Obama and all the other administration policymakers of what the law is. In the excerpt below, I skip past his opening yet please, after reading this, go read the whole thing:

Johnsen’s other bête noire is national security — at least to the extent it involves detaining terrorists and enemy combatants as military opponents rather trying them as civilian criminal defendants. Her 2008 academic article “What’s a President to Do? Interpreting the Constitution in the Wake of Bush Administration Abuses” gathers the Left’s full array of anti-war tropes and disguises them as legal analysis. There is the determination to ignore the terrorist attacks of the 1990s, such that the War on Terror is presented as something President Bush started after 9/11 rather than a years-long jihadist provocation to which the United States finally responded after 9/11. This framework would make it impossible to prosecute as war crimes such pre-9/11 atrocities as the bombings of the USS Cole and the embassies in East Africa. Johnsen further denigrates as an “extreme and implausible Commander-in-Chief theory” Bush’s rationale for warrantless surveillance of suspected al-Qaeda communications into and out of the United States. In fact, the practice was strongly supported by federal court precedent and has since been reaffirmed by the appellate court Congress created specifically to consider such issues. And Johnsen has recently written that the new administration “should order an immediate review to determine which detainees should be released and which transferred to secure facilities in the United States” for civilian trials.

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Editor — The term bête noire (French for dark beast) is used to refer to an object or abstract idea that causes fear or has the potential to cause significant harm.

al-Ajmi, Debra Burlingame, Guantanamo, Kuwaiti 12

Former Guantanamo detainee Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi

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Debra Burlingame is currently on NPR radio discussing former Guantanamo detainee Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi.

Click here to view more about him.

In case you missed this show, I will post the audio late this evening so please stop back.

Update 3:22 PM, Eastern:

The link to the NPR article and audio (download available at 6 PM) is here.

In addition, Debra Burlingame provided me a copy of her letter to the Editor of the Washington Post that she sent and has yet to be published:

While the proximity of fellow militants at Guantanamo Bay may have reaffirmed Abdullah al-Ajmi’s dedication to his religious fanaticism, the record and his own words reflect that he arrived at the detention center a hardened Islamist. Indeed, he risked imprisonment in his own country by deserting the Kuwaiti army to go to Afghanistan in anticipation of U.S. military action after the 9/11 attacks.

Tom Wilner, al-Ajmi’s lead Shearman & Sterling attorney, professes not to understand why the U.S. chose to release his client in 2005. Mr. Wilner’s 1.5 million dollars in fees, paid by the government of Kuwait–an important oil industry client of Shearman & Sterling–covered not only Mr. Wilner’s work in the courtroom but also his lobbying efforts on behalf of al-Ajmi in the halls of Congress and at the State Department. It is an outrage for Mr. Wilner to now claim that our military forces at JTF-GTMO, whose average age is 22, are to blame for his client’s radicalism. The chief contributing factor in the deaths of the 13 people al-Ajmi killed and the 42 others he maimed in a suicide attack three years after his release was Mr. Wilner’s own relentless efforts to politicize Guantanamo and set al-Ajmi free.