Attorney General Holder and Gitmo: Conflict of Interest?

Forgive me for being so late on the uptake ... You might already be aware of this, but I'll hold my head in shame and still blog about it anyway, because this little tidbit of info almost caused me to drive off the rode the other day!  Maybe some of you might be shocked at this, too.

The U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is senior partner of the lawfirm Covington & Burling, which represents 17 Yemeni prisoners at Gitmo.

This is from Covington & Burling's website with regards to its pro bono work:

Guantanamo Bay Detainees

• We represent sixteen men detained at the United States Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.  Most of the men have been detained for approximately seven years.  None have been charged with any crimes, and none have been accorded the protections of the Geneva Convention.  In Boumediene v. Bush, 128 S. Ct. 2229 (2008), where we were co-counsel for eleven of the detainees, the Supreme Court held that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus extends to detainees held at Guantánamo Bay.  Following that decision, we have been preparing for habeas corpus hearings to be held in federal district court Washington, DC, for eleven of our clients. 
  
• The firm has been involved in the Guantánamo related litigation for the last five years.  In addition to the on-going habeas corpus proceedings, our efforts have included: bringing cases for review of enemy combatant classification decisions in the D.C. Circuit under the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005; challenging the destruction of CIA torture tapes in federal court; filing amicus briefs and coordinating the amicus effort in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557 (2006); filing amicus briefs in support of Supreme Court review in Moussaoui v. United States, 382 F.3d 483 (4th Cir.), cert denied, 544 U.S. 931 (2005); challenging the government’s practice of redacting information from documents given to security-cleared habeas counsel; and challenging the abusive medical and living conditions that the detainees experience at Guantánamo.

How can this not be a conflict of interest?!?


For your amusement: Watch the squirming.
Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) last month questioned Eric Holder about the prosecution on American soil of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 5 other terror suspects.  Graham nails Holder for granting the terrorists the same rights of U.S. citizens and calls it a perversion of American justice:



Graham, who served six and half years as an attorney Air Force and serves on six senate committees, including Armed Services, Homeland Security and the Judiciary, might know a bit more about the possible repercussions of military tribunals versus civilian trials.

So, I'm damned near a year late in learning about this ... maybe the cloud of depression I was in following Obama's inauguration blocked my senses from picking up on it.  But, here's what Michelle Malkin posted about it back then:

Covington & Burling’s Gitmo bar roster has included some of the most radical detainee advocates; see David Remes, who peeled down to his underwear at a press conference in Yemen to draw attention to his clients’ plight and Marc Falkoff, who published a book of detainee poetry and who, in the book’s intro, compared their heroic struggle to the Jews held in concentration camps and Japanese Americans held in internment camps during WWII. [One of Falkoff's "gentle, thoughtful" young poets--a Kuwaiti "cleared for release" and repatriated in 2005--blew himself up in a truck bomb in Mosul last March, killing 13 Iraqi army soldiers and wounding 42 others.]

The fact that Mr. Holder, while Deputy Attorney General, pushed for the release of 16 violent FALN terrorists against the advice of the FBI, the US Attorneys who prosecuted them and the NYPD officers who were maimed by them, suggests that he was perfectly willing to put politics before the national security interests of the country. He is not suited for the job of attorney general, which is central to the issues surrounding the disposition of war on terror detainees. 

Thank God for watchdogs like Malkin who manage to keep their wits about them despite the turmoil and insanity!