Last November, when Attorney General Eric Holder testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) demanded that he identify the attorneys in the Justice Department (DOJ) who either represented Guantanamo Bay detainees or worked for groups who advocated for them. "This prior representation creates a conflict-of-interest problem for these individuals," argued Grassley. He, along with six other Republicans, followed up with a letter to Holder requesting that the Attorney General release the names of all DOJ political appointees who worked on behalf of detainees.

In February, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich responded to Grassley's inquiries, saying in a letter that "only five of the lawyers who serve as political appointees in those components represented detainees, and four others either contributed to amicus briefs in detainee-related cases or were otherwise involved in advocacy on behalf of detainees." Weich named two of the lawyers, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal and National Security Division Attorney Jennifer Daskal, whom Grassley had previously identified.

The right wing responded incredulously, labeling the lawyers "The Gitmo Nine" and questioning whether "past work for terrorist detainees has biased" them. "Just whose side are they on?" asked the far right Investors Business Daily in an editorial titled "Department of Jihad." On Monday, Keep America Safe, the right-wing organization set up by Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol and Debra Burlingame to "make the case against President Barack Obama's moves to wrench America away from Bush era foreign policy," released an internet ad calling the yet-to-be identified lawyers "the al Qaeda 7." Keep America Safe spokesman Michael Goldfarb essentially accused them of treason, telling Politico that the lawyers had "propagandized on behalf of our enemies, engaging in a worldwide smear campaign against the CIA, the U.S. military and the United States itself while we are at war."

THE RETURN OF 'PURE McCARTHYISM': Cheney's ad questioning the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers has been met with swift push back from advocates of the rule of law. "It is absolutely outrageous for the Cheney-Grassley crowd to try to tar and feather Neal and Jennifer and insinuate they are al-Qaeda supporters," retired Col. Morris Davis, who formerly served as the chief prosecutor of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, told the Washington Independent. "You don't hear anyone refer to John Adams as a turncoat for representing the Brits in the Boston Massacre trial." "This is plainly unacceptable in the United States,"

Ken Gude, the Associate Director of the International Rights at the Center for American Progress, told Politico's Josh Gerstein. "Condemnation is not sufficient. This is pure McCarthyism." "It's not kind of like McCarthyism, it is exactly what Joe McCarthy did with his Communist witch hunts," Gude added in comments to TPMmuckraker. "Cheney accuses the Attorney General of the United States of being a supporter of al Qaeda and running the 'Department of Jihad.'" The American Prospect's Adam Serwer noted yesterday that the smear campaign also impugns the loyalty of members of the military who represented detainees at Guantanamo Bay. "The logical conclusion of their argument is that the military lawyers who act as defense counsel to detainees in the military commissions are also traitors and should be court-martialed," wrote Serwer. As Gerstein pointed out, "even the Bush/Cheney Administration didn't have much tolerance for public attacks on the loyalty of lawyers representing Guantanamo detainees." Gerstein noted that "in 2007, Defense Department detainee affairs chief Charles Stimson made similar comments, calling for a boycott of firms handling such cases, often pro bono. The Pentagon publicly distanced itself from Stimson's statements, which were condemned by a broad array of voices in the legal community. Stimson eventually apologized and resigned a short time later."

Bush administration veterans have also spoken out against the Keep America Safe attack. "While it's legitimate for the public to inquire about the past work of DOJ political appointees, we need to recognize that our judicial system cannot function without pro bono counsel, and it doesn't make a lawyer less patriotic just because he or she has represented a criminal or terrorist suspect," former U.S. attorney and homeland security adviser Kenneth Wainstein told the Washington Post.

THE RULE OF LAW IS 'THE AMERICAN WAY': Unmentioned by most of the conservatives impugning the patriotism of Holder's Justice Department is that the Supreme Court has sided with many of the lawyers they are seeking to smear. Katyal was the lawyer who won Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the case that struck down the Bush administration's military commissions system. Daskal signed her name to an amicus brief in the Boumediene v. Bush case arguing that Guantanamo detainees be accorded habeas corpus rights to challenge their convictions.

The Supreme Court sided with Daskal's position. Former Bush White House lawyer Reginald Brown told the Washington Post, "It's beyond a cheap shot to suggest that a lawyer is an al-Qaeda sympathizer because he advocates a detainee's position in the Supreme Court." "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," said Gude. "The disgusting logic of these attacks is that the Supreme Court is in league with al-Qaeda." As Col. Davis noted with his reference to John Adams, lawyers "zealously" defending the rights of the accused is "the American way." But adherence to the rule of law in the fight against terrorism is exactly what bothers the conservatives at Keep America Safe. Justifying the "al Qaeda 7" ad, Burlingame complained to CNSNews that "this is what you get when you have a country run by progressives, taking us back to the mindset of the 1990s in which civil liberties and the legal, due process protections for terrorists was their chief concern, their chief priority." As Lt. Col. David Frakt, who has represented detainees both in military and civilian courts, told Serwer, "The right is treating the lawyers who came up with the justification for torture as heroes, and the lawyers like Katyal who helped restore the rule of law as villains." "They've just got their heads screwed on backwards."

ANOTHER HYPOCRITICAL POLITICAL ATTACK: Yesterday, Fox News' Mike Levine revealed the identity of the seven other lawyers who worked on behalf of detainees before joining the government. The Justice Department confirmed the report, stating that "each of the nine people referenced in the letter filed legal briefs that are available by using something as simple as Google" and that their names were not initially revealed because the Department did not want to "participate in an attempt to drag people's names through the mud for political purposes."

Levine also pointed out that "the Obama Administration is not the first to hire lawyers who represented or advocated for terror suspects," naming three Bush administration lawyers who worked in such a capacity. ABC News' Jake Tapper reported that "it does not appear that any of these conservatives and Republicans stated any objections to the Bush Justice Department's hiring" of those lawyers. This hypocrisy should come as no surprise. For a long time now, conservatives have attacked the Obama administration's national security policies over issues they stayed silent on during the Bush administration. For instance, conservatives have lambasted Obama over the fact that the would-be Christmas Day bomber was read his Miranda rights, despite the fact that when President Bush was in charge, the "shoe bomber" Richard Reid "was read or reminded of his Miranda rights four times in two days."