Just don't lie to us!

Truth can have a variety of meanings, from the state of being the case, being in accord with a particular fact or reality, being in accord with the body of real things, events, actuality, or fidelity to an original or to a standard. In archaic usage it could be fidelity, constancy or sincerity in action, character, and utterance. The term has no single definition about which a majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree, and various theories and views of truth continue to be debated. There are differing claims on such questions as what constitutes truth; what things are truthbearers capable of being true or false; how to define and identify truth; the roles that revealed and acquired knowledge play; and whether truth is subjective, relative, objective, or absolute. Just don’t lie to us!

First we have a President that has trouble with telling the truth. He then appoints an Attorney General, Eric Holder, that could not recognize the truth if it hit him in the face. His biases overwhelm any common sense he may have. Then again, he is a lawyer. There is no such thing as common sense in the law.

Here are some of the Attorney General's whoppers from just his opening statements today, Wednesday, November 18, 2009:

1. The "tragic shooting" at Ft. Hood. What happened at Ft. Hood was a jihadist massacre — a terrorist act, not a tragedy.

2. The civilian justice system has been handling terrorism cases successfully for years. No mention of Mamdouh Salim, the al-Qaeda founder who was never brought to trial for 1998 U.S. embassy bombings because he maimed a Bureau of Prisons guard in an escape attempt during which he attempted to kidnap his taxpayer-funded defense lawyers.

3. We can protect classified material because of the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA). It is not just classified information that is helpful to terrorist organizations. The list of people who might be identified as unindicted coconspirators that was turned over in 1995 was not classified, but it told al-Qaeda who was on the government's investigative radar screen. Moreover, CIPA does not shield all classified information from the terrorists — just the classified information the judge decides is neither discoverable under the rules nor relevant to the trial. If it is discoverable or relevant, the defense gets it. And in civilian court, the terrorists can demand to represent themselves, so the government can't shield the classified information from them as it can in the military system (where it can require them to have military lawyers with security clearances in order to get access to the discovery).

The Left seems to always complain that too much information in government is classified.

Implicitly, Holder is now suggesting that we classify far more information than we otherwise would to bring it under the protection of CIPA. In addition, CIPA requires that all classified information issues be litigated (including any appeals) prior to trial. If we classify everything, that's going to require a mammoth pretrial trial and appeal before the actual trial happens. And, even if you did that, CIPA cannot control what goes on in the courtroom once witnesses start answering questions and blurting out information — and once the defense lawyers start asking questions about classified information in order to provoke the prosecutors into objecting (defense lawyers often don't care about the answers to these questions; they ask for the purpose of inducing the prosecutor to object and make the government look like it is hiding important information from the jury).

4. Classified information procedures in the Military Commissions Act that would apply at military commissions, are "based on" the CIPA that applies in civilian trials. They may be "based on" the CIPA rules, but they are not the same as the CIPA rules. The MCA provisions (Sec. 949(j)(c)) expressly provide for (1) deletions of classified material from discovery documents made available to the accused; (2) the withholding of methods and sources of intelligence collection from the accused; and (3) the deletion of classified information from exculpatory evidence. It is true that, whether you're in civilian or military court, the executive branch gets the opportunity to propose a substitution (e.g., an unclassified summary of the information) rather than surrender the classified information. But in civilian court under CIPA, the presumption is that if classified information is relevant under the rules of evidence, the accused gets access to it. In military court under the MCA, the presumption is that classified information gets withheld, especially if it involves methods and sources of intelligence.

5. A civilian trial is no more a platform for KSM than a military commission would have been. That's ridiculous. KSM was ready to plead guilty and be executed eleven months ago. Whatever soapbox he was going to have, he'd largely already had, and while we'd have had to let him speak before sentence was imposed, that would have been the end of it. Now, he's going to get a full-blown trial — after combing through the discovery for a couple of years and after putting the Bush administration under the spotlight. Is this possibly the whole point of this charade?

Holder derided Senator Kyl for pointing this out, saying Kyl had no way of knowing what KSM's position is today. That's a specious point. We do know what his position was eleven months ago when the Obama administration could have accepted his plea and pushed for his execution. Moreover, why would that still be KSM's position today, when he now knows Holder is ready to give him the stage in New York that he's been seeking since the day he was captured?

6. In a civilian trial, America will see KSM for the coward that he is — Holder: "I am not scared of KSM." Submitting a war criminal to a military commission is not an exercise in fear; it is an exercise in justice. We already know all about what kind of animal KSM is, thanks to the exrtraordinary information that has come out in the military proceedings and the CIA interrogations. You could fill a book with it, which the 9/11 Commission did. We don't need to bear the risks of a civilian trial either to learn more about KSM or so Mr. Holder can show how brave he is.

7. Holder expects to detain the terrorists in federal prisons under Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) to ensure that they do not pose a risk to Americans. In addition to not mentioning, Salim the attorney general skipped over the inconvenient fact that his Justice Department just caved in on the SAMs in the case of terrorist Richard Reid.

8. For eight years justice has been delayed — no longer, "It is past time to finally act." Holder, of course, does not mention the role of his firm and others in delaying and derailing the military commissions during their representation of America's enemies.

I suppose we should be grateful Holder is calling Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a coward, rather than describing the American people as "a nation of cowards" (as he did earlier this year). But is anyone else struck by the tinny bravado of Holder's prose? When politically correct careerists start beating their chests and proclaiming their own courage--you know they're in deep trouble. Let's see how Holder does today when he finishes posturing and has to answer the intellectually serious and morally compelling criticisms of his plan to grant KSM and his fellow terrorists a trial in federal court in New York. And if he does badly, let's see if some congressional Democrats have the courage to break with the administration and join in passing legislation to block Holder's plan.

But for a moment, let’s get back to the delays in bringing these war criminals to justice. Holder makes is sound as if it was the fault of the Bush administration. Was it? Putting on the best terrorist defense is a Covington & Burling, Holder’s old law firm, specialty. Among the firm’s other celebrity terrorist clients: 17 Yemenis held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. The law firm employed dozens of radical attorneys such as David Remes and Marc Falkoff to provide the enemy combatants with more than 3,000 hours of pro bono representation. Covington & Burling co-authored one of three petitioners’ briefs filed in the Boumediene v. Bush detainee case, and secured victories for several other Gitmo enemy combatants in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Falkoff went on to publish a book of poetry, Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak, which he dedicated to the suspected terrorists: “For my friends inside the wire, Mahmoad, Majid, Yasein, Saeed, Abdulsalam, Mohammed, Adnan, Jamal, Othman, Adil, Mohamed, Abdulmalik, Areef, Adeq, Farouk, Salman, and Makhtar. Inshallah, we will next meet over coffee in your homes in Yemen.”

How sweet. One of the class of Yemeni Gitmo detainees that Falkoff described as “gentle, thoughtful young men” was released in 2005—only to blow himself up (gently and thoughtfully, of course) in a truck bombing in Mosul, Iraq, in 2008, killing 13 soldiers from the 2nd Iraqi Army division and seriously wounding 42 others.

As a senior partner, Eric Holder undoubtedly had significant input on what kind of charity cases his firm picked up. He surely knew that dozens of lawyers from his firm were among the 500-plus civilian lawyers representing the 244 or so remaining detainees (on top of military-court-appointed defenders). Even now, his Covington colleagues continue to allege rampant torture at Gitmo. They’re fighting hard to have detainees tried through the US court system—essentially given the same rights as US citizens. And their arguments and plans hinge largely on having Holder issue a bad report card. Report card issued. Covington gets back some of the money they contributed to OB's election.

Is Eric Holder crooked? Maybe. Is he unethical? Maybe. Is he our nation’s top law enforcement officer? Yes. Should he be? The Senate, including 19 Republicans, confirmed Holder on February 2, 2009. Hmmm.