Benjamin Wittes on the AQ7 Ad

by Kenneth Anderson



From the opening of Ben Wittes’s essay:






4 Responses

  1. The same principle does not apply.  For defense counsel the principle is representation in adversarial proceedings.  For torture lawyers, it is counseling someone to commit a crime which is an ethical violation and a crime. Big difference no matter how hard everyone works to create equivalence in their own head.

  2. Incivility in the arena of National Security goes along with the democratization of that space.  There are people who do think sending Americans to war on false pretenses is a fairly significant incivility.  Or torturing people in our name.  Now these may be done in filtered tones by people in well dressed suits with fine pedigrees from the finest institutions and many friends, but that should be of no moment in a nation of laws and not men.


    Wittes doesn’t say anything about liberal praise in his TNR piece so that’s a red herring. The starting premise was conservative ambivalence about defending the AQ7 because of a perceived asymmetry in the defence of legal professionalism. Wittes simply argues that were a sub-set of “moderate” Bush lawyers who were subject to what he characterises as unfair and intemperate attacks by the New York Times, and critics such as Scott Horton, which did not evoke this kind of letter from liberals. But he notably excludes the main architects of the Bush torture-detainee policy fiasco, such as Yoo, Bybee and Addington, from this defence of good faith which obviously opens a significant gap in the equivalency argument.

    So this is really an argument at the margins about people like Haynes, Goldsmith and Bellinger. Personally, I can see where he’s coming from as far as that goes, but his piece doesn’t really demonstrate the equivalency. The AQ7 haven’t done anything remotely improper, whereas it’s at least arguable that, in some instances, the above lawyers made mistakes or failed to have sufficient curative effect, as Wittes acknowledges in his piece. Moreover, they certainly didn’t get treated with the same opprobrium as the main torture architects, or arguably the AQ7, so the rationale for a letter is less convincing.

    At best Wittes has made a decent case that the allegations against some of these more moderate conservatives deserve to be revisited, with some accountability for the harshest commentary, but that’s a different issue.

  4. The Haynes, Goldsmith and Bellinger’s are certainly seeking to have themselves rehabilitated – been going on for years – and this is a further thinly veiled effort on those people.  Yet they are up to their elbows in this space too starting from January-February 2002 and that is why a object to these relentless efforts for people to be rehabilitated.  Good faith leaves me cold. It is as if good faith makes illegal activities OK.  Tell that tp Charlie Graner serving 10 years for doing the bidding of these types.

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