Terrorist lawfare and radical lawyers

Terrorists have used our legal system as a weapon for quite a while, and have found no shortage of American lawyers willing to do their dirty work. Witness the ACLU this week, suing an American air transport company on behalf of three alleged Al Qaeda terrorists. (National Public Radio’s spin is that the ACLU is suing a company that “profited from torture.”)

The lawyers defend themselves to critics by saying that by standing by the most unpopular, they are protecting the rights of all of us. It’s the American thing to do.

That’s all a load of crap, of course, but the sick thing is that it’s no longer an extremist view. Last week I addressed a group of first-year law students from the Franklin Pierce Law Center of New Hampshire, discussing how terrorists use our legal system as a weapon.

I was rather surprised to find the overwhelming majority of the law students were adamant that the alleged terrorists we capture abroad should be accorded full rights under the United States Constitution, even if they never set foot on American soil. Most disagreed with the notion that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to terrorists – even though none apparently had even read the conventions as some of us have.

With only a couple of exceptions, the students argued about the injustice of the detainee center at our Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Most thought it was no problem that a radical lawyer who sympathizes with terrorists litigated on their behalf to get the Supreme Court ruling that enemy combatants deserve our constitutional protections.

And most seemed sincerely puzzled that I had a problem with lawyers like Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights who devoted their careers to defending extremists, KGB agents and terrorists. Some did admit that Lynne Stewart did abuse the attorney-client relationship by illegally acting as a courier for the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

This is an awful witness about the state of some of our law schools – and the legal profession – that considers aiding and abetting terrorists to be a virtue.