Marc Thiessen

Marc Thiessen writes at the Washington Post:

Would most Americans want to know if the Justice Department hired a bunch of mob lawyers and put them in charge of mob cases? Or a group of drug cartel lawyers and put them in charge of drug cases? Would they want their elected representatives to find out who these lawyers were, which mob bosses and drug lords they had worked for, and what roles they were now playing at the Justice Department? Of course they would -- and rightly so.

Yet U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder hired former al-Qaeda lawyers to serve in the Justice Department and resisted providing Congress this basic information. In November, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee sent Holder a letter requesting that he identify officials who represented terrorists or worked for organizations advocating on their behalf, the cases and projects they worked on before coming to the Justice Department, the cases and projects they've worked on since joining the administration, and a list of officials who have recused themselves because of prior work on behalf of terrorist detainees.

Holder stonewalled for nearly three months. Finally, two weeks ago, he admitted that nine political appointees in the Justice Department had represented or advocated for terrorist detainees, but he failed to identify seven whose names were not publicly known or to directly answer other questions the senators posed. So Keep America Safe, a group headed by Liz Cheney, posted a Web ad demanding that Holder identify the "al-Qaeda seven," and a subsequent Fox News investigation unearthed the names. Only under this public pressure did the Justice Department confirm their identities -- but Holder still refuses to disclose their roles in detention policy.

Read the whole thing.

The Huffington Post has published a piece explaining how awful it supposedly is that Marc Thiessen, author of Courting Disaster (full disclosure: I reviewed a draft at Thiessen’s request), has been hired by the Washington Post to write a column.  The Huffington Post’s chief witness against Thiessen is attorney Brent Mickum, of Hollingsworth LLP, “who is one of the attorneys serving in Abu Zubaydah's defense.”   

Thiessen’s book deals with the controversial interrogations of Zubaydah. And this obviously “angers” al Qaeda attorney Mickum. You see, according to Mickum he isn’t an al Qaeda attorney at all because Abu Zubaydah isn’t really an al Qaeda member:

"Abu Zubaydah, categorically, was not affiliated with al Qaeda," Mickum said. "He was never a top leader of al Qaeda because he was never a member and he openly disagreed with the militaristic policies of al Qaeda. The camp he is alleged to have been involved with was closed in 2000 -- two years before his capture -- because the emir who oversaw it refused to allow it to fall under the control of al Qaeda. Thus, he is not, and never was, the man that the Bush administration made him out to be -- someone who orchestrated terrorist attacks."

This is absolute nonsense. And I’ve debunked it before, see here, here and here.

Here's some cable news gold, in which Joe Scarborough has to cut to commercial because Lawrence O'Donnell can't stop yelling at Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen (update: full clip here):

Marc Thiessen, whose book Courting Disaster comes out this week, confronted CNN’s chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour about her misleading reporting on interrogation techniques used to extract information from suspected terrorists at Guantanamo.