Al Qaeda Justice Pick

I just saw this story from the New York Post last Friday:

IF you were hiring a lawyer to help pro tect Americans from terrorists, you likely wouldn’t choose a left-wing ac tivist who’s been a champion of the killers held at Guantanamo Bay.

Then again, you’re not President Obama. His Justice Department has raised eyebrows by tapping Jennifer Daskal, formerly “senior counterterrorism counsel” at Human Rights Watch, to work as counsel in its National Security Division and to serve on a task force deciding the future of Guantanamo and its detainees.
. . .

As a lawyer for the advocacy group, Daskal never missed a chance to give Gitmo detainees the benefit of the doubt while assuming the worst about US government intentions. She has called for a “truth commission” to investigate Bush anti-terror policies, and was even unhappy with Team Obama before joining it.
. . .

Daskal thinks America is guilty of torture — but she has an odd understanding of it. In a 54-page report on Gitmo detainees’ allegedly deteriorating mental health, she laments how one detainee, “a self-styled poet,” “found it was nearly impossible to write poetry anymore because the prison guards would only allow him to keep a pen or pencil in his cell for short periods of time.” Quick, call the Red Cross!

Then there’s the attention Daskal lavished on Canadian-born Omar Khadr, a detainee she says is being denied “his rights as a child.” (Human Rights Watch has urged Defense Secretary Bob Gates to transfer Khadr to courts where he’d be treated as a juvenile.)

He’s an adult now, but Khadr was 15 when apprehended on an Afghan battlefield — where, US troops say, he launched the grenade that killed Sgt. First Class Christopher Speer.

Sgt. Layne Morris, who was wounded by the same grenade, calls claims that Khadr should be treated as a child “laughable.” And he says: “The fact that she took on that young man’s case — and has argued the ridiculous things that she has — and is now appointed to the Justice Department, where she brings in those same thought processes and prejudices — it doesn’t bode well for the security of our country.”

Full piece here.

The Obama Administration is besotted with terrorists like Khadar, but threatens to prosecute CIA and Bush White House officials who kept us safe from terrorist attacks since 9/11.

It’s going to be a l-o-n-g four years.