Like father, like daughter. Liz Cheney is now fronting another one of the right wing’s outrageous smears. The issue at hand is the conduct of nine lawyers who, prior to their current service in the Department of Justice, represented detainees at Guantanamo. Cheney has dubbed them the “Gitmo Nine,” and openly questioned their patriotism. It seems that in the Alice in Wonderland logic of the extreme right, believing in American values is treason is you believe in them enough to act on them in unpopular cases.

Okay, folks. We’re supposed to be the good guys. We’re the good guys because we have a set of values that we believe are superior to the values of our enemies. That’s why they’re the bad guys. So we’re defending our American way of life, our democratic values, against people who don’t believe in them. Follow that so far? A central tenet of that way of life is the belief in a fair trial. That’s why it’s in the Constitution. We believe that people–no matter how heinous the crimes they might have committed– are entitled to know the charges against them, to face their accusers, to hear the evidence against them, and to mount a defense. That’s the only way we can truly decide if they’re guilty. Except, Cheney seems to believe, when we’ve already decided they’re guilty before we try them. Question: if we don’t believe that our own values apply when the issue is national defense, then what, exactly, are we defending?

The Bush administration did a great job of muddying the waters, refusing to clarify that the detainees at Guantanamo were ACCUSED terrorists. Most were not, in fact, captured on any battlefield. Many were turned in for bounty, the evidence against them dubious at best, completely fabricated at worst. Yet, the administration created a system of indefinite detention in which they had no rights, no access to counsel, no chance of proving their innocence, no legal recourse–a lifetime sentence of limbo. The lawyers who came to their defense persuaded the Supreme Court–a very conservative Supreme Court, I might add–that this system was untenable under our own laws.

Now the men and women who stood up, not for terrorists, but for the American system of justice, are being pilloried as traitors. The Cheney legacy of contempt for the principles this country allegedly stands for passes proudly to the next generation.

I found myself wondering how Cheney, Fox News & co. would have reacted to John Adams’ defense of the British soldiers accused of the Boston Massacre in 1770. As tensions escalated in the Colonies, a much-despised contingent of British troops was stationed in Boston. On March 5, a confrontation between colonists and the troops turned violent, with British soldiers killing five Americans. Twelve soldiers were arrested, eight ultimately coming to trial for murder. A young lawyer named John Adams was asked to defend them. Knowing how unpopular it would make him, he still accepted the job. He believed that it was essential to show that Americans could give their hated overseers a fair trial. He performed brilliantly, and his clients were ultimately acquitted.

Had he been hounded from government service by his critics, as Liz Cheney and friends are trying to do to the Guantanamo lawyers, that same John Adams would not have been available to negotiate desperately needed loans from foreign governments to keep the fledgling United States solvent, would not have been one of the intellectual fountainheads of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, someone else would have became the second President of the United States, and this country’s history would have been very, very different.