In the above 2008 video of a Human Rights Watch panel, lawyer Jennifer Daskal says that the U.S. interrogators had done “things the United States has called war crimes when carried out against Americans.”
Daskal, who once defended Gitmo detainee Omar Khadr, was tapped last summer to work in the DOJ’s “National Security Division and to serve on a task force deciding the future of Guantanamo and its detainees.”
As Tom Joscelyn has reported:
Khadr was neither a child, nor a soldier, at the time he reportedly killed an Army medic. Khadr comes from a known al Qaeda family dedicated to Osama bin Laden. He was trained in al Qaeda camps and served a senior member of al Qaeda. There is even a video of Khadr manufacturing and placing IED’s in Afghanistan. Khadr is a terrorist, not a soldier.
The above video shows Daskal calling Khadr a “child soldier” and claiming that he is entitled to an education financed by the U.S. government:
This is all standard fare for your average lefty-lawyer. Daskal suggests that international agreements such as the Geneva Conventions apply to illegal enemy combatants–and therefore the United States ought to apply the same standard of treatment to foreign terrorists as it would prisoners of war. And teenage terrorists have a right to an education provided by the U.S. government. She is entitled to her ideology, and Eric Holder and Barack Obama are entitled to have an activist lawyer help set detainee policy at the Department of Justice. The American people are also entitled to know that her ideology, like other pro bono Gitmo lawyers, is that of a radical civil libertarian, as Charles Krauthammer put it.
