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Eric Holder’s pro-terrorist lawyers
By MICHELLE MALKIN
Last Updated: 12:19 AM, October 13, 2012
Posted: 10:30 PM, October 12, 2012

Yesterday marked the 12th anniversary of the bombing of the USS Cole. The grim milestone comes as President Obama faces mounting questions about the murderous attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya. And it came just a day after resurgent al Qaeda thugs pulled off the drive-by assassination of a top Yemeni security official who worked at the US embassy in Sanaa.
These are not “bumps in the road.” These are gravesites on the blood-spattered path to surrender.
Seventeen US sailors died in the brutal suicide attack on the guided-missile destroyer Cole as it refueled at the Yemeni port of Aden in the fall of 2000. Then-President Bill Clinton vowed to track down the Muslim terrorist attackers: “We will find out who was responsible and hold them accountable.” But a dozen disgraceful years later, that promise has become a bitter punch line.
This White House only delayed and denied justice to the victims and their families.
Cole bombing suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the former Persian Gulf operations chief for al Qaeda, has been in US custody since 2002 and at Gitmo since 2006.
In February 2009, Obama met with Cole families and promised them justice. Then, he stabbed them in the back by ordering the Justice Department to abandon the death-penalty case assembled against the al Qaeda mastermind under the Bush administration.
That’s right: The Osama bin Laden football-spikers deliberately dropped the ball on al-Nashiri’s military prosecution because of their opposition to the Guantanamo Bay detention system.
Jesse Nieto, father of murdered Cole sailor Marc Nieto, won’t forget it. “That really left a bitter, bad taste in my mouth,” he told the Newnan (Ga.) Times-Herald this year.
Last year, the administration reinstated the charges amid a widespread backlash against Attorney General Eric Holder’s plans to bestow US civilian trials in Manhattan to foreign Gitmo goons. But the trial has been plagued by yet more delays and left-wing lawyer antics painting Nashiri as a victim of American hegemony.
“This whole trial is a political football the politicians are playing with,” Nieto aptly noted. “If they left it to the military, it would be taken care of. And it would be fair.”
Team Obama’s initial withdrawal from the prosecution came out of left field — literally. But it is no surprise to those who paid attention to Holder’s allegiances.
As I reported in “Culture of Corruption,” Holder joined the prestigious Covington and Burling law firm after a quarter-century as a government lawyer. The stint boosted his net worth to nearly $6 million. Covington and Burling’s post-9/11 claim to fame? Representing 17 terror suspects held at Gitmo who hail from Yemen, long a safe haven for terrorists.
Holder’s law firm employed dozens of radical attorneys such as David Remes and Marc Falkoff to provide the enemy combatants with more than 3,000 hours of pro bono
representation. Covington and Burling secured victories for several Gitmo enemy combatants in the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. Remes now represents Nashiri.
One of the class of Yemeni Gitmo detainees that Falkoff described as “gentle, thoughtful young men” was released in 2005 — only to blow himself up (gently and thoughtfully, of course) in a truck bombing in Mosul, Iraq, in 2008, killing 13 soldiers from the 2nd Iraqi Army division and seriously wounding 42 others.
In January 2010, The Times of London reported that “at least a dozen former Guantanamo Bay inmates [had] rejoined al Qaeda to fight in Yemen.” Another Yemeni Gitmo recidivist and top al Qaeda leader, Said al-Shihri, was freed after undergoing “rehabilitation” — and then promptly rejoined jihadi forces. He was reportedly killed in a US missile strike last month.
In February 2010, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) forced Holder to acknowledge that at least nine Justice Department attorneys officially represented or served as advocates for Gitmo detainees before joining the Obama administration.
Gitmo recidivists — a burgeoning demographic that includes suspected Benghazi jihad plotter Abu Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed Hamuda bin Qumu — certainly are better off than they were four years ago.
malkinblog@gmail.com