Bryan Cave Partner Grilled on Terrorism Article at Deputy AG Confirmation Hearing
Bryan Cave partner James Cole defended a terrorism article he wrote for Legal Times in 2002 during a hearing yesterday on his confirmation to become deputy attorney general.
The article had criticized the Bush administration’s war on terrorism, report the Washington Post and Reuters. “The attorney general is not a member of the military fighting a war—he is a prosecutor fighting crime,” Cole wrote for Legal Times. “For all the rhetoric about war, the Sept. 11 attacks were criminal acts of terrorism against a civilian population.”
The ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, suggested Cole’s nomination sends a signal about the president’s lack of determination in fighting terrorism. Cole responded that the Justice Department must fight the “scourge” of terrorism, both through military commissions and federal courts. “We must use every tool we have to fight terrorism,” he said.
The point of his article, Cole said, was that the rule of law governed the legal fight against terrorism. He said there were constitutional questions about the original military commissions created to try terrorism suspects, but they were improved after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
Cole served in the Justice Department for 13 years. The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times also has a story on the hearings.
