Ben Smith obtains a letter from a collection of lawyers objecting strenuously to Keep America Safe’s disgraceful slander that DOJ lawyers who represented Guantanamo detainees are sympathetic to Usama bin Laden. (Or, the ‘al-Qaeda Seven’, as the Cheneyites’ add said.) “Shameful,” the signatories call it, writing, “The American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients is at least as old as John Adams’ representation of the British soldiers charged in the Boston massacre.” Signatories include veterans of the Bush legal apparatus like Pentagon ex-detentions chief Matt Waxman and — this is an actual surprise to me — David Rivkin, a Reagan veteran and usually a go-to conservative lawyer for most everything war-on-terror and lawless.

Keep America Safe overreached with this one. They went after unobjectionable legal behavior — and, more importantly, an action that any lawyer would sympathize with performing. In Ben’s story, look at how Bill Kristol tries to dig Keep America Safe out of its miscalculation:

Kristol responds that his group’s video didn’t represent “attacks” on the lawyers — labeled the “Al Qaeda Seven” in the video — and says that his group’s claim isn’t that the lawyers shouldn’t be allowed to work in Justice, but that their names should be public, a question on which Justice caved last week. The other question, Kristol writes, is “whether former pro bono lawyers for terrorists should be working on detainee policy for the Justice Department.”

Kristol would need the press to have not actually seen the Keep America Safe video for anyone to take seriously the idea that an ad that calls these lawyers “The al-Qaeda Seven” isn’t an attack on them. (Good on Ben for the contextualized reminder.) And if he’s reduced to saying that the group isn’t calling for the lawyers’ heads, that’s a sure sign that the group is running away from its mistake, rather than pressing the attack. People like Tony West, who defended John Walker Lindh, leads the Justice Department’s civil branch and has nothing to do with detentions policy. KAS didn’t do the slightest bit of due diligence on this ad, and that helps explain why they were unprepared for the backlash.