CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen is a long-time critic of the Bush administration, enhanced interrogation techniques, military tribunals, Gitmo, and many aspects of the government's prosecution of the war on terror. For general background, see Cohen's CBS News blog "Court Watch." It is, therefore, no surprise at all to see Cohen defending the propriety of the upcoming New York City terror trials. 

In his latest article in Washington Post ("A terrorism trial's myths"), Cohen attempts to counter some of the [very legitimate] concerns of those opposed to the idea of criminal trials for the 9/11 terrorists.

Cohen writes:

A Mohammed trial for Sept. 11 crimes -- the case might actually be styled United States v. Mohammed -- could be one of the biggest legal landmarks in American history. It's not surprising that bringing one of the "faces of terror" to within blocks of Ground Zero would generate a lot of fear, trepidation and political hysteria. So let's try to separate sizzle from steak.

It appears CBS News's Chief Legal Analyst doesn't agree with his colleague Bob Schieffer that former Vice President Dick Cheney is winning the national security debate with Barack Obama.

Quite the contrary, Andrew Cohen thinks Cheney is still living in "the world of September 11, 2001, a world where hijacked planes are screaming toward their targets, chaos reigns, and anything goes." 

As a result, Cohen wondered in a Friday posting at his CBSNews.com blog "Court Watch" if Cheney is, "as many people say, just a d**k":

On Monday’s CBS Evening News, correspondent Nancy Cordes reported on perjury allegations against Illinois Senator Roland Burris and calls for his resignation: "Burris admits he did much more than just talk to one person, in fact, he says he talked to four other people with close connections and took three phone calls from the ex-governor's brother about raising money. In the down and dirty world of Illinois politics, some Republicans are calling on him to resign."

In addition to bashing Illinois Republicans, Cordes’s report featured CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen, who argued: "From a purely legal point of view, it is not a strong perjury case. All it does is suggest that Mr. Burris was a little bit more involved in all of this than he initially claimed to be."

In contrast, in January 2007, Cohen described perjury charges against Vice President Cheney’s former chief of Staff Scooter Libby this way: "The whole thing reminds me of an experience I had in law school. I was serving as a ‘baby’ public defender and one of my ‘clients’ was a man, already incarcerated, who was being brought up on new charges that he stole a car. "I didn't steal that car," he said to me. ‘Great,’ I said. ‘That's great. Can you tell me what did happen?’ ‘You don't understand,’ he said to me, "I'm a crack dealer. I don't do that petty car (stuff).’ That is darn close to what Libby and his lawyers are saying. He was an architect and implementer of (mostly failed) foreign policies, the defense goes, and thus did not have time, inclination or criminal state of mind to be guilty of the petty offense of perjury and obstruction of justice."

Liberal hack CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen is at it again, resharpening his knives for former Bush adviser Karl Rove. In a February 26 Couric & Co. blog post at CBSNews.com, Cohen pointed back to Sunday's "60 Minutes" story alleging malfeasance on Rove's part in urging the federal prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (D).

Yet for a man trained in the law and supposedly concerned with the discovery of truth in open court, Cohen erroneously smeared Rove with responsibility for the Valerie Plame leak:

Former White House advisor Karl Rove has made a career out of “smearing” his political opponents. Just ask Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. Indeed, a litany of Rove’s targets would fill up the rest of the column. So why is this smear different from all other smears?

Cohen is either lying or a year and a half behind the curve. From CNN.com, August 30, 2006 (emphases mine):

In his September 10 article "Opportunities Squandered Since 9/11," CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen declares that "[o]ur leaders have made it far worse for themselves, and for us, by choosing confrontation over collaboration in the creation of a new legal order to best combat terrorism." Cohen's idea of "collaboration," of course, means that Republicans and the Bush Administration should listen to and implement the ideas of Cohen (and others who think like him). But while Cohen is quick to dump criticism upon post-9/11 conservative legal policy, he does not credit that policy for the prevention of further terrorist attacks.

Cohen chooses some familiar liberal talking points for the opening of his critique.

In his recent blog ("Making Headlines: The Law, Summer 2007"), CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen describes his midsummer night's dream of legal headlines he would "like to see, but probably won't." In the tradition of another more-famous CBS employee, Cohen lists his "top ten" legal headlines - a wish list with an obvious liberal slant.

Here are some of Cohen's headlines, along with the necessary translation.

The following was submitted by Jason Aslinger, a private practice attorney in Greenville, Ohio. Portions in bold below are the added emphasized of NB managing editor Ken Shepherd. It's a long post but it's worth the read:

In the wake of last week’s Supreme Court decision regarding racial integration in public schools, the media have gone out of their way to obscure the facts for the purpose of advancing its familiar political agenda, not to mention skipped over giving readers a glimpse of the concurring opinions of Justices Thomas and Kennedy, both of which shed light on the case's significance to the average American.

In a prior NewsBusters post, I called out MSNBC's Keith Olbermann for his false and race-baiting claim that the Supreme Court had “overturned” the landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education. The subsequent commentary by the media has at least been more clever, but no less false. Undoubtedly, the press and “expert commentators” have calculated that the general public would not check their factual (and political) conclusions by reading the Court’s 185-page opinion. Without knowing the specific facts, the media distortions can not be fully appreciated. Below we'll take a look at the facts of the case as well as the reasoning from the justices, reasoning that all too often is glossed over if not outright ignored in the media.

The following is submitted by Jason Aslinger, a NewsBusters reader and a private practice attorney from Greenville, Ohio. Cohen pictured at right (file photo).

In his June 28 "Court Watch" article, CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen laments the conservative bent of the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts. But rather than give readers sound legal critiques, Cohen sounds out a decidely political lament.

With a title like “Rightward Ho!” you might think that Cohen would attack the Court’s conservative justices, and he does, dismissing Justice Samuel Alito as a "rigid starboard-facing ideologue" while he derides Chief Justice John Roberts as "silly and condescending."

Cohen lists several cases from the 2007 term in which, in Cohen’s view, Justice Alito delivered the deciding vote. Cohen writes:

CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen found the rulings from the Supreme Court today to be a boon for conservatives, but he couldn't resist hinting about his personal opinions about those cases. He didn't seem to agree with any of them. (emphasis mine):

Conservatives go 4-4 today at the Supreme Court

Let's stay with our baseball theme today.

Legal and political conservatives hit for the cycle Monday morning when they "won" four long-awaited rulings from the United States Supreme Court. The Justices further chipped away at the wall that separates church and state, took some of the steam out of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, neutered federal regulators in environmental cases to the benefit of developers and slammed a high school kid who had the temerity to put up a silly sign near his high school.

Perhaps a sign of how blind the liberally-biased media are to arguments from gun rights advocates, CBS's Andrew Cohen wrote in his Washington Post "Bench Conference" blog that "There Is Irony in the Tragedy at Virginia Tech."

I learned from CBS News' Armen Keteyian that school administrators and college officials at Virginia Tech had in fact implemented reasonable security measures (against the wishes of state legislators) designed to limit guns on campus. In other words, even though the university was relatively proactive in confronting the problem of guns on campus, the brutal slayings occurred anyway.

Actually, that's not so much irony as the law of unintended consequences, something that any pro-gun rights advocate could tell Cohen. I've not seen a worse definition of irony since Alanis Morissette wrote a song about it. (continued...)

In a front-page article in the Washington Post in 1993, reporter Michael Weisskopf quipped that Christian conservatives were "largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command."

Of course, that's utter malarkey, but even when well-educated Christian conservatives serve in high offices in the federal government, they don't fare much better in the liberally biased media, particularly if they graduated from Regent University, an accredited private graduate school founded by [gasp] Pat Robertson.

Take CBS's Andrew Cohen. The legal analyst/blogger who recently argued that Alberto Gonzales may well be the nation's worst Attorney General ever, picked up on a Boston Globe article to turn his anti-Gonzales drumbeat into a swipe at Bush political appointees who hail from evangelical Christian circles:

Wednesday's CBS Evening News, anchored by Russ Mitchell, provided a sympathetic look at efforts to win an early release for John Walker Lindh, the American citizen who was convicted of giving aid to the Taliban during the war in Afghanistan. Mitchell and correspondent John Blackstone, who only displayed soundbites sympathetic to Lindh, relayed the argument of Lindh's parents that his 20-year sentence was "not fair considering Australian David Hicks was sentenced to just nine months for his terror conviction," without considering whether Hicks' sentence was too light. CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen further contended that because Lindh was tried relatively soon after the 9/11 attacks, that he was a "victim of timing" in a "harsh atmosphere." Andrew Cohen: "He was the first person to go through the legal system after 9/11 in federal court, and the atmosphere at that time was so intense and harsh that he is essentially a victim of timing." (Transcript follows)

...but being the gracious guy he is, Andrew Cohen helpfully offers a way for the White House to escape Washington's favorite three-ring circus: televised congressional hearings.

Silly me, I thought network legal analysts weren't paid for political strategy but for cogent analysis of, well, legal developments.

Cohen writes at the "Couric & Co." blog:

First, Congress should relent and allow these sessions to take place in private. Sure, I would love to see Rove grilled in public— who wouldn’t? I mean, watching Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, question Rove could be a pay-per-view event in many parts of the country. A long, savory public hearing would be good for my career, I suspect, and sure would beat talking more about the paternity hearing for Anna Nicole Smith’s baby. But I am willing to get behind private sessions if it gives the President a measure of comfort about releasing his subordinates to talk candidly about who did what to whom and why when it came to firing those eight federal prosecutors. So, Point One of my Plan is: Private Hearings.

CBS finally picked up the Clinton administration’s record of firing 93 federal prosecutors, but they still rushed to Clinton’s defense with false assertions. On the March 15 edition of "The Early Show," reporter Bill Plante sought to make this distinction between the Bush and Clinton firings.

"Mr. Bush isn't the first president to fire US attorneys and replace them with his own appointments. At the beginning of his first term, President Clinton cleaned house, ousting all 93 US attorneys. Not unusual, they serve at the pleasure of the president. The difference this time, the charge that politics played a role in their dismissal."

CBS legal pundit Andrew Cohen is back at it again with a new blog post at Katie's e-sandbox, "Couric & Co.":

As always, thank you for taking the time to read my post and to write a response. The more dialogue and discussion and debate we have on this topic the better. It is true that Janet Reno, as her predecessors before her had done, asked for the resignations of U.S. Attorneys. This is standard operating procedure designed to allow the President to have in place his own federal prosecutors. What is different about this current episode is that a Republican White House sought to replace Republican-appointed federal prosecutors mid-stream who were by all accounts doing precisely what they had been asked to do. We now know, from last week’s testimony, why in some cases this was so and the answers we got make it clear that the reasons were not high-minded or lofty.

CBS legal expert Andrew Cohen took to the "Couric & Co." blog to blast Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as a Bush toadie, then turned to law scholars with a history of donating to liberal Democratic candidates to back up his claims.

We’ve indeed got trouble. Few attorneys general in recent history have
been more beholden to their President than Gonzales is to President
George W. Bush. In fact, two years ago, when asked by the Academy of
Achievement to list his role models, Gonzales listed his mother, his
father, and the President as the three people to whom he owed the most.
This would be more charming if the Attorney General had during the past
two years stood up to his hero-- on domestic surveillance, on
Guantanamo Bay, on protecting good federal prosecutors—instead of
simply defending or justifying White House policies and practices.

So, in essence, Cohen asserted that Gonzales has no independent thought on his own because Gonzales failed to act how Cohen thinks he should have. That is, Gonzales is at fault for doing his job: crafting and implementing the president's legal strategy for the war on terror.

Not content to leave his gripe with Gonzales as a matter of personal opinion, Cohen brought in two ostensibly politically neutral legal experts to lend credence to his attack on the attorney general's performance in office: Stanley Kutler of the University of Wisconsin and Stanley Katz of Princeton University.

Cohen was particularly enamored with Katz, quoting him as he closed his March 13 blog post:

CBS News's legal analyst Andrew Cohen let loose a label-laced column on CBSNews.com today on President Bush's rendition of trick-or-treat (to liberals and conservatives respectively) in naming Samuel Alito to succeed Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court.

Alito was painted as "a rock-ribbed conservative jurist who is not afraid to get out in front of the curve when it comes to" the "social issues" which get "the president's base foaming at the mouth."

Cohen finds himself gun-shy with a label for partial-birth abortion however, using an uncomfortable syntactical jumble to hint that Alito may have an impact on the Court's rulings on abortion:

CBS News legal analyst, Andrew Cohen, today relays a conspiracy theory some have cooked up regarding the Miers nomination: Miers was never intended to sit on the Court, but rather to be a "sacrificial lamb" whose botched nomination would make it harder for liberals to sink her more conservative replacement.

Cohen himself finds the notion "only mildly paranoid when you think about it," adding:

Can this be? Why not. Anyone who has read those suck-up notes that Miers wrote to President Bush (they’ve been published and posted everywhere, in case you are wondering) wouldn’t have too hard a time believing that she would be wiling to sacrifice her own professional reputation for all eternity to further the political goals of the man to whom she has long hitched her star.

All three broadcast network evening newscasts on Monday focused attention on the disappointment expressed by conservatives at President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, but the CBS Evening News went the furthest in reporting the selection through a liberal prism. Anchor Bob Schieffer employed “rights” language which put the liberal position in a positive light: “Social conservatives wanted someone who is on the record against gay rights and abortion rights. Many liberals wanted someone who is for abortion rights.”

John Roberts put the most negative hue on Miers' connection to Bush as he asserted that “Miers' ties to President Bush are too close for some people on the left and right. What looks like, they say, to be the very embodiment of cronyism." To back that up, Roberts ran a clip from CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen. Unlike ABC's Terry Moran and NBC's Pete Williams, Roberts failed to point out (as did Gloria Borger in a subsequent piece) how Miers gave a $1,000 to the Al Gore campaign in 1988, but Roberts, using phraseology favorable to abortion backers, stressed her position on abortion: “We do know as head of the Texas bar, she fought against support for abortion rights and she was a patron of a Texas anti-abortion group. Friends say she is very religious.” Roberts concluded with an extreme label: “White House officials, including the Vice President, insist she has the sort of bedrock conservative judicial philosophy that even the far right will like." (I doubt Cheney used the term “far right.”)

CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen vented yesterday on CBSNews.com about how mum John Roberts has been during questioning, refusing to take the bait on hot-button questions posed by liberal senators. But in doing so, Cohen gives away his bias: he'd prefer a Supreme Court justice who believes in judicial activism, rather than judicial restraint:

Roberts took the so-called "Ginsburg Test" for refusing to answer Committee questions — dubiously named in honor of the 1993 Court nominee, Ruth Bader Ginsburg — to a new extreme.

He invoked it so many times, and in such an eager fashion, that they ought to do a Saturday Night Live Skit about it — a guy gets asked if he wants fries or a salad and he answers that he isn’t comfortable answering the question because it eventually may come before the Court.

To Republicans on the panel, Roberts was happy to expound upon all the many things a judge must not do, or say, or think, or resolve, when it comes to the law. He was happy to talk about how and why the judiciary must often and typically be a passive partner in the dance between governmental branches.

He thus gave succor to those on the right who hope that the newly-constituted Supreme Court will be less reluctant than its predecessor in striking down Congressional legislation or in challenging the authority of the executive branch.