Debra Burlingame has a disturbing piece in OpinionJournal today on the international leftist-Islamist axis’ largely successful attempt to subvert the truth about the detainees at Guantanamo Bay—and about the war on militant Islam—turning Islamist fanatics into sympathetic figures, and chipping away at the public’s post-9/11 resolve bit by little bit: Gitmo’s Guerrilla Lawyers.

A Montreal-based marketing firm was hired to create the families’ full-service Web site which fed propaganda—unsourced, unrebutted and uninvestigated by the media—aimed at the media all over the world. Creating what Mr. Levick calls a “war of pictures,” the site is replete with images meant to appeal to Americans: smiling Kuwaiti families wearing T-shirts and baseball caps, cute children passing out yellow ribbons.

After the Rasul decision, the PR momentum picked up speed and the Supreme Court became, in Mr. Levick’s words, their “main weapon,” a “cudgel” that forced more attention in what he calls the traditional “liberal” press. Dozens of op-eds by Mr. Wilner and the family group leader (described as a U.S.-trained former Kuwaiti Air Force pilot who cherishes the memory of drinking Coca Cola) were aimed at the public and Congress.

Mr. Levick maintains that a year and a half after they began the campaign, their PR outreach produced literally thousands of news placements and that, eventually, a majority of the top 100 newspapers were editorializing on the detainees’ behalf. Convinced that judges can be influenced by aggressive PR campaigns, Mr. Levick points to rulings in the detainee cases which openly cite news stories that resulted from his team’s media outreach.

The Kuwaiti 12 case is a primer on the anatomy of a guerilla PR offensive, packaged and sold to the public as a fight for the “rule of law” and “America’s core principles.” Begin with flimsy information, generate stories that are spun from uncorroborated double or triple hearsay uttered by interested parties that are hard to confirm from halfway around the world. Feed the phonied-up stories to friendly media who write credulous reports and emotional human interest features, post them on a Web site where they will then be read and used as sources by other lazy (or busy) media from all over the world. In short, create one giant echo chamber.

Mr. Mutairi’s profile is the most brazen example of Mr. Levick’s confidence that the media can be easily manipulated. The Web site describes him as a member of an apolitical and peaceful sect of missionaries, and that he went to Afghanistan in October of 2000 to “minister in the small mosques and schools” in the country’s poorer regions.

Everything Mr. Levick did was in partnership with Tom Wilner and the law firm of Sherman & Sterling. It was their joint litigation-PR plan, with the Guantanamo lawsuits helping the PR messaging and the PR messaging helping the lawsuits. All of this may be legal, but it is hardly ethical.

Shearman & Sterling lawyers aren’t hucksters crassly promoting a cheap product; they are sworn officers of the court volunteering to represent alien enemy combatants in a time of war, interjecting themselves in cases that affect how American soldiers on the battlefield do their job. It is one thing to take these cases in order to achieve the proper balance between due process concerns and unprecedented national security issues. It is another to hire PR and marketing consultants to create image makeovers for suspected al Qaeda financiers, foot soldiers, weapons trainers and bomb makers, all of which is financed by millions of dollars from a foreign country enmeshed in the anti-American, anti-Israel elements of Middle East politics.

Read the whole thing…