Genocide on Trial

Pol Pot’s henchmen may finally face “justice” — in 2010.

by Alyssa A. Lappen
Front Page Magazine | Feb. 23, 2009

“I have waited 30 years for this trial,” said painter Vann Nath, 63, on the eve of Feb. 17 pre-trial proceedings in Phnom Penh’s international Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). So have an estimated 3 million other survivors of Pol Pot’s five-year Cambodian reign of terror.

On April 17, 1975—“Year Zero,” as the communist tyrant named that date—Pol Pot’s communist forces began driving people from Cambodian cities with the fanatical goal of recreating a perfect, clean, peasant-controlled, communist agrarian society. The cadres of “brother number one,” as Pol Pot was known, starved, beat and murdered up to 2 million Cambodians, more than a fifth of the population in 1975. With backing from China, Pol Pot destroyed virtually all Cambodia’s doctors, attorneys, intellectuals, artists and musicians in the nation’s rural areas, which quickly became killing fields. Even today, Cambodia’s countryside is littered with human bones and indiscriminately placed land mines.

Bringing the perpetrators of Cambodia’s genocide to justice has been a story almost as sad as the horrific atrocities themselves. Vietnamese communist forces liberated Cambodia over 30 years ago, in January 1979. However, Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge forces remained at large in Cambodia’s jungles until well after Vietnamese rule ended in 1991. Cambodia at long last achieved independence and self-rule in 1993, but Khmer renegades controlled some rural areas until March 1998, when the final Khmer cadres surrendered.

Meanwhile, there were virtually no efforts to obtain justice, apart from the absurd July 1997 show trial Pol Pot received from his comrades in Anlong Veng, and his sentence of house arrest for life. Pol Pot remained under house arrest he died in 1998. His military leader, Ta Mok, likewise died in July 2006, without ever facing justice.

These “punishments” reflected the enormous conflict of interest of Cambodia’s government. While self-ruled since 1993, the young polity actually had counter-incentives against seeking genocide trials. Co-Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a former Khmer official, had served Vietnam’s People’s Republic of Kampuchea as a foreign minister from 1979 through 1990. Even in the relative calm of 1993 to 1998, when Hun shared the Prime Minister’s post with Cambodian Prince Norodom Ranariddh, the government rebuffed a 1994 coup, regional upheaval and pockets of Khmer Rouge unrest. Hun feared indictments against many of his regime’s other former Khmer appartchiks. Moreover, he feared public scrutiny and backlash over his continued close ties with Chinese leaders, who actively backed the Khmer Rouge, from 1975 until Vietnamese rule ended in 1991. “I do not understand why some people want to remove Pol Pot,” Chinese vice premier Deng Xiaoping said in 1984. “It is true that he made some mistakes in the past but now he is leading the fight against the Vietnamese aggressors.”

In June 1997, 18 years after the Khmer reign of terror, Hun and Prince Norodom pretended to request genocide trials, asking the U.N. General Assembly to establish a tribunal like those for the Rwanda and former Yugoslavia genocides. But Cambodian conflicts of interest remained. Thus, on ascending as sole Prime Minister—following the final Khmer rebels’ surrender—Hun granted criminal immunity to Noun Chea, Pol Pot’s “brother number two,” and advised Cambodians to “dig a hole and bury the past” to reconcile. In 1999, Hun rejected the U.N. proposal to seat international judges on Cambodia’s genocide tribunal.

Cambodian delays and U.N. Secretary General grandstanding prevented the General Assembly from reaching any agreement until March 2003. Only in 2007 did Hun Sen accept participation by foreign justices on the “hybrid” ECCC.

Still, years of wrangling seemed to remain. “This just goes on and on and I’ve almost lost hope there’ll ever be justice,” Vann Nath said in February 2007, a decade after the Cambodian government asked the U.N. to help convene a tribunal. Indeed, three other survivors of Phnom Penh’s most notorious prison since then literally died waiting for justice.

Yet, Hun continued to delay and let corruption run amok. From 2007 to early 2009, agencies including the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), European Commission and U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services (UNOIOS), alleged that Cambodian officials had demanded kick backs from local justices and court staff appointed to the ECCC. Deputy prime minister (and Khmer Rouge trials Task Force chair) Sok An repeatedly promised to investigate—but did nothing. In mid-2008, “payroll embezzlement” charges lead the UNOIOS to freeze Cambodia’s portion of ECCC funding. He so abused the U.N. human rights envoy, that Yash Ghai last year quit. There were also the cost overruns endemic to such international tribunals. Originally estimated at $19 million, the ECCC budget is now expected to exceed $170 million, reports the Economist, similar to astronomical increases in 2003 Sierra Leone court mandate and the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals, which together consumed over $2 billion.

But worst of all is the lack of justice. In 2007, officials finally arrested Khmer Rouge ideological chief Nuon Chea, 82; former head of state Khieu Samphan, 76; former foreign minister Ieng Sary, 82; and fellow Central Committee member and Ieng’s wife, Thirith, 75. In 1999, the government also arrested Toul Sleng prison chief Kaing Guek Eav, 66, a former math teacher known as Duch (pronounced doik), who ordered the deaths of more than 14,000 prisoners in the Phnom Penh high school turned slaughter house. Now an avowed Christian, Duch admitted committing atrocities on his arrest, but claims he would have been murdered himself had he not followed orders.

In 12 years, Cambodia has detained just five perpetrators. “A lot of people ask: ‘Why only five? Why only five? Why only five’?” notes Cambodian humanist Kek Galabru, adding these five are “the minimum of the minimum.” It is certainly not for lack of evidence: In 2005, Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Project handed Cambodia voluminous documents it had amassed since 1994.

Duch will be tried first. After waiting three decades to be heard about the catastrophic crimes they witnessed, only four of Duch’s victims remain alive, among them painter Vann Nath, 63; Chum Mey, 77; and sole child survivor Norng Chan Phal, now 38.They watched the February 2009 ECCC pre-trial proceedings with anxious relief. “I could not sleep last night. I was waiting for sunrise so I could see Duch in the dock,” Vann said.

But it remains to be seen whether the other Khmer Rouge masterminds, old and ailing, will survive long enough to go to trial, which will not be scheduled until 2010, if ever. In sum, the international community has disappointed Cambodia as much as its own government. The “limited scope and poor design” of the international and Cambodian “hybrid” ECCC will call few surviving Democratic Kampuchea (DK) perpetrators “to account for their crimes,” sadly concludes Cambodian scholar Sopheada Phy. Once again, Khmer Rouge planners, supporters and participants may get away with mass murder.

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The Evils of Islamic Political Ideology

Part I: The Muslim War on Free Speech

By Alyssa A. Lappen
Right Side News | Feb. 17, 2009
RightSideNews Copyright © 2009

The U.S. Constitution, ratified on March 4, 1789, forbade treason against the young republic. Article III, section 3 reads: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” The founding fathers apparently were more concerned with treason than individual rights—since the first ten amendments, establishing individual rights, were neither drafted nor ratified until 1791.

American patriots, whether of Christian or Jewish religious conviction, suffered brutal oppression at the hands of the British and their allies. Their homes were invaded, their property stolen, and their very lives forfeit. Therefore, they naturally cemented life and liberty “for all” into the Constitution’s very foundation. Moreover, to maintain that standard the founders realized that all citizens must support equal rights to life and equal liberty for all, without exception.

To put it another way, America’s fathers and the Constitution’s ratifying states—in both historical sequence and principal—held above everything else, loyalty to the supposition of life and liberty for all. Before all else, the nation’s founding idea was that citizens’ Constitutionally guaranteed rights were and are not exclusive to some, but deniable to others.

The very first clause of the opening item on the Bill of Rights (the initial ten Constitutional amendments) sets into U.S. law the principal of a federal government free from legislation “respecting an establishment of religion.” Americans generally understand that phrase to establish each individual’s right to freedom of faith, yet the precise wording mentions no individual rights at all. Rather, it pointedly prohibits U.S. federal laws or regulations that require or in any way institutionalize religious practices.

Now, President Barack Obama advocates a so-called civil rights agenda—to “expand hate crime” statues like the Matthew Shepard Act, named for a student tortured and murdered in 1998 for his sexual orientation.

Yet this insidious legislative turn would would raise motive above the importance of criminal acts themselves, and attempt to legislatively control thinking—something time and again proven impossible, always with murderous consequences.

Even “New York Times bestselling” uber-thought cop Glenn Greenwald recognizes the danger. In defense of free speech, Greenwald decries Obama’s new policy, albeit from inside a little glass house, while casting obnoxious epithets at journalists with whom he disagrees (totally without basis in fact). One needs only imagine hate-crime “proceedings directed at opinions and groups that one likes,” Greenwald correctly observes. “If Muslim groups can trigger government investigations due to commentary they find offensive, so, too, can…” Now, replace Greenwald’s stone-throwing and name-calling with whatever you like.

Here’s the rub: In the 21st century, some claiming themselves pious consider their right not to be offended—however they perceive that—more valuable and sacrosanct than all rights of all other Americans. Thwarting every criticism of that faction would simultaneously gut Constitutional rights to life and liberty for all, without exception.

Muslims constitute the “political faction” advocating loudest for “hate crime” statutes. Their intent is to “restrict and punish speech” they dislike, i.e. criticism of Islam and Mohammed, to benefit their global war on free speech. To consolidate gains against free speech in Europe and the United Nations, the Islamic faction is heavily campaigning against North American free speech too.

Most large North American Muslim organizations hope to globally impose shari’a law, which prohibits “defamation” of Islam and Mohammed. Muslims who leave the faith or “blaspheme” against Islam or Mohammed earn the classical punishment, death—a statute on the books in several Muslim states, and elsewhere, widely enforced by mob rule. Non-Muslims daring to criticize Islam or Mohammed often receive the same punishment, whether in Islamic states or not.

Pakistan’s hudud code for example enforces shari’a on all citizens and residents—Muslims and non-Muslims. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan also execute hudud laws—and not on modern whims. Under 7th century Islamic law, these statutes apply to all mankind.

The widespread Muslim hope to prosecute shari’a laws globally stems partly from the basic Islamic belief that “all people are Muslims at birth,” enshrined for example in Morocco‘s legal code and Malaysia‘s constitution, despite the latter’s ostensibly secular nature and 40% non-Muslim population. Indeed, everyday Muslims often advocate for global shari’a laws. A Malaysian blogger addresses such a message to “all Non Muslims reading this.”

“You must know about the Hudud Laws of Islam as you are also a creation of Allah, no matter that you are today a Kaffir @ an Unbeliever in Allah because you have been born as such

“It is up to you, as a free human being to choose to learn and study about these True Laws of Allah, as a source of knowledge and information about what they truly are and not be misled anymore about them based on what you have read or been fed by those who have an agenda to keep you in the dark about the Truth of Islam as revealed to us by our Lord and Creator.” (emphasis in original)

Fortunately, the West has individually sponsored websites too—like Right Side News.

Also fortunately, America has stalwart patriots such as Pamela Geller, editor and publisher of AtlasShrugs.com. Geller considers America’s current situation extremely dire. The U.S., she thinks, stands on the edge of a precipice. Like revolutionary-era journalist Thomas Paine, however, Atlas speaks common sense to, and for, common Americans. She too considers America “ultimately unconquerable.” And most importantly, unlike Paine, Atlas will never retreat to Europe or anywhere else.

Herewith we begin an interview with Atlas Shrugs founder Pamela Geller, on the evils of Islamic ideology. Right Side News opens this exclusive interview four-part series by investigative journalist Alyssa A. Lappen with a discussion on the worldwide Islamic assault on free speech, now intensifying in North America. Please check Right Side News in coming weeks for the second through fourth parts, covering other important aspects of the Islamic ideological threat.

AAL: What induced you to start a blog, and when?

Atlas: The blog was born on February 11, 2005. We just had our fourth birthday. I started it because I’m an individualist. I grew up in a post-historical world, as it were. I assumed my freedom. It was a given. After World War II, the good guys won. It was over.

I noted world events. But apart from being Jewish and supporting Israel because it is a beacon of democracy in modern civilization, I was not involved in politics. I was very ambitions and had a good career. I was the associate publisher at the New York Observer.

Then 9/11 clubbed me. On that day, I lost everything at the very foundation of what I believed. At that moment, I realized that nothing is forever, not even America. I felt very guilty that I did not know anything about who had invaded this country. So what could I do? One reacts to the political scene. But I was politically inactive, and I had a lot to learn.

Then I went to hear [Islamic scholar] Bat Ye’or speak at Columbia University. After her lecture, I asked for advice. She told me to learn everything. I started reading, and read all her books. I read everything I could about Islam. The media was not giving us information. And I read the internet—websites, news and blogs on subjects the media wasn’t reporting. I began to see that many people were saying what I was thinking.

In a way, I was raised to do this. My mother and father had a very good marriage. They worked hard. My father was a tough guy. He made $60 a day. He was a workaholic. My mother really respected him. Once, we were driving, and he said, “Nothing is for ever.” My mother objected, “America is.” My father said, “No, not even America.” On 9/11, I realized my father was right.

Initially, I did not do the blog. I went to protests. If there was an anti-Ahmadinejad protest, I was there. If there was a Hamas rally and counter-protest against them, I was there. I covered protests, I took videos and recorded them. Now the same rallies are against Jews, in America. Finally, a really smart commentator—I have a lot of respect for him—said, “Start a blog.” He said, “Do it,” and I did.

I am exactly the same now. I blog exactly the same as when I had 10 readers, and when I had 20,000 readers. My focus is just bigger and broader. It is hard when I go to my computer. There are always another 300 emails. It’s not terribly lucrative. But the responses are worth it. Today, I got an email from a woman. Listen to this. She writes, “I found your site by accident. I never realized what a mess we are in. Thank you. My eyes are open. I am passing this on.”

AAL: What took so long?

Atlas: I had never thought of blogging. And anyway, I had to learn before I could say anything. I spent about four years. You need to know what you’re talking about. It’s not like World War II. How many people are clued in to the doctrine in the Qur’an? They can expound on it all day long, but have never read it, and still call anyone a racist who cites what’s in there. This is not about al Qaeda, or Hamas, or Islamic Jihad, or any of those organizations. They are just changing their underwear. It’s all about jihad.

AAL: Why did you name the blog Atlas Shrugs?

Atlas: I loved the metaphor [Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged]. That was exactly what people were doing. Atlas Shrugging.

There are so many misconceptions about Ayn Rand. She is individualist. Her party is the party of individual rights, the smallest minority in the world. In this story, the world’s producers and entrepreneurs, people who make things happen, are so put upon by regulation and government. It is like what’s happening now. And the characters give nice names to things, like now, calling it a “Stimulus package” when it’s really a socialist package

In the novel, all the producers go on strike. The book is a stunning indictment of statism. It speaks for capitalism. It says, “I will not ask another man to live for my sake.”

Ayn Rand was an uncompromising person. In any compromise between good and evil, she understood that evil profits. The bad never comes over to our side. Evil has to be crushed. People do not like to hear that. But it does. Science advances and technology advances. Human nature stays the same.

AAL: Why do you think mainstream newspapers and broadcast media do not cover the the influence of the Qur’an, Islamic jurisprudence and theological edicts on Islam’s basically totalitarian goals?

Atlas: It is auto censorship and fear. Also, everyone is worried all about insulting Islam. Reporting even the smallest factoid earns an onslaught of charges of bigotry and racism. The net result is that you cannot even call an honor killing an honor killing and not get that kind of charge.

You can have a whole article on how a father, brothers and husband in a Muslim family are going to kill their sister or mother or niece. Yet the reporter will not even call the deed an honor killing. That line [of reporting leads] to the door. [Reporters get fired for it.] That is the problem. We saw that tendency with the [Kurt Westergaard Mohammed] cartoons. And that was [in September 2005] before Muslims were really on the march here. But even back then, in late 2005, I went to a panel discussion about the cartoons at New York University. They were going to show the cartoons so we could talk about them. But then the hosts decided at the last minute not to show the cartoons. I got there and the easels were black. That was March 2006. That is the level that we’re at now. At the one college where a school newspaper printed the cartoons, the university fired or suspended the student publisher. A couple of publishers were courageous enough to admit, “Look, we do not want to be targeted.” But that is now standard operating procedure.

AAL: A more current example is the failure to report Obama’s executive order giving $20 million and refugee status to “resettle” people from Gaza, in other words, Hamas.

Atlas: They haven’t reported that, no. The Arab narrative has taken over. The reporting in December and January said that Israel was targeting innocent civilians. But the only evidence was to the contrary. In fact, we have proof that Hamas shoots its own people in their homes. They literally shoot people in the streets, to punish them, or make it look like Israel targeted homes. Israel was hit from inside mosques and by mortars from a UN school and foreign press offices. Hamas hijacks ambulances to transport terrorists.

But U.S. newspapers don’t report it. This is auto-censorship. It is enormous. It shows where the sympathy lies. I see it as Islamic apologism. To their [Muslims’] credit, on even the smallest insult, their push-back is huge. They are winning. Mohammed said, “War is deceit,” and they are doing an awfully good job so that very few in America even recognize the risk.

If you report what they say, if you report their hate speech, you are considered a hate speaker. Truth has become hate speech. That is what we are talking about. So people are really clueless. They need blogs. Someone like me will be labeled a racist. This is what they do. They smear the good name of people and immediately associate you with the worst of humanity. If you say “ka ka”—or speak badly of Obama— your career is destroyed.

U.S. newspapers tell people not to believe their eyes. I tell people to believe their eyes and I am excoriated for it. The most highly visible example of that is Geert Wilders, [whom Holland is prosecuting for hate speech, for producing Fitna, and Great Britain denied entry last week to speak in the House of Lords]. Here is a man who cites Qur’anic verse, and they want him in jail.

But meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people can march and call for the death of Jews and it’s not hate, from London, to Paris, to Amsterdam, to Fort Lauderdale, and New York. Those death marches should have been on the front page of every newspaper and the lead story of every cable news and net. And it is almost unthinkable that the police would escort the jihadists to the Israeli embassy and at the same time be harassed and have shoes thrown at them. This is the apex of civilization. And where are the Muslims counter protesting not in our name? Where are they? I want them. Where are all those moderate Muslims.

AAL: This kind of thing goes on in government, too, doesn’t it.

Atlas: On February 2, I was on a conference call with [former U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy (2001 â€“ 2005)] Douglas Feith. I asked, when the Bush administration was planning the invasion into Iraq, if they took into account the jihadist ideology. His response was very revealing. In the beginning, he said [former Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld and [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard B.] Myers emphasized the importance of the ideology. They wanted a strategic method to counter it. The rest of the government was doing nothing. Rumsfeld and Myers created the Office of Strategic Influence at the Pentagon. But the Pentagon public affairs people were very unhappy with the creation of that office. And it was infiltrated almost from the beginning. Someone leaked its existence. The New York Times inaccurately reported that the Office of Strategic Influence intended to lie to foreign journalists. It never occurred to them that their sources, not the government, were lying to hurt the U.S. Feith said that U.S. government strategy has not recovered from that to this day.

AAL: So honestly, don’t you think we are going to lose?

Atlas: No. I have faith in the individual, and in the indomitable American spirit. The picture you get from the media is very misleading. I don’t think that the silent majority has a clue to who and what we elected and the pickle that we were in even before B. Hussein took [the president’s] office.

But America is already waking up. Look at [Diane McDaniels] the mother whose son [Seaman James Roderick McDaniels] died [with 16 other servicemen] in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. She voted for Hussein. Now she says she made a mistake. Her son was killed on the Cole, but Obama plans to release the [alleged] Cole perpetrator [Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri]. She was invited to go the White House with other Cole and September 11 families, and she refused to go.

And look at what this man did in his first two weeks of his office. The first foreign leader he calls is [Holocaust denier Mahmoud] Abbas, he is selling airplane parts to Syria, which is a state sponsor of terror [since December 1979]. He does not play hail to the chief. He ordered the U.S. Marine Band to play Sting’s “Desert Rose,” by an Arabic signer Cheb Mami, [rather than John Phillip Souza’s “Hail to the Chief”]. And he gives his first television address to apologize to the Muslim world. Apologize for what? For liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein? For paving the way to an Islamic state in the heart of Europe? And he alludes to the U.S. as being a colonial power. America was never a colonial power.

Well freedom of speech is for me. That is how I define what I do.

All is not lost. Look at Churchill. They were bombing London when he was Prime Minister. Londoners were running for the shelter in the underground. It will get much darker here. But we live in a free country. We have a moral imperative. And I know that what we see on the TV does not speak for the American culture, or America’s ethics. Freedom of speech will win in the end.
_______________________________________
Alyssa A. Lappen, a freelance investigative journalist, is a former senior fellow of the American Center for Democracy, former senior editor of Institutional Investor, Working Woman and Corporate Finance and former associate editor of Forbes. Her work has also appeared in FrontPage Magazine, the Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Pajamas Media, American Thinker, Human Events, Midstream and Revue Politique. Her website is https://www.alyssaalappen.org/.

Leahy’s “Truth Commission”

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy tries to fuel the partisan mud-slinging machine

by Alyssa A. Lappen
Front Page Magazine | Feb. 16, 2009

Two of Congress’s most radical members believe George W. Bush’s America was the equal of apartheid South Africa.

Last week, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy proposed that Congress establish a “truth commission” to investigate alleged Bush misdeeds. In the House, Judiciary committee chairman John Conyers seconded Leahy’s request.

The concept of the “truth commission” originated in post-apartheid South Africa, when the Mandela government launched an investigation into crimes against humanity. Punishments were waived on the grounds that the nation needed to know the truth about the white minority regime’s suppression of black Africans. Presumably, Leahy assumes President Bush engaged in equally egregious behavior during the War on Terror. Leahy, like his Michigan colleague Carl Levin, hopes to distort any circumstantial evidence he uncovers about how Bush-44 successfully kept this nation free from a second terrorist attack for seven years into proof of the greatest violation of civil rights since Lincoln suspended habeas corpus.

If the investigation exposes the ongoing, covert measures Bush has taken to keep America safe, Leahy will only smile as they are revealed. He has a long history of exposing the most vital secrets of our nation. At least one operative was murdered after Leahy publicly leaked a 1985 intercept that had enabled the capture of the Achille Lauro terrorists. After Leahy leaked a 1986 covert operation to topple Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddhafi, it was necessarily canceled. But for that, in other words, 270 victims of Libya’s Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie Scotland might still be alive.

Finally in January 1987, Leahy was forced to resign as vice-chair of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence after leaking classified information on the Iran-Contra affair. Not surprisingly, after 9/11, the FBI investigated national security leaks from Congress, specifically House and Senate Select Intelligence committee leaks.

In the 14 years after resigning from the intelligence committee in disgrace, the Vermont Senator also thwarted key speech and public education. In July 1999, then Defense Secretary William Cohen in a Washington Post op-ed predicted a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil. He and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright were so convinced Osama bin Laden would hit the U.S. that they canceled a planned visit to Albania that month. Yet in 2000, for fear of an unspecified threat against “civil liberties,” Leahy successfully opposed publication of a 2000 National Commission on Terrorism report in intelligence legislation—another measure that could have saved lives.

Had terrorists ended up in the U.S. courts, many benches would be empty thanks to Leahy. Through January 2001, he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee. He grew petulant, however, when New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg replaced Leahy—and Bush appointed John Ashcroft as Attorney General over his intense objections. (Mind, many early Ashcroft opponents ended up heralding him as a hero for defending the U.S. Constitution far better than they’d expected.) In June 2001 Leahy returned as Senate Judiciary chair for 18 months. He then worked overtime to halt and block Bush judicial nominations. As ranking committee member from January 2003 through December 2006, he likewise plotted to thwart every Bush judicial nominee, an allegation he tried to turn against Republicans who attempted to expose him. In January 2007, upon resuming the Judiciary chairmanship, Leahy reinforced his stalwart political blockade, which he maintained throughout the 110th Congress. Political shenanigans over judicial nominees grew so pronounced that even the Washington Post objected to what it called intentional “justice delayed.”

The scales of justice are highly imbalanced in Leahy’s world. Pat defended Illinois Senator Richard Durbin when he compared U.S. troops in Guantanamo Bay to Nazis on the Senate floor. Leahy quickly appeared on Vermont’s Charlie & Ernie talk radio show. Although the Wall Street Journal directly quoted the U.S. Congressional Record, Leahy whined WSJ reporters “are notorious for taking quotes totally out of context, even making them up.”

Now, Leahy wants to convince the public that his “Truth Commission” is merely a good faith attempt to “get to the bottom of things.”

Were he interested in investigations that may have some political impact, he could turn his attention to potential conflicts of interest in the Obama administration. Although Obama signed an executive order barring lobbyists from serving in his administration, he also signed 17 lobbyist waivers including Attorney General Eric Holder (until 2004, a registered lobbyist for clients like bankrupt Global Crossing), White House intergovernmental affairs director Cecilia Munoz (through 2008, an anti-immigration enforcement advocate for National Council of La Raza) and Deputy Defense secretary nominee William Lynn (until 2008, a Raytheon defense contractor executive and registered lobbyist).

Leahy could investigate campaign donations Obama received from disgraced former Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) chairman Franklin D. Raines and his supporters, which total more than $100,000. Obama gave his blessings and state and federal legislative help to several developers who subsequently received more than $700 million in subsidies and loans for their projects. The developers, including Obama’s Chicago law partner Allison Davis, Syrian developer Antoin “Tony” Rezko (now incarcerated on 16 political corruption charges) and Chicago slumlord Cecil Butler, among others, all profited greatly from loans to unqualified borrowers—largely at U.S. taxpayer expense. These may have only the appearance of impropriety — but had they occurred in the Bush administration, Leahy would have long since started mining the “truth.”

Leahy’s blatant partisan witch-hunt is the most recent sign that Bush Derangement Syndrome remains alive and well. Whatever the left’s talk of “hope and change,” of abandoning the “politics of fear,” its bomb-throwers simply wish to continue fighting yesterday’s battles, because their hatred will not allow them to, err, Move On.

Obama’s Census-ational Power Grab

Judd Gregg blows the whistle on the silent coup

By Alyssa A. Lappen
Front Page Magazine | Feb. 13, 2009

After President Barack Obama nominated his second Commerce Secretary candidate in two weeks, his uber-liberal core constituency began screeching that his “big tent” was “bursting at the seams.” A grand jury investigation into state contracts for political donors had forced New Mexico governor Bill Richardson to drop out and Obama tapped New Hampshire Republican Sen. Judd Gregg. California Rep. Barbara Lee petulantly decried Gregg’s complaints over Clinton Administration Census Bureau methods.

Gregg didn’t refuse to fund the Census, as Lee wants the public to believe. He objected to Clinton administration attempts to “redraw their congressional districts” and reallocate federal grants to states with “statistical sampling” adjustments. The Supreme Court ruled against Census use of statistical sampling to reapportion the 435 House of Representative seats in the 1999 case Commerce Department v. U.S. House. Alas, the high court did not outlaw statistical samples methods to redistrict within states. But Lee got her way: Gregg too dropped out on February 12, citing his dissatisfaction with the administration’s handling of the census and stimulus packages Thus, the “recurrent fantasy of Census critics on the Left” remains, to revise “population numbers more to their liking,” observes former Census chief Bruce Chapman (1981-1983). If successful, such a feat would redistribute power and funds for least a decade—and could permanently damage America’s political landscape and its carefully constructed internal balance of power.

Nevertheless, President Obama relaunched the notion into political play on February 5. The Census Census Bureau will report directly to his Chief of Staff for the 2010 decennial count. Wresting Census from Commerce Department to White House control threatens “reckless politicization of the Census Bureau.” It could project “the image of a Chicago-style partisan power play”—and corrupt all fundamental data sustaining U.S. national statistics. Obama is a Daley-style Democrat, though, and Democratic party stalwarts since Jimmy Carter have broadly supported deploying the Census to their permanent political advantage. In 1978, President Carter ordered immigration enforcement officers not to arrest illegal aliens without executive branch approval, reports retired senior INS investigator Michael Cutler, who afterwards sarcastically labeled them “pre-citizens.” Angry immigration enforcement officers nationwide adopted Cutler’s term to protest Carter’s outrageous political maneuver.

Over law enforcement objections, Democrats have been monkeying with the Census ever since. Besides Obama, the chief culprits today are partisans like New York City Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a former ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Federalism and the Census, who want Obama to appoint former Census chief Kenneth Prewitt to head the 2010 Census. Prewitt advocated “statistical sampling” to reapportion House seats under Clinton, until the Supreme Court nixed it in 1999.

Then, as now, Democrats coveted statistical projection to enumerate for the census rather than counting individuals one by one. Opponents correctly recognize “the proposal as a violation of the Constitution, which calls for ‘actual enumeration’,” and an obvious ploy to bolster Democratic standing in congressional redistricting following the census, according to the Los Angeles Times.

In politics, though, pretense is everything.

As “one of our country’s premier scientific agencies,” the Census Bureau “should be accorded the status of peers such as NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation,” Maloney said last September, on introducing the “Restoring the Integrity of American Statistics Act of 2008” to make it independent in 2012. With backing from the census chiefs of the last seven presidents, from Richard M. Nixon to George W. Bush, Maloney heralded the bill as “a clear signal to Americans that the agency they depend upon for unbiased monthly economic data as well as the important decennial portrait of our nation is independent, fair, and protected from interference.” It went no where, although Maloney plans to reintroduce the bill this session.

Yet in February 2009, Maloney sings a different tune. “Obama won the election. Ultimately he’s the boss anyway,” says a staff member, waving her true political colors. Therefore, the argument goes, it doesn’t matter whether the Census Bureau reports to the White House or Commerce. And on Feb. 12, Maloney claimed that former Census chiefs’ concerns over the Obama administration Census agency hijacking amount to a “page from Seinfeld…a show about nothing.”

Chapman and Charles Louis Kincannon (Census chief, 2002-2008) vociferously disagree. Science should be scientific. Statisticians almost universally reject adjusting numbers. It follows that having Census report to the White House—which has previously never been done—would turn statistical science “into something where speculation and guesswork could introduce egregious and prejudicial errors.”

It is bad enough that the Constitutional Census clause does not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens. The founding fathers would undoubtedly have cast it differently had they envisioned a time when illegal aliens would distort the rights of citizens to fair representation.

“Undocumented is synonymous with unauthorized and illegal,” observes Connecticut Data Center manager Orlando J. Rodriguez at the University of Connecticut. Illegal aliens, if counted, will “distort the relative voting power of all citizens nationwide,” thereby influencing “America’s representative political system.” Excluding non-voters from congressional reapportionment would provide a much broader geographical disbersement of House seats, and fairer citizen and voter representation, he found in 2007 and subsequent studies. The converse is to allow illegal alien settlement to generate Congressional seats for southern border states at the expense of citizens and voters in northern and mid-western states.

Most disconcerting, however, is Democrats’ “plain hope” to leverage illegal aliens via controversial sampling and computer modeling to “adjust” the Census numbers in 2010, and further distort citizens’ relative voting power. Surely, Americans should not tolerate a political party redistributing power and funds away from citizens by riding roughshod over the Constitutional requirement for actual numeration.

“Let’s see,” Chapman quips of Democratic concerns. Obama Commerce nominee Gregg “cannot be trusted, but the Democratic politicos in the West Wing can?”

By commandeering the Census Bureau, Obama may hope to orchestrate a silent political coup. If so, however, key House Democrats insist this amounts to “nothing.”

The Stimulus as Spoils System

Illegal immigrants are the latest beneficiaries of the Democrats’ patronage politics

by Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine | Feb. 9, 2009

After most legislators went home last Friday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced to the few remaining on the floor a tentative deal to pass that chamber’s version of the American Recovery and Renewal Tax Act. Pared to “just” $827 billion from $937 billion a day earlier, the package includes another dozen or so amendments and one giant rub: The Senate’s “economic stimulus” package provides Americans zero assurance that its corporate and government beneficiaries would use all that taxpayer money to hire only verified U.S. citizens and legal foreign workers.

“This makes about as much sense as trying to fill your bathtub while the bottom drain is open,” says retired senior U.S. immigration agent Michael Cutler, who served the government for 30 years. “The U.S. claims determination, through its economic stimulus plan, to put money in the hands of Americans who presumably will spend money in the U.S. At this time, it’s counterintuitive and antithetical to hire foreign workers whose goal is to ship their earnings overseas.” Indeed, before World War II, the Dept. of Labor enforced U.S. immigration laws to protect American workers and mandated a shortened, 40-hour work week “to spread jobs to as many American citizens as possible,” Cutler adds.

President Barack Obama insists that the U.S. has “inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the days of the Great Depression.” If true, it would make no sense to pass an economic stimulus plan that simultaneously increases the number working in the U.S.

Senator Majority leader Harry Reid would like nothing better, however. On January 7, Reid introduced the paradoxically named the “Stronger Economy, Stronger Borders Act of 2009.” Reid constructed the imprecisely worded two-page “placeholder” to later house comprehensive immigration “reform and rationalize” legislation. Translation: Reid wants massive amnesty for illegal aliens—now realistically estimated at 20 million. He even hopes to increase lawful immigrants to the U.S., whose numbers by 2006 had topped 1.3 million a year. Such “reform” would only further weaken the U.S. economy and erode already lax borders.

In response, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala) has introduced SA 239, a measure that would require local governments and businesses that receive stimulus funds to use E-Verify, an online verification system that allows employers to check the legal status of their workers. Under the SA 239, government contractors benefiting from the stimulus plan would electronically validate job applicants’ social security numbers and names against a central database.

Challenged Friday night by Sessions on why SA 239 was not included in proposed stimulus amendments, Reid hemmed and hawed. He did not know, he said, asserting that Senators would later have opportunities to add further amendments. Although polite, Sessions was understandably not sanguine. Reid has now scheduled the “stimulus package” floor vote for Tuesday without adding the necessary E-Verify protections.

Verifying employees’ legal qualifications to work in the U.S. should not be partisan politics. Not doing so costs everyone—Democrats, Independents and Republicans alike—big bucks. Illegal aliens send as much in untaxed earnings as possible “back home.” They withdraw from the U.S. economy much more than they contribute. Working or not, moreover, illegal aliens also use educational, natural, welfare and other U.S. resources for which they do not pay taxes. The estimated cost is nearly $325 billion annually.

Illegal aliens account for most federal prison inmates, too, according to many studies. Immigration cases made up 57% of “all new federal criminal cases brought nationwide” in March 2008, according to Syracuse University-affiliated analysts. They include hundreds of thousands of criminals—a violent alleged sexual predator in New Jersey; a convicted drug dealer and alleged shooter of two New York policemen; a juvenile felon and alleged triple murderer; crack cocaine dealers; a drunk driver who killed two Virginia teens; an illegal Panamanian ex-convict and police killer and so on. Contrary to popular opinion, authorities often criminally charge illegal aliens following felonies and violent crime, not just illegal U.S. entry.

The governmentâ€™s failure to enforce immigration laws has not been lost on voters. In 2008, millions of citizens time and again appealed to the 110th Congress to renew the expiring E-Verify bill, which had hundreds of legislative co-sponsors. Last week, both parties therefore gave broad support to the House E-Verify amendment.

Yet House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last year flatly refused to allow a House floor vote on the comprehensive “Secure America through Verification and Enforcement” (SAVE) measure, intended to permanently expand E-Verify usage to all U.S. companies and government contractors. Now, Senate majority leader Reid is stonewalling on E-Verify in Madam Pelosi’s stead. The only possible logic rests in illegal aliens’ reputed preference for the Democratic legislators determined to swap political responsibility for future votes.

That problem dates back to 1978. During the U.S. Census count, President Jimmy Carter ordered Immigration officers not to arrest illegal aliens, says Cutler. “He did not order us not to arrest drug dealers or murderers.” The House of Representatives is apportioned by the U.S. Census—and populous states tend to vote Democratic. Carter recognized illegal immigration as a means of increasing Democratic party power. A magnet for illegal immigration, California now has 53 representatives—over 23% more than in 1978. Texas, another state attracting a large illegal alien population, now has has 32 congressmen, more than the 29 in New York. Representatives from those states use the Census to serve their party—rather than their positions to serve legal citizenry, Cutler says.

Friday night, Senators did adopt an amendment prohibiting more than 200 banks that got federal bail-out funds from hiring foreigners. Legislators were compelled to act after the Associated Press reported that banks who had laid off thousands of U.S. workers in 2008 requested nearly a third more foreign worker visas. The amendment gives American workers small change, however. It bans banks from hiring foreigners only for one year.

President Obama’s economic stimulus seems intended not to benefit the U.S. public but rather to shore up the core constituencies of the Democratic Party—including those illegal immigrants who will form the partyâ€™s base in the future. Such cynical political engineering may be good for the Democrats, but there is little evidence that it is good for the country.

Stealing the stimulus

Why the Democrats’ pork-stuffed stimulus package won’t help the economy

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine | Feb. 6, 2009

When are earmarks not earmarks? When Congressional Democrats add them to New Deal-style legislation.

According to Congressional Democrats, “there are no earmarks” in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the massive $1.1 trillion stimulus bill under debate in the Senate this week. In fact, there is little except earmarks in the pork-laden legislation the Obama administration is marketing to skeptical Americans as the urgent cure for the country’s ailing economy.

As things now stand, less than 10 percent of the stimulus bill’s proposed projects could be expected to generate real economic uplift, mostly through tax credits and infrastructure funds. On the other hand, more than 90 percent of the bill would channel taxpayer funds to “special-interest earmarks,” state-level bailouts, and “permanent spending” increases for what will in effect be social engineering by the federal government.

Pork abounds in the bill. For instance, there is $88 million for a new Coast Guard polar icebreaker, $13 billion to repair and weatherize public housing, $2.25 billion for national parks, and $1 billion for the National Railway Passenger Corp. (Amtrak), which hasn’t earned one red cent since its original 1971 government rescue from Penn Central’s ashes. And that’s just the beginning.

The Senate bill greatly expands welfare spending. There are $13.3 billion earmarked to raise health insurance for unemployed workers, $27.1 billion for increased unemployment benefits, and $11.1 billion for “Other Unemployment Compensation.” Another $20 billion will go to raise maximum Supplemental Nutrition Assurance Program benefits (i.e., food stamps).

Elsewhere, the bill looks like a vehicle for Barack Obama’s campaign plan to foster a national “green economy.” To that end, there is $18.5 billion set aside for energy efficiency and renewable energy programs, another $2.4 billion for demonstrations of how to safely remove atmospheric greenhouse gas, $2 billion for a Matoon, Ill. FutureGen near-zero emission power plant, and $600 million for federal government employee hybrid vehicles.

Despite its grand billing as a national life preserver, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in a telling demonstration of what Democrats once called “the politics of fear,” had earlier warned that “five hundred million” Americans would loose their job each month if the stimulus package were not passed…,” the bill is increasingly becoming liberal politics by other means. All in all, the bill packs in $136 billion for unproven ideas to create 32 new open-ended federal programs—most of which failed close inspection in earlier Congressional sessions.

While the bill will vastly increase the federal government’s reach, it is noteworthy that the government has never profitably managed a single enterprise. A by-no-means-exhaustive list of government failures might include mortgage giants Fanny Mae Freddie Mac, the mismanaged Federal Reserve Bank and US Postal Service, and the insolvent Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid systems. They’re all bankrupt, as are 40 of the 50 states, each of which is now begging for handouts from a federal government effectively just as bankrupt. As pundit David Coughlin asks, “Why do we think the people who caused these problems are able to fix them …?”

The stimulus bill amounts to a major opportunity missed. Bankruptcy—not a government bailout—is often the road back to solvency. Consider that six major airlines—including United, Delta, Northwest, and Continental—all filed for Chapter 11 and emerged with real hopes for profit. Such large and small steel companies as National Steel, Bethlehem Steel, Wheeling-Pittsburgh, Kaiser, Bayou, Weirton Steel, and many others have leveraged Chapter 11 to emerge as stand-alone companies—or to sell a leaner version of themselves to competitors. Pacific Gas & Electric and Kmart are healthy again, too, following their Chapter 11 filings.

No surprise, then, that over 100 economists are petitioning the Senate against the stimulus and 200 oppose financial bailouts in general. The public seems to agree. Support for the Senate stimulus plan has plummeted to just 37%, according to Rasmussen. Cooler heads are even starting to prevail in the Senate. President Obama called “centrist” Maine Sen. Susan Collins to the White House this week to discuss cutting the plan’s price tag to $700 billion, and to focus on tax cuts and spending to specifically generate jobs. That means spending of dubious stimulative potential—$780 million to prepare for a flu pandemic, for example—may soon be trimmed from the bill.

Still, it’s too bad that no one has managed to convince President Obama to eliminate the idea of “stimulus” spending all together. The U.S. already has squandered nearly $1 trillion in bailouts, to no avail. We got here “by spending and investing money that didn’t exist,” notes Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn. As a good physician, Coburn wisely prescribes treating the disease, not its symptoms.

The generic term for raising holdings in a tanking stock is “doubling down.” But great investors only do that for successful companies. The stimulus bill is something else entirely. If the Senate passes this “stimulus,” it would merely be doubling down on legislative pork. In the end, not even calling such proposals “job-creating investments” can disguise the fact that the bill won’t actually create jobs.