Justice – ILANA MERCER

Is A-Jad (Ahmadinejad) The Fall Guy For The AG (Attorney General)?

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 07:00:00 +0000

“This ‘brilliant’ FBI and DEA coordinated sting operation that has, allegedly, ‘uncovered an Iranian ‘plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington and to attack the Saudi and Israeli embassies'”: How does its exposure distract from the investigation into your US-Mexican gun-running operation?” That’s the question I’d have liked to pose to Attorney General Eric Holder, had I been present at the news conference he and FBI Director Robert Mueller gave to a group of journo lap dogs, on October 11.

The indictment is the kind of cloak-and-dagger that belongs in an episode of “The Unit,” not in the courts of a civilized country. To entrap the two defendants, Mansour Arbabsiar and Ali Gholam Shakuri, assistant US attorneys relied on Title 18 of the United States Code. Sections in this “versatile” law were used to ensnare domestic diva Martha Stewart (for fibbing to the Feds about a recipe, not for insider trading).

Indeed, the court complaint has more twists than a serpent’s tail, but none leads conclusively to Teheran, unless Teheran is code for “Surveillance State USA.”

It is befitting that the second defendant is named Gholam. In Jewish folklore “Golem” means zombie. Golem well describes Ali Gholam, who is alleged to have wired funds to Arbabsiar via “an overseas wire transfer from a bank located in a foreign country,” in furtherance “of the plot to kill the Ambassador to the United State of Saudi Arabia.”

According to the claims of the two accused clowns, Gholam is a member of the Iranian Qods Force, a branch of the Iranians Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (the IRGC) that conducts “sensitive covert operations abroad.” If we know anything about the Iranian Special Forces, it is that they are nothing like the schlemiels we’ve just indicted. The two remind me of Chipopo, the hero in a series of Hebrew children’s books I used to devour as a kid in Israel. Chipopo was a monkey. Defendants Mansour and Shakuri’s antics, as detailed in the legal brief that reads like a hastily written potboiler, conjure “Chipopo Joins the IDF,” an adventure in this series. Needless to say, it was not his height that gave the monkey away during basic training.

Enter CS-1.

CS-1 is the chief witness against Holder’s aspiring terrorists, and “a paid confidential source,” who had been “previously charged in connection with a narcotics offense by authorities of a certain U.S. state. In exchange for CS-1’s cooperation … the State charges were dismissed.”

Put it this way, allowing CS-1 to conduct a sting operation is a lot like letting a criminally minded attorney general run guns to Mexico’s drug cartels. Oops. Holder has already done his subversive best to corner that “market” by allegedly authorizing “Operation Fast and Furious,” in which a gang going by the acronym ATF—the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—sold assault rifles to Mexican gangsters and their local gun-runners, who later used their taxpayer-funded ammunition and immunity to gun down innocent Americans and many more, mostly unmentioned, Mexicans. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed with one of these weapons. (When good guys like Agents John Dodson and Lee Casa questioned the practice, they were ordered to “stand down,” or confine their activities to “surveillance.”)

The Feds can be funny. CS-1 and his compadres were told to pose as “associates of a sophisticated and violent international drug-trafficking cartel,” and offer themselves up as assassins for hire to Gholam Shakuri and his Iranian amigos. CS-1 met Team Chipopo in Mexico. It’s almost like our sophisticates were tracing the smuggling routes of Operation Fast and Furious. Or perhaps, these simpletons were simply drawn to the original scene of the crime. “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

At this rate, it is not impossible to imagine America’s attorney general funneling arms to odd-balls in Iran using Operation Fast and Furious as a fig leaf.

In his broken English—a US citizenship requirement—Arbabsiar, a naturalized American, boasted about his culprit-cum-cousin: The man Arbabsiar called the “Colonel” was a “wanted man in America”; “on CNN,” and a top banana in Iran. (I told you this is funny.)

Enough of this nonsense. The FBI often entraps pliable dolts (to better serve their political masters). The seven Miami-based men who were accused of “concocting a plot to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower” come to mind. They were illiterate and probably borderline retarded.

Not even Fouad Ajami, a dedicated Arab neoconservative, managed to divine a motive for this moronic plot, whose targets, conveniently, are satellites of the US. The Saudis and the Israelis would gladly corroborate any American tall tale. And not even A-Jad, much less alleged members of the Qods crack team, would be so foolish as to think a minor Saudi functionary is a worthy target for terror.

On October 3, 2011, days prior to this single arrest (the “Colonel” is still at large in Iran or Cancún), CBS News reported that “Attorney General Eric Holder was sent briefings on the controversial Fast and Furious operation as far back as July 2010,” in contradiction to his statement to Congress.

The Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform are breathing down Holder’s neck, about to crack Fast and Furious asunder.

The plot to frame Iran might well have been hatched in Disneyland, the code name for DC.

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All Burglars are Home Invaders

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 07:00:00 +0000

On July 23, 2007, two men were apprehended at the scene of a crime—the Petit family home in Cheshire, Connecticut. The culprits were Joshua Komisarjevsky and his accomplice Steven Hayes. Their crimes:

• Raping Mrs. Hawke-Petit and her 11-year-old daughter Michaela.
• Strangling Jennifer Hawke-Petit.
• Setting the family home on fire, thereby killing Michaela and her 17-year-old sister, Hayley.

Dr. Petit, who had been beaten and bound in the basement, managed to escape. He had hopped up the stairs and made his way to a neighbor, who called the police. Twice alerted, the cops were conspicuous by their absence.

The crimes were premeditated. The two career criminals had stalked the Petit women. They “messaged” one another in anticipation of an orgy of violence. At one stage during the six-hour ordeal, Hayes popped out to purchase four gallons of gasoline. He also escorted Jennifer Hawke-Petit to the bank to withdraw cash. She had the wherewithal to alert a teller. Right away, the bank manager rang the police to report that a crime was underway at a home on Sorghum Mill Drive.

Hostage to procedure and self-preservation, police concerns were allayed by the late Mrs. Hawke-Petit’s optimistic assessment of the situation. She told the bank teller that her assailants were “being nice,” and that they likely wanted money, nothing more.

Last year, Hayes was sentenced to death. Komisarjevsky’s turn has arrived. In court today, Capt. Robert Vignola hearkened to Mrs. Hawke-Petit words to explain “why police decided not to enter the home.” “The police had no reason to believe anyone was in immediate danger,” seconded CNN stupidly.

Media and law enforcement are in the habit of describing a deadly home invasion as “a robbery gone wrong.” Consequently, homeowners have been culturally conditioned to consider the uninvited house guest as one would a modern-day Jean Valjean. Like Victor Hugo’s protagonist in Les Misérables, the “thief” is likely looking only to take a loaf of bread and leave—that is unless he openly announces his intentions to harm his reluctant hosts.

One extremely conservative writer even bristled when a news reporter broke protocol and applied the “home invasion” appellation to the offense of breaking and entering:

“… burglary is when a person illegally enters private property and steals things. A home invasion is when people illegally enter a home in order to terrorize, harm, or kill the residents… If we start calling all burglaries ‘home invasions,’ we lose the distinction between them.”

The sooner we lose this distinction the better! All burglars are home invaders in-the-making.

Confronted with a criminal breaking and entering, there’s precious little the occupant can do to divine the intentions of the invader. It should be assumed that anyone violating another man’s inner sanctum will willingly violate the occupant. The law should give latitude to the invaded, not the invader—it ought to regard all burglaries as potential home invasions, and forgive the resident who finds himself using deadly force to defend hearth and home. The Castle Doctrine used to proceed from just such a premise. But exceptions to the doctrine are fast becoming the rule.

If you believe in the sanctity of life you should fight for the sanctity of private property. It is a man’s right—even obligation—to defend his life and the lives of the loved ones living under his roof. Arguably, a right that is not vigorously defended is as good as a right forfeited.

Life is too precious to skirt an indelicate matter: Komisarjevsky and his accomplice entered the Petit home through an unlocked rear door. In correspondence with author Brian McDonald, child killer and rapist Komisarjevsky revealingly wrote the following:

“Hayley is a fighter; she tried time and time again to free herself. … Mr. Petit … ran away when he thought his life was threatened, and ran away to leave his wife and children to madmen… Had Mr. Petit fought back [at] the very beginning, I would have been forced to retreat. … You’re the first line of defense for your family, not law enforcement.’”

The least a man can do is to lock up the house before he retires. If he refuses to arm himself, let him arm an alarm system.

From inside his home in Cape Town, South Africa, a man close to this writer watched as two men waltzed into the back yard on a Sunday afternoon, as the family relaxed by the pool. The man saw his wife flee as in slow motion. He rushed to the safe, and retrieved the gun. He aimed at the invaders and roared, “Get the hell out of my home.” They obeyed. Since then, this man has strapped a piece to his ankle.

Petit family members or friends are particularly well-placed to take up the cause of self-defense and Second-Amendment rights.

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American Veteran-Hero Jailed

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 07:00:00 +0000

As I document in my new book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa,” “South Africa’s ruling dominant party disregards the importance of private property and public order and the remedial value of punitive justice. Consequently, innocent victims of crime often defend themselves in their own homes and businesses on pain of imprisonment.”

In the new South Africa, “The Amendments to the Criminal Procedure Act demand that, in the course of adjudicating cases of ‘private defense,’ in South Africa, the right to life (the aggressor’s) and the right to property (the non-aggressor’s) be properly balanced. ‘Before you can act in self-defense,’ remonstrates Anton du Plessis of the Institute for Security Studies, ‘the attack against you should have commenced, or at least be imminent. For example, if the thief pulls out a firearm and aims in your direction, [only] then you would be justified in using lethal force to protect your life.”

One example among many given in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” is of an “elderly couple—he seventy-seven, she seventy-three—who may spend the rest of their days in jail for attempted murder. The plucky pair had overpowered and pummeled an intruder who had grabbed their pistol and was poised to pounce.

Since “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” juxtaposes the almost-overnight deconstruction of South Africa to the more incremental transformation underway in the USA, the premise of the discussion about eroding gun rights in South Africa was that the constitutionally fortified American Castle Laws had yet to be undermined completely.

As a number of landmark cases would suggest, America’s “Make My Day Laws”—a favored American sobriquet for Castle Laws inspired by the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry character—might even be getting stronger. Belatedly, the Supreme Court of the United States, in Heller vs. The District of Columbia, had even reaffirmed the Second Amendment to the American Constitution as a natural right to self-defense.

But are the impediments to the defense of life and property enacted by South Africa’s dominant-party-in-perpetuity so different from the decisions issuing from American courts?

A world away from South Africa, Dr. Jerome Ersland was recently condemned to life in prison for defending his property and his employees from a gang of armed robbers.

As abcnews.com reports, “Ersland, 59, had been hailed as a hero for protecting two co-workers during the May 19, 2009, robbery attempt at the Reliable Discount Pharmacy in south Oklahoma City. Dramatic surveillance video of the attempted burglary shows 16 year-old Antwun Parker and an accomplice running into the pharmacy in the crime-ridden neighborhood and pointing a gun directly at Ersland. The video then shows Ersland, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel, firing a pistol at the two men, hitting Parker with one shot that knocked him to the ground. After chasing Parker’s accomplice out of the store, Ersland retrieved a second gun and returned to shoot Parker five more times, 46 seconds after firing the first shot.”

Ersland was accused of hastening the descent into hell of “Parker” with excess zeal.

According to CBS.com, the “Oklahoma City pharmacist was sentenced on Monday, July 11, to life in prison with the possibility of parole for the shooting death. …” On May 26, a jury (clearly not of his peers) had convicted him of first-degree murder. Although they had the discretion “of finding Ersland guilty of first-degree manslaughter instead of murder, or of acquitting him,” they chose not to exercise it.

Ditto Oklahoma County District Judge Ray C. Elliott. The Justice rejected pleas for clemency, having opted to side with the prosecution throughout the trial and exclude extenuating testimony.

According to a site collecting donations for Dr. Ersland, who is now broke and will likely die in jail, the disabled veteran, who had retired from the United States Air Force, “joined the military and became a pharmacist because he wanted to serve … In spite of his disability, Jerome still worked full time and continued to serve his community in various charitable capacities including as vice president of his church and as an advisor for the Boy Scouts.”

We understand, some better than others, that a man’s home is not mere property—it is his castle. In defending his home, an individual is defending a safe haven for his most cherished belongings: his person and his beloved. Someone eager to violate another’s inner sanctum will be more than willing to violate the occupant. But can the same not be said about a man’s place of business?

In the 1980s, Oklahoma legislators certainly thought so; they extended Oklahoma’s “Make My Day Law” to the automobiles and workplaces of their residents. Besides, how is a proud man to afford a home and a haven if he can’t work in safety?

As I document in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa,” not only can self-defense be an offense in South Africa’s new “constitutional” democracy, but it may be considered racist when practiced by whites. COSATU, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, under whose auspices, presumably, private property invaders fall, has accused many a South African hero in the mold of Dr. Ersland of racism.

The agitators-in-chief against Dr. Ersland were COSATU’s indigenous equals, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP urged the state to show no mercy for this authentic American hero. “It’s politically motivated,” confirmed defense attorney Irven Box.

Make that racially motivated.

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Anderson Cooper’s Mission Against The Missionaries

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

As I write, I scour the CNN website, in vain, for news that broke hours ago on Fox:

A Haitian judge would be ordering the release of 10 American missionaries who were arrested for taking 33 children and trying to transport them out of the country.

Hours on, CNN, which had followed the story to the exclusion of more urgent items ─ and is generally quick to break news ─ had informed its internet followers only that Haitians had canceled Carnival.

Mercifully, CNN doesn’t engage in straightforward editorializing. The Kvetch channel’s unadulterated leftism — not to mention hard-core statism — creeps into reports by way of story selection, slant, energetic facial grimacing, and punishing programs such “Black, Brown, and plain Bored in America.” (Where whites are concerned, it’s an existential whiteout.)

Call it the CNN meta-message.

The tough tenor toward the missionaries from Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho, was set by CNN alpha female, Anderson Cooper. The activist anchor and his houseboys in Haiti had been exceedingly hard on the hapless group, whose aim it was to, first, whisk the children to the Dominican Republic, and, next, help “each child find healing, hope, joy and new life in Christ,” as well as “opportunities for adoption into a loving Christian family.”

This mission statement ─ Christianity in practice, if you will ─ was scorned by the New York Times too. The paper accused the evangelicals of “trying to buy souls,” and pronounced them “guilty of a kind of spiritual trafficking, by mixing the help they offer to victims of last month’s earthquake with proselytizing.”

A derelict that defaults on a loan or incurs bad debt has the slobbering sympathies of Cooper and company. Not these unworldly Christians. AC was quick to dig-up and run stories about Laura Silsby, the team’s representative, detailing her chaotic financial affairs. “The Americans lied” was an oft-repeated Cooper refrain. (The jet-setting journalist has never, as far as I know, protested the practice of taqiyya, or lying for Islam).

Thankfully ─ and contrary to CNN’s self-styled newsman-cum-humanitarian ─ one Haitian justice was not as eager to see “The Americans” go down for their goodness. As Reuters reported, the (eminently reasonable) investigating Haitian judge looked for criminal intent in his investigation. He found none. So the Haitian justice concluded that the incarcerated missionaries acted with no malice aforethought.

Mens rea: now that’s a difficult concept for Cooper to comprehend.

In fairness, Anderson is not working with much. He suffers from what Peter Brimelow, editor of VDARE.COM, has termed intellectual inertia. It infects most mainstream journalists. Put less politely, Anderson’s stupid. How is he to know that a legal burden must be met before a manifestly ludicrous prosecution proceeds? Hopefully, a Haitian justice has taught Anderson a legal lesson (and some humility).

“The study of primitive societies refutes the notion that all men are brothers, and that all men are equal,” wrote Russell Kirk in “The Conservative Mind.” Had he stopped to “dig deeper” ─ the title of a segment on the Cooper nightly “weep-a-thon”─ instead of force-feeding his worldview to his viewers, Anderson might have discovered that the 33 boys and girls, most of whom hailed from the village of Calebasse, adjacent to Port-au-Prince, had been handed-over by parents and other guardians, willingly.

The likes of Cooper foist their own politically proper, psychologically palatable perspective on the objects of their pity. Ditto Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post. The WaPo editor projected his American parenting preferences onto the villagers of Calebasse, declaring that, “Giving up a son or daughter is one of the most wrenching decisions a parent can face, and it has to be done right.” The paternalistic Brother Robinson here implies that the Haitian villagers could not have possibly done the surrendering “right.”

As incomprehensible as this may be to insular, insulated Americans, thousands of Haitian children are sold into slavery each year. Yes, the former slave colony has kept the tradition alive. Child chattel still thrives in Haiti in the form of the “Restavec system.” Children are kept in grinding poverty and worked to the bone, sold, or given away to their owners by parents and guardians. Unheard of in the US; in Haiti, owning a Restavek is a status symbol; being rid of a burdensome child, often a relief.

There are approximately 300,000 restaveks─ almost ten percent of Haiti’s children have been sold into servitude by the formative figures in their little lives. Haiti is “a piece of Africa transported to the new world.” If lucky, in this the poorest country in the Americas, a child can look forward to subsisting on $2 a day ─ For that is Haitian GDP per capita. If unlucky, she may be sold into sexual and domestic servitude.

Her foibles and frailties notwithstanding, Laura Silsby ─ backed by the Rev. Clint Henry and his 500-member, Idaho-based, Baptist Church ─ is probably the best thing that’ll ever happen to these waifs. Whatever were Sillby’s plans for the children, these were far and away better than what’s in store for them if they remain at home.

Mind you, the kids can hope to be caught on camera ─ Anderson Cooper’s ─ as they chase him and his crew begging for tasty morsels, while Cooper flexes his muscles, furrows his forehead, and shows just how much he feels their pain.

Postscript: As I put this column to bed, CNN.com finally reported that a “Haiti judge may rule in Americans’ case.” Could the network still be holding out for a conviction?

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O.J.-Like Evidence Convicts Noxious Knox

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Oblivious to the cameras ─ or perhaps for them ─ Amanda Knox (22) and Raffaele Sollecito (25) exchanged a slow, sensual kiss in full view of world media. Not far from where the two kissed lay the body of Meredith Kercher, the English girl with whom Knox had shared student accommodation in Perugia, Italy. Her throat slit, Meredith had expired in slow agony.

The kinky canoodling of Knox and her paramour outside the house of horrors conjured the climactic moment in the film noir “The Comfort of Strangers.”

Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren play an older couple (Robert and Caroline) who live in a palazzo in Venice. They gain the trust of the vacationing Mary and Colin (played by the late Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett), a young English couple. As Colin sips a cocktail with Robert at the latter’s Venetian residence, Robert suddenly and swiftly (as planned) moves to cut Colin’s throat. He then steps over his gurgling victim and the gushing blood to engage in frenzied sex with his eager wife Caroline.

The two have fulfilled a shared fantasy.

“Some time during the night,” by the Times of London’s telling, “the couple had returned to the cottage and faked a burglary in the room of another housemate. But as the police picked through the broken glass they were told that nothing had been stolen. They would have left it at that had not the housemate asked insistently why the door to Kercher’s room was locked shut. Eventually, it was knocked down. Kercher lay virtually naked on the floor, her two cotton tops rolled up above her chest. Oddly, her body was partly covered by a beige quilt” [the telltale signature of a female perpetrator, as a behavioral analyst would subsequently explain].

Knox, Sollecito and Rudy Guede, a local drifter born in the Ivory Coast and known to Knox, were convicted of the murder and sexual assault of Kercher. CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, on and on ─ all have united in advocating for Amanda, “An Innocent Abroad.”

Going against the grain of American-style boosterism, Barbie Nadeau of Newsweek stuck with “journalism” to detail the ample evidence against the pair, downplayed or downright suppressed in the American media. For one, “Neither suspect [had] a credible alibi for the night of the murder, and both told a variety of lies about that night.” Knox changed her alibi, not once or twice, but several times. In the process, she accused Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner, of the crime. Based on the convincing yarn Knox spun, Lumumba spent time in jail before being released.

After Knox had cast her pal Lumumba aside, she tried to implicate her lover of two weeks, venturing: “I think it is possible Raffaele went to Meredith’s house, raped her, then killed her and then when he got home, while I was sleeping, he pressed my fingerprints on the knife.

“[C]redible witnesses had shattered Sollecito’s alibi for the night of the murder. Sollecito says he was home that night working on his computer, but specialists … testified that his computer was dormant for an eight-hour period the night of Kercher’s murder.”

“Theatrics aside,” wrote Newsweek’s Nadeau, “the Amanda Knox trial comes down to forensics. … Among the most damning evidence against Sollecito is his DNA on the metal clasp of the bra that was cut from Kercher after she died.”

Also revealed with Luminol was a bloody footprint at the crime scene that matched Sollecito’s. “Key forensic evidence against Knox includes her footprint in blood in the hallway outside Kercher’s room. There [were] also mixed traces of Knox’s DNA and Kercher’s blood on the fixtures in the bathroom the girls shared. And a knife was found in Sollecito’s apartment with Knox’s DNA on the handle and … Kercher’s DNA in a groove on the blade.”

Like the original “Dream Team,” defense attorneys for Knox, “who at one time admitted to being at home when the murder took place,” alleged contamination (even though the crime scene was sealed off in-between searches), character assassination and insufficient amounts of DNA (it’s the type of DNA that matters, not the amount).

Knox’s vocal and voluminous supporters stateside yelped anti-Americanism and a general Italian backwardness. Amanda had been deprived of due process, they said. In American (positive) law, procedural violations can get evidence of guilt — a bloodied knife or a smoking gun — barred from being presented at trial. More often than not, such procedural defaults are used to suppress immutable physical facts, thus serving to subvert the spirit of the (natural) law and justice.

After attempting in vain to implicate Lumumba and the hapless Sollecito, Knox went on to scream police brutality, claiming she had been coerced into incriminating admissions. Knox was asked to identify the female officer whom she accused of slapping her during the interrogation, upon which she fell silent.

When the guilty verdict came down, a procession of fulminating female talkers soon convened on CNN to rubbish Italy’s legal system: The evidence (cited above) was weak, or practically non-existent. The prosecutor and the Italian jury were provincial bumpkins incapable of properly appreciating a high-spirited American. And so on and so forth.

In Italy, “if you’re accused, you’re as good as guilty,” asserted Judy Bachrach of Vanity (un)Fair. Bachrach was joined in ugly displays of American chauvinism by the likes of Lisa Bloom (spawned by ambulance-chasing attorney Gloria Allred) and the scary Stacey Honowitz. The two soon backed down somewhat, Bloom later admitting, on Anderson Cooper 360°, that indeed Knox’s confession, her “damaging behavior” following the murder, as well as the blood evidence, would be enough to bring down a conviction in our hallowed legal system.

The Knox clan has since recruited a veritable media mafia to put the Italian judicial system on trial for railroading their cherub. Agitating for Amanda are Secretary Hilary Clinton, Senator Maria Cantwell (WA), King County Superior Court Judge Michael Heavey, ubiquitous tele-attorney Anne Bremner, public relations advisor David Marriott, and “48 Hours” correspondent Peter Van Sant, who has abandoned impartiality for outright advocacy.

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Take this, Mr. President, For Ramos and Compean

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Their names are nowhere on the list of pardons and commutations George W. Bush has issued before saying adieu. They are the brave Border-Patrol agents, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.

I’ve said it before: Bush would wrestle a crocodile for a criminal alien. Duly, for shooting a drug dealer in the derriere—in the process of defending their country and countrymen—Bush unleashed his bloodhound, U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton, on the two patriotic patrolmen. The state’s “rules of engagement” rule-out any meaningful defense of American lives and property; they are rigged against America’s defenders and favor her infiltrators.

Sutton’s legal strategy is what sickens: this U.S. Attorney courted a criminal alien, granting him immunity in exchange for his testimony against the heroic law enforcement officers. As WND has reported, the men “have already served nearly two years in prison – mostly in solitary confinement.” Without leniency, they’ll remain locked-up for at least a decade longer.

The plenary power of pardon granted to the president is extremely broad. The president has seen fit to pardon a man dead and buried for 20 years. In 1948, Charles Winters helped deliver to the beleaguered Israel two converted B-17 bombers. In total, the Israeli Air Force had only three heavy bombers with which to repel six invading Arab armies. Winters was instrumental in helping the nascent Jewish state win its independence.

A man who helped defend another nation’s borders is worthy of mercy, but not men who defend their own. Not a peep has the president uttered in sympathy for the two agents. No clemency is in the offing.

I bet Bush was the school bully. The pardoning process sure brought out the sadist in him. The president played Isaac R. Toussie like a hooked fish. First he pardoned the residential property developer from Brooklyn, N.Y, and then he revoked the pardon. Now you’re free; now you’re not. (“This is such fun, Laura.”)

Although Lewis Libby has yet to be absolved, you’ll recall that “W,” predictably, had spared his fall guy, and commuted his sentence. I don’t disagree: Libby was convicted for the same “crime” for which Martha Stewart was wrongly jailed: fibbing to the FBI. Libby didn’t leak the identity of former, (so-called) classified CIA operative Valerie Plame; Richard Armitage did.

Evangelical leader Pat Robertson ought to know better than Bush. CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux solicited Robertson’s opinion as to the president’s pardons. Robertson lobbied for Libby. Asking for an acquittal for the agents clearly did not cross his mind.

The Lewis Libby prosecution was an abuse of power by Patrick Fitzgerald, another crooked, US Attorney. However, given his role in taking us to war, there was some poetic justice in the Libby conviction (not that I support such justice). There was no justice—poetic, or other—in the convictions of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.

Had Ramos and Compean been shooting up Iraqis while defending that occupied country’s borders, Bush would be pinning purple hearts to their lapels.

As luck would have it, a brave Baghdadi journalist stood up to the bully. In what will go down as the high-water mark of his career, journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi lobbed a loafer at Bush for invading his country, during the president’s last official trip to that country. Iraqis, tens of thousands of whom were killed and millions displaced, have every reason to throw boots, baklava, and even bombs at Bush. But they’ve come along way. Shoe tossing is much better than bomb throwing.

Speaking of significant progress, the Muslim world responded to the melee in a thoroughly American way. The man—Muntadhar—and the moment became iconic, immortalized on YouTube, and replayed over and over again around the world. Even better: the shoe became a best-selling brand.

The owner of the Istanbul-based Baydan Shoe Company was inundated with orders for the black leather loafers he rebranded as the “Bye-Bye Bush shoes.” Ramazan Baydan told Forbes.com that he had received “370,000 new orders from Europe, the Middle East and the United States compared to only 40,000 orders of this particular model in December last year.”

Like Scheherazade of “A Thousand and One Arabian Nights,” Mr. Baydan may be embellishing a bit. But, all in all, in times of terrorism and economic downturn, the brave journalist who booted a violent bully, and the entrepreneurial shoe merchant who built a brand around this barmy comedy—these are good news stories.

The second shoe al-Zeidi threw was “from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.” To this already crowded list, allow me to add Ramos and Compean.

* Credit for image here

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José Medellín’s Dead; Cue The Mariachi Band

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

After raping Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Peña in every which way possible, José Medellín proceeded to strangle, slash, and stomp the young girls to death. “The bitch wouldn’t die,” he complained when one of these vibrant lasses lingered. Before dumping the bodies, Medellín and his gangbangers—for whom this orgy was an initiation rite—stripped them of “valuables,” which were then given to girl friends.

José Medellín was allowed to go on living in jail almost as long as Jennifer and Elizabeth had lived on earth. Finally, Rick Perry, the (dashing) governor of Texas, defied Mexico City, The Hague, and their enablers in Washington, and ended Medellin’s miserable life. He was executed on August 5, 2008, 15 years after the crime, because the usual local, international, and loco “liberati” fought ferociously for his life.

Said a grateful Randy Ertman, Jennifer’s father: “I love Texas. Texas is in my blood.”

About Medellín’s guilt there was never any doubt. The perp bragged about what he had done. The evidence was irrefutable. “Medellin was found to have raped both girls, and to have helped to murder at least one by holding one end of the shoelace used to strangle her,” wrote Medellín’s pals at the “International Justice Project.”

But the case, and 50 others like it, roiled liberal hemophiliacs at home, abroad and at the World Court. For they had uncovered—or, rather, minted—new rights: “consular rights.” The right to a consular consultation is, apparently, on par with the right to life, liberty, property, freedom of speech and religion, and due process of law.

Indeed, there is much here that jars, not least the ponderous references to “consular rights.” A procedural default such as the failure to apprise a defendant of his consular contacts is never a violation of a natural right. “Consular rights” are of a piece with Miranda rights and the Exclusionary Rule—technicalities tarted up as real rights.

Fail to Mirandize a murderer properly, and his confession will be tossed out. In the same vein, a procedural violation of the Fourth Amendment, say, an improper search, can get evidence of guilt—a bloodied knife or a smoking gun—barred from being presented at trial. More often than not, such procedural defaults are used to suppress immutable physical facts, thus serving to subvert the spirit of the law and justice.

Nevertheless, Medellín claimed he had been deprived of due process as his jailors did not brief him about his right to contact the Mexican consular post, a “right” embedded in the “Vienna Convention on Consular Relations,” to which the US is a signatory.

Texas courts and the federal courts dismissed the notion that a failure to contact the Mexican Consulate impeded due process or changed the facts of the case. Mexico promptly sued the US in the International Court of Justice on behalf of Medellín and other killer compadres awaiting a similar fate.

My apologies if I’ve given you the reader the impression that the president of the United States failed to pull out all the stops for Medellín. Bush would wrestle a crocodile for a criminal alien. Medellín the murderer was no exception.

The president had set a precedent in the case of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean. For defending their country, and in the process shooting a drug smuggler in the derriere, Bush sicced his bloodhound, U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton, on these Border Patrol Agents. With the same inverted morality, Bush rode to the rescue of another Mexican outlaw, Medellín; this time against the state he once governed. The president ordered Texas to heed the World Court. Texas said NO. The Supreme Court seconded Texas.

Liberals tried to have a technicality trump the truth about Medellín; Texas turned them down.

If mainstream media were not so adept at shedding darkness on these and most matters they’d have quizzed Obama and McCain about the meaning of Medellín. (Here the reader is encouraged to fill in all the clichés of improbability he can conjure.)

I predict that certainly Obama, and probably McCain—whoever succeeds King George—will cede the rights of Americans to global governors and jurists. They’ll both baffle “Boobus Americanus” with references to the “Supremacy Clause” in Article VI of the Constitution, which states that all treaties made by the federal government shall be “the supreme Law of the Land,” and shall usurp state law. “My friends,” McCain will mumble condescendingly, “I don’t want the ‘consular rights’ of an American abroad compromised.” If Obama’s The One, he will rationalize treason similarly.

But should an American visiting overseas do what Medellín did, the thought of him getting what he deserves warms the cockles of this heart. Give him due process, I say, and his “consular rights” be damned.

©BY ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
August 8, 2008

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No Due Process For A Despot

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Remember the joke that circulated around the time the Iraqis, or rather their American sponsors, were writing their constitution? Someone smart suggested we give them ours, since we don’t use it that often. Evidently the Iraqis don’t have much use for their brand new, American-style constitution either.

I’m not speaking of the vulgar cellphone images circulating on the Internet, in which a stoic Saddam, noose about his neck, is heckled by a hooded Shiite executioner. As repugnant as it was, the hasty hanging was far less offensive—and certainly not illegal—than the legal proceedings that preceded it.

Saddam’s trial did not even qualify as a show trial. Justice coming out of terror-riddled Iraq better resembles the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution (or Mike Nifong’s in Durham County). Masquerading as a court of law, the Iraqi, US-sponsored, Tribunal is more like the French Revolutionary Assembly, meting justice by popular demand.

The Iraqis have something that resembles the Sixth Amendment. As the Law Library of Congress states on its website, “Article 19 of Iraqi Law Number 10 of 2005 sets out the rights of the accused.” However, Saddam Hussein enjoyed a “speedy and public trial,” only if being brought to trial two years after capture is speedy.

The trial was public only in the sense that we knew it was underway. At the time, Paula Zahn was too busy reporting on her latest colonoscopy to dispatch a legal analyst to publicize the proceedings. For different reasons, Zahn’s cable cohort had confined their coverage to badmouthing former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. In the spirit of true American justice, Clark had volunteered to provide due process for the despot. But to the TV talkers, merely being on Saddam’s dwindling defense team—attorneys were being eliminated like crazy—was the same as “supporting” him.

Under Iraqi law, modeled upon ours, the accused had the right “to be immediately informed of the substance, details, nature and reasons of the charges,” as was he “to be given time and assistance sufficient to permit him to prepare a defense.” But Saddam was formally charged scandalously late in the day. In fact, Hussein’s surviving attorneys had to request time to study the charges against their client during the trial.

Iraqi Article 19 enunciates the right of the accused to confront the witnesses against him. Would that the Iraqis on the stand were merely swaddled in traditional garb. Those not too frightened to testify were hidden behind screens, out of the defense’s reach, their voices modulated.

Prior to Bush’s invasion of Iraq, I didn’t give a tinker’s toss what Iraqis did with Saddam. He was their baggage. It’s a different matter now that the burlesque of justice he received is branded “made-in-America”; it’s a Mark of Cain on us all.

As to the execution, Americans might not have called out, “Dead man walking,” but our officials promptly handed Hussein over to the Iraqis at an execution bloc in the Kadhimiya district of northern Baghdad. However, once the execution turned out not to be a political box-office success, American officials began twisting into pretzels to demonstrate they tried to forestall it. The same officials now claim they attempted to alert the Iraqis to the fact that the execution contravened clauses in their own constitution.

In particular, the belated, alleged concern was over the flouting of “a constitutional provision requiring Iraq’s three-man presidency council to affirm all executions before they are carried out,” reports John Burns of the Times. The other two council members—one of whom was Jalal Talabani, an opponent of the death penalty—would have likely declined to sign the order. Alas, as our “unnamed officials” tell it, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki refused to postpone the execution.

Methinks someone protests too much, and it’s not the Iraqis. Why should they? True, Saddam was denied due process. But his disadvantaged lawyers had exhausted the appeal process and his sentence complied with Article 27 of Iraqi Law Number 10 of 2005. It states that, “No authority, including the President of the Republic, has the right to grant clemency or reduce the sentence pronounced by the Tribunal. Any such sentences should be carried out within thirty days from the date the appellate process has been exhausted.” Protestations aside, American officials must have known this.

Here’s what’s probably afoot: Saddam was executed after his first criminal trial, the al-Dujail case, which was relatively insubstantial. Future prosecution was planned. This would have exposed Hussein’s use of poison gas against the Iranians; chemical weapons on Halabjah, possible genocide against the Marsh and Shi’a Arabs of southern Iraq, as well as against Iraqi Kurds in northern Iraq. Such prosecution would have provided an important historical record for Iraqis.

And for Americans. Cluster bombs, missile components, chemical and biological precursors, pesticides and poisonous compounds, deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague, intelligence, and billions of dollars of credit—you name them, we supplied them to Saddam. Future trials would have recorded for posterity how the US succored Saddam at his most monstrous. Hence the hasty hanging.

WorldNetDaily.com

January 5

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No-Fault Forgiveness Is Fatal

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Shortly after Michael and Cathryn Borden of Lititz, Pennsylvania, were slain by their daughter’s boyfriend (David Ludwig), family and clergy, at least those who presented themselves to the media, indicated their readiness to forgive little Lizzie, I mean Kara Borden. Forgiveness at least implies some acknowledgment of wrongdoing. The media, for the most, wouldn’t even impugn the girl.

After the shootings, Borden hopped into her beau’s get-away car. She told him she wanted to “get as far away as possible, get married, and start a new life.” Only after Borden was confronted with surveillance cameras did she confess to accompanying Ludwig of her own free will.

The two had been involved in an intense sexual relationship. They were hopped-up on feelings of uniqueness and a heightened sense of being misunderstood. In e-mail exchanges with girl friends, Borden had intimated her woes would soon be over—by this she meant the separation from Ludwig her parents had imposed. On the fateful day the boy executed the Bordens, an argument had ensued. The teens had stayed out all night, violating Kara’s curfew. It now seems more than likely she had summoned the heavily armed Ludwig to the house.

Before instant clemency came disbelief.

Kevin Eshleman, the Borden’s pastor, assured Paula Zahn (who investigates only in the sense that Larry King “interviews”) that since he knew the teen personally, he could say with certainty she would never conspire against her parents in this manner. “It just is almost incomprehensible,” he emphasized. Borden’s brother’s best friend also vouched for her. Said Kellymarie Conlon: “It’s impossible to believe that Kara had any involvement in this at all.”

Scott Peterson’s friends and family said the same of him. Practically every alleged criminal’s kin repeat similar incantations. By now we know these testimonials are worthless.

Still, one can understand family and friends refusing to believe the cherubic 14-year-old was nothing but a victim in the squalid affair. But what excuse do the chronically incurious and uncritical media have in view of the emerging—and incriminating—evidence?

“Probably none” is how MSNBC’s Clint Van Zandt, a private investigator, evaluated Borden’s possible involvement in the murders. The sentiment was seconded by John Kasich, sitting in for Bill O’Reilly. They were not alone. Out of liberal deference to youth, and Franco Zeffirelli’s film, “Endless Love,” some members of the media even called the two “the couple.”

At the funeral, family friend Bill Bradford waxed poetic about Kara’s “ability to reach out in compassion and touch even the most unlovely people.” They’d been touched by an angel, no less. Church elder David Sheaffer assured reporters that there was no strain between Kara and the other children and that the family was supportive, refraining from any finger pointing. Acquaintance Vera Zimmerman contributed this corrosive cliché: “They were good kids … they just made some bad choices.” Oops. There was more talk of faith-dictated unconditional forgiveness.

These all-too familiar spasms of no-fault forgiveness, however, are more a distillation of the mass culture than a reflection of any real religious sensibility. If anything, they are a sign of people adrift in a moral twilight zone. In so charitably absolving and embracing alleged killers and their culprits, well-meaning clergy and flock are supplanting the power of the God whose mercy they claim to represent; evincing religious doctrinal failure; and doing injustice to the victims, to society, and, inadvertently, to the offender.

For mercy without justice is no mercy at all.

If punishment is a declaration of those values we wish to uphold, then pardoning a killer or an accessory before he has made amends and paid for his crime perverts and subverts those values. Redemption can be achieved only when the consequences of one’s actions are faced. With each easy act of absolution, the sanctity of life is diminished and murder becomes a little less abhorrent.

In the Jewish perspective, justice always precedes and is a prerequisite for mercy. A Jew is not obliged to forgive a transgressor unless he has ceased his harmful actions, compensated the victim for the harm done, and asked forgiveness. Even then, he can but is not obligated to forgive. This is both ethically elegant and psychologically prudent. It upholds the notion of right and wrong and lends meaning and force to the process of asking for and extending forgiveness. And it doesn’t mandate the incongruous emotion of compassion for someone who has murdered, maimed, or committed other unforgivable crimes.

A Jew is, however, obliged to seek justice. And so are Christians.

In their much-missed “Orthodoxy” column, in the (now-defunct) Report Newsmagazine, Ted and Virginia Byfield confirmed that the Christian and Jewish doctrines are very similar. Christian forgiveness is also contingent on the sinner’s repentance, and can be granted only by the one sinned against, and not by the various proxies of popularity. Instant expiation flows more from the values of the 1960s than from any doctrinal Christian values. The corollary of the current practice of minute-made forgiveness is that “it not only abolishes the necessity of repentance; it abolishes sin itself,” the couple wrote.

These memorable words are the perfect caption to the picture of Kara Borden in a front-row seat at the funeral she may have helped plan.

WorldNetDaily.com

November 25

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THE CRIMINAL’S THEORETICAL ENABLERS

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Anti-incarceration activists are doing a great deal of breast beating over the number of inmates in the U.S. prison system – there were 2,166,260 at yearend 2002.

Their emotional statements, such as that “the United States currently imprisons more of its population than any other nation,” suggest that all the imprisoned have somehow been aggrieved and aggressed against – and that public policy should aim at reducing prison population per se.

But to go ballistic simply because the incarceration figure strikes one as “excessively” large is senseless. And out of context.

It so happens that in the heyday of liberal “alternatives to incarceration” – the mid-1960s through the 1970s – crime rates doubled and tripled. Then something interesting happened: states and the federal government began to get tough, ending early-release programs, limiting parole, passing “truth in sentencing” and “three strikes” laws to up the ante against violent and repeat felons.

The result? Crime rates have plunged, across the board. To take just one category, the Bureau of Justice Statistics confirms that the homicide rate, which in 1980 peaked at 10.2 per 100,000 population, has finally “declined sharply, reaching 5.5 per 100,000 by 2000.” According to Frank J. Murray’s Washington Times October report on the topic, murder has hit a 40-year low.

Contrary to the claims of MotherJones.com, the beloved source reference for liberals and radical-chic libertarians, more violent and repeat offenders are being incarcerated and for longer. Which means that they are no longer free to commit crimes.

Contrary to the propaganda of such anti-punishment ideologues, our prisons aren’t loaded with choir boys. The BJS reports that “Of the 272,111 persons released from prisons in 15 states in 1994, an estimated 67.5 percent were rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within 3 years, 46.9 percent were reconvicted, and 25.4 percent re-sentenced to prison for a new crime.” These 272,111 discharged offenders accounted for nearly 4,877,000 arrest charges over their recorded careers.

In other words, the overwhelming majority of incarcerated felons deserve to be there. And by locking up more such sociopaths for longer terms, society is much safer.

Moreover, justice is done: The consequences to the criminal are now much more proportionate to the harm he does to his victims.

Anti-incarceration theorists, among whom are assorted liberals and libertarian anarchists, point out quite correctly that crimes are committed against individuals and not against the amorphous entity called “society.” Solutions, they say, should thus focus on making criminals pay restitution to their victims.

It used to be that the cause du jour among libertarians was to reduce prison population by freeing innocent people whose activities, lawful by natural-law standards, the state had criminalized. Now their aim, it seems, is to reduce the involvement of the state at any costs, even if it means freeing guilty offenders.

And in their quest to get the state out of the loop by emptying jails, anti-incarceration “individualists” have embraced a convenient collectivist argument. Imprisonment has “social costs” – costs to the same collective that they deny when defining the parameters of crime.

If we are going to be “methodological individualists,” let’s be even-handed about it, shall we?

When more dangerous offenders are incarcerated, more innocent individuals (not “society”) incur fewer costs. When fewer violent criminals are apprehended, more innocent individuals (not “society”) are harmed. If innocent individuals are incarcerated, they (and not “society”) are harmed as well as many other individuals like them.

Moreover, anarchist libertarians cunningly, incorrectly and condescendingly conflate punishment with vengeance, and restitution with justice. And so we are treated to facile flimflam such as that “the desire for vengeance” (read punishment) cannot become “the foundation of jurisprudence.” By this verbal manipulation, these “thinkers” disingenuously advance a definition of justice that precludes incarceration, and equates it only with restitution.

While no one would argue against compelling criminals to work for their victims, libertarian anarchists essentially want to see punishment replaced by a system of financial restitution. But in cases (and there are many) where criminals can’t remotely repay victims for the harm done (especially in violent crimes), this means the consequences to the criminal won’t be remotely proportionate. In effect, by rejecting proportionate punishment for what is usually disproportionately paltry “restitution,” libertarian anarchists are endorsing systematic injustice.

For example, libertarian theorists like Bruce Benson uphold primitive societies as a model for how judicial reform must proceed. In these societies, writes Benson in “Restitution in Theory and Practice,” the emphasis was on the victim’s right to expect restoration from their victimizers but not to exact punishment. By this, he means: not to expect proportionate justice.

Benson effects a bogus bifurcation. Victims, for whom he presumes to speak, are said to want restitution from their victimizers. Justice for victims he then equates only with financial restitution. It is only the state, you see, that wants punishment, incapacitation and deterrence, all of which – if we accept Benson’s claims – the typical victim of crime isn’t enthusiastic about.

While no one would argue against restitution – where possible – I have never heard a victim of crime suggest that a financial settlement with her rapist is far preferable to having the scum bag removed from “society.” (Forgive my unelevated sentiments – it’s the Old Testament in me.)

In fact, to listen to victims of crime is to know that libertarian anarchists are proffering formulations that fit the demands of theory, not humanity.

I suppose it is hypothetically possible that, as Benson and others assert, medieval England, Ireland, Iceland, even Somali tribes are worthy exemplars of how we ought to settle disputes today. It is also equally plausible that the average victim has no sense of justice, and desperately needs the post-graduate cleverness of the libertarian anarchist to help her gain perspective.

But beneath the clouds of platonic theorizing, and back on terra firma, victims of crime almost always demand punishment that fits the crime, and express a fear that if the necessary precautions are not taken to incapacitate their attackers, other members of the community might suffer as they have.

This is not revenge; it is common sense.

In his seminal essay, “Crime and Moral Retribution,” Robert James Bidinotto provides a definition of just retribution as opposed to revenge. “Revenge,” he writes, “means the carrying out of a bitter desire to injure another for a wrong done to oneself or to those who seem a part of oneself. By contrast, though, retribution suggests just or deserved punishment, often without personal motives, for some evil done.”

Bidinotto, author of Criminal Justice?, refers to liberal and libertarian enablers of criminals as “the Excuse-Making Industry.” He points out that a legal system that imposes proportionate, retributive justice may well incorporate restitution into its scheme of punishments – but that this can’t work in reverse.

“Criminals are notoriously unproductive, while causing tremendous harm,” he says. “Expecting them to be able to repay victims is simply absurd. Thus, relying on restitution alone means that the worst offenders will never have to pay a price that begins to match the damages they cause. They will learn that, for them, ‘crime pays.'”

Still, for the sake of argument, let’s presume that our rape victim – she’s a liberal or libertarian penal abolitionist – forfeits punishment in favor of payoff. Her rapist, she argues, offended against her alone. Since he has settled the score (fat chance), he must go free.

She may find this satisfactory, but what of the rest of us? Again, one doesn’t have to be a “methodological individualist” to know that many besides her face a clear and present danger from the “paid-up” rapist. Recidivism rates among criminals more than demonstrate this plain point.

In such cases, restitution should be added to incarceration, not substituted for it.

Justice for all demands no
less.

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