Among the Intellectualoids/The War Crimes Racket

...203] 453-9794 9 ~ . 4 ~ ' " ~ I / l l I l l l l l I / l l # w 23 Wllham Schaap, a guild acUvlst who Only half the panel's eight "judges" were lawyers Presiding was a frail, edits the Covert Actton Information Bulletin, a clone of CounterSpy, the had most of the Pentagon Papers m its, possession a year before they leaked to the Ttmes, provided further proof of aged Stanley Faulkner, a founding IPS's ability to obtain advance possession of material embarrassing to the government by giving a preview of the CIA primer for the Nicaraguan "contras" that was shortly thereafter to cause the Reagan Administration conslderable discomfort magazine famous for exposing the identity of US agents worldwide Schaap portrayed the Sandlnlstas as guileless agrarian reformers falsely charged with intervention in El Salvador And last, Peter Kornbluh of the Institute for Pohcy Stu&es, which A GREAT CHRISTMAS PRESENT "'WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY" ",4 Blueprint for the Future" by CONGRESSMAN NEWT GINGRICH President Ronald Reagan called ~t " . a source of new hope for bufld)ng an Opportunity Society that sparks the best m each of us and permits us to chart a better future for our children and our children's children" "WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY" If you want to know what President Reagan's Opportumty Soctety means over the next four years, you must read Jt Available at Crown, Walden, B Dalton and other fine bookstores member of the IADL and currently a U S member of the Soviets' premier international front, the World Peace Council Faulkner has acted as attorney for a series of Spanish-speaking Communists His most famous cl]ents were probably David Sequelros, the Mexican painter who made the first, unsuccessful attempt on Trotsky's life, and Luls Corvalan, chief of the Chilean Communist party who in 1976 was exchanged for the distinguished Soviet dissident Vlad]mlr Bukovsky Faulkner's contributions have been recogmzed by the East German government, which awarded him its "Peace Medal "Other lawyer-judges were the Honorable Bruce Wright of the New York State Supreme Court (known fanuharly as "Turn 'em loose Bruce"), Wllma Reveron T]o, an actlv]st m the cause of freeing Puerto Rico from U S colomahsm, and Paul O'Dwyer, onet]me New York City Council chairman, now seeking to free Northern Ireland from British Imperialism Among the non-lawyer "judges" was the Rev William Sloane Coffin, pastor of Riverside Church' Coffin's enthusmsm for peace between nations does not extend to the domestic hearth, his second marriage foundered when he administered a karate chop to his wife that left her with a halrhne skull fracture Then there was the Rev Ben Chavls, spruce in a black and yellow dashiki over his clerical garb Chavls, deputy director of the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racml Justice, is best known as one of the Wilmington Ten (His conviction for firebombing a grocery In North Carolina was set aside by the US Court of Appeals after he had served four years ) He IS also--although this too was omitted in the credltswco - chairman, with Commun]st party vinepresidential candidate Angela Davis, of the Committee Against Racist and Pohtlcal Repression, a group, mwabde dtctu, with close ties to the U S Communist party Other judges were Doris Turner, president of District 1199 of the National Union of Hospital and Health Employees, and Rosa Parks, the black lady who started the bus boycott In Alabama m 1955 by moving to the front of the bus In a "more just" society, the guild's Harold Meyerson informed us in his opening remarks, Faulkner and O'Dwyer would be sitting on the Supreme Court and Parks and Chavls would be there as "coequals " 'According to newspaper accounts, Coffin "judged" the first day, although he was not present for that part of the proceedings I attended There ]s opportun, i In Amer]c 12] Sarkes Tarzlan Inc Bloommgton Indtana 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1985 While the evadence is adlmttedly c]rcumstantml, ]t seems to me highly probable that the idea for these "war crimes trlbunals'--ten add]t]onal ones were scheduled to take place in other major C]tles--was cooked up by the International AssocmtIon of Democratic Lawyers, the Sov]et front with which two of the tnbunal's sponsoring groups are affiliated For one thing, war crimes tribunals have become something of an IADL specmlty The IADL has helped to organ]ze tribunals focusing on U S "mercenarlsm" in Angola, "US crimes" in Vietnam, and, probably least faded in publ]c memory, "US crimes" ]n Iran--the "International Conference to InvesUgate US Intervention in Iran," conducted in Tehran in June 1980 under the supervision of then Iranmn foreign minister, Sadeq Ghotbzadeh Moreover Lennox Hinds, the IADL's "Permanent Representative to the U N ," two years ago disclosed the lADEs interest in putting on a show of this kind on Central America In June 1982 Hinds, who was formerly assocmte director of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, along with a delegation from that group and the National Lawyers Guild, went to the U N to demand that ]t "take any and all appropriate action" against the U S for having "flagrantly violated" ]nternat]onal law in E1 Salvador Hinds then mentioned that the IADL was thinking of estabhshlng an " i n t e r n a t i o n a l commission" on Reagan's foreign policy It would appear that plan was fulfilled with a tribunal held in Brussels on September 28-30, 1984 Official sponsor of this affair was a recently created outfit called the "International Progress Orgamzatlon," but many of the names appended were famlhar World Peace Council activists It seems reasonable to conclude that the International Progress Organization, whose "findings" in Brussels echoed the Soviet hne on every subject from Central America to the inalienable rights of the PLO to the Pershing and MX missiles, was set up by the Soviets to avoid the "name recognition" that adheres by now to both the World Peace Council and the Internattonal Association of Democratic Lawyers It is thus not surprising that a full page ad devoted to "Conclusions and Judgment of the Brussels Tribunal" appeared in the New York Ttmes on October 7, just one day before the war crimes tribunal In Manhattan The ad, apparently, was designed to serve as a back-up to the local event The presence of four "International legal observers" from the International Association of Democratic Lawyers was announced during the proceedings I attended, and their credentmls were included m the program packet One of the members of the "Legal Secretariat," according to the program, had just returned from the Brussels tribunal Another individual openly hnked to both is Ramsey Clark, the former U S attorney general, who has developed Into something of a war crimes trial maven Clark headed the US delegatmn to the Iranmn show trial, was a featured speaker at the Brussels tribunal, and was listed as legal adviser to the New York tribunal Equally suggestive was the Center for Constitutional Rights' indictment, ostensibly brought on behalf of "the people of the United States" against the President and h~s administration Although the proceedings were confined to U S "war crimes" in Central America, the In&ctment had a "second count" It charged the U S was engaged in a "conspiracy" to unleash nuclear war "against the peoples of the world" by deploying the cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe The attempt to roll back the US nussfle deployment in Europe, emphasized m the Brussels tribunal, was thus not neglected m New York And, finally, both the Brussels and New York tribunals directed their "findings" to the U N It goes without saying that ff the New York tribunal as well as the ten others around the country were indeed part of an IADL campaign, those who participated would wittingly or MENTAL REALIGNMENTS Given that the closest thing to a conservatlve ldeologue ever to sit in the White House was overwhelmingly reelected to a second term, you might have thought that conservatism had won a full-throated endorsement from the voters last November No way The way the press told It, both Walter F Mondale and liberalism lost and Ronald Reagan won But conservatism didn't wm or lose, it wasn't up for judgment Somehow the 89 3 million Americans who went to the polls managed to render a favorable verdict on Mr Reagan without taking a stand, Fred Barnes is Nattonal Pohncal Reporter for the Baltimore Sun THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1985 even a hesitant one, on the ideology that is the source of Reagan's pohtical motivation and the touchstone of many of his policies as President All in all, a nifty trick Some of the explanations of how this happened were extraordinarily lngemous One was simply to assume that Reagan is a middle-of-the-roader, or at least that he's taken the country on a middling course Haynes Johnson of the Washmgton Post quoted the voters as sending this message "We like you personally, Mr President, and we like the way things are now going In America But we don't want much of a change, and we'd like to keep the country moving straight down the unwittingly have been implementing one of the Soviet Union's "active measures" in the United States While war crimes tribunals abroad serve as theatrical devices to whip up anti-U S sentiment, here I think they must be seen as part of the Left's effort to "mstltUtlonahze" its attack on "the system " In this case the pretext is that the courts have fmled to act and so the alternatwe "tribunal" must be established to rule justly, even if, at this time, it cannot implement its findings Another such device is the "alternative budget" pmneered by the Institute for Policy Studies a decade ago, the most recent budget of th~s sort having been prepared during the Reagan Administration at the request of fifty-five members of Congress These budgets provide a "just" allocation of national resources, meeting "human needs" and sharply curtadmg mlhtary expenditures The "Peace Academy"--which Congress may well w~tlessly vote into existence--is another such project of the radical Left All these offer mechamsms to claim moral authority Imphclt is a powerplay If the estabhshment's restitutions have failed, those who serve as custodmns of the society's true values deserve to govern Whatever the purpose of these tribunals, the obvious question is do they matter Even in the afternoon, PRESSWATCH center of the road for the next four years we're giving you " Hedrick Smith of the New York Times suggested that the President won in spite of his conservative views and did so by leaving the grubby world of politicians and entering the firmament of superheroes "For more than a year, as opinion polls showed Mr Reagan holding strong against sharp criticism from the group of Democratic candidates running for President, political experts began reahzing that he had become more than a politician," Smith wrote "He had become, in their view, a phenomenon existing outside his policies, many of which were not being embraced nearly as warmly by Americans " when attendance ~mproved, no more than a hundred people were present and it is unhkely that the tribunals In other cities did much better Press coverage was minimal (In the U S, that is Three top-flight Soviet journahsts covered the New York tribunal, their articles appearing in Pravda and Komsomolskaya Pravda ) Yet one reason these tribunals have significance is that they point up the increasing misuse of the law by a segment of the radical bar, a phenomenon associated with the rise of the "Movement" of the 1960s that has gone all but unremarked And of course these tribunals, modeled explicitly on the Nuremberg trials, make their own contribution to the corruption of language and to emptying of meaning one of the twentieth century's most terrible events But perhaps the most significant aspect of the tribunals is that they serve to remind us of the National Lawyers Guild's success (and that of the host of radical institutes and activist orgamzations with which the guild interlocks) in shaping pubhc perception of U S actions In Central America While the guild is unfashmnable, its Ideas have become the epitome of radical chic In October, while the guild's "witnesses" were declaiming to a scrubby handful, a party was being given at the New York AthleUc Club for the beautiful people to meet Nora Astorga, the Sandlnlsta temptress who lured one of Somoza's generals to her bedroom to be mutilated and murdered In the meantime Commandante Ortega, the Sandinlsta choice for president, was beIng feted at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club and by Hollywood's Committee of Concern for Central America, which on October 12 held a "Town Meeting on Central America," scheduled to perform in five major cities When all is saad, it just might be that the proper way to see these war crimes tribunals is in the context of the current crop of cults We marvel at the appeal of such sects as the RajneeshIs, the Sebaba, Hare Krlshna, Sclentology, and a host of others None of these has a belief system remotely as implausible as that shared by the guild's activists and their followers These people do not experience the United States as most of us do, they inhabit a Kafkaesque Amenka, a diabolical and cruel society, oppressive at home, malevolent abroad They see this country as fascist, or at the edge of fascism, its storm troopers poised at any moment to carry them away in the middle of the night And so they huddle together in their terror, lashing out at the great Behemoth And where do they turn for succor, comfort, and support9 Why, precisely to those totalitarian governments that do carry [] people away into the night) by F r e d Barnes Another tack was to posit that the electorate was ratifying a successful presidency and a national mood, irrespective of the fact that it took a dramatic policy shift in Washington to bring both of them about Voters, said Ttme, "were not necessarily approving Reagan's conservative ideology, though that Ideology holds more sway than anyone could have guessed even in 1980, or rewarding his engaging personahty, attractive though it obviously IS Above all they were expressing satisfaction with what has become a rarity in American pohtlcs what seems to be a successful presidency, in terms of economic growth and national strength and pride, especially in con25...

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...AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS THE WAR CRIMES RACKET On the morning of October 9, 1984, a band of fifty true believers gathered in the vaulted stone assembly hall of Manhattan's Riverside Church to celebrate their faith through solemn ritual Thetr creed is the irredeemable infamy of the United States, and the ritual on this occasion was a "War Crimes Tribunal on Central America and the Caribbean "For two successive days (the first day's solemnities were held at Columbia University's School of International Affairs) the fmthful could devote themselves for eleven uninterrupted hours to a litany of U S atrocities, tortures, murders, barbarit~es, genocides, past and planned, going back at least 180 years To be sure, there was a secular--one might say profane--side to these celebrations The tribunal's official sponsors were the National Lawyers Guild, the National Conference of Black Lawyers, the La Raza Legal Alhance, and the Center for Constitutional R~ghts The first two are the U S affiliates of the International Associa- launched "a massive psychological tion of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), destablhzatzon campaign never before described by the CIA as "one of the seen to impact on such a small populamost useful Communist front tion "According to Prof Matias, once orgamzatlons at the service of the on the island, this advanced-degree Soviet Communist Party", the third is contingent set up its own media and affiliated with the IADUs southern hemisphere splnoff, the Association of American Jurists, headquartered, appropriately, in Havana, and the last is a "public interest" law firm founded by guild activists that works closely with Prof Matias invaded Grenada both the guild and the National Con- herself after the U S action, as part of ference of Black Lawyers an "investigative team," and found the While according to the program, the population in acute "trauma" as families "disintegrated economically first day, which I missed, focused exclusively on the satanic behavior of the and socially" Indeed she found GrenaUS in Honduras, El Salvador, and dians in such a state of shock that a Guatemala, the second day contrasted number of them had "curled up in the righteousness with evil Paeans were fetal position "Not content with what sung to the blessed societies created by It had done to the people, the United Castro in Cuba, the SandInistas in States had even done violence to the Nicaragua, and Maurice Bishop in pre- shrubbery near the beach and had invasion Grenada, while the impious driven up the price of beachfront efforts of the United.States to destroy property Rael Jean Isaac's most recent book (wtth Erich Isaac) ts The Coercive Uto- Another emotional witness was Jane Franklin of the Center for Cuban pians (Regnery Gateway) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1985 the wonders they had wrought were decried The format consisted of "lawyers" from a "legal secretariat" who Introduced "witnesses" to the "judges" of the tribunal before whom these witnesses gave "testtmony" pertinent to an "indictment" prepared by the Center for Constitutional Rights Given that no one spoke for the defense, the witnesses performed in the religious sense of testifying for the faith One of the more impassioned was Margarita Samad-Matias, a small dark-hmred woman with wide-set eyes, who upon being introduced as director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at City College gave "witness" to U S crimes against the people of Grenada She told of 16,000 U S troops in the invasion force (even the formal "Indictment" cited only 5,000) Yet it was not the troops that evoked her deepest outrage, but what she claimed were 350 people "with advanced degrees" who, prior to landing, "discredited the people's government " All this presumably was Prof MatIas's way of accounting for the enthusiastic endorsement of the U S action by the vast majority of people on the island ,.by Rael Jean Isaac which they hoped to survive U S attack For Fidel, we were assured, always knows what the U S is planning to do next, and he had said the U S would Not all the witnesses were this intense Terence Cannon, Revson fellow at City College, author of Revoluttonary Cuba, and--somehow ormtted in the credits--for years a staff writer for the Communist Dally World, US against the people of Cuba " Harold Meyerson, a member of the in a war against the Cuban people, he said, but It was also engaged "in a second war--against-the American peop l e ' - t o keep Americans from receiving "ideas" from Cuba Then there was Studies From offices in New York Ci- she reported that the Cuban people ty, the center dispenses to the faithful were even now building trenches in the speeches of Fidel and assorted Cuban officials, and publishes a bulletin that informs readers of the "monolithic Ideological unity of the Cuban people" A woman in her fif- invade in November ties with long yellow hair, Miss Franklin has extraordinarily pasty skin that stretches tautly over the bones, gwlng her face a skull-like appearance Her spiritual energies seem to have been wholly engaged by Fldel and his revolution Despite the onslaughts of chromcled the "undeclared war by the U S imperialism, she noted Cuba had "achieved three fantastic developments'--ltS health system, its literacy National Lawyers Guild's Cuba Subcampaign, and its allegiance to revolu- committee, took this theme one step tionary principles of self-determina- further Not only was the U S engaged tion Miss Franklin pointed proudly to Cuban troops in Angola and Ethiopia as evidence of Fldel's "belief m other people's right to determine their own destiny" Finally, on the edge of tears, l m I Fr~cheCU~ I 'e~ea~:sact~~ I agde rn genB t r:ct'~ I into a "teaching mach,ne W~th ~ts umque pattern drdl learning method I you set your own pace - 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