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For the Love of CountryListen to history come alive with this five-CD series. A collection of Revolutionary War stories with over five hours of rich listening entertainment. Includes “Tales of American Heroism,” “The Fringe War,” “Patriots & Countrymen,” “Struggle for the South,” “The Revolutionary Women.” (2007, 303min, $39.95 per set, $9.95 per individual CD) CdSFLC

The Real Face of the EUThis documentary produced by Phillip Day includes commentary from a member of the European Union (EU) Parliament and other EU analysts. It covers the history and goals of the EU, as well as the

disturbing, irrevocable implications the EU continental government holds for every British citizen. With a similar process unfolding in America under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Americans are starting to ask themselves if their elected officials should be allowed to go down the same path and create a North American Union. (2008, 36min)

(DVD/sleeved: 1-3/$1.50 ea, 4-6/$1.25 ea, 7-9/$1.00 ea, 10-20/$.90 ea, 21-50/$.80 ea, 51+/$.75 ea) dvdRFeU

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Duo DVDOverview of america and a Case for Blocking the North american unionOverview of America dynamically illustrates what makes America unique. A Case for Blocking the North American Union offers an updat-ed, no- nonsense report on the dangers of the proposed North American Union. (2007, 40min total; 1-3, $4.00 ea; 4-6, $3.00 ea; 7-9, $2.50 ea; 10-20, $2.00 ea; 21-50, $1.75 ea; 51+, $1.50 ea) dvdBdUO

Mental Health, Education and Social Control In a follow-up volume to National Mental Health Program and Mental Health Screening, author Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D. explains how our government is using sweep-ing legislation on mental health, joined with education, as a means of social con-trol. (2007, 128pp, pb, $10.95) BKmHeSC

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Vol. 24, No. 9 April 28, 2008

Cover Story TERRORISM

12 A Bad Investmentby William F. Jasper — U.S. support for so-called “moderate” terrorists, as we have given in Palestine, is a recipe for disaster.

18 Global Blowbackby William F. Jasper — Backing terrorists and terror regimes has come back to haunt us.

COVER Design by Joseph W. Kelly

FeatureS CONGRESS

20 House Holds Rare Secret Sessionby Alex Newman

ECONOMY

21 The Money Trust’s Next Moveby Charles Scaliger — The looming financial crisis has set the stage for giving the Fed broad powers over the entire financial sector.

24 Don’t Spend Money; Save Itby Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. — The Bush administration wants us to spend our way out of recession, but that won’t work.

INTERVIEW

27 Defending Gun OwnershipInterview of Larry Pratt by John F. McManus

BOOK REVIEW

30 Creating Corruptionby Gregory A. Hession, J.D. — Once the cradle of liberty, Massachusetts now has become a cesspool of political corruption.

HISTORY — PAST AND PERSPECTIVE

35 Cuba Under Fidel and Raulby John F. McManus — The island nation has suffered greatly under the Castros.

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5 Letters to the Editor

7 Inside Track

11 QuickQuotes

33 The Goodness of America

41 Exercising the Right

42 Correction, Please!

44 The Last Word

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Freedom’s CallThe New AmericAN champions a return to constitutional principles to safeguard our rights and our way of life, but this is only part of the solution. A recommitment to traditional morality, family- centered ideals, and sound money are also needed to preserve liberty and prosperity. This issue tells why. (April 14, 2008, 48 pp) TNA080414

2008 Climate Debate Despite bold assertions that human-caused global warming is an established fact — such as the Denver Post’s claim that “you could have a convention of all the scientists who dispute climate change in a relatively small phone booth” — a convention in New York brought together over 100 of the world’s top scientists who dispute conventional global-warming dogma. (March 31, 2008, 48pp) TNA080331

A Bad InvestmentBoth before and during the “war on terror,” the U.S. government has given money, arms, and military training to groups which could ostensibly help accomplish its objectives. But events have shown that the groups we are aiding — like the Palestinian Authority — are often as destructive as the enemy we are fighting. (April 28, 2008, 48pp) TNA080428

Who’s Listening In on You?Is the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act’s new revision called the Protect America Act too intrusive on Americans’ privacy? Get the answers here. (March 17, 2008, 48pp)TNA080317

Special Report: Merger in the MakingThe importance of this special edition on the North American Union cannot be overstated. It tells how U.S. political and business elites are working below the radar to merge the United States, Mexico, and Canada into an entity similar to the European Union — and how it will affect you if they succeed. (October 15, 2007, 48pp) TNA071015

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Publisher John F. McManus

Editor Gary Benoit

Senior Editor William F. Jasper

Associate Editor Kurt Williamsen

Contributors Dennis J. Behreandt

Christopher S. Bentley Steven J. DuBord

Jodie Gilmore Gregory A. Hession, J.D.

Ed Hiserodt William P. Hoar

R. Cort Kirkwood Warren Mass

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. Ann Shibler

Michael E. Telzrow Joe Wolverton II, J.D.

Editorial Assistant Denise L. Behreandt

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Desktop Publishing Specialist Steven J. DuBord

Research Brian T. Farmer Bonnie M. Gillis Wayne Olson

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Printed in the U.S.A. • ISSN 0885-6540P.O. Box 8040 • Appleton, WI 54912920-749-3784 • 920-749-3785 (fax)

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Rates are $39 per year (Hawaii and Canada, add $9; foreign, add $27) or $22 for six months (Hawaii and Canada, add $4.50; foreign, add $13.50). Copyright ©2008 by American Opin-ion Publishing, Inc. Periodicals postage paid at Appleton, WI and additional mailing offices. Post-master: Send any address changes to The New AmericAN, P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54912.

The New AmericAN is pub-lished biweekly by Ameri-can Opinion Publishing

Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of The John Birch Society.

Treading on AmerityreI just read, with great excitement, James Perloff’s article on Amerityre (February 18 issue) and immediately went to the compa-ny’s website to see how we could purchase these American-made polyurethane tires and invest in such a fantastic new American enterprise. Much to my shock and dismay, I found their 2007 Shareholder Meeting Presentation to be loaded with references to global markets and global manufacturing.

Then to make matters worse, their major investor in Composite Tires refers immedi-ately to signing agreements with Communist China, as if this is a natural formula for suc-cess with any new American enterprise. It is also assumed then that both manufacturing and distributing for Amerityre composite products will be done in China, not in the U.S.A. Amerityre says in a slide presentation that they have a “signed agreement with [a] Chinese partner” and that they shipped the “largest pour machine in the world” to their “launch partner” China, a machine that pro-cesses 3,000 lbs. per minute. Could James Perloff have missed this life-draining part-nership with China and Amerityre when he researched this “entrepreneurship” article?

Amerityre founder Richard Steinke is quoted in The New AmericAN as saying, “In other countries, they’re afraid to innovate.... The great thing about America is, you can fail, and keep on trying.” Could the reason why other countries do not innovate be be-cause Americans love to innovate and spend the time and money here to create an incred-ible product, only to sell it to non-innovat-ing (socialist/communist) countries who are more than willing to capitalize on it?

After my short visit to Amerityre’s web-site, I am not at all interested in purchasing or investing in “Chinatyre.” Is there anyone loyal to America anymore? Do the Chinese spell tire as “tyre”? Is that how the name “Amerityre” came about?

STeve roSe

Steamboat Springs, Colorado

James Perloff responds: I fully agree with keeping manufacturing in America; unlike many conservatives, I even support tariffs on imports. Amerityre’s only plant is in America; all its products are made here. To say Ameri-tyre is “signing agreements with Communist China” is distorting — it has one contract with one Chinese company, Qingdao Qizhou. The latter is not using Amerityre’s polyure-

thane to make auto tires, only retreads for enormous tires used on mining vehicles.

Mr. Rose calls this a “life-draining part-nership with China,” implying it will con-sume American jobs. Why aren’t the retreads U.S.-made? First, tiny Amerityre lacks the capacity to retread these huge mining tires. Efforts by U.S. companies to make such re-treads from rubber have proven unsuccess-ful, because heat from prolonged vulcani-zation makes the tires unstable. Amerityre had hoped a U.S. company would try it with their polyurethane, but to date no American company has been willing. Therefore the Qingdao Qizhou arrangement threatens no U.S. jobs. Amerityre hopes it will motivate U.S. companies to come on board, manufac-turing retreads here at home.

Also, what about Amerityre’s American deals? On February 8, Michigan-based Amigo Mobility, which makes shopping vehicles for the disabled, announced it is switching to Amerityre’s polyurethane tires. “Amerityre shares our business ideals,” said Amigo president Al Thieme, “and believe[s] in producing high quality goods that are made in America.” Amerityre will initially supply Amigo with 25,000 tires per year — completely American-made.

Last year, Amerityre signed an agreement with Arizona-based DRT, which manufac-tures tires for sand-racing cars. DRT will use Amerityre’s technology to build its products — again, entirely American-made.

While I commend Mr. Rose’s patriotic economics, I think it unfair to focus solely on Amerityre’s one Chinese contract and call the company “Chinatyre,” as if it were a multinational corporation seeking to under-mine the home job market. There are plenty of those, but Amerityre isn’t one.

Regarding your story about Amerityre, as a longtime General Motors employee, I would like to point out the mistake that Mr. Perloff and many others ignorant of automotive his-tory make. It was Ransom Olds, not Henry Ford, who had the first automotive assembly line in 1901. He produced the curve dash Oldsmobile on an assembly line from 1901 to 1904. Checking back on our automotive history you will find that Ford Motor Co. is often credited with innovations that it stole from others. The automotive assembly line was not a Ford innovation!

michAel Powell

Clarkston, Michigan

5THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Mexican national Jose Medellin was arrested, tried, and convicted for raping and murdering two Texas teenagers in 1993. He was awarded the death penalty. But because he was not advised of a right to receive legal assistance from the Mexican consul, Mexico sued the United States on his behalf in the World Court, a United Nations body. In 2004, the World Court ruled that the United

States must reopen the case. President Bush promptly an-nounced his sup-port for the World Court’s ruling and told Texas to com-ply with it.

Medellin’s law-yers went back to court in the United States, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected their appeal in 2006. Texas Judge Mi-chael Kaesler even stated that President

Bush “had exceeded his constitutional authority by intruding into the independent powers” of his state’s judicial system. So the lawyers for the convicted criminal appealed further to the Su-preme Court of the United States.

On March 25 of this year, the Supreme Court rejected this lat-est appeal in a 6-3 ruling and effectively told the president that his powers are not unlimited. Chief Justice John Roberts stated that Article 94 of the UN Charter provides only that “each member of the United Nations undertakes to comply” with World Court decisions, and that further action by Congress would be needed if the United States were to be subject to World Court decisions.

In his dissent, Justice Steven Breyer pointed to the Constitu-tion’s Article VI and claimed that treaties — such as the ques-tionable characterization of U.S. entry into the UN in 1945 as a treaty — supersede the Constitution. Breyer’s contention is not supported by history. His attitude was roundly rejected by Hamil-ton, Madison, and Jefferson, the men who wrote and commented on the very point raised by Breyer.

Yes, Medellin’s conviction has been upheld. Yes, Bush’s latest grab for imperial power has been stifled. But the Supreme Court has indicated that should Congress enact legislation to comply with World Court decisions, the Constitution could find itself relegated to an inferior position vis-à-vis the United Nations and its subsidiary bodies.

Supreme Court Ruling Rebukes President Bush

A March 14, 2003, memorandum written by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Yoo of the U.S. Department of Jus-tice’s Office of Legal Counsel granted military interrogators broad authority to use harsh methods in questioning suspects deemed “unlawful combatants.” Yoo’s memo, the subject of which was “Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combat-ants Held Outside the United States,” was addressed to William J. Haynes II, general counsel of the Department of Defense. Haynes had requested that the Justice Department examine the legal standards governing military interrogations of such unlaw-ful combatants.

The memo, made public on April 1 following declassification in response to a request by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, rambles on in often de-tached, clinical language for 81 pages. For example, a section sub-headed “Severe Pain or Suffering” states: “The key statu-tory phrase in the definition of torture is the statement that acts amount to torture if they cause ‘severe physical or mental pain or suffering.’ [Legal case citation] makes plain that the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insuf-ficient to amount to torture. Instead, the pain or suffering must be ‘severe.’... Thus, the adjective ‘severe’ conveys that the pain or suffering must be of such a high level of intensity that the pain is difficult for the subject to endure.”

Yoo applied an end-justifies-the-means constitutional stan-dard when he wrote: “If a government defendant were to harm

an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch’s constitutional authority to pro-tect the nation from attack justified his actions.”

In response to the release of the memo, Senator Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said it re-vealed policies that threatened “our country’s status as a beacon of human rights.”

2003 Justice Department Memo Authorized Military Torture

THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008

Inside Track

John Roberts

William J. haynes II

THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008 7

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Congressman Ron Paul has endorsed the John Birch Society in a state-ment recently received from his office. Dr. Paul stated, “The John Birch Society is a great patriotic organization featuring an educational program solid-ly based on constitutional principles. I congratulate the Society in this, its 50th year. I wish them contin-ued success and endorse their untiring efforts to

If Democrat leaders get their way, the Fairness Doctrine, a policy abolished by the Federal Communications Commission in 1987, will be reinstated to regulate the opinions aired by broadcasters. Talk-radio and religious broadcasters would be significantly im-pacted. Democrat leadership has called for it, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Half a century ago when stations were few, the FCC required broadcasters to provide air time (paid or unpaid) for opposing viewpoints about controversial issues of public importance (as determined by bureaucrats). Offending the FCC resulted in fines or a loss of broadcasting privileges. That intimidated broadcasters

foster ‘less government, more responsibility, and — with God’s help — a better world.’”

John McManus, president of JBS, responded, “We graciously accept Dr. Paul’s endorsement. He continues to demonstrate what an elected official should be doing … obeying the Constitution. We thank him for his continuous commitment to protect the free-doms of all Americans. There’s a reason why he consistently rates toward the top of the Freedom Index, our congressional score-card rating legislators’ votes published twice a year in The New AmericAN magazine.”

Dr. Paul’s endorsement comes after confirmation that he has agreed to be the keynote speaker at the Society’s 50th anniversary celebration, October 2-5, in Appleton, Wisconsin.

The New AmericAN is an affiliate of JBS and John McManus is the publisher of TNA.

into self-censorship, thus abridging their constitutionally guaran-teed right to free speech. Making matters worse, foxes were in charge of the chicken coop. Both Democrat and Republican ad-ministrations in the ’60s and ’70s manipulated the FCC, using the Fairness Doctrine litigation threat to silence opposition, under the pretext of enforcing the fair use of scarce frequencies. In 1987, the FCC revoked the Fairness Doctrine.

To prevent reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine “The Broad-caster Freedom Act of 2007” was introduced in the House as H.R. 2905 and in the Senate as S. 1748. For more information, go to www.thenewamerican.com/node/7658.

Ron Paul Congratulates the John Birch Society on 50th Anniversary

Free Speech in Broadcasting Threatened by Fairness Doctrine

When the 2004 EU Constitution was making its way toward ratification by all EU nations, French and Dutch voters issued a resounding No in referenda in their nations. Because acceptance by all nations is required, that killed the constitution. So the Eu-ropean world planners went back to the drawing board. In 2007 at a gathering in Lisbon, the leaders of the 27 EU na-tions produced a new document called the “EU Treaty.”

Treaty ratification has begun, and the British people were gearing up for the promised referendum in their country. But it won’t happen. The British parlia-ment, heavily influenced by new Prime Minister Gordon Brown, told angry Britons, “If this was a constitutional treaty, we would hold the referendum. But the constitutional concept was abandoned.”

Former French President Giscard D’Estaing served as chair-man of the group that created the rejected constitution. He has stated that “the difference between the original treaty and the present Lisbon Treaty is one of approach, not of content.” Italy’s

former Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, D’Estaing’s vice chairman in creating the rejected constitution, says of the of-ficials who created the new treaty, “They decided that the document should be unreadable” so it could be foisted on an unknowing public. Former Irish leader Garrett Fitzgerald approvingly referred to the new treaty as “virtual incompre-hensibility.” And Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel supports the treaty be-cause “the substance of the constitution is preserved.” So, the angry Brits have a right to demand that the promised refer-endum will occur. But it won’t.

Promised EU Referendum Won’t Be Allowed in Britain

8 THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008

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Screen legend Charlton Heston, famed for his epic film roles in the 1950s and ’60s and his activism on behalf of conserva-tive political causes in the 1980s and ’90s, passed away at his home in Beverly Hills on April 5. He was 84. His signature per-formances in The Ten Commandments (as Moses), Ben-Hur (as Judah Ben-Hur, for which he won a best-actor Oscar), and The Agony and the Ecstasy (as Michelangelo) estab-lished him as Hollywood’s top lead-ing man for historical, larger-than-life figures. However, he also proved himself equally capable at playing modern characters in a 20th-century setting — or even in the future, as in his sci-fi classics Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, and The Omega Man.

Heston combined the athleticism, rugged good looks, and tall (6' 3")

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested 34 workers, identified as Mexican nationals, at Memphis Interna-tional Airport working on the new Tennessee Air National Guard base. The various contractors who hired them will likely not be penalized because they’ll say that they didn’t “knowingly” hire the illegal immigrants. If the illegals showed even crudely fraudulent IDs to get hired, the employers are immune from prosecution.

In fiscal year 2007, ICE arrested 4,077 people on immigration charges nationwide. Considering there are approximately 14,300 ICE employees, that’s one arrest for every 31⁄2 employees. Must be a tough job!

Federal officials said that they are focusing immigration en-forcement efforts on projects where national security is a con-cern. In other words, they have simply decided to ignore what the Commercial Appeal of Memphis describes as “battalions of im-

muscular frame of an action star with a sonorous voice, charisma, and the dramatic skills of a classical stage actor. He was also a leader, serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild for a record six terms, and as president and chairman of the American Film Institute. On political and philosophical issues, Charlton

Heston parted ways with many of his celebrity cohorts, most notably on the right to keep and bear arms. A princi-pled supporter of the Second Amend-ment, he served as president of the National Rifle Association from 1998 to 2003, and is famously remembered for holding an antique musket above his head at an NRA convention and defiantly pledging that gun-control advocates would not take his gun un-less they could pry it “from my cold, dead hands.” n

migrants from Mexico and central America..., an unseen force at the bottom rungs of the Memphis area’s most important industry, distribution.” The paper added that the major companies in the area, except FedEx, use the illegals and that there are hard feel-ings between the Hispanics and blue-collar blacks in the Mem-phis area, who would be the main beneficiaries if the Hispanic illegal immigrants weren’t there.

The companies that hire the Hispanics, such as Williams- Sonoma, Technicolor Home Entertainment Services (which dis-tributes CDs and DVDs for Disney, Paramount, and Universal), and Microsoft, prefer hiring illegal immigrants because they can take on as many workers as they want each day and send the rest home; they don’t have to give any benefits; and they can hire workers for $7 to $7.50 per hour. Of course, none of the afore-mentioned companies “knowingly” hires illegal immigrants.

Charlton Heston Passes Away at 84

Memphis and Illegal Immigration and Enforcement

Last year the Arizona Senate passed a resolution asking Congress to withdraw the United States from the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America and block any activity that seeks to create a North American Union. In contrast, this year the Arizona House has taken the lead by passing a similar resolution on March 18 by a vote of 37 to 22. In another piece of good news, the Kansas House passed an excellent anti-NAU, anti-NAFTA Superhighway, anti-NAFTA resolution by a vote of 93 to 28 on April 4.

Idaho became the first state to ask Congress to withdraw U.S. membership in NAFTA when its Senate passed an anti-NAFTA bill by voice vote on March 20. Six days later the Idaho House passed the same bill by voice vote. The legislation urges “the

Congress of the United States, and particularly the congressional delegation representing the State of Idaho, to use all their efforts to ensure certain conditions for continued NAFTA participation are met, and in the event of default of such conditions then with-draw to stop additional harm to the American economy and work-force, loss of sovereignty and border security.”

During the 2007-2008 time period, the number of states that have passed anti-NAU resolutions in both houses stands at five (Idaho, Montana, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Utah). Twenty-one states have introduced anti-NAU resolutions during this period. See www.jbs.org/node/3430 for more information and updates.

States Keep Up the Pressure Against North American Integration

9THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008

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eep your America free...

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Call It Hubris or, if You Prefer, Unadulterated Arrogance“So?”When told that two-thirds of Americans do not support the way the war in Iraq is being conducted, Vice President Dick Cheney gave his disdainful re-sponse to a reporter and then discounted the polling process as unreliable.

Bill Richardson’s Endorsement of Obama Draws Fiery Response“His endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for thirty pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate.”A supporter of Hillary Clinton for president, James Carville was very unhappy when New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson announced his support for her rival.

Ted Has Become a Scientist“Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.”According to Ted Turner, the world will not be a very nice place in 40 years if action isn’t taken to reverse the problem of global warming.

Former British Prime Minister Frustrated Over Global-warming Indecision“We have an agreement that there should be an agreement. But there’s no agreement on what that agreement should be.”While vacationing at billionaire Richard Branson’s privately owned is-land in the British Virgin Islands, Tony Blair — now a senior adviser to JP Morgan Chase — participated in a conference with several other high rollers who were seeking a solution for a problem many scientists say isn’t anything but a naturally caused phenomenon.

Automakers Look to China for Engines and Other Parts“Today, it’s South Korea and Japan, and tomorrow it’s going to be China. It’s only a matter of time before G.M., Ford and Chrysler are going to deal with the crisis they face by going to these countries.... Very few consumers ask: Where is the engine built or where is the transmission made?”At Chevrolet’s Equinox plant in Ottawa, Canada, engines labeled Ecotec, Vortec, and Northstar are installed in the vehicles, prompting union official Basil Hargrove to acknowledge the effect of trade policies he deplores.

Texas Congressman Claims “Surge” Is No Success“Under the ‘surge’ policy, the United States military has trained and equipped with deadly weapons those Iraqi militia members against whom they were fighting just months ago. I fear by arming and equipping opposing militias we are just setting the stage for a more tragic and dangerous explosion of violence, possibly aimed at U.S. troops in Iraq.”In his weekly “Texas Straight Talk” column of March 23, Con-gressman Ron Paul pointed to several aspects of U.S. policy that few others will discuss.

Homeland Security Boss Puts Blame for Real ID on Congress“Showing up at the airport with only a driver’s license from such a state will be no better than showing up without iden-tification. No doubt this will impel many to choose the in-convenience of traveling with a passport.”Pointing to the holdout states of Maine, Montana, and South Carolina, Michael Chertoff said it was not he but Congress that established the rules that states are now being forced to adopt. n

— comPiled by JohN F. mcmANuS

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by William F. Jasper

Blowback: Unintended negative consequences from some action or policy.

Tuly Wultz and his 16-year-old son Daniel were enjoying a Passover holiday dinner at a Tel Aviv restau-

rant when the suicide bomber struck. Nine diners were killed in the grisly attack that

day in April 2006 and dozens more were wounded, including the Wultzes, Ameri-cans from Florida who were visiting Israel on vacation. Daniel, who was the more se-verely injured of the two, lost his spleen, a kidney, and a leg in the blast. Despite the heroic efforts of doctors, he died a month later in an Israeli hospital. Because Daniel Wultz was an American, the terror attack that claimed his life received more atten-tion in the U.S. media than the “typical”

suicide bombings that have become all too familiar in Israel, Iraq, Pakistan, and many other parts of the world.

Few Americans are aware, however, that the deadly attack that took the life of Daniel Wultz was planned and car-ried out by U.S.-trained terrorists of the PLO’s (Palestine Liberation Organization) notorious al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. The Brigades, which are formally listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State De-

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U.S. support for so-called “moderate” terrorists as the alternative to worse terrorists, as we have given in Palestine, is a recipe for disaster.

A BadInvestment

partment, have carried out numerous sui-cide bombings, car bombings, shootings, and rocket attacks. Nevertheless, they are a major military arm of Palestinian Au-thority President Mahmoud Abbas’ PLO/Fatah organization. As such, they share in the hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars that annually are showered on the Abbas-led Palestinian regime.

But cash is not the only thing the U.S. government lavishes on the Palestinian Authority. Incredibly, it also sends Abbas and his colleagues tons of arms as well — along with training in military tactics, intelligence gathering, and explosives. All of this is done for the ostensible purpose of supporting the “moderate” Palestinian ter-rorists under Abbas against the supposedly more radical Hamas terrorists.

The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed responsibility for the bombing in which Daniel Wultz was murdered. American journalist Aaron Klein, who has met and interviewed many of the Palestinian terror-ist leaders, reports in his book, Schmooz-ing With Terrorists:

The cell of the Brigades that directed the attack … happens to be one of the groups I am closest to. Accord-ing to Brigade sources, the entire bombing operation — from the plan-ning to the recruitment of the suicide bomber — was carried out by Fatah’s Brigades....

The very crew who sent the bomb-er into Israel to gravely injure Daniel Wultz consisted of none other than the U.S.-trained Brigades leaders who walk around with American-provided assault rifles.

Klein, the intrepid Jerusalem bureau chief for World Net Daily, talked to the terrorists responsible for the attack. They were un-apologetic and pledged more of the same. Klein reported:

American-trained Nasser Abu Aziz,

deputy commander of the Brigades in Nablus and the West Bank, called Wultz’s passing a “gift from Allah.” Abu Aziz’s cell directed the bombing that killed Wultz....

Abu Aziz went on to pledge more suicide bomb-ings inside Israel. “We will hit whenever we think it is suitable and do not expect that I give details but we can hit everywhere,” he said.

“Our money helped pay for the death of Wultz and so many others,” Klein charges. And he provides details and hard proof to back up the charge, showing case after case of the U.S.-backed Abbas “moder-ates” carrying out deadly terrorist attacks, including attacks on Americans. It should be clear to all but the willfully blind that Mahmoud Abbas’ PLO/Fatah is the same vicious terrorist organization that Yassir Arafat founded nearly half a century ago. That the U.S. government not only provides the Abbas terror apparatus with financial, military, and diplomatic support, but also systematically overlooks and covers up its terrorist activities, is indefensible.

The Granddaddy of Terror“It’s good to have you back here in the Oval Office,” said President Bush, wel-coming President Mahmoud Abbas of the

Palestinian Authority to the White House on November 26, 2007. “Thank you for coming,” he continued, “and thank you for working hard to implement a vision for a Palestinian state. We want to help you. We want there to be peace. We want the people in the Palestinian Territories to have hope. And we thank you for your willingness to sit down with Israel to negotiate the settlement.”

It was the eve of the Annapolis Confer-ence, which would initiate a flurry of dip-lomatic activity culminating in the Decem-ber “donors conference” in Paris. And the Paris confab would result in total pledges of $7.5 billion to the Palestinian Authority. In January 2008, President Bush journeyed to the West Bank city of Ramallah, where he met Abbas at the Muqata, the infamous PLO headquarters where Yassir Arafat and Abbas had harbored many of the world’s most-wanted fugitive terrorists. In March, Vice President Dick Cheney duplicated

Mahmoud Abbas’ pLo/Fatah is the same organization that Yassir Arafat founded nearly half a century ago. that the u.S. government not only provides it with financial, military, and diplomatic support, but also overlooks and covers up its terrorist activities, is indefensible.

Blowback victim: Relatives and friends of U.S. teenager Daniel Wultz touch his coffin during a memorial service. Wultz died of wounds sustained in a suicide bombing by a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, many of whose members are trained and funded by the United States.

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the trek to the Muqata, to coincide with the delivery of a no-strings-attached $150 million payment from the U.S. taxpayers to the Abbas government.

In the world of terrorism, no organiza-tion has enjoyed a more charmed existence than Yassir Arafat’s PLO/Fatah. No matter how much murder and mayhem he dished out over the decades, Arafat could always depend on support not only from the So-viet and Third World blocs, but also from the United Nations and much of the Is-lamic world. And increasingly in his later years, his stature inflated by White House visits, international conferences, a Nobel Peace Prize, and sympathetic media cov-erage, Arafat and the PLO assumed an air of legitimacy.

By the time of his death in 2004, Ara-

fat had been transformed, in much of world opinion, from a brutal terrorist thug run by the Soviet KGB into the “moderate” elder statesman of the Palestinian people. He presided over a global empire that included an estimated $10 billion-$50 billion in cash, commercial assets, and investments and an annual revenue of $1.5-$2 billion from donations, extortion,

drug trafficking, arms dealing, and other activities.

Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s longtime lieutenant, has further advanced the PLO’s march toward international respectability, thanks partly to his personal style: in con-trast to Arafat’s perennial stubble, grubby fatigues, trademark Keffiyeh scarf, and generally crude, slovenly persona, Abbas always appears as the soft-spoken, well-groomed, grandfatherly diplomat in a business suit. More important, however, than the stylistic change from Arafat to Abbas has been the rise of Hamas, which, at times, can make the PLO/Fatah look reasonable by comparison. But by far the biggest factor in transforming first Arafat, and now Abbas, into “moderates” has been the willingness of Western gov-ernments and the Western press to turn a blind eye toward, or even actively to cover up, the fact that the PLO contin-ues to be one of the most violent terror-ist organizations in the world, despite its

feigned renunciation of “the use of terror-ism and other acts of violence.”

Much of the PLO’s most violent dirty work (under both Arafat and Abbas) has been carried out by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which compete with Hamas in the suicide bombing category. For public relations with the West, Arafat tried to distance himself from the Brigades’ grisly attacks. But documents surfaced showing that Fatah was funneling large sums to the Brigades, and it was difficult to hide the fact that many of al-Aqsa’s top command-ers were also high-ranking officers in Ara-fat’s inner circle.

From their Soviet advisers, Arafat and Abbas learned the art of creating “deniable assets” to shield the PLO from the reper-cussions of its most reprehensible acts. In the early 1970s, Arafat created a special terror squad, the Black September Organi-zation, to carry out the PLO’s most notori-ous deeds — but without any apparent ties to the PLO. Arafat would disavow them as renegades, even though they operated under his direction.

In 1973, Arafat’s Black September ter-rorists stormed the Saudi Arabian embas-sy in Khartoum, taking U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel, U.S. Charges d’Affaires George Moore, and Belgian diplomat Guy Eid hostage. The following day they brutally tortured and executed all three men. Arafat feigned innocence — and the U.S. govern-ment feigned belief in his innocence.

Deception of this sort is to be expected of a terrorist. However, far more repre-

through successive u.S. administrations, as Arafat and the pLo were elevated to new heights of respectability, the secrecy surrounding Arafat’s guilt in the khartoum murders was maintained. It was not until 33 years later that the truth was finally admitted.

Zakaria Zubeidi, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades leader in the West Bank, is carried by supporters during a 2004 rally in support of PLO’s Mahmoud Abbas.

Zakaria Zubeidi and fellow al-Aqsa terrorists carry “moderate” Mahmoud Abbas on their shoulders in a 2004 West Bank rally.

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hensible and shocking is the fact that the U.S. government and other Western gov-ernments gave credence to this charade for decades, even though they had proof it was a lie. In the case of the Khartoum operation, for example, we had ironclad proof that Arafat had ordered the murder of our officials.

For years, James J. Welsh, a National Security Agency analyst, had been trying to force this fact into the open. Welsh had been the NSA’s Palestinian analyst who intercepted Arafat’s voice transmission specifically ordering the execution after the hostage takeover. However, apparently under the orders of Henry Kissinger, then President Nixon’s National Security Ad-viser (and soon to be secretary of state), the existence of the tapes and transcripts of Arafat’s order were kept secret.

Through successive U.S. administra-tions, as Arafat and the PLO were elevat-ed to new heights of respectability, the secrecy surrounding Arafat’s guilt in the Khartoum murders was maintained. It was not until 33 years later that the truth was finally admitted.

Truth About PLO/Fatah RevealedIn May 2006 — two years after Arafat’s death — a declassified document concern-ing the kidnapping/murder was posted, unannounced, on the State Department website. The document, a summary of the terrorist event, acknowledges that the Khar-toum operation “was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal

approval of Yasir Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the head of Fatah.” The report also notes that “Fatah representatives based in Khartoum participated in the attack, using a Fatah vehicle to transport the terrorists to the Saudi Arabian embassy.” It goes on to state that after the terrorists “had received orders from Fatah headquarters in Beirut, they killed the two United States officials and the Belgian Charge.”

According to a 1975 U.S. government-commissioned Rand Corporation report on the attack, Arafat personally gave the order to execute the Americans via a

shortwave radio transmission from Beirut to Khartoum. After the murders had been completed, Arafat instructed his men:

Your mission is ended. Release Saudi and Jordanian diplomats. Submit in courage to Sudanese authorities to explain your just cause to [the] great Sudanese Arab masses and interna-tional opinion. We are with you on the same road.

Mahmoud Abbas almost certainly was also personally involved in the attack. Abbas, according to a number of credible sources,

Allies, Not EnemiesWhile Hamas and the Arafat/Abbas-led PLO often have engaged in bitter rivalry,

they also have been allies in joint terror operations. On December 14, 2004, for instance, the Abbas/PLO-controlled Voice of Palestine (VOP) radio proclaimed that the bombing and shooting attack the previous day, which had killed several Israelis at a border crossing checkpoint, had been a joint Hamas-Fatah operation. VOP regularly praises Hamas suicide bombers as “heroic martyrs.” Many PLO/Fatah terrorists, includ-ing members of Abbas’ elite Force 17, are also members of Hamas units.

In 2005, Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas journeyed to Damascus, Syria, where he met with Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal. He has been in negotiations with Meshaal ever since, trying to arrange a Fatah/Hamas “unity” government for Palestine.

In 2007, Hamas spokesman Abu Abdullah confidently stated that U.S. weapons given to Fatah will eventually end up in the hands of Hamas fighters, telling Aaron Klein: “These American weapons will be one day the property of all the Palestinian people and its resistance, including Hamas.” “The US gives weapons to Fatah during internal Palestinian clashes, but one day when we go back to carrying out operations together, these (weapons) will be shared.” n

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False peace: Israeli prime Minister Yitzhazk Rabin, president Clinton, and pLo Chairman Yassir Arafat at the signing of the 1993 peace accord between Israel and the pLo.

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was in charge of financing the much more well-known terror operation of the previ-ous year, the Black September attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics, in which 11 Israeli athletes were murdered before a worldwide audience. Arafat feigned in-nocence in this action as well. However, according to Abu Daoud, the Black Sep-tember commander who led the Munich operation, the entire attack was planned and blessed by Arafat. And Abbas, in ad-dition to arranging the finances for the operation, joined Arafat in kissing Abu Daoud and wishing him luck on the ter-rorist attack.

Mahmoud Abbas continues the same deception today, with the active conniv-ance of our government officials. Sec-retary of State Condoleezza Rice in her testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on October 24, 2007, stated: “We will be seeking funds to sup-port the government of … Mahmoud Abbas because we believe, as I said, that is the best chance for a moderate Palestin-ian government.”

Moderate? In 2004, Abbas openly ad-mitted that the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are part of PLO/Fatah, and his Brigades commanders are some of the most notori-ous terrorist leaders and recruiters of sui-cide bombers.

On November 14, 2006, Ahmed Hales Abu Maher, the secretary of PLO/Fatah in Gaza, declared on the Abbas-controlled Palestinian Authority TV:

Oh warrior brothers, this is a na-tion that will never be broken, it is a revolution that will never be de-feated. This is a nation that gives an example every day that is imitated across the world. We gave the world the children of the RPG [Rocket Pro-pelled Grenades], we gave the world the children stone [-throwers], and we gave the world the male and fe-male Martyrdom-seekers [suicide bombers].

Zecharias Zubeidi, commander of the Martyrs Brigades in Yaabid and Jenin, is especially proud of the newly paved main street in Yaa-bid, paid for with $402,000 from the U.S. foreign-aid program. That street has been renamed in honor of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to show, says Zubeidi, that “Saddam Hussein is still alive.” Mahmoud Abbas has made a point of publicly embracing Zubeidi and cam-paigning with him on the streets of Jenin. And he has made sure that Zebeidi and other Brigades commanders — such as Abu Yousuf, Ala Senakreh, Nasser Abu Aziz — are provided with the best weapons and training the U.S. can provide.

In the late 1990s, the Clinton administration began providing

military assistance and training to Ara-fat’s various “police” and “security” units. CIA, FBI, and U.S. military personnel were given the task of providing Arafat’s forces with advanced training in weapons, tactics, intelligence, counterintelligence, communications, and other skills. Clin-ton’s CIA director George Tenet began bringing squads of PLO snipers to Vir-ginia to receive instruction in advanced marksmanship. Over the past few years, the Bush administration has dramatically escalated the provision of U.S. armaments and military training, with thousands of automatic rifles and sniper rifles and mil-lions of rounds of ammunition going to the PLO.

On May 23, 2007, Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, the Bush administration’s Security Coordinator for Palestine, testi-fied before a House subcommittee on the supposed need to fund President Abbas’ “security forces,” a euphemism for the collection of terrorist thugs from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Islamic Jihad, Force 17, and various other PLO/Fatah militias. “I am committed personally and professionally,” said Gen. Dayton, “to putting the $59 million authorized to me by the Congress to the uses you intended with the Presidential Guard … and the Office of National Security under Presi-dent Abbas. We must remain mindful of the dangerous challenges facing Abbas’s security forces, and continue to encour-

President Bush walks with palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas at the Muqata, the pLo’s infamous headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah on January 10, 2008.

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age our European and Arab partners to complement our efforts with their own assistance.”

The arming and training of the Abbas-led forces has been sold to the American public as necessary to prevent a takeover by the supposedly more radical Hamas forces. However, as terrorism expert Ra-chel Ehrenfeld emphatically notes, there’s virtually “no difference” between Hamas and our Arafat/Abbas PLO “peace part-ners.” Dr. Ehrenfeld, the author of Nar-co-Terrorism and Funding Evil, told The New AmericAN: “Both [Hamas and Fatah] carry out suicide bombings, murder, kid-napping, assassination, rocket attacks on civilian neighborhoods, extortion, drug trafficking — you name it. They both hate Israel and the United States and are com-mitted to our destruction. Show me the dif-ference [between them].”

In Schmoozing With Terrorists, Aaron Klein has al-Aqsa Brigades commander Abu Yousuf explain in his own words how he and his men have put their U.S. training to use. “All the methods and techniques that we studied in these trainings, we ap-plied them against the Israelis,” Yousuf boasted to Klein in an interview. Yousuf continued:

We sniped at Israeli settlers and sol-diers. We broke into settlements and Israeli army bases and posts. We col-lected information on the movements

of soldiers and settlers. We collected information about the best timing to infiltrate our bombers inside Israel. We used weapons and we produced explosives, and of course the train-ings we received from the Americans and the Europeans were a great help to the resistance.

“I do not think,” said Yousuf, “that the operations of the Palestinian resistance would have been so successful and would have killed more than 1,000 Israelis since 2000 and defeated the Israelis in Gaza without these [American] trainings.”

Very likely, Yousuf or some of his U.S.-trained Fatah colleagues were responsible for the 2003 murder of U.S. embassy em-ployees John Branchizio, Mark Parson, and John Linde, Jr. Their vehicle was de-stroyed by a road bomb as they journeyed to Gaza to interview Palestinian students for Fullbright scholarships in the United States. The Palestinian Authority (PA) stated soon after the blast that it knew the

identities of the bombers and would bring them to justice, but it never has done so. In fact, the man appointed by the PA to investigate the crime, Rashid Abu Shabak, is himself a longtime terrorist. Dr. Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of the Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center Director, has charged that it is Abu Shabak himself who should be considered the top suspect for mastermind of the bombing. Of course, based on Khartoum embassy experience, and the dissembling and cover-up we have seen so far in this case, we can expect our government to cover up any evidence that might implicate our “essential ally” Mah-moud Abbas in this vicious crime.

Tragically, as the next article (page 18) shows, the PLO is not the only terrorist organization our tax dollars are support-ing. From the West Bank and Gaza to Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Alba-nia, and Pakistan, the story is the same. How many American lives will we allow to be sacrificed to blowback from these treacherous policies of aiding and abet-ting our enemies? n

U.S.-armed terrorists of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades sporting American M16s (including newer versions than supplied to our soldiers in iraq) in the West Bank city of Nablus, November 30, 2007.

EXTRA COPIES AVAILABLEAdditional copies of this issue of

The New AmericAN are available at quantity-discount prices. To order, visit www.thenewamerican.com/marketplace/ or see the card between pages 38-39.

➧

Unity in terror: Mahmoud Abbas shakes hands with Palestinian Prime Minister ismail Haniyeh as Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal (center) looks on. The rival Palestinian leaders met in Mecca in February 2007 to discuss a Hamas-PLO coalition government.

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by William F. Jasper

Long before 9/11, Osama bin Laden’s terrorist activities around the world were being cited as a classic case

of “blowback.” Quite obviously, the CIA’s support for bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other radical Islamists in Afghanistan in the 1980s, ostensibly to counter the So-viets, had indeed helped spawn a virulently anti-American global terror network that was returning to haunt us.

Unfortunately, aiding al-Qaeda is far from the only “mistake” of this sort to be made by our government. In fact, the top policymakers at the State Department and National Security Council — in both Re-publican and Democratic administrations — seem to have a perverse proclivity for backing some of the most brutal terrorist organizations and terror-sponsoring re-gimes, time after time after time.

Here are a few disturbing examples of the absurd and indefensible “war on ter-ror” policies that are aiding our enemies and undermining our security — and that

are certain to bring a torrent of deadly blowback to America for years, if not de-cades, to come.

• Kosovo: In Kosovo, President Bush has continued the Clinton policy of supporting Hashim Thaci, the Islamo-Leninist leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) ter-rorists. Thaci came to power in this prov-ince of Serbia as a result of our military in-tervention on behalf of the KLA. For years now, the KLA has been carrying out a bru-tal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Orthodox Christians who still live in Ko-sovo. Thaci is also the head of the Drenica Group of the fearsome Albanian mafia. Under his leadership, hundreds of Christian churches and monasteries, many dating to Medieval times, have been desecrated and destroyed. Christians have been murdered, robbed, persecuted, and driven out. Kosovo, the cradle of Serbia’s Orthodox Christian-ity, has been transformed into a Marxist-Is-lamic thugocracy. President Bush’s recog-nition of Kosovo’s claim of independence in February of this year will accelerate the radical Islamification of Europe.

• Albania: The Bush administration is intensifying the love affair begun by Presi-dent Clinton and Secretary Albright with the Albanian regime of Sali Berisha. Dur-ing his historic trip to Albania in 2007 (the first by a U.S. president), President Bush praised Albania as “a model of religious tolerance” and congratulated Berisha for his desire “to fight corruption.” Religious tolerance? Virtually all non-Muslims have been driven out of Albania under Berisha, who is broadly recognized as one of the most corrupt rulers in Europe. As presi-dent of Albania from 1992-1997, Berisha welcomed Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda cadres into Albania. Now the coun-try’s prime minister, Berisha is the benefi-ciary of U.S. and NATO assistance, even as he continues to back Islamic terrorists in neighboring Bosnia and Kosovo.

• Iraq: The U.S. government has sacri-ficed the lives of thousands of American troops, along with hundreds of billions of dollars, to back the government of Nouri al-Maliki. But the Maliki government is closely allied with Iran — which, the ad-

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Backing terrorists and terror regimes has come back to haunt us.

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Dechristianization: Hundreds of churches like the one pictured to the left in the town of Djakovica have been destroyed and the Christian population driven out of Kosovo by the U.S.-supported KLA.

“Tolerant” ally? President Bush is shown above promoting dictatorial Prime Minister Sali Berisha during a June 2007 visit to Tirana, Albania.A

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ministration tells us, is our deadly enemy. In Iraq’s violent inter-sectarian and intra-sectarian violence, the administration is backing “good” Sunni and Shia factions, which have terrorist pedigrees equally as vulgar as those of the “bad” Sunni and Shia factions we are opposing. Hence we find the U.S. military arming and train-ing the Iranian-backed Badr Brigades and other forces of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). In fact, our underpaid soldiers are now tasked with literally handing out truck-loads of cash in stacks of hundred dol-lar bills to Iraqi militia members, many of whom are members of (or allies of) al-Qaeda and other groups that are kill-ing our troops. In a February 19, 2008 article entitled “Money Day in Baghdad,” U.S. News & World Report correspon-dent Alex Kingsbury describes the U.S. “micro grants” program, in which a U.S. Army captain with a backpack jammed full with $110,000 in hundred dollar bills hands out packets of $2,500 to (supposedly) worthy recipients.

That, of course, represents but a molecule compared to the bil-lions of dollars that were flown into Baghdad on C-130s in the first couple years of the war; liter-ally hundreds of tons of hundred dollar bills stacked and shrink-wrapped on pallets — that disap-peared without any accounting. According to an investigation last year by the House Commit-tee on Government Reform and Oversight, the total of “lost” cash may be more than $12 billion. But that’s just part of the price of placing “moderates” in Iraq’s government, right? Moderates like terrorist Member of Parlia-ment Jamal Jaafar Mohammed, who was convicted of helping plan the 1983 suicide bombing of the U.S. embassy in Kuwait. Or Abdul Aziz al-Halim, a leader of both the radical SCIRI mul-lahs and the United Iraqi Alli-ance, which dominates the Ma-liki government. Jamal Jaafar Mohammed and Abdul Azziz al-Hakim are two of Iran’s most ardent supporters in the Maliki regime.

It was precisely these same kinds of interventionist policies (by the usual coterie of policy elites at the State Department, the National Security Council, and the CIA) during the 1980s that produced the Saddam Hus-sein threat. Saddam, we were told way back then — against all evidence to the contrary — was going to be our great ally against revolutionary Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. Billions of dollars in military, technical, and financial aid were showered on “ally” Saddam by the “Bush 41” foreign-policy team during the Reagan-Bush years.

We know, of course, what that toxic al-liance with Saddam ultimately begat: not one, but two major wars in Iraq — to make the world safe from Saddam.

It was during that same period that the same omniscient brain trust devised the grand strategy that produced the al-Qaeda

threat. With the ostensible object of check-ing the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan, our CIA-State Department went shopping for Mujahedeen allies. But instead of support-ing the proven pro-American, anti-com-munist forces under Younas Khalis, Abdul Haq, and Abdul Qadir, they lavished aid instead on the most virulently anti-Ameri-can Muslims, such as Gulbadin Hekmatyar (a cutthroat warlord who killed more of his fellow Afghans than he did Soviets), and the al-Qaeda Arabs under the command

of the fanatical Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

However, even during the late 1990s, after the Clinton State De-partment had declared al-Qaeda to be a terrorist organization, our CIA continued knowingly to arm, train, and finance al-Qaeda’s most violent subcontractors in Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo, and Macedo-nia, even as those open bin Laden allies carried out terrible atroci-ties and built their global terror networks. Incredibly, the Bush administration has continued arming and supporting the same sadistic thugs to this day.

Countless victims in these lands have already experienced the awful reality of blowback re-sulting from the fateful decisions of our government to side with the terrorists. On September 11, 2001, America received a bitter lesson in how terrible blowback can be, as terrorists who had once been hailed as our allies brought death and destruction to our shores. How many more deadly attacks will be unleashed upon us in the future by terror-ists whom our government today supports as allies? n

the top policymakers in both Republican and Democratic administrations seem to have a perverse proclivity for backing some of the most brutal terrorist organizations and terror-sponsoring regimes, time after time after time.

Troubling ties: Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (left) shakes hands with u.S.-backed Iraqi prime Minister nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad on March 2, 2008.

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19TNA • APRIL 28, 2008

House Holds rare Secret Session

by Alex Newman

The House of Representatives held a secret session on March 13 for only the sixth time since 1812.

After being sworn to silence at the request of Republican leadership, members sup-posedly discussed information relating to revisions to the controversial Foreign In-telligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for an hour behind closed doors.

Several representatives rose to express alarm when the first closed session in almost 25 years was proposed, but they eventually withdrew their objections so it could proceed.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) said, “It raises questions about the Constitution of the United States,” before noting that he knew the House had the power to make its own rules and that he would not be attending the session. “We ought to be proceeding with the utmost

caution in going into this direction.”Kucinich also told the House that some

members felt the country had drifted to-wards a “national security state” and that in his experience with secret committee meetings, the information was of “at best dubious value” and sometimes untrue or misleading.

He said the secret session of Congress probably had more to do with the ad-ministration’s efforts to pass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act than “with any compelling new information about national security.”

If the secret House session was about the president trying to ram his changes about FISA through Congress, his attempt seems not to have been fully successful. A mea-sure backed by Democrats was approved by the House 213 to 197 the day after the session despite supposed opposition from President Bush and Republican senators. If adopted by the Senate and signed into law, the new version would not offer the contested retroactive immunity for tele-communication companies that illegally helped gather information about Ameri-

cans without a warrant. Experts say a veto is likely if the legislation makes it to the president’s desk because he insists on pro-tecting the telecom companies, which he claims is vital for national security. “Mem-bers of the House should not be deceived into thinking that voting for this unaccept-able legislation would somehow move the process along,” Bush warned in a press conference.

He also claims the delay in approving his FISA demands is hampering anti-terrorist efforts, but the NSA already has broad surveillance powers: it can monitor any source for 72 hours by claiming it is trying to obtain a warrant, and it doesn’t need permission to monitor foreigners. Many analysts believe Bush is simply hoping to protect companies that may have violated the law, so they will be willing to violate it in the future.

The companies in question complained about not being able to defend themselves because of the administration’s “state se-crets” proclamations. So, the supposed “compromise legislation” agreed to by the House replaced immunity with anoth-er provision: evidence can be made secret while a judge conducts proceedings with-out allowing the plaintiff to be present. The judge could then relate unclassified material to the plaintiff if necessary.

Bush opposes other parts of the House bill as well. For example, before surveil-lance begins approval by a special court would be required, except in “emergency” cases. Another provision would establish an independent commission to monitor the administration’s surveillance activities.

Some experts say the House bill is for the most part very similar to the Senate’s, but Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) has objected to various provisions in the House’s bill, and he could prove to be an important obstacle.

What needed to be kept secret? Nobody can know for sure except those present, but the executive branch gives Congress secret information on a routine basis. The difference is that it’s usually done in a closed hearing, not a closed session of the House. n

Alex Newman is the president of Liberty Sentinel

Media, Inc. and the executive editor of the Liberty

Sentinel of North Central Florida.

President Bush makes a statement on FiSA, March 13, 2008.

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CONGRESS

by Charles Scaliger

I t is difficult to assign a starting point to the ongoing economic crisis that, according to popular wisdom, origi-

nated with risky mortgage lending. Since the creation of the Federal Reserve sys-

tem in 1913, market uncertainty, with the constant cycle of boom and bust spurred by modern banking practices, has been un-relenting. The Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, has unlimited and unchecked power to create as much (or as little) money as it wants. Because this money is not backed by any fixed standard like gold or silver, the relative health of the finan-

cial markets and, by extension, the entire economy, for almost a hundred years, has been at the whim of the secretive authori-ties within the Fed, who act in collusion with the Treasury Department, large mon-ey-center banks, and certain privileged securities dealers.

Now yet another bust is upon us, trig-gered, at least in the short term, by several years of frenetic malinvestment in high-risk mortgages. By artificially lowering interest rates far below where the free market would tend to set them, the Fed-eral Reserve created unnaturally lax credit markets. As a result, bankers and others participating in the huge U.S. housing mortgage industry were willing to lend to buyers who, in rational market conditions, would not have qualified for mortgages, or who might have qualified under much more stringent terms of repayment.

The Federal Reserve’s activities do not tell the entire story, though. Besides easy credit and the inevitable inflation it engen-ders, the mortgage market has long been distorted by federal government involve-ment in the home loan industry, subsidiz-ing loans at taxpayer expense and helping to shield lenders from the consequences of excessive risk. Such conditions inevi-tably create what economists call “moral hazard,” that is, the tendency for people — in this case, lenders and investors — to behave less responsibly because they know they will be shielded from the full consequences of bad decisions.

The activities of the Federal Reserve, coupled with the moral hazard created by government regulatory and safety nets, have now combined to give us a perfect fi-nancial storm — by no means the first in modern American history but, if former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan is right, the most severe since World War II. But beyond the market fluctuations, media chatter, and dire economic forecasts, the real story — the one that will have consequences long after the current crisis has abated — is the re-sponse of the federal government itself. By Charles Scaliger is a teacher and freelance writer.

Banking behemoth: The J.P. Morgan Chase headquarters (center) in New York now seems closer than ever to Bear Stearns (left). in a deal brokered by the Fed, J.P. Morgan Chase will buy Bear Stearns for pennies on the dollar with the help of a $29 billion Fed-backed loan.

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The looming financial crisis has set the stage for giving the Fed broad powers over not just banking but the entire financial sector.

The Money Trust’s

Next Move

every indication, both the Federal Reserve and the Bush administration are determined to exploit the financial and economic tur-moil to impose the broadest set of new con-trols on America’s already tightly regulated economy since the 1930s.

Regulatory TsunamiThe first inkling of the coming regula-tory tsunami was last December, when the Federal Reserve announced the creation of a brand-new facility, the Term Lend-ing Facility, to auction “term funds” (i.e., short-term loans of money created by the Fed) to banks at bimonthly auctions. This little-heralded event was the beginning of a series of initiatives by the Fed to, in effect, expand its options for money cre-ation, increasing its power over the money markets in the bargain. The following three months saw a veritable blizzard of Fed ac-tivity, ranging from frequent and extraor-dinarily large cuts in “interest rates” (which technically means the “federal funds rate,” the rate at which banks loan funds to one another, usually overnight) to further innovations in credit creation.

Two actions in March were especially significant, because they greatly enhanced the degree of Fed involvement with non-bank financial organizations — an omen of things to come, as events are turning out.

On March 11, the Fed freed up $200 billion of its reserve of treasury securities, to be auctioned directly to so-called “primary dealers” (privileged investment banks that are al-lowed to buy and sell securities from the Fed through its weekly open-market operations). These dealers were to be permitted to pledge mortgage-backed se-curities as collateral for these 28-day loans.

A few days later, the Fed followed up with a truly remarkable change in policy: for the first time since the 1930s, the Fed-eral Reserve would loan money to invest-ment banks through the “discount win-dow,” the avenue of credit traditionally reserved for commercial banks as a loan source of last resort. Use of the discount window is an old device for managing the money supply, but it has become so stig-matized among commercial banks that the Fed has been unable to make much use of it during the current crisis — until now. Investment banks, unconcerned with appearances, have rushed to take advantage of this newest source of cheap, direct credit, borrowing tens of billions of dollars daily during the second week alone of the new program. Although the Fed, per its usual practices, has been se-cretive about the new program, keeping confidential the names of firms involved,

Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and Morgan Stanley have all “begun to test the new lending mechanism,” according to an AP report.

In effect, the Federal Reserve, over the past several months, has opened one money spigot after another to try to keep the reservoir full — but the dam continues to crumble. In the midst of the March mad-ness, one of America’s oldest and most powerful investment banks, Bear Stearns, went into free-fall, sparking near panic in markets worldwide. In response, the Fed embarked on yet another new adventure — the bailout of an investment bank deemed too big to fail. What Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues actually did was broker an emergency backroom deal with JP Morgan Chase & Co., whereby the New York banking behemoth would buy up Bear Stearns for pennies on the dollar, with the help of an emergency loan from the Fed. The amount of the loan, $29 bil-lion, would be covered by the Fed if JP Morgan Chase failed to recoup its money, meaning that, yet again, American tax-payers would be shaken down for another corporate bailout if the deal soured. But if the deal soars, JP Morgan Chase & Co., not the American taxpayers, would reap the profits.

But the consequences of the Bear Stearns bailout and recent decisions by the Fed to change its relationship with invest-ment banks have set the stage for a regu-

What Secretary paulson is proposing is nothing less than turning the Federal Reserve into a Department of homeland Security for financial activities, with the same sorts of inevitable abuses, controls, and institutional incompetence as the latter organization.

The stock market is considered a beneficiary of current Fed policy to lower interest rates. But artificially low interest rates cause bad spending and investment decisions that harm the economy.

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latory revolution with far-reaching conse-quences, one that every American holding a mortgage, investing in stocks and bonds, or enjoying the protection of any kind of insurance should be aware of.

In deciding to break with 75 years of precedent and reinvent itself as the lender of last resort for major investment firms in addition to traditional banks, the Fed has crossed the Rubicon, according to a Washington Post article in late March. “This will redefine the Fed’s role,” fi-nance professor and Wall Street historian Charles Geisst told the Post. “We have to realize that central banking now takes into its orbit everything in the financial system in one way or another. Whether we like it or not, they’ve recreated the financial universe.” For one thing, the Post pointed out, the Fed’s decision to bail out a major investment bank will undoubtedly create yet more moral hazard, encouraging large firms to take greater risks in the future, secure in the belief that the Fed will step in to protect them from the full brunt of their follies.

Even more ominously, the U.S. Trea-sury Department, as if on cue, unveiled on the last day of March a sweeping new proposal to overhaul federal oversight of every sector of the financial markets, from mortgage companies to insurance broker-ages to investment firms large and small. It need hardly be said that “sweeping” is synonymous with “unconstitutional”; the Bush administration’s new plan, though unlikely to be implemented in full right away, contemplates near-total federal con-trol over every aspect of American finan-cial activity, usefully condensed into three gigantic regulatory authorities.

The Federal Reserve on SteroidsChief among these new authorities, the “Market Stability Regulator,” will be the Federal Reserve itself, remade into a central bank-cum-federal regulatory bureaucracy, the worst new idea to come out of Washington in a very long time. The Federal Reserve as Market Stability Regulator, says the Treasury report sum-mary, “would have the responsibility and authority to gather appropriate informa-tion, disclose information, collaborate with other regulators on rule-writing, and take corrective actions when necessary to ensure financial market stability.” This of

an organization whose inner workings are so secretive that it has never even been formally audited by Congress, is not part of any system of checks and balances, and has no accountability to the Ameri-can public.

Also contemplated in the Treasury re-port are a “Prudential Regulator,” a yet-unnamed regulatory behemoth in com-plete charge of all “firms with federal guarantees,” and the “Business Conduct Regulator,” which would “monitor busi-ness conduct regulations across all types of financial firms,” including “key aspects of consumer protection such as rule-writ-ing for disclosures, business practices, and chartering/licensing.”

In announcing the Treasury’s so-called “Blueprint for Financial Reform,” Trea-sury Secretary Henry Paulson preemptive-ly fended off those who would criticize the blueprint for advocating more regulation by claiming they were “over-simplifying this critical and inevitable debate.” “The Blueprint,” he said, presumably with a straight face, “is about structure and re-sponsibilities — not the regulations that each [new] entity would write.”

Secretary Paulson went on to describe a brave new world where a new Federal Reserve writ large will “collect informa-

tion from commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, commodity pool operators” and “will have broad powers and the necessary correc-tive authorities to deal with deficiencies that pose threats to our financial stabil-ity.” This new, steroid-enhanced Fed will, in the Wonderland rhetoric of Secretary Paulson, have “broad powers” and “cor-rective authorities” (note the plural!) over the entire financial sector, as well as the means to snoop on any financial activity anywhere — yet somehow this will not re-quire exponential growth both in the regu-latory burden and the institutional zealotry to enforce it.

What Paulson is proposing is nothing less than turning the Federal Reserve into a Department of Homeland Security for financial activities, with the same sorts of inevitable abuses, controls, and institu-tional incompetence as the latter organi-zation. As Secretary Paulson was candid enough to admit, “More effective regula-tion [cannot] prevent the periods of finan-cial market stress that seem to occur every five to ten years.” But then, solving market woes is not the point; establishing greater control is the real objective.

Interestingly, Secretary Paulson also indicated that the planning for this new

Treasury Secretary henry paulson proposes giving the Fed “broad powers” and “corrective authorities” over the entire financial sector, as well as the means to snoop on any financial activity anywhere.

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THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008 23

blueprint has been in the works since at least March of 2007, well before the fi-nancial crisis broke. The blueprint was, according to the Treasury Department’s Fact Sheet, the product of unnamed “industry leaders and policymakers” planning to overhaul our “outdated fi-nancial regulatory network.” And with the ongoing financial turmoil, “market conditions today provide a pertinent backdrop for this study’s release,” the Fact Sheet wryly notes.

Brave New Financial SocialismThus we have been treated, over the past few months, to a series of well-planned, possibly coordinated events preparing the way for a radical new foray into financial socialism. After a series of Federal Reserve actions designed to set new precedents for how and with whom the Fed does business, the Treasury De-partment announced a grand scheme that proposes to make permanent all of the new expansions of Fed authority, and a whole lot more besides. As if on cue, liberal members of Congress, like Senator Charles Schumer, have already criticized the Treasury’s new plan as not going far enough. The legislative outcome, therefore, is likely to trans-form America’s entire financial system into a virtual arm of the government, stifling further innovation, squelching risk, and limiting growth.

In the long run, the economic effect of such a revolution would be devas-tating: no more double-digit returns on investments, for example, or financial privacy. Buying insurance or a mort-gage of any description would become as irksome as paying federal income taxes. Asset growth of all kinds would stagnate as the risk-free environment of total financial socialism, long envis-aged by America’s elites, slowly but surely suffocated our once-vibrant, risk-dependent free-market system.

Nor is the story finished. As finan-cial uncertainty continues in the weeks and months ahead, expect further inno-vation on the part of Bernanke’s Fed, and further calls for more government controls. Only principled, concerted, well-publicized resistance will stave off Bernanke and Paulson’s financial dystopia. n

The Bush administration wants us to spend our way out of recession, but that won’t benefit the national economy any more than it would improve our household budget.

Don’t spend Money;Save It

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Somehow it always comes down to economics. In good times, the poli-ticians play and play, and everyone

figures that there is nothing that could go wrong. Suddenly we are all looking at the reality of recession. Investment is falling. The externals are even scarier: dollar and stocks skidding, gold and other prices (particularly producer prices) rising. But what tipped the psychological scales is the statistic no one has cared much about in many years: unemployment.

The actual rate is very low by any his-torical standard: 5 percent. What matters here is the direction of change. It jumped

from 4.7 percent. In the old days, unem-ployment rates of 5 percent and 6 percent were considered “full employment” in the Keynesian economic models — socialist-inspired economics that call for govern-ment intervention in markets to “control” the economy. If government attempted to push employment below that level (and it is absurd to think that anyone in Washing-ton can control the economy in that way), it would risk setting off inflation, or so it was believed.

Cause and EffectIf the actual unemployment rate is low, what is behind this wave of pessimism? All data in the postwar period of American

Bloated budget: Federal spending has soared during George W. Bush’s presidency, and the excessive spending has fueled the credit crisis as well as the creation of money out of thin air.

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ECONOMY ECONOMY

economic history consistently show that an increase in the rate has coincided with the onset of recession. However, keep in mind that the link between rising unemployment and recession is largely true by definition only. In other words, those charged with defining what is and what isn’t a recession put a huge weight on rising unemploy-ment. So, of course, it appears that weak labor markets are what push an economy into recession.

This is sheer fallacy, and a particularly dangerous one. Rising unemployment is a symptom of a recession, not its cause — just as rising prices are a symptom but not a cause of inflation. If the critical problem of recession is unemployment, policymak-ers are tempted to address this one area to the exclusion of everything else.

Everyone in Washington is talking about a “fiscal stimulus” to counter this trend. Perhaps if Bush and Congress had been famed penny pinchers, you could see how a stimulus would make some sense on the surface in any case. But it is hard to imagine a more fiscally profligate regime than the Bush administration.

The view that unemployment was caus-ing recession was one of the great errors of the New Deal and the Great Depression. The government looted the private sector and transferred it to visible jobs programs. It forced business to maintain high wages precisely when the market was attempt-ing to equilibrate them downward. Firms were pressured, unions enabled, and cut-ting wages could even be illegal under the fascist-inspired National Recovery Administration of FDR. It increased the costs of hiring just when the costs needed to be lower.

Writing in 1931, in his book Causes of the Economic Crisis, Ludwig von Mises explained that there would be no involuntary un-employment in a free market. There will always be some unemployment in a market in the same way that there are houses that are empty and not selling and resources that are not being used for production. This isn’t due to market failure but to in-dividuals who have the freedom to lower their asking price, provided they are permitted by policy to do so and businesses are free to negoti-ate wages freely.

What, then, is the solu-tion to unemployment? As Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1931, “The determination of wage rates must become free once again. The forma-tion of wage rates should be hampered neither by the clubs of striking pickets nor by government’s apparatus of force. Only if the determination of wage rates is free, will they be able to fulfill their function of bringing demand and supply into balance on the labor market.”

There is an error even more fundamen-tal than seeking an interventionist solution to the problem of unemployment. It is the attempt to seek a solution to the recession itself, as if it were the critical problem. Writing all throughout the 1930s, both Mises and F.A. Hayek tried to explain that the recession itself served a market pur-pose, in the same way a correction to an inflated stock market serves a purpose. It is working to re-coordinate economic structures that have grown seriously out of balance.

In other words, they urged that we look back before the recession, to the good old days of economic boom, and realize the prosperity of the past was a partial illusion. The recession is the way that the economy tells the truth about the fundamentals. The illusion itself is caused by errors in mon-etary policy. Interest rates are driven down by policymakers at the Fed, and this causes

widespread errors in the investment sector. These investments are unsustainable over the long term. The recession is the time of cleansing out errors and reestablishing economic soundness.

The housing boom and bust here is only a symptom of a wider problem. If the economy has indeed fallen into recession, we can know with certainty that recession is precisely what the economy needs the most. It is the equivalent of the drunk who needs time on the wagon.

The rap on the Austrian School of eco-nomics, which espouses that government intervention into markets always has nega-tive consequences, is that they counseled a do-nothing policy on the Depression dur-ing the 1930s. That is not true. There are many things that government can do but they all amount to doing less, which is a positive action of sorts. It must not attempt to prop up and raise wages. It must stop taxing business so heavily and raising the costs of investment. It must cut regulations that are hampering recovery. It can cut spending dramatically as a way of return-

Economic expansion is based not on spending but on capital expansion rooted in savings. the only path to future prosperity is delaying current consumption in favor of future investment.

25THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008

ing resources to the private sector where they can do some good.

What government cannot do without causing ever more problems is take posi-tive action against symptoms, such as fall-ing stocks prices, rising unemployment, business failures, and falling incomes. This is precisely what caused the Great Depression to get its name instead of being called what it might have been called: the recession of 1929-1931.

There is another perennial target as well: tightfisted consumers. After 9/11, Bush told everyone to go out and spend money so the economy could avoid reces-sion. Even then, there was a confusion about whether he was right or wrong. Some sensible voices pointed out that eco-nomic expansion is based not on spending but on capital expansion rooted in savings.

That is to say, the only path to future prosperity is delay-ing current consumption in favor of future investment.

Household BudgetOne only needs to think of the household budget here to see the point. If you are planning for the future for your family, what is the wis-est course? Does one go into debt as much as possible, buy

the largest house and the biggest car, throw lavish parties, and hand out all existing liq-uid funds to friends and strangers? Based on the view that consumption is the way to avoid economic problems, this would indeed be the right course.

But this also defies everything we know about family finance. The path to a secure prosperity is delaying consumption. One should spend as little as possible and save as much as possible for the future, and let that money be used in the service of in-vestments that yield a solid rate of return. Those who have chosen a different path now see the folly: they are being burned in the soft housing market, for example.

The lesson is also true for the nation at large, because the logic doesn’t magically change when moving from the family budget to the national stage. Just because

something involves “macroeconomics” doesn’t mean that we should throw out all good sense.

In a recession or a crisis, the right ap-proach for individuals is to save. So too for the national economy. A looming recession will prompt a pullback in consumer spending as a rational response to the perception of economic troubles. This action does not cause the economy to fall into recession any more than more spend-ing can save it from re-cession. The downturn is a fact that cannot be avoided. We don’t

blame umbrellas for floods, and in the same way, we shouldn’t blame tightfisted consumers for recessions.

There is no question that this is what is happening. What is critical is to keep cause and effect in mind. The pullback on spending is not going to cause a recession. If we think about the long term, this is not a dangerous trend but a hopeful one. The more people pull back and save, the more the foundation is laid for a recovery after the current correction takes its course.

To see that requires that we take a long view. Government, however, seems inca-pable of seeing the long term, much less doing the right thing to prepare for it. Making matters worse, this is that dread-ed event called an election year. Prettying things up to make the economy palatable to voters is priority number one.

What does this mean? More monetary expansion. More government spending. The Bush administration is resorting to sending checks out to every American family with the proviso that the money has to be spent, not saved.

No doubt many people are thrilled by this. But look beneath the surface. Govern-ment has no money to spend on anything that it doesn’t extract from the pocket of you and me and the whole American pub-lic. This is easy enough to see concerning taxes. It is not so easy to see when the gov-ernment runs up debt that is guaranteed by the printing presses.

The monetary issue can be understood by an analogy to orange juice. The more water you add, the less substance it has. If you keep adding, eventually you come to the point in which you can no longer tell that it was ever orange juice. This is the same with money. If you print enough — literally or electronically through the credit markets — it will continue to lose value. If money grew on trees, it would be about as valuable as fall leaves.

Yes, government can increase consump-tion, but by doing so, it does nothing to care for the long term. The long-term health of a nation is not different from that of a household budget. Tough times require cutbacks and a beefing up of savings.

So let’s not demonize the consumer public for doing what it should be doing. It’s a good rule of thumb that when the government tells you to spend money, think again. n

A pullback in consumer spending does not cause the economy to fall into recession any more than more spending can save it from recession. the downturn cannot be avoided. We don’t blame umbrellas for floods, and we shouldn’t blame tightfisted consumers for recessions.

Rocket science? Hardly! To turn around our economy, we must insist that our governmental officials heed the same lessons about spending and savings we teach our children.

26 THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008

ECONOMY

Interview of Larry Pratt by John F. McManus

Larry Pratt is executive director of Gun Owners of America, a no-compromise pro-gun lobbying or-

ganization that supports the rights of gun owners guaranteed by the Second Amend-ment. He also hosts GAO’s weekly radio program Live Fire.

The New AmericAN: What’s the main goal of your organization?Larry Pratt: Gun Owners of America is organized to lobby Congress to focus on pro-Second Amendment legislation and actually to try and get what’s been put on the books taken off, as the federal govern-ment has no authority regulating guns.

TNA: How do you differ from other groups that are also doing this?

Pratt: I think we stand apart for perhaps two reasons in particular.

1) We do think that gun control really needs to be taken off the books. We don’t think it’s constitutional to make somebody prove his innocence before he exercises a right.

2) Beyond that, we think that politics is inherently confrontational. Confron-tational politics means you may or may not wish to participate, but you’re going to lose if you don’t, and you’d better get organized.

TNA: There are some who say firearms ownership is a collective right. Other peo-ple often say that they have their Second Amendment rights, and refer to the term “people” in that amendment. Isn’t it a God-given right protected by the Second Amendment?Pratt: The term “people” is some-

thing that you find in the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 9th, and 10th Amendments at least. When-ever the Constitution uses the term “peo-ple,” in the Bill of Rights, that’s actually a reference to individuals.

Also, in what was otherwise not a par-ticularly good decision that came down in the 19th century, the court ruled in Cruik-shank that rights do not originate from the government having established them, but that rights — such as the right to be armed as stated in the Second Amendment — predated the existence of the American Republic and its Constitution. All the Con-stitution is doing is observing their reality and endeavoring to protect rights, because that’s the way God made us.

TNA: Some argue against the right to keep a concealed weapon. Comment?Pratt: One of the things that we should point out is that every time that concealed carry is introduced in a state or is being considered for loosening up the laws to make it easier for people to carry in more

places, we hear an argument or we’re always warned with alarmist rhetoric that guns and people, guns and students, guns and schools, guns and churches, guns and whatever — fill in the blank — are so dangerous and this is going to lead to road rage, turning these places red with blood flowing from irresponsi-ble activity. It never happens.

In fact, what we find is that people who have concealed carry permits are the ones who commit the fewest crimes of any in the population — and this in-cludes police and ministers, for that matter. We should be en-couraging them to be carrying in churches so that they can re-

Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, answers questions about the Second Amendment, concealed-carry laws, and how best to argue for gun rights.

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spond the way the volunteer security detail of the church members in the New Life Church in Colorado Springs was able to respond and stop a killer, literally dead in his tracks, before he was able to kill what, if we judged by the ammunition he was carrying, would have been hundreds of people.

We have been working to encourage legislatures to back off of these “no-gun zones” because they are simply “criminal safe zones.”

TNA: When one analyzes who gets shot to death, often criminals kill other crimi-nals, and large numbers of criminals are killed each year by gun-wielding intended crime victims and so forth. It’s fairly rare for a responsible gun-wielding citizen to be killed by an attacker or to shoot an in-nocent bystander. Why do so many people have the misconception that a gun for self-defense is a bad idea?Pratt: The biggest single reason for peo-

ple failing to understand the effectiveness of individual gun ownership and individu-als carrying guns in reducing crime stems from the media, which filters out success-ful defensive gun uses.

I debated a man one time on television who said, “What you’re talking about and what John Lott talks about with all the studies he’s done means that more guns means less crime. Why we’ve just never seen anything like that in the media so it can’t be true.” He actually said that.

TNA: Are there any bad laws currently on the books that you are worried about?Pratt: We just lost a battle over substitut-ing a psychiatrist’s diagnosis for due process in a court of law. This specifi-cally has hammered veterans. Their diagnoses [of post-traumatic stress disorder and other disorders] trigger a loss of gun rights. Their diagnoses have been put into computers at the Veterans’ Administration and then sent over to the FBI to be added to the

Brady Instant Check List of people who can’t buy a gun. Hence we call it the “Veterans Disarmament Act.”

Veterans should not lose their right to keep and bear arms because of a psychiatric diag-nosis instead of a trip to court with due pro-cess. They should have

the ability to confront their accuser, the ability to have their attorney protect their rights throughout that whole process, and so forth. For veterans, that’s just been given up.

This is something that has the poten-tial to be broadened to people who have other diagnoses allegedly that would make them a possible danger to self and to others.

TNA: Do you have any numbers of the military that are being affected by this?Pratt: At present, 140,000 veterans have been disarmed and it’s increasing at the

rate of 1,000 per month. The debate, as the former deputy assistant secretary for pol-icy of the Veterans Administration Mike McClendon told us, is whether or not all veterans should be classified as having post traumatic stress disorder. So this is potentially huge.

TNA: In the wake of disasters, terrorist attacks, etc., are you fearful of how the au-thorities will react, of how they will treat us in that instance?Pratt: Disasters and emergencies are his-torically opportunities for government to aggrandize and grab power, usurp power,

[Ask somebody who is anti-gun], “Would you be willing to put a sign on your house that says ‘There are no guns in this house’”? Offer to give them that sign for free. I’ve yet to find anybody to take the sign.

— Larry Pratt

Saving lives: if it weren’t for an armed member of the New Life Church’s security detail, dozens, if not more, of innocent people could have perished.

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Disarming: Many thousands of veterans are returning home, only to be “diagnosed” with a disorder, and then, without due process, stripped of their right to self-defense.

and get power illegitimately. After Ka-trina, the Internet made a big difference in what followed.

There were at least two news clips put out on video over the Internet, and Gun Owners of America was able to capture those videos. You can see guns being con-fiscated from peaceful citizens in the af-termath of Katrina, after the rain, and even after the flood water was subsiding.

What the people were doing was guard-ing their properties so they wouldn’t be subject to looters coming through vacant homes. This was outrageous, to say the least.

Thanks to Louisiana Senator David Vitter and Representative, now Governor, Bobby Jindal, it’s now illegal for any fed-eral law-enforcement agent to grab some-body’s gun during one of these circum-stances from a peaceful citizen.

They will be open to being sued per-sonally. If any of them confiscates a gun from a peaceful citizen, they are opening themselves up to a devastating lawsuit that could take everything they own.

TNA: With somebody who is anti-gun, what’s the single best argument to use?Pratt: Well, one way to argue is to say, “Oh, so you believe guns are really bad? That being the case, would you be will-ing to put a sign on your house that says ‘There are no guns in this house’”? Offer to give them that sign for free. I’ve yet to

find anybody to take the sign.We’ve made these as bumper stickers,

and I still have the original stack that we had printed up, other than those I gave out to a few people who thought it was funny.

The other thing you’ll face is someone who is sort of agnostic about the debate who says, “I agree that the Second Amend-ment means what it says, that individuals are protected in their individual right to keep and bear arms, but I don’t feel like I need a gun right now.” Respond to them, “Oh good, so you don’t have homeown-ers insurance either, right?” That usually makes the point.

You hope your house is never going to burn down, but you still buy the insurance. You hope you are never going to use your gun, but it’s there if you need it.

TNA: The Million Mom March came and went, but it was many times smaller in size than they billed it to be, with participants perhaps in the thousands. Could that sen-timent easily be whipped up again?Pratt: The Million Mom March was an embarrassment to the anti-gunners. I don’t know that they will ever try that again. It represented nobody at the time; it certainly doesn’t represent anybody today.

The anti-gunner has a real problem. He has no constituency.

If it weren’t for George Soros and his money financing a lot of the anti-gun folks, if it weren’t for the media which make it look as if the anti-gunners still have some kind of strength, it would be evident to the whole world that these people speak for a very small number of people — those who

actually don’t believe in self-defense.When I’ve debated them and I have

enough time — more than the five-minute segment that they might do on Fox News — I’ve gotten to where I ask anti-gunners, “So you don’t really believe in self-defense do you?” And they refuse to answer.

TNA: Roughly what percentage of U.S. citizens owns firearms?Pratt: Happily we don’t know how many Americans own guns because guns are not registered in any central fashion. Al-though every time we buy a gun at the store, it is registered. But then in most states the gun can be transferred legally to somebody else without any paperwork whatsoever.

Probably at least half of the households have firearms in them, and probably one of the best measures that America is still a rather well-armed society is that home in-vasions in the United States involve, about 13 percent of the time, one that is occu-pied. In Britain it’s about 65 percent. The criminals in the United States are obvious-ly afraid of being shot by a home owner, and in disarmed Britain, they are not.

TNA: Any final comments?Pratt: In probably 97 percent of the defen-sive gun uses in America, which probably happen some two million times a year, no-body fires a shot, nobody’s killed, and no-body’s wounded. Americans are extremely responsible. n

Longer versions of this interview, in both print and

video formats, are available online at thenewameri-

can.com and YouTube.com/TheJohnBirchSociety.

29THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008

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Once the cradle of liberty, Massachusetts now has become a cesspool of political corruption, with spillover infecting the entire nation.

by Gregory A. Hession, J.D.

The Bluest State: How Democrats Creat-ed the Massachusetts Blueprint for Amer-ican Political Disaster, by Jon Keller, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007, 258 pages, hardcover, $24.95.

The Brothers Bulger: How They Terror-ized and Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century, by Howie Carr, New York: War-ner Books, 2006, 342 pages, hardcover, $25.95.

T hese two books, The Bluest State, by Jon Keller, and The Brothers Bulger, by Howie Carr, show how

Massachusetts, once a state at the center of the birth of American freedom, now breeds toxic politics and politicians that corrupt the nation.

Both of these books are entertaining reading, and both are expertly written in

quite different styles. They give much insight into how the culture and politics of an entire state can be thor-oughly co-opted to evil purposes, and the outsized effect that it has had on the nation. Keller, a longtime Boston political commenta-tor and avowed liberal, does an honest job at shining the light on the failings of his fellow liberals, but vainly thinks that socialism could still work, if only the right people were at the helm.

Howie Carr, a Boston radio and newspaper fix-ture, has no such illusions in his biography of Billy Bulger, a quintessential Boston Irish politician, and his brother James “Whitey” Bulger, who ran the mob in Boston with the complete cooperation of corrupt FBI

agents. Carr exposes political chicanery with a mordant style and with bemused cynicism. By turns sardonic and serious, he chronicles the rise of “legit” brother Billy Bulger, who headed the Massachu-setts State Senate for 30 years, and the out-law brother, Whitey, who currently occu-pies the spot right under Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s most wanted list.

Kennedy CountryIn The Bluest State, Jon Keller concen-trates a critical eye mainly on how seldom Massachusetts’ liberals actually follow through at fulfilling promises to help the poor and how the policies they implement exacerbate government corruption, pover-ty, and inequality. Keller, a self-described liberal and a supporter of same-sex “mar-riage” and abortion, nonetheless turns an unflinching spotlight on Massachusetts’ liberalism and assesses its failures real-istically. However, he believes that the

system can be repaired and function well, particularly for the poor and working class, if only we had more honest, effi-cient, and less-selfish government leaders. One senses his profound disappointment with his fellow liberals, as he sincerely believes that a command economy with high taxes for the rich and heavy regula-tion of business could and should work, and that it would ameliorate poverty and suffering if only the right people were running the government. Thus, this book is useful and instructive to persons on all sides of the debate.

The term “Kennedy country,” which is a recurring metaphor in the book, came from a remark made in a political debate between Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Mitt Romney in the 1994 U.S. Senate race. In the debate, Romney recounted a campaign trip to a depressed section of Boston, during which he was accosted by a Ted Kennedy supporter re-minding him, “This is Kennedy country.” Romney then looked around, saw boarded up buildings, saw jobs leaving, and said, “It looks like it.” The mostly Democratic crowd gasped, unaccustomed to such an attack on their icon.

Keller’s premise in the book is that the high-minded talk by liberals about helping the poor and creating a good responsive government has been betrayed by a “poli-tics of narcissism and self-delusion.”

He illustrates the failure of the welfare state through the story of Clarabel Ven-tura, a drug addict arrested for injuring her four-year-old son. She was one of 14 children of a Puerto Rican immigrant all living on welfare, with 74 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren all on the state dole. At the time, this family cost Mas-sachusetts over a million dollars a year. When interviewed about whether the tax-payers should continue to be burdened by her family, one of Clarabel’s sisters said, “Just tell them to keep paying.”

Keller laments that Massachusetts has become “a place where the poor lack

Creating Corruption

30 THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008

BOOK REVIEW

hope and live in Appalachia-like squalor, where even middle class workers with salaries well above the national median struggle to afford inferior housing, hold jobs that barely subsidize survival, and wait in vain for meaningful help from the government.”

Keller identifies Senator John Kerry as one of the politicians who have failed to uphold the dream in Kennedy country. Keller observes, somewhat sarcastically, that Kerry and his contemporaries “all ducked out on local obligations to bring their priceless gifts to the nation.” For ex-ample, Senator Kerry has voted to increase taxes 98 times, and voted against reduc-ing taxes 127 times, primarily on the poor and middle class. Senator Kennedy has exceeded even that heroic total.

Another example of Massachusetts bringing “its priceless gifts to the nation” is its recent Supreme Judicial Court ruling ordering the legislature and the executive branch to recognize same-sex “marriage,” in violation of separation-of-powers prin-ciples. Although Keller does not find “gay marriage” objectionable, he properly de-nounces reliance on court fiat for change, rather than developing grass-roots sup-port for it. He decries the elite politicians’ “overweening confidence in their own correctness, and a willingness to use the courts to obtain what they could not get by legislation.”

“How much agony would the nation have been spared,” he opines, if abortion had not been legalized by judicial order. True enough. However, his acceptance of that barbaric practice, and of same-sex “marriage,” taints this otherwise excel-lent book.

As for helping women get equal treatment with men, JFK, his brothers, and their progeny advance a type of feminism that Keller calls fake, unless “serial infidel-ity and exploitation are now feminist traits.” They pretend to care about women, while using and destroying them. One “successful” student of that Massachusetts-style feminism was William Jeffer-son Clinton.

At the 2004 Democratic Party Con-vention, Senator Kennedy enumerated the usual litany of identity politics-based “rights” that Democrats have fought for on behalf of the poor, the handicapped, women, and children. Keller brilliantly calls this endless victimizing “a totality of oppressions.” In Kennedy country, every-one is a victim, and everything in America is horrible.

But the compassion is only ankle deep. One street-savvy black minister who has tried for years to interest the “liberal caring” crowd to help with projects to reduce crime and poverty in inner-city Boston cynically calls them “elites bereft of relevance.” He complained that “the moral and intellectual hypocrisy of the Massachusetts liberal is that on the one hand, you want to say you are friend to the black and poor, but you don’t want to be held responsible for the terrible conditions. And more disturbing than the actual conditions themselves is their re-fusal to ask the question: how is it their left-liberal ideology permits or tolerates

such intolerable conditions? How does that happen in Kennedy country?”

Read this book, and you will know.

Taking Advantage of OpportunityThe focus of Howie Carr’s book, The Brothers Bulger, is less about failed poli-cies and promises than it is about how crime and corrupt politics that are toler-ated by the law can wreak havoc both lo-cally and nationally. The book shows how the Bulger brothers, ostensibly on oppo-site sides of the law, were actually both outlaws who enjoyed legal protection of their perfidy at the highest levels.

In 1961, Billy Bulger arrived in the Massachusetts State House and quickly learned how to control the levers of graft in the grand tradition of former Boston Mayor James Michael Curley, who was

In The Bluest State, Jon keller concentrates a critical eye mainly on how seldom Massachusetts’ liberals actually follow through at fulfilling promises to help the poor and how the policies they implement exacerbate government corruption, poverty, and inequality.

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James “Whitey”

Bulger

Billy Bulger

once elected mayor from jail. He ingrati-ated himself with the power brokers and eliminated competition, so he was able to control the favors. Billy also benefited from some fabulously lucky timing, as several potential rivals retired or were caught in scandal, leaving him, over time, the undisputed political boss.

Carr lays out the credo for doing busi-ness in Massachusetts during the Bulger era: 1) Nothing on the level; 2) Everything is a deal; 3) No deal too small. Billy cor-rupted everything he touched.

Senator Bulger essentially ran the legis-lature like a mob racket, with bribes, pay-offs, no-show jobs, and endless looting of the public till. For example, the Metropoli-tan Boston Transit Authority really became Mister Bulger’s Transit Authority because he stashed so many cronies and relatives there. The rule was pay or no play. When the sale of a parcel of Boston-owned land

for a large skyscraper project was being negotiated, the de-veloper had to pay $1.8 mil-lion to Billy’s law-firm part-ner for “monitoring the sale at City Hall.” Billy, of course, got his generous cut.

Much of Billy’s power rested on giving taxpayer-supported jobs to his cronies. Whenever a job became avail-able, a traditional “nationwide search” would be done, and

surprisingly, the Bulger coat holder was always the one who got the job.

Here is part of a description of what it meant to have a government “job” in Bul-ger’s Boston, as Carr describes a 1990 raid by the police on some of Whitey Bulger’s drug dealers:

After midnight, the cops grabbed Thomas “T.K.” Cahill. He was sleep-ing through his overnight shift at the city Department of Public Works yard on Frontage Road, and had been expected to report for work the next morning at his other public sector job at the Massachusetts Water Resourc-es Authority, where the personnel di-rector was the wife of a state senator loyal to Billy.

At his peak, no one could challenge Bil-ly’s power. He had a saying for those who tried: “Reformers won’t be back.” And they usually weren’t.

Carr provides fascinating details on how brother Whitey Bulger and his mob pals corrupted the FBI to the highest lev-els. In its obsession to get the Italian mob, the bureau set up Whitey as an informant and let him kill and run drugs for decades, with full knowledge and sometimes even participation by FBI agents. In exchange for providing evidence on his Mafia rivals in Boston, Whitey was always tipped off by the FBI when heat came down from another law-enforcement source that hadn’t been bought. The feds systematically and unwittingly eliminated his only competition, La Cosa Nostra. That left him the undisputed king of the Boston underworld. By the end of the ’80s, the Boston Globe estimated Whitey was worth $50 million.

The Brothers Bulger is populated by colorful characters, like Vinny “The Ani-mal” Ferrara, Steve “The Rifleman” Flem-mi, and his brother, Vincent “Jimmy The Bear” Flemmi. With monikers like that, one can surmise their occupations without difficulty. Though Billy Bulger still claims that he had no knowledge about Whitey’s criminal activities, the headquarters of the South Boston Irish mob was in a house 15 feet away from Billy’s own house. It was in that headquarters that Whitey and his henchman Steve Flemmi strangled one of Flemmi’s girlfriends when she wanted to leave Flemmi for another man, and also killed her daughter, whom Flemmi was “dating.”

Whitey was not the noble or sympathet-ic gangster portrayed by some Hollywood filmmakers; he was a beastly, stone-cold killer. He and his thugs personally killed scores of persons, ranging from small-time hoods to girlfriends. He would strangle or shoot them, often after torture. Then, he pulled their teeth out with pliers and cut off their fingers and tongues so they couldn’t be identified, and buried them in death pits, or even in his basement.

In the 1990s, after Billy Bulger’s long stint as State Senate president, he recog-nized that his power was waning, and he angled for a soft landing as president of the five-campus University of Massachu-setts system, at a modest annual salary of $359,000, more than twice that of the gov-ernor. Once ensconced, he immediately created a hackorama in his new domain, splurging for fabulous high-rent Boston offices and padding the payroll with hun-dreds of new, high-paid sycophants and yes-men.

Meanwhile, Whitey had left town when the FBI couldn’t protect him from exposure anymore. He had deliberately traveled the world for several years, setting up aliases and safe deposit boxes to prepare for that eventuality. Then one day he just left — but not before winning a large payout in the Massachusetts lottery under more than somewhat clouded circumstances.

Billy was ousted as UMass president in 2003 by then-Governor Mitt Romney. On his way out, though, just like Whitey, he snagged a big bag of loot, including an $11,300-per-month pension.

Who says crime and politics don’t pay? n

Howie Carr’s book, The Brothers Bulger, is about how crime and corrupt politics that are tolerated by the law can wreak havoc. It shows how the Bulger brothers, ostensibly on opposite sides of the law, were actually both outlaws who enjoyed legal protection at the highest levels.

32 THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008

BOOK REVIEW

Florida Mom Stops ShooterOn the afternoon of January 25, Louise Zoller, along with her 11-year-old daugh-ter, Morgan, arrived at Bobbie Noonan’s Child Care in Cape Coral, Florida, to pick up her two-year-old daughter, Hannah. As Morgan attempted to enter the secu-rity code, the unlocked door swung open. Something was definitely amiss. The school’s director told Zoller that there was a man outside with a gun. Zoller and her daughter quietly went to the classroom of Christine Lozier-Dunn, Hannah’s teacher. When Zoller saw Hannah and the other children huddled in the classroom’s bath-room stalls, she asked the teacher what was going on.

Zoller remarked about the teacher to the News-Press (Southwest Florida), “She was so calm.” “She just said, ‘Oh, there’s a guy outside.’ Looking back, I think she knew it was him. But she didn’t let me know anything was wrong. And I think she was really being calm for the kids.”

“Him” was Robert H. Dunn, Lozier-Dunn’s estranged husband, and he sud-denly appeared in the room, carrying a camouflage green gun that Zoller did not even think was real, because it looked like plastic.

When the gunman uttered an expletive (apparently asking about his estranged wife’s whereabouts), Zoller tried to get him to look outside, but he instead en-tered the lavatories where the teacher and children were hiding. She heard a gunshot come from the lavatories, but thought it was a blank. But when she heard the chil-dren screaming she became very angry. As she told the story to the News-Press: “I just said, ‘Stop it.’ I said, ‘You’re scaring the children. Just stop.’”

Dunn knocked Zoller to the ground, and she expected him to strike her. But when Morgan screamed “Mommy!” she real-ized she must act quickly and wrestled the man to the floor. Zoller knocked the gun away from the deranged man and managed to recover it and flee the building with the children.

Zoller then noticed blood on the chil-dren’s clothing. Lozier-Dunn was dead. The police entered the building and ar-rested Dunn.

Zoller saw the slain teacher’s two-year-old daughter Allyson, whom the other children in the class called “Baby Allyson,” cradled in the arms of another teacher and became sad. The girl is now being raised by her grandmother, Lozier-Dunn’s mother.

Zoller appeared on the ABC television program The View on February 20, when hosts Barbara Walters and Elizabeth Has-selbeck announced that a $25,000 donation was being given to the Allyson Dunn As-sistance Fund, established in part to help the slain woman’s daughter go to college.

On February 11 Cape Coral Mayor Eric Feichthaler declared “Louise Zoller Day” at the start of the city council meeting. Zoller was also presented with the key to the city. Like most heroes, the woman was humble and dismissed her actions, stating simply: “I’m not a hero. I’m just a mom.”

Contractor Helps FamilyThe Luchsinger family of Onondaga Hill, New York, had undergone some severe tri-als. First their dairy farm was destroyed by fire, and then the father of the family, Jamie Luchsinger, was diagnosed with ALS, a usually fatal disease characterized by a wasting away of the muscles, popu-larly called Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The Luchsinger family contacted local contractor Scott McClurg of nearby Marcel-lus to get an estimate on putting in a handi-cap-access bathroom. But, as McClurg told the Camillus Advocate & Solvay-Geddes Express (Onondaga County, New York): “Once inside, I realized [the house] needed a lot more. I went back and asked some of my employees if they could volunteer some time to this project, and not one of them said no. They couldn’t wait to help.”

The team of volunteers led by McClurg worked on the Luchsinger home for three weeks. Some of them put in over 100 hours on the project. As work progressed around the clock during that time, the men installed two new bathrooms, a new kitchen, flooring, a new electrical system, sheetrock, insulation, windows, and light-ing fixtures. Moving outside, they even did landscaping and put in a new driveway.

Because young Erica Luchsinger has

loved butterflies since she saw one at her grandmother’s funeral, the workers redeco-rated her bedroom with a butterfly motif.

In recognition for the generous work that McClurg and his employees did for the Luchsinger family, State Senator John A. DeFrancisco presented them with the New York State Senate Liberty Award on Janu-ary 31. The senator noted: “Scott and his team of volunteers should be commended for the many nights and weekends they spent working to completely renovate the Luchsinger home so Jamie can continue to live comfortably with his family.”

In accepting the award, McClurg gave credit to “the entire team of volunteers who generously gave their time, talents and fi-nancial support to help a local family most of us didn’t even know.” McClurg added, “I’d be happy to talk to anyone who would want to do the same for another family. This is why we live in Central New York — we’re surrounded by good people.”

Alert Waiter Saves WomanColt Haugen was working his shift as a waiter at a Colorado Springs Ruby Tues-day restaurant on January 3, when he observed a man dropping a pill into the drink of his female companion, who had momentarily left the table.

Fox News 31, KDVR, in Denver reported that when the woman returned, Haugen very calmly took her drink away and brought her a new one. He also called police.

The Colorado Springs Gazette reported that, after a police investigation, the wom-an’s dining companion, Robert Lawrence Psaty, an employee of the state mental health hospital in Pueblo, who is a former Florence City Council member, was ar-rested on February 20. A test performed on the woman’s drink determined that it had contained Diazepam, a mild tranquil-izer prescribed to reduce anxiety and relax muscles.

Psaty, who had met the woman through a dating service, had two felony charges filed against him: assault by drugging a victim and attempting to have someone induce a controlled substance by fraudu-lent means. n

— wArreN mASS

33THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008

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by John F. McManus

On February 19, Cuba’s radio and television stations announced that ailing 81-year-old Fidel Castro

had stepped aside as the nation’s leader. Their messages noted that the Cuban par-liament speedily named his 76-year-old brother Raul as president. Accepting the office on February 24, Raul Castro stated, “I assume this responsibility knowing that as far as the commander in chief is con-cerned, there is only one. Fidel is Fidel. All of us know he is irreplaceable.” That was Raul’s way of indicating there will be no marked deviation from 49 years of communist tyranny in the island nation only 90 miles from the tip of Florida.

That is not good news for the Cuban people, who have endured Fidel’s rule for the past five decades. Prior to that, in the late 1950s, Cuba was such a thriving bas-tion of free enterprise that its government had to curtail immigration of Europeans anxious to partake of freedom. A bur-geoning economy made it an investor’s dream, and the nation actually possessed the highest standard of living in all of the Western Hemisphere except for the United States and Canada. Fidel, Raul, and their comrades took control in January 1959, imposed iron-clad communist rule, and proceeded to execute opponents. Tens of thousands perished by firing squads, more died in prison camps, and no one knows how many more perished at sea fleeing Cuban tyranny.

Cuba quickly became an open Soviet satellite aiming nuclear missiles at the

United States. Fidel even pleaded with Nikita Khrushchev to launch the deadly weapons at U.S. cities, but even Khrush-chev wasn’t that bold. The Cuban people have had no free elections in 50 years. Ap-proximately 20 percent of the population fled to the United States. Cuban troops, armed by the USSR, not only served to keep Fidel in power, they functioned in the service of international communism when large numbers of Cuban troops were sent

to Angola and Ethiopia to protect commu-nist governments in those nations.

Anyone who cares to learn the brutal truth about Castro’s supposed paradise can find it in Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag by Armando Val-ladares. After spending 22 years in Cuba’s dungeons, Valladares was freed, went to live in Spain, told his story and the plight of his oppressed countrymen, and earned the label “Cuban Solzhenitsyn.” His book is as

Cuba Under Fidel and Raul

Image versus reality: Fidel Castro, shown here with his brother Raul (left) prior to coming to power in Cuba, was portrayed by the New York Times and other influential American media organs as a freedom fighter. the truth was otherwise. A

P Im

ages

The island nation has suffered greatly under the Castros, and though Fidel has stepped down, his tragic legacy remains, with brother Raul still at the helm.

35THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008

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revealing about Cuba’s communist tyranny as Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago is about the USSR’s merciless despotism.

Valadares had won release after his decades of deprivations when the French government intervened on his behalf. As he ended his book, he recounted only some of the many atrocities he had witnessed:

I recalled the two sergeants, Porfiirio and Matanzas, plunging their bayo-nets into Ernesto Diaz Madruga’s body; Roberto Lopez Chavez dying in a cell, calling for water; Boitel, de-nied water too, because Castro want-ed him dead; Clara, Boitel’s poor mother, beaten by Lieutenant Abad in a Political Police station because she wanted to find out where her son was buried. I remembered Carrion, shot in the leg, telling Jaguey not to shoot, and Jaguey mercilessly, heartlessly, shooting him in the back; the officers who threatened family members if they cried at a funeral. I remembered Estebita and Piri dying in blackout cells, the victims of biological exper-

imentation; Diosdado Aquit, Chino Tan, Eddy Molina, and so many oth-ers murdered in forced-labor fields, quarries and camps. A legion of spec-ters, naked, crippled, hobbling and crawling through my mind, and the hundreds of men wounded and muti-lated in the horrifying searches.

Less than a year after reluctantly freeing Valladares, Fidel Castro was interviewed in Havana by American and French jour-nalists. As a fitting Epilogue, the man who had survived treatment no human should ever have to endure published what Fidel told the assembled foreigners on July 28, 1983: “From our point of view, we have no human-rights problem — there have been no ‘disappeareds’ here, there have been no tortures here, there have been no murders here. In twenty-five years of revolution, in spite of the difficulties and dangers we have passed through, torture has never been committed, a crime has never been committed.” Telling lies is consistent with creating tyranny.

Yet, during these years when so many

Cubans were trying to flee, Hollywood’s leftists continued to shower Castro with adulation. Oliver Stone described him as “selfless and moral.” Harry Belafonte claimed: “If you believe in freedom … jus-tice … democracy, you have no choice but to support Fidel Castro.” Jack Nicholson called him “a genius.” Gina Lollobrigida said he “is warm and understanding and seems extremely humane.” Francis Ford Coppola thought so highly of the Cuban dictator that he slobbered, “Fidel, I love you.” And Chevy Chase chimed in with, “Socialism works. I think Cuba might prove that.” These are only some of the outrageous statements published by ac-claimed author Humberto Fontova in his book, Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant. Other Castro lovers include Robert Red-ford, Vanessa Redgrave, Danny Glover, and Norman Mailer.

Left-leaners in politics and the mass media were hardly outdone in their gush-ing over Fidel. Dan Rather called him “Cuba’s own Elvis.” Fontova compiled a long list of plaudits for the bearded Cuban leader from the likes of Jesse Jackson, Katie Couric, Ted Turner, Charlie Rangel, Maxine Waters, George McGovern, Bill Clinton, and others.

While Castro was given a pass and fre-quently idolized, Chile’s anti-communist Augusto Pinochet earned nothing but scorn from Hollywood and much of Amer-ica’s media. The Chilean leader saved his nation from an imminent communist takeover, instituted a free-market economy that quickly became envied all throughout Latin America, and even presided over promised free elections. He then stepped aside when the voters wanted someone else. Hollywood managed to produce a number of anti-Pinochet films but never any about the Castro brothers and their bloody tyranny. Nor, as one commentator noted, has Hollywood ever seen fit to pro-vide moviegoers with the ugly truth about Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung.

The Truth Was KnownIn September 1958, the small-circulation American Opinion magazine headed by Robert Welch (who founded the John Birch Society three months later) pub-lished an assessment of what was hap-pening in Cuba. He wrote, “Now the evi-dence from Castro’s whole past, that he is

Castro’s Cuba: Fidel addresses thousands the day he and his guerrilla army arrived triumphant in Havana. Half a century of communist oppression would follow.

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36 THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008

— PAST AND PERSPECTIVEHISTORYHISTORY

a Communist agent carrying out Commu-nist orders and plans, is overwhelming.” At the time, Castro was portrayed by the American media not as a communist but as a reformer, even as a Robin Hood. But if Welch, a private citizen, knew the truth about Castro, could it be that top officials in the U.S. government were unaware? The evidence clearly indicates that our nation’s officials not only knew the truth but aided Castro’s rise to power, our government’s ostensible anti-communist foreign policy notwithstanding.

Welch added in his short September 1958 piece, “Of course, for the record, Castro says he is not a Communist, and reminds you that writers in the New York Times say he is not a Communist.... We remember how emphatically Mao Tse-ting and his good friends among the New York Times writers insisted that Mao was not a Communist either.” These statements by Robert Welch, we emphasize, were written several months before communist control descended on the island nation.

Looking back, we see that key U.S. of-ficials knew that Castro took time off from studying law at Havana University in 1948 and traveled to Bogota, Colombia, with a Cuban student group. While there, well-known Colombian political leader Jorge Gaitan was assassinated and Fidel was be-lieved by many to have collaborated with the local Communist Party in perpetrating the crime. Immediately, much of the city of Bogota erupted into communist-stimu-lated anarchy with Castro in the thick of it. During that bloody uprising, a band of revolutionaries seized a local radio sta-tion and a voice was heard broadcasting, “This is Fidel Castro. This is a communist revolution.” When order was restored, the young revolutionary hightailed it out of Bogota and fled to Mexico, and was soon back in Cuba.

Meanwhile, Fidel’s brother Raul had joined the Partido Socialista Popular, Cu-ba’s affiliate of the Soviet-backed Cuban Communist Party. On July 26, 1953, the brothers and a force of about 1,000 men attacked Moncada Barracks. The attack failed and the two Castros were captured, tried, and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Others were also imprisoned. The suppos-edly tyrannical Cuban leader, Fulgencio Batista, later issued a general amnesty and the two Castros, after serving only

22 months of their sentence, went back to Mexico. Soon, Raul introduced the Argen-tine revolutionary Che Guevara to his older brother. And it was Raul who befriended KGB agent Nikolai Sergeevich Leonov in Mexico, thereby beginning a relationship with Moscow that fueled the Cuban revo-lution for several decades.

From Mexico, the revolutionaries — now numbering 81 — executed a return to Cuba, landing on the coast of Oriente Province in late 1956. Senate reports years later claimed they were supplied with arms by sources in Florida and by Russian sub-marines surfacing off the Cuban coast. Attracting the worst elements of Cuban society, their numbers grew steadily. Oper-ating from Cuba’s eastern mountains, the Castro-led forces unleashed a reign of ter-ror that included bombings in markets and anywhere else innocent civilians gathered. They destroyed bridges and roads, kid-napped U.S. citizens caught in the escalat-ing struggle, and extorted protection money from Americans who owned businesses in Cuba. Soon, Raul Castro would be named commander of the revolutionary forces.

Unheeded WarningsArthur Gardner, an able U.S. diplomat, was serving as our nation’s ambassador to Cuba at the time. Pro-Castro leftists in the

State Department received repeated warn-ings from Gardner about the communist nature of the Castro-led uprising. For his effort, he was removed and even prevent-ed from briefing his successor, Earl E.T. Smith. Instead, Smith was told by State Department officials Roy Rubottom and William Wieland to gather information about what was happening in Cuba from Herbert Matthews, the New York Times reporter who admired Castro and propa-gandized on Castro’s behalf. For instance, in the Times for February 24, 1957, Mat-thews effused that Castro “has strong ideas of liberty, justice, social democracy.” And in the Times for July 16, 1959, more than six months after Castro came to power, Matthews claimed that Castro “is not only not Communist but decidedly anti- Communist.”

Smith discovered the truth prior to Cas-tro coming to power, but his reports, like Gardner’s, were ignored, with the result that Castro succeeded in taking control of Cuba in January 1959.

In 1960, after the Castros were sol-idly entrenched in Havana, Ambassador Smith told a Senate committee, “Without the United States, Castro would not be in power today.” He emphasized the harm generated by Matthews’ articles glorify-ing Castro, that they had “served to in-

Flight to freedom: these Cubans were fortunate to reach Miami by airplane on January 5, 1961, two years after Castro came to powers. over the years, countless thousands have fled Cuba in small boats and rafts — many of the desperate victims perishing before making it to Florida. A

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37THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008

flate Castro to world stature and world recognition.” And he severely castigated the State Department for its work that “helped to overthrow the Batista dicta-torship which was pro-American only to install the Castro dictatorship which is pro-Russian.”

The Eisenhower administration official-

ly recognized Castro as Cuba’s legitimate leader within days of the January 1959 takeover. A victorious Fidel, with Raul ever at his side, immediately initiated policies that saw vast amounts of property confis-cated, opponents arrested and executed, a vibrant economy destroyed, Cuba’s people forced into poverty, and the nation itself

converted into a Soviet satellite. Raul oversaw the execution of soldiers who had sided with the Batista government. Gone was the Cuba that had been decidedly pro-American, a respecter of privately owned businesses and residences, and a bastion of free enterprise enjoyed by a prosperous middle class. But widespread admiration for Castro continued until 1961 when the Cuban dictator announced publicly, “I am a Marxist-Leninist.” The State Depart-ment, still infested with pro-communists, claimed with feigned sorrow that “what began as a movement for democracy and freedom has been perverted into a mecha-nism for their destruction.” For his work, William Wieland won promotion to consul general and settled into his assignment in Australia.

During his retirement in April 1963, Dwight Eisenhower, whose administration steered the Castros into power, stated dur-ing one of his infrequent press conferences that only a “genius and prophet” could have known Castro was a communist in the late 1950s. He didn’t intend to send a glowing compliment to Robert Welch, but his statement surely did exactly that.

With Fidel’s retirement because of age and illness, no one can be sure how Cuba will fare under Raul Castro’s leadership. He is just as much a tyrant as his older brother ever was. But the heavy subsi-dies Cuba received from the former So-viet Union are no more. Conditions in the island nation are deteriorating even more speedily, forcing Cuba to turn to other revolutionaries for assistance. Raul has al-ready stated that a communist system will remain. There has been speculation that he will attempt to create a Chinese-style communist rule with manufacturing abil-ity that will challenge all the products seen in Wal-Mart. He has already reached out to Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who can be counted on to keep communism in charge in Havana.

In other words, Cuba will remain a despotism. But no one should forget that the tyrannical regime so close to our own nation resulted from treachery inside the U.S. government aided by the New York Times. And its destructiveness has ben-efited greatly from Hollywood leftists and from pro-left politicians and media personnel — all of whom ought to be repudiated. n

Cuba today: Raul Castro (left), shown here with venezuela’s Marxist leader hugo Chavez in 2006, now holds the reins of power in Cuba.

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Police ImpostersTwo armed men, later identified as Jorge Elugardo and Brian Kennedy, kicked in the door to Cody Buckler’s Fountain, Col-orado, home at about 11:30 p.m. on Janu-ary 21. They announced to 16-year-old Jesse Robinson, who had been sleeping on the couch, that they were police offi-cers — though they were wearing masks at the time and one of them pointed his gun at the boy. The intruders’ noise woke Buckler, who quietly checked out what was happening and then went back to his bedroom for a shotgun.

When Buckler returned to the living room with his gun, he saw one of the in-truders carrying his flat-screen TV out of the house. Buckler shot that intruder, caus-ing him to drop the TV and flee. Buckler then spotted the other intruder coming up some basement stairs and shot him. The second intruder got away by diving through a large plate-glass window.

The intruders initially got away, but were caught when they sought medical assistance at a hospital. Gazette.com re-ported: “Kennedy doesn’t have a criminal record in Colorado, court records show. Elugardo has been arrested numerous times, court records show, with at least one conviction for misdemeanor assault.”

Not Keeping an Eye OutIn Wilmington, Delaware, liquor-store owner Bernis Martin was not paying close attention to his surroundings at 10 p.m. on the evening of February 13 because he wanted to hurry from his store to get his wife “some roses for Valentine’s Day” before going to his second job, reported delawareonline. He did not see the robber lurking outside holding a rifle.

The robber demanded money, saying, “Give it up, old head,” and Martin gave him about $300. Then “Martin went back into his store as the gunman started backing away.” When Martin looked out again, the robber shot at him. Martin grabbed a pistol from his waist holster and began firing. He struck the robber in the leg. Martin did not have a concealed carry permit, but in Dela-ware, citizens are allowed to carry a loaded gun for protection if it is clearly visible.

When police responded, they caught two youths, assumed accomplices, run-ning away from the scene. Police also ap-prehended the primary robber, a 15-year-old, when he went to a hospital for care, and they caught up with a fourth subject as well. Arrested were two teens, including the primary robber, and 20-year-olds Chris-topher Whittacker and Cory Clark. Police are fairly certain the alleged accomplices were involved in the incident because im-mediately after the robber was wounded, the youths banged on doors nearby to get aid for their wounded friend.

Though police found the robber’s rifle at the scene of the shooting and decided not to press charges against Martin, the state district attorney’s office has yet to decide whether it will charge Martin with a crime. In Delaware, a person is allowed to use deadly force only when he believes his life or another’s life is in immediate jeopardy. Since the robber shot at Mar-tin, Martin shouldn’t have to worry about criminal charges being filed against him, unless the attorney general, Beau Biden, is as zealously anti-gun as his father, Senator Joseph Biden.

Pint-sized Problem SolverEighty-year-old North Texan James Pickett opened his door on February 9 to two young men. As soon as he did, the men “came through that door, stabbing and beating,” Pickett told WFAA.com. The location and severity of Pickett’s wounds testify to the viciousness of the attack: he was stabbed in the forehead, stabbed just in front of his right ear, slashed from his nose through his upper lip, suffered a gash across his nose, and was bashed in the eye.

The attackers had the upper hand from the get-go, but Pickett, a WWII veteran, wasn’t going to lie down and die. Like his favorite movie icon John Wayne, Pickett pulled out a revolver, a minuscule gun that he had slipped into his front pocket before he answered the door, and he began shoot-ing. He hit one attacker, Paul Perry, in the back, and Paul and the other attacker, Paul’s brother Holden, fled. The two at-tackers were caught when they called for an ambulance.

Pickett didn’t seem unduly concerned after the attack. He said about the incident: “The only problem was I run out of bul-lets.” And that won’t be a problem if there is a next attack.

Surveillance and SecurityOn February 3, two men robbed the Quick Market in Racine, Wisconsin. One of the robbers had a gun. On February 15, two robbers tried again.

Like the robbery earlier in the month, two men entered the store, one of them armed. But this time the storeowner, Numan Pasqualine, was ready for them be-cause he noticed them acting suspiciously on his surveillance system. Pasqualine told the Journal Times, “I thought there was something wrong. They had their heads down, so you couldn’t see their faces.” Because Pasqualine was ready for trou-ble, the two robbers never even got close to the cash register before Pasqualine had his own gun out.

He told the armed robber to lie down on the floor, but the armed man and his accomplice ran away.

Rape InterruptedForty-four-year-old David Fleming, a felon who had previously been convicted of rape, robbery, assault, and burglary, forced his way into a Brighton, Tennes-see, house owned by his onetime girlfriend at about 3 a.m. on February 19. His “ex” wasn’t there. He proceeded to tie up the woman’s two daughters, ages 14 and 22, with the cord from an electric heater with the intent of raping them.

When Fleming began to abuse the older sister, the younger girl escaped from her bonds and ran next door to her aunt’s house to get help. Her aunt’s son, 25-year-old Keith Ingram, “grabbed his pistol and ran next door to help his cousin,” reported commercialappeal.com. Ingram entered the house next door and heard his cousin calling for help. He warned Fleming to stop doing what he was doing or he would shoot, and Fleming attacked him. Ingram shot Fleming once, killing him. n

— KurT williAmSeN

41THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008

“... the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” EXERCISING THE RIGHT

Guaranteeing Gas PainsiTem: The New York Times on March 25 editorialized in favor of increased taxation on gasoline and other energy sources, say-ing: “Higher taxes on energy mean other rich countries are more energy-efficient across the board. The average German or Japanese uses little more than half the en-ergy consumed by an average American.... Americans are beginning to curb consump-tion. Gasoline demand declined in the first 11 weeks of the year for the first time since 1997. But it is far too little, and government policy is lagging far behind the problem.... A lot more needs to be done to prepare the American economy for a world of scarcer, more expensive energy.”iTem: One of the nation’s “leading en-ergy economists,” according to a release from Carnegie Mellon’s business school published in Mississippi’s Sun Herald for March 27, “believes that fuel costs are actually well below what they should be to reflect actual market value.” Profes-sor Lester Lave of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University maintains that the real cost of a barrel of oil is more than $200. “Lave also believes this truer cost of oil should be communi-cated to the market with a gasoline tax that raises the price of a gallon of gas to about $7. He says this would help to curb demand, stimulate the economy and break America’s dangerous addiction to oil.”

“Although he acknowledges such a tax would be unpopular among consumers and elected officials alike, Lave believes it would actually serve as a boon to the U.S. economy, adding nearly $500 billion to federal coffers.”correcTioN: The professor may be an “intellectual” and his profession may be honorable, but one would have to be com-pletely devoid of common sense or down-right duplicitous to contend that dramati-cally raising taxes on vital energy supplies will be a boon to the U.S. economy. Euro-peans now pay higher gas prices. Are we supposed to believe that higher gas prices stimulate their economies?

One of the surest ways to get less of something is to tax it. Moreover, with the feds continuously misusing the billions in

gas tax dollars they siphon from Ameri-cans, why should we compound the error by fueling the government’s insatiable appetite?

Consider some of the all-too-typical projects that have been bankrolled by the federal government through gasoline taxes — monies supposedly reserved for roads. The Tax Foundation compiled such gems as the following from the 2005 Highway Bill: $6 million for graffiti elimination in New York; $2.95 million to Alaska for a film about state roads; $2.2 million to construct a waterfront esplanade at Fort Totten in New York; $8 million for a Har-lem Hospital garage; almost $4 million for the National Packard Museum in War-ren, Ohio, and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan; $2.4 million for a Red River National Wildlife Refuge Visi-tor Center in Louisiana; and $1.2 million to install lighting and steps and to equip an interpretative facility at the Blue Ridge Music Center.

But, it may be argued, who will pay for the roads? An apt response might be, why should such projects be funded through Washington? As pointed out by John Hood, president of the John Locke Foundation: “There’s nothing magical about ‘federal’ funding of local roads. The money doesn’t come flying in from some Neverland. Instead, the system simply compels motorists to send gobs of money to Washington every time they fill up their tanks. The politicians in Washington then swipe one-quarter of this gas-tax money for non-highway purposes, such as build-ing underutilized transit lines and financ-ing the federal budget deficit.”

Writing in Investor’s Business Daily, Hood notes that after the feds grab their share, the remainder of the funds “is re-turned to the states, but not in ways helpful to most American drivers. For one thing, federal highway dollars don’t flow back to states in proportion to how much they pay in. Many populous states with major

Burning our food: According to UN figures, world food prices have risen 65 percent since 2002, and dairy prices alone rose 80 percent in 2007. Yet calls echo from intellectuals to give subsidies for ethanol production and add production-reducing penalties on oil companies.

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42 THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008

transportation challenges — such as Texas, Florida, Michigan and my home state of North Carolina — have over the years been net losers. They’d certainly be better off if Washington stopped ‘helping’ them. Even if the outflow were more equitable, most states would end up on the losing end of the deal. You see, federal highway dol-lars come with strings attached. They force states to pay prevailing union-scale wages, for instance, jacking up the cost of high-way construction in many jurisdictions.”

Although new gas taxes would undoubt-edly not be spent well, would hinder state road construction, and would torpedo our economy, many congressmen will obvi-ously support them so the congressmen can fund pet projects regardless of the taxes’ effect on you and me.

Oil and natural gas profits have been used to kindle a propaganda firestorm against the industry’s supposed greed. The facts are much different than usu-ally portrayed. Average gasoline industry earnings in 2007, according to American Petroleum Institute (API) figures, aver-aged 8.3 percent, below many other indus-tries — though this didn’t seem to filter through waves of indignation. By com-parison, there is little outrage over the 15 cents for every dollar’s worth of gasoline at the pump that goes to the government — which produces nothing but red ink. ExxonMobil reports that it paid $105 bil-lion in taxes in 2007, or more than two-and-a-half times as much as its profits. And profit, lest we forget, is a company’s primary responsibility to its shareholders and employees.

When it comes to manufactured in-dignation over profits, the outrage in the media and on the political left is very se-lective. As summarized by the Virginia-based Business & Media Institute:

Journalists have a history of ignoring how little control oil companies have over the price of oil or gasoline. Nor do they focus much on how oil com-panies invest their profits in research and development.... ExxonMobil’s profit was about 10 percent of rev-enues. Chevron and ConocoPhillips

had profits below 10 percent of rev-enue. Those percentages aren’t high when compared to other industries. Bank of America operates with an 18-percent profit margin, according to Forbes.com. Berkshire Hatha-way has profit margin of 11 percent. AT&T: 11.8 percent. Procter & Gam-ble: 13.1 percent.

By the newspaper industry’s stan-dards, oil companies must be on the verge of collapse. Newspapers, in spite of incessant fears that the in-dustry is declining, reported pre-tax profit margins “in the high teens” in 2007, according to the Project for Ex-cellence in Journalism.

To reiterate: more taxation won’t result in more production. Yet, more production is not the objective of the establishment left. You will recall, as noted in the excerpt quoted at the beginning of this column, that the expressed goal of the New York Times is to pave the way for scarcity — to force Americans to use less oil, not to produce more.

The tax level is quite high enough al-ready, thank you, in the oil and natural

gas industry without trying to approach the even more crushing levels of socialist European economies. Citing figures gath-ered by the U.S. Energy Information Ad-ministration, API notes that 2006 income taxes as a share of net income averaged 40.7 percent for U.S. oil and natural gas companies, compared to 22.1 percent for U.S. manufacturing industries.

Not only do U.S. government tax poli-cies hurt production, but when federal restrictions are piled on, those injuries are intensified. At the same time, much untapped energy remains on federal lands and waters, often restricted from access. Sitting on such federal property is an estimated 635 trillion cubic feet of natu-ral gas, reports API, enough to meet the natural gas needs of 60 million American homes for 140 years. Federal lands also hold an estimated 112 billion barrels of recoverable oil, sufficient to produce gas for 60 million automobiles and fuel oil for 25 million homes for 60 years.

If the government actually wanted to assist U.S. energy production and it could only do one thing, this is what would work: get out of the way. n

— williAm P. hoAr

Where the dollars go: Average gasoline industry earnings in 2007 were 8.3 percent. Fifteen cents of every dollar spent at the pump goes to taxes. That’s 15 percent.

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43THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008

On March 22, voters on Taiwan elected Nationalist Party

candidate Ma Ying-jeou, a Harvard-educated lawyer and former Taipei mayor, as presi-dent of the Republic of China. Ma, who defeated Democrat-ic Progressive Party candidate Frank Hsieh by a 58-percent to 42-percent margin, will be Taiwan’s first president to have campaigned for closer economic relations with com-munist mainland China.

The news of Ma’s election triggered a surge in Taiwan’s stock market, prompted by expectations that Ma’s eco-nomic policies will spur the nation’s stagnant economy. The president-elect said in a March 23 interview that he hoped his new policy of opening Taiwan to tourism from mainland China would have a positive effect on the economy within 100 days of being implemented.

If the voters of Taiwan seem shortsighted for emphasizing economic prosperity at the expense of national security and even future sovereignty, maybe they are merely playing the hand dealt to them by the world’s superpowers (the United States included) as best they can. President Bill Clinton admitted bluntly in his 1998 Shanghai Library remarks on “Shaping China for the 21st Century”: “We don’t support independence for Taiwan, or two Chinas or one Taiwan, one China. And we don’t believe that Taiwan should be a member in any organization for which state-hood is a requirement.”

Clinton’s remarks reflected a long history of U.S. acquiescence and even favoritism toward the communists on mainland China. In fact, U.S. policies encouraging trade deals with China, includ-ing even deals subsidized by the U.S. government, have helped to make China a major player in the international marketplace.

Yet, in terms of the balance of trade with China, Taiwan is actually faring much better than we are. A report posted at the communist Chinese government’s website at the end of 2006 in-dicated that the value of goods exported that year from Taiwan to the mainland totaled $79.2 billion, while Taiwan imported $18.9 billion of goods from the mainland. The report observed: “The mainland has become the biggest export market and the biggest source of trade surplus for Taiwan, according to the [mainland Chinese] ministry [of Commerce].”

On the other hand, the United States suffered a $232 billion deficit with China that same year. U.S. trade with China has been a losing proposition since the days when President Nixon first called for the “normalizing of relations” and establishing

trade with China. Back then, China had no money to spend on American goods, except what it could receive from the sale of illicit narcotics. The so-called U.S.-China “trade” was financed by long-term, low-interest loans (gifts, actually) guaranteed by the U.S. Export-Import Bank and made possible by funds extracted from the American taxpayers.

A few decades later, thanks to its economy being jump-started by the United States, the vast outsourcing of man-ufacturing to China by U.S. companies, and the flood of

Chinese imports, the Chinese are so flush with cash that William Schneider, CNN’s senior political analyst, wrote in an October 25, 2005 article, “Re-evaluating U.S. Debt”: “China’s invest-ment in U.S. government debt has more than tripled in the past five years, from $71 billion in 2000 to $242 billion in 2005.” In simple language, we are in hock to the Chinese.

The people of Taiwan are playing a dangerous game in getting cozy with Beijing, which would break trade agreements, na-tionalize foreign companies established in China (just as Castro did after coming to power in Cuba), and take even more drastic actions, including military, if it thought it was in its interest to do so. Mainland China is the largest communist power in the world, with a population of over 1.3 billion and an army of 2.3 million active troops.

But Taiwan is merely emulating on a smaller scale what the United States has been doing for years. As William R. Hawkins, senior fellow for national security affairs at the U.S. Business and Industrial Council, wrote in an April 20, 2005 commentary:

The ability to boost military spending is a function of being “prosperous,” and the massive American trade deficit with China gives Beijing the hard currency needed to finance foreign weapon acquisitions — mostly Russian systems designed to attack American targets. As for “transforming,” it seems Beijing is only moving from a moribund com-munism to an energetic fascism. Is it really so difficult to connect the dots?

The danger for Taiwan (as well as for the United States) is easy to understand if we realize that all communist governments are run by gangsters. The naïve businessman who forms a partner-ship with a gangster soon finds out that the gangster controls his business, as well as his life. n

Taiwan’s Dangerous Game

44 THE NEW AMERICAN • APRIL 28, 2008

THE LAST WORDby wArreN mASS

Ma Ying-jeou shakes hands with supporters

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First Ten Amendments to the ConstitutionArticle I. Congress shall make no law respect-ing an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Govern-ment for a redress of grievances.

Article II. A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Article III. No soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Article IV. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirma- tion, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Article V. No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of

life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Article VI. In all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtain- ing witnesses in his favor, and to have the assis- tance of counsel for his defense.

Article VII. In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise re-examined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Article VIII. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Article IX. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Article X. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respec- tively, or to the people.

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“’Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world....”

– George Washington (1796)

“Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.” – Thomas Jefferson (1799)

“I deem [one of] the essential principles of our government [to be] peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none....”

– Thomas Jefferson (1801)