From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Reply-To: covici@ccs.covici.com
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: OSI/ADL Hate Mongers Under Assault in Courts
Date: 14 Sep 92 15:20:25 GMT
Organization: Covici Computer Systems

OSI and ADL hate-mongers under
assault in courts
by Jeffrey Steinberg

The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL)
and its Department of Justice (DOJ) cronies in the
``Nazi-hunting'' Office of Special Investigations (OSI)
are finding themselves under escalating attack in a number
of state and federal courts around the country. If the
momentum continues, the OSI may soon find itself out of
business and the ADL's decade-long campaign to impose
Orwellian ``hate crimes laws'' upon the United States may
be smashed once and for all. 
   On Aug. 26, the Ohio State Supreme Court declared an
ADL-authored hate crime statute to be unconstitutional.
The 1986 law, which was based on an ADL model statute,
mandated increased jail time and larger fines in cases
where individuals convicted of crimes were found to have
targeted their victims on the basis of religious, racial,
or other biases. The Ohio court, in a consolidated ruling
on four separate cases, found that ``enhancing a penalty
because of motive therefore punishes the person's thought,
rather than the person's act or criminal intent.'' This,
the court ruled, amounts to the creation of a ``thought
crime,'' in violation of state and federal constitutions. 
   The Ohio Supreme Court ruling, which mirrored an
earlier ruling by a Wisconsin court, was particularly
significant in that the original author and sponsor of the
bill, former State Sen. Lee Fisher, is now the Ohio State
Attorney General. A darling of the ADL, Fisher was a
keynote speaker last year at the founding conference of
the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC), an
ADL-dominated political action group which seeks to spread
Zionist lobby influence inside the Democratic Party and
among Democratic elected officials. Fisher has been a
staunch supporter of the death penalty, going so far as to
attempt to overturn a series of clemency orders by former
Gov. Richard Celeste that preempted a number of scheduled
executions in Ohio. Interviewed by the Jewish Telegraph
Agency following the court decision, Fisher said bitterly
that he thought the Ohio Supreme Court is ``just plain
wrong,'' and indicated that he planned to take the case up
to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

           - Demjanjuk case setback for OSI -
   On Sept. 4, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas
Wiseman, acting in his capacity as special master for the
Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, held a meeting with
attorneys representing the OSI and John Demjanjuk, the
Ukrainian-American retired auto worker who was extradited
to Israel in 1986 on charges that he was the Treblinka
concentration camp mass-murderer known as ``Ivan the
Terrible.'' In August, following oral argument, the Sixth
Circuit named Judge Wiseman as special master charged with
gathering evidence of possible government fraud on the
court in the Demjanjuk case. Attorneys for Demjanjuk had
successfully argued at the Aug. 11 hearing that the Sixth
Circuit had the authority to probe whether DOJ attorneys
had withheld exculpatory evidence proving that Demjanjuk
was not the infamous ``Ivan,'' resulting in his unlawful
denaturalization, deportation, and extradition to Israel,
where he was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. 
   On Sept. 4, Judge Wiseman convened a meeting in his
courtroom in Nashville, Tennessee to set a calendar for
evidentiary hearings. Among the witnesses already slated
to be questioned are three OSI attorneys, including the
unit's former chief Allan Ryan. Prior to the meeting, the
OSI had filed a lengthy statement arguing that Judge
Wiseman's mandate was extremely narrow. Incredibly, the
DOJ brief had argued that in an extradition proceeding,
the government is only obliged to present selective
evidence establishing probable cause, and that the
defendant has no right to present arguments in his or her
own defense: 
   ``The court's reference to the special master
encompasses a single issue: whether government attorneys
fraudulently failed to disclose material evidence that
would have changed the result of the extradition
proceeding. Because an extradition hearing is limited to a
showing of probable cause and because a defendant in an
extradition hearing has no right to introduce evidence
contradicting the government's showing of probable cause,
that reference permits inquiry only into whether, prior to
the extradition proceeding, the government had evidence in
its possession that would have completely obliterated the
government's showing of probable cause. Demjanjuk bears
the burden of proof in resolving that question.'' 
   Judge Wiseman, at the Sept. 4 meeting, rejected the
underlying premise of the Justice Department memorandum.
According to Debra Nagle, the public information officer
for the Sixth Circuit, Wiseman, speaking from the bench,
asserted that ``any allegation of attorney misconduct in
any proceeding which may have affected the outcome of that
or any other proceeding may be explored.'' Wiseman
characterized the government memo as ``too narrowly
construed.'' Questioning of the witnesses will probably
begin before the end of September. 

             - A broadside against the OSI -
   Even as the Demjanjuk case was unearthing a wealth of
evidence of fraud upon the court by the self-described
``Nazi hunters,'' the OSI was being hit on another flank
that threatens to permanently shut down the unit. In July,
attorneys representing a Ukrainian-American organization,
its president, and three eastern Europeans who were all
victims of the OSI, filed a civil suit in U.S. District
Court for the District of Columbia demanding that the
``Holtzman Amendment'' be declared unconstitutional. 
   According to William Nezowy, the president of the
American Ukrainian Political Action Council of the United
States (Aupacus), the Holtzman Amendment, which authorized
the Attorney General of the United States to denaturalize
and deport any individual who ``participated in the
persecution of any persons'' in conjunction with the Nazis
between 1933-45, is both unconstitutional on its face and
prejudicial against Americans of eastern European descent
in its implementation. ``It is a detour around the U.S.
Constitution,'' depriving naturalized eastern Europeans of
their rights under the First, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and
Fourteenth Amendments, Nezowy recently told {EIR.} 
   The plaintiffs in the lawsuit were Aupacus, Nezowy,
Frank Walus, Radoslav Artukovic, and Anu Linnas. Walus, a
Polish-American, was targeted by the OSI as an alleged
Nazi concentration camp officer. Although a dozen
witnesses came forward swearing that they could identify
Walus, his attorneys subsequently obtained
incontrovertible proof that he was innocent. The Walus
case underscored the unreliability of so-called eyewitness
testimony in such emotionally charged cases (the Sixth
Circuit raised the Walus precedent in the Aug. 11
Demjanjuk hearing). Artukovic and Linnas are both the
children of victims of OSI prosecutions who were deported
to Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, respectively, and died
in prison while awaiting execution. 
   The lawsuit charges that the revisions of the
criminal code Title 8, known as the Holtzman Amendment,
``are unconstitutional in that they are enforced in a
discriminatory fashion against individuals of selected
ethnic background, in violation of the protections of due
process and equal protection of the United States
Constitution, and that they violate on their face the
protections of the First, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and
Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution.''
The suit charges that of the more than 40 cases brought to
trial under the Holtzman Amendment, the overwhelming
majority have been against eastern Europeans or citizens
of the former ``Captive Nations'' of the Baltics or Ukraine.
``As such, these prosecutions were initiated or assisted by
those governments under the control of the former Soviet
Union for distinctively political and ideological
purposes, in which the formalities of genuine judicial
procedure were of little or no consideration, and the
Office of Special Investigations, by such a policy has
become an instrument of the same political and ideological
considerations, in violation of the true legislative
intent of Congress in enacting those provisions and in
violation of the Constitution of the United States.'' 
   The suit additionally charges that Order No. 851-79,
signed by then-Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti on
Sept. 4, 1979, which created the OSI inside the Criminal
Division of the Department of Justice, is a further
violation of the Constitution. Under the Holtzman
Amendment, naturalized American citizens charged with
wartime crimes are deprived of the right to a jury trial,
the right to an attorney, and other constitutional
provisions required in a criminal proceeding. All of the
victims of OSI prosecutions are subjected to criminal
prosecutions following their denaturalizations and
extraditions; and in most cases, the prosecutions are for
capital crimes. 
   ``We are concerned first and foremost about the
treatment of human beings,'' Nezowy told {EIR} on Sept. 2.
``It may very well be that there are other concerns here as
well, such as the misappropriation of government funds for
the spreading of false allegations, but first of all, our
concern is to restore the full rights under the
Constitution to the former eastern European and Captive
Nation citizens who have been singled out by OSI.'' 
   Nezowy believes that the court must declare the
Holtzman Amendment unconstitutional. ``In violation of all
the immigration laws of the United States, this amendment
provides for automatic denaturalization--with no due
process. What is worse, most of these cases were developed
on the basis of evidence received from the Soviet Union or
their satellite states--no questions asked. With the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB is in a temporary
state of limbo. They are still around and active, but for
the time being, some documents are finding their way into
the United States. We are now getting proof that the
Soviets forged evidence and peddled it to the OSI, as in
the Demjanjuk case. Nicholas Daniloff, the former {U.S.
News & World Report} magazine correspondent in Moscow,
said that the KGB had the capacity to forge any document
overnight if necessary. It appears that Daniloff was
right.'' 
   Nezowy's anger is directed at others in the
government, outside of just the OSI. He believes that
former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh created ``a new
constitution--his constitution. Things have not improved
under William Barr.'' He is also angry at the failure of
the Congress to take on the OSI and other cases of clear
Department of Justice politically motivated prosecutions.
He cites the case of Lyndon LaRouche as another example of
this kind of political targeting. ``Congress is too
wishy-washy. Most of them should be replaced. They are
gutless,'' he said. 
From Executive Intelligence Review v19, #37.


----
         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com