Now for what purpose did CBS arrange for communitcation between thier source of these forged and faked memos and the kerry campiagn? Seems CBS is totally devoid of ethics. The ONLY reason that I can come up with, is that there was some collusion between CBS and the kerry campaign. What other reason would there be? CBS and Dan rather have tried to influence this election and bring down the President. An investigation is in order along with Rather's immediate firing or resignation. - Sailor
CBS arranged for meeting with Lockhart
By Kevin Johnson, Dave Moniz and Jim Drinkard,
USA TODAY
September 20, 2004
WASHINGTON — CBS arranged for a confidential source to talk with Joe Lockhart, a top aide to John Kerry, after the source provided the network with the now-disputed documents about President Bush's service in the Texas National Guard.
Lockhart, the former press secretary to President Clinton, said a producer talked to him about the 60 Minutes program a few days before it aired on Sept. 8. She gave Lockhart a telephone number and asked him to call Bill Burkett, a former Texas National Guard officer who gave CBS the documents. Lockhart couldn't recall the producer's name. But CBS said Monday night that it would examine the role of producer Mary Mapes in passing the name to Lockhart.
Burkett told USA TODAY that he had agreed to turn over the documents to CBS if the network would arrange a conversation with the Kerry campaign.
The network's effort to place Burkett in contact with a top Democratic official raises ethical questions about CBS' handling of material potentially damaging to the Republican president in the midst of an election. This "poses a real danger to the potential credibility ... of a news organization," said Aly Colón, a news ethicist at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
"At Burkett's request, we gave his (telephone) number to the campaign," said Betsy West, senior CBS News vice president.
CBS would not discuss the propriety of the network serving as a conduit between Burkett and the Kerry campaign. "It was not part of any deal" to obtain the documents, West said, declining to elaborate.
But Burkett said Monday that his contact with Lockhart was indeed part of an "understanding" with CBS. Burkett said his interest in contacting the campaign was to offer advice in responding to Republican criticisms about Kerry's Vietnam service. It had nothing to do with the documents, he said.
"My interest was to get the attention of the national (campaign) to defend against the ... attacks," Burkett said, adding that he also talked to former Georgia senator Max Cleland and Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean during the past 45 days. "Neither the Democratic Party or the Kerry campaign had anything to do with the documents," he said.
Lockhart said he phoned Burkett at the number provided by CBS. Lockhart also said that the documents never came up in his conversation with Burkett. Lockhart said the conversation lasted just a few minutes. "It's possible that the producer said they had documents" before his conversation with Burkett, he said.
At the end of the conversation, Lockhart said he thanked Burkett for his interest, and there was no further contact with him. Asked why he called Burkett, Lockhart said he talks to "a lot of people."
"I called you, didn't I?"
The White House said CBS' contact with Lockhart was inappropriate. "The fact that CBS News would coordinate with the most senior levels of Sen. Kerry's campaign to attack the president is a stunning and deeply troubling revelation," said Dan Bartlett, White House communications director.
Contributing: Judy Keen
Man Linked to Bush Memos Contacted Cleland
Associated Press
AUSTIN, Texas -- A retired Texas National Guard official mentioned as a possible source for disputed documents about President Bush's service in the Guard said he passed along information to a former senator working with John Kerry's campaign.
Also, a White House official said Saturday that Bush has reviewed disputed documents that purport to show he refused orders to take a physical examination in 1972 and did not recall having seen them previously.
The long-running story on Bush's Texas Air National Guard service took an unusual twist when CBS broadcast a report on what it said were the newly discovered records. The authenticity of the documents has come into doubt.
In his first public comment on the CBS documents controversy, the president told The Union Leader of Manchester, N.H., "There are a lot of questions about the documents, and they need to be answered." The retired Guard official, Bill Burkett, said in an Aug. 21 e-mail to a list of Texas Democrats that after getting through "seven layers of bureaucratic kids" in the Democrat's campaign, he talked with former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland about information that would counter criticism of Kerry's Vietnam War service. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the e-mail Saturday.
"I asked if they wanted to counterattack or ride this to ground and outlast it, not spending any money. (Cleland) said counterattack. So I gave them the information to do it with," Burkett wrote.
Burkett, who lives just outside of Abilene, wrote that no one at the Kerry campaign called him back.
The e-mail was distributed to a Yahoo list of Texas Democrats. The site, which had about 570 members Saturday, is not affiliated with the state party.
Republican National Committee spokesman Jim Dyke suggested collaboration between Burkett and the Kerry campaign. "The trail of connections is becoming increasingly clear," he said.
In the telephone interview published Saturday, Bush replied "I don't know" to a question whether the White House had evidence that either the Kerry campaign or the Democratic Party were involved in releasing the disputed papers.
"The Kerry campaign had absolutely nothing to do with these documents, no ifs, ands or buts," spokesman David Wade said. "Jim Dyke inhabits the fantasy world of spin where George Bush pretends we haven't lost millions of jobs and everything in Iraq is coming up roses. He'd be better served getting answers from the president, not hurling baseless attacks."
No More Dialogue With Press
Burkett, who identifies himself as a Democrat, did not return several phone messages left by The Associated Press over the past week. There was no answer at his telephone number Saturday.
Burkett's lawyer, David Van Os, a Democratic candidate for the Texas Supreme Court, issued a statement this week saying Burkett "no longer trusts any possible outcome of speaking to the press on any issue regarding George W. Bush."
Burkett, who retired from the National Guard in 1999, has been cited in media reports as a source for the CBS News "60 Minutes" story about documents allegedly written by one of Bush's former commanders that indicated the future president ignored an order to take a physical.
The authenticity of the documents has been called into question by some experts and relatives of the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, who supposedly wrote them when he supervised Bush in 1972 and 1973. One of the memos indicated that Killian had been pressured to sugarcoat Bush's performance.
CBS has stood by its reporting, but said the network would redouble its efforts to determine the authenticity of the documents.
Leading operatives for the Texas Democratic Party did not receive Burkett's August e-mail, said Kelly Fero, one of the state party's strategists.
"The Democrats who run the party and are sort of the main strategists in Texas never saw it," Fero said. "We have lots of groups of Democrats who communicate among themselves constantly by e-mail."
Burkett, 55, told the AP in a lengthy telephone interview in February that he now is a supporter of Democrats, although at the time he said he didn't necessarily back Kerry.
He said he overheard a conversation in 1997 between then-Gov. Bush's chief of staff, Joe Allbaugh, and then-Adjutant Gen. Daniel James of the Texas Air National Guard in which the two men spoke of getting rid of any military records that would "embarrass the governor."
Burkett said he saw documents from Bush's file discarded in a trash can a few days later at Camp Mabry in Austin. Burkett described them as performance and pay documents. Allbaugh and James denied the allegations.
Burkett retired from the National Guard after more than 28 years of service because of medical reasons. He was involved in a lawsuit against the Guard over his medical benefits, which he lost on appeal.
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Monday, September 20, 2004
Antiewar Activist and The Mysteries of John Kerry's War Record
Here are the two op ed pieces mentioned in the NY Post Editorial. - Sailor
ANTIWAR ACTIVIST
By JOHN HINDERAKER, SCOTT JOHNSON & EDWARD MORRISSEY
New York Post
September 20, 2004 -- THE main reason for other veterans' anger at John Kerry is plainly what he did after re turning home: As a leader of the radical anti-war group Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Kerry accused his fellow soldiers of war crimes and atrocities in testimony before Congress.
On April 22, 1971, Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Most controversial is his allegation that American soldiers were committing war crimes, "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." He spoke of "the 200,000 [Vietnamese] a year who are murdered by the United States of America."
Kerry did not claim to have witnessed atrocities himself. But he repeated claims made in the "Winter Soldier Investigation" of three months earlier. Kerry had been a sponsor of that national conference, which took testimony from a number of witnesses. It later developed that some witnesses had never been to Vietnam at all, and others subsequently recanted their charges.
On the basis of Winter Solider, young Kerry told the senators that American soldiers had "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam . . . "
Former POW Air Force pilot Jim Warner and others have told of how the North Vietnamese forced American prisoners of war to listen to these words and other speeches by Kerry as part of their effort to make prisoners confess to war crimes.
Kerry's campaign has argued that in his Senate testimony, Kerry was only reporting charges made by others, but that claim is not consistent with Kerry's words. Kerry's testimony is a matter of record. But some questions remain: Why did he testify to war crimes and atrocities occurring "on a daily basis" if he had no knowledge of such atrocities? What was his basis for saying that American soldiers murdered 200,000 Vietnamese a year?
The Assassination Plot
At a November 1971 meeting in Kansas City of the leaders of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, one Scott Camil proposed "Operation Phoenix" — a plan to assassinate the leading pro-war members of the U.S. Senate. The group adjourned to a secret location to debate the assassination plan, and ultimately voted it down.
John Kerry originally claimed that he resigned from VVAW's executive committee two days before that meeting, and has denied attending. But contemporaneous FBI surveillance records place Kerry in Kansas City, and a number of witnesses — including the head of Kerry's campaign in Missouri, Randy Barnes — have said that Kerry attended the Kansas City meeting and argued against the assassination plan. (Thomas Lipscomb broke this story in the New York Sun this spring.)
Why has Kerry been unable to point to any evidence that he resigned from VVAW prior to the Kansas City meeting? If Kerry was there, why didn't he tell the authorities that some members were plotting political assassinations?
THE MYSTERIES OF JOHN KERRY'S WAR RECORD
By JOHN HINDERAKER, SCOTT JOHNSON & EDWARD MORRISSEY
New York Post
September 20, 2004 -- WHEN John Kerry "reported for duty" at the Democratic Na tional Convention and pres ented himself as qualified to lead by virtue of his service in Vietnam, he opened up for public scrutiny his actions in Vietnam and, later, as an antiwar activist. Kerry's critics, including the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, promptly responded with a critique of Kerry's record. The charges and counter-charges have left many confused, especially as some issues seem to turn on obscure, if not arcane, facts.
What follows is a primer on the main issues, the evidence and open questions.
Christmas in Cambodia
On March 27, 1986, Kerry took the floor of the U.S. Senate to deliver a dramatic indictment of Reagan administration foreign policy. As is his habit, he drew on his Vietnam experience: "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and having the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there."
He continued: "I have that memory which is seared — seared — in me, that says to me, before we send another generation into harm's way we have a responsibility in the U.S. Senate to go the last step, to make the best effort possible to avoid that kind of conflict."
Kerry has told of this Cambodia trip many times, from a 1979 Boston Herald review of "Apocalypse Now" to a June 1, 2003, Washington Post profile. The Post's Laura Blumenfeld reported that Kerry pulled a mildewed hat out of his briefcase and described it as "my good luck hat, given to me by a CIA man as we went in for a special mission in Cambodia."
Yet parts of Kerry's story are incredible on their face — such as saying Richard Nixon was responsible for the illegal mission, when Lyndon Johnson was president in 1968.
And there is no record that Swift boats were ever used for secret missions in Cambodia. (Their size and noisy engines make them ill-suited for the job.) Kerry's authorized biography, "Tour of Duty" by Douglas Brinkley, makes no mention of any such mission during Kerry's service.
Not a single crewman who served with Kerry has supported his claim to have entered Cambodia, and three have expressly denied it. Kerry's commanding officers have denied he was ever sent there. And Kerry's own Vietnam journal (excerpted in the Boston Globe) shows that on Christmas 1968 he was docked at Sa Dec, 50 miles from Cambodia.
In mid-August, these facts promped the Kerry campaign to "correct" the story, saying the mission took place in January 1969 when Kerry "inadvertently or responsibly" crossed the border.
Yet "inadvertently" straying into Cambodia — were that even possible — belies the basic point of Kerry's original story: that he lost his faith in government because the president lied about having sent U.S. troops into Cambodia. It also contradicts his story about ferrying a CIA man.
And the "correction" plainly hasn't sunk in: The Democratic Party chairman, Terry McAuliffe, told us in an interview earlier this month that Kerry had made two missions to Cambodia to drop off CIA men.
Some questions that Kerry himself has yet to answer: When exactly did he enter Cambodia? Accidentally, or intentionally? If by accident, how did that lead him to lose faith in the government? If on a secret mission, what was its purpose? What is the name of the CIA man? Why is there no record of any Cambodia mission, even in Kerry's journals? And why do Kerry's crewmates and fellow officers unanimously deny that any such mission ever occurred?
First Combat . . . Maybe
Kerry won his first Purple Heart for a combat engagement on Dec. 2, 1968, while training on a skimmer, or Boston whaler. On his campaign Web site, Kerry claims that on that day, he "experiences his first intense combat; receives combat-related injury" — for which he would eventually receive a Purple Heart.
But in "Tour of Duty," Brinkley writes:
"They pulled away from the pier at Cat Lo with spirits high, feeling satisfied with the way things were going for them. They had no lust for battle, but they also were not afraid. Kerry wrote in his notebook, 'A cocky feeling of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel because we hadn't been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven't been shot at are allowed to be cocky.' "
According to Kerry's journal, the date on which he "hadn't been shot at yet" was Dec. 9. Which means he hadn't been in combat on Dec. 2.
This fits in with the Swift vets' contention that Kerry's initial request for a Purple Heart had been denied by the chain of command. In fact, he didn't get a Purple Heart commendation for his Dec. 2 injury until months later, after transferring to a different command — which took Kerry at his word on being under enemy fire in the earlier engagement.
Kerry's campaign has now admitted that his first Purple Heart wound may have been unintentionally self-inflicted, sustained when he exploded a hand grenade too close to shore. The Kerry camp has not responded substantively to questions on the discrepancies between his citation and his journal entries as published by his biographer.
False Memories Of Fighting Together
David Alston has accompanied Kerry on campaign appearances, giving powerful testimony about Kerry's leadership under fire (including perhaps the most effective speech on Kerry's behalf at the Democratic Convention).
Alston and Kerry have both spoken of two engagements in which they took fire together on PCF-94, one on Jan. 29, 1969, the other on Feb. 28, 1969, when Kerry won his Silver Star.
Problems with these stories arose this April, when Lt. Tedd Peck complained that Kerry had appropriated one of Peck's actions as his own. It turned out that Peck, not Kerry, commanded PCF-94 on Jan. 29.
Both Peck and Alston were seriously wounded in that battle. We know that no other officer was aboard PCF-94, because enlisted man Del Sandusky took command after Peck was disabled. So Kerry's claim to have commanded the boat in that engagement is clearly false.
Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan created a timeline that credited all of PCF-94's January engagements to Kerry. Only after Peck complained publicly did Kerry stop trying to take credit for engagements that occurred before he was assigned to PCF-94. The campaign Website now notes only that he took command of PCF-94 in "late January."
According to records formerly available on the site, Alston was Medevaced to an Army hospital in Binh Thuy after being injured in the Jan. 29 fight, and did not return quickly. Kerry took command of PCF-94, the next day, replacing the injured Lt. Peck. The boat also got at least one and probably two new gunners to replace Alston. Fred Short arrived as the new gunner on Feb. 13.
On Feb. 28, PCF-94 took part in the engagement that won Kerry a Silver Star, and a commendation for every member of his crew. Alston has repeatedly asserted, since at least May 2002, that he participated in that action. In an interview with ABC News on June 24, Alston said: "I know when John Kerry told Del to beach that damn boat, this was a brand-new ball game. We wasn't running. We took it to Charlie."
"We?" All of Kerry's crew received commendations for this action. Absent from the list is the name David Alston. But Short's name is listed, and he was photographed at the award ceremony along with Kerry and his five enlisted men (a full PCF crew). Not in the photo: David Alston.
In an interview with Byron York of National Review, Short said that Alston didn't return to PCF-94 until after March 4, 1969, well after the Feb. 28 engagement. The exact date of Alston's return remains a mystery because (like Kerry) Alston has refused to release his military records. What is clear is that both Alston and Kerry have lied since at least May 2002 about Alston's service under Kerry.
Why did Kerry claim to have been in command of PCF-94 on Jan. 29, 1969? Why did Kerry try to replace Fred Short with David Alston as gunner in the Feb. 28 engagement? Only Kerry and Alston can explain. But since the controversy arose, Alston has disappeared from the campaign trail.
One Medal, Three Citations
In that Feb. 28 engagement, Kerry beached his PCF to frontally assault a Viet Cong ambush. He then leapt off the boat and chased an armed VC from the beach, killing him and capturing his rocket launcher. On that much, everyone agrees. The mystery surrounds the three differing citations Kerry has for the Silver Star he earned that day.
Adm. Elmo Zumwalt personally awarded the medal to Kerry. The citation (No. 1) notes that "an enemy soldier sprang up from his position not ten feet from Patrol Craft Fast 94 and fled. Without hesitation, Lieutenant (junior grade) KERRY leaped ashore, pursued the man behind a hootch and killed him . . . " The citations says the operation resulted in 10 Viet Cong killed.
For most people, one citation per award is sufficient. However, Kerry has another (No. 2) for this incident, this one signed by Adm. John Hyland, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet.
This citation fails to mention the VC that Kerry killed, but has added praise: Kerry now acted "with utter disregard for his own safety and the enemy rockets" and has now faced a "numerically superior force."
Citation No. 3 was signed by John Lehman as secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, more than 10 years after the action. It's nearly identical to No. 2, except it adds, "By his brave actions, bold initiative, and unwavering devotion to duty, Lieutenant (jg) Kerry reflected great credit upon himself."
What really happened on the Dong Cung River that day? Kerry's own crew (most of whom support his candidacy) insisted that Kerry chased the injured VC behind the hootch, out of sight of the crew, before killing him. Kerry denies leaving his crew's sight — which would be a brave but foolish tactical mistake for the commander of a beached boat under fire. And both later citations fail to mention Kerry personally killing the VC.
Last week, The Post's Deborah Orin confirmed from Navy sources that the original teletype of the after-action report had been found in the Naval Archives. It confirms the statements of Kerry's crew: "OinC [Officer in Command] of PCF 94 chased VC inland behind hootch and shot him while he fled capturing one B-40 rocket launcher with round in chamber."
The report also makes clear that the three PCFs carried a contingent of 90 Vietnamese RFPF troops, which would have hardly made their patrol numerically inferior to the snipers that ambushed them. And the final calculation of KIA from that mission, according to the immediately-filed after-action report, was 4 KIA, not 10 or a score as the citations state.
Kerry performed well under fire. But his changing stories regarding the action have mysteriously found their way into the extraordinary series of citations that stretch out over a decade for this single action and award.
Lehman, moreover, insists that he never signed the third citation nor wrote the additional language. On Friday, the Navy inspector general concluded, following an investigation prompted by a Judicial Watch request, that the proper procedure had been followed in the processes initially used to approve Kerry's medals and the officers involved had proper authority to approve the awards. But Adm. R. A. Route's probe didn't address any qualitative review of Kerry's awards, and Lehman's disavowal of citation No. 3 has prompted a separate investigation.
Conclusion
Much more could be said about John Kerry and the Vietnam years, but this primer may suggest why Kerry has been keeping his distance from the press these last six weeks. Kerry can put some of these questions to rest — by signing the standard military form to allow his records to be made public. Until those records are released, many questions will remain unanswered.
Minneapolis attorneys John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson are proprietors of the Web log powerlineblog.com. Minneapolis-based freelance writer Edward Morrissey is proprietor of the Web log captainsquartersblog.com.
ANTIWAR ACTIVIST
By JOHN HINDERAKER, SCOTT JOHNSON & EDWARD MORRISSEY
New York Post
September 20, 2004 -- THE main reason for other veterans' anger at John Kerry is plainly what he did after re turning home: As a leader of the radical anti-war group Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Kerry accused his fellow soldiers of war crimes and atrocities in testimony before Congress.
On April 22, 1971, Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Most controversial is his allegation that American soldiers were committing war crimes, "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." He spoke of "the 200,000 [Vietnamese] a year who are murdered by the United States of America."
Kerry did not claim to have witnessed atrocities himself. But he repeated claims made in the "Winter Soldier Investigation" of three months earlier. Kerry had been a sponsor of that national conference, which took testimony from a number of witnesses. It later developed that some witnesses had never been to Vietnam at all, and others subsequently recanted their charges.
On the basis of Winter Solider, young Kerry told the senators that American soldiers had "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam . . . "
Former POW Air Force pilot Jim Warner and others have told of how the North Vietnamese forced American prisoners of war to listen to these words and other speeches by Kerry as part of their effort to make prisoners confess to war crimes.
Kerry's campaign has argued that in his Senate testimony, Kerry was only reporting charges made by others, but that claim is not consistent with Kerry's words. Kerry's testimony is a matter of record. But some questions remain: Why did he testify to war crimes and atrocities occurring "on a daily basis" if he had no knowledge of such atrocities? What was his basis for saying that American soldiers murdered 200,000 Vietnamese a year?
The Assassination Plot
At a November 1971 meeting in Kansas City of the leaders of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, one Scott Camil proposed "Operation Phoenix" — a plan to assassinate the leading pro-war members of the U.S. Senate. The group adjourned to a secret location to debate the assassination plan, and ultimately voted it down.
John Kerry originally claimed that he resigned from VVAW's executive committee two days before that meeting, and has denied attending. But contemporaneous FBI surveillance records place Kerry in Kansas City, and a number of witnesses — including the head of Kerry's campaign in Missouri, Randy Barnes — have said that Kerry attended the Kansas City meeting and argued against the assassination plan. (Thomas Lipscomb broke this story in the New York Sun this spring.)
Why has Kerry been unable to point to any evidence that he resigned from VVAW prior to the Kansas City meeting? If Kerry was there, why didn't he tell the authorities that some members were plotting political assassinations?
THE MYSTERIES OF JOHN KERRY'S WAR RECORD
By JOHN HINDERAKER, SCOTT JOHNSON & EDWARD MORRISSEY
New York Post
September 20, 2004 -- WHEN John Kerry "reported for duty" at the Democratic Na tional Convention and pres ented himself as qualified to lead by virtue of his service in Vietnam, he opened up for public scrutiny his actions in Vietnam and, later, as an antiwar activist. Kerry's critics, including the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, promptly responded with a critique of Kerry's record. The charges and counter-charges have left many confused, especially as some issues seem to turn on obscure, if not arcane, facts.
What follows is a primer on the main issues, the evidence and open questions.
Christmas in Cambodia
On March 27, 1986, Kerry took the floor of the U.S. Senate to deliver a dramatic indictment of Reagan administration foreign policy. As is his habit, he drew on his Vietnam experience: "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and having the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there."
He continued: "I have that memory which is seared — seared — in me, that says to me, before we send another generation into harm's way we have a responsibility in the U.S. Senate to go the last step, to make the best effort possible to avoid that kind of conflict."
Kerry has told of this Cambodia trip many times, from a 1979 Boston Herald review of "Apocalypse Now" to a June 1, 2003, Washington Post profile. The Post's Laura Blumenfeld reported that Kerry pulled a mildewed hat out of his briefcase and described it as "my good luck hat, given to me by a CIA man as we went in for a special mission in Cambodia."
Yet parts of Kerry's story are incredible on their face — such as saying Richard Nixon was responsible for the illegal mission, when Lyndon Johnson was president in 1968.
And there is no record that Swift boats were ever used for secret missions in Cambodia. (Their size and noisy engines make them ill-suited for the job.) Kerry's authorized biography, "Tour of Duty" by Douglas Brinkley, makes no mention of any such mission during Kerry's service.
Not a single crewman who served with Kerry has supported his claim to have entered Cambodia, and three have expressly denied it. Kerry's commanding officers have denied he was ever sent there. And Kerry's own Vietnam journal (excerpted in the Boston Globe) shows that on Christmas 1968 he was docked at Sa Dec, 50 miles from Cambodia.
In mid-August, these facts promped the Kerry campaign to "correct" the story, saying the mission took place in January 1969 when Kerry "inadvertently or responsibly" crossed the border.
Yet "inadvertently" straying into Cambodia — were that even possible — belies the basic point of Kerry's original story: that he lost his faith in government because the president lied about having sent U.S. troops into Cambodia. It also contradicts his story about ferrying a CIA man.
And the "correction" plainly hasn't sunk in: The Democratic Party chairman, Terry McAuliffe, told us in an interview earlier this month that Kerry had made two missions to Cambodia to drop off CIA men.
Some questions that Kerry himself has yet to answer: When exactly did he enter Cambodia? Accidentally, or intentionally? If by accident, how did that lead him to lose faith in the government? If on a secret mission, what was its purpose? What is the name of the CIA man? Why is there no record of any Cambodia mission, even in Kerry's journals? And why do Kerry's crewmates and fellow officers unanimously deny that any such mission ever occurred?
First Combat . . . Maybe
Kerry won his first Purple Heart for a combat engagement on Dec. 2, 1968, while training on a skimmer, or Boston whaler. On his campaign Web site, Kerry claims that on that day, he "experiences his first intense combat; receives combat-related injury" — for which he would eventually receive a Purple Heart.
But in "Tour of Duty," Brinkley writes:
"They pulled away from the pier at Cat Lo with spirits high, feeling satisfied with the way things were going for them. They had no lust for battle, but they also were not afraid. Kerry wrote in his notebook, 'A cocky feeling of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel because we hadn't been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven't been shot at are allowed to be cocky.' "
According to Kerry's journal, the date on which he "hadn't been shot at yet" was Dec. 9. Which means he hadn't been in combat on Dec. 2.
This fits in with the Swift vets' contention that Kerry's initial request for a Purple Heart had been denied by the chain of command. In fact, he didn't get a Purple Heart commendation for his Dec. 2 injury until months later, after transferring to a different command — which took Kerry at his word on being under enemy fire in the earlier engagement.
Kerry's campaign has now admitted that his first Purple Heart wound may have been unintentionally self-inflicted, sustained when he exploded a hand grenade too close to shore. The Kerry camp has not responded substantively to questions on the discrepancies between his citation and his journal entries as published by his biographer.
False Memories Of Fighting Together
David Alston has accompanied Kerry on campaign appearances, giving powerful testimony about Kerry's leadership under fire (including perhaps the most effective speech on Kerry's behalf at the Democratic Convention).
Alston and Kerry have both spoken of two engagements in which they took fire together on PCF-94, one on Jan. 29, 1969, the other on Feb. 28, 1969, when Kerry won his Silver Star.
Problems with these stories arose this April, when Lt. Tedd Peck complained that Kerry had appropriated one of Peck's actions as his own. It turned out that Peck, not Kerry, commanded PCF-94 on Jan. 29.
Both Peck and Alston were seriously wounded in that battle. We know that no other officer was aboard PCF-94, because enlisted man Del Sandusky took command after Peck was disabled. So Kerry's claim to have commanded the boat in that engagement is clearly false.
Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan created a timeline that credited all of PCF-94's January engagements to Kerry. Only after Peck complained publicly did Kerry stop trying to take credit for engagements that occurred before he was assigned to PCF-94. The campaign Website now notes only that he took command of PCF-94 in "late January."
According to records formerly available on the site, Alston was Medevaced to an Army hospital in Binh Thuy after being injured in the Jan. 29 fight, and did not return quickly. Kerry took command of PCF-94, the next day, replacing the injured Lt. Peck. The boat also got at least one and probably two new gunners to replace Alston. Fred Short arrived as the new gunner on Feb. 13.
On Feb. 28, PCF-94 took part in the engagement that won Kerry a Silver Star, and a commendation for every member of his crew. Alston has repeatedly asserted, since at least May 2002, that he participated in that action. In an interview with ABC News on June 24, Alston said: "I know when John Kerry told Del to beach that damn boat, this was a brand-new ball game. We wasn't running. We took it to Charlie."
"We?" All of Kerry's crew received commendations for this action. Absent from the list is the name David Alston. But Short's name is listed, and he was photographed at the award ceremony along with Kerry and his five enlisted men (a full PCF crew). Not in the photo: David Alston.
In an interview with Byron York of National Review, Short said that Alston didn't return to PCF-94 until after March 4, 1969, well after the Feb. 28 engagement. The exact date of Alston's return remains a mystery because (like Kerry) Alston has refused to release his military records. What is clear is that both Alston and Kerry have lied since at least May 2002 about Alston's service under Kerry.
Why did Kerry claim to have been in command of PCF-94 on Jan. 29, 1969? Why did Kerry try to replace Fred Short with David Alston as gunner in the Feb. 28 engagement? Only Kerry and Alston can explain. But since the controversy arose, Alston has disappeared from the campaign trail.
One Medal, Three Citations
In that Feb. 28 engagement, Kerry beached his PCF to frontally assault a Viet Cong ambush. He then leapt off the boat and chased an armed VC from the beach, killing him and capturing his rocket launcher. On that much, everyone agrees. The mystery surrounds the three differing citations Kerry has for the Silver Star he earned that day.
Adm. Elmo Zumwalt personally awarded the medal to Kerry. The citation (No. 1) notes that "an enemy soldier sprang up from his position not ten feet from Patrol Craft Fast 94 and fled. Without hesitation, Lieutenant (junior grade) KERRY leaped ashore, pursued the man behind a hootch and killed him . . . " The citations says the operation resulted in 10 Viet Cong killed.
For most people, one citation per award is sufficient. However, Kerry has another (No. 2) for this incident, this one signed by Adm. John Hyland, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet.
This citation fails to mention the VC that Kerry killed, but has added praise: Kerry now acted "with utter disregard for his own safety and the enemy rockets" and has now faced a "numerically superior force."
Citation No. 3 was signed by John Lehman as secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, more than 10 years after the action. It's nearly identical to No. 2, except it adds, "By his brave actions, bold initiative, and unwavering devotion to duty, Lieutenant (jg) Kerry reflected great credit upon himself."
What really happened on the Dong Cung River that day? Kerry's own crew (most of whom support his candidacy) insisted that Kerry chased the injured VC behind the hootch, out of sight of the crew, before killing him. Kerry denies leaving his crew's sight — which would be a brave but foolish tactical mistake for the commander of a beached boat under fire. And both later citations fail to mention Kerry personally killing the VC.
Last week, The Post's Deborah Orin confirmed from Navy sources that the original teletype of the after-action report had been found in the Naval Archives. It confirms the statements of Kerry's crew: "OinC [Officer in Command] of PCF 94 chased VC inland behind hootch and shot him while he fled capturing one B-40 rocket launcher with round in chamber."
The report also makes clear that the three PCFs carried a contingent of 90 Vietnamese RFPF troops, which would have hardly made their patrol numerically inferior to the snipers that ambushed them. And the final calculation of KIA from that mission, according to the immediately-filed after-action report, was 4 KIA, not 10 or a score as the citations state.
Kerry performed well under fire. But his changing stories regarding the action have mysteriously found their way into the extraordinary series of citations that stretch out over a decade for this single action and award.
Lehman, moreover, insists that he never signed the third citation nor wrote the additional language. On Friday, the Navy inspector general concluded, following an investigation prompted by a Judicial Watch request, that the proper procedure had been followed in the processes initially used to approve Kerry's medals and the officers involved had proper authority to approve the awards. But Adm. R. A. Route's probe didn't address any qualitative review of Kerry's awards, and Lehman's disavowal of citation No. 3 has prompted a separate investigation.
Conclusion
Much more could be said about John Kerry and the Vietnam years, but this primer may suggest why Kerry has been keeping his distance from the press these last six weeks. Kerry can put some of these questions to rest — by signing the standard military form to allow his records to be made public. Until those records are released, many questions will remain unanswered.
Minneapolis attorneys John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson are proprietors of the Web log powerlineblog.com. Minneapolis-based freelance writer Edward Morrissey is proprietor of the Web log captainsquartersblog.com.
Why Voters Need to Know
I have posted it over and over. kerry made a huge error in judgement when he decided to try and use his Vietnam service as the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. Who ever advised him on that, just about sealed the election for President Bush. - Sailor
WHY VOTERS NEED TO KNOW
New York Post Editorial
September 20, 2004 -- From the moment John Kerry made his military service in Vietnam a pillar of his presidential bid, the Massachusetts senator opened himself to questions about it.
Indeed, that history — his military decorations on the battlefield, followed by his strident anti-war activism — has been the rationale for Kerry's entire political career.
Over the years, most people have accepted his account of those exploits at face value. But now that Kerry stands as a candidate for president — a goal he reportedly set for himself decades ago — it's time for a closer look.
In the opposite columns, three Weblog authors, John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson and Edward Morrissey, who led the way in exposing CBS' Memogate scandal have summarized the most serious questions that have been raised, and that linger even despite a finding Friday by a Navy investigator that Kerry won his awards through proper procedures:
* For nearly 20 years, Kerry claimed that he spent Christmas 1968 in Cambodia on a "special mission." This experience, he has said, "is seared — seared — in my memory." Indeed, he's said it was his personal knowledge that President Nixon was lying when he denied U.S. forces were in Cambodia that made him lose faith in government.
Except that according to his own Vietnam journal, Kerry was 50 miles from Cambodia that day — which, incidentally, was a month before Richard Nixon even took office. Moreover, Swift boats, which he commanded, — weren't used for secret missions in Cambodia.
Kerry's campaign now says he misremembered the date of the border crossing — which may well have been "inadvertent."
* Kerry won his first Purple Heart for a combat engagement that took place at least a week before his own journal says he first faced enemy fire. Yet his campaign said the medal was for a "combat-related injury."
The campaign now concedes the wound may have been self-inflicted, suffered when he exploded a grenade too close to shore.
* Kerry has been accompanied on the campaign trail by David Alston, who has testified to the candidate's leadership under fire by citing two engagements in which they served together. But records indicate that Alston was not present during the second episode.
* Over the years, Kerry has been given three separate citations for the engagement in which he was awarded the Silver Star. That's unusual enough — but in each, the story of what happened keeps getting more grand.
And there are other questions, beyond those covered here — like Kerry's apparent wartime meeting in Paris with North Vietnamese.
WHY does all this matter? Why, when America is engaged in a global war against terrorism, should voters care about what happened 30-plus years ago?
First of all, because John Kerry says it matters — and made it key to his presidential bid.
Second, because his heroism supposedly justifies his venomous denunciations of U.S. soldiers as war criminals and murderers — speeches to which captured POWs in Hanoi were forced to listen.
That's an argument with which we suspect most people (rightly) disagree. But if Kerry's own record is open to question, then his '70s-era attacks on American soldiers become that much more malicious.
Meanwhile, he refuses to release all of his records, which could clear up many questions.
John Kerry has made what he did during the Vietnam War — both there and here — the touchstone of his credibility as a presidential candidate. It's time for the voters to understand that record — but to do so, they need to know the entire story.
WHY VOTERS NEED TO KNOW
New York Post Editorial
September 20, 2004 -- From the moment John Kerry made his military service in Vietnam a pillar of his presidential bid, the Massachusetts senator opened himself to questions about it.
Indeed, that history — his military decorations on the battlefield, followed by his strident anti-war activism — has been the rationale for Kerry's entire political career.
Over the years, most people have accepted his account of those exploits at face value. But now that Kerry stands as a candidate for president — a goal he reportedly set for himself decades ago — it's time for a closer look.
In the opposite columns, three Weblog authors, John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson and Edward Morrissey, who led the way in exposing CBS' Memogate scandal have summarized the most serious questions that have been raised, and that linger even despite a finding Friday by a Navy investigator that Kerry won his awards through proper procedures:
* For nearly 20 years, Kerry claimed that he spent Christmas 1968 in Cambodia on a "special mission." This experience, he has said, "is seared — seared — in my memory." Indeed, he's said it was his personal knowledge that President Nixon was lying when he denied U.S. forces were in Cambodia that made him lose faith in government.
Except that according to his own Vietnam journal, Kerry was 50 miles from Cambodia that day — which, incidentally, was a month before Richard Nixon even took office. Moreover, Swift boats, which he commanded, — weren't used for secret missions in Cambodia.
Kerry's campaign now says he misremembered the date of the border crossing — which may well have been "inadvertent."
* Kerry won his first Purple Heart for a combat engagement that took place at least a week before his own journal says he first faced enemy fire. Yet his campaign said the medal was for a "combat-related injury."
The campaign now concedes the wound may have been self-inflicted, suffered when he exploded a grenade too close to shore.
* Kerry has been accompanied on the campaign trail by David Alston, who has testified to the candidate's leadership under fire by citing two engagements in which they served together. But records indicate that Alston was not present during the second episode.
* Over the years, Kerry has been given three separate citations for the engagement in which he was awarded the Silver Star. That's unusual enough — but in each, the story of what happened keeps getting more grand.
And there are other questions, beyond those covered here — like Kerry's apparent wartime meeting in Paris with North Vietnamese.
WHY does all this matter? Why, when America is engaged in a global war against terrorism, should voters care about what happened 30-plus years ago?
First of all, because John Kerry says it matters — and made it key to his presidential bid.
Second, because his heroism supposedly justifies his venomous denunciations of U.S. soldiers as war criminals and murderers — speeches to which captured POWs in Hanoi were forced to listen.
That's an argument with which we suspect most people (rightly) disagree. But if Kerry's own record is open to question, then his '70s-era attacks on American soldiers become that much more malicious.
Meanwhile, he refuses to release all of his records, which could clear up many questions.
John Kerry has made what he did during the Vietnam War — both there and here — the touchstone of his credibility as a presidential candidate. It's time for the voters to understand that record — but to do so, they need to know the entire story.
The Alliance Builder?
An interesting take on how the poodle sees alliances and alliance buliding. It is rather revealing that johnny boy feels better with Jacques "The Weasel" Chirac, then his band of brothers in swift boats. - Sailor
The Alliance Builder?
By Carroll Andrew Morse
Published 09/20/2004
As coverage of the Swift boat veterans and the Bush national guard stories enters a phase revealing as much about the media as it does the candidates, let's take a moment to remember how who did what 30 years ago became an issue in the first place. From the beginning of his campaign, Senator John Kerry trumpeted his Vietnam service as a key qualification for the American Presidency. The idea was that Americans wanted a leader who was, quite literally, battle-tested.
Kerry and his surrogates claimed that soldiers who had served with Kerry would vouch for his fitness as a leader. To help dramatize this point, Kerry's campaign ran an advertisement that included a 1969 photograph of Kerry with 19 of his fellow Swift boat commanders from Vietnam.
The use of the photo presented a problem. According to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, "Of 19 Swift boat skippers pictured other than Kerry, 12 consider him unfit, 2 are neutral, two have died, and 3 now support Kerry. Four other officers were not present for the photo session; all oppose Kerry."
The dissention between the veterans is telling. As TCS's Lee Harris has observed, much of the apparent irrationality in the method that Americans use to choose a president serves an important purpose. The purpose is to expose the potential leader of the most powerful nation on earth to a "grueling series of artificially induced crises that simulate those he will ultimately have to face as president. The American electoral process is, in a way, like the simulated testing done by the manufacturers of automobile tires -- we want to know which ones are reliable before we put them on our cars, rather than afterward…"
John Kerry was handed what should have been a baby-step in the presidential-simulator. Manufacture an alliance of veterans. For a candidate who is centering his foreign policy on the notion of building alliances, creating an alliance of men with whom he shared common background should have been an easy task.
John Kerry failed to build a credible alliance. Unilaterally speaking for the group of 23 veterans represented in the 1969 photograph highlighted the failure. His use of the photograph was based on a fraudulent coalition of just 3 of the 23.
The only thing that mattered to Kerry about the 19 men in the photo was how their image could be used to advance his leadership ambitions. He ignored the fact that they might not want to be used as part of his campaign. The views and concerns of the little people did not matter. He failed the fundamental challenge of alliance building -- accommodating people with disparate interests.
What does this tell us about the kind of alliances that John Kerry seeks to build? Perhaps Senator Kerry believes that he will do a better job with Jacques Chirac and European diplomats than he did with the Swift Veterans because he believes that Europeans more readily identify with him than his band of brothers does. This seems to be the argument Howard Dean is making for Kerry. In a PBS interview at the Democratic National Convention in July, Dean cited the fact that "He's [Kerry is] the son of a diplomat. He's spent time in Europe" as a primary alliance-building credential.
More troubling is the fact that a scaled-up version of ignoring the little people is the preferred alliance building procedure for international bureaucrats and the diplomats of old Europe. When promoting tranquility amongst a few hundred members of the diplomatic class meant ignoring basic concerns of tens of millions of Iraqis living under a dictator, the ordinary Iraqis' concerns were ignored. Presently, delays in taking meaningful action in Sudan put hundreds of thousands of lives at risk, yet the delays persist. They persist because finding language that serves the political interests of the diplomatic corps is given a higher priority than saving lives. John Kerry's treatment of the Swift Veterans -- his assumption that everyone should quietly subordinate their individual interests to the political interests of a leader -- uncomfortably echoes this alliance building procedure.
The author is a TCS contributor. He recently wrote for TCS about the Carter Center and the Venezuela election.
The Alliance Builder?
By Carroll Andrew Morse
Published 09/20/2004
As coverage of the Swift boat veterans and the Bush national guard stories enters a phase revealing as much about the media as it does the candidates, let's take a moment to remember how who did what 30 years ago became an issue in the first place. From the beginning of his campaign, Senator John Kerry trumpeted his Vietnam service as a key qualification for the American Presidency. The idea was that Americans wanted a leader who was, quite literally, battle-tested.
Kerry and his surrogates claimed that soldiers who had served with Kerry would vouch for his fitness as a leader. To help dramatize this point, Kerry's campaign ran an advertisement that included a 1969 photograph of Kerry with 19 of his fellow Swift boat commanders from Vietnam.
The use of the photo presented a problem. According to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, "Of 19 Swift boat skippers pictured other than Kerry, 12 consider him unfit, 2 are neutral, two have died, and 3 now support Kerry. Four other officers were not present for the photo session; all oppose Kerry."
The dissention between the veterans is telling. As TCS's Lee Harris has observed, much of the apparent irrationality in the method that Americans use to choose a president serves an important purpose. The purpose is to expose the potential leader of the most powerful nation on earth to a "grueling series of artificially induced crises that simulate those he will ultimately have to face as president. The American electoral process is, in a way, like the simulated testing done by the manufacturers of automobile tires -- we want to know which ones are reliable before we put them on our cars, rather than afterward…"
John Kerry was handed what should have been a baby-step in the presidential-simulator. Manufacture an alliance of veterans. For a candidate who is centering his foreign policy on the notion of building alliances, creating an alliance of men with whom he shared common background should have been an easy task.
John Kerry failed to build a credible alliance. Unilaterally speaking for the group of 23 veterans represented in the 1969 photograph highlighted the failure. His use of the photograph was based on a fraudulent coalition of just 3 of the 23.
The only thing that mattered to Kerry about the 19 men in the photo was how their image could be used to advance his leadership ambitions. He ignored the fact that they might not want to be used as part of his campaign. The views and concerns of the little people did not matter. He failed the fundamental challenge of alliance building -- accommodating people with disparate interests.
What does this tell us about the kind of alliances that John Kerry seeks to build? Perhaps Senator Kerry believes that he will do a better job with Jacques Chirac and European diplomats than he did with the Swift Veterans because he believes that Europeans more readily identify with him than his band of brothers does. This seems to be the argument Howard Dean is making for Kerry. In a PBS interview at the Democratic National Convention in July, Dean cited the fact that "He's [Kerry is] the son of a diplomat. He's spent time in Europe" as a primary alliance-building credential.
More troubling is the fact that a scaled-up version of ignoring the little people is the preferred alliance building procedure for international bureaucrats and the diplomats of old Europe. When promoting tranquility amongst a few hundred members of the diplomatic class meant ignoring basic concerns of tens of millions of Iraqis living under a dictator, the ordinary Iraqis' concerns were ignored. Presently, delays in taking meaningful action in Sudan put hundreds of thousands of lives at risk, yet the delays persist. They persist because finding language that serves the political interests of the diplomatic corps is given a higher priority than saving lives. John Kerry's treatment of the Swift Veterans -- his assumption that everyone should quietly subordinate their individual interests to the political interests of a leader -- uncomfortably echoes this alliance building procedure.
The author is a TCS contributor. He recently wrote for TCS about the Carter Center and the Venezuela election.
Sunday, September 19, 2004
57 Varieties of Radical Causes, Part II
Here is part II. It does make for some very interesting reading. It this the direction kerry would take the country if elected? - Sailor
57 Varieties of Radical Causes, Part II
By Ben Johnson
FrontPageMagazine.com September 17, 2004
This is the continuation of our new book, 57 Varieties of Radical Causes: Teresa Heinz Kerry's Charitable Giving, written by Ben Johnson with a foreword by David Horowitz. Click here to read the beginning of this expose. Click HERE to purchase a copy. -- The Editors.
Chapter 4: Partisan Causes
Teresa Heinz Kerry has in fact invested an enormous amount of tax-exempt grant money in “a laundry list of partisan causes and fringe political groups.” The grants speak for themselves.
ACLU: The Legal Left after 9/11
For many years, no association has been so identified with the public image of the left as the ACLU. While Teresa Heinz Kerry served as a Carnegie trustee in 2000, that body donated $300,000 to the ACLU Foundation. Since 9/11, the ACLU has crusaded in behalf of al-Qaeda detainees, hindered investigations of suspected terrorists, sowed hysteria about the Patriot Act and smeared Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Justice Department as a foe of the Constitution.
According to the ACLU the Patriot Act authorizes a radical expansion of federal wiretapping and investigative powers. A typical ACLU press release reads, “Under the new Ashcroft guidelines, the FBI can freely infiltrate mosques, churches and synagogues and other houses of worship, listen in on online chat rooms and read message boards even if it has no evidence that a crime might be committed.” However, these guidelines are not “new”; these powers were granted in 1978 by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The Patriot Act merely allows federal agents to use these investigative tools on terrorists as they have for decades on the Mafia – preventing rather than waiting for an imminent terrorist attack. Terrorism wiretaps must be approved in court, just like those in a criminal investigation. In short the ACLU’s civil liberties zeal seems to be related to the perceived “victims”: terrorists. Ordinary criminals inspired no comparable crusade.
In the post-9/11 period, the ACLU has ruthlessly sued any airline taking extra security steps which caused inconvenience to Muslims, who are responsible for 100 percent of the terrorist incidents since (and including) the attack on the World Trade Center. To the ACLU, a sharpened focus on a group from which all post-9/11 terrorists have been recruited is “racial profiling.”[1]
The ACLU also opposes the government’s policy requiring some “temporary visa” holders to register with Immigration Services or face deportation. This policy was drafted to affect only males between the ages of 16 and 25 from nations with known ties to terrorism. Since the government did not equally inconvenience every temporary visa holder in the country (which would be beyond its resources), the ACLU has declared the policy “discrimination,” offering legal advice to those affected, organizing protests on their behalf, and harassing government agencies through legal complaints.
The ACLU has leaped to the defense of many terrorists including Sami al-Arian, the indicted chief financier and co-founder of the Palestine Islamic Jihad, responsible for the suicide bombing murders of more than 100 individuals including two American citizens. Professor al-Arian ran the University of South Florida’s International Institute of Islamic Thought, where he hired fellow terrorists as “assistants,” all the while directing money to PIJ terrorists. The ACLU has since sought to interfere with the government’s investigation of the International Institute of Islamic Thought, questioning the scope of federal search warrants. The lawyers even jumped to al-Arian’s defense when he told them his jailers only let him change his underwear once a week. In this denial of a prisoner’s inalienable right to fresh skivvies, the ACLU smells “the disgusting raw exercise of power by John Ashcroft.” The prison denies any wrongdoing, but this has not kept the ACLU from repeating al-Arian’s charges.[2]
The Heinz grant did not go directly to this particular ACLU effort. It was earmarked for the ACLU’s “voting rights project.” But by funding another of the ACLU’s projects, Carnegie frees up the ACLU’s own funds for programs like this. On the other hand, the voting rights project itself supports three agendas most Americans might find offensive: stifling democracy, race-based politics, and bigger government.[3] For example, the “voting rights” project supported the creation of an all-Indian voting district in Montana, because, in the Orwellian wording of its press release, “even though both Rosebud and Lake counties include substantial voting blocs of Indians…their votes are diluted by the white majority.”[4]
Here the ACLU is following the jurisprudence of quota maven Lani Guinier, the Harvard professor Bill Clinton unsuccessfully nominated to head his Civil Rights Division in 1993. Guinier believes that not only should minorities have their own congressional districts, but they should retain veto power over any bill passed by a majority of Americans to which they object. This would lead to the Balkanization of the American polity along race lines, which is exactly what the divisive left wants. As a by-product of focusing voters on narrowly racial political interests, this proposed reform would help assure the targeted districts would represented by Democrats. (For some reason, these ACLU lawsuits only get filed for heavily Democratic constituencies.)
The ACLU voting rights project also proposes “full public [that is, taxpayer] financing for federal elections.”[5] Putting the money for elections in the hands of the majority political party (which is what this in effect would achieve) is a prescription for ending democracy, not improving it. Thomas Jefferson once said, “To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” That nicely summarizes the ACLU proposal.
The ACLU has engaged in a series of controversial court cases questioning most aspects of the president’s Homeland Security policy, litigating for terror suspects, supporting racial preferences and defending the North American Man-Boy Love Association, which promotes sex between adults and “consenting” children.
Undermining Homeland Security via the Open Borders Lobby
Teresa Heinz Kerry’s charities have steered well over half-a-million dollars to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), one of the premier organizations making up the “open borders” lobby. Carnegie supplied MALDEF with $750,000 in 2000 alone; the Heinz Endowments have also given unrestricted money to MALDEF. MALDEF used this cash in a prolonged effort to erase America’s borders and undermine the nation’s security.
When founded in 1966, MALDEF acted as a public interest law firm looking after the legitimate interests of Mexican-Americans immigrants who had become citizens. However, after a recommendation from the NAACP-Legal Defense and Education Fund, officials at the Ford Foundation met with MALDEF head Peter Tijerina, and gave the tiny organization $2.2 million. Over the ensuing three decades, Ford funded MALDEF with more than $30 million. For twenty years it was for all intents and purposes the sole funder of MALDEF. It used is leverage to transform the organization, moving its headquarters from San Antonio to San Francisco and radicalizing its political agendas.
It was MALDEF, with help from San Francisco’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, that neutered California’s popular Proposition 187, which denied non-emergency government services to illegal immigrants. MALDEF also encouraged state governments to accept Mexico’s nearly worthless matrícula ID cards. These cards, which are notoriously easy to forge, are now used as the equivalent of a driver’s license in establishing identities for illegal aliens. MALDEF is working to see even these matrícula cards are freely given to illegal immigrants (not all of whom are of Hispanic extraction), with all the privileges they accord.
Not content with second-rate IDs, the Ford-managed legal group sued the state of Georgia “to expand access to driver’s licenses without regard to immigration status” and succeeded in getting California’s outgoing governor, Gray Davis, to approve a similar policy. Thus, illegal immigrants were given an extra tool to avoid police detection.[6] The possibility that these will help provide cover for Islamist aliens is real and disturbing – but not to MALDEF or Kerry.
Mrs. Kerry is so untroubled by this activism she has underwritten, through the Heinz Family Foundation, the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA). The funds specifically went to the 2001 “Give Liberty a Hand” Awards program in a token gesture of support for MIRA’s agenda. Subsequent winners of the award include Rep. Barney Frank, for his pro-immigrant stance.[7]
MIRA is also engaged in undercutting Homeland Security. The year the grant was awarded, MIRA called the Patriot Act “very troubling.”[8] In June 2002, MIRA explicitly told its followers not to comply with federal immigration law:
Please do NOT aid people in applying with INS unless you are familiar with their immigration history and are certain they would not be at risk of deportation by doing so. Always refer clients to an attorney if they are out of status or have a criminal record of any kind. It is very important that we, as service providers, do not put people at risk even as we try to help them.[9] (Emphasis in original.)
Immediately after 9/11 a MIRA press release asked people to “Refer local Arab, Muslim, and affected groups to MIRA.”[10]
MIRA advocates that illegals should be allowed to receive in-state tuition discounts at state universities.[11] The DREAM Act legislation, which MIRA favors would encourage this. MIRA fumes, “President Bush has done nothing to help its passage, in essence, squelching the dreams of immigrant youth throughout the country.”[12]
Teresa Heinz Kerry also oversaw the funding of another Open Borders/anti-Homeland Security group, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc. (CLINIC), distributing a $25,000 grant from Carnegie in 2000 to be used for legal issues regarding immigrants. When the grant was awarded, CLINIC had been defending those detained by the INS. After 9/11, this would take on an entirely new significance. CLINIC continues to represent detainees, now not Mexicans but Islamist radicals suspected of plotting terrorism. It has also launched a media effort to criticize the allegedly “devastating track record on the treatment of immigrants in INS custody.” CLINIC promises, “The immigration policies resulting from September 11th will certainly represent an area of high priority in CLINIC's media work.” Elsewhere, this pillar of the Religious Left works to assure that illegal immigrants – which it describes only as “immigrant laborers” –receive the equal legal protection of labor provided by U.S. law, the same law these illegals broke when entering the country in the first place. It appears CLINIC also hopes to provide illegals the right to vote. CLINIC’s National Immigrant Empowerment Project says it hopes to help immigrants increase “civic participation” – and CLINIC, like the liberal U.S. Catholic Bishops, makes no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. “Approved projects,” CLINIC says, “have sought to empower immigrants around issues of labor, housing, education, crime reduction, municipal services, immigration, health care and state and federal laws.”[13] (Emphasis added.)
In 1999, Teresa Heinz Kerry allocated $450,000, through Carnegie, to the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund’s general fund. According to its introductory booklet, the Defense and Education Fund has filed motions supporting racial preferences and eroding the government’s ability to act only in English.[14] The booklet spells out more PRLDEF causes:
From bringing cases on redistricting in a number of states, to representing the people of Vieques, Puerto Rico in their fight to have the U.S. Navy stop bombing practices on their island; from protecting the labor rights of undocumented Mexican workers to fair wages and treatment on the job, to bringing lawsuits against public universities to assure their access to Latino immigrants, the Fund’s Legal Division continues to fight the good fight.[15]
By assuring university “access to Latino immigrants,” PRLDEF means in-state tuition rates for illegals.
The Howard Heinz Endowment in 2001 similarly donated $200,000 to Pittsburgh’s El Hispano Centro/The Hispanic Center Inc. “to support recruitment and employment services in the Hispanic community.” The Hispanic Center’s focus is to serve “recently arrived families,” attracting new immigrants (legal or illegal) to the Pittsburgh area. The first item listed under “main areas in which The Center can be of assistance” is “Legal, for problems related to immigration.”[16] Its “Family Reunification Plan” assists Hispanics who want to bring their relatives into the United States.[17] El Hispano Centro is affiliated with ACORN, a grassroots socialist organization formed by New Left radicals.[18]
Islamic Indoctrination
Over a five-year period, the Heinz Endowments have given $700,000 to the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh. The Council has created a social studies curriculum for area schoolteachers that blames America country for 9/11 – and even names Osama bin Laden as one of the key forces that will bring an end to America’s superpower status. A handout in the Council’s lesson plan on “American primacy” tells students America’s days as a superpower are coming to a close – and specifically names Osama bin Laden as our replacement. Students may not see our inevitable slide into obscurity, but:
the long-term trend is unmistakable. Other nations are rising, and non-state actors – ranging from Usama bin Laden to Amnesty International to the International Criminal Court – are increasing in number and acquiring power.[19]
That’s an interesting juxtaposition of organizations: Amnesty International, the World Court and al-Qaeda.
These words, written before September 11th, would have been outrageous at the time. That the local World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh developed them powered by large grants from Teresa Heinz Kerry, and continue to feature them on the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh’s website and in their programmatic efforts three years after the attack on the World Trade Center is more than troubling.[20]
Another curriculum of the Council is its set of lesson plans on weapons of mass destruction. One student handout informs youngsters that, “American intervention in troubled areas is not so much a way to fend off [foreign/terrorist] threats as it is what stirs them up.” Moreover, “It is hardly likely that Middle Eastern radicals would be hatching schemes like the destruction of the World Trade Center if it had not been identified for so long as the mainstay of Israel…Playing Globocop feeds the urge of aggrieved groups to strike back.”[21] The curriculum offered no alternative views to students.
A handout in the 1999 series blames the spread of Islamic fundamentalism on the West. “European women have invaded Tunisia’s sparkling beaches, parading in topless swimsuits and stimulating a brisk trade in alcohol and prostitution,” children are taught. “That’s why Tunisian women and their husbands are embracing Islamic fundamentalism.”[22] Suicide bombing of innocents? Beheading of captives? Caucasian breasts made them do it.
Another handout from the same year includes the English translation of the Islamic declaration of faith, with a transliteration in Arabic. The handout does not inform its recipients that from a Muslim standpoint, if one pronounces this prayer aloud in its entirety in any language, one has converted to Islam.[23]
The World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh generally produces material uncritical about Islam and ferociously slanted against the secular, Judeo-Christian and democratic West. In January 2002, as the nation debated going into Iraq, the Council mailed a series of glossaries to teachers for use in their classrooms. The first defined the words “distort,” “hearsay,” “propaganda,” “assume,” “insinuate,” “assert,” “speculate,” and finally “fact.” A second defines “ethnocentrism,” “prejudice,” “racism,” “stereotyping,” and “xenophobia.”
The teachers “resource” lists a number of websites educators should consult for further information. Among these are the aforementioned CAIR, the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Council on Islamic Education, the Middle East Policy Council, and Arab World And Islamic Resources.[24]
Dr. John Esposito, former head of the Middle East Studies Association who also advised the Clinton State Department, operates the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. Esposito may be the most influential academic in the area of Middle Eastern Studies. In early 2001, Esposito claimed American officials were too worried about Osama bin Laden. “Focusing on Osama bin Laden risks catapulting one of the many sources of terrorism to center stage, distorting both the diverse international sources and the relevance of one man.”
This is not the only terrorist threat he missed or dismissed. When University of South Florida President Judy Genshaft fired terrorist Sami al-Arian, Esposito wrote her a letter on al-Arian’s behalf. In it, he stated he was “stunned, astonished and saddened” at his friend’s dismissal, as he had known al-Arian to be “a consummate professional.” Esposito excused the charges against al-Arian by noting he “and his family are Palestinians. They have suffered and feel deeply about Palestine and the plight of the Palestinians.”[25]
In keeping with this theme, Esposito once said Hamas – the largest terrorist army in the world – is not in fact organized around terrorism so much as “honey, cheese-making, and home-based clothing manufacture.” He told an NPR interviewer that Yasser Arafat’s calls to “jihad” simply indicate performing good social actions, like starting a “literacy campaign” or joining the “fight against AIDS.”[26]
Esposito is not the only individual at the Center to provide the media with misinformation on Islamists. When fundamentalist Muslim terrorists began decapitating Americans in Iraq, Esposito’s fellow professor Yvonne Haddad told New York Newsday, “There is absolutely nothing in Islam that justifies cutting off a person's head.” Yet the Koran itself refers to this practice:
God revealed His will to the angels, saying: “I shall be with you. Give courage to the believers. I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads, strike off the very tips of their fingers.” (Sura 8, Verse 12)
“When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield strike off their heads.” (Sura 47, Verse 4)[27]
This practice was taught “by all four classical schools of Islamic jurisprudence, across the vast Muslim empire.” Far from unique, the “infidel” population of Muslim Spain often met the same fate as twenty-first century American Nicholas Berg.[28]
The Council on Islamic Education produced the tome Across the Centuries, which presents the major events of Mohammed’s life as fact rather than theology. It notes, for instance, “Jerusalem is where Jesus was crucified and buried, and it was where Muhammad rose to heaven.” (But not, apparently where Jesus was resurrected or Solomon built his Temple.) The history skews heavily toward Muslim society. For instance, the European Middle Ages receive seven pages in the book; the “Village Society in West Africa” gets eight.[29] In a class exercise, students are informed, “You and your classmates will become Muslims” and are then told to recite the prayer, “Praise be to Allah, Lord of Creation.”
This is not the first time the Middle East Policy Council and Arab World And Islamic Resources have been paired together. The two worked together in 1999 to produce Arab World Studies Notebook. The Middle East Policy Council printed the 540-page teachers guide, which was written by Arab World and Islamic Resources Executive Director Audrey Park Shabbas. This classroom tool claims Muslims discovered America before Columbus and intermarried with Alogonquin Indians, later rising to the level of chief.[30] This is the stuff of fantasy.
The supplement the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh issued the following September is likewise flawed.[31] The online guide links to the PBS/Frontline “Roots of Terrorism” teachers guide. The browser is immediately greeted on the website by a picture of Muslim protesters holding an enormous billboard reading, “Americans Think! Why You Are Hated All Over The World.”[32] (Emphasis in original.)
“Bring Najaf to New York”
Teresa Heinz Kerry’s dollars have also flowed freely to the propaganda organs of the far-left. Chief among these is the Independent Media Institute, based in San Francisco, which accepted a $24,500 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York in the year 2000, while Teresa was still a trustee. The grant was issued “for a media strategy on campaign finance issues at state level.” The Independent Media Institute also receives significant financial backing from the Open Society Institute (George Soros), the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy (Bill Moyers), the Tides Foundation, and Working Assets.[33] IMI is the parent of AlterNet.org, its “progressive” syndication service. The group is currently screening the anti-Fox News “documentary” Outfoxed throughout the San Francisco Bay area.[34]
AlterNet encouraged riots at the 2004 RNC. Reproducing a Naomi Klein story from The Nation, AlterNet headlined her article, “Bring Najaf to New York” (Najaf is an Iraq city stronghold of the terrorist forces). AlterNet advanced her view that the current political climate “means there is only one chance for Americans to express their wholehearted rejection of the ongoing war on Iraq: in the streets outside the Republican National Convention. It's time to bring Najaf to New York.”[35] The site also was home to an exclusive piece by Sixties radical and Communist collaborator Tom Hayden, in which he encouraged RNC protests akin to those he led in 1968, which brought down the presidential campaign of anti-Communist liberal Hubert Humphrey.[36]
Bridging the worlds of anarchy and paranoia, Independent Media Institute’s project has not-so-subtly accused the Bush administration of murdering its comrades. In a column distributed by AlterNet, Dr. Michael I. Niman lists a half-dozen politicians who died in supposedly mysterious plane accidents (including Senator John Heinz), then intimates all may have been murdered – and that President George W. Bush might even have had Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone assassinated. Writes Niman:
Anyone familiar with my work knows that I’m certainly not a conspiracy theorist. But to be honest, I know I wasn’t alone in my initial reaction at this week’s horrible and tragic news: that being my surprise that Wellstone had lived this long…There is no indication today that Wellstone's death was the result of foul play. What we do know, however, is that Wellstone emerged as the most visible obstacle standing in the way of a draconian political agenda by an unelected government. And now he is conveniently gone. For our government to maintain its credibility at this time, we need an open and accountable independent investigation involving international participation into the death of Paul Wellstone. Hopefully we will find out, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that this was indeed an untimely accident. For the sake of our country, we need to know this.[37]
Reading that statement, blogger Andrew Sullivan asked, “Should the UN be called in to investigate whether the president of the United States ordered a hit job on a leading senator? This is looney tunes.”[38] Perhaps. But thanks to Teresa Heinz Kerry’s generosity, the insinuation is remarkably well funded.
So, too, is the Proteus Fund, the object of a $325,000 Carnegie grant in 2000 aimed at “strengthening…the Piper Fund.” The Piper Fund, too, promotes campaign finance reform. This program is heavily financed by Tides, the Ford Foundation, Bill Moyers’ Schumann Foundations, Working Assets, and George Soros’ Open Society Institute.[39] Soros, of course, is the financial power behind such Democratic 527 groups (so named because of their tax status) as MoveOn.org and Americans Coming Together. Soros, who has called defeating George W. Bush in 2004 “the central focus of my life,” has pledged $10 million of his own riches to that effort. The irony in having a wholly owned subsidiary of Soros, Moyers and Kerry inveigh against the corruption of the Almighty Dollar should be obvious.
However, campaign finance reform is far from Proteus’ only agenda. Its “Colombe Foundation” is a major antiwar protester/funder that seeks to “shift from wasteful military spending to investments in programs addressing poverty, environmental degradation and other root causes of violence.”[40] Those receiving money from the Colombe Foundation include United for Peace and Justice, the Tides Center’s September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, another Tides Center project, Mother Jones, Nation, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Union of Concerned Scientists, Institute for Policy Studies, and the left-wing talk show Democracy Now![41]
Another media endeavor receiving Bill Moyers, Ford Foundation and Teresa Heinz Kerry’s money is the The American Prospect, a magazine funded by Bill Moyers to provide a voice for the Democratic Party left. TAP received $132,000 from the Carnegie Corporation in 2000. It was a $5.5 million grant from Bill Moyers’ Florence and John Schumann Foundation in 1999 that transformed TAP from an academic journal to a biweekly newsstand publication meant to shape the future of the Democratic Party. Moyers also sits on the board of George Soros’ Open Society Institute.[42]
Editor-at-Large of The American Prospect is Harold Meyerson, Vice-Chair of the Democratic Socialists of America and a veteran radical leftist. One day after 9/11, Meyerson wrote, “even with Tuesday’s attack, our defense budget is still indefensibly high.” An avatar of the hate Bush movement, he described him as “The Most Dangerous President Ever,” saying he most closely resembles Confederate President Jefferson Davis.[43] The subject Carnegie underwrote? “A series of articles and a special issue focused on electoral and campaign finance reform.”
Unilateral Disarmament
Carnegie provided a half-million-dollar grant to the Center for Defense Information in 1999 for “institutional and program development.” Retired Rear Admiral Gene R. La Rocque founded the Center in 1972. In addition to its activities as a think tank, it also produces “America’s Defense Monitor,” which airs on many PBS affiliates. Throughout the Cold War, the Center for Defense Information took a radical position on disarmament. In 1983, La Rocque went on Soviet television to declare President Ronald Reagan “is not serious about arms control,” a move some thought crossed the line of responsible criticism. Washington Times national security reporter Bill Gertz has commented that spokesmen for the Center, “often reflect the Soviet position on so many things.” One episode of “America’s Defense Monitor,” aired at the height of the Cold War, quoted Marian Wright Edelman’s assertion, “For each missile we cancel, we could eliminate poverty for a year in 92,000 families headed by females. If we cancelled the whole program, we could eliminate poverty for all children in the U.S. twice over and have enough left to send all female heads of low-income families to college for a year!” On these grounds, the Center for Defense Information proposed deep cuts in military spending.[44]
The Center for Defense Information has not been absent from the War on Terror; far from it. The Center’s Distinguished Military Fellow General Anthony Zinni has made many headlines. In his book Battle Ready, Zinni wrote, “In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption.” On national television, he intimated that “neo-conservatives” (all those he named were Jewish) went to war to secure the position of Israel in the Middle East.[45]
Physicians on the Left
As part of the philanthropic anti-anti-terror war, the Heinz Endowments made two separate, unrestricted grants within three years to Physicians for Social Responsibility, a holdover group of the Sixties disarmament left. Physicians for Social Responsibility, which led the domestic campaign for the United States to unilaterally end nuclear testing during the Cold War (a major goal of the Soviets), has turned its sights on the War on Terrorism.
In addition to actively taking part in the antiwar (and often anti-American) rallies before, during and after Operation Iraqi Freedom, PSR has endorsed Democratic Rep. Lynne Woolsey’s “SMART Security plan.” Aside from asking for a UN permission slip to deploy American troops, the most important plank in the SMART program is increasing “funding for humanitarian programs, which address the root causes of instability and terrorism, like hunger, illiteracy and unemployment.” This is only slightly more important than supporting “institutions that can bring terrorists to justice, like the International Criminal Court.” The Physicians for Social Responsibility pamphlet fleshes out these proposals. It warns, “the Bush administration’s go-it-alone reliance on military response is doing more harm than good…It’s time we reject the role of go-it-alone policeman of the world.” (Emphasis in original). Then it lays out the most important element of Physicians for Social Responsibility’s prescription to end the threat of Islamofascist terror: “America needs to invest more at home – on health care for all Americans, rebuilding our schools and education system, creating jobs, and stopping pollution of our air, land and water.”[46] (Emphasis in original.)
Sure, that’ll stop al-Qaeda. The International Criminal Court is more likely to indict Henry Kissinger than Osama bin Laden, to bring American GIs to their knees than terrorist cells to justice.
Physicians for Social Responsibility founder Helen Caldicott – notorious for her anti-American, pro-Soviet views – contributed a chapter to the book Metal of Dishonor, an anti-nuclear tract published by the International Action Center, Ramsey Clark’s front group for the pro-Milosevic, pro-Kim Jong Il, Workers World Party. Clark, who also contributed a chapter to the book, has most recently volunteered his services to act as Saddam Hussein’s legal counsel.[47] The PSR opposed the UN’s economic sanctions against Iraq. “Killing children is not a foreign policy,” declaimed Evan Kanter, President of Washington state’s PSR implying that the sanctions supported by the United States were starving Iraqi children (precisely Saddam’s official propaganda line). In fact, the United States had supported the Oil for Food Program which was designed to provide $50 billion a year to feed Iraq’s children, but whose good intentions were thwarted by corrupt UN officials working in collusion with Saddam Hussein.[48]
Still fighting the disarmament fight, Physicians for Social Responsibility urges its members to contact Congress and oppose purchasing any new nuclear weapons. Its form letter to Congress scolds, “These programs send a clear ‘do as I say, not as I do’ message to the rest of the world and threaten to undermine the nation’s attempts to stem the world’s appetite for weapons of mass destruction.”[49]
Physicians for Social Responsibility has teamed up with the Center for Defense Information to host forums on nuclear disarmament as recently as last year.[50] Rep. Jim McDermott held a reception after that forum. The year before, on the even of war, Democratic Congressmen McDermott, David Bonior and Mike Thompson visited Baghdad, where McDermott declared, “I think the president would mislead the American people.”[51] After Saddam was captured in December of 2003, McDermott told a Seattle radio station that the military triumph was staged, and U.S. servicemen could have gotten the despot “a long time ago if they wanted.”[52] Teresa Heinz Kerry helped underwrite Physicians for Social Responsibility’s efforts to make McDermott into a hero.
The Feminist Left
The Heinz Family Foundation bestowed $2,000 upon the National Women’s Political Caucus “for general operating support.” The National Women’s Political Caucus opposes the Partial Birth Abortion ban (favored by as many as 90 percent of Americans) and takes a hard line against confirming President Bush’s long-filibustered judicial appointees. The Caucus also opposes Ward Connerly’s initiatives to make the nation’s laws colorblind – the original goal of the civil rights movement.[53] The Caucus endorses only women candidates, and only left-wing women candidates, including Patty Murray, Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, Lynne Woolsey and Zoe Lofgren.[54]
U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-WA, compared the United States with Osama bin Laden in front of a room of high school honors students – to Osama’s favor:
He's been out in these countries for decades building roads, building schools, building day-care facilities, building health care facilities. . . We have not done that. We haven't been out in many of these countries helping them build infrastructure. How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?[55]
Rep. Barbara Lee, D-CA, is a former runner for the Black Panther Party, and former aide to radical Berkeley Congressman Ron Dellums. Lee cast the lone vote against authorizing President Bush to fight al-Qaeda. Speaking on the House floor three days after the al-Qaeda terrorists claimed thousands of American lives, Lee feared President Bush really wanted to “embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.” She had previously cast the lone vote against a resolution expressing benign support of the troops already fighting (to save Albanian Muslims) in Serbia.
Lee learned her radicalism at the feet of her mentor, Ron Dellums. She served nine years in his office, ultimately rising to the position of Chief-of-Staff. In 1983, Lee conducted a “fact-finding” mission to the pro-Soviet regime of Grenada, later submitting a “report” to Congress personally doctored (at her invitation) by Grenada’s Marxist dictator. A letter written by another Dellums staffer to that dictator – discovered during the liberation of the island by U.S. troops – revealed that besides this Grenada strongman, “The only other person that I know of that [Dellums] expresses such admiration for is Fidel [Castro].” Lee’s own admiration for the Cuban dictator manifested itself shortly after her election to Congress in 1998, when she led a delegation to Cuba. She capped off the journey by calling on President Clinton to end the U.S. boycott of Cuba. Apparently, she could not bring herself to support U.S. servicemen currently in action in Serbia and cannot support striking a terrorist network’s key sponsor-state in self-defense, but she feels compassion for a sadistic Communist dictator.
Maxine Waters, D-CA, has a long history of racialist agitation to her credit. Waters has accused the CIA of selling crack in black neighborhoods during the 1980s, even though the San Jose Mercury-News retracted the story on which she based her allegations for lack of evidence. She defended the racial hatred that led a gang of black hoodlums to nearly murder white truck driver Reginald Denny during the 1992 L.A. Riots, saying, “the anger in my district is… righteous…I’m just as angry as they are.”[56] In September of 1998, Waters wrote a letter of apology to Castro after she had voted in favor of a bill calling on him to turn over former Black Panther Joanne Chesimard. Convicted 25 years earlier of murdering a New Jersey state trooper, she escaped from prison and received refugee status in Havana. While there, she took on a new name which Waters failed to recognize. When Waters learned the woman she’d voted to extradite was a Black Panther murderer, she urged Castro to continue safeguarding Chesimard, because she had been “persecuted for her civil-rights work.”[57]
During the War on Terror, Waters complained that suspected terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay “could not get bail.”[58] On the left-wing radio program “Democracy Now!” she referred to Operation Iraqi Freedom as a “coup d'etat” and stated, “Now we find that we are violating the prisoners. We're treating them worse than so-called Saddam had treated them.”[59] (Emphasis added.)
Rep. Lynne Woolsey, D-CA, helped draw up the “SMART Security” plan endorsed by Physicians for Social Responsibility. Woolsey condemned our “unnecessary and unjustified war in Iraq” She declared, “This war has not made us safer, but has squandered scarce resources, has cut short the lives of over 900 American service members, and has dangerously undermined our credibility throughout the world.”[60] She even blamed Saddam Hussein’s murderous intransigence on America’s reluctance to ratify the Kyoto Treaty:
President Bush has sent a message of his own by backing out of the ABM Treaty, refusing to sign the Kyoto treaty, refusing to be a party to the Mine Ban Treaty, withdrawing the U.S. signature to the International Criminal Court, failing to pay off our immense debt to the United Nations, and embracing the use of mini-nukes. Is it any wonder that other nations are not flocking to our side when we ignore the same international standards that we accuse Saddam Hussein of disregarding?[61]
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-CA, last made headlines when a former staffer was arrested for acting as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein and attempted espionage.
Racial Agitators
A generous portion of Heinz-controlled charity has gone to radical minority groups. Some claim the Republican Party “disenfranchised” black voters in 2000, others file suit to keep state governments from breaking up gerrymandered minority voting districts, some wish to give convicted felons the right to vote on the assumption that criminals are “political prisoners” and will vote for Democrats. All work against a racially harmonious society.
Some of the Heinz grants have gone to honor black Marxists. One such grant in 2001 went to honor singe and political activist Harry Belafonte. Historian and former New Leftist Ronald Radosh has described some of Belafonte’s political causes:
· “In June 2000, Belafonte was a featured speaker at a rally in Castro’s Cuba, honoring the American Soviet spies, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Tears, one observer reported, ‘streaked down’ Belafonte’s face, ‘as he recalled the pain and humiliation his friend [Paul] Robeson had been forced to endure’ in 1950s America. Undoubtedly, he was pleased to hear Cuba presented ‘as an example of keeping the principles the Rosenbergs fought and died for.’
· “In 1997, Belafonte was featured speaker at the 60th Anniversary celebration of the ‘Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,’ at which he honored these self-proclaimed ‘premature anti-fascists’ who served in the mid-1930s as Stalin's private Comintern army, a battalion (not a brigade) that served as enforcers of Soviet policy during the Spanish Civil War. To Belafonte, nothing had changed since the 1930s. The Lincoln Brigade vets were still representatives of ‘a truth that engulfed the universe . . . that fascism anywhere is a threat to people everywhere.’
· “Speaking in October 1983 at a ‘World Peace Concert’ run by East Germany's official Communist youth organization, Belafonte gave his blessings to the Soviet-sponsored ‘peace’ campaign pushing unilateral Western disarmament, at a time when the Soviets were putting SS-20 missiles in East Germany.
· “As The New York Times reported, Belafonte ‘attacked the American invasion of Grenada and also criticized the scheduled NATO weapons deployment’ of Pershing 2 missiles in West Germany…deployed to offset the Soviet missile offensive.”[62]
Shortly after this, Belafonte savagely attacked Colin Powell as a house “slave” of the Bush administration and blocked Condoleeza Rice from speaking at a fundraising dinner for Africare, another organization set to honor him. Most believe Dr. Rice, whose life has been dedicated to fighting first the Soviet menace and then that of Islamofascists, is more worthy of praise than a man who still weeps for American spies.
In early 2001, before Teresa Heinz Kerry left Carnegie’s board, Carnegie gave $400,000 to the general fund of the National Voting Rights Institute. The National Voting Rights Institute describes itself as “a prominent non-partisan legal center in the campaign finance reform field,” presenting campaign finance reform as a “civil rights issue.”[63] It likewise filed legal suit in Massachusetts after state redistricting broke up a formerly racially gerrymandered Latino district.[64] The Heinz Family Foundation also contributed $25,000 to the Idaho Hispanic Caucus “for Latino Vote 2002.” In 2001, IHC asked the Idaho chapter of the ACLU to oppose breaking up similar, racially rigged Congressional districts.[65]
In 2000, the Carnegie Corporation conferred $500,000 on the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law for general “support.” The Lawyers Committee’s main effort has been assisting the lawsuit NAACP v. Harris against the state of Florida “to address the disproportionate disenfranchisement of black Florida voters on election day.” Of course, testimony has since disclosed those voters turned away 1) were never registered to vote; 2) were no longer registered to vote; or 3) were convicted felons who lost their right to vote under state law. “Felon disenfranchisement” greatly concerns the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. Its website reveals it “filed an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals challenging Washington state’s felon disenfranchisement law as a violation of the Voting Rights Act.”[66] Washington state law – shared by many other states – decrees that convicted felons lose their right to vote. Using the same tortured logic Peggy Sheppard employs in her “environmental racism” cases, the Lawyers Committee claims that since this law disproportionately affects blacks, it is ipso facto racist.
In this effort, they are joined the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund (which received a comparable amount of Carnegie money in recent years, as well as a modest donation from the Heinz Endowments), People for the American Way, the ACLU and the Advancement Project.[67] In fact, the NAACP-LDEF has made this “racist” disenfranchisement one of its top five goals.[68] This despite the fact that these laws, based upon similar statutes from the Roman Empire, were originally adopted during the colonial era, before black citizens even had the right to vote.[69] Naturally, both the NAACP-LDEF and LCCRUL favor Congressional districts based on race, as well.[70]
Reparations
Heinz Kerry, through her connection to Carnegie, has financed groups of varying ethnicities that all share the same racialist political agenda. The Native American Rights Fund picked up a general support grant of $450,000 from Carnegie in the year 2000. Executive Director John Echohawk is on the Board of Directors of the Natural Resources Defense Council.[71] NARF proudly participated in the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, in September 2001. At this conference, attendees – led by the Arab states – attacked the United States and Israel holding them responsible for global racism and “xenophobia.” The conference reached high farce when Fidel Castro thundered the United States should pay reparations to American blacks.[72] In fact Cuba had more African slaves than the entire North American continent, and at this very moment its own citizens are not free. The conference made the United States and Britain – and Europeans generally – responsible for the slave trade, ignoring the much larger Muslim slave trade to the east, and turning a blind eye to the hundreds of thousands of black Africans currently enslaved in Muslim Sudan, Mauritania or Eritrea.[73] Jewish attendees of the conference were spat upon, beaten and summarily dismissed from its hearings.[74] Proceedings reached such levels of anti-Americanism that the U.S. delegation left (except for Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who later alleged President Bush had advance knowledge of 9/11).[75] The Native American Rights Fund was a participant in the proceedings, courtesy of Carnegie.
In addition to demanding reparations from the United States and Britain, NARF has challenged Alaska’s English-Only Law and “filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the cancellation of the pro-football Washington ‘Redskins’ trademark.”[76]
Public Broadcasters
Teresa Heinz Kerry has made numerous grants to underwrite public television’s political programming. She has donated $8.2 million to WQED, Pittsburgh, a sizable chunk of which was designated “for public affairs” programming. This is but the largest budget item for the Heinz Endowment’s financing of public broadcasting’s news programming – much of it pushing a Green agenda. Other examples include:
$200,000 to Persephone Productions, Inc., “for production of four field pieces on various topics on the [very liberal] PBS television program ‘To the Contrary.’”
$370,000 to the Pittsburgh Community Broadcasting Corp. for the production of the “Allegheny Front,” an environmentalist radio program.
$100,000 to the Public Broadcasting System “for the Reaching Accord project.”
$250,000 to the liberal Public Radio International for coverage of environment, women’s issues and economic security issues on “The World.”
$540,000 to National Public Radio from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
$10,000 to the Population Communication International Inc., “for distribution of the People Count broadcasts,” another environmentalist propaganda outlet.
$5,000 to the Population Media Center (run by Turner Broadcasting), also “for the People Count project.”
These media grants have put money into the hands of fellow leftists. A portion of a larger Heinz grant to the Mon Valley Media was designated to produce the video “Terminal Time.” One of the film’s three co-producers is Michael Mateas of Carnegie Mellon University. In his incomprehensible description of his film, Mateas found numerous occasions to quote Lenin, and to praise the Soviet dictatorship (not his term) for the “strong political support given to filmmakers in particular.”[77] (Those they didn’t support, they shot.) The second co-producer, Steffi Domike, is a lecturer in the Communications Department at Pittsburgh’s Chatham College. The key essay on Ms. Domike’s website is entitled “The Work of (Activist) Art in an Age of Empire.”[78] In it, she reveals that as a young person in Chile, she supported the pro-Castro Marxist Salvador Allende and continues to support “Latin American land reform.” Later, in her own words, she “chose to work here in the U.S., in what activists in the 1960s called the ‘belly of the beast.’” Her work, she writes, includes everything from “revolutionary polemics to rank and file organizing, from television propaganda to tactical media practice and performance.” She also works with a “cyberfeminist” organization.[79] Paul Vanouse, the third co-producer of “Terminal Time,” is Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Buffalo. His portfolio includes such “artwork” as the “Follower” video game, in which the player must kill on command. This “hyperbolic video game…questions the heroic portrayal of authoritarian violence in American pop culture, and the methods of first-world military operations in the post-Vietnam era.”[80]
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57 Varieties of Radical Causes, Part II
By Ben Johnson
FrontPageMagazine.com September 17, 2004
This is the continuation of our new book, 57 Varieties of Radical Causes: Teresa Heinz Kerry's Charitable Giving, written by Ben Johnson with a foreword by David Horowitz. Click here to read the beginning of this expose. Click HERE to purchase a copy. -- The Editors.
Chapter 4: Partisan Causes
Teresa Heinz Kerry has in fact invested an enormous amount of tax-exempt grant money in “a laundry list of partisan causes and fringe political groups.” The grants speak for themselves.
ACLU: The Legal Left after 9/11
For many years, no association has been so identified with the public image of the left as the ACLU. While Teresa Heinz Kerry served as a Carnegie trustee in 2000, that body donated $300,000 to the ACLU Foundation. Since 9/11, the ACLU has crusaded in behalf of al-Qaeda detainees, hindered investigations of suspected terrorists, sowed hysteria about the Patriot Act and smeared Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Justice Department as a foe of the Constitution.
According to the ACLU the Patriot Act authorizes a radical expansion of federal wiretapping and investigative powers. A typical ACLU press release reads, “Under the new Ashcroft guidelines, the FBI can freely infiltrate mosques, churches and synagogues and other houses of worship, listen in on online chat rooms and read message boards even if it has no evidence that a crime might be committed.” However, these guidelines are not “new”; these powers were granted in 1978 by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The Patriot Act merely allows federal agents to use these investigative tools on terrorists as they have for decades on the Mafia – preventing rather than waiting for an imminent terrorist attack. Terrorism wiretaps must be approved in court, just like those in a criminal investigation. In short the ACLU’s civil liberties zeal seems to be related to the perceived “victims”: terrorists. Ordinary criminals inspired no comparable crusade.
In the post-9/11 period, the ACLU has ruthlessly sued any airline taking extra security steps which caused inconvenience to Muslims, who are responsible for 100 percent of the terrorist incidents since (and including) the attack on the World Trade Center. To the ACLU, a sharpened focus on a group from which all post-9/11 terrorists have been recruited is “racial profiling.”[1]
The ACLU also opposes the government’s policy requiring some “temporary visa” holders to register with Immigration Services or face deportation. This policy was drafted to affect only males between the ages of 16 and 25 from nations with known ties to terrorism. Since the government did not equally inconvenience every temporary visa holder in the country (which would be beyond its resources), the ACLU has declared the policy “discrimination,” offering legal advice to those affected, organizing protests on their behalf, and harassing government agencies through legal complaints.
The ACLU has leaped to the defense of many terrorists including Sami al-Arian, the indicted chief financier and co-founder of the Palestine Islamic Jihad, responsible for the suicide bombing murders of more than 100 individuals including two American citizens. Professor al-Arian ran the University of South Florida’s International Institute of Islamic Thought, where he hired fellow terrorists as “assistants,” all the while directing money to PIJ terrorists. The ACLU has since sought to interfere with the government’s investigation of the International Institute of Islamic Thought, questioning the scope of federal search warrants. The lawyers even jumped to al-Arian’s defense when he told them his jailers only let him change his underwear once a week. In this denial of a prisoner’s inalienable right to fresh skivvies, the ACLU smells “the disgusting raw exercise of power by John Ashcroft.” The prison denies any wrongdoing, but this has not kept the ACLU from repeating al-Arian’s charges.[2]
The Heinz grant did not go directly to this particular ACLU effort. It was earmarked for the ACLU’s “voting rights project.” But by funding another of the ACLU’s projects, Carnegie frees up the ACLU’s own funds for programs like this. On the other hand, the voting rights project itself supports three agendas most Americans might find offensive: stifling democracy, race-based politics, and bigger government.[3] For example, the “voting rights” project supported the creation of an all-Indian voting district in Montana, because, in the Orwellian wording of its press release, “even though both Rosebud and Lake counties include substantial voting blocs of Indians…their votes are diluted by the white majority.”[4]
Here the ACLU is following the jurisprudence of quota maven Lani Guinier, the Harvard professor Bill Clinton unsuccessfully nominated to head his Civil Rights Division in 1993. Guinier believes that not only should minorities have their own congressional districts, but they should retain veto power over any bill passed by a majority of Americans to which they object. This would lead to the Balkanization of the American polity along race lines, which is exactly what the divisive left wants. As a by-product of focusing voters on narrowly racial political interests, this proposed reform would help assure the targeted districts would represented by Democrats. (For some reason, these ACLU lawsuits only get filed for heavily Democratic constituencies.)
The ACLU voting rights project also proposes “full public [that is, taxpayer] financing for federal elections.”[5] Putting the money for elections in the hands of the majority political party (which is what this in effect would achieve) is a prescription for ending democracy, not improving it. Thomas Jefferson once said, “To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” That nicely summarizes the ACLU proposal.
The ACLU has engaged in a series of controversial court cases questioning most aspects of the president’s Homeland Security policy, litigating for terror suspects, supporting racial preferences and defending the North American Man-Boy Love Association, which promotes sex between adults and “consenting” children.
Undermining Homeland Security via the Open Borders Lobby
Teresa Heinz Kerry’s charities have steered well over half-a-million dollars to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), one of the premier organizations making up the “open borders” lobby. Carnegie supplied MALDEF with $750,000 in 2000 alone; the Heinz Endowments have also given unrestricted money to MALDEF. MALDEF used this cash in a prolonged effort to erase America’s borders and undermine the nation’s security.
When founded in 1966, MALDEF acted as a public interest law firm looking after the legitimate interests of Mexican-Americans immigrants who had become citizens. However, after a recommendation from the NAACP-Legal Defense and Education Fund, officials at the Ford Foundation met with MALDEF head Peter Tijerina, and gave the tiny organization $2.2 million. Over the ensuing three decades, Ford funded MALDEF with more than $30 million. For twenty years it was for all intents and purposes the sole funder of MALDEF. It used is leverage to transform the organization, moving its headquarters from San Antonio to San Francisco and radicalizing its political agendas.
It was MALDEF, with help from San Francisco’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, that neutered California’s popular Proposition 187, which denied non-emergency government services to illegal immigrants. MALDEF also encouraged state governments to accept Mexico’s nearly worthless matrícula ID cards. These cards, which are notoriously easy to forge, are now used as the equivalent of a driver’s license in establishing identities for illegal aliens. MALDEF is working to see even these matrícula cards are freely given to illegal immigrants (not all of whom are of Hispanic extraction), with all the privileges they accord.
Not content with second-rate IDs, the Ford-managed legal group sued the state of Georgia “to expand access to driver’s licenses without regard to immigration status” and succeeded in getting California’s outgoing governor, Gray Davis, to approve a similar policy. Thus, illegal immigrants were given an extra tool to avoid police detection.[6] The possibility that these will help provide cover for Islamist aliens is real and disturbing – but not to MALDEF or Kerry.
Mrs. Kerry is so untroubled by this activism she has underwritten, through the Heinz Family Foundation, the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA). The funds specifically went to the 2001 “Give Liberty a Hand” Awards program in a token gesture of support for MIRA’s agenda. Subsequent winners of the award include Rep. Barney Frank, for his pro-immigrant stance.[7]
MIRA is also engaged in undercutting Homeland Security. The year the grant was awarded, MIRA called the Patriot Act “very troubling.”[8] In June 2002, MIRA explicitly told its followers not to comply with federal immigration law:
Please do NOT aid people in applying with INS unless you are familiar with their immigration history and are certain they would not be at risk of deportation by doing so. Always refer clients to an attorney if they are out of status or have a criminal record of any kind. It is very important that we, as service providers, do not put people at risk even as we try to help them.[9] (Emphasis in original.)
Immediately after 9/11 a MIRA press release asked people to “Refer local Arab, Muslim, and affected groups to MIRA.”[10]
MIRA advocates that illegals should be allowed to receive in-state tuition discounts at state universities.[11] The DREAM Act legislation, which MIRA favors would encourage this. MIRA fumes, “President Bush has done nothing to help its passage, in essence, squelching the dreams of immigrant youth throughout the country.”[12]
Teresa Heinz Kerry also oversaw the funding of another Open Borders/anti-Homeland Security group, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc. (CLINIC), distributing a $25,000 grant from Carnegie in 2000 to be used for legal issues regarding immigrants. When the grant was awarded, CLINIC had been defending those detained by the INS. After 9/11, this would take on an entirely new significance. CLINIC continues to represent detainees, now not Mexicans but Islamist radicals suspected of plotting terrorism. It has also launched a media effort to criticize the allegedly “devastating track record on the treatment of immigrants in INS custody.” CLINIC promises, “The immigration policies resulting from September 11th will certainly represent an area of high priority in CLINIC's media work.” Elsewhere, this pillar of the Religious Left works to assure that illegal immigrants – which it describes only as “immigrant laborers” –receive the equal legal protection of labor provided by U.S. law, the same law these illegals broke when entering the country in the first place. It appears CLINIC also hopes to provide illegals the right to vote. CLINIC’s National Immigrant Empowerment Project says it hopes to help immigrants increase “civic participation” – and CLINIC, like the liberal U.S. Catholic Bishops, makes no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. “Approved projects,” CLINIC says, “have sought to empower immigrants around issues of labor, housing, education, crime reduction, municipal services, immigration, health care and state and federal laws.”[13] (Emphasis added.)
In 1999, Teresa Heinz Kerry allocated $450,000, through Carnegie, to the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund’s general fund. According to its introductory booklet, the Defense and Education Fund has filed motions supporting racial preferences and eroding the government’s ability to act only in English.[14] The booklet spells out more PRLDEF causes:
From bringing cases on redistricting in a number of states, to representing the people of Vieques, Puerto Rico in their fight to have the U.S. Navy stop bombing practices on their island; from protecting the labor rights of undocumented Mexican workers to fair wages and treatment on the job, to bringing lawsuits against public universities to assure their access to Latino immigrants, the Fund’s Legal Division continues to fight the good fight.[15]
By assuring university “access to Latino immigrants,” PRLDEF means in-state tuition rates for illegals.
The Howard Heinz Endowment in 2001 similarly donated $200,000 to Pittsburgh’s El Hispano Centro/The Hispanic Center Inc. “to support recruitment and employment services in the Hispanic community.” The Hispanic Center’s focus is to serve “recently arrived families,” attracting new immigrants (legal or illegal) to the Pittsburgh area. The first item listed under “main areas in which The Center can be of assistance” is “Legal, for problems related to immigration.”[16] Its “Family Reunification Plan” assists Hispanics who want to bring their relatives into the United States.[17] El Hispano Centro is affiliated with ACORN, a grassroots socialist organization formed by New Left radicals.[18]
Islamic Indoctrination
Over a five-year period, the Heinz Endowments have given $700,000 to the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh. The Council has created a social studies curriculum for area schoolteachers that blames America country for 9/11 – and even names Osama bin Laden as one of the key forces that will bring an end to America’s superpower status. A handout in the Council’s lesson plan on “American primacy” tells students America’s days as a superpower are coming to a close – and specifically names Osama bin Laden as our replacement. Students may not see our inevitable slide into obscurity, but:
the long-term trend is unmistakable. Other nations are rising, and non-state actors – ranging from Usama bin Laden to Amnesty International to the International Criminal Court – are increasing in number and acquiring power.[19]
That’s an interesting juxtaposition of organizations: Amnesty International, the World Court and al-Qaeda.
These words, written before September 11th, would have been outrageous at the time. That the local World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh developed them powered by large grants from Teresa Heinz Kerry, and continue to feature them on the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh’s website and in their programmatic efforts three years after the attack on the World Trade Center is more than troubling.[20]
Another curriculum of the Council is its set of lesson plans on weapons of mass destruction. One student handout informs youngsters that, “American intervention in troubled areas is not so much a way to fend off [foreign/terrorist] threats as it is what stirs them up.” Moreover, “It is hardly likely that Middle Eastern radicals would be hatching schemes like the destruction of the World Trade Center if it had not been identified for so long as the mainstay of Israel…Playing Globocop feeds the urge of aggrieved groups to strike back.”[21] The curriculum offered no alternative views to students.
A handout in the 1999 series blames the spread of Islamic fundamentalism on the West. “European women have invaded Tunisia’s sparkling beaches, parading in topless swimsuits and stimulating a brisk trade in alcohol and prostitution,” children are taught. “That’s why Tunisian women and their husbands are embracing Islamic fundamentalism.”[22] Suicide bombing of innocents? Beheading of captives? Caucasian breasts made them do it.
Another handout from the same year includes the English translation of the Islamic declaration of faith, with a transliteration in Arabic. The handout does not inform its recipients that from a Muslim standpoint, if one pronounces this prayer aloud in its entirety in any language, one has converted to Islam.[23]
The World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh generally produces material uncritical about Islam and ferociously slanted against the secular, Judeo-Christian and democratic West. In January 2002, as the nation debated going into Iraq, the Council mailed a series of glossaries to teachers for use in their classrooms. The first defined the words “distort,” “hearsay,” “propaganda,” “assume,” “insinuate,” “assert,” “speculate,” and finally “fact.” A second defines “ethnocentrism,” “prejudice,” “racism,” “stereotyping,” and “xenophobia.”
The teachers “resource” lists a number of websites educators should consult for further information. Among these are the aforementioned CAIR, the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Council on Islamic Education, the Middle East Policy Council, and Arab World And Islamic Resources.[24]
Dr. John Esposito, former head of the Middle East Studies Association who also advised the Clinton State Department, operates the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. Esposito may be the most influential academic in the area of Middle Eastern Studies. In early 2001, Esposito claimed American officials were too worried about Osama bin Laden. “Focusing on Osama bin Laden risks catapulting one of the many sources of terrorism to center stage, distorting both the diverse international sources and the relevance of one man.”
This is not the only terrorist threat he missed or dismissed. When University of South Florida President Judy Genshaft fired terrorist Sami al-Arian, Esposito wrote her a letter on al-Arian’s behalf. In it, he stated he was “stunned, astonished and saddened” at his friend’s dismissal, as he had known al-Arian to be “a consummate professional.” Esposito excused the charges against al-Arian by noting he “and his family are Palestinians. They have suffered and feel deeply about Palestine and the plight of the Palestinians.”[25]
In keeping with this theme, Esposito once said Hamas – the largest terrorist army in the world – is not in fact organized around terrorism so much as “honey, cheese-making, and home-based clothing manufacture.” He told an NPR interviewer that Yasser Arafat’s calls to “jihad” simply indicate performing good social actions, like starting a “literacy campaign” or joining the “fight against AIDS.”[26]
Esposito is not the only individual at the Center to provide the media with misinformation on Islamists. When fundamentalist Muslim terrorists began decapitating Americans in Iraq, Esposito’s fellow professor Yvonne Haddad told New York Newsday, “There is absolutely nothing in Islam that justifies cutting off a person's head.” Yet the Koran itself refers to this practice:
God revealed His will to the angels, saying: “I shall be with you. Give courage to the believers. I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads, strike off the very tips of their fingers.” (Sura 8, Verse 12)
“When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield strike off their heads.” (Sura 47, Verse 4)[27]
This practice was taught “by all four classical schools of Islamic jurisprudence, across the vast Muslim empire.” Far from unique, the “infidel” population of Muslim Spain often met the same fate as twenty-first century American Nicholas Berg.[28]
The Council on Islamic Education produced the tome Across the Centuries, which presents the major events of Mohammed’s life as fact rather than theology. It notes, for instance, “Jerusalem is where Jesus was crucified and buried, and it was where Muhammad rose to heaven.” (But not, apparently where Jesus was resurrected or Solomon built his Temple.) The history skews heavily toward Muslim society. For instance, the European Middle Ages receive seven pages in the book; the “Village Society in West Africa” gets eight.[29] In a class exercise, students are informed, “You and your classmates will become Muslims” and are then told to recite the prayer, “Praise be to Allah, Lord of Creation.”
This is not the first time the Middle East Policy Council and Arab World And Islamic Resources have been paired together. The two worked together in 1999 to produce Arab World Studies Notebook. The Middle East Policy Council printed the 540-page teachers guide, which was written by Arab World and Islamic Resources Executive Director Audrey Park Shabbas. This classroom tool claims Muslims discovered America before Columbus and intermarried with Alogonquin Indians, later rising to the level of chief.[30] This is the stuff of fantasy.
The supplement the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh issued the following September is likewise flawed.[31] The online guide links to the PBS/Frontline “Roots of Terrorism” teachers guide. The browser is immediately greeted on the website by a picture of Muslim protesters holding an enormous billboard reading, “Americans Think! Why You Are Hated All Over The World.”[32] (Emphasis in original.)
“Bring Najaf to New York”
Teresa Heinz Kerry’s dollars have also flowed freely to the propaganda organs of the far-left. Chief among these is the Independent Media Institute, based in San Francisco, which accepted a $24,500 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York in the year 2000, while Teresa was still a trustee. The grant was issued “for a media strategy on campaign finance issues at state level.” The Independent Media Institute also receives significant financial backing from the Open Society Institute (George Soros), the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy (Bill Moyers), the Tides Foundation, and Working Assets.[33] IMI is the parent of AlterNet.org, its “progressive” syndication service. The group is currently screening the anti-Fox News “documentary” Outfoxed throughout the San Francisco Bay area.[34]
AlterNet encouraged riots at the 2004 RNC. Reproducing a Naomi Klein story from The Nation, AlterNet headlined her article, “Bring Najaf to New York” (Najaf is an Iraq city stronghold of the terrorist forces). AlterNet advanced her view that the current political climate “means there is only one chance for Americans to express their wholehearted rejection of the ongoing war on Iraq: in the streets outside the Republican National Convention. It's time to bring Najaf to New York.”[35] The site also was home to an exclusive piece by Sixties radical and Communist collaborator Tom Hayden, in which he encouraged RNC protests akin to those he led in 1968, which brought down the presidential campaign of anti-Communist liberal Hubert Humphrey.[36]
Bridging the worlds of anarchy and paranoia, Independent Media Institute’s project has not-so-subtly accused the Bush administration of murdering its comrades. In a column distributed by AlterNet, Dr. Michael I. Niman lists a half-dozen politicians who died in supposedly mysterious plane accidents (including Senator John Heinz), then intimates all may have been murdered – and that President George W. Bush might even have had Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone assassinated. Writes Niman:
Anyone familiar with my work knows that I’m certainly not a conspiracy theorist. But to be honest, I know I wasn’t alone in my initial reaction at this week’s horrible and tragic news: that being my surprise that Wellstone had lived this long…There is no indication today that Wellstone's death was the result of foul play. What we do know, however, is that Wellstone emerged as the most visible obstacle standing in the way of a draconian political agenda by an unelected government. And now he is conveniently gone. For our government to maintain its credibility at this time, we need an open and accountable independent investigation involving international participation into the death of Paul Wellstone. Hopefully we will find out, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that this was indeed an untimely accident. For the sake of our country, we need to know this.[37]
Reading that statement, blogger Andrew Sullivan asked, “Should the UN be called in to investigate whether the president of the United States ordered a hit job on a leading senator? This is looney tunes.”[38] Perhaps. But thanks to Teresa Heinz Kerry’s generosity, the insinuation is remarkably well funded.
So, too, is the Proteus Fund, the object of a $325,000 Carnegie grant in 2000 aimed at “strengthening…the Piper Fund.” The Piper Fund, too, promotes campaign finance reform. This program is heavily financed by Tides, the Ford Foundation, Bill Moyers’ Schumann Foundations, Working Assets, and George Soros’ Open Society Institute.[39] Soros, of course, is the financial power behind such Democratic 527 groups (so named because of their tax status) as MoveOn.org and Americans Coming Together. Soros, who has called defeating George W. Bush in 2004 “the central focus of my life,” has pledged $10 million of his own riches to that effort. The irony in having a wholly owned subsidiary of Soros, Moyers and Kerry inveigh against the corruption of the Almighty Dollar should be obvious.
However, campaign finance reform is far from Proteus’ only agenda. Its “Colombe Foundation” is a major antiwar protester/funder that seeks to “shift from wasteful military spending to investments in programs addressing poverty, environmental degradation and other root causes of violence.”[40] Those receiving money from the Colombe Foundation include United for Peace and Justice, the Tides Center’s September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, another Tides Center project, Mother Jones, Nation, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Union of Concerned Scientists, Institute for Policy Studies, and the left-wing talk show Democracy Now![41]
Another media endeavor receiving Bill Moyers, Ford Foundation and Teresa Heinz Kerry’s money is the The American Prospect, a magazine funded by Bill Moyers to provide a voice for the Democratic Party left. TAP received $132,000 from the Carnegie Corporation in 2000. It was a $5.5 million grant from Bill Moyers’ Florence and John Schumann Foundation in 1999 that transformed TAP from an academic journal to a biweekly newsstand publication meant to shape the future of the Democratic Party. Moyers also sits on the board of George Soros’ Open Society Institute.[42]
Editor-at-Large of The American Prospect is Harold Meyerson, Vice-Chair of the Democratic Socialists of America and a veteran radical leftist. One day after 9/11, Meyerson wrote, “even with Tuesday’s attack, our defense budget is still indefensibly high.” An avatar of the hate Bush movement, he described him as “The Most Dangerous President Ever,” saying he most closely resembles Confederate President Jefferson Davis.[43] The subject Carnegie underwrote? “A series of articles and a special issue focused on electoral and campaign finance reform.”
Unilateral Disarmament
Carnegie provided a half-million-dollar grant to the Center for Defense Information in 1999 for “institutional and program development.” Retired Rear Admiral Gene R. La Rocque founded the Center in 1972. In addition to its activities as a think tank, it also produces “America’s Defense Monitor,” which airs on many PBS affiliates. Throughout the Cold War, the Center for Defense Information took a radical position on disarmament. In 1983, La Rocque went on Soviet television to declare President Ronald Reagan “is not serious about arms control,” a move some thought crossed the line of responsible criticism. Washington Times national security reporter Bill Gertz has commented that spokesmen for the Center, “often reflect the Soviet position on so many things.” One episode of “America’s Defense Monitor,” aired at the height of the Cold War, quoted Marian Wright Edelman’s assertion, “For each missile we cancel, we could eliminate poverty for a year in 92,000 families headed by females. If we cancelled the whole program, we could eliminate poverty for all children in the U.S. twice over and have enough left to send all female heads of low-income families to college for a year!” On these grounds, the Center for Defense Information proposed deep cuts in military spending.[44]
The Center for Defense Information has not been absent from the War on Terror; far from it. The Center’s Distinguished Military Fellow General Anthony Zinni has made many headlines. In his book Battle Ready, Zinni wrote, “In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption.” On national television, he intimated that “neo-conservatives” (all those he named were Jewish) went to war to secure the position of Israel in the Middle East.[45]
Physicians on the Left
As part of the philanthropic anti-anti-terror war, the Heinz Endowments made two separate, unrestricted grants within three years to Physicians for Social Responsibility, a holdover group of the Sixties disarmament left. Physicians for Social Responsibility, which led the domestic campaign for the United States to unilaterally end nuclear testing during the Cold War (a major goal of the Soviets), has turned its sights on the War on Terrorism.
In addition to actively taking part in the antiwar (and often anti-American) rallies before, during and after Operation Iraqi Freedom, PSR has endorsed Democratic Rep. Lynne Woolsey’s “SMART Security plan.” Aside from asking for a UN permission slip to deploy American troops, the most important plank in the SMART program is increasing “funding for humanitarian programs, which address the root causes of instability and terrorism, like hunger, illiteracy and unemployment.” This is only slightly more important than supporting “institutions that can bring terrorists to justice, like the International Criminal Court.” The Physicians for Social Responsibility pamphlet fleshes out these proposals. It warns, “the Bush administration’s go-it-alone reliance on military response is doing more harm than good…It’s time we reject the role of go-it-alone policeman of the world.” (Emphasis in original). Then it lays out the most important element of Physicians for Social Responsibility’s prescription to end the threat of Islamofascist terror: “America needs to invest more at home – on health care for all Americans, rebuilding our schools and education system, creating jobs, and stopping pollution of our air, land and water.”[46] (Emphasis in original.)
Sure, that’ll stop al-Qaeda. The International Criminal Court is more likely to indict Henry Kissinger than Osama bin Laden, to bring American GIs to their knees than terrorist cells to justice.
Physicians for Social Responsibility founder Helen Caldicott – notorious for her anti-American, pro-Soviet views – contributed a chapter to the book Metal of Dishonor, an anti-nuclear tract published by the International Action Center, Ramsey Clark’s front group for the pro-Milosevic, pro-Kim Jong Il, Workers World Party. Clark, who also contributed a chapter to the book, has most recently volunteered his services to act as Saddam Hussein’s legal counsel.[47] The PSR opposed the UN’s economic sanctions against Iraq. “Killing children is not a foreign policy,” declaimed Evan Kanter, President of Washington state’s PSR implying that the sanctions supported by the United States were starving Iraqi children (precisely Saddam’s official propaganda line). In fact, the United States had supported the Oil for Food Program which was designed to provide $50 billion a year to feed Iraq’s children, but whose good intentions were thwarted by corrupt UN officials working in collusion with Saddam Hussein.[48]
Still fighting the disarmament fight, Physicians for Social Responsibility urges its members to contact Congress and oppose purchasing any new nuclear weapons. Its form letter to Congress scolds, “These programs send a clear ‘do as I say, not as I do’ message to the rest of the world and threaten to undermine the nation’s attempts to stem the world’s appetite for weapons of mass destruction.”[49]
Physicians for Social Responsibility has teamed up with the Center for Defense Information to host forums on nuclear disarmament as recently as last year.[50] Rep. Jim McDermott held a reception after that forum. The year before, on the even of war, Democratic Congressmen McDermott, David Bonior and Mike Thompson visited Baghdad, where McDermott declared, “I think the president would mislead the American people.”[51] After Saddam was captured in December of 2003, McDermott told a Seattle radio station that the military triumph was staged, and U.S. servicemen could have gotten the despot “a long time ago if they wanted.”[52] Teresa Heinz Kerry helped underwrite Physicians for Social Responsibility’s efforts to make McDermott into a hero.
The Feminist Left
The Heinz Family Foundation bestowed $2,000 upon the National Women’s Political Caucus “for general operating support.” The National Women’s Political Caucus opposes the Partial Birth Abortion ban (favored by as many as 90 percent of Americans) and takes a hard line against confirming President Bush’s long-filibustered judicial appointees. The Caucus also opposes Ward Connerly’s initiatives to make the nation’s laws colorblind – the original goal of the civil rights movement.[53] The Caucus endorses only women candidates, and only left-wing women candidates, including Patty Murray, Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, Lynne Woolsey and Zoe Lofgren.[54]
U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-WA, compared the United States with Osama bin Laden in front of a room of high school honors students – to Osama’s favor:
He's been out in these countries for decades building roads, building schools, building day-care facilities, building health care facilities. . . We have not done that. We haven't been out in many of these countries helping them build infrastructure. How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?[55]
Rep. Barbara Lee, D-CA, is a former runner for the Black Panther Party, and former aide to radical Berkeley Congressman Ron Dellums. Lee cast the lone vote against authorizing President Bush to fight al-Qaeda. Speaking on the House floor three days after the al-Qaeda terrorists claimed thousands of American lives, Lee feared President Bush really wanted to “embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.” She had previously cast the lone vote against a resolution expressing benign support of the troops already fighting (to save Albanian Muslims) in Serbia.
Lee learned her radicalism at the feet of her mentor, Ron Dellums. She served nine years in his office, ultimately rising to the position of Chief-of-Staff. In 1983, Lee conducted a “fact-finding” mission to the pro-Soviet regime of Grenada, later submitting a “report” to Congress personally doctored (at her invitation) by Grenada’s Marxist dictator. A letter written by another Dellums staffer to that dictator – discovered during the liberation of the island by U.S. troops – revealed that besides this Grenada strongman, “The only other person that I know of that [Dellums] expresses such admiration for is Fidel [Castro].” Lee’s own admiration for the Cuban dictator manifested itself shortly after her election to Congress in 1998, when she led a delegation to Cuba. She capped off the journey by calling on President Clinton to end the U.S. boycott of Cuba. Apparently, she could not bring herself to support U.S. servicemen currently in action in Serbia and cannot support striking a terrorist network’s key sponsor-state in self-defense, but she feels compassion for a sadistic Communist dictator.
Maxine Waters, D-CA, has a long history of racialist agitation to her credit. Waters has accused the CIA of selling crack in black neighborhoods during the 1980s, even though the San Jose Mercury-News retracted the story on which she based her allegations for lack of evidence. She defended the racial hatred that led a gang of black hoodlums to nearly murder white truck driver Reginald Denny during the 1992 L.A. Riots, saying, “the anger in my district is… righteous…I’m just as angry as they are.”[56] In September of 1998, Waters wrote a letter of apology to Castro after she had voted in favor of a bill calling on him to turn over former Black Panther Joanne Chesimard. Convicted 25 years earlier of murdering a New Jersey state trooper, she escaped from prison and received refugee status in Havana. While there, she took on a new name which Waters failed to recognize. When Waters learned the woman she’d voted to extradite was a Black Panther murderer, she urged Castro to continue safeguarding Chesimard, because she had been “persecuted for her civil-rights work.”[57]
During the War on Terror, Waters complained that suspected terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay “could not get bail.”[58] On the left-wing radio program “Democracy Now!” she referred to Operation Iraqi Freedom as a “coup d'etat” and stated, “Now we find that we are violating the prisoners. We're treating them worse than so-called Saddam had treated them.”[59] (Emphasis added.)
Rep. Lynne Woolsey, D-CA, helped draw up the “SMART Security” plan endorsed by Physicians for Social Responsibility. Woolsey condemned our “unnecessary and unjustified war in Iraq” She declared, “This war has not made us safer, but has squandered scarce resources, has cut short the lives of over 900 American service members, and has dangerously undermined our credibility throughout the world.”[60] She even blamed Saddam Hussein’s murderous intransigence on America’s reluctance to ratify the Kyoto Treaty:
President Bush has sent a message of his own by backing out of the ABM Treaty, refusing to sign the Kyoto treaty, refusing to be a party to the Mine Ban Treaty, withdrawing the U.S. signature to the International Criminal Court, failing to pay off our immense debt to the United Nations, and embracing the use of mini-nukes. Is it any wonder that other nations are not flocking to our side when we ignore the same international standards that we accuse Saddam Hussein of disregarding?[61]
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-CA, last made headlines when a former staffer was arrested for acting as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein and attempted espionage.
Racial Agitators
A generous portion of Heinz-controlled charity has gone to radical minority groups. Some claim the Republican Party “disenfranchised” black voters in 2000, others file suit to keep state governments from breaking up gerrymandered minority voting districts, some wish to give convicted felons the right to vote on the assumption that criminals are “political prisoners” and will vote for Democrats. All work against a racially harmonious society.
Some of the Heinz grants have gone to honor black Marxists. One such grant in 2001 went to honor singe and political activist Harry Belafonte. Historian and former New Leftist Ronald Radosh has described some of Belafonte’s political causes:
· “In June 2000, Belafonte was a featured speaker at a rally in Castro’s Cuba, honoring the American Soviet spies, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Tears, one observer reported, ‘streaked down’ Belafonte’s face, ‘as he recalled the pain and humiliation his friend [Paul] Robeson had been forced to endure’ in 1950s America. Undoubtedly, he was pleased to hear Cuba presented ‘as an example of keeping the principles the Rosenbergs fought and died for.’
· “In 1997, Belafonte was featured speaker at the 60th Anniversary celebration of the ‘Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,’ at which he honored these self-proclaimed ‘premature anti-fascists’ who served in the mid-1930s as Stalin's private Comintern army, a battalion (not a brigade) that served as enforcers of Soviet policy during the Spanish Civil War. To Belafonte, nothing had changed since the 1930s. The Lincoln Brigade vets were still representatives of ‘a truth that engulfed the universe . . . that fascism anywhere is a threat to people everywhere.’
· “Speaking in October 1983 at a ‘World Peace Concert’ run by East Germany's official Communist youth organization, Belafonte gave his blessings to the Soviet-sponsored ‘peace’ campaign pushing unilateral Western disarmament, at a time when the Soviets were putting SS-20 missiles in East Germany.
· “As The New York Times reported, Belafonte ‘attacked the American invasion of Grenada and also criticized the scheduled NATO weapons deployment’ of Pershing 2 missiles in West Germany…deployed to offset the Soviet missile offensive.”[62]
Shortly after this, Belafonte savagely attacked Colin Powell as a house “slave” of the Bush administration and blocked Condoleeza Rice from speaking at a fundraising dinner for Africare, another organization set to honor him. Most believe Dr. Rice, whose life has been dedicated to fighting first the Soviet menace and then that of Islamofascists, is more worthy of praise than a man who still weeps for American spies.
In early 2001, before Teresa Heinz Kerry left Carnegie’s board, Carnegie gave $400,000 to the general fund of the National Voting Rights Institute. The National Voting Rights Institute describes itself as “a prominent non-partisan legal center in the campaign finance reform field,” presenting campaign finance reform as a “civil rights issue.”[63] It likewise filed legal suit in Massachusetts after state redistricting broke up a formerly racially gerrymandered Latino district.[64] The Heinz Family Foundation also contributed $25,000 to the Idaho Hispanic Caucus “for Latino Vote 2002.” In 2001, IHC asked the Idaho chapter of the ACLU to oppose breaking up similar, racially rigged Congressional districts.[65]
In 2000, the Carnegie Corporation conferred $500,000 on the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law for general “support.” The Lawyers Committee’s main effort has been assisting the lawsuit NAACP v. Harris against the state of Florida “to address the disproportionate disenfranchisement of black Florida voters on election day.” Of course, testimony has since disclosed those voters turned away 1) were never registered to vote; 2) were no longer registered to vote; or 3) were convicted felons who lost their right to vote under state law. “Felon disenfranchisement” greatly concerns the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. Its website reveals it “filed an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals challenging Washington state’s felon disenfranchisement law as a violation of the Voting Rights Act.”[66] Washington state law – shared by many other states – decrees that convicted felons lose their right to vote. Using the same tortured logic Peggy Sheppard employs in her “environmental racism” cases, the Lawyers Committee claims that since this law disproportionately affects blacks, it is ipso facto racist.
In this effort, they are joined the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund (which received a comparable amount of Carnegie money in recent years, as well as a modest donation from the Heinz Endowments), People for the American Way, the ACLU and the Advancement Project.[67] In fact, the NAACP-LDEF has made this “racist” disenfranchisement one of its top five goals.[68] This despite the fact that these laws, based upon similar statutes from the Roman Empire, were originally adopted during the colonial era, before black citizens even had the right to vote.[69] Naturally, both the NAACP-LDEF and LCCRUL favor Congressional districts based on race, as well.[70]
Reparations
Heinz Kerry, through her connection to Carnegie, has financed groups of varying ethnicities that all share the same racialist political agenda. The Native American Rights Fund picked up a general support grant of $450,000 from Carnegie in the year 2000. Executive Director John Echohawk is on the Board of Directors of the Natural Resources Defense Council.[71] NARF proudly participated in the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, in September 2001. At this conference, attendees – led by the Arab states – attacked the United States and Israel holding them responsible for global racism and “xenophobia.” The conference reached high farce when Fidel Castro thundered the United States should pay reparations to American blacks.[72] In fact Cuba had more African slaves than the entire North American continent, and at this very moment its own citizens are not free. The conference made the United States and Britain – and Europeans generally – responsible for the slave trade, ignoring the much larger Muslim slave trade to the east, and turning a blind eye to the hundreds of thousands of black Africans currently enslaved in Muslim Sudan, Mauritania or Eritrea.[73] Jewish attendees of the conference were spat upon, beaten and summarily dismissed from its hearings.[74] Proceedings reached such levels of anti-Americanism that the U.S. delegation left (except for Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who later alleged President Bush had advance knowledge of 9/11).[75] The Native American Rights Fund was a participant in the proceedings, courtesy of Carnegie.
In addition to demanding reparations from the United States and Britain, NARF has challenged Alaska’s English-Only Law and “filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the cancellation of the pro-football Washington ‘Redskins’ trademark.”[76]
Public Broadcasters
Teresa Heinz Kerry has made numerous grants to underwrite public television’s political programming. She has donated $8.2 million to WQED, Pittsburgh, a sizable chunk of which was designated “for public affairs” programming. This is but the largest budget item for the Heinz Endowment’s financing of public broadcasting’s news programming – much of it pushing a Green agenda. Other examples include:
$200,000 to Persephone Productions, Inc., “for production of four field pieces on various topics on the [very liberal] PBS television program ‘To the Contrary.’”
$370,000 to the Pittsburgh Community Broadcasting Corp. for the production of the “Allegheny Front,” an environmentalist radio program.
$100,000 to the Public Broadcasting System “for the Reaching Accord project.”
$250,000 to the liberal Public Radio International for coverage of environment, women’s issues and economic security issues on “The World.”
$540,000 to National Public Radio from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
$10,000 to the Population Communication International Inc., “for distribution of the People Count broadcasts,” another environmentalist propaganda outlet.
$5,000 to the Population Media Center (run by Turner Broadcasting), also “for the People Count project.”
These media grants have put money into the hands of fellow leftists. A portion of a larger Heinz grant to the Mon Valley Media was designated to produce the video “Terminal Time.” One of the film’s three co-producers is Michael Mateas of Carnegie Mellon University. In his incomprehensible description of his film, Mateas found numerous occasions to quote Lenin, and to praise the Soviet dictatorship (not his term) for the “strong political support given to filmmakers in particular.”[77] (Those they didn’t support, they shot.) The second co-producer, Steffi Domike, is a lecturer in the Communications Department at Pittsburgh’s Chatham College. The key essay on Ms. Domike’s website is entitled “The Work of (Activist) Art in an Age of Empire.”[78] In it, she reveals that as a young person in Chile, she supported the pro-Castro Marxist Salvador Allende and continues to support “Latin American land reform.” Later, in her own words, she “chose to work here in the U.S., in what activists in the 1960s called the ‘belly of the beast.’” Her work, she writes, includes everything from “revolutionary polemics to rank and file organizing, from television propaganda to tactical media practice and performance.” She also works with a “cyberfeminist” organization.[79] Paul Vanouse, the third co-producer of “Terminal Time,” is Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Buffalo. His portfolio includes such “artwork” as the “Follower” video game, in which the player must kill on command. This “hyperbolic video game…questions the heroic portrayal of authoritarian violence in American pop culture, and the methods of first-world military operations in the post-Vietnam era.”[80]
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Saturday, September 18, 2004
57 Varieties of Radical Causes, Part I
Is it any wonder that Mrs. kerry does not want to release her tax returns? Part II tomorrow - Sailor
57 Varieties of Radical Causes, Part I
By Ben JohnsonFrontPageMagazine.com September 16, 2004
This is the introduction to the newest book from FrontPage Magazine. Order your copy today! Click HERE for details.
Foreword by David Horowitz
This report by Ben Johnson documents the tax-exempt giving by Teresa Heinz Kerry to political groups, which are shaping the American future. The structure of the U.S. tax code designates only those groups that directly promote candidates and electoral parties as political. Partisan ideological groups that claim to be serving the “general welfare” can qualify for “charitable” 501(c)(3) status and receive tax-deductible contributions. As a result of this quirk in the tax code, an entire universe of shadow political organizations has been created. In between elections cycles, these organizations dominate the non-governmental political discourse of the nation, shaping the debates over national security, immigration, the environment, social values, and every other political issue. They also play a large role in the election cycles themselves.
Groups like the ACLU, which lobbies against Republican judicial appointments, or United for Peace and Justice, which is the umbrella group that organized the demonstrations against the war in Iraq and the protests against the Republican National Convention in New York, are “non-political” under the current tax code, qualifying as “charitable” and tax-exempt. Of course this loophole is not confined to the political left. The conservative side of the political debate has comparable 501(c)(3)s, which engage in shadow politics, but not nearly as many as the left and not nearly as well-funded. This will come as a surprise to some, since the mythology promulgated by a left-wing media maintains that giant foundations of the right – Olin, Scaife and Bradley are the institutions most frequently cited – provide conservatives who are the party of the rich (another leftist myth) with an overwhelming advantage in the shadow political battles, also known as the “culture wars.”
A group of activists led by Hillary Clinton has recently created a new $20 million left-wing think tank, funded by billionaire George Soros, called the Center for American Progress, on just that presumption. Its executive director, former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, explained the need for its creation by alleging, “For more than a decade, the right wing has had a lock on the use of think tanks as policy promotion ‘political weapons.’” This sentiment is echoed in a report by one of the most well heeled left-wing organizations, People for the American Way, which claims, “One consequence of this extraordinary level of funding from right-wing foundations is that these conservative think tanks vastly outspend their progressive counterparts.”[1]
The facts suggest a different reality. As Ben Johnson’s report shows, Teresa Heinz Kerry, all by herself, presides over greater assets involved in the funding of shadow political activities than the three chief conservative foundations – Scaife, Olin and Bradley – combined. While, these conservative foundations have combined assets of $809 million, the three Heinz Endowments, in whose boardrooms Teresa Heinz Kerry speaks with a voice louder than all others, have total assets of $1.2 billion. Mrs. Kerry also sits on the board of the Carnegie Corporation, which as this report reveals is also an active funder of the political left and which has assets of $1.6 billion. In other words, Mrs. Kerry has a say in the disposition of funds earmarked for the left which are more than three times greater than the celebrated funders of the right combined. And this is only a part of Mrs. Kerry’s raw financial power in these matters. As Ben Johnson notes, “Teresa Heinz Kerry [also] heads the H. John Heinz III Foundation and the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Foundation, but due to their tax status, she is not required to provide detailed records of how they receive their funding – nor to whom they award their grants.” Even though she is the wife of a presidential candidate, whose disposable political assets are a matter of public interest, Mrs. Kerry has steadfastly refused to open the records of these foundations to public scrutiny.
The raw figures available provide a benchmark that allows us to put Mrs. Kerry’s influence in perspective. Without question, she is a major player in the culture wars between left and right, and in the shadow universe that shapes the political future. What she has invested in these conflicts significantly affects the political fortunes of her candidate husband, as well, and provides important clues as to what she would do if she were to become first lady with the prestige and resources of the federal government behind her.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Ben Johnson’s report what it reveals about the scope of Mrs. Kerry’s political investments and the range of left-wing agendas she supports. Directly or indirectly, Teresa Heinz Kerry has sponsored a political spectrum that includes violent anarchists, anti-free market socialists, anti-Homeland Security activists, racial dividers, open borders agitators, pro-terrorist radicals and a range of honors and tributes that includes a memorial to an environmentalist whose misguided reforms have led to the unnecessary deaths of tens of millions of African children. Mrs. Kerry’s beneficiaries are in the forefront of the attacks on the Patriot Act, for which her husband voted; they are organizers of the demonstrations against the war in Iraq that her husband supported and the disorderly protests at the Republican convention to nominate his opponent. And they are behind the campaign to open America’s borders and remove existing border controls, and thus to weaken homeland security in the War on Terror.
The political donations of foundations like the Heinz Endowments and the more secretive trusts controlled by Mrs. Kerry are not seriously scrutinized by the government or the representatives of the American people, although the monies invested surely impact the future of all Americans. The funds themselves are held in perpetuity and can shift in their direction from one end of the political spectrum to the other on the whim of individuals and without accountability to any wider public constituency. The late John Heinz was a Republican. The wife who inherited his power in the Heinz Endowments evidently was not. Is this shift in the disposition of billions fair and just (as a leftist might say in other circumstances)? Probably not. But what is to be done about it? Subjecting the activities of such endowments to public scrutiny, as this report by Ben Johnson does, can provide the beginning of an answer.
57 Varieties of Leftist Causes
by Ben Johnson
Introduction
From intimations that she is still in love with first husband John Heinz, to the speech she insisted on giving at the Democratic National Convention in which she droned on and on about herself before mentioning her current husband (the one running for president), Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry has made headlines a wise candidate (or candidate’s wife) would normally avoid. Responding to the Bush administration’s (non-existent) attacks on her husband’s patriotism, she called the president and vice president “unpatriotic.” [2] She then famously stole a news cycle from her husband’s campaign by calling her political opponents “un-American.” When Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporter Colin McNickle requested a clarification she responded, “You said something I didn't say, now shove it!” A sympathetic media protected her by focusing on her coarse verbiage, not the fact that videotape had captured the speech and verified that she did.
This report does not deal with Teresa Heinz Kerry’s sharp tongue or colorful campaign gaffes. Instead, it focuses on the activities that have occupied her adult life: the tax-exempt giving she has authorized as head of the Heinz Endowments and as a board member of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. As chair of the Heinz Family Foundation, chair of the Howard Heinz Endowment, and a board member of the Vira I. Heinz Endowment, she is trustee of more than $1.2 billion in assets and more than $60 million a year in grant monies. As trustee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, she casts her vote on dispensing $1.8 billion in assets and an additional $80 million in grant monies every year.
The radical nature of the organizations she has funded in her capacity as a trustee of these foundations is, to say the least, unsettling. It is an issue that takes on added importance as she has pledged to continue her role as head of these philanthropies if she becomes first lady.[3] Having recently experienced how a strong-willed, politically motivated first lady can affect the policies of government, the American electorate deserves to know what kinds of causes Teresa Heinz Kerry has supported in her public life. This report is intended to fill that gap.
All grant figures have been taken from the relevant IRS 990 forms for the years 1998-2002,[4] or from the Heinz Endowments’ website for the year 2003.[5]
The report begins with a topic that has generated the most heat and least light in the discussion of Mrs. Kerry’s activities: her long connection to the shadowy Tides Foundation and Tides Center of San Francisco. It goes on to explore the impressive array of left-wing groups, her charities have funded including the not-so-charitable organizers of this year’s anti-Republican protests at the GOP’s national convention in New York City. The causes her funding has promoted include anti-Homeland Security advocates, “open borders” lobbyists, radical feminists and anti-gun zealots. A special section focuses on the immense largesse dispensed to radical environmentalist groups, clearly the cause dearest to Mrs. Kerry’s heart.
It should be noted that even this picture is necessarily incomplete, since Teresa Heinz Kerry has steadfastly refused to release her tax records – a refusal unprecedented for the spouse of a presidential (or vice-presidential) candidate. In addition to the Howard Heinz and Vira I. Heinz Endowments, Teresa Heinz Kerry heads up the H. John Heinz III Foundation and the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Foundation, but due to their tax status, she is not required to provide detailed records of how they receive their funding – nor to whom they award their grants.[6] These records will only be available when Teresa Heinz Kerry ends her historic stonewall – a stonewall she would never accept from any corporation – and discloses her full financial records to public scrutiny. In addition to providing the American people with needed information about a woman at the center of their political life, it would end what she derides as baseless speculation about her finances. We hope the day will be soon in coming, but until it does, her refusal will lend strength to the suspicion that scrutiny is exactly what Teresa Heinz Kerry doesn’t want.
Chapter 1: The Truth About Tides
Interest in Teresa Heinz Kerry’s left-wing “philanthropy” was first stimulated when media outlets revealed her close association with the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation and its spin-off, the Tides Center. An article published by the Capital Research Center’s Tom Randall made the nation aware of Tides’ left-wing orientation and ties to radical organizations – as well as its connections to President Bush’s political opponents, including the “September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows,” a group of anti-War-on-Terror activists with family ties to 9/11. (The group had protested a five-second clip of 9/11 images in a Bush campaign ad.)
Over the last decade, Teresa Heinz Kerry has steered $8.1 million to the Tides group, which is a nerve center of the left and which has funneled the monies to numerous radical groups. When the stories about Mrs. Kerry’s connection to Tides appeared, all identified parties protested their innocence, and a politically sympathetic media conveniently dismissed the connections. But, the facts themselves will not go away.
What is Tides?
The Tides Foundation is a tax-exempt charity established in 1976 by antiwar activist Drummond Pike. It distributes millions of dollars every year to political organizations identified with left-wing causes. Among these are United for Peace and Justice, which is led by pro-Castro activist Leslie Cagan; the National Lawyers Guild, an organization with fifty years of involvement in pro-Communist and anti-American causes; the equally radical Center for Constitutional Rights; and the Council for American Islamic Relations, three of whose executives have been indicted for terrorist activities. The Tides Foundation and the closely allied Tides Center, distributed nearly $66 million in grants to radical organizations in 2002 alone.
The Tides Center is a spin off of the Tide Foundation run by the same executive director, Drummond Pike. Although they are legally distinct, this is a distinction without a difference. The Tides Center and Foundation, along with two other Tides entities, “collaborate as partners,”[7] according to Tides’ own official boilerplate.
During the last ten years, the Heinz Endowments, which Teresa Heinz Kerry heads, have given the Tides entities $8.1 million in grants. Until February 2001, Kerry was also a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Carnegie has given Tides numerous six-figure grants.
Tides’ defining feature is that it allows donors to anonymously contribute money to a variety of causes – and thereby avoid public accountability for their donations. The donor simply makes the check out to Tides and instructs the Foundation where to forward the money. This allows high-profile individuals to fund extremist organizations by “laundering” their money through Tides, leaving no paper trail. Founder Drummond Pike referred to his organization as “a convenient vehicle with squeaky clean books.”[8] The Tides Foundation keeps as much as ten percent of the total amount for “charitable advisory fees,” which it can use for administrative costs and also as a treasury over which it has discretionary control. Likewise, the Tides Center will handle administrative functions for third-party non-profit organizations compatible with its political agenda, skimming up to 10 percent of all donations for itself.
The projects and organizations the Tides Foundation has chosen to fund are troubling. For example, the so-called “legal left” (this is how its members refer to themselves) has been a prime beneficiary of Tides largesse. One of the principal recipients is the National Lawyers Guild, which began as a Communist front organization and, even after the fall of the Soviet empire, remains proud of its lineage. In October 2003, its national convention featured a keynote address by one of its most celebrated and admired figures, attorney Lynne Stewart. Stewart is a veteran of the hard left, specializing in defending terrorists, who has been indicted by the Justice Department for providing “material support” to the man who tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman killed six people and injured more than a thousand before Stewart took him on as a client and subsequently endorsed his agendas. The Justice Department accuses Stewart of helping Rahman communicate from prison with his terrorist “Islamic Group” and abet his terrorist activities.
Stewart’s support for terrorist activities against defenders of what she calls “capitalism” and “racism,” is not something she hides. “I don't believe in anarchist violence but in directed violence,” she told the New York Times in 1995. “That would be violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions and accompanied by popular support.” In her National Lawyers Guild keynote address, Stewart told her approving audience that they were carrying on a proud tradition of their forebears, past and present:
And modern heroes, dare I mention? Ho and Mao and Lenin, Fidel and Nelson Mandela and John Brown, Ché Guevara…Our quests like theirs are to shake the very foundations of the continents.[9]
Recently, the National Lawyers Guild endorsed the “March 20 call to End Colonial Occupation from Iraq to Palestine & Everywhere” issued by International ANSWER, a Stalinist anti-war group,[10] that like the National Lawyers Guild supports the Communist regime in North Korea. (The NLG recently sent a delegation of lawyers to Pyongyang to study its judicial system.) The National Lawyers Guild website also features a legal petition for “Post-Conviction Relief” for convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.[11]
Along with George Soros and the Ford Foundation, Tides has also funneled tens of thousands of dollars to the Center for Constitutional Rights, an organization established by Sixties radicals William Kunstler and Arthur Kinoy. Prior to creating the Center, the two floated a plan to establish a new “Communist Party.” [12] Not surprisingly, the old Communist Party USA has enjoyed a close relationship with the Center. In 1999, the party publication People’s Weekly World honored Center for Constitutional Rights Executive Director Ron Daniels alongside a member of the Communist Party national committee.[13] Daniels, who was Deputy Campaign Manager for Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential run and the 1992 presidential candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party, has a longstanding cordial relationship with the racist, anti-Semitic former poet laureate of New Jersey, Amiri Baraka.[14]
Echoing Tides’ mission statement, the Center claims it is “committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.”[15] Since 9/11, the Center for Constitutional Rights has channeled its efforts into fighting the Bush administration’s every Homeland Security measure. The Center’s lawyers opposed increasing the government’s ability to wiretap Islamists suspected of plotting terrorism and bemoaned the sequestering of terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay as an inexcusable form of “racial profiling.” The Center’s president, Michael Ratner, has portrayed American foreign policy as the real cause of 9/11, because it allegedly provoked the terrorists.[16] The Center has also defended Lynne Stewart’s “innocence” in aiding Sheikh Rahman’s Islamic Group and has filed an amicus brief on her behalf.[17]
Immediately after 9/11, Tides formed a “9/11 Fund” to advocate a “peaceful national response” to the opening salvos of war. The Foundation replaced the 9/11 Fund with the “Democratic Justice Fund,” which was established with the aid of George Soros’ Open Society Institute. (Soros, a currency speculator and drug legalization advocate is a major contributor to Tides, having donated more than $7 million.)
Tides has also given grant money to the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Ostensibly a “Muslim civil rights group,” CAIR is in fact one of the leading anti-anti-terrorism organizations in the United States. CAIR regularly opposes American efforts to fight terrorists, claiming Homeland Security measures are responsible for an undocumented surge in “hate crimes.” CAIR officials have reason to fight Bush’s War on Terror measures, since many CAIR officials are on the record supporting terrorist organizations. In 1994, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad declared, “I am a supporter of the Hamas movement.”[18] More recently, Community Affairs Director Bassem K. Khafagi pleaded guilty to charges of visa and bank fraud in connection with terrorist support activities.[19] In 2003, Randall Royer, a Communications Specialist and Civil Rights Coordinator at CAIR, was arrested along with a group of Islamic radicals in Virginia for allegedly planning violent anti-American jihad.[20] CAIR has defended terrorist “charities” shut down by the Bush administration.[21] CAIR’s abysmal record led Senator Chuck Schumer, D-NY, to observe that its leaders have “intimate links with Hamas…we know CAIR has ties to terrorism.”[22]
In addition to advocating a peaceful response to the 9/11 terror attacks, Tides has established an Iraq Peace Fund and a Peace Strategies Fund to finance the so-called antiwar movement. These projects fueled MoveOn.org, the website that powered the Howard Dean campaign and featured two separate commercials portraying President Bush as Adolf Hitler. MoveOn.org and the radical website Indymedia.org played key roles in creating that antiwar movement by providing activists with “alternate media coverage.” Indymedia.org, an enormous news and events bulletin board with local pages in most of the world’s major cities, provided a vital link for radical activists, often with violent agendas, to coordinate their protests. Indymedia received $376,000 from the Tides Foundation.
Turning the Tide for Castro
Tides also runs another “alternative media source,” the Institute for Global Communications, which describes itself as “a project of the Tides Center, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization.”[23] A leftist communications facilitator, the Institute was the leading provider of web technology to the radical left during the 1990s. With Tides money, the Institute’s Canadian affiliate used an undersea cable to connect Castro’s Cuba to the internet in 1991.[24] Rep. Mario Diaz-Bartlet, R-FL, a Cuban American commented: “When you give money to such an organization, it's because you sympathize with their work. If not, where is her outrage now that she knows?”[25]
The Institute for Global Communications’ website links to such “recommended sites” as the War Resisters League, a radical group which focuses on non-payment of taxes as a form of protest and the equally radical American Friends Service Committee.[26] Most disturbing is its link to Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center,[27] a front for the Workers World Party, a Marxist-Leninist vanguard that supports international war criminal Slobodan Milosevic and North Korean strongman Kim Jong-Il.[28] Interestingly, Tides claims it cannot “find any association with [IAC] in our records.”[29]
The International Action Center is the force behind International ANSWER, which sponsored the major antiwar (and anti-Bush) rallies in the days before Operation Iraqi Freedom.[30] When ANSWER was outed as a Communist organization in the fall of 2002, Tides beneficiary[31] United for Peace and Justice was created as its “moderate” alternative.[32] United for Peace and Justice was created in the offices of People for the American Way, an organization also funded by Tides.[33] It was headed by longtime Communist Party member and pro-Castro activist Leslie Cagan who maintained her membership in the party after the fall of the Berlin Wall. United for Peace and Justice co-founder Medea Benjamin also made the pilgrimage to Castro’s island gulag, saying on her return that the contrast with her own country “made it seem like I died and went to heaven.”[34] The Tides-funded “A Better Way Project,” has also coordinated efforts of United for Peace and Justice and the Win Without War Coalition, another radical group.
The confluence of People for the American Way, Win Without War, George Soros and Tides provides a typical example of well-financed, overlapping radical causes uniting to oppose a Republican president – all using the loophole provided by the tax code under the rubric of “charitable activities.” Tides-funded groups also specifically targeted the Republican National Convention in New York City for violence. Since 1999, the Tides Foundation has donated $150,000 in grants to the Ruckus Society, a violent anarchist group.[35] Along with Medea Benjamin’s Global Exchange,[36] Ruckus wreaked havoc on Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting, causing thousands of dollars in property damage through “direct action.” Executive Director John Sellers defended his actions in the pages of Mother Jones, saying, “I think you can be destructive, you can use vandalism strategically.” Ruckus now teaches these techniques to other “activists.” Among the topics taught at Ruckus boot camps are “street blockades,” “police confrontation strategies” and “using the media to your advantage.” Their most recent project is protesting the Republican Party’s 2004 convention[37]…and they are not the only Heinz-funded organization going (see next chapter).
Like the “United Way”?
When confronted with news reports of the involvement of his patron Teresa Heinz Kerry and the Heinz Endowments in radical activities through Tides, Endowment executive Maxwell King took umbrage at being tied to the Tides Center. After media stories began exposing Heinz’s longstanding relationship to Tides, he responded:
The Heinz Endowments has been accused of using its funding of the Tides Center of Western Pennsylvania to advance a laundry list of partisan causes and fringe political groups…The Heinz Endowments has scrupulously observed both the letter and the spirit of the law barring foundations from partisan activity. That hasn’t changed. These accusations to the contrary are rooted in politics, not fact.
He also stated “by legally binding contract” every penny of Heinz money went to other charities, which happened to be administered by the Tides Center or were granted through the Tides Foundation. However, as noted above, both organizations take a ten percent fee, often directing this tithe to the “progressive” causes listed above.
He then claimed Tides supports several causes. “It is no more accurate to suggest that Heinz supports every one of these programs than it is to suggest that someone who contributes to a specific group through the United Way supports the agenda of every other United Way beneficiary.”[38]
The Tides Center describes its political agenda another way. “For more than twenty years, Tides Center has been working with new and emerging charitable organizations who share our mission of striving for positive social change.” (Notice the similarity to the Center for Constitutional Rights’ mission statement.) The Tides Foundation defines this as, “strengthening…the progressive movement through innovative grantmaking.”[39] This agenda hardly bears comparison to that of the United Way. Of course a pliant press permitted King to get away with his deception.
In fact, Teresa Heinz Kerry’s various charities donated $1.6 million to establish the Tides Center for Western Pennsylvania, allowing the San Francisco-based Tides Center to set up shop in the east. Tides employees did not see this windfall as a chance to reinvent the Center along the lines of the United Way. “They saw it as a great opportunity to encourage a progressive social agenda,” said Jo DeBolt, director of the Tides Center of Western Pennsylvania. Although any non-profit group can apply for Tides’ services, DeBolt says, “We look at mission fit as the No. 1 cut.”[40]
In the field of philanthropy, grants are normally weighed carefully. Thus, Teresa Heinz Kerry’s decision to become a major funder of Tides is hardly an oversight. However, her decade-long, intimate financial relationship with the financial nerve center of the radical left has gone without media scrutiny. Far from being a “red herring,” as her defenders have claimed, Teresa Heinz Kerry’s patronage of Tides speaks volumes about her political motivations and the groups who would have her ear in a Kerry administration.
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57 Varieties of Radical Causes, Part I
By Ben JohnsonFrontPageMagazine.com September 16, 2004
This is the introduction to the newest book from FrontPage Magazine. Order your copy today! Click HERE for details.
Foreword by David Horowitz
This report by Ben Johnson documents the tax-exempt giving by Teresa Heinz Kerry to political groups, which are shaping the American future. The structure of the U.S. tax code designates only those groups that directly promote candidates and electoral parties as political. Partisan ideological groups that claim to be serving the “general welfare” can qualify for “charitable” 501(c)(3) status and receive tax-deductible contributions. As a result of this quirk in the tax code, an entire universe of shadow political organizations has been created. In between elections cycles, these organizations dominate the non-governmental political discourse of the nation, shaping the debates over national security, immigration, the environment, social values, and every other political issue. They also play a large role in the election cycles themselves.
Groups like the ACLU, which lobbies against Republican judicial appointments, or United for Peace and Justice, which is the umbrella group that organized the demonstrations against the war in Iraq and the protests against the Republican National Convention in New York, are “non-political” under the current tax code, qualifying as “charitable” and tax-exempt. Of course this loophole is not confined to the political left. The conservative side of the political debate has comparable 501(c)(3)s, which engage in shadow politics, but not nearly as many as the left and not nearly as well-funded. This will come as a surprise to some, since the mythology promulgated by a left-wing media maintains that giant foundations of the right – Olin, Scaife and Bradley are the institutions most frequently cited – provide conservatives who are the party of the rich (another leftist myth) with an overwhelming advantage in the shadow political battles, also known as the “culture wars.”
A group of activists led by Hillary Clinton has recently created a new $20 million left-wing think tank, funded by billionaire George Soros, called the Center for American Progress, on just that presumption. Its executive director, former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, explained the need for its creation by alleging, “For more than a decade, the right wing has had a lock on the use of think tanks as policy promotion ‘political weapons.’” This sentiment is echoed in a report by one of the most well heeled left-wing organizations, People for the American Way, which claims, “One consequence of this extraordinary level of funding from right-wing foundations is that these conservative think tanks vastly outspend their progressive counterparts.”[1]
The facts suggest a different reality. As Ben Johnson’s report shows, Teresa Heinz Kerry, all by herself, presides over greater assets involved in the funding of shadow political activities than the three chief conservative foundations – Scaife, Olin and Bradley – combined. While, these conservative foundations have combined assets of $809 million, the three Heinz Endowments, in whose boardrooms Teresa Heinz Kerry speaks with a voice louder than all others, have total assets of $1.2 billion. Mrs. Kerry also sits on the board of the Carnegie Corporation, which as this report reveals is also an active funder of the political left and which has assets of $1.6 billion. In other words, Mrs. Kerry has a say in the disposition of funds earmarked for the left which are more than three times greater than the celebrated funders of the right combined. And this is only a part of Mrs. Kerry’s raw financial power in these matters. As Ben Johnson notes, “Teresa Heinz Kerry [also] heads the H. John Heinz III Foundation and the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Foundation, but due to their tax status, she is not required to provide detailed records of how they receive their funding – nor to whom they award their grants.” Even though she is the wife of a presidential candidate, whose disposable political assets are a matter of public interest, Mrs. Kerry has steadfastly refused to open the records of these foundations to public scrutiny.
The raw figures available provide a benchmark that allows us to put Mrs. Kerry’s influence in perspective. Without question, she is a major player in the culture wars between left and right, and in the shadow universe that shapes the political future. What she has invested in these conflicts significantly affects the political fortunes of her candidate husband, as well, and provides important clues as to what she would do if she were to become first lady with the prestige and resources of the federal government behind her.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Ben Johnson’s report what it reveals about the scope of Mrs. Kerry’s political investments and the range of left-wing agendas she supports. Directly or indirectly, Teresa Heinz Kerry has sponsored a political spectrum that includes violent anarchists, anti-free market socialists, anti-Homeland Security activists, racial dividers, open borders agitators, pro-terrorist radicals and a range of honors and tributes that includes a memorial to an environmentalist whose misguided reforms have led to the unnecessary deaths of tens of millions of African children. Mrs. Kerry’s beneficiaries are in the forefront of the attacks on the Patriot Act, for which her husband voted; they are organizers of the demonstrations against the war in Iraq that her husband supported and the disorderly protests at the Republican convention to nominate his opponent. And they are behind the campaign to open America’s borders and remove existing border controls, and thus to weaken homeland security in the War on Terror.
The political donations of foundations like the Heinz Endowments and the more secretive trusts controlled by Mrs. Kerry are not seriously scrutinized by the government or the representatives of the American people, although the monies invested surely impact the future of all Americans. The funds themselves are held in perpetuity and can shift in their direction from one end of the political spectrum to the other on the whim of individuals and without accountability to any wider public constituency. The late John Heinz was a Republican. The wife who inherited his power in the Heinz Endowments evidently was not. Is this shift in the disposition of billions fair and just (as a leftist might say in other circumstances)? Probably not. But what is to be done about it? Subjecting the activities of such endowments to public scrutiny, as this report by Ben Johnson does, can provide the beginning of an answer.
57 Varieties of Leftist Causes
by Ben Johnson
Introduction
From intimations that she is still in love with first husband John Heinz, to the speech she insisted on giving at the Democratic National Convention in which she droned on and on about herself before mentioning her current husband (the one running for president), Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry has made headlines a wise candidate (or candidate’s wife) would normally avoid. Responding to the Bush administration’s (non-existent) attacks on her husband’s patriotism, she called the president and vice president “unpatriotic.” [2] She then famously stole a news cycle from her husband’s campaign by calling her political opponents “un-American.” When Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporter Colin McNickle requested a clarification she responded, “You said something I didn't say, now shove it!” A sympathetic media protected her by focusing on her coarse verbiage, not the fact that videotape had captured the speech and verified that she did.
This report does not deal with Teresa Heinz Kerry’s sharp tongue or colorful campaign gaffes. Instead, it focuses on the activities that have occupied her adult life: the tax-exempt giving she has authorized as head of the Heinz Endowments and as a board member of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. As chair of the Heinz Family Foundation, chair of the Howard Heinz Endowment, and a board member of the Vira I. Heinz Endowment, she is trustee of more than $1.2 billion in assets and more than $60 million a year in grant monies. As trustee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, she casts her vote on dispensing $1.8 billion in assets and an additional $80 million in grant monies every year.
The radical nature of the organizations she has funded in her capacity as a trustee of these foundations is, to say the least, unsettling. It is an issue that takes on added importance as she has pledged to continue her role as head of these philanthropies if she becomes first lady.[3] Having recently experienced how a strong-willed, politically motivated first lady can affect the policies of government, the American electorate deserves to know what kinds of causes Teresa Heinz Kerry has supported in her public life. This report is intended to fill that gap.
All grant figures have been taken from the relevant IRS 990 forms for the years 1998-2002,[4] or from the Heinz Endowments’ website for the year 2003.[5]
The report begins with a topic that has generated the most heat and least light in the discussion of Mrs. Kerry’s activities: her long connection to the shadowy Tides Foundation and Tides Center of San Francisco. It goes on to explore the impressive array of left-wing groups, her charities have funded including the not-so-charitable organizers of this year’s anti-Republican protests at the GOP’s national convention in New York City. The causes her funding has promoted include anti-Homeland Security advocates, “open borders” lobbyists, radical feminists and anti-gun zealots. A special section focuses on the immense largesse dispensed to radical environmentalist groups, clearly the cause dearest to Mrs. Kerry’s heart.
It should be noted that even this picture is necessarily incomplete, since Teresa Heinz Kerry has steadfastly refused to release her tax records – a refusal unprecedented for the spouse of a presidential (or vice-presidential) candidate. In addition to the Howard Heinz and Vira I. Heinz Endowments, Teresa Heinz Kerry heads up the H. John Heinz III Foundation and the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Foundation, but due to their tax status, she is not required to provide detailed records of how they receive their funding – nor to whom they award their grants.[6] These records will only be available when Teresa Heinz Kerry ends her historic stonewall – a stonewall she would never accept from any corporation – and discloses her full financial records to public scrutiny. In addition to providing the American people with needed information about a woman at the center of their political life, it would end what she derides as baseless speculation about her finances. We hope the day will be soon in coming, but until it does, her refusal will lend strength to the suspicion that scrutiny is exactly what Teresa Heinz Kerry doesn’t want.
Chapter 1: The Truth About Tides
Interest in Teresa Heinz Kerry’s left-wing “philanthropy” was first stimulated when media outlets revealed her close association with the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation and its spin-off, the Tides Center. An article published by the Capital Research Center’s Tom Randall made the nation aware of Tides’ left-wing orientation and ties to radical organizations – as well as its connections to President Bush’s political opponents, including the “September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows,” a group of anti-War-on-Terror activists with family ties to 9/11. (The group had protested a five-second clip of 9/11 images in a Bush campaign ad.)
Over the last decade, Teresa Heinz Kerry has steered $8.1 million to the Tides group, which is a nerve center of the left and which has funneled the monies to numerous radical groups. When the stories about Mrs. Kerry’s connection to Tides appeared, all identified parties protested their innocence, and a politically sympathetic media conveniently dismissed the connections. But, the facts themselves will not go away.
What is Tides?
The Tides Foundation is a tax-exempt charity established in 1976 by antiwar activist Drummond Pike. It distributes millions of dollars every year to political organizations identified with left-wing causes. Among these are United for Peace and Justice, which is led by pro-Castro activist Leslie Cagan; the National Lawyers Guild, an organization with fifty years of involvement in pro-Communist and anti-American causes; the equally radical Center for Constitutional Rights; and the Council for American Islamic Relations, three of whose executives have been indicted for terrorist activities. The Tides Foundation and the closely allied Tides Center, distributed nearly $66 million in grants to radical organizations in 2002 alone.
The Tides Center is a spin off of the Tide Foundation run by the same executive director, Drummond Pike. Although they are legally distinct, this is a distinction without a difference. The Tides Center and Foundation, along with two other Tides entities, “collaborate as partners,”[7] according to Tides’ own official boilerplate.
During the last ten years, the Heinz Endowments, which Teresa Heinz Kerry heads, have given the Tides entities $8.1 million in grants. Until February 2001, Kerry was also a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Carnegie has given Tides numerous six-figure grants.
Tides’ defining feature is that it allows donors to anonymously contribute money to a variety of causes – and thereby avoid public accountability for their donations. The donor simply makes the check out to Tides and instructs the Foundation where to forward the money. This allows high-profile individuals to fund extremist organizations by “laundering” their money through Tides, leaving no paper trail. Founder Drummond Pike referred to his organization as “a convenient vehicle with squeaky clean books.”[8] The Tides Foundation keeps as much as ten percent of the total amount for “charitable advisory fees,” which it can use for administrative costs and also as a treasury over which it has discretionary control. Likewise, the Tides Center will handle administrative functions for third-party non-profit organizations compatible with its political agenda, skimming up to 10 percent of all donations for itself.
The projects and organizations the Tides Foundation has chosen to fund are troubling. For example, the so-called “legal left” (this is how its members refer to themselves) has been a prime beneficiary of Tides largesse. One of the principal recipients is the National Lawyers Guild, which began as a Communist front organization and, even after the fall of the Soviet empire, remains proud of its lineage. In October 2003, its national convention featured a keynote address by one of its most celebrated and admired figures, attorney Lynne Stewart. Stewart is a veteran of the hard left, specializing in defending terrorists, who has been indicted by the Justice Department for providing “material support” to the man who tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman killed six people and injured more than a thousand before Stewart took him on as a client and subsequently endorsed his agendas. The Justice Department accuses Stewart of helping Rahman communicate from prison with his terrorist “Islamic Group” and abet his terrorist activities.
Stewart’s support for terrorist activities against defenders of what she calls “capitalism” and “racism,” is not something she hides. “I don't believe in anarchist violence but in directed violence,” she told the New York Times in 1995. “That would be violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions and accompanied by popular support.” In her National Lawyers Guild keynote address, Stewart told her approving audience that they were carrying on a proud tradition of their forebears, past and present:
And modern heroes, dare I mention? Ho and Mao and Lenin, Fidel and Nelson Mandela and John Brown, Ché Guevara…Our quests like theirs are to shake the very foundations of the continents.[9]
Recently, the National Lawyers Guild endorsed the “March 20 call to End Colonial Occupation from Iraq to Palestine & Everywhere” issued by International ANSWER, a Stalinist anti-war group,[10] that like the National Lawyers Guild supports the Communist regime in North Korea. (The NLG recently sent a delegation of lawyers to Pyongyang to study its judicial system.) The National Lawyers Guild website also features a legal petition for “Post-Conviction Relief” for convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.[11]
Along with George Soros and the Ford Foundation, Tides has also funneled tens of thousands of dollars to the Center for Constitutional Rights, an organization established by Sixties radicals William Kunstler and Arthur Kinoy. Prior to creating the Center, the two floated a plan to establish a new “Communist Party.” [12] Not surprisingly, the old Communist Party USA has enjoyed a close relationship with the Center. In 1999, the party publication People’s Weekly World honored Center for Constitutional Rights Executive Director Ron Daniels alongside a member of the Communist Party national committee.[13] Daniels, who was Deputy Campaign Manager for Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential run and the 1992 presidential candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party, has a longstanding cordial relationship with the racist, anti-Semitic former poet laureate of New Jersey, Amiri Baraka.[14]
Echoing Tides’ mission statement, the Center claims it is “committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.”[15] Since 9/11, the Center for Constitutional Rights has channeled its efforts into fighting the Bush administration’s every Homeland Security measure. The Center’s lawyers opposed increasing the government’s ability to wiretap Islamists suspected of plotting terrorism and bemoaned the sequestering of terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay as an inexcusable form of “racial profiling.” The Center’s president, Michael Ratner, has portrayed American foreign policy as the real cause of 9/11, because it allegedly provoked the terrorists.[16] The Center has also defended Lynne Stewart’s “innocence” in aiding Sheikh Rahman’s Islamic Group and has filed an amicus brief on her behalf.[17]
Immediately after 9/11, Tides formed a “9/11 Fund” to advocate a “peaceful national response” to the opening salvos of war. The Foundation replaced the 9/11 Fund with the “Democratic Justice Fund,” which was established with the aid of George Soros’ Open Society Institute. (Soros, a currency speculator and drug legalization advocate is a major contributor to Tides, having donated more than $7 million.)
Tides has also given grant money to the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Ostensibly a “Muslim civil rights group,” CAIR is in fact one of the leading anti-anti-terrorism organizations in the United States. CAIR regularly opposes American efforts to fight terrorists, claiming Homeland Security measures are responsible for an undocumented surge in “hate crimes.” CAIR officials have reason to fight Bush’s War on Terror measures, since many CAIR officials are on the record supporting terrorist organizations. In 1994, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad declared, “I am a supporter of the Hamas movement.”[18] More recently, Community Affairs Director Bassem K. Khafagi pleaded guilty to charges of visa and bank fraud in connection with terrorist support activities.[19] In 2003, Randall Royer, a Communications Specialist and Civil Rights Coordinator at CAIR, was arrested along with a group of Islamic radicals in Virginia for allegedly planning violent anti-American jihad.[20] CAIR has defended terrorist “charities” shut down by the Bush administration.[21] CAIR’s abysmal record led Senator Chuck Schumer, D-NY, to observe that its leaders have “intimate links with Hamas…we know CAIR has ties to terrorism.”[22]
In addition to advocating a peaceful response to the 9/11 terror attacks, Tides has established an Iraq Peace Fund and a Peace Strategies Fund to finance the so-called antiwar movement. These projects fueled MoveOn.org, the website that powered the Howard Dean campaign and featured two separate commercials portraying President Bush as Adolf Hitler. MoveOn.org and the radical website Indymedia.org played key roles in creating that antiwar movement by providing activists with “alternate media coverage.” Indymedia.org, an enormous news and events bulletin board with local pages in most of the world’s major cities, provided a vital link for radical activists, often with violent agendas, to coordinate their protests. Indymedia received $376,000 from the Tides Foundation.
Turning the Tide for Castro
Tides also runs another “alternative media source,” the Institute for Global Communications, which describes itself as “a project of the Tides Center, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization.”[23] A leftist communications facilitator, the Institute was the leading provider of web technology to the radical left during the 1990s. With Tides money, the Institute’s Canadian affiliate used an undersea cable to connect Castro’s Cuba to the internet in 1991.[24] Rep. Mario Diaz-Bartlet, R-FL, a Cuban American commented: “When you give money to such an organization, it's because you sympathize with their work. If not, where is her outrage now that she knows?”[25]
The Institute for Global Communications’ website links to such “recommended sites” as the War Resisters League, a radical group which focuses on non-payment of taxes as a form of protest and the equally radical American Friends Service Committee.[26] Most disturbing is its link to Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center,[27] a front for the Workers World Party, a Marxist-Leninist vanguard that supports international war criminal Slobodan Milosevic and North Korean strongman Kim Jong-Il.[28] Interestingly, Tides claims it cannot “find any association with [IAC] in our records.”[29]
The International Action Center is the force behind International ANSWER, which sponsored the major antiwar (and anti-Bush) rallies in the days before Operation Iraqi Freedom.[30] When ANSWER was outed as a Communist organization in the fall of 2002, Tides beneficiary[31] United for Peace and Justice was created as its “moderate” alternative.[32] United for Peace and Justice was created in the offices of People for the American Way, an organization also funded by Tides.[33] It was headed by longtime Communist Party member and pro-Castro activist Leslie Cagan who maintained her membership in the party after the fall of the Berlin Wall. United for Peace and Justice co-founder Medea Benjamin also made the pilgrimage to Castro’s island gulag, saying on her return that the contrast with her own country “made it seem like I died and went to heaven.”[34] The Tides-funded “A Better Way Project,” has also coordinated efforts of United for Peace and Justice and the Win Without War Coalition, another radical group.
The confluence of People for the American Way, Win Without War, George Soros and Tides provides a typical example of well-financed, overlapping radical causes uniting to oppose a Republican president – all using the loophole provided by the tax code under the rubric of “charitable activities.” Tides-funded groups also specifically targeted the Republican National Convention in New York City for violence. Since 1999, the Tides Foundation has donated $150,000 in grants to the Ruckus Society, a violent anarchist group.[35] Along with Medea Benjamin’s Global Exchange,[36] Ruckus wreaked havoc on Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting, causing thousands of dollars in property damage through “direct action.” Executive Director John Sellers defended his actions in the pages of Mother Jones, saying, “I think you can be destructive, you can use vandalism strategically.” Ruckus now teaches these techniques to other “activists.” Among the topics taught at Ruckus boot camps are “street blockades,” “police confrontation strategies” and “using the media to your advantage.” Their most recent project is protesting the Republican Party’s 2004 convention[37]…and they are not the only Heinz-funded organization going (see next chapter).
Like the “United Way”?
When confronted with news reports of the involvement of his patron Teresa Heinz Kerry and the Heinz Endowments in radical activities through Tides, Endowment executive Maxwell King took umbrage at being tied to the Tides Center. After media stories began exposing Heinz’s longstanding relationship to Tides, he responded:
The Heinz Endowments has been accused of using its funding of the Tides Center of Western Pennsylvania to advance a laundry list of partisan causes and fringe political groups…The Heinz Endowments has scrupulously observed both the letter and the spirit of the law barring foundations from partisan activity. That hasn’t changed. These accusations to the contrary are rooted in politics, not fact.
He also stated “by legally binding contract” every penny of Heinz money went to other charities, which happened to be administered by the Tides Center or were granted through the Tides Foundation. However, as noted above, both organizations take a ten percent fee, often directing this tithe to the “progressive” causes listed above.
He then claimed Tides supports several causes. “It is no more accurate to suggest that Heinz supports every one of these programs than it is to suggest that someone who contributes to a specific group through the United Way supports the agenda of every other United Way beneficiary.”[38]
The Tides Center describes its political agenda another way. “For more than twenty years, Tides Center has been working with new and emerging charitable organizations who share our mission of striving for positive social change.” (Notice the similarity to the Center for Constitutional Rights’ mission statement.) The Tides Foundation defines this as, “strengthening…the progressive movement through innovative grantmaking.”[39] This agenda hardly bears comparison to that of the United Way. Of course a pliant press permitted King to get away with his deception.
In fact, Teresa Heinz Kerry’s various charities donated $1.6 million to establish the Tides Center for Western Pennsylvania, allowing the San Francisco-based Tides Center to set up shop in the east. Tides employees did not see this windfall as a chance to reinvent the Center along the lines of the United Way. “They saw it as a great opportunity to encourage a progressive social agenda,” said Jo DeBolt, director of the Tides Center of Western Pennsylvania. Although any non-profit group can apply for Tides’ services, DeBolt says, “We look at mission fit as the No. 1 cut.”[40]
In the field of philanthropy, grants are normally weighed carefully. Thus, Teresa Heinz Kerry’s decision to become a major funder of Tides is hardly an oversight. However, her decade-long, intimate financial relationship with the financial nerve center of the radical left has gone without media scrutiny. Far from being a “red herring,” as her defenders have claimed, Teresa Heinz Kerry’s patronage of Tides speaks volumes about her political motivations and the groups who would have her ear in a Kerry administration.
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