Turning a blind eye to justice

By Dave Ruthenberg, Columnist

Sifting through the news of the past week and trying to make some sense of it all …

Terror in the courts: The decision by Attorney General Eric Holder to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged accomplices in the federal court system in New York may be one of the more outrageous decisions by an administration that, in less than a year, has seemingly exceeded its quota of dumbfounding actions.

Let’s leave aside for a moment the fact bringing these suspects into our criminal courts, and giving them rights afforded to our own citizens, brings with it a never-ending list of concerns that includes a discovery process that could allow them access to classified information, exposing our security measures and potentially endangering our troops, there is also a simple matter of safety.

Just ask Louis Pepe.

Pepe was a guard in a federal prison facility when he was seriously injured in 2000 by a suspected terrorist being housed in our prison system who was awaiting trial for the planned bombing of an American embassy overseas. Mamdouh Mahmud Salim’s weapon was provided courtesy of a decision by a federal judge who ruled Salim was allowed to have hot sauce in his cell, based on religious grounds. All Salim and his cell mate did was use that very hot sauce as a mace, spraying it in the face and eyes of Pepe, then attacking him with a sharpened comb they drove through his left eye and into his brain. While laying there in a mass of blood, the prisoners attempted to sexually assault him. Their escape attempt failed, but Pepe was left blinded in one eye and to this day has permanent brain damage.

These detainees are difficult enough to handle for our military guards and now we are going to expose more civilian guards to these folks? And we are being told our federal court system can handle this.

Tell us, Mr. Holder, with such fine judicial decision-making such as that which led directly to the maiming of 42-year-old Louis Pepe, who will never fully recover, are we really supposed to feel confident about your decision? Who is going to protect us from our judges, yet alone the terrorists?

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Liars figure department: The Obama administration has been playing awfully fast and loose with the numbers when it comes to the most recent stimulus package, claiming 650,000 new jobs have been created. Really? Well, maybe not.

The Obama camp created the Web site, www.recovery.gov, to track jobs created by the stimulus package and then used those numbers as a basis for its claim of 650,000 new jobs except there was no way to control the information being fed into the Web site. It seems anybody was able to go there, enter in the nature of their business, how many new employees they hired and what congressional district they were in. Anybody else see a problem here?

ABC News found there was a report on the Web site 30 new jobs had been “saved or created” using $761,420 in federal stimulus funds in Arizona’s 15th congressional district. There was just a slight problem: there is no 15th congressional district in Arizona. In fact, Arizona only has eight congressional districts.

Right here in Oklahoma, the Web site, again according to ABC News, reported 15 jobs were created with $19 million in stimulus money (that works out to $1.267 million per job), also in non-existent congressional districts.

“We report what the recipients submit to us,” said Ed Pound, communications director for the Recovery Board, which supposedly tracks the stimulus spending. Unable to implement a simple fact-checking system on a Web site, are we really supposed to entrust this administration with managing our health care system?

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Three cheers for … the ACLU? OK, you won’t hear me praising the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) very often, but when they get it right, they deserve to be acknowledged.

You may recall from a recent column Jim Gilchrist of the Minuteman Project was prevented from speaking at Harvard after being invited by a student group to address the issue of immigration. The invitation was rescinded after threats of violence by those opposed to Gilchrist's appearance.

Undeterred, Gilchrist accepted an invitation from a University of Nevada student group to appear in a forum to discuss immigration. Predictably, almost as if on cue, leftist faculty members began to organize to spike Gilchrist’s appearance. However, the ACLU stepped forward, issuing a public statement urging the school “not to succumb to pressure” and allow the free exchange of ideas. Imagine that, free expression of thought on campus.

There may be some hope after all.



Ruthenberg is copy editor at the News & Eagle. He can be reached at daver@enidnews.com.

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