TREASON SYMPOSIUM: THE FUTURE OF TREASON
Front Page Magazine
Jamie Glazov: When it comes to the agitations of the political left over the war in Iraq, Patriotism and Treason are the elephants in the room. And not just for the political left. Even the words “appeasement” and “capitulation” have been absent from the political debate over the war in Iraq, although there have been prominent advocates for both. Have we seen, as Daniel Pipes has titled a recent column, “The End of Treason” because people identify with causes like Islam and Social Justice and no longer feel allegiance to nation states? In fact, no one has been prosecuted for treason since World War II, although there are many obvious candidates – Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Aldrich Ames, John Walker Lindh. Why? To discuss these questions, Frontpage Symposium has gathered a distinguished panel. Our guests are:"
Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He prosecuted the Blind Sheik and his organization for seditious conspiracy in 1995;
Henry Mark Holzer, (www.henrymarkholzer.com), Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn Law School and an appellate lawyer who specializes in constitutional law. He is the co-author (with his wife Erika Holzer) of Aid and Comfort: Jane Fonda in North Vietnam. He is writing a book about the jurisprudence of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas;
and
David Horowitz, the Editor-in-Chief of Frontpagemag.com and author Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam And The American Left.
Andrew C. McCarthy, Henry Mark Holzer and David Horowitz, welcome to Frontpage Symposium. Mr. McCarthy, let us begin with you.
Why do you think no one been prosecuted for treason since 1945 and why are disloyal acts like Jimmy Carter’s acceptance of a Nobel Prize designed as a slap – in wartime -- at his own commander-in-chief no longer attended by public disgrace any more?
McCarthy: It’s a pleasure to be here, especially in such distinguished company.
I don’t think serious people can question that, as my friend Daniel Pipes argues, ideas about the importance of national loyalty are much different today from what they were at the end of World War II. I’ve written a bit about this myself (see here). That’s a crucial part of the explanation for the lack of treason prosecutions since 1945. There are a couple of others: one related, one not.
First, hand-in-hand with the evolution (some of us would say “devolution”) of perceptions about national loyalty has been a joint cultural and legal revolution in the concept of dissent. David has described the cultural phenomenon more powerfully than anyone I can think of: the Sixties, Vietnam, Watergate – that whole era is a formative experience for our present day elites in the media, the academy and government. Dissent became fashionable.
On the legal side of the ledger, we find an over-correction of excessive prosecutions, like the ones under the espionage act during WW-I. We went from one extreme to another. For example, after upholding the controversial Smith Act convictions right after WW-II, the Supreme Court – during the Warren era – went on to rule that “mere” membership in the Communist Party could not be grounds for a prosecution. To this day, that makes people question whether “mere” membership in another organization dedicated to the demise of America, al Qaeda, is a crime. That mentally we could somehow divorce joining an organization from the stated purposes of the organization is bizarre. We’ve done analogous things in the related area of speech that advocates violence. There should be no First Amendment protection for that – and as Judge Robert Bork has eloquently noted, it was not the case half a century ago. But these prosecutions are very hard unless you can show a truly imminent threat – which in an age of WMD threats is not really an acceptable place to draw the line. The courts’ and the academy’s message is clear: the legal armor around speech that expresses dissent should be impregnable – even though we know that such speech, in militant Islam, is a trigger for action.
The second point is practical. Treason prosecutions are complex from a litigation standpoint. In almost any instance when the evidence is strong enough to bring one, the same evidence could also sustain a charge that is easier to prove and that carries a weighty penalty (like terrorism conspiracy or material support to terrorism cases). The incentive to resort to a treason charge is thus not strong.
Holzer: It’s good to be with you three. Let’s shed some light on a very misunderstood subject.
Jamie has asked two questions—(1) Why no treason prosecutions since post-WW II?, and (2) “Is there no future for treason?”—and I’ll answer them in that order.
But first a suggestion. In his recent “The End of Treason” (Front Page Magazine, August 16, 2005), Dr. Daniel Pipes commingled treason under US and other laws, and domestic and foreign traitors. Because I, for one, am not qualified to address foreign treason and traitors, our discussion today should be limited to treason under our law and to Americans who arguably commit that crime.
Second, a disagreement. Dr. Pipes asserts that “[t]he law of treason was always difficult to apply but now it is impossible.” I disagree with his “difficult” point, as the post-WW II Cramer, Haupt, Chandler, Gillars, Best, Burgman, D’Aquino and Kawakita prosecutions and convictions demonstrate.
As to Taliban John Walker, in my monograph Why Not Call it Treason?: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Today, I argue that Walker could (and should) have been indicted for the “aid and comfort” prong of treason (the “levying war” prong is another matter entirely) given that federal prosecutors could have gone to the jury with the Supreme Court’s four requisite elements of the former crime: (1) intent to betray the United States, which can be inferred from (2) an overt act (3) witnessed by two people (4) that gave aid and comfort to our enemy. In the monograph I also argue that Lynne Stewart, indicted and convicted in Mr. McCarthy’s old district, should have been treated similarly. Indeed, I am confident that were he still in the Southern District of New York, with an honest jury he could have made a treason charge stick. (Let’s not get into the “no declared war” issue. A declaration is unnecessary (See the Burr prosecution), and the question is an appellate one anyhow).
Now to the questions.
(1) Dr. Pipes is correct that at least in the United States “the crime of treason is defunct” because “the notion of loyalty has fundamentally changed.” Mr. McCarthy is correct that the “dissent revolution” has devalued the concept of treason, equating “aid and comfort to the enemy” with labor picketing. There are other reasons: historical baggage, from when the English crown used treason laws to stifle dissent; confusion between speech/dissent and treason. There is, however a crucially important, albeit pernicious, reason which appears in Mr. McCarthy’s last paragraph—the “practical” reason: “In almost any instance where the evidence is strong enough to bring [a treason prosecution], the same evidence could also sustain a charge that is easier to prove and that carries a weighty penalty (like terrorism conspiracy or material support to terrorism cases).” With all due respect—and I have much for Mr. McCarthy—when our government confronts treasonable conduct, the Attorney General’s last concern should be “practicality.” As I wrote in my monograph, by not prosecuting Fonda, Walker, and Stewart (let alone rogue CIA, FBI, NSA agents, and other American citizen spies) for treason, “the United States government has defaulted on its obligation to provide [not only legal, but] moral justice.”
(2) There is no future for treason prosecutions in the United States until “the notion of loyalty has fundamentally changed,” until the people and their institutions understand the difference between speech/dissent and “aid and comfort”/”levying war,” and until our prosecutors eschew the “practical” for the moral. I fear none of these necessary changes in attitude will occur until one of our cities is destroyed by home-grown terrorists, and maybe not even then.
Horowitz: It is a pleasure to be in such knowledgeable company and among two men who have put the law in the service of the community that created it.
Unfortunately, I agree with Henry Holzer that only a major atrocity – or series of atrocities – inflicted on the homeland will wake Americans up to the fact that we are in a war and have to take the war seriously if we are to defend ourselves. We have already seen the beginning of such an awakening in England, a country which had probably traveled further down the suicidal path than we have. It is obvious that most Americans, and an even greater percentage of so-called liberal Americans don’t even recognize that we are in a war at this point.
Capitulation on the field of battle is apparently seen as a plus by some leaders of the Democratic Party and Republicans like Chuck Hagel. As for the homefront, a bereaved mother makes herself the spokesperson for a movement that regards the terrorists as “freedom fighters” and us as the terrorists and no one in the media or at Homeland Security bats an eyelash. The sentiments expressed on the left are reminiscent of the peace movements of the 1930s who regarded Churchill and Roosevelt as the “real” threats, and Hitler as a somewhat abused and overrated clown. At the instigation of radical groups, more than 350 American cities have passed resolutions refusing to cooperate with the Homeland Security Department and it isn’t even news.
I also agree with Andrew McCarthy that we have redefined legal categories in a bizarre way that makes terrorist organizations part of the democratic process. I also agree with him that for some well meaning people this was an over-reaction to episodes like Watergate, but only if we understand that Watergate was a fairly trivial episode that was exploited by a political movement to cripple the Nixon Administration and defeat America in Vietnam. This movement was quite malevolent and deliberately exaggerated and exploited Watergate to achieve its ends. It was abetted then as the soft on terrorism crowd is now by a willing leftwing press.
Like most Americans who actually love this country and understand that it is in danger, Andrew has a far too benign explanation for what has happened. The redefinitions of national security, loyalty and dissent are the work of a fifty-year campaign by domestic enemies of this country on the political left to weaken our national security structures by redefining the concepts and laws that protect us.
The Communist Party long ago created organizations which pretended to defend civil liberties with the intent of weakening America’s defenses in the face of a determined totalitarian enemy. The National Lawyers Guild was one, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee another. The Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born was a third Communist front dedicated to preventing agents of the Soviet Union (leaders of the Communist Party) who were not native born from being deported during the Cold War. The anti-Patriot Act “civil liberties” movement was itself launched by a terrorist, Sami al-Arian, and his Committee for the Protection of Political Freedom, an organization specifically created to defend al-Arian’s brother-in-law Mazzen al-Najjar from deportation for terrorist activities under the 1996 anti-terrorism act.
The ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights were witting partners of al-Arian in attacking the 1996 anti-terrorism act and the Patriot Act and still defend him (along with many other terrorists whose agendas they rationalize and even embrace). The ACLU has led the pack by zeroing in on the provisions of the Act that criminalize “material support for terror.” Why? Because the ACLU knows that many of the radical organizations who are its friends and allies in innumerable causes of the left – including such “civil liberties” organizations as CAIR -- are also political supporters of the terrorists. When does political support for terrorists become material support? That is for the FBI to investigate and the courts to decide.
The ACLU (and of course the NLG and the CCR) do not want the FBI to investigate groups like Global Exchange, United for Peace and Justice, Occupation Watch and the International Solidarity Movement – to name just a few who are very close to the line, if not already over it. In looking at this problem we should keep in mind that the Weather Underground, which was a terrorist organization that formally declared war on the United States in the early Seventies was never brought to heel by the FBI. Its leaders operated for five years underground carrying out military attacks on government buildings and killing several people in the process without ever being apprehended, or prosecuted when they surfaced. And that was in a fairly primitive war. The Weather leaders colluded with the Vietnamese Communists. Imagine a contemporary Weather Underground (and I am sure there are discussions in the left about forming such) colluding in this war with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
McCarthy: It’s bracing to find Professor Holzer confront me – however gently – for adherence to a position that abdicates government’s “obligation to provide … moral justice.” And David is putting on my remarks weight they were not intended to bear when he suggests that I am being too benign. To recap, I was asked merely to explain the absence of treason cases in 300 words – not to defend it, much less to analyze the general calamitous fall-out of what I quite agree has been a half-century campaign to undermine national security and the cultural Americanism that once walked hand-in-hand with the concept of patriotism.
But OK, let’s dive into it. While respect is quite mutual here, my colleagues put way too much stress on treason as an indicted crime (as opposed to an attitudinal phenomenon in the body politic). In this, they make an error logically similar to the one made throughout the 1990’s, when the value of criminal prosecution became so over-inflated it was permitted to become the virtually exclusive weapon for fighting what, since 1993, has actually been a military war. Criminal prosecution is a grossly inadequate (and with modern discovery law, an often reckless) means of waging a war. Analogously, though, it is also a grossly inadequate means of revitalizing the waning virtue of national loyalty.
Government is an instrument of society, not the other way around. Government’s role is not to drag society kicking and screaming to its senses – about patriotism or most anything else. If one were to make a list of the top hundred reasons why patriotism is not what it was in 1945, the absence of treason prosecutions, I daresay, would not make the cut. And as far as remedies go, one David Horowitz book is worth about a thousand treason indictments.
Now, in 1995, I prosecuted a jihad organization for seditious conspiracy and several other crimes. Some of the defendants could have been tried for treason (either because they were American citizens or legal immigrants with sufficient status to predicate such a charge), but several could not have. All of the defendants were convicted and received severe sentences.
We opted not to bring treason charges. The public interest in a national security prosecution is not that a civics lesson be taught. It is that national security threats to the United States be nullified. The prosecutor’s duty is to maximize the government’s chance of convicting as many terrorists as possible, getting them sentenced as severely as possible, and disclosing as little sensitive intelligence to the enemy as possible. This last imperative is perhaps the most difficult given the daunting discovery obligations resultant from the defendants’ rights revolution of the last 40 or so years. It is also – especially during wartime – a reason we should try to avoid trials when we can, a reason why we now detain enemy combatants outside the criminal justice system, and one of the principal reasons why it was so foolhardy to make criminal prosecution the point of the counterterrorism spear during the 1990s.
With due respect to Daniel Pipes and Lord Carlile, it is irrelevant that there is little or no prosecutorial experience trying treason cases on either side of the Atlantic. I had no experience with the nearly-never-employed seditious conspiracy statute either, and my cohorts who used the ramped-up offenses created by the 1996 anti-terror law (in the embassy bombing case, for example) of necessity had no experience using those charges. Competent prosecutors can try any offense for which there is supporting evidence. But there are very good strategic reasons not to complicate a case with treason charges when other, simpler charges will suffice to obtain a capital, life, or otherwise severe sentence.
Every additional charge in a case requires the government to turn over additional discovery. Because our enemy, militant Islam, is a movement, most national security cases will be multi-defendant affairs. Because treason carries a special stigma and status in the law (being the only offense defined by the Constitution), alleging it against some but not all defendants in a case would increase the likelihood that a court would sever the non-treason defendants. This means multiple trials, rather than one – increasing the amount of information provided to the defense, forcing the system to bear double burdens (and I’d point out that my single trial, not atypically of national security cases, took nine months), forcing aggrieved and intimidated witnesses to testify multiple times, and increasing the chances of acquittal for the later tried defendants (because they have the tremendous advantage of seeing the government’s case, and have the ammunition of the first trial to use in cross-examining witnesses in the second trial).
This is a kind of roulette you may perhaps play in a stock fraud investigation. When national security is at stake, however, it is not the kind of risk you take for no better reason than to make a point about national loyalty. It is the society’s job to instill national loyalty, not the criminal justice system’s. It is the criminal justice system’s task to maximize public safety.
Sayyid Nosair, an American citizen who was the murderer of Meir Kahane and a conspirator in the World Trade Center bombing, received a multiple-life sentence upon being convicted of, among other things, homicide in aid of racketeering and conspiring to levy war against his country. I did not, and do not, feel that by failing to charge him, in addition, with treason, I abdicated my responsibility to provide moral justice for the American people.
Holzer: At the risk of carrying this love fest too far, I agree with virtually everything Andrew McCarthy says: we are in a war against terrorists, not a campaign against the Mafia; the goal is to put away the former for as long as we can (if not execute them); and that as to many of them, their destination should be Guantanamo (and comparable places) rather than a federal prison. I disagree, however, about what I take to be his position on treason prosecutions because of the “practical” (e.g., discovery, severance, duration) problems associated with them.
In the first place, because treason is the only crime defined in the Constitution, acts constituting that crime should be taken seriously—and other than by prosecuting, I know of no other way to do that.
Second, it is very much the purpose and function of the law, in certain circumstances, to make moral statements, as do many of our statutes and common law doctrines. Criminal laws punishing everything from homicide to shoplifting come to mind, as do civil laws providing recompense for everything from breached contracts to intentional infliction of emotional distress. Indeed, underlying the award of punitive damages is the punishment of civil wrongdoers—certainly a moral statement. And what has Mr. McCarthy’s former employer, the Department of Justice, said over and over again about corporate morality in its recent prosecutions of corrupt businessmen?
Third—and this is empirical based on my own experience—an important aspect of prosecuting (and, even better, convicting) someone, say Jane Fonda, for treason, is to provide vindication for those who have suffered from the treasonous acts. Yes, I know, the purpose of the criminal law is supposedly to vindicate “society” (which in reality is nothing more than lots of individuals), rather than any specific persons. But tell that to Enron employees, rape victims, and those whom I know very well: veterans of the Vietnam War in general, and the American POWs in particular. Ever since Erika Holzer and I made the case against Fonda for treason in “Aid and Comfort”: Jane Fonda in North Vietnam, hundreds (maybe thousands) of veterans have expressed dismay that she was never prosecuted. They feel, rightly, that their government let them down. They suffered, and she walked—and prospered!
I do not argue that practical considerations have no role in who gets prosecuted and for what. I would never sacrifice necessary convictions for a grandstand treason play. I simply hold that not enough attention has been given to that crime, and that practical considerations should not always carry the day. Indeed, Bobby Garwood spent some thirteen years with the Vietnamese Communists, some of them abusing American POWs, and when he returned to the United States a Marine court-martial only busted him from PFC to private and forfeited all his pay and allowances accrued during the time he played footsie with the Communists. If ever there was a case for treason, Garwood was it. Yet he, too, walked. Leaving behind an incredulous public to become even more cynical about its government’s failure to call a spade a spade. “Why Not Call it Treason?”
Horowitz: I will gladly carry the love fest too far. I agree wholeheartedly with Andrew McCarthy that the issue of patriotism is first and foremost a moral issue and that this is where we have been losing the battle so far. (I thank him for his kind words about my books – the spirit they were written in is that of providing a warning to others from my experience in the left).
In the end, the issue really is patriotism. Love of country. Concern for the safety of the people who inhabit it. Recognition that the rights and privileges and general bounties of this country were created by its culture, and that this culture was built on the faith and dedication and sacrifice of Americans who went before us -- that we owe them a debt in addition to the debt we owe the living members of our own generations..
Today, millions of Americans on the left, think this country and the rights and privileges it has bestowed on them are the result of accidents that have no relation to its culture or worse – that it is predator nation rather than liberating nation, that its history is a narrative to be embarrassed over, its legacy something to be discarded. The traitors in our midst commit their treason out of a delusional loyalty to “humanity,” a loyalty that is allegedly “higher” and therefore superior to patriotic loyalty.
Loyalty to humanity is in fact a concept so abstract and malleable that it means literally nothing. It is not a loyalty to anyone or any value. It is an excuse to betray one’s country. In my book, Unholy Alliance, I have called people who invoke this particular form of bad faith – Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Cindy Sheehan come to mind – “secessionists” in that that they have abandoned America for what they think is membership in an imaginary “world” community.
The truth about the world is encapsulated in its only institutionalize form (much favored by this crowd) the United Nations. In the real world, the UN is a collection of tyrannies, kleptocracies and slavocracies, and feckless democracies like Germany and France who are appeasers and abettors of the same. The UN is a moral cesspool that has honored terrorists like Arafat and once gave a standing ovation to a cannibal named Idi Amin. The UN only yesterday colluded in the genocide of the Rwandans, colludes today in the enslavement and slaughter of black Africans in the Sudan and embezzled billions from the criminal coffers of Saddam Hussein. This is humanity as it has evolved without the great foundational covenants that guide this country and that created in these territories a government of, by and for the people, dedicated to the belief that all men are created equal and that they endowed by their Creator with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The first duty of a citizen of America is to defend this -- these institutions and this people that created America’s democratic culture and has sustained it. The idea that suicide bombing terrorists in the Middle East who strap bombs to their own children and tell them to blow up other children and they will go to heaven – the idea that savages like this will create anything in the Middle East but a second Holocaust is a delusion. But it is a delusion that unites the factions of the political left in America and leads them to betray their own country and their own people.
Destruction on a massive scale is the only thing America’s enemies have shown themselves capable of. To denounce America and its elected president in the midst of the terrorist war being waged against it – to denounce America as “the greatest terrorist state” and to proclaim its terrorist enemies “freedom fighters” in the manner of Cindy Sheehan, who is the symbol and mouthpiece these days of the political left, is to declare oneself an enemy of one’s own country and its people, and to proclaim oneself a waiting and willing accomplice to those who want to destroy it.
To be a patriotic critic of the war is not hard. It means to consider that your country and its citizens have been unjustly marked for death by an inhuman foe – a foe that crystallizes the very meaning of evil -- and to frame your criticism accordingly, taking those realities into consideration. Lack of patriotism is manifest when you make your own people your enemy, as Sheehan and her supporters clearly have. And that morally speaking is treason.
I leave the legal issue of whether to prosecute treason as treason to the superior legal minds in this discussion.
McCarthy: I think David, Henry and I all agree that patriotism is a core value, and that its vitality has ebbed due to a tireless assault on it. We all also concur that it would be beneficial to revive the conceit that traitorous behaviour should be condemned. Our quarrel – and this is mainly Prof. Holzer and I – is on two comparatively minor points: (a) the chicken-and-egg question of whether the criminal justice system ought to be leading or following society in reaffirming the significance of patriotism, and (b) whether society’s condemnation of traitorous behaviour needs to include the specific vehicle of treason prosecutions.
My own view is that the criminal justice system is a reflector of public attitudes – as they have been refashioned by elite opinions – not a driver of public attitudes.
Material support to terrorism statutes are a good example. Society makes an unassailable decision: if your organization engages in terrorist activity, we are going to consider it radioactive – anyone who contributes to it in any way is condemned. But Congress creates exceptions allowing contributions to terror groups of medical supplies and “religious materials” (a strange caveat in the midst of a terrorist war waged by Islamists). The message is muddled. The statutes then get applied and judges create more “humanitarian” exceptions for “First Amendment protected activities” like advice in how to conduct non-violent activities – failing to recognize that anything that makes the organization more efficient overall also makes it more deadly. Prosecutors naturally respond by choosing cases on the safe side of the trajectory created by exceptions, rather than out of bright-line moral conviction that all aid to terror groups is wrong.
This really cannot be reversed by anything other than the society responding unequivocally – by public condemnation of people who provide terror groups with any kind of aid, including so-called humanitarian assistance. The criminal justice system is not going to fix that problem.
On the importance of treason prosecutions – I simply have a disagreement with Prof. Holzer. I don’t quarrel that it would be a good thing to prosecute for treason, as long as doing it did not reduce the chances of convicting a terrorist or a terrorist facilitator of easier to prove crimes, or cause an unacceptable degree of extra discovery during wartime. I do not, however, agree that there is a necessary correlation between the catharsis we get from prosecutions and treason specifically. That is, if Jane Fonda had been prosecuted for providing material support to the Vietcong (if there had been such a law at the time), I don’t think the public would feel “let down.” The problem, as he aptly puts it, is that “she walked – and prospered!” That is, there were no charges or social consequences of any kind.
In any event, it has been an honor to participate in an exchange with two true patriots.
Holzer: Before making my concluding remarks, I want to say that participating in this discussion has been most enjoyable. David knows in how much esteem I hold him, and I have long been an admirer of Mr. McCarthy’s work as a prosecutor and writer.
I take it that by the criminal justice system “reaffirming the significance of patriotism” Mr. McCarthy means enforcement of federal criminal laws protecting our Nation and punishing those who transgress them.
As to “(a) the chicken-and-egg” question of whether the criminal justice system ought to be leading or following society in reaffirming the significance of patriotism,” the answer is not “either/or,” but both. ). The criminal justice system leads in reaffirming by punishing the unpatriotic in open proceedings which, hopefully, mete out punishment to the transgressors. Obviously the criminal justice system follows society in the sense that the electorate through its political representatives makes laws fostering patriotism and protecting the Nation, and the system then enforces/applies those laws (or is supposed to).
As to (b) “whether society’s condemnation of traitorous behaviour needs to include the specific vehicle of treason prosecutions, “ my view is that it “needs” to and should—if we can afford it strategically and tactically, and consonant with our security requirements.
More important, however, than any of this is Mr. McCarthy’s point that “the message is muddled.” I am afraid that political correctness, relativism, subjectivism and other intellectual corruption (let alone fear) has made our legislative, congressional and even executive response to the so-called War on Terror much too soft for our own good. I was old enough during World War II, close enough to the draft during Korea, adult enough during Vietnam (and after), and knowledgeable enough about history, to know what a “war” is. Apart from taking and holding ground, if that is possible, war is about killing as many of the enemy as fast as you can—and, as a corollary, neutralizing those you can’t (or won’t ) kill. If, as we are told, we are in a “War on Terror” (where there is little or no ground to take and hold), then neutralization and killing the enemy must be our first priority. Mr. McCarthy is correct that the public must condemn all those who support terror groups—but it must also condemn and punish their representatives who “don’t get it.”
Finally, to circle back to where we began, I offer a quote: “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” All good people must never let it prosper. I know we three shall not.
Horowitz: The message is muddled. This is the message of this discussion. And it is a message first all to conservatives and to patriotic Americans in general. By patriotic Americans I mean people who understand that our country is in danger but first of all who care that it is in danger. Clarity about our situation and about the enemies we face both without and within will come first to those who are patriots and only after that to others.
Jane Fonda is certainly an emblem of the muddle. Having committed treason during the Vietnam War she was rewarded with an Academy Award and other accolades, then shamed into a disingenuous and deceitful “apology” (she was not sorry for betraying her country and its troops but for embarrassing herself) which has now been stripped of all its pretense as she joins forces with British traitor George Galloway to tour America sabotaging our effort to bring a measure of freedom and stability and security from terror to Iraq. Galloway of course was a paid agent of Saddam Hussein and is a supporter of the Iraqi terrorists. Here is an excerpt from a recent interview with Galloway:
Mohammad Basirul Haq Sinha: "You often call for uniting Muslim and progressive forces globally. How far is it possible under current situation?"
Galloway: "Not only do I think it's possible but I think it is vitally necessary and I think it is happening already. It is possible because the progressive movement around the world and the Muslims have the same enemies. Their enemies are the Zionist occupation, American occupation, British occupation of poor countries mainly Muslim countries. They have the same interest in opposing savage capitalist globalization which is intent upon homogenizing the entire world turning us basically into factory chickens which can be forced fed the American diet of everything from food to Coca-Cola to movies and TV culture. And whose only role in life is to consume the things produced endlessly by the multinational corporations. And the progressive organizations & movements agree on that with the Muslims."
This is the perfect self-definition of a traitor to his own country and an enemy of ours. George Galloway has been embraced by the American left. Galloway is the person whom Jane Fonda has chosen to take on as a partner in her war against the war. She has returned to the path of treason to this country which she never really left – any more than any anti-American pro-Communist leftist from the Vietnam generation who has not broken with his comrades and past has ever really left that path. What does this partnership of Galloway and Fonda say about the left that supports them, that does not dissociate itself from them?
We are faced with a treacherous fifth column in this country, which is coterminous with mainstream activist “anti-war” left, and which – as in the Cold War and as in Vietnam – drags along with it the gullible, the incautious and the unconscious. The more we fail to take treason seriously the larger the ranks of the latter and the stronger the real betrayers become. To return to what I said earlier, the problem of confronting this internal enemy begins with conservatives who insist on calling such people “liberals” and give them the benefit of the doubt. Conservatives should and can know better.
It has been a pleasure conversing with the two of you, and I hope we can do this again.
Glazov: Andrew C. McCarthy, Henry Mark Holzer and David Horowitz, thank you for joining us today. We'll see you again soon.
