ADRIAN MORGAN, EDITOR F.S.M: ERIC HOLDER…RIGHTS, JUSTICE AND MORAL RELATIVISM
Exclusive: Eric Holder – Rights, Justice and Moral Relativism
Afghanistan and Corruption
Yesterday, Attorney General Eric Himpton Holder was in Kabul, Afghanistan. He gave a press conference in the US Embassy, and praised Afghan President Hamid Karzai for his efforts to fight corruption – even though the Afghan leader’s latest election had been mired by revelations of fraud.
Holder also met with his Afghan counterpart, Attorney General Mohammad Ishaq Aloko. The main reason for Holder to be in the country was to give his official seal of approval to a drive to root out corruption in Afghanistan.
On Tuesday, Aloko had defended himself against accusations that suggested he had been pressured to allow powerful Afghan figures to escape prosecution. Aloko, who had been in his post for two years, was not the only figure in the Afghan elite to be accused of bowing to pressure.
One of the individuals whose corruption led to the visit was Mohammad Siddiq Chakari. He was the Afghan minister for Islamic affairs, who was accused of siphoning off millions of dollars from companies who wished to secure government contracts to take Afghans to Mecca on Hajj pilgrimage. Chakari had fled the country earlier this year and is now in London.
The Afghan Attorney General had been particularly irked by a comment made by the US Ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, who had apparently threatened that Aloko should lose his job if he did not ensure an Afghan banker would not get prosecuted. Aloko had raged: “It is against all diplomatic ethics that the U.S. ambassador is telling me: ‘If you don’t put this person in prison, you must resign. I am the attorney general of an independent country.â€
Holder made a speech about tackling corruption and improving the Afghan justice system. He seems oblivious that a country that has a shariah-based penal code – which allows the death penalty for the crimes of blasphemy and apostasy from Islam – starts from a decidedly flaky notion of “justiceâ€. Afghan’s jurisprudence puts it in the rank of countries where justice has not evolved beyond tribalism and 7th century savagery.
In December 1948, Afghanistan was a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Article 18 of that document states:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.â€
Afghan law should respect this agreement. If a country cannot abide by the treaties it has signed, it seems fruitless trying to make it act in a civilized manner. But Holder will ignore such breaches of the law, and still expect the Afghans to act in a civilized “constitutional†manner.
Eric Holder’s Shifting Standards
Holder’s role is to uphold the law of the United States for all people equally, but he has sometimes been condemnatory of the people of this country – see today’s Quote of the Day. He appears to still see racism everywhere, and he has a skewed version of history.
For example, he gave a speech on April 17 this year at North Carolina, at the 50th anniversary of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). He evoked the memory of the days of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and segregation. He praised the SNCC’s policies of non-violent confrontation against racial discrimination. Yet, as the National Review pointed out, he did not mention the period when SNCC went through its own policies of discrimination, expelling white members and having leaders such as Stokely Carmichael and then H. Rap Brown (now known as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin). Brown famously declared: “If America don’t come around, we’re gonna burn it down.†Now he is in jail for homicide. But Holder carefully airbrushed out that part of the SNCC history which involved the man who would become the “Justice Minister†for the Black Panthers.
Holder has every right to criticize racism and oppression, yet most of the oppressive laws in the South denying black people the rights promised to them by Abraham Lincoln – the Jim Crow laws – were all introduced by the southern representatives of the party that Holder now belongs to. The Ku Klux Klan was founded by southern Democrats. In 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was introduced to the House of Representatives, Democrats from southern states voted overwhelmingly against it, 92 to 11.And let us not forget that one recently departed Senator of the same persuasion, Robert Carlyle Byrd, had no problems joining the KKK when he was a young adult and had filibustered to prevent the 1964 Civil Rights Act being passed.
Mr. Holder has attracted his own fair share of scandals.
Defending Big Business and Terror Sponsors
In July 1997, Holder had been nominated as a deputy Attorney General under the Clinton Administration. When George W. Bush was elected, Holder was a lawyer in a Washington private practice, Covington and Burling. At this time, he was involved in a Colombian banana import company called Chiquita International Brands. Chiquita was taken to court by the United States, as it had paid money to a Colombian leftist terrorist group called AUC (Autodefensas Unidas De Colombia or “United Colombian Self-Defenseâ€).
AUC had been designated by the US government as a terrorist organization on September 10, 2001, and on May 29, 2003, (pdf) it was designated as a Significant Narcotics Trafficker. On February 19, 2004, the US government had ordered assets controls upon key leaders of both AUC and the group it had close relations to, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or “FARCâ€. (FARC now is involved closely with terror groups Hezbollah and Al Qaeda).
On June 17, 2008 in Manhattan, Diego Murillo-Bejarano of AUC had admitted plotting to import several tons of cocaine into the United States. AUC and FARC operate extortion rackets, and are notorious for intimidation through mutilating their victims.
In March 2007, Chiquita Brands International Inc, which in 2003 made an annual turnover of $2.6 billion, was charged (pdf) with “Engaging in Transactions with a Specially-Designated Global Terrrorist. The company admitted that between 1997 and 2004, it had paid out around 1.7 million dollars to this terror group, and was fined $25 million.
Holder had acted on behalf of the company in negotiating the deal, and had argued that the money was paid as protection to prevent its banana farms being destroyed. But the company had gone beyond that. Even the Huffington Post expressed surprise that Holder had been nominated, for the Chiquita Brand had also given AUC members a cache of machine guns. Huffpo journalist Dan Kovalik wrote that Holder,
“using his influence as former deputy attorney general under the Clinton Administration, helped to negotiate Chiquita’s sweeheart deal with the Justice Department in the criminal case against Chiquita. Under this deal, no Chiquita official received any jail time. Indeed, the identity of the key officials involved in the assistance to the paramilitaries were kept under seal and confidential.â€
The payments to AUC had, according to Colombian authorities, led to the deaths of 4,000 people.
Chiquita was not alone in being accused of making payments to Central American terrorists. The Christian Science Monitor wrote:
At least three multinationals operating in Colombia – coal mining giant Drummond, Nestle, and Coca-Cola – have been targeted in civil lawsuits in the US that claimed these companies paid paramilitaries to kill or intimidate union workers.
Holder managed to become the Attorney General, even though media outlets, including Sean Hannity of Fox, publicized Holder’s role in securing a “sweet deal†for Chiquita.
Principles and Partiality
Holder does not support gun ownership, despite what it states in the Bill of Rights. Holder said at the time of his acceptance that he was opposed to the death penalty, but would uphold the law.
Lawyers who have defended notorious clients – such as Clarence Darrow who managed to spare Leopold and Loeb from the death penalty – have gone down in history as honorable men. But Holder seems to ruin every positive move he makes with a bitterness-filled and inflammatory statement relating to “historyâ€, and this is his ultimate weakness. Darrow – whatever his faults – acted upon unswerving principle and a belief in all aspects of the law and Constitution. Holder is not from that mold.
While deputy Attorney General, Holder had been involved in securing the pardoning by Bill Clinton of Marc Rich, a financier and commodities trader who did dirty oil deals with Iran during the hostage crisis. Despite an indictment in 1983, he had fled to Switzerland and escaped justice. Rich’s pardon had shocked people of both sides of the political divide. When he was in private practice, Holder had also represented Zurich-based Swiss Bank UBS AG, which was later placed under investigation by the US Justice Dept.
The latest accusations against Holder come from J. Christian Adams, a former attorney in the Justice Dept. Adams, who blogs here, now works as a lawyer in Virginia. He maintains that, in a case of alleged voter intimidation by Minister King Samir Shabazz, Malik Zulu Shabazz and Jerry Jackson of the New Black Panther Party, Holder decided to drop the case on racially-motivated grounds. The incident had originally taken place in November 2008 in Philadelphia.
Adams has written:
“The New Black Panther case was the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career. Because of the corrupt nature of the dismissal, statements falsely characterizing the case and, most of all, indefensible orders for the career attorneys not to comply with lawful subpoenas investigating the dismissal, this month I resigned my position as a Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney.â€
When Holder declared that he was against the Arizona Immigration Bill, 13 days after it had been published, but had still not read it, more doubts were raised about the sincerity of the man.
Nowadays, Holder talks nostalgically about the Civil Rights movement, and I am sure he must have endured some deeply disturbing racism in his time. Yet since he became a lawyer, Holder has spent much of his time defending multinationals and supporting the causes of high finance. His statements on the Civil Rights movement seem to be designed to play to the gallery. Behind the lofty rhetoric, Eric Himpton Holder is a corporate man; a man more concerned with his own ambitions than being a defender of the common, ordinary American citizen – whatever color, religion or political persuasion that citizen may have.
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