Professor Herbert Romerstein of the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC, who co-authored "The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors," recently explained the left's behavior in strategic terms. "Since the mid-1970s," says Romerstein, "a concerted effort has been made by the extreme left to weaken the FBI and the CIA...."
Noting the heavy restrictions placed on FBI counter-terrorism operations by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1979, Romerstein blamed the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Lawyers Guild for bringing this legislation forward and manipulating the U.S. legal system, paving the way for recent terrorist strikes.
The National Lawyers Guild has been a Communist front for many years. Along with the Communist Party USA, the Revolutionary Communist Party (pro-Beijing) and the Workers World Party it is part of a small Marxist-Leninist network which has long sought to undermine U.S. national security.
Romerstein's comments may come as a shock to those who think Communism is dead. Far from being dead, the Communists in this country are leading the so-called peace movement. They are in the forefront of those who would like to undermine the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Those who do not understand the continuing game played by Communists (foreign and domestic) should count the losses of Sept. 11, which owe in part to the efforts of Communist front organizations. Of course, political outcomes are determined by organized minorities and not by the disorganized majority. And no minority is better organized than the Communist left.
The National Lawyers Guild recently e-mailed leading U.S. Muslim organizations, urging them to a standard of greater sensitivity. "If the police or FBI or INS or anyone else tries to question you or tries to enter your home without a warrant, just say No!"
In other words, the Communist organizations and fronts within the country are encouraging Muslim-Americans to turn their backs on the country, to spurn the inquiries of the FBI and police.
But it is not only from the ultra-left - from overt Communists - that America's war effort is being undermined. There is also the "soft left," led by politicians who have avoided the taint of far left association, who even now hound the Attorney General, the FBI and the Justice Department with complaints.
Consider New York Senator Charles Schumer's Nov. 27 announcement of hearings examining the issue of U.S. military tribunals in the war against terror. Instead of supporting the president's call for special military tribunals, Schumer is challenging a basic wartime necessity. Never mind the fact that those who attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11 have threatened judges, witnesses, juries and their families. Ordinary judicial procedures can be effectively compromised in the course of open, public trials involving foreign terrorists. By questioning this necessity Schumer is linking up with left wing groups who want foreign terrorists to enjoy the same rights that U.S. citizens enjoy, even though these foreigners would use those rights to destabilize the United States and mock the justice system itself.
The enemy in this war respects no rules, has no idea of procedural fairness, and is only interested in one thing: the destruction of the United States. If we treat foreign terrorists as U.S. citizens, giving them rights they are not by law entitled to, we further undermine our own security. Since Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1979, U.S. law enforcement and counter-intelligence has been shackled to Communist-inspired strictures that have enabled terrorists to operate freely and without fear of detection. In an age of mass destruction weapons, when the next terrorist strike could involve nuclear or biological weapons, Americans will have to choose between national survival and granting effective citizenship to the nation's sworn enemies.
Politicians who gently nudge us toward the granting of rights to foreign terrorists behave exactly as the late James Burnham predicted. They are assuring future setbacks and losses. According to Burnham, "what Americans call 'liberalism' is the ideology of Western suicide."
The short argument here is a simple one. In his book, "Suicide of the West," Burnham wrote: "Liberalism permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution." It offers arguments that weaken our resolve and distract us from the task at hand; namely, the task of defeating the enemy.
Senator Schumer's brand of politics, which has indirectly served the agenda of Communist organizations like the National Lawyers Guild, is part of an argument that tends to dissolve the West and its institutions, or at least render them indefensible. But far worse than Schumer, we find a kind of politician in America who knows all the anti-American pitches and loves to throw them. Former President Bill Clinton gave a speech at Georgetown University on Nov. 7 that turned more than a few heads. "Here in the United States," said Clinton, "we were founded as a nation that practiced slavery, and slaves quite frequently were killed even though they were innocent."
Imagine if former President Herbert Hoover had made this statement two months after Pearl Harbor? In almost any other period of this country's history Clinton's statement would have thoroughly discredited him. But now we are liberal and easygoing. We are ready to see the other side's point. In fact, this is put forward as our ticket to peace on earth. If we can understand our own faults (as if we anything to do with things that happened hundreds of years ago) we are then fortified in an effort to buy off our enemies with money and technology, exactly as Clinton did with the Chinese.
Clinton further lectured the Georgetown students: "This country once looked the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human. And we are still paying a price today."
Thousands of innocent Americans were slaughtered by foreign terrorists, yet former President Clinton throws the past mistreatment of native Americans in our faces. Clinton's notion that we are "still paying the price" suggests, however indirectly, that the terrorists are the spokesmen for some kind of just retribution. In other words, the terrorists have a point or two.
Clinton told the Georgetown students that they were caught in a tremendous struggle "for the soul of the 21st century and the world." What of this terrorist threat? It is an old problem, he said. "In the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it and proceeded to killed very woman and child who was a Muslim on the Temple Mount."
Whatever Clinton meant by this statement, however it is to be explained in context, there is something evil in it; something profoundly out-of-place. Did Clinton secretly enjoy seeing the World Trade Center collapse?
Instead of reciting Muslim atrocities, Clinton recited Christian atrocities. Instead of calling for vigilance and increased patriotism, he mocked the patriotic impulse as attaching to something sinister and evil. And then, for plausible deniability, he later said he was merely attempting to show how people in the rest of the world saw the U.S.
"There are a lot of people that see the world differently than we do," Clinton explained. "...we have to be smart enough to get rid of our arrogant self-righteousness so that we don't claim for ourselves things we deny for others."
It is a curious formulation. In fact, it is Marxist. In order to save ourselves, he says, we must recognize the fact that we are denying prosperity to the Third World's huddled masses. We are rich and they are poor, and this is class oppression. Clinton said that peace was our only choice.
As Herbert Romerstein pointed out, "Recent [peace] demonstrations in New York were organized by the Committees of Correspondence. This organization was formed from a faction of the Communist Party that split after the fall of the Soviet Union...."
It is no accident that virtually all the world's terrorist organizations were created and trained in association with the world's communist dictatorships. And it is no wonder that the left shows sympathy for these people.
It is important for us to understand the linkages between foreign Communists, terrorists and domestic malcontents.
