Dave Schechter
CNN Senior National Editor
What would you do about a small number of men, the youngest in their 80s and generally not in the greatest of health, who immigrated to the United States after World War II and have been living working-class American lives for decades. They have wives, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They also stand accused of participating in the extermination of 6 million Jews and countless others in Nazi concentration camps.
While exact numbers are hard to come by, an estimated 90,000 to 125,000 Holocaust survivors live in the United States, the youngest in their late 60s and early 70s. They remember grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles and siblings beaten or shot to death, starved in forced labor camps or gassed and their bodies burned in the crematoria of death camps whose names remain infamous.
Some forgive; many don’t. They want justice, no matter how many years have passed.
What do you do about these old men, let nature take its course or find them, prosecute them and deport them?
Brian Todd
CNN Correspondent
Editor’s Note: This story is part of newly-released documents from the Office of Special Investigations, a unit of the Justice Department created in the 70’s to track down war criminals, prosecute them and get them extradited.
A chilling account of a Nazi police commander who thought he’d escaped to America free and clear after committing atrocities in eastern Europe during World War II. For decades, he lived in obscurity in New England until a dogged American prosecutor tracked him down. CNN’s Brian Todd takes a look at what one prosecutor calls the “ultimate cold case.”
Editor’s Note: On rare occasions, CNN has embargoed stories at the request of Government and law enforcement agencies, and other media organizations in the past. CNN has exchanged information with Governments, Law Enforcement Agencies and Intelligence Services.
James Janega
Chicago Tribune
As the federal probe into Gov. Rod Blagojevich intensified in recent weeks, editors and reporters at the Chicago Tribune balanced a competitive story with a rare request from U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald’s office: To hold off on what they uncovered until a key phase in the investigation could be carried out.
Except in unusual circumstances, newspapers rarely comply with such requests because journalists typically try to steer clear of doing anything that can be seen as working with the governmental agencies they cover.
“It’s very important for news organizations to remain independent from law enforcement. Independence is the key to journalistic integrity. When you enter into agreements or partnerships, you find your independence compromised,” said Kelly McBride, media ethicist at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. “If we are too cozy with law enforcement, we will have no credibility when we question law enforcement, in the eyes of the public.”
Since October, the Tribune has broken several stories on the Blagojevich probe, but in some cases withheld information because of the government’s request.
Five former security guards from Blackwater Worldwide have been indicted on charges of voluntary manslaughter, attempt to commit manslaughter, and weapons violations, Justice Department officials announced Monday.
The 35-count indictment charges each of the former guards with 14 counts of manslaughter, 20 counts of attempted manslaughter, and one count of using a firearm in the commission of a violent crime.
If convicted, the defendants would face a maximum of 10 years in prison for each manslaughter count, seven years in prison for each count of attempted manslaughter, and a 30-year mandatory minimum sentence for the firearms charge.
A sixth former security guard — Jeremy P. Ridgeway of California, 35 — has pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and attempt to commit manslaughter.
The charges stem from a September 16, 2007, shooting incident in a Baghdad square in which 17 Iraqis were killed, Justice Department officials announced Monday.
Five former security guards from Blackwater Worldwide turned themselves in to federal authorities Monday in Salt Lake City, Utah, over charges stemming from the 2007 shootings in Baghdad that killed 17 Iraqis.
The Justice Department on Monday plans to charge the former guards with manslaughter and a weapons charge of using a machine gun while committing a crime of violence, a source with knowledge of the investigation said.
A sixth Blackwater guard tied to the incident has reached a plea deal with the government, a source said.
The Justice Department ordered the guards to surrender by Monday or face arrest. One of the guards is from Utah.
The sources said that defense attorneys decided to have all of them surrender in one location rather than in their home states or in Washington, where the federal grand jury handed up the charges last week.
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Program Note: See CNN Senior Analyst Jeffrey Toobin’s analysis of President Bush’s pardon today of more than a dozen convicts on AC360 tonight at 10pm.
Terry Frieden
CNN Justice Department Producer
The President has such total absolute power in granting clemency that he does not even have to receive a request for a pardon or commutation to grant one.
Most clemency applications are made to the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney where an elaborate and detailed process is followed. After checks which include consultation with the FBI and prosecutors and judges and corrections officials, a recommendation for granting or denying clemency eventually goes to the Deputy Attorney General who may change it, or send it back, or forward it to the White House General Counsel. And finally it goes to the President.
That’s the normal procedure. That’s how most pardons and commutations are screened and ultimately approved. But none of the reasons for granting a pardon or commutation are ever made public, so we don’t know WHY a President and his administration officials approve the applications. We do know most applications received are ultimately rejected because the Justice Department annually lists the number of petitions received, granted, and denied.
And every time a list of pardons comes out, once or twice or three times a year, it prompts puzzled looks, because so many of the crimes seem to be garden variety drug or fraud cases, and it remains a mystery what exactly prompts Presidential intervention.
A pardon is a forgiveness for the commission of a federal crime. It cannot be filed until five years after an individual has finished serving his sentence and parole, or until five years after a conviction if there was no sentence. A commutation is a shortened sentenced for someone serving time. It does not forgive the crime, or wipe it off the books, but simply shortens or immediately ends the prison sentence.
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Program Note: See CNN Senior Analyst Jeffrey Toobin’s analysis of President Bush’s pardon today of more than a dozen convicts on AC360 tonight at 10pm.
Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
The Justice department is getting flooded with a new wave of requests for pardons and commutations from convicted felons hoping for clemency from President Bush before he leaves office. A number of politically connected Washington lawyers have been retained to push the cases, but there are few signs that Bush will be open to anything resembling the last minute “pardon party” that marked President Clinton’s final days in office.
Bush has taken a stingy stand on pardons, granting fewer of them—just 157, and none of them high profile—than any president in modern history. He has directed all hopefuls to submit applications to the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, which evaluates all requests using strict, longstanding guidelines, including a requirement that applicants have finished serving their sentences and expressed remorse. The office received a record 555 pardon requests during the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 and an additional 103 in the past month.
Washington superlawyer Ted Olson, who served as solicitor general during Bush’s first term, has submitted a pardon request on behalf of former junk-bond king Michael Milken, who is seeking a pardon for his 1990 securities-fraud conviction. Other commutation applicants include Marion Jones, the Olympic sprinter who was convicted of lying about steroid use, and John Walker Lindh, the so-called “American Taliban,” now serving 20 years for providing material support to a terrorist organization.
The 2003 Justice Department memo released Tuesday night, asserting an overarching, almost unchecked view of the president’s wartime power, needs to be seen in the context of the Administration’s efforts to justify the rough tactics it had used on al Qaeda prisoners for the first 1-1/2 years in the war on terror.
As I discuss in my new book, “Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice,” John Yoo — the author of the memo released this week on the treatment of prisoners and of a still-classified opinion on the NSA wiretapping program — was the White House’s point man in the Justice Department and was responsible for writing almost all the key opinions asserting presidential authority.
Despite his growing prominence in the early years of the war on terror, Yoo wasn’t particularly well-liked at the Justice Department. His critics there saw him as a brilliant but sometimes sloppy lawyer who was too often willing to do the bidding of the White House and the Pentagon.
Justice Department lawyers complained that even the Attorney General wasn’t aware at times what opinions Yoo was giving the White House.
“It will take 50 years,” a Justice Department official who was critical of Yoo’s work told me for my book, “to undo the damage that he did to the place.”
With many of the legal opinions from the early years of the war on terror still classified, it may take that long just to understand the tactics and legal tenets asserted by the Bush Administration.
- Eric Lichtblau, author and reporter for The New York Times
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