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Will Zuzak; DEMANUK.018 = EIR on Demjanjuk case (25Kb); 1995-08-10
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Dear UKES and s.c.u netters:
My thanks to Stefan Lemieszewski for forwarding the
following information on the continuing saga of the Demjanjuk fiasco.
The following is the text of an article that appeared in June 30, 1995
issue of the Executive Intelligence Review magazine, as part of a feature
entitled "The Long Overdue Cleanup of the Justice Department".
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The Demjanjuk Case
DOJ commits fraud upon the court
and attempted murder by decree
by Jeffrey Steinberg
--------------------------------
On Nov. 17, 1993, a 17-year ordeal ended for John
Demjanjuk. The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in
Cincinnati, Ohio issued an 83-page decision overturning
his denaturalization, and extradition and deportation
to Israel on the grounds that the U.S. Justice Department's
Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the so-called
``Nazi-hunting'' unit, had committed prosecutorial
misconduct and fraud upon the court. The Sixth Circuit
ruling blasted the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith
(ADL) by name for political interference in the
functioning of the Department of Justice.
The Ukrainian-American retired autoworker from
Cleveland, Ohio and his entire family were drawn for 17
years into a pitched battle against the combined forces of
the OSI, the ADL, and the majority of the American mass
media.
Had Demjanjuk, his family, and friends not
persevered, and had the Israeli Supreme Court and the U.S.
Appeals Court for the Sixth Circuit not acted forcefully
in the name of justice, Demjanjuk would have been hung in
Israel, a country he had never previously visited, for
crimes he had never committed. He would have gone down in
infamy as the Nazi mass-murderer ``Ivan the Terrible,'' of
the Treblinka, Poland concentration camp.
The Demjanjuk case is an appropriate starting point
for this probe of systemic corruption inside the U.S.
Department of Justice, particularly within the permanent
bureaucracy. Over the 17-year period between the initial
allegations against Demjanjuk and his eventual
exoneration, there have been five U.S. Presidents and
eight U.S. Attorneys General. The Justice Department's
OSI, which prosecuted Demjanjuk and orchestrated his
extradition to Israel, did not yet even exist when the
accusations against Demjanjuk were first published in a
Soviet propaganda organ. Yet, most of the key players in
the Justice Department permanent bureaucracy who would
carry out the Demjanjuk travesty--including Deputy
Assistant Attorney General Mark Richard and Chief of the
Office of International Affairs Michael Abbell--were
already long established inside the department, and many
of them remain in place to this day.
This is a story of ``continuity of corruption'' and
``government by arrogance and brutality,'' which began
before Bill Clinton was elected to his first term as
governor of Arkansas. It is also a story that is still
awaiting its final chapter. The OSI still exists,
continuing its corrupt collusion with the ADL, and it is
still targeting some of America's most vulnerable
citizens.
- Kissinger launches the `Nazi hunt' -
Although the OSI was established on March 28, 1979 by
then-Attorney General Griffin Bell, the impetus for the
Nazi-hunt came in the early 1970s from Henry Kissinger. In
1971, Kissinger, Richard Nixon's national security
adviser, dispatched a team of lawyers to Moscow to
establish liaison with the Office of the Soviet Procurator
General. Among the Kissinger representatives in the early
Moscow talks was Walter Rockler, one of Kissinger's
personal attorneys, and the man who would be appointed the
first director of the OSI, eight years later.
Kissinger's efforts were coordinated with both the
ADL apparatus and the Communist Party U.S.A. (and came at
the same time that the FBI, under Operation Cointelpro,
was colluding with the Communist Party leadership in
soliciting the murder of Lyndon LaRouche--see article,
p.|20). When ADL-backed Elizabeth Holtzman (D-N.Y.) was
elected to the U.S. Congress in November 1972, her first
move was to put forward a list of 59 alleged Nazi war
criminals living in the United States. The list was
provided by Dr. Otto Karbach, president of the World
Jewish Congress (WJC), but had been prepared by Charles
Allen, a Communist Party U.S.A. propagandist who had been
spewing out Soviet hate literature about ``a Nazi takeover
of America,'' and the building of ``secret concentration
camps'' since the 1950s. Allen's source on the ``Nazis in
America''? Julius Mader, a propagandist for the the East
German State Security Service (the Stasi) and KGB writer
Ernst Henry.
Two weeks after Richard Nixon's resignation,
Kissinger, by now both the secretary of state and national
security adviser to Gerald Ford, obtained permission from
the President to open up formal collaboration with the
Soviet Procurator to prosecute Nazi war criminals living
in America.
The agreement that Kissinger wrangled out of
President Ford set a dangerous precedent. For the first
time ever, Soviet ``evidence'' would be used by the
Department of Justice and admitted into American courts,
with no questions asked. Kissinger promptly passed on the
WJC's list of 59 names to Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei
Gromyko, and soon, the DOJ and its Immigration and
Naturalization Service (INS) were being flooded with
Soviet ``documentation'' of the ``Nazi backgrounds'' of
the targets.
In October 1975, the Soviets provided U.S. Senators
Jacob Javits (R-N.Y.) and Abraham Ribicoff (D-Conn.) with
a list of 70 Ukrainians allegedly guilty of war crimes.
Ribicoff was, at the time, an honorary vice chairman of
the ADL, and Javits was a longtime ADL official. The list
was conduited to the senators by Michael Hanusiak, editor
of the English-language {Ukrainian Daily News} and a
well-known Soviet propagandist who had been recruited by
the Russians in 1969. John Demjanjuk's name was included
on the Hanusiak list.
Within a month of the issue of the Javits-Ribicoff
Made-in-Moscow target list, the INS was in contact with
``Jewish organizations'' in the Cleveland area, as well as
in Israel, seeking evidence and potential witnesses
against Demjanjuk. In Israel, the government took out
advertisements in newspapers soliciting information about
Demjanjuk and a second accused war criminal, Fedor
Fedorenko. At this point, Demjanjuk was being accused of
having worked at the Nazi concentration camp at
Sobibor--not at Treblinka.
On Aug. 26, 1976, the Soviet government turned up the
heat, publishing an article in a Ukrainian weekly magazine
referencing an identity card from the Trawniki SS training
camp, in the name Demjanjuk. The article claimed that
testimony had been given by a former guard at Sobibor
identifying Demjanjuk; however, the accuser had been tried,
convicted, and executed for war crimes back in the 1950s,
so Demjanjuk would have no opportunity to confront the
man. Later, the so-called ID card would be exposed as
a Stasi forgery.
Despite the flimsy nature of the charges against him,
Demjanjuk was ordered to appear at the INS office in
Cleveland on Oct. 19, 1976 to be interrogated by U.S.
Attorneys.
- A bizarre shift -
On Aug. 25, 1977, in the midst of a propaganda
barrage against so-called ``Nazis in America,'' fueled by
{New York Times} scribbler Howard Blum's recently released
book on the subject, Demjanjuk was formally charged by the
U.S. government with lying on his immigration application,
by failing to report his alleged Nazi concentration camp
duties. The charges against Demjanjuk did not tie him to
the camp at Sobibor. He was suddenly accused of being
``Ivan the Terrible,'' the Nazi concentration camp
motorman at Treblinka charged with the extermination of
800,000 prisoners, mostly Jews. In response to the
advertisements published in the Israeli newspapers,
several Treblinka survivors had come forward claiming, 35
years later, that they recognized Demjanjuk from his
postwar photograph as ``Ivan.''
The decision to proceed with the Demjanjuk case was
pure politics. The prospect of bagging a ``big fish'' like
Ivan the Terrible was too much for the ADL and its corrupt
henchmen inside the Justice Department to resist. The
flimsiness of the evidence became even more obvious in May
1978, when the DOJ's case against Fedor Fedorenko fell
apart because the Israeli ``victim-witnesses'' failed to
provide clear testimony. Later in the year, the Special
Litigation Unit (SLU), the precursor to OSI which was
responsible for the prosecution of the ``Nazi'' cases,
lost another high-visibility denaturalization case against
Frank Walus on the same grounds.
Following the Fedorenko defeat, panic set in among
the DOJ Nazi-hunters. A July 28, 1978 memo from SLU
attorney Donald Couvillon to INS General Counsel David
Crosland warned that a repeat of the Fedorenko fiasco
could bring an end to the entire Nazi-hunting effort. He added that
the SLU-INS needed a ``big win'' to revive the credibility
of the eyewitnesses. A few weeks later, SLU head Martin
Mendelsohn traveled to Israel to solicit the help of
Israeli authorities in going ahead with the Demjanjuk
case. After his return, he wrote a memo to Crosland
calling the Demjanjuk prosecution ``critical.''
- Innocent beyond a doubt -
On Oct. 13, 1978, the SLU received copies of 19
interrogations of 11 Soviet citizens that proved in no
uncertain terms that Demjanjuk was not ``Ivan.'' The
documents, sent by the Soviet government, had been
originally requested for use in the Fedorenko case. For
that reason, they came to be known as the ``Fedorenko
protocols.'' Included were interviews with two Treblinka
guards, Pavel Leleko and Nicholay Malagon, who were
interrogated by the Soviets shortly after World War II.
They provided detailed accounts of the internal workings
of Treblinka and stated unequivocally that, during the
1942-43 period when the U.S. government claimed Demjanjuk
was ``Ivan the Terrible,'' there were only two motormen at
Treblinka, ``Marchenko and Nicholay.''
In 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union,
investigators for Demjanjuk would get their hands on other
Soviet documents that were never transmitted to the United
States, including the confession of Nicholay Shalayev, who
admitted that he had been one of the two motormen at
Treblinka. Shalayev identified Ivan Marchenko as the
second motorman. The file included photographs and
biographical data on Marchenko making it absolutely clear
that he was not John Demjanjuk.
Even without the benefit of the complete Soviet file,
however, the ``Fedorenko protocols'' already constituted
sufficient evidence to exonerate Demjanjuk--nearly three
years before Demjanjuk's first denaturalization hearing.
It gets worse. On Aug. 31, 1979, the Justice
Department received another series of documents, these
from the Polish Main Commission, the Polish government's
war archive, including a list of all the known
concentration camp guards at Treblinka. Demjanjuk's name
did not appear on the list--but the name ``Ivan
Marchenko'' did. In short, by no later than August 1979,
the DOJ had incontrovertible proof that Demjanjuk was the
wrong man.
Despite this, plans accelerated to bring Demjanjuk to
trial. In March 1979, the SLU had been upgraded to the
Office of Special Investigations, commanding a $2.3
million startup budget and a staff of 50. By this date,
the original World Jewish Congress-laundered KGB list of
alleged ``Nazis in America'' had swelled to over 200
names. The OSI was placed in the Criminal Division chain
of command directly under Mark Richard, the Deputy
Assistant Attorney General in charge of international
liaison and national security. OSI would also forge close
working relations with another senior DOJ careerist,
Michael Abbell. By 1980, Abbell was in the Office of
International Affairs, responsible for extradition
matters.
A lot was riding on the Demjanjuk case. But not
everyone inside the OSI was anxious to jump on board. On
Feb. 28, 1980, George Parker, an OSI attorney assigned to
the Demjanjuk case, wrote a memo to OSI director Alan
Ryan, headlined ``Demjanjuk: A Reappraisal.'' The memo
raised ``ethical'' and ``evidentiary'' concerns about the
Demjanjuk case. Parker had read the case file, and was
disturbed that there were glaring contradictions between
the information contained in the original allegations
about Demjanjuk being a guard at Sobibor and the later
charges that Demjanjuk had been ``Ivan'' of Treblinka.
Parker pointed out that the Soviet-produced ID card was
``dubious'' at best, and that the investigation of both
the Sobibor and Treblinka charges was ``fraught with
problems.'' He concluded: ``We have little admissable
evidence that defendant was at Sobibor, yet there are
serious doubts as to whether he was at Treblinka.''
Parker followed up with a meeting in March 1980 with
Ryan, Walter Rockler, and Norman Moscowitz to discuss his
reservations about proceeding with the Demjanjuk
prosecution. When he got no satisfactory response from the
OSI hierarchy, he left the OSI altogether.
All of this did little good for Demjanjuk. It would
be years before his attorneys would pry loose any
information about the internal turmoil at OSI, or the
``Fedorenko protocols,'' or the Polish Main Commission
files.
The wheels of injustice rolled forward. On Aug. 11,
1980, OSI head Ryan wrote to Abbell informing him that the
OSI would seek to extradite alleged war criminals to their
country of origin to stand criminal trial. This was the
first formal move by the OSI to have their targets booted
out of the country. A year later, on July 10, 1981, OSI
attorney Bruce Einhorn, an ADL official from Los Angeles,
wrote to the new OSI boss, Neal Sher, urging the
extradition of OSI targets to Israel--a country that did
not even exist at the time the alleged war crimes took
Place. Five months later, Sher traveled to Israel to meet
with National Police officials and arrange for Israel to
``request'' the extradition of Demjanjuk to stand
trial for war crimes.
In February-March 1981, Demjanjuk had been tried in
the District Court in Cleveland before Judge Battisti. It
was ostensibly a civil proceeding dealing with his
naturalization status. In fact, it was life or death for
Demjanjuk, who was found guilty of lying on his
immigration application and on his naturalization papers.
Judge Battisti's ruling included gratuitous findings that
the Trawniki ID card was authentic (even though the
Soviets had only provided a copy of the document), and
that all of the witnesses who had placed Demjanjuk at
Treblinka through ``photo lineup'' identification were
credible. The Sixth Circuit initially upheld the lower
court's ruling, despite protests from Demjanjuk's
attorneys that they had been denied access to exculpatory
evidence. On Oct. 26, 1983, Demjanjuk's attorneys filed
amended papers charging that the government had committed
``fraud upon the court.'' How right they were!
Following the Sixth Circuit's initial findings, the
U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider the case.
On Nov. 18, 1983, the U.S. Attorney in Cleveland
filed an extradition request for Demjanjuk on behalf
of the Israeli government.
On May 23, 1984, an Immigration Court judge ruled
that Demjanjuk was deportable.
On Feb. 27, 1986, John Demjanjuk was extradited to
Israel to stand trial as ``Ivan the Terrible.'' It was
slated to be the biggest show trial in Israel since the
prosecution of {genuine} Nazi mass murderer Adolf
Eichmann in the early 1960s. A whole new generation of
Israelis was to be educated about the Holocaust--and
Demjanjuk was to be the human sacrifice.
The Demjanjuk trial began on Feb. 16, 1987 and
continued until Feb. 18, 1988. The entire proceeding was
broadcast on Israeli national television.
On April 18, 1988, Demjanjuk was found guilty of
being ``Ivan the Terrible.'' The judge took ten hours to
read the verdict.
One week later, on April 25, Demjanjuk was sentenced
to death by hanging. It was the second time in Israel's
history that the death penalty had been invoked. The last
incident was in 1962: Adolf Eichmann.
- Fighting for innocence--and winning -
As the Demjanjuk nightmare proceeded, Demjanjuk's
son-in-law Ed Nishnic was drawn into the fray, eventually
giving up his job and working round-the-clock, with other
family members and friends, to prove his father-in-law's
innocence. Beginning in 1986, Nishnic received a series of
anonymous packages of documents, all internal OSI memos
showing that the office was withholding exculpatory
evidence from the Demjanjuk defense team, detailing secret
collusion between the U.S. and Israeli prosecutors, and
spelling out a coverup of that collusion.
Nishnic took advantage of the road-map those
documents afforded him, filing a lawsuit under the
Freedom of Information Act, and, finally, in September
1987, U.S. District Court Judge for the District of
Columbia Oberdorfer ordered the OSI to release copies of
the ``Fedorenko protocols'' to Nishnic. Pursuing other
leads, he eventually won the backing of Rep. James
Traficant (D-Ohio).
In 1990, as the Demjanjuk case was being taken up on
appeal by the Israeli Supreme Court, Nishnic, along with
the Israeli attorney defending his father-in-law, traveled
to Ukraine in pursuit of fresh evidence. Despite desperate
efforts by the Israeli prosecutor and some KGB elements to
block access to the crucial Soviet files, Nishnic did
eventually obtain some evidence about the existence of
Ivan Marchenko. It was enough of a wedge to prompt the
Israeli Supreme Court to order prosecutor Michael Shaked
to turn over the files {he} had squirreled away from the
KGB. They included the Nicholay Shalayev debriefing that
provided the identity of the real ``Ivan the Terrible of
Treblinka.''
During arguments before the Israeli Supreme Court on
Dec. 18, 1991, Demjanjuk's attorney Yoram Sheftel
presented testimony from 21 Treblinka guards who
identified Ivan Marchenko as ``Ivan.'' He told the court:
``You have a complete frameup. The documents speak for
themselves.''
The perseverence of Demjanjuk's family and friends
scored another victory in early 1992. The Demjanjuk
revelations at the Israeli Supreme Court had reverberated
back to the United States. The {New York Times} published
accounts of the ``new revelations,'' suggesting
Demjanjuk's innocence (among the major news publications
in the United States, for years, only {EIR} had been
regularly covering the Demjanjuk case from the standpoint
of exposing the systemic OSI and ADL corruption). In
response to that publicity, the Chief Judge of the Sixth
Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Judge Gilbert
Merritt, ordered his clerk to write a letter to Robert
Mueller, the head of the Criminal Division, requesting all
new evidence obtained by the DOJ regarding the Demjanjuk case.
The DOJ never even acknowledged receipt of the clerk's
letter.
On June 3, 1992, after a second letter from Green to Mueller
went unanswered, the Sixth Circuit announced that
it was inviting Demjanjuk's lawyers to request a review of
the {habeas corpus} petition that authorized Demjanjuk's
extradition to Israel. After a hearing in early August,
the three-judge Sixth Circuit panel headed by Judge
Merritt announced the appointment of a Special Master,
Judge Thomas Wiseman, to determine whether OSI and other
government attorneys had committed ``fraud upon the
court.''
In June 1993, after extensive depositions of
government attorneys and other witnesses, Judge Wiseman
completed his investigation and submitted a report to the
Sixth Circuit panel. Although the report ultimately
concluded that there was no evidence of governmental fraud
upon the court, the report amounted to a damning
indictment of the OSI's conduct, and included important
evidence of ADL political interference.
From there, things moved very quickly. On July 29,
1993, the Israeli Supreme Court, after an agonizing delay
of over one year, issued a 500-page decision overturning
the conviction of Demjanjuk and finding that, under the
terms of the U.S.-Israeli extradition treaty, Demjanjuk
could not be retried--as some ADL assets in Israel and the
United States had argued--on any other charges.
On Aug. 3, 1993, the Sixth Circuit lifted the ban on
Demjanjuk's return to the United States, providing him
with temporary permission to come home, pending a hearing
on the Special Master's findings scheduled for Sept. 3,
1993.
- Justice, at last -
On Nov. 17, 1993, the Sixth Circuit issued its
ruling, finding that ``the OSI attorneys acted with
reckless disregard for the truth and for the government's
obligation to take no steps that prevent an adversary from
presenting his case fully and fairly. This was fraud on
the court in the circumstances of this case where, by
recklessly assuming Demjanjuk's guilt, they failed to
observe their obligation to produce exculpatory materials
requested by Demjanjuk....
``For the reasons set out herein we vacate the
judgment of the district court and the judgment of this
court in the extradition proceedings on the ground that
the judgments were wrongly procured as a result of
prosecutorial misconduct that constituted fraud on the
court.''
The Sixth Circuit ruling went to great lengths to
praise the actions of the Israeli prosecutor and the
Israeli Supreme Court, juxtaposing their honorable
behavior with that of the OSI and groups like the ADL.
``The `win at any cost' attitude displayed by [OSI]
contrasts sharply with the attitude and actions of the
Israeli prosecutors, who were under domestic political
pressure themselves. But for the actions of the Israeli
prosecutors, the death sentence against Demjanjuk probably
would have been carried out by now. He would have been
executed on a charge for which he has now been
acquitted.''
The Sixth Circuit ruling singled out ex-OSI chief
Alan Ryan's 1986 ``lecture tour'' of Israel, sponsored by
the ADL, as a particularly egregious instance of the ``win at
any cost'' attitude. ``It is obvious from the record that
the prevailing mindset at OSI was that the office must try
to please and maintain very close relationships with
various interest groups because their continued existence
depended upon it.''
But the court's action was targeted at a concert of
forces, both inside and outside the Department of Justice.
Between the Special Master's report and the final ruling
of the Sixth Circuit (which the U.S. Supreme Court refused
to revisit), scores of DOJ bureaucrats were identified as
complicit in the ``fraud''--from Mark Richard, the senior
DOJ manager who oversaw the office, to every director of
OSI from the day it opened its doors up to the day of the
ruling, to Criminal Division chief Robert Mueller, whose
arrogance sparked the Circuit Court's review of the case
in the first place.
==========================================
John Sigerson
Web Site Administrator
LaRouche Exploratory Committee
[email protected]
http://www.clark.net/larouche/welcome.html
==========================================
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Will Zuzak; DEMANUK.018 = EIR on Demjanjuk case (25Kb); 1995-08-10
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