SPOTLIGHT EMAIL NEWSLETTER #31 Please visit the NEW and controverial LIBERTY LIBRARY BOOKSTORE ONLINE! The store now has the full Liberty Library catalog and a shopping cart system! http://www.spotlight.org/store/commerce.cgi? IN THIS ISSUE: McCain’s Ties With Vietnam Robert Rubin: Public Servant? Constitution Under Attack Constitution Under Attack The case of Bradford Metcalf, sentenced to virtually life in prison for merely owning guns, shows that for many, constitutional protections no longer have meaning in a court of law. Exclusive to The SPOTLIGHT By Howard Carson The Bill of Rights has become a collection of meaningless words in the hands of federal judges and prosecutors. A case in point: Bradford Metcalf. Metcalf was indicted, tried and convicted for a “conspiracy,” which was created solely in the mind of federal prosecutor, Lloyd K. Meyer. Meyer had political ambitions and needed a “big case” to make a name for himself. So, he created one. One of the elements of this prosecutor-created conspiracy was “possession of machine-guns.” But Metcalf had no machine-guns and Meyer knew it. Prior to the trial, Meyer furnished Metcalf with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) regulations concerning machine-guns, which plainly stated that the Browning .50 caliber and .30 caliber “machine-guns” in his possession without the right sideplates are not “machine-guns.” This didn’t stop Meyer. In his closing argument to the jury, Meyer said Metcalf had the right sideplates buried on his property. But no evidence was introduced during the trial to show that Metcalf had the sideplates in his possession. The jury dutifully convicted Metcalf of all the charges on the indictment. Judge Richard Alan Enslen of the Western District of Michigan then sentenced Metcalf to 40 years in federal prison. Metcalf’s case illustrates what has happened to our Bill of Rights, and the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution, in the hands of today’s federal judges and prosecutors. The rights our ancestors struggled to secure for us have simply ceased to exist. A comparison of the Bill of Rights with what actually happened to Metcalf amply illustrates what instruments of oppression our federal courts have be come. FIRST AMENDMENT: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Govern ment for a redress of grievances. The first count of the Metcalf indictment charged a “conspiracy.” A federal conspiracy charge consists of an agreement to commit an illegal act with an act performed. The agreement to commit the illegal act—the object of the conspiracy—is whatever the prosecutor says it is when he drafts the indictment. Metcalf and his two co-defendants, Randy Graham and Ken Carter, had a few telephone conversations about the sorry state of the federal government in general and the federal judiciary in particular. Those telephone conversations were secretly wire-tapped and recorded by the government. SECOND AMENDMENT: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. Nearly all federal and state courts have held that this right is a “collective right” and does not apply to individuals. The theory is patently wrong. According to Don B. Kates Jr., writing in the Michigan Law Review in 1983, the word “people” in the First and Fourth Amendments did not change meaning in the Second Amendment. This past April, a federal district judge in Texas ruled that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to own a gun in United States v. Emerson. This case is in Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. FOURTH AMENDMENT: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and ef fects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. Metcalf’s problems started when BATF agents raided his trailer, trashed it and confiscated military-issue fire arms that were legally in his possession. FIFTH AMENDMENT: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; not shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. Meyer wrote the Metcalf indictment before he submitted it to the grand jury for the usual rubber-stamp approval. The original reason for a grand jury investigation and grand jury secrecy was to keep governmental attorneys out of the criminal investigation and out of the grand jury room. Metcalf, along with Graham, submitted 15 pre-trial motions that pointed out the defect in their case and the indictment. They received a detailed six-page denial of all their motions on Sept. 23, 1998, signed by Judge Enslen. More than a month later, in open court, Judge Enslen told Metcalf he hadn’t read the indictment and didn’t even know what Metcalf was charged with. SIXTH AMENDMENT: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor; and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense. Judge Enslen refused to allow Metcalf an expert witness to testify as to the legality of his weapons. His reason: “Because you didn’t have a lawyer.” Metcalf fought his case pro se because he didn’t trust anyone who was part of the system to fight the system. Robert Rubin - Public Servant? Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin reaped the benefits of “civil service,” but when he was in office, it wasn’t the public he was serving. By Martin Mann Exclusive to The SPOTLIGHT In April 1998, Sanford Weill, the multi billionaire corporate raider and chairman of the Travelers Group, the largest U.S. financial-services Conglomerate, telephoned Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to ask for an urgent meeting. “Why? Do you want to buy the government?” Rubin joshed. “No,” quipped Weill. “Just the law.” In reality, what Weill wanted was not to introduce a new law but to “reform” an old one: the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, separating commercial banks from insurance and brokerage firms. But the telephone exchange between Rubin and Weill, now part of certified Wall Street lore, makes a “telling anecdote,” said Dr. Dexter Weston, a lecturer in business jurisprudence at a New York university. “The 1990s [when Rubin served as the Clinton administration’s economic czar] will be recalled by historians as the era when laws were bought and sold by Wall Street lobbyists; when Congress served, not the national interest, but the feverish financial markets,” Weston noted. Rubin has a “long and dirty rap sheet,” added Holt Cogswell, a veteran bond trader in New York City. “It goes back to the 1980s, to the smash-and-grab days of [former junk bond king] Mike Milken.” Rubin, then amassing his first $100 million as the co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, the voracious Wall Street investment bank, became entangled in the mammoth Milken scandal. “Milken pleaded guilty to a string of felony frauds. That’s well-known,” Cogswell related. “What is less well-known is that so did Robert Freeman, who served as Rubin’s deputy and right-hand man at Goldman Sachs.” The consensus on Wall Street is that “Freeman took the fall for Rubin,” Cogswell said. At other times, Rubin escaped criminal investigation and potential indictment by buying his way out of legal trouble. As boss of Goldman Sachs, Rubin was the personal banker of Robert Maxwell, the international con man, Israeli agent and thieving media mogul whose corporate empire—energized by embezzlement and excess—was based in Britain. When Maxwell’s billion-dollar pyramid of fraud and deceit collapsed with his mysterious death at sea in 1991, Britain’s Serious Fraud Squad opened a criminal investigation of Rubin’s links to the financial scandal. But the inquiry was cut short when Rubin agreed to pay $250 million—of Goldman Sachs’ money—in restitution to a group of elderly British pensioners mercilessly mulcted by Maxwell. Between 1993 and 1994, Goldman Sachs made fat profits underwriting some $5 billion in Mexican debt issues. When the deal was threatened by the collapse of the Mexican economy, Rubin helped launch an (initially) illegal $50 billion bailout falsely represented as the “financial rescue of our troubled southern neighbor.” In fact, that bailout was set up entirely to save the profits of Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Chase Manhattan and their drug dealing Mexican bankers,” Cogswell said. “It was not a ‘rescue,’ but a scam from beginning to end.” In a similar vein, the campaign to “reform” the Glass-Steagall Act took a crooked turn as soon as Rubin became involved. Weill, as head of the Travelers financial conglomerate, and John Reed, chairman of Citibank, the leading commercial money-center in the United States, had a special interest in promoting this piece of legislative legerdemain. Weill and Reed agreed to unite their corporate empires into the world’s largest financial-services conglomerate, known as Citigroup. But there was a hitch. The Glass-Steagall Act was put on the books to prohibit just such speculative merging of insurance, banking and stock-market operations under a single corporate umbrella. Prodded by Weill, Reed and other Wall Street power brokers, Rubin drafted “reform” legislation effectively canceling Glass-Steagall and pushed it through Congress. Insurance companies can now own banks. Banking institutions can sell in surance and speculate in the stock market with their depositors’ money. In fact, “they can wheel-and-deal just like the savings and loans outfits did before that system collapsed, sticking taxpayers with losses in the hundreds of billions of dollars,” financial writer Arthur Cimbalom recalled. But the sharpsters on top always come out winners,” he added. “That is Rubin’s motto.” This month, with the merger of Citibank and Travelers now legalized by law, it was announced that Rubin, who quit government in June, will take over as the co-chairman of the new Citigroup conglomerate. “Rubin is getting a huge private payoff from Citigroup for services he rendered them as a powerful public servant,” Cogswell said. “If an almanac of high-level corruption is ever compiled, I’m sure Rubin’s career will be included as a textbook case.” McCain's Ties to Vietnam John McCain, the Re pub lican senator from Arizona and former Navy pilot, has emerged as the leading advocate for normalizing relations with the same government that has repeatedly lied about torturing and killing U.S. soldiers who were captured during the Vietnam War. By Ted Sampley ANOTHER In a Series Sen. John McCain’s high-profile and unrelenting support for a government that brutally tortured and murdered his fellow POWs is causing POW/MIA family members and fellow Vietnam veterans to question the senator and his motivations. They ask what drives McCain, who owes his public life to the tag “former POW,” to work so hard for Hanoi and so diligently to discredit any possibility, in fact the probability, that Hanoi held back live U.S. prisoners of war after the 1973 prisoner release. The POW/MIA families point out that they worked hard during the Vietnam War to secure McCain’s freedom when he was held by the Communists. The families want to know why he is betraying them in their efforts to get answers about their missing loved ones. None of the senators who served on the 1991-92 Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs were as vicious in their attacks on POW/MIA family members, veterans and activists as McCain. During the POW/MIA hearings, Fran ces Zwenig, the $118,000-a-year staff director of the Senate Select Committee, reported to McCain that she was told by the Vietnamese, during a July 1992 meeting with the Vietnamese, that something had to be done about the POW/MIA activists who were opposing lifting the U.S. imposed trade embargo against Vietnam. Not long after, McCain started de manding that the Select Committee investigate the activists, prompting one observer to ask: “Are the Vietnamese now directing the affairs of the Senate Select Committee?” McCain accused the POW/MIA families and activists who openly challenged the U.S. government’s POW/MIA policy of fraud. In his attacks he said: “The people who have done these things are not zealots in a good cause. They are criminals and some of the most craven, most cynical and most despicable human beings to ever run a scam.” McCain took the lead in the Senate and demanded a Justice Department investigation of the activists. The Justice Department investigated and found no reason to charge any of the POW/MIA activists. When Col. Bui Tin, one of McCain’s former interrogators, testified before the Senate Select Committee, McCain did not display that same “pit bull” inclination to attack as he did for the POW/MIA families and activists. Tin, a former senior colonel in the North Vietnamese Army, told the committee that because of his high position in the Communist Party during the war, he had the right to “read all the documents and secret telegrams from the Politburo” pertaining to American prisoners of war. He said not only did the Soviets interrogate some American prisoners of war, but they treated them very badly. During a break in the hearing, McCain warmly embraced Tin as if he were a long lost brother. McCain fought a hard and successful campaign to get the U.S.-imposed trade embargo against Vietnam lifted, despite the opposition of all major veterans organizations, the two POW/MIA family groups and the majority of the Vietnamese Americans in this country. The veterans want to know why McCain, the “conservative” politician, takes such a strong stand for the Vietnamese Communists and against such patriotic groups. McCain was born in the Panama Ca nal Zone on Aug. 29, 1936. His father, Adm. John McCain II, became commander-in-chief of the Pacific forces in 1968 and later ordered the bombing of Hanoi while his son was held there as a prisoner of war. McCain’s grandfather, Adm. John S. McCain Sr., was the commander of aircraft carriers in the Pacific under Adm. William F. Halsey in World War II. McCain’s early years were spent in var ious places on the east and west coasts. He attended Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va., and is a 1958 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. At the Naval Academy, McCain’s grades in electrical engineering were satisfactory, although he had numerous demerits for breaking curfews and infractions. He graduated fifth from the bottom of his class. Despite his low class standing, Mc Cain’s request for training as a Navy pilot was granted. His father’s rank of admiral and family history apparently played a part in the decision. After qualifying as a Navy pilot, McCain was shipped to Vietnam. On his 23rd mission over North Vietnam on Oct. 26, 1967, McCain was shot down by a surface-to-air missile. McCain later recalled that he was flying right over the heart of Hanoi in a dive at about 4,500 feet when a Russian missile the size of a telephone pole came up—the sky was full of them—and “blew the right wing off my Skyhawk dive bomber. It went into an inverted, almost straight-down spin.” “I pulled the ejection handle, and was knocked unconscious by the force of the ejection—the air speed was about 300 knots,” McCain said. “I didn’t realize it at the moment, but I had broken my right leg around the knee, my right arm in three places and my left arm. I regained consciousness just before I landed by parachute in a lake right in the center of Hanoi, one they called the Western Lake. My helmet and my oxygen mask had been blown off. “I hit the water and sank to the bottom . . . I did not feel any pain at the time, and I was able to rise to the surface. I took a breath of air and started sinking again.” After bobbing up and down, McCain said he was eventually pulled from the water by Vietnamese who swam out to get him. He said a mob gathered on shore. He was bayoneted in the foot and his shoulder was smashed with a rifle butt. He was put on a truck and taken to Hanoi’s main prison, McCain said. THE ‘RHINESTONE HERO’ In Congress, McCain’s peers tout him as a great war hero. On occasion, the press categorizes McCain as one of the most tortured prisoners of the Vietnam War. Neither is true. He was never brutally tortured and, by his own admission, he collaborated with the communists. When one totals McCain’s 23 missions over North Vietnam times the number of minutes he was actually over enemy territory (approximately 20 to 35 minutes per mission), McCain’s total time over Vietnam before being shot down was about 10-and-one-half hours. For those 10-and-one-half hours over Vietnam, McCain was awarded two Silver Stars, two Legions of Merit, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, three Bronze Stars, the Vietnamese Legion of Honor and three Purple Hearts averaging over one hero medal per hour. Compare McCain’s 10-and-a-half hours of combat and 13 medals to that of a U.S. infantry private who spent 365 days trudging through South Vietnam’s jungle and mud, facing death on a daily basis. He was lucky to leave Vietnam with a simple good conduct ribbon. Compare McCain’s record as a prisoner of war to that of Army Special Forces Capt. “Rocky” Versace of Norfolk, Va., who was captured by Vietnamese Communists (Viet Cong) on Oct. 29, 1963 in South Vietnam. Versace resisted his captors to the end. Very few, if any, in Congress know about Versace. Versace spent two years chained in a bamboo cage and endured almost daily torture by the Vietnamese Communists. He continuously frustrated his Viet Cong interrogators by refusing to obey demands that he denounce America and accept the communist philosophy of revolution. He told his captors as they were dragging him to an interrogation hut, “I am an officer of the United States Army. You can force me to come here, you can make me sit and listen, but I don’t have to believe a damn word you say.” The Viet Cong decided that day to take no more resistance from Versace. A few days later, on orders of Viet Cong leader Vo Van Kiet, Vietnam’s current prime minister and McCain’s friend, Versace was dragged from his filth-ridden, mosquito-infested bamboo cage for the last time and forced to kneel with his forehead pressed into the jungle mud. Versace was then shot in the back of the head. McCain doesn’t talk about MIAs such as Versace, Sgt. Kenneth Roraback of Fayetteville, N.C., or Army Sgt. Harold Bennett of Perryville, Ark., all of whom were ordered executed by his friend, Kiet, according to reports. Compare McCain, the POW hero, to another fellow prisoner of war, Marine Capt. Donald Cook, who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. Cook was awarded our nation’s highest award for valor because, during his years of captivity, he jeopardized his own health by sharing his meager supply of food and scarce medicines with other U.S. prisoners who were more sick than him. He became legendary for his refusal to betray the military Code of Conduct. On one occasion, Kiet’s Viet Cong cadre put a pistol to Cook’s head, demanding that he denounce the United States. Cook resisted and calmly recited the nomenclature of the parts of the pistol, giving the communists nothing. The Viet Cong were so infuriated at Cook’s resistance that they isolated him from other American prisoners. They intentionally denied him much needed food and medicine. Like Versace, Cook disappeared and was never heard from again. Hanoi claims Cook died as a result of malaria and that they do not know where his remains are buried. McCain discourages any talk about Versace, Roraback, Bennett and Cook. To talk about such patriots would require the United States to demand the return of their remains or, at the very least, records of their deaths. If those MIAs are proven dead and their remains returned, then McCain’s friend, Kiet, would be forced to explain the holes in the back of their skulls and why he ordered the POWs murdered. McCain is no hero. He violated the military Code of Conduct and willfully collaborated with the Vietnamese, Soviets and Cubans. It is not yet publicly known just how much McCain collaborated and what kind of favors he received in return. Those in the U.S. government who do know are not talking. **************************************************************************** Subscribe to THE SPOTLIGHT! Only $59.00 for 1 year or $99.00 for 2 years. Every week, get the important stories that the popular media either miss... or ignore. For around $1.00 per issue, THE SPOTLIGHT is a steal! Don't wait any longer. Make sure that you never miss another issue. Subscribe now! To subscribe online, visit our SECURE server at www.spotlight.org. You can also mail your subscription to THE SPOTLIGHT, 300 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003. 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