We're The 'Lose-Lose' People!

We're The 'Lose-Lose' People!
December 15, 2004
Ann Coulter

Lawyer Mark Geragos should go into business with political consultant Bob Shrum and defend Sen. Arlen Specter's claim to the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee. They should advertise exclusively on MSNBC. Maybe they could even get Al Gore to endorse them and hire Howard Dean as their spokesman. Our motto: "A HUMILIATING DEFEAT EVERY TIME – OR YOUR MONEY BACK!"

Shrum's losing streak obscures the fact that he is also a swine. Among his charming unifying political campaigns, in 1996, Shrum yanked his dripping snout from the political donation trough just long enough to design the commercial against California's Proposition 209 – which proposed banning racial preferences – that featured Klansman, burning crosses and David Duke. (Conforming to pattern: Shrum lost, Californians voted for the Proposition 54-46 percent, and then liberals tried to get a court to overturn it.)

This year, Shrum racked up his eighth loss in an unblemished 0-8 record of losing Democratic presidential campaigns. He's the embodiment of the Democratic Party ideal: Screw up, keep getting hired or promoted. One more loss and his last name officially becomes a verb, as in "we were ahead by 6 points but we ended up 'shrumming.'"

At least Shrum's client only has to go back to the Senate. Geragos' client Scott Peterson has been sentenced to death.

This came as no surprise to those who have followed the fate of Geragos' other hapless clients throughout the years. (Or, to be fair, the evidence against Peterson.) Among Geragos' clients are:

Clinton crony Susan McDougal: spent 18 months in federal prison. In his defense, at least Geragos didn't get Susan McDougal the death penalty. Any additional damage Geragos could do to McDougal's case was nullified when Clinton granted her a presidential pardon hours before he left office. As Susan McDougal assured New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in 1997, Clinton would never pardon her: "He's not going to wake up one day and confer it on me." As to how McDougal knows the way Bill Clinton behaves when he first wakes up in the morning, I'll leave that to your imagination.

Gary Condit: suspected (but never accused!) of involvement in Chandra Levy's disappearance. Condit was never charged with any crime. But he hired Geragos to manage a media campaign to defend his reputation. The next thing Condit knew, he was kissing his 30-year political career goodbye when he lost to his Democratic primary opponent by a whopping 18 points. Or as the kids are saying these days, Condit got "shrummed" by 18 points. The only way Condit could have lost by a bigger margin would be if Bob Shrum had managed his campaign.

Winona Ryder: convicted of grand theft. Instead of having her throw herself on the state's mercy and beg for a plea bargain, Geragos took the case to trial, where the jury had to balance a videotape of Ryder caught in the act of stealing against Geragos' argument that the store security guards were mean to her. (If there was any more to the defense's theory, I missed it.) Geragos boasts that he won a sentence of only community service and probation for Ryder. That might be something to crow about if the prosecutor had asked for anything more than ... community service and probation.

Michael Jackson: fired Geragos almost immediately after hiring him. Jackson has sterile facial masks that lasted longer than this guy. I guess he figured, hey, it's no skin off my nose. As we go to press, Jackson remains a free man.

And now Geragos' client Scott Peterson has been convicted of first- and second-degree murder in a trial that I believe began sometime in the '80s – which is good because you can always catch the trial highlights on VH1's "I Love the '80s."

The only reason to hire Mark Geragos is if the only other attorney left on Earth is Mickey Sherman, aka the "Mark Geragos of the East Coast." And that's only if Long Island gunman Colin Ferguson, who famously represented himself at trial, is not taking new clients.

But even Geragos and Sherman would never sneeringly dismiss evidence in a murder trial as "circumstantial evidence." Only nonlawyers who imagine they are learning about law from "Court TV" think "circumstantial evidence" means "paltry evidence." After leaping for the channel clicker for six months whenever the name "Scott Peterson" wafted from the television (on the grounds that in a country of 300 million people, some men will kill their wives), I offer this as my sole contribution to the endless national discussion.

In a murder case, all evidence of guilt other than eyewitness testimony is "circumstantial." Inasmuch as most murders do not occur at Grand Central Terminal during rush hour, it is not an uncommon occurrence to have murder convictions based entirely on circumstantial evidence. DNA evidence is "circumstantial evidence." Fingerprints are "circumstantial evidence." An eyewitness account of the perpetrator fleeing the scene of a stabbing with a bloody knife is "circumstantial evidence." Please stop referring to "circumstantial evidence" as if it doesn't count. There's a name for people who take a dim view of circumstantial evidence because they don't understand the concept of circumstantial evidence: They're called "O.J. jurors."

Speaking of O.J., I keep hearing TV commentators say the Scott Peterson jury was influenced by the O.J. jury. Besides the fact that the jurors themselves say O.J. never crossed their minds until the press started asking them questions, the comparison is absurd. Among the burdens liberals have placed on blacks is the nutty idea that all blacks are obliged to defend the worst elements of their race.

White people don't feel a need to defend Jeffrey Dahmer or Scott Peterson. Go ahead, kill him. If we did, the Judgment at Nuremberg would have ended in a hung jury. In fact, the biggest dilemma we usually face after a case like Scott Peterson's is, "Lethal injection, or Old Sparky?"

Former FBI Agent Cites Penetration of CIA by China

Former FBI Agent Cites Penetration of CIA by China
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
15 December 2004

China's intelligence service spent years training a spy who posed as a Catholic priest in New York and was part of an escape plan for a Chinese agent in the CIA, according to a veteran FBI counterspy.

Retired Special Agent I.C. Smith said China's use of the masquerading priest was "one of the most fascinating things" about the spy case of Larry Wu-tai Chin, who supplied secrets to China for decades as a CIA translator until his arrest in 1985.

"The People's Republic of China Ministry of State Security took a married Chinese national from the People's Republic and over several years gave him the background to be a priest," Mr. Smith said in an interview.

He identified the agent-priest as Mark Cheung, a minister with the Church of the Transfiguration in New York's Chinatown. "He was actually a Ministry of State Security operative," Mr. Smith said of Cheung.

Cheung was a Chinese "illegal" — a deep-undercover spy dispatched abroad to help in intelligence-gathering operations, he said. Mr. Smith said Cheung "was there to be part of the escape plan for Larry Chin."

According to Mr. Smith, emergency escape plans called for Chin to meet Cheung in the confessional booth of the downtown New York City church. China's intelligence service "spent years on this guy, bouncing him around in the South Pacific, building up a background to make it appear that he was a legitimate Catholic priest."

FBI agents later caught up with Cheung in Hong Kong and questioned him about his activities. But he was "uncooperative" and eventually fled to mainland China, where he is believed to be today, Mr. Smith said.

Mr. Smith, a former FBI special agent in charge in Little Rock, Ark., worked for years in Chinese counterintelligence within the agency. He disclosed new information about China's spy and influence operations in his book, "Inside: A Top G-Man Exposes Spies, Lies and Bureaucratic Bungling Inside the FBI." Mr. Smith spent 1973 to 1998 in the FBI.

Chin was uncovered in 1983 and arrested in November 1985. In 1986, he killed himself using a plastic bag in an Alexandria jail cell two weeks after he was convicted of spying for China since 1948. He was revealed after an official of the Ministry of State Security began working secretly for the CIA before defecting to the United States.

The Chinese defector has been identified by U.S. officials as Yu Zhensan, who was code-named "Planesman" by the FBI. He is one of only two major intelligence defections from China. "He was a guy that was being operated in China," Mr. Smith said.

Chin was caught after the defector provided a "sketchy" clue in the early 1980s that an Asian employee of U.S. intelligence was spying for China and had once been delayed prior to a flight to Hong Kong to meet a control agent.

"The source basically said [the spy] came to Beijing, but his flight got delayed," Mr. Smith said. "We go back and find a phone call went in to the [Chinese] Embassy, where it basically said, 'Hey, my flight's delayed, what do I do?' That kind of gave it to us. We looked at everybody on the flight. It was just typical grunt, hard investigative work."

The phone call led the FBI to Chin.

Prior to the FBI probe, the CIA conducted its own probe, but failed to uncover Chin, a translator who was granted access to classified information in 1970. He caused the deaths of U.S. agents by supplying information to Chinese intelligence during trips to Hong Kong, Mr. Smith said.

Never Say Never

'Never Say Never'
The Ukrainian revolution and the renaissance of democracy.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Wednesday, December 15, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

Orange, rose, yellow. These are the colors not just of sunrise, but of a few of the many "people power" revolutions that over the past generation have been by increments changing the world. Yellow was the Philippines in 1986. Rose was the former Soviet republic of Georgia last year. Now we see an exuberant orange in Ukraine, where despite election fraud, poisoning and the displeasure of the Kremlin, democratic candidate Viktor Yushchenko looks poised to win a revote Dec. 26.

I'll get to the caveats in a minute. But first, despite the perils of our time, despite the terrorists and bombs and war, despite the inevitable erosion of high ideals and disappointments of daily political practice, I will hazard the prediction that if we of the free world stick to our principles--and, where necessary, defend them with our guns--we stand on the verge of a global renaissance.

This was driven home in an interview Sunday with Mr. Yushchenko's close aide, Ukrainian legislator Oleh Rybachuk, who has just completed a whirlwind trip to the U.S. A tall, athletic-looking man, Mr. Rybachuk reportedly radiates energy at the worst of times. Right now, he is surfing a tidal wave of hope. To sit down with him over coffee in New York is to catch a whiff of the vitality with which the people of Ukraine have stood up to demand government of, by and for the people.

Fluent in English, and sporting the same kind of bright orange scarf that has become Mr. Yushchenko's trademark, Mr. Rybachuk had a great deal to say about his party's plans. He stressed such gritty basics as monetary stability, unhooking Ukraine from Big Brother in Moscow, and joining the European Union. He described the inspiration Ukraine's democratic opposition has drawn from Poland--once a Soviet vassal state, now a member of the EU.

All these matters are important, and if Mr. Yushchenko becomes president, there will no doubt be plenty of devil in the details. But what came through most clearly in Mr. Rybachuk's conversation, the point to which he returned again and again, was his pride that the people of Ukraine have stood up for their freedom. Not so long ago, there were few believers that this could happen. Ukraine achieved independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, only to be written off in short order as a basket case. The country has been run for the past 10 years by a former Soviet party boss, President Leonid Kuchma; sunk in corruption and lamed by generations of subservience to Moscow. When Mr. Yushchenko set out upon his campaign for the presidency, says Mr. Rybachuk, there were people "laughing in my face, saying we are idiotic, or romantic, or naive."

As it turned out, the voters of Ukraine thought otherwise, and when Mr. Kuchma tried to steal the election, they spoke up. With their flags and vigils and calls for fellowship from the democratic nations of the world, they have been insisting on their right to choose freely and fairly who will govern their country. "This is real independence day," Mr. Rybachuk told me, "because we have kids who will never be slaves again."

In such statements is a world of promise for the people of nations where the moment of democratic truth has not yet arrived. Ukraine is telegraphing around the globe a reminder that freedom brings with it the great gift of dignity. That is precisely why it is so stirring to watch such revolutions. They speak to the best part of the human spirit, because we are witnessing people, often against big odds and at great risk, recovering their self-respect.
And right there is the basic remedy for the miseries of the Middle East. There has been plenty of debate about the humiliations of the Muslim world, and how to redress or contain the rage and hate this breeds. There have been endless disquisitions on the complicated politics, the complex cultural and religious divides, and the--how did Mr. Rybachuk put it?--the idiocy, romanticism and naiveté of the idea, put forward as policy by President Bush, that living under the rule of some of the world's most corrupt thugs are vast silent majorities who given any room to maneuver would prefer to create free societies.

The bottom line is simple, and universal. Freedom brings with it a degree of dignity that repression can never confer. No amount of handouts from the likes of the Saudi royals, or Libya's terrorist tycoon, Moammar Gadhafi, or United Nations-sanctioned rations under a Saddam Hussein, can make up for the self-respect that comes with the self-determination of free people.

The caveats are obvious. People-power revolutions do not always succeed with a first try. In some cases--Nazi Germany, say, or Iraq--democrats stand no chance at all unless someone wages war to remove the tyrant. And democracy depends on institutions that need time to evolve. They cannot be unpacked overnight from a kit. The Philippines in 1986 got rid of Ferdinand Marcos, but has yet to live up to the full hopes that swept the country when he left. In Burma in 1988, thousands died in protests that led to the election of democratic leaders who were never allowed by the junta to take power. In China in 1989, the Tiananmen uprising ended with army gunfire. In Russia, the great moment in 1991 of Boris Yeltsin atop an armored personnel carrier, waving the red-white-and-blue Russian flag, has given way to a rough 13 years marred most recently by President Vladimir Putin's increasingly authoritarian rule. Ukraine itself is now in round two of the contest for liberty and justice, and from there may yet face round three or four.

But even with the setbacks, the general direction is progress. One heroic act encourages the next. Every time people stand up for their rights, they send the kind of message we are now hearing from Ukraine. Freedom matters. Democratic rule matters. The Philippine revolution may have fallen short of the mark, but the country is freer today than under Marcos, and that uprising 18 years ago became a shot heard round the world. Within the decade, Taiwan and South Korea went democratic. The people of Burma and China flashed the message that they desire the same. The Baltics broke free; the Berlin wall fell; Eastern Europe shook loose. Russia today may be a deeply troubled country, but it's a big step up from the Soviet Union. And I would place my bet that there are plenty of people in Russia--and in dismally repressed neighboring Belarus--watching quietly but intently right now Ukraine's second run at the democratic prize.

Likewise, in Iraq, even in a society still suffering a violent Baathist hangover, there is finally room for voters in January to choose something other than a 99.9% show for Saddam--and there begins the real recovery. Afghanistan is already embarked on the democratic trail. From Ukraine comes this latest beacon, and I promise you, it is being observed not only with applause in America, but with yearning in places such as China, Cuba and Iran.
Before saying goodbye to Mr. Rybachuk, I asked if he had any advice for people living in nations where rule of liberty and law still seems a dream beyond hope. He answered, "Never say never."

Ms. Rosett is a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute. Her column appears here and in The Wall Street Journal Europe on alternate Wednesdays.