Terrorist-Sponsor Jerrold Nadler Hangs U.S. Troops out to Dry

The House of Representatives is now deliberating over a military-spending bill to finance battlefield and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for the coming year. One of those House members, Democrat Jerrold Nadler of New York, is aiming to strip the bill of a key provision whose purpose is to protect the lives of American soldiers. By trying to expunge it, Nadler is exhibiting the same disregard for innocent Americans as he showed eight years ago when he persuaded then-President Clinton to pardon a pair of violent domestic terrorists.

The provision in question was inserted into the Senate version of this spending bill (which was passed Thursday in an 86 to 3 vote) by Senators Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham. Specifically, the provision bans the release of the infamous “torture” photos involving U.S. military personnel—the photos that Barack Obama had originally pledged to make public, until the CIA and the Defense Department persuaded him to reverse course. While the images in the photos are reputed to be no more inflammatory than those that came out of Abu Ghraib in 2004, if they were to be made public Al Jazeera television—the very voice of anti-Americanism in the Arab world—would swiftly dangle them before every pair of eyes in every town and hamlet across the Middle East. That would, of course, expose American service personnel in the region to potentially grave and needless retaliatory violence.

But none of that matters to Jerrold Nadler, Barney Frank, and a number of additional members of the House of Representatives who want to strip the bill of the photo-ban provision. From their safe havens in the United States, these fashionably attired, well-fed, self-absorbed, self-satisfied fools couldn’t care less about the possibility that their actions will cause any number of U.S. soldiers to die horrible, senseless deaths in a faraway land.

Nadler’s opposition to the ban is particularly odious. In the latter days of the Clinton presidency, the congressman disgraced himself by giving aid and comfort to two incarcerated domestic terrorists, Linda Evans and Susan Rosenberg.

In the 1970s, Evans and Rosenberg had been members of the Weather Underground, a Marxist-Leninist cult that was launched under the name Weatherman in 1969. Trained in Marxist philosophy and urban warfare by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and the Soviet KGB, this violent group formally declared war on “Amerikkka” (which it spelled that way to convey its belief that the nation was irredeemably racist to its core) and dedicated itself to fomenting social chaos and racial warfare against the “white” United States on behalf of the non-white, allegedly exploited Third World. At a 1969 “War Council” in Michigan, Weatherman leader Bernardine Dohrn (who today is a board member of the ACLU) praised the serial murderer Charles Manson and his accomplices. During its reign of terror, the Weather Underground set off at least 30 bombs in such strategic locations as police stations, corporate offices, military draft offices, ROTC buildings, the US Capitol building, National Guard headquarters, FBI headquarters, courthouses, the Pentagon, the State Department, the National War College, the Navy Yard Computer Center, and the Navy Yard Officers Club.

In 1981 Evans and Rosenberg, their anti-American radicalism undiminished, took part in the deadly Brinks armored-car robbery in Nyack, New York, where two security guards and two police officers were shot, three of them fatally. Three years later, the women were finally apprehended. At the time, they had 740 pounds of explosives (which they admitted were earmarked for bombings) in their possession. Rosenberg was sentenced to 58 years in prison, Evans to 40 years.

But in early 2001, Congressman Nadler suddenly intervened on the incarcerated terrorists’ behalf. It seems that Rosenberg’s mother had assembled documents from her daughter’s parole hearings that purportedly showed the latter to be a model prisoner; the mother presented these materials to Rolando Matalon, her rabbi at New York’s liberal Congregation B’nei Jeshurun Rolando Matalon. Rabbi Matalon then gave the documents to Nadler, who was also a member of the congregation, and Nadler in turn passed them on for President Clinton to consider as evidence that Rosenberg might merit consideration for a presidential pardon.

Clinton in fact decided to pardon not only Rosenberg (42 years before her sentence was due to end), but Evans as well (24 years early, in her case)—over the strong objections of Mary Jo White, the US attorney in New York. After her release from prison, Susan Rosenberg was given a job at Congregation B’nei Jeshurun. As attorney Alan Dershowitz put it, “This was a congregational victory.”

Why did Nadler go to these lengths to secure Susan Rosenberg’s release? Perhaps the congressman, who was a leftwing, anti-Vietnam War activist in the years that the Weather Underground was conducting its own brand of “protest,” felt sympathy for Rosenberg and her radical supporters. And perhaps whatever personal acquaintance he had with Rosenberg’s mother gave him an extra motive for getting involved.

Why did Clinton, for his part, oblige Nadler’s request? Perhaps it was payback to the congressman, who, as a member of the Judiciary Committee in the 1990s, had used his influence to oppose the impeachment proceedings against the President.

By seeking to have the so-called “torture” photos made public, Jerrold Nadler has allied himself with the loathsome ACLU, which has been busy in federal court seeking to force the government to release those same pictures. Though it piously characterizes itself as America’s “guardian of liberty,” the ACLU, in matters involving American security and terrorist threats, consistently sides with the terrorists. Obviously, partisanship of that nature is not altogether alien to Congressman Nadler.