MIKE CHERTOFF'S DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS: BUSH'S NEW HOMELAND SECURITY CZAR

Anyone referred to this blog by David Icke's website should click here before reading further.

I wrote the following for this week's L.A. Weekly:

The Bush White House thinks they’re being clever by naming a prosecutor instead of a criminal to head the Department of Homeland Security: Mike Chertoff, whose appointment as DHS czar in the wake of the failed nomination of scandal-plagued Bernie Kerik (now under investigation by multiple law-enforcement agencies) was announced as the Weekly went to press. But Chertoff is as political an appointment as one can imagine--especially for those who know the arcana of politics in New Jersey, where Chertoff was U.S. Attorney, and where his naming to the DHS job caused jaws to drop.

Chertoff was a political attack dog in that job, indicting and convicting a raft of Democratic officeholders. But one who Chertoff deliberately let get away was his big buddy, Bob “The Torch” Torricelli, forced to resign his U.S. Senate seat from Sopranoland in a major corruption scandal. Nick Acocella, editor of the respected insider newsletter New Jersey Politifax, recalls that, at the height of the Torricelli scandal, and while Chertoff was U.S. Attorney, he saw The Torch and Chertoff together at a South Jersey Jewish banquet where they embraced and huddled intimately “like twins separated at birth.” One would have thought a federal prosecutor would have kept his distance from a target of criminal investigations that were making daily headlines in the Jersey press.

When Chertoff was named by Bush to head the Justice Department’s Criminal Division--partly because he was a skilled political hitman, who’d also raised a ton of money as financial vice-chair of Bush’s Garden State campaign in 2000-- it’s an open secret in Jersey that he squelched an indictment of Torricelli as a reward for The Torch’s support of key Bush legislation the Democratic Party leadership opposed, including tax cuts for corporations and the very rich. (Many of the fat-cats Chertoff shook down for Bush had also been huge givers to The Torch.)

Long active in the Federalist Society--a conspiratorial brotherhood of legal reactionaries--Chertoff, at Justice, helped to write the civil liberties-shredding Patriot Act. He was John Ashcroft’s honcho in the indiscriminate grilling of over 5000 Arab-Americans after 9/11, cooked up the use of “material witness” warrants to lock up people of Middle Eastern descent and hold them indefinitely without trial, and on behalf of the Justice Department wrote a brief (in Chavez v. Martinez) arguing there was no Constitutional right to be free of coercive police questioning.

Moreover, Chertoff wrote legislation, known as the Feeney Amendment, which gutted federal sentencing guidelines -- under which federal judges were allowed to use some discretion when sentencing criminal defendants -- by preventing judges from shortening sentences--and, worse, required judges who deviated from the Feeney Amendment to have their names and actions reported to the Justice Department, thus establishing what Sen. Teddy Kennedy denounced as a judicial “blacklist.“

Why would Chertoff give up a lifetime seat on the federal bench to take a job in the hornet’s nest of problems that is the DHS? According to a top Jersey Democratic pol who knows Chertoff well, Chertoff--described as being “as cold-blooded as they come“-- has a personal agenda that includes becoming U.S. Attorney General and, eventually, grabbing a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. But there’s a problem for Chertoff with conservative Republicans--he happens to be pro-choice. So, taking the DHS job is Chertoff’s way to “make his bones,” as they say in Jersey, and grab headlines as a hard-line persecutor of “the towel-heads” to please the right and neutralize his abortion stance.

However, Chertoff has zero experience in running anything remotely resembling DHS, a mammoth with 180,000 employees and 22 federal agencies under its umbrella. He was picked for two reasons: his political loyalty to Bush (he won’t go off the reservation on his own as Tom Ridge did) and the fact that he’s already been confirmed by the Senate thrice, so he has no hidden Kerik-like problems and will sail through with little or no opposition from the spineless Democrats (he’s already been endorsed by Sens. Chuck Schumer and Joe Lieberman for the DHS job). But choosing someone on the basis of confirmability rather than qualifications is dangerous--as is the choice of a hyper-ambitious Torquemada for a job with enormous power over our already-reduced rights and liberties, which will no doubt be further eroded under Chertoff.

P.S. NO ROOM AT THE INN:  Just before Christmas, New York Law Prof. Art Leonard wrote in his Gay City News legal column, Chertoff rendered a lethal anti-gay decision in which he denied asylum to a Jamaican gay man who had been outed by an inflammatory newspsper article, assaulted by neighborhood anti-gay gangs, and forced to seek political asylum in the U.S. to save his life--and in doing so over-ruled an immigration judge who had found the man's life was at risk and that he deserved asylum from Jamaica's notoriously homophobic culture. To read about this cold and mean Chertoff decision, click here. (Thanks to Art's GCN colleague Andy Humm for bringing this to my attention,)

MORE ON TEAM BUSH: In the same L.A. Weekly issue as the above dissection of Chertoff, you can also find a profile by me of Bush's new chief domestic policy adviser entitled "The Bush Theocracy: Righteous Homophobe Claude Allen Brings His Agenda to the White House."