News Item: Former South African President Nelson Mandela has been taken off the U.S. terror watch list. President George W. Bush signed a bill removing him and other members of the African National Congress from the list that has kept them from entering the U.S., except to visit the United Nations complex, without special dispensation from the U.S. Secretary of State.
This from a government that allowed suspected and known terrorists into the country for years and, for all we know in this era of keeping as much as possible secret from the public, still does.
It all came about when Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) was designated as a terrorist organization by South Africa’s old apartheid regime back in 1960.
Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison for working against the policy of racial terrorism, became his nation’s first post-apartheid president but the U.S. inexplicably kept the ANC on its terror watch list.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had called the restrictions a “rather embarrassing matter that I still have to waive in my own counterpart, the foreign minister of South Africa, not to mention the great leader Nelson Mandela.”
Bush’s action is a nice birthday present for Mandela who will turn 90 this month.
New York magazine has one of its patented — well, copyrighted, anyway — inside-stories, this one on the man seen here who masterminded a ghoulish cadaver snatching ring that included the remains of such luminaries as Alistair Cooke.
How detailed and fascinatingly creepy is the story? Consider this excerpt:
“They were just going to come and collect him and return the ashes in due course,” (Cooke’s daughter Susan) Kittredge recalls. But instead, there was a man waiting for Alistair Cooke, with a knife.
“He cared nothing for Cooke’s mind or manners. He had actually come for the body — that pale, wizened, cancer-ridden cadaver of a 95-year-old Englishman, stretched out now beneath the light in the embalming room.”
Few topics have more quickly polarized the community of New York officialdom — and unofficialdom, for that matter — than freshman-year Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s plan to reward scofflaws with driver’s licenses.
More than a dozen county clerks, representative of those offices that dispense the majority of licenses in New York, met this week in Albany to demand a full explanation of the reason behind the governor’s desire to allow illegal aliens to get legal licenses from the state.
Let’s review. In Eliot Spitzer’s world, if you (1.) thumb your nose at U.S. immigration law rather than going through the process to which literally millions of people — probably your ancestors and mine — submitted, then (2.) New York will grant you legitimacy and a license to operate a vehicle anywhere in the U.S., and (3.) no move will be made to penalize you for willfully breaking the law.
This from a law-and-order type who preached strict adherence to the law during his time as state attorney general.
Spitzer, whose family crest is a steamroller crushing any opposition to anything he likes, is sending a dangerous message. In effect, he’s saying that people whose first act in the U.S. is to break the law are every bit as worthy of licensing privileges as those who are law-abiding, legal residents — born, naturalized or government authorized.
Frank Merola, the Rensselaer County clerk, was one of the first to stand up to the Spitzer dictum, and good for him. When a Spitzer representative sent to meet with the clerks in Albany failed to provide more than happy talk and political pap in response to questions from these elected officials, Merola walked out on the session. Again, good for him.
No matter one’s party affiliation, Spitzer’s push to make other elected officials do something of, to put it charitably, questionable legality is the height of arrogance. Their resistance to it is the height of responsible action.
The idea of such a list was, so the story goes, dreamed up back in 1949 when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was playing cards with William Kinsey Hutchinson, head of the old International News Service. They were chit-chatting about ways to promote capture of the FBI’s “toughest guys.” Hutchinson saw to it that a news article was written about the idea, it caught on, and on March 14, 1950, the FBI officially announced the list.
There is no particular length of time a fugitive stays on the list. Some people have been there for years. One, Billie Austin Bryant, was on it for about two hours in 1969. Some fail to make a dent in the public consciousness. Others, like James Earl Ray and Ted Bundy, are indelibly etched there.
Has this list done much besides give postmasters something to hang on their lobby bulletin boards? That’s debatable because dangers in our society have grown to the point the original list isn’t the only one the FBI maintains. There now also is a Most Wanted Terrorists list.
News Item: Former South African President Nelson Mandela has been taken off the U.S. terror watch list. President George W. Bush signed a bill removing him and other members of the African National Congress from the list that has kept them from entering the U.S., except to visit the United Nations complex, without special dispensation from the U.S. Secretary of State.
New York magazine has one of its patented — well, copyrighted, anyway — inside-stories, 
