Attorney General
DOJ Nazi Hunters Shift Focus to Perpetrators of New Atrocities
Posted Aug 20, 2009 8:42 AM CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
Nazis responsible for Holocaust atrocities are dying out, but the Justice Department unit responsible for extraditing them from U.S. soil continues to operate, albeit with a new focus.
The Office of Special Investigations, created in 1979, has won deportation orders against 107 immigrants suspected of lying about their pasts on citizenship forms and prevented another 180 from entering the United States, the Washington Post reports. The unit continues to race to extradite the few remaining Nazis in the United States, but it has expanded its mission.
Now the unit is focusing on new war crimes, a more difficult mission given the lack of detailed records like those kept by the Nazis. The unit is investigating 80 cases in which people are suspected of lying about genocides and other human rights violations to enter the country.
In one of its leading cases, the unit is trying to deport 82-year-old Lazare Kabaya Kobagaya, a resident of Topeka, Kan., suspected of taking part in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
But the unit may not survive in its present form. Lanny Breuer, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's criminal division, told the Post it could be merged with the department’s domestic security section, recently in the news for its prosecution of Charles Taylor Jr., the son of Liberia's former president. Taylor was sentenced to 97 years in prison for his role in the torture of political opponents.
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Comments
B. McLeod
Aug 20, 2009 9:39 AM CST
Cheney will likely be heading back to that undisclosed location now.
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fed up
Aug 20, 2009 11:56 AM CST
“The Office of Special Investigations, created in 1979…” What took so long? VE day was May 8, 1945, so why the 34 year interval?
Individual Nazis responsible for Holocaust atrocities may be dying out, but what about the role of the rule of law responsible for Holocaust atrocities?
Lawyers created the “final solution” that was the Holocaust. It began with the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, the so-called blood and honor laws. The final solution was refined and implemented at the Wannsee conference January 20, 1942 in suburban Berlin. While Adolf Eichmann is generally called the architect of the Holocaust, he was aided by a number of attorneys.
Reinhard Heydrich was the conference chairperson. Some of the lawyers present at Wannsee were Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, Erich Neumann, Josef Bühler, Roland Freisler, Rudolf Lange, Gerhard Klopfer. Dr. Stuckart co-authored the Nuremberg Laws.
The Nuremberg Laws were inspired by US anti-miscegenation laws. US anti-miscegenation laws were written by American lawyers. So American lawyers have some responsibility for the Holocaust.
The scale of atrocities that made the Holocaust was only possible with the cooperation of the legal profession, the instrumentality of government, and corporations (and corporate lawyers).
For more, see: The corporate ‘nexus’ that assisted the Nazis, by Edwin Black
http://www.njjewishnews.com/njjn.com/031209/opedCorporateNexusAssistedNazis.html
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