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U.S. federal agents allegedly cut a deal with the Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed it to traffic tons of narcotics across the border, in exchange for information about rival cartels, according to documents filed in federal court. Click here to view the Sinaloa Cartel case document.

Ever since John McCain won the South Carolina and Florida Republican primaries, the Internet has been awash (ablaze is probably a better word) with assertions, arguments, and proof that he is not a conservative. See, for example, Straight Talk About The Straight-Talker. In the last few days, however, a few commentators have revived long-standing speculation about whether McCain’s non-conservative positions and conduct are rooted in something much darker than mere opportunism or closet liberalism. Some have even characterized McCain as a Vietnam War “Manchurian Candidate”—after the title of the famous 1959 novel by Richard Condon, and the subsequent movie of...

There is a scene in the classic Elia Kazan film “Viva Zapata” when a young Emiliano Zapata for the first time meets his bride-to-be’s father, a shopkeeper manifestly unimpressed with his daughter’s suitor. The father calls Zapata “a man of substance, without substance.” So, too, it is with John McCain. He is “a man of integrity without integrity”—meaning that the senator is reputed to have great integrity, but in fact has little, given the definition of that word: “the quality of possessing and steadfastly adhering to high moral principles or professional standards” (Encarta Dictionary). Two different, but related, events that...

MILITARY AWARDS: EARNED OR NOT, WAS THE CRITERIA MET? By Gerald F. Merna, 1st Lt, U. S. Marine Corps (Retired) INTRODUCTION: Like many former, active and retired military personnel I am fairly active on the internet, I am a member of several Marine Corps and veterans organizations, and I actively participate in (sometimes two) “annual reunions” with one specific infantry company I served with during the Korean War. I have great interest in military matters generally, and more specifically in areas that I either experienced or was otherwise aware of as a result of my 22 year Marine Corps...

JFK (II): WAR HERO OR FAKE WARRIOR? Henry Mark Holzer Senator John Forbes Kerry, Navy veteran and candidate for the democrat party nomination for President of the United States, has for years played the “war hero” card. As the story goes, for his service in wartime Vietnam Kerry was awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. However, for all those years, and especially now, questions have been raised and doubts have surfaced about the legitimacy of some of those awards. Few people know the truth, preeminently Senator Kerry—but he’s not talking. This is not to...

Jul. 9, 2003 It's Groundhog Day - but not in Punxsutawney By Sarah Honig Compulsive and obsessed, we cannot extricate ourselves from our interminable ordeal It's getting on my nerves. Night after night I keep having the same recurring dream: I'm always in a darkened movie theater and invariably treated to the same feature. Over and over. There is never any flick but Groundhog Day. As soon as I nod off, I see TV weatherman Phil waking up - always to face the same day. He is repeatedly forced to cover Groundhog Day ceremonies in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, an assignment he...

Free Speech is Not a Monopoly of the Antiwar Left By Erika Holzer FrontPageMagazine.com | April 3, 2003 Starting with the first tense days of the war against Iraq, I made it a point to watch American servicemen being interviewed on cable television. Every one of them, when asked why they were eager to fight in Iraq, in essence gave this unhesitating reply: "First, to destroy a murderous regime before it acquires the capability to attack our country and the rest of the free world with weapons of mass destruction." [It’s called "self-defense."] "Second, to liberate the people of Iraq...

“The Director Made Me Do It”: The “Winona” Defense By Henry Mark Holzer FrontPageMagazine.com | November 15, 2002 Criminal defense lawyers are constantly trying to find new ways to acquit their clients. Remember the "twinkies" defense, when a criminal defendant claimed he killed because the confection’s ingredients affected his mind? In the just-concluded Winona Ryder trial, her lawyer propounded yet another spurious defense. The jury didn’t buy it. Ryder was charged with three crimes: burglary, vandalism, and felony grand theft (the latter sometimes euphemistically called "shoplifting"), for helping herself to over five- thousand dollars’ worth of designer-expensive clothes and accessories...

Bush vs. Congress: The War Powers Resolution By Henry Mark Holzer FrontPageMagazine.com | September 12, 2002 On September 4, 2002, amidst a national guessing game over President Bush's intentions regarding Iraq and the role of Congress in his plans, the president sent a carefully worded letter to Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert. After establishing that America and the civilized world are at a crossroads regarding Iraq, Mr. Bush wrote (the emphasis is mine): I am in the process of deciding how to proceed. This is an important decision that must be made with great thought and care....

Some of the nation's most notorious personal injury lawyers are mounting an all-out assault on America's healthcare system that could batter it into a smoldering ruin before the next Presidential election. If successful, these unelected and unaccountable lawyers will raise healthcare costs to the point where millions of Americans and their employers may find themselves priced out of the system. Fresh from the tobacco wars and currently representing only a handful of plaintiffs, the lawyers' are attempting to convince a Miami-based federal judge that they should be allowed to represent almost all of the nation's 600,000 physicians as well as...

<p>The case of Robert Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban," has resurrected the issue of treason. What constitutes treason? What are the precedents? Why wasn't Lindh, who was captured early in the war in Afghanistan, charged with treason? The answers to these and many other questions can be found in a very useful new book about another high-profile case involving an American citizen, who like Lindh, arguably "adher[ed] to [America´s] enemies, giving them aid and comfort"— Jane Fonda.</p>

In our political system, lawyers occupy a privileged position. On the civil side, only they can represent litigants. On the criminal side, as prosecutors they have the power to send people to prison; as defense attorneys only they can represent persons charged with crimes. With this government-granted monopoly power to work the levers of the legal system comes a heavy responsibility, reflected in lawyers’ codes of ethics. While a lawyer has the duty to represent his client “zealously,” at the same time there are entirely appropriate restraints on his advocacy. He can’t, for example, hide evidence, knowingly allow his client...

John Walker Lindh should have been hauled before a military tribunal. He probably would have been, were it not for the provision in President Bush's executive order limiting military tribunals' jurisdiction to non-citizens (a move thought by some to have been a preemptive strike against the Fifth Column's legal crowd). If Lindh had been tried by a military tribunal - whatever the specific charge(s) - given the facts, he almost assuredly would have been convicted. The death penalty was a distinct possibility. Instead, Lindh was transferred from military to civilian control, and put into the civilian judicial system. Once that...

On July 15, 2002, Taliban John Walker Lindh pleaded guilty to criminal charges levied against him for his association with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Heralded as a "surprise deal" by the Associated Press, Lindh's capitulation was anything but a surprise — not to me, nor to readers of Front Page Magazine. Ever since Lindh was flushed out of that prison basement in Afghanistan, I've been predicting that he'd cop a plea because of the strength of the government's case and the lack of a defense. For example, in February I wrote a piece entitled "Reading Brosnahan's Mind," and said: The...

The Fifth Column’s Legal Team By Henry Mark Holzer FrontPageMagazine.com | June 18, 2002 DESPITE ITS NAME – which is meant to suggest fealty to the Constitution and Bill of Rights of the United States of America – The Center for Constitutional Rights is a Leftist law factory that grinds out one anti-American case after another. Rather than acting to protect and preserve American constitutional values – e.g., freedom and capitalism – the Center exists to attack and undermine those values. While one could devote an entire book to demonstrating that the Center was founded by America-haters, that its agenda...

TALIBAN JOHN: THE NOOSE TIGHTENS Henry Mark Holzer If there has been doubt in anyone's mind about the nature of the government's principal case against John Walker Lindh, last week's court filing by the United States Attorney should have dispelled it. To understand the significance of what the government's motion papers said, it's necessary to remind ourselves about what "conspiracy" means in federal criminal law, and then about what the indictment charges Lindh with having done. Conspiracy is proved by evidence showing an agreement (which can be tacit, so long as it is clear) to do something illegal (e.g., killing...

Where Have All The Critters Gone? By Henry Mark Holzer FrontPageMagazine.com | June 6, 2002 SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY – a public institution, supported by taxpayer funds – is adorned with maps of the Middle East that exclude the State of Israel. Campus posters depict soup cans with labels displaying drops of blood, dead babies, and the description "canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license." This, of course, is the infamous "blood libel" that has haunted Jewry for centuries. Other signs equate Zionism with racism, Jews with Nazis. Recently, SFSU Jewish students and others held...

TALIBAN JOHN: THE DESPERATE DEFENSE Henry Mark Holzer It’s obvious that despite its bravado, the John Walker Lindh defense camp is desperate. First, we saw two examples of “graymail,” a tactic used by defense lawyers in national security cases. The idea is for the defense to seek in the discovery stage of the case highly sensitive documents and testimony so that the government is put on the horns of a dilemma: comply with the request, and risk compromising important secrets (which the government, understandably, is loathe to do), or refuse to comply, and risk dismissal of the case (which the...

The High Cost Of Openness By Notra Trulock April 26, 2002 The Energy Department recently declassified its fifth report to Congress on "inadvertent" disclosures of classified nuclear weapons information. For the past three years, classification experts have been scouring millions of pages of supposedly declassified government documents dumped into the public domain under the Clinton administration’s misguided openness policy. They have uncovered a gold mine of nuclear warhead secrets that, according to an Energy Department assessment, "would aid an adversary in obtaining a weapon of mass destruction." In 1993, citing the end of the Cold War and the "rapidly changing...

Taliban John: The Conventional Wisdom—And the Truth By Henry Mark Holzer FrontPageMagazine.com | April 16, 2002 NEWSWEEK MAGAZINE'S April 15, 2002, issue has published an article by Steven Brill titled, "End of Their Rope," carrying the subtitle "The Feds threw the book at John Walker Lindh, whetting the nation's appetite for vengeance. Too bad the evidence is so weak." Putting aside that the Justice Department has, unfortunately, not thrown the book at the American Taliban - he should have been indicted for treason (see www.talibanjohn.info) - Brill's analysis reveals how little he understands about the law of conspiracy that Lindh...