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The independent panel, the Mann-Chesnut Commission, met and heard testimony in the fall of 1995 on the abuses in the LaRouche case, cases involving the targeting of minority elected officials, and others.
A northern Virginia hotel, located just 15 minutes from the U.S. Capitol dome, served as the site of a series of extraordinary public hearings to investigate allegations of gross misconduct by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), on August 31 and September 1.
The independent hearings, which were facilitated by the Schiller Institute, were prompted by the refusal this past summer, of the House Judiciary Committee probe of the incident at Waco, to actually hear evidence of rampant corruption inside the permanent bureaucracy at the U.S. Department of Justice. Initially those congressional hearings seemed to be driven by broad based, bipartisan concern that the Waco case, along with other pertinent cases, was a predicate of a continuing pattern of behavior by certain elements attached to the DOJ. But, once those hearings were literally hijacked by a group of Republican congressmen, whose only objective was to pillory President Clinton, the result was a massive cover-up of the flagrant DOJ corruption the Congress had promised to investigate.
Members of the Panel
The independent panel, which declared that they would investigate what the House subcommittees refused to hear, included former Congressman James Mann of South Carolina (who, while in Congress, served as a prominent member of the House Judiciary Committee); Senator Robert Ford and Senator Maggie Wallace Glover of the South Carolina State Senate; Rep. William Clark and Rep. John Hilliard of the Alabama House of Representatives; Rep. Toby Fitch and Rep. Howard Hunter of the North Carolina House of Representatives; Rep. Ulysses Jones, Jr. of the Tennessee House of Representatives; Rep. Percy Watson of the Mississippi House of Representatives; attorney J.L. Chestnut,one of the foremost civil rights lawyers in America today; and Msgr. Elias El Hayek, Chor Bishop of the Maronite Church and professor of law. International observers included Dr. Josef Miklosko, former Vice Prime Minister of post-communist Czechoslovakia; Dr. Kofi Awoonor, former Permanent Ambassador to the United Nations from the Republic of Ghana; Marino Elseviff, a prominent attorney from the Dominican Republic; and Amelia Boynton Robinson, of the Schiller Institute.
The panel focused on cases where there was evidence of politically motivated targeting of groups and individuals by a concert of private organizations outside the U.S. government, working in tandem with corrupt officials inside federal governmental law enforcement agencies.
The Testimony
The testimony was organized around three panels: the harassment of African American elected and public officials--the FBI's "Operation Fruehmenschen"; the conduct of the DOJ's so-called Office of Special Investigations, particularly the cases of John Demjanjuk and former UN Secretary General and President of Austria Kurt Waldheim; and the LaRouche case, the largest-scale single case involving this same corrupt DOJ apparatus that operated in the OSI and Operation Fruehmenschen cases. Congressman Mann also read into the record a request he had received from General Manuel Antonio Noriega, of Panama, who is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Miami, that the panel, at some future date, also consider evidence of DOJ misconduct and human rights violations that pervaded Noriega's American trial.
The proceedings opened with a Memorial Tribute and moment of silence in memory of Rep. David P. Richardson, of Pennsylvania. Richardson, who was to have served on the panel, died suddenly just a week prior to the formal opening of the hearings. He was the youngest person ever elected to the Pennsylvania state legislature, and, during 24 years of distinguished public service, was a national leader, and one of the pioneers, in the battle against "Operation Fruehmenschen." He was 47 years old at the time of his death.
The Presenters
Testimony on Operation Fruehmenschen was presented by Sen. Theo Walker Mitchell (f), Sen. Herb Fielding (f), Judge Tee Ferguson (f), and Rep. Frank McBride (f), all of South Carolina; Judge Ira Murphy (f) of Tennessee; Councilman Roosevelt Bell of Alabama; and Patricia Moore and attorney Ollie Manago, of California.
Testimony on the OSI was presented by Yoram Sheftel of Tel Aviv, Israel, who represented John Demjanjuk in his death penalty trial before the Israeli Supreme Court; Dr. Hans Koechler, of the International Progress Organization, Vienna, Austria; and William Nezowy, of the American Ukrainian Political Action Council of the United States.
Testimony on the LaRouche case was presented by Odin Anderson of Boston, who has served as Mr. LaRouche's attorney for over a decade; Lyndon LaRouche; Helga Zepp-LaRouche; and finally, wrapping up two days of startling testimony, former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark.
In case after case, decisive evidence of rampant DOJ corruption, prosecutorial misconduct, withholding of exculpatory evidence, and conscious perjury and fraud upon the court, politically motivated and designed to deprive the American citizen of effective representation, was presented, not by the good word of the witnesses, but by government documents, records, and memoranda, first suppressed and later obtained by FOIA and other legal actions.
At the close of testimony, the panel, under the joint chairmanship of Cong. Mann and J.L. Chestnut, ruled that no summary statement could capture the shocking and dramatic nature of the testimony itself. By unanimous decision, the panel is now preparing a series of written and video-taped presentation of the proceedings that will be produced for broad, international circulation, as well as submission to every member of the United States Congress. One by one, the panelists expressed their confidence, given that the nature of the evidence they had compiled was so compelling and so indicting, that congressional oversight hearings into the matter, as well as other governmental action, would soon be forthcoming. "Justice," stated Congressman Mann, "must finally be returned to the Department of Justice."
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