Bordering On Insanity

By INEVSTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, November 16, 2007 4:20 PM PT

Criminal Justice: He's not as famous as Barry Bonds, but the indictment of Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila is a reminder of why there should be an asterisk alongside U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton's name as well.

The Mexican Border is a "War Zone"!

Normally the indictment of someone arrested for smuggling drugs into the U.S. would be of little note. But the arrest of Aldrete-Davila at an international port of entry in El Paso on Thursday is a stark reminder of a grave miscarriage of justice involving two U.S. Border Patrol agents who were incarcerated, we believe, for doing their assigned job of protecting the American people against criminals and intruders.

Aldrete-Davila's arrest was announced by U.S. Attorney for West Texas Johnny Sutton. Sutton is the prosecutor who convicted former Border Patrol agents Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos, now serving 12 and 11 years, respectively, for the nonfatal shooting of Aldrete-Davila in 2005. The agents shot Aldrete-Davila in the buttocks as he was transporting more than 700 pounds of marijuana into America through Fabens, Texas, 40 miles east of El Paso.

Compean and Ramos thought they were fulfilling their duties on Feb. 17, 2005, when they shot an allegedly unarmed Aldrete-Davila as he was fleeing into Mexico.

They were convicted of, among other charges, violating Aldrete-Davila's civil rights and trying to conceal their "crime."

Aldrete-Davila showed his gratitude by breaking the immunity agreement he was given by Sutton in exchange for testifying against the two agents and attempting to smuggle an additional 753 pounds of weed into the U.S. the following October. It is that second incident that Sutton successfully concealed from the jury. It is this second felony for which Aldrete-Davila has been arrested and indicted.

As Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., has pointed out, "The prime witness against these two border patrol agents was involved in another major load of drugs, and the prosecution made a conscious decision to keep these facts from the jury."

And as World Net Daily reports, DHS special agent Christopher Sanchez described in a memo how DEA investigators conducted a knock-and-talk in Clint, Texas, on Oct. 23, 2005, with one Cipriano Ernesto Ortiz-Hernandez, who positively identified Aldrete-Davila as the driver who dropped off the 753 pounds of marijuana in a Chevy Astro van at Ortiz-Hernandez's home the day before.

Compean and Ramos were prosecuted by Sutton on the grounds that they shot an unarmed man and conspired to cover it up. But in an April 4, 2005, memo, Agent Sanchez states that Compean believed Aldrete-Davila was armed.

"Compean said that Aldrete-Davila continued to look back over his shoulder toward Compean as Aldrete-Davila ran away from him," Sanchez wrote in the memo.

"Compean said that he began to shoot at Aldrete-Davila because of the shiny object he thought he saw in Aldrete-Davila's left hand. . . . Compean said he thought that the shiny object might be a gun and that Aldrete-Davila was going to shoot him because he kept looking back at him as he was running away."

We believe that, like the Marines accused of crimes at Haditha in Iraq, Ramos and Compean were wrongly accused and imprisoned for doing their job along a border that's becoming increasingly violent. We have reported on repeated armed incursions by drug runners and those paid to protect their operations.

Shawn Moran, a 10-year Border Patrol veteran who serves as vice president of the National Border Patrol Council Local 1613 in San Diego, says:

"They've got weapons, high-tech radios, computers, cell phones, GPS systems and can react faster than we are able to. And they have no hesitancy to attack the agents on the line, with anything from assault rifles and improvised Molotov cocktails to rocks, concrete slabs and bottles."

In February, ICE agents seized an arms cache that included two improvised explosive devices, materials for making 33 more, 1,280 rounds of ammunition, five grenades and other hardware for making weapons to kill border agents.

Convict Aldrete-Davila. Pardon Ramos and Compean.

An Energy Crisis Of Our Own Making

Energy Policy: As oil climbs toward an unprecedented $100 a barrel, we can only blame ourselves. By falsely demonizing oil in the debate over global warming, we assure an energy-impoverished future.

Do It Yourself Doom

It would be nice if we could lay this at the doorstep of just one party. Unfortunately, it's a bipartisan mess, created by politicians on both sides of the aisle who are being stampeded into action on climate change.

Take Rep. Bob Inglis, a Republican from South Carolina. He says he realized something needed to be done when his own children threatened to vote for his opponent if he didn't take on the warming issue. Based on this valuable input, Inglis has deduced that Republicans will "get hammered" if they don't do something.

Excuse us, but we'll all get "hammered" if they do.

As Weather Channel founder John Coleman said this week, global warming is "the greatest scam in history." Literally thousands of reputable climatologists agree with this.

Yet fear of warming is giving rise to all kinds of bad ideas that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars and deliver very questionable benefits. These ideas include "carbon" taxes on all of us and "windfall" profit taxes on oil companies, bans on drilling for new oil in Alaska and off our coasts, and expensive new mandates — such as higher fuel economy for cars — to reduce "carbon footprints."

If elected president, Sen. Hillary Clinton wants a $50 billion "strategic energy fund," paid for with oil company profits, to bankroll lots of pork-barrel projects that will waste money but produce no new energy. Not to be outdone, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's energy plan hits middle-class Americans with $15 billion in new taxes to boost renewable energy.

The assumption behind each of these ideas is that government will take money from you in the name of "curbing global warming" and fix the energy problem. It won't — it can't.

Instead, these not-so-nifty ideas will sock Americans with billions in costs while not creating any net new energy.

Want to bring prices down? The real problem behind soaring oil prices — a lack of supply — hasn't been addressed at all. Today we have what economists call a "demand shock." It's a result of the greatest global economic boom in history — a result of more poor people in more countries being pulled out of poverty than ever, thanks to fast-growing economies and free trade.

That means oil use is soaring — especially in places such as China and India. The U.S. used to have the world's oil largely for its own privileged use, taking a third of the world's supplies while producing a third of total economic output. Not anymore.

As the chart shows, our failure to replace our depleted domestic oil reserves has left us with a serious mismatch of supply and demand. We use more oil each year, but supply less of it ourselves.

That makes us vulnerable. We send hundreds of billions of dollars overseas each year to the Middle East, Africa and South America, helping fund terrorism and prop up some nasty regimes.

As Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, notes, if we had started drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 1995 — when President Clinton nixed the idea — we'd be pumping millions more barrels today. Ditto if we had more vigorously pursued our offshore reserves.

But would that matter? According to the American Petroleum Institute, we have at least 131 billion barrels of oil and more than 1,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that we can get at now, with current technology. It's just waiting for us to find and pump it. But Americans — cowed into submission by aggressive global warming propaganda — are afraid to do so.

This is where Congress could be of help. Right now, we have an oil-based economy. We can't escape it — we need more oil.

If lawmakers stopped dithering and acted, we could turn our energy future around — feeding our need for oil in the short term, while spinning out new technologies like hydrogen fuel cells, clean coal and modern nuclear power plants over the long term.

That, however, would take vision and courage — two traits that today's leaders in Washington conspicuously lack.

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, November 08, 2007 4:20 PM PT

Cut Adrift In Water World

International Law: The Law of the Sea Treaty, the latest Bush administration surrender of U.S. sovereignty, has passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by a 17-4 vote. Prepare to be boarded by the United Nations.

Once Britain ruled the waves, then the U.S. Navy. Now will it be judges from landlocked states such as Chad and Bolivia?

It will be, if LOST, as it is commonly known, receives a two-thirds majority required for ratification of a treaty on the Senate floor.

The administration supports the treaty that Ronald Reagan vetoed in 1982, arguing that it is not the same accord, but rather a version said to address Reagan's objections submitted by Bill Clinton in 1994.

We find that hardly an endorsement of a treaty also endorsed by the National Resources Defense Council, largely because of the environmental and economic restrictions it places on the U.S.

LOST would establish rules governing uses of the world's oceans, defined as waters more than 200 miles from land, placing them under the jurisdiction of a body called the International Seabed Authority.

The ISA would be empowered to selectively grant mineral, oil and fishing rights to countries and companies, collecting what amounts to a global tax for the privilege.

LOST would also establish rules of the road for the world's oceans. But the U.S. Navy already obeys standard international conventions and does not need a U.N. body to tell it how it how or where it can conduct operations to protect the U.S. Nor does it need the permission of a panel of judges in Hamburg, Germany.

The administration says the treaty exempts military activities. But it does not define a military activity. Would an American carrier task force off Iran violate the treaty? Is the use of active sonar to detect quiet enemy submarines be a violation if the Hamburg judges rule it harms marine life?

The administration also claims the support of the military, which likes the 12-mile limit on national claims of sovereignty. Yet international law already protects nonaggressive passage, as well as nonmilitary activities of naval vessels.

Certainly Reagan didn't need the U.N. in 1986, when Libya laid claim to the entire Gulf of Sidra. To demonstrate what the State Department termed "U.S. resolve to continue to operate in international waters and airspace." All that Reagan needed was the Sixth Fleet and a few F-14 Tomcats.

This isn't the first time the Bush administration has shown a preference for international law versus U.S. law and sovereignty.

Bush supported a decision by the International Court of Justice regarding Jose Medellin, a Mexican national on death row in Texas, ordering the U.S. to reopen the case on the grounds Medellin's rights had been violated under the 1963 Vienna Convention.

The treaty was co-authored by Elisabeth Mann Borgese, an admirer of Karl Marx, who ran the World Federation of Canada. She called the oceans the "common heritage of mankind" and in a January 1999 speech declared: "The world ocean has been, and is, so to speak, our great laboratory for the making of a new world order."

LOST would codify John Kerry's "global test" of the validity of U.S. activities. Communist China, a LOST signatory, contends the treaty bans our Proliferation Security Initiative, which lets us stop and search ships suspected of transporting WMD on behalf of or for use by terrorists.

Borgese argued LOST prohibited the free movement of U.S. nuclear submarines through international waters because the treaty stipulated that the oceans "shall be reserved for peaceful purposes."

When John Kerry declared in 2004 that U.S. actions be subjected to a "global test," President Bush rightly responded that our national security was too important to be left to bodies such as the United Nations Security Council.

Bush was right then, but not now. Our access to the seas should be guaranteed by the U.S. Navy and not a U.N. bureaucracy.

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, November 02, 2007 4:30 PM PT