Bonkers at the Border - WSJ.com

January 26, 2007

Bonkers at the Border - WSJ.com

Bonkers at the Border - WSJ.com

What follows is an e-mail I sent in response to the above opinion piece:

Bonkers at the Border

For some reason it always shocks me when a reputable newspaper gets things completely wrong. Your "Bonkers at the Border" opinion piece is just one of those times. It substitutes political expediency and loyalty to Bush appointees for truth and justice. I have been telling people for weeks now that this was happening and would happen in this case and now it has. Democrats and Bush supporters who believe in immigration reform will, I have said, turn on these Border Patrol agents because it is politically expedient to do so. They are and will be caught in the crossfire. That a grave injustice has been perpetrated at the hands of Johnny Sutton and the U.S. Department of Justice will fall on deaf ears because the agents are being supported by "restrictionists" and other lunatics. You know, the same guys who voted to put up the wall. Well, I don't care about the politics and the Bush media machine (did you guys write nice things about Brownie too?). The truth is that these Border Patrol agents have been unjustly convicted by an overzealous prosecutor in a case that is either politically motivated or motivated by corruption.

The prosecutor would have you believe the "facts" as you published them. Yet his case has many logical inconsistencies. He says, for example that he couldn't have convicted the drug trafficker, yet he says that at least three agents placed that trafficker at the scene (his "innocent" agent whose testimony was covered by immunity and the two agents in question). You fail to mention that the agents claim the drug trafficker had a gun, yet the only person who contradicted that was the drug trafficker whose testimony was immunized. Medical experts said that the single bullet that entered the side of the buttocks of the trafficker was consistent with the trafficker pointing a weapon back at the agents. Why, you might ask, did the Department of Home Land Security, several weeks later, go down to Mexico to find a drug trafficker, immunize his testimony and bring him back to convict two border patrol agents? One wonders if Sutton would have done the same had the van contained C-4, or weapons, or dead immigrant children.

Of course Sutton says that the jury convicted them so that's the end of that. You might remind people that juries have been known to get it wrong and to do injustices. This would not be the first time. Nor would it be the first time that the full weight and authority of the U.S. Government was brought down on innocent people for political purposes. It is also a fact that three jurors filed affidavits stating that they would not have convicted the agents had they properly understood their instructions. Juries in southwest Texas are not notoriously favorable to border patrol agents in any event. You might also point out that it has been reported that family members of the drug dealer said he never crossed the border without a gun. You might also point out that both the State Department and the Justice Department have said that the border in this area is extremely dangerous. You might point out that numerous law enforcement officers in Mexico have been murdered by the drug trafficking organizations and there have been many reports of threats against not only these agents and their young families but others as well. You might also point out that the Justice Department has stated in its drug threat assessment for 2006 that Mexican drug trafficking organizations pose "greatest organizational threat to the United States ." You might wonder why Johnny Sutton in the exercise of his prosecutorial discretion chose to pursue this case so viciously and with so much favor to a drug trafficker. It almost smacks of the kind of corruption found in third world countries, not the United States. But you won't point these things out. It would not be politically expedient to do so.

By the way, just so there is no confusion, I am a registered Democrat who believes strongly in immigration reform. I just believe that justice for the individual against a powerful government agency requires that people stand up even when it is not politically expedient to do so. I would have thought that others, both democrats and republicans, would think so as well. Unfortunately very few have and I find myself agreeing with people who's politics I generally abhor.