FACES AND PLACES: Another OSI casualty (12/07/97)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Another OSI casualty

If it were not for the Demjanjuk debacle, Gilbert Merritt would probably be a U.S. Supreme Court justice. So believes Yossi Melman, who traced the career of the judge for a recent article in Ha'aretz, a respected Israeli newspaper.

Judge Merritt was the federal judge who, in April 1985, upheld the ruling that John Demjanjuk was "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka. At the time, his decision was praised by major Jewish organizations.

When the Israeli Supreme Court found Mr. Demjanjuk innocent of the charges brought against him, Judge Merritt regretted his earlier judgment. He quickly came to believe he had been duped; he denounced the U.S. Department of Justice, particularly the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) which, he argued, "had perpetrated fraud upon the court," the Israeli Foreign Ministry and various Jewish organizations, all of whom had insisted (and still insist) that John Demjanjuk was guilty.

Big mistake! Judge Merritt's change of heart was severely criticized by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), the very organizations that had praised him earlier. Overnight Judge Merritt went from hero to pariah in the eyes of the Jewish nomenklatura.

Some believe that up until then, Judge Merritt, a liberal Democrat, was on a fast track to the Supreme Court. He has a Harvard law degree, extensive experience and a sterling judicial and civic record. That didn't matter. The ADL, the WJC and the SWC lobbied the White House and Congress against any thought of his elevation to the Supreme Court. "They hinted that Merritt was anti-Semitic," according to the Ha'aretz article, "and was not suited for the position of the Supreme Court. President Clinton buckled under to the pressure of the Jewish lobby and opted to appoint Ruth Ginsburg to the post four years ago."

As anyone familiar with the Demjanjuk case now knows full well, back in the 1980s, the OSI, fully funded by American taxpayers, was under great congressional pressure to produce results. Criticized for being inefficient and inept, OSI officials were told to produce results or lose their funding. In the words of Allan Ryan, then the director of the OSI, during a 1981 interview with an Alabama newspaper: "It [Demjanjuk] was one of the first cases we tried, and we were very much on the line. If we had lost that case, we probably would have had a very short lifespan." It is ironic that in his Ukrainophobic book "Quiet Neighbors," Mr. Ryan condemns John Demjanjuk as a person who "when his own security and well being was threatened, had shown no feeling for the lives of others." At the time Mr. Ryan knew that his statement was a lie. In reality, it was the OSI that had conspired to shorten Mr. Demjanjuk's life in order to lengthen its own. OSI officials concealed documents exonerating Mr. Demjanjuk for four years!

Despite the scurrilous attacks he has had to endure, Judge Merritt is unrepentant. During his interview with Ha'aretz, Judge Merritt noted: "Today we know that they - the OSI, the prosecution in the case and the State Department - lied through their teeth. Even when they knew without a doubt that Demjanjuk was not 'Ivan the Terrible,' they hid the information from us." Judge Merritt has since demanded an investigation of the OSI, especially Mr. Ryan, on suspicion of violating Mr. Demjanjuk's civil rights. "My moral and legal obligation, as a human being and as a judge, is to the Constitution and to the rule of law," he said. "This is also the obligation of the officials in Washington." His request for an investigation is still pending.

Amazingly, Judge Merritt praises Michael Shaked, the prosecutor in the Israeli show trial of John Demjanjuk, whom he considers to be "a noble man with the highest of principles, quite unlike our own liars." He credits Mr. Shaked with having doubts about the evidence early in the trial. It was these doubts, he believes, that eventually led to Mr. Demjanjuk's freedom.

Yoram Sheftel, the Israeli attorney who defended John Demjanjuk, has a different opinion of Michael Shaked. "Shaked's argument [before the Israeli Supreme Court] brought the prosecution to a nadir, in terms of both professional honesty and the quality of the argument expected from a public prosecutor in the Supreme Court," writes Mr. Sheftel in his book "Defending Ivan the Terrible: The Conspiracy to Convict John Demjanjuk." He writes: "The argument that Shaked made in the Supreme Court, at the behest of his superiors, was no more than a sordid attempt to commit cold-blooded judicial murder. The intended victim was Demjanjuk; the subterfuge the prosecution used to carry out its evil scheme was the argument, which it knew to be false that Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible; the weapon was not a pistol or a knife, but Shaked's tongue." Shaked did not restrict his argument to Treblinka. He now argued that John Demjanjuk was at Sobibor, despite the fact that there were no witnesses from Sobibor who could identify him, nor any document of any kind indicting that Mr. Demjanjuk had been there.

The Israeli Supreme Court praised the lower court for its diligence, but overuled its verdict adding, as if to justify Mr. Demjanjuk's seven-and-a-half-year incarceration, that he had been an SS camp guard trained at Trawniki - this despite the fact that there was no evidence that he had ever been there or at any other Nazi death camp.

One would think that, given the years of public interest in the Demjanjuk case, the TV commentaries, the hundreds of articles and newspaper stories, the "60 Minutes" broadcast, as well as the condemnations of Ukrainian Americans who defended John Demjanjuk, that America's mass media would be more interested in the aftermath of the trial. If nothing else, one might have expected that Mr. Sheftel's book about the Israeli show trial would become a best seller. Nothing of the kind. Mr. Sheftel did a book tour a while back, spoke on a few obscure radio shows, and that was that. No Larry King. No "60 Minutes." Not even a significant book review. On the contrary, his book was ignored and is now practically unavailable.

Fortunately, the Ukrainian American Justice Committee has a few copies left. Interested parties can order one from: UAJC, 107 Ilehamwood Drive, DeKalb, IL 60115. Enclose a check for $40 plus $2.50 shipping and handling.

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: [email protected]

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