John LeBoutillier
Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2001

Let us quickly examine three cases in the news:

1) Two days ago the New York Times ran the obituary of Robert Treuhaft, a "crusading radical lawyer."

Mr. Treuhaft was a controversial, cause-oriented leftist. He married the writer, Jessica Mitford, and together they joined the Communist Party in the late 1940's. As communists they were denied passports by the U.S. Government.

By 1958 they tired of the Communist Party and left it. Then, in 1964, Mr. Treuhaft was one of four lawyers expelled from Portugal by the fascist government there when he wanted to examine the prison system.

Mr. Treuhaft was an earlier version of William Kunstler and his partner, Ron Kuby.

So, apparently, was the female intern Mr. Treuhaft hired in 1971.

Her name?

Hillary Rodham.

Oh, the 'company you keep'.

2) CIA Director George Tenet - desperate to keep his job - is flying around Southern Asia. And letting the media and the world know about it, too.

He has just been in Pakistan to meet, of all groups, the ISI - the famed Inter-Service Agency. The Pakistani version of the CIA, it is the very intelligence organization that helped create, support, fund and defend the Taliban!

The ISI is an independent agency which is filled with Taliban supporters - Pashtun tribesmen - who saw in that movement a chance to control neighboring Afghanistan. The Pakistani government - a non-elected coup government - is impotent to control ISI.

Tenet should not be meeting with ISI. They are the enemy!

ISI's chief promised Tenet that his agency would help in the 'hunt for Osama.' We should wonder if they will - and what price they extracted from a too-eager-to-please Tenet.

Tenet's conduct as CIA Director has been sloppy and disgraceful - mirroring his mentor, Bill Clinton - throughout this entire affair.

After revealing Johnny Spann's identity and pronouncing him as the "First combat casualty of the War on Terrorism," Tenet then further endangered Spann's widow and children by having the press come to the arrival ceremony for Spann's coffin. Her face has now been splashed on front pages worldwide!

She has been moved to a new location. But why in the world play games with innocent wives and children? Haven't they already lost enough?

Is the ego and career of a power-hungry DC bureaucrat that important?

G.W. Bush better watch out. He might want to remember that we all can be judged by 'the company we keep'.

3) Twenty years ago I was pilloried for calling then-Senator Charles Percy a "wimp" for wanting to recognize the PLO as a legitimate government.

One day on the TODAY SHOW yours truly displayed photographs of infants murdered in Israel by Arafat's PLO thugs. I tried to defend my outspokenness by showing the true stripes of the murdering Arafat.

For another 20 years Arafat has survived - thanks to a misguided belief that he could be a partner in peace. Even President Reagan 'rescued' an embattled Arafat from Beirut in 1983, showing that the anti-Israel State Department had won again.

How could someone - and an organization - dedicated to "driving Israel into the sea" - ever be trusted?

All those touchy-feely foreign policy types have misread Arafat. They never saw him the way he truly is: a disciple of Mao's belief that "power comes from the barrel of a gun."

All of them - in our pathetic State Department, in our media, and on our poisonous campuses - are yet again examples of 'the company you keep'.

They are all partially responsible for the reign of terror and murder that has hit Israel this week.