Neutrality and Justice

"Contrary to the government's assertion, it is by no means self-evident that a person engaged in extra-territorial or resistance activities — even militant activities — is necessarily a threat to the security of the United States. One country's terrorist can often be another country's freedom-fighter."

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It happens that those words were written by one of our wisest federal Judges, John Noonan, who rides the 9th United States appellate circuit. He was deciding, in 2004, an immigration case involving a Sikh militant. We thought of the judge's point as we were ruminating on two current criminal prosecutions on the Coast that are being levied by the Justice Department against individuals who are hardly neutral — they are on our side in a twilight struggle against remnant communist regimes in Indochina.

One, whose opening arguments last week were covered by our Josh Gerstein, involves the trial of a Cambodian American Yasith Chhun, an accountant who was indicted in May 2005 under the Neutrality Act for alleged acts against the government of Cambodia. The charges also included conspiring to kill in a foreign country, to destroy property overseas, and to use a weapon of mass destruction, namely, rocket propelled grenades. Mr. Chhun's defense, our Mr. Gerstein reported Wednesday, is arguing that he was engaged in a noble, if naive, attempt to free his countrymen from a despotic regime and that he had no desire to see anyone killed in the process. The head of the regime against which he plotted, Hun Sen, was, the defense has pointed out, a brigade commander under Pol Pot, one of the worst mass murderers in history.

The second case, which Mr. Gerstein has also been covering, involves the Hmong freedom fighter, Vang Pao, who, with ten other men, was indicted in June at Sacramento on a strikingly similar set of federal charges for their attempts to liberate their homeland of Laos. They were also charged with conspiring to violate the Neutrality Act and conspiring to kill abroad. The Hmong group also faces weapons charges because it allegedly tried to purchase weapons here in America. We have already voiced in these columns our alarm at the case against Vang Pao. In league with our Central Intelligence Agency, he led the Laotian hill tribes in the twilight struggle against the communist conquest of his, and neighboring, countries in Indochina. There are few men alive on the planet today to whom the cause of freedom owes as much as is owed to Vang Pao.

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The issues in these trials, however, go way beyond Vang Pao and Yasith Chhun — to the question of America's traditional role in the world. "At least since 1848, the year of democratic revolutions in Europe," Judge Noonan wrote in the immigration case cited above, "the United States has been a hotbed of sympathy for revolution in other lands, often with emigres to this country organizing moral and material support for their countrymen oppressed by European empires such as those of Austria, Britain and Russia." He cited such famous figures as David Ben Gurion and Nelson Mandela and made a reference to the struggle for Tibet. The jurist issued a call for an evaluation of evidence rather than speculation that couldn't be more important as America regards the freedom-fighters operating against the remnant communist dictators in Indochina.