Posted on 06/05/2002 6:53:39 AM PDT by alloysteel
Did you miss that headline in the news last week? Well, that's because no one ran it.
Ingmar Guandique, a violent Salvadoran national who is serving a 10-year sentence for assaulting two female joggers in Washington's Rock Creek Park last year, was interrogated recently as part of the investigation into the intern murder mystery. But in my review of all 115 news items archived in the Lexis-Nexis database that mention Guandique in connection with the Levy case, not a single story referred to his status as a criminal illegal alien.
The Associated Press described Guandique merely as an "immigrant;" the New York Times called him a "Washington man." On the basic questions of where Guandique came from, how he got here, and how he managed to stay, the Washington Post-the mainstream media giant closest to the scene of Guandique's crimes- has printed nothing at all.
Though Guandique reportedly passed lie detector tests, he remains an unofficial person of interest in the Levy case. D.C. police chief Charles Ramsey says the media is making too big a deal of Guandique. Quite the contrary. The glaring omission of Guandique's immigration status from the mainstream media's no-stone-unturned Levy coverage is a newsworthy act of negligence as the nation grapples with lax borders and national (in)security.
Only one media outlet, the invaluable Washington, D.C.-based newsweekly Human Events, has published the pertinent facts. Editor Terry Jeffrey reported this week that not only is Guandique an illegal alien, but also that the INS had given him a green light to work in the country legally while his application for "Temporary Protected Status (TPS)" was pending. Guandique's TPS application was eventually denied, but not before he committed two brutal attacks in the same park where Chandra Levy's body was found.
TPS is basically a bad-weather pass into the U.S. Whenever a natural disaster strikes, we allow thousands of foreigners to stay here-mostly from Latin America-while their homelands supposedly recover. But the INS doesn't track down TPS beneficiaries once their status expires. Worse, INS chief James Ziglar recently remarked during a trip to the Mexican border that it would be neither "reasonable" nor "practical" to deport millions of illegal aliens who have snuck across the borders, violated their visas, or overstayed on TPS. How many future Guandiques (or Attas or Almihdhars) are among them? Ziglar doesn't seem to care. He's too busy nullifying the immigration laws he's supposed to enforce.
The public deserves informed analysis of whether fraud-ridden immigration programs such as Temporary Protected Status and other various forms of amnesty have come at the expense of our public safety and the national interest. But how can the question be answered if the press never asks?
Instead of hard-nosed analysis, observed author William McGowan at a forum on immigration and media coverage hosted by the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., last week, journalists maintain an "overly romantic" view of the issue. McGowan's penetrating new book, "Coloring The News," documents how political correctness has corrupted coverage of myriad policy issues, including immigration. He noted superficial reporting of airport security and visa screening issues in the pro-illegal alien New York Times before September 11, sympathetic stories on providing driver's licenses to illegal aliens, and the flippant title of a bleeding-heart Times magazine cover piece a few years back: "What Immigration Crisis?"
Another panel member and veteran immigration analyst, Lodi (Calif.) News-Sentinel columnist Joe Guzzardi, reported on the results of a 1,500-article review he conducted for NumbersUSA.com, a grass-roots reform group, to gauge fairness and balance of immigration coverage. "Very few stories met the reporters' definition of fair and balanced," he said. Most news stories are frontloaded with quotes from illegal immigration and open borders advocates, while opposing views are buried and marginalized.
Indeed, most editors still can't even bring themselves to use the term "illegal," preferring the flagrantly biased euphemism, "undocumented."
Questions about the adequacy of immigration news coverage, as the Center for Immigration Studies noted, are longer academic. It's "a matter of life and death." When will the media take off the rose-colored blinders and start reporting the true costs of our continuing, criminal-friendly immigration policies?
I could, if they were fleeing their country of origin because they were behaving like sociopaths there already. And one act of sociopathic behavior in this country is more than enough excuse to summarily dump them at the customs re-entry station of the country they claimed to be their origin.
We really, really have to keep better track of immigrant aliens in this country. Failure to report their location at timely intervals is reason enough to summarily deport any that are caught. And not just to the border posts, but to the capital city of whatever country they came from. The expense to provide air transport for each and every one of them back is far less than the direct and indirect costs of another September Eleven assault on this country.
could you repeat that?
Unfortunately for Levy and others, many on this forum support the flood of illegal aliens into America.
Heck, I'd even take an educated guess and say that Levy's parents support illegals in America.
The Pubbies claim we need them for manual labor, but sadly they overlook the collateral damage they cause.
The America I knew as a young man is dead....
Mary Hartman Mary Hartman
The Crimes and Misdemeanors of Gary Condit
(The writer had a boilerplate story that merely required that he fill in the blank for "criminal illegal alien.")
Illegal Alien Questioned In Chandra Levy Case
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/695122/posts
I am certain that they are going to try to make Guandique the scapegoat. Illegal alien or not, he should not take the fall because the PD is to stupid or dishonest to find the facts.
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