Mock Trial of President Bush for War Crimes

Almost never.

NOTHING is more important than assuring that future generations are not provided with a mediocre education and instead spoon-fed anti-western, anti-American and anti-British propaganda by a radical clique of so-called "educators".

Also, stopping attempts by the far left to influence foreign policy by propagandizing outrageous opinions would seem significant to me.

You have it right Major, and this is why the future of our great Republic is uncertain.

The only way to change this problem is to legislate a set of National laws for teachers, which includes, penalties for treason.

Ops4 God Bless America!

One of the kids from the mock trial called Rush's show & spoke to guest host Roger Hedgecock. The kid was a Liberatarian & was supposed to be defending the prez, but he couldn't understand Roger's disagreements with the entire trial. BTW, I live in Morris County.

That was the good news...here's an article from the main Morris County, NJ newspaper:

Mock Bush trial example of precious freedom

PARSIPPANY -- Students who showed up at Thursday's board of education meeting planned to defend their classroom project and their teacher from what they figured might be some angry people. Some critics called the project -- a mock trial of President Bush for alleged war crimes -- anti-American. The Morris County freeholders passed a resolution saying it was contrary to our national interests.

One of the freeholders even said something about loose lips sinking ships when the subject was a Parsippany High School class project. Some national media pundits suggested that the students somehow were being led astray by their teacher, Joseph Kyle. Some people who never talked to any of the students, who never talked to the teacher or to any school administrators, were talking about loose lips.

So students had been learning lessons beyond the classroom.

"We learned that the media is important for democracy, but that there is a side of it more directed toward entertainment," said one of the students, Catherine Galdun.

They learned that complex issues sometimes get boiled down to sound bites. They learned that the nation has become so polarized that you either are on one side or the other when it comes to some issues. They learned that the term "war crimes" makes some people think about Nazi Germany and genocide or Yugoslavia and ethnic cleansing or Rwanda and mass murder -- even though it's also applied to much less serious crimes, such as the illegal transfer of prisoners of war.

So on Thursday, they were given a chance to talk to the school board and the public. They praised their teacher. They talked about what they had learned.

"Why can something as free, as democratic and American as this have anything but praise for it?" said Kevin Schultz, one of the students, and many of the nearly 200 people in attendance got up to cheer.

For more than a week, some people seemed to be saying that the project was a little too free, that it went too far. Those voices were quiet on Thursday night, perhaps because public comment was held until the end of the meeting.

Frank Calabria, the board member who criticized the project, did not speak when board members were given a turn to say something. So much for debate on this night. One critic who did say something was praising students by the time they finished talking.

"You can run my next campaign," Parsippany Councilman Jamie Barberio said to Schultz. He added that he was impressed by the students but still didn't like the idea of putting Bush on trial during wartime.

That was far different from the tone of the debate for the past week. Some people had been upset by the term "war crimes," and one man called the Daily Record to leave a message saying that Kyle seemed to be comparing Bush with Adolf Hitler.

"Those are signal reactions, people responding emotionally rather than intellectually," Robert Perlett, Parsippany's board of education president, said the other day in support of the project.

"If we are selling our brand of democracy across the world, we better be practicing it."

Kyle, who did not attend Thursday's meeting, earlier said he plans to have his students analyze the media's response to the project. It would make a good First Amendment project. He said his biggest fear is that some other teacher might hesitate to take a chance, might look at what happened to him and decide that no project is worth this kind of national attention, not to mention a condemnation by the county government.

The freeholders might want to think again about the message they sent this week. It's one thing to make personal statements about what had become a national story. Their joint resolution -- only Cecilia Laureys voted against it -- might have a chilling effect on the next teacher who wants to tackle a controversial subject.

"Obviously, there are a lot of strong feelings," Kyle said.

Maybe he should have known that this project, once people found out about it, would get this kind of attention. He should have known that the term war crimes comes with certain images.

Freeholder John Inglesino suggested that a mock congressional hearing might have been a better idea. But it's worth noting that, for the most part, Kyle's students were not asking questions during their mock trial that haven't been asked before by politicians and media pundits. They were supposed to be thinking about moral choices made during wartime. They were examining the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, which led to courts-martial, and asking whether high-ranking officials knew about that abuse.

Ravi Upadhyaya, one of the students, played the part of Paul Bremer, the former head of the U.S.-led occupation government in Iraq. He testified during the mock trial that no one told him about prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. He repeated what he learned doing research. That was the point of the project, he said, to look at both sides of issues. He said the teacher, whatever his political views, asked his students to think for themselves.

"He encourages questioning different sides," Upadhyaya said.

There is nothing wrong with debating the way we are waging the war on terrorism. Italian prosecutors reportedly are preparing to put CIA agents on trial in absentia for allegedly kidnapping a Muslim cleric off the streets of Milan and shipping him to Egypt, where he says he was tortured. A German Lebanese man says he was kidnapped and taken to Afghanistan, where he allegedly was abused while being interrogated about terrorism. It is no secret that some nations' intelligence agencies have been accused of violating other nations' laws. We are a moral nation, but even the most moral nations sometimes face tough choices during wartime.

We should be talking about those choices, not stifling debate.

Some people seemed to forget that this was just a high school class project, an exercise designed to get students thinking about real issues. The students were not holding a genocide trial. They were examining allegations about the treatment of prisoners made even by some of our allies. They were looking at the military's use of depleted uranium. They weren't saying that Bush knew what happened at Abu Ghraib, but were examining whether that was possible. They were thinking.

Then their project became national news, and a lot of adults weighed in about what they thought was going on in the classroom. Local politicians made a statement about what is appropriate for a high school class project. That is the lesson that students might take from all of this -- that even in a nation that treasures free speech, someone might want to take it away, which is what makes it so precious.

That newspaper, I believe, is an organ of the Gannett Press.

It is a very liberal, left-wing pro-Democratic newspaper which edits conservative letters to the editor. The Gannett Press controls a entire string of newspapers all over the world and even "U.S.A. Today" is one of their "products".

Any rational person who looks at what this teacher was doing, views the Freeholder resolution, and then reads this editorial can only conclude that the papers' defense of this teacher is pure sophistry.

There is a continual ongoing problem in this country involving the steady radicalization of the educational profession by individuals with a decided left-wing bent. They are using their position to spread their personal views on a whole host of social issues and bend the minds of the young towaards their own way of thinking. In the past this activity was confined to colleges and universities, but now it has filtered down to high schools and grammar schools.

What went on in Parsippany was not an academic exercise. It was an exercise in treason and propaganda. And the frighting thing about it is it merely one exposed tip of a monstrous iceberg which represents a good deal of the educational organisation in the west.

This teacher knew very well what he was doing. Having a debate on the merits of the war and America's involvemetn in it is a perfectly good exercise in civics. Implying the President is guilty of "war crimes" is a gross distortion of reality - but reality has very little to do with the thinking of academics in today's world.

Recently there was another case in the western U.S. involving a teacher who compared Bush to Hitler, the American flag to a swastika, and the State of the Union Adress to a Nurmeberg speech. This is not education. Nor is it merely treason. Its a exercise which demostrates that that individual teacher's connection with reality is so tenuous that he is unfit to educate the youth of this nation - or any other.

Yet his school has aparently backed down and permitted him to return to teaching.

The only thing necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.

Morris County leans Republican. The newspaper, The Daily Record, leans left editorially, but the Star-Ledger is even worse.

The Daily Record is the Gannett Organ. But you are right -they are both bad and don't refflect the political views of the majority of the residents of northwestern New Jersey.

I view the Gannett Organ as the worst as they are not confined to promulgating their propaganda to New Jersey. They spread it world-wide.

You can contact the Morris County Board of Chosen Freeholders via weblink at http://www.co.morris.nj.us/
to express your support.

The contact link is on the top page of the website. It sends a message to the County Public Information Officer, Joseph Garifo.

The Freeholder who directed adoption of the above resolution was a John Ingelsino of Rockaway Township, New Jersey.