U.S. Drops Charges in PLO Deportation Case

William B. Odenkrantz, regional counsel for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, was quoted in The Times as saying of a group of seven Palestinians and a Kenyan national whom his agency seeks to deport, “they’re PFLP.” He ascribed to them a potential for violence and asked, “Do we wait for people to blow up the federal building?”

It is despicable of Odenkrantz to bring to the media the utterly unsubstantiated charge that the eight are members of the PFLP on the very day that his agency withdrew that charge against six of them in a conference with the immigration judge.

To proceed in court, the INS needs evidence that it does not have. To taint these people in the media, to injure them and perhaps endanger them here and abroad, Odenkrantz needs only his own reckless and ruthless words.

Federal officials have acknowledged that after 3 1/2 years of surveillance, they have no evidence that any of the eight has engaged in criminal conduct or intended to do so. If Odenkrantz actually had such evidence, he would presumably have taken steps to see that it reached a criminal court rather than the press.

The only discernable motivation for his choice of the media as the arena in which to make this baseless allegation is that he appears to be intent upon so alarming the public about imminent devastation in downtown Los Angeles that violations of the civil liberties of the eight will be countenanced in the ensuing hysteria.

The government’s underestimation of the degree to which the public esteems the First Amendment and common sense has been a premise of its misconduct of this case from the outset.

DAN STORMER

Los Angeles

Stormer is the lead counsel for the eight accused in the deportation case.