LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

God and Country

At the Bible Institute where I teach in Larimore, North Dakota, THE NEW AMERICAN is well read and passes through many hands. It is our desire to train young men to be faithful to the Bible and to the Constitution. We believe both go hand and hand.

Recently, THE NEW AMERICAN has proven again your faithfulness to true constitutional principles. An example is the August 13th issue on President George W. Bush ("The Real Bush Record" by Gary Benoit) and William F. Buckley ("The Pied Pipers of Neoconservatism" by John F. McManus). The article by William Norman Grigg on "The UN Disarmament Campaign" is also well done.

You are doing outstanding work. The August 13th issue was one of the finest editions in a time of great need for our country. May God continue to bless your good work.

GORDON SILcox

Larimore, North Dakota

In Defense of the KLA 

Your article suggesting that I am shilling for the KLA, which you describe as a bunch of drug dealing gangsters, is -- let us say -- very imaginative (see our "Insider Report" item entitled "Rohrabacher Shills for the KLA," September 24th issue, page 6). Have there been criminal elements in the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army]? Yes. Do they dominate that resistance organization? No. With the logic of THE NEW AMERICAN, back in the 1980s we should never have supported the freedom fighters in various parts of the world who were fighting the Soviet Union.

The central fact is that the overwhelming majority of people living in Kosovo want to be free of Serb domination. The KLA, made up of good guys and bad guys, fought Milosevic, Serb strongman and Europe's last blood-sucking Stalinist. To quote a seven-year-old report on the nature of the KLA, as your article did, is ridiculous, especially when your article didn't mention the genocidal war of suppression recently committed by Milosevic's Stalinist Serb regime.

Finally, yes, even Albanian Muslims, when they are in the vast majority, have the right through the democratic ballot to elect their leaders and control their own destinies, even if some of them are bad guys. And when people fight for this right, even if they are a mix of good and bad guys, we should sympathize with, if not support, those seeking a representative government.

DANA ROHRABACHER

Member of Congress

THE NEW AMERICAN agrees with John Quincy Adams that America "is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." In his justly famous Independence Day 1821 speech to Congress, Adams warned that America must not "go abroad in search of monsters to destroy"; by ignoring this wise advice, we have given some of those monsters the ability to attack our own homeland.

Rep. Rohrabacher's letter was dated September 19th, meaning that it was written after the devastating Black Tuesday attack. The chief suspect in that crime, former Afghan Mujahideen leader Osama bin Laden, is one of the "freedom fighters" extolled by the congressman in his letter. We sincerely hope that this fact would prompt the congressman to reassess his support for bin Laden's KLA comrades.

New York Times Balkans correspondent Chris Hedges describes the KLA's leadership as a mix of "die-hard Marxist-Leninists" and "descendants of the fascist militias" of World War II. We would be indebted to Congressman Rohrabacher if he would clarify the distribution of "good guys" and "bad guys" within that unsavory assortment. Nor has the KLA abandoned its criminal nature: In congressional testimony offered last December, Ralf Mutschke of Interpol described in-depth the continuing role played by the KLA in heroin trafficking, forced prostitution, and other forms of organized crime. Both Mutschke and terrorism analyst Yossef Bodansky, author of the definitive biography of Osama bin Laden, have described extensive links between bin Laden and the KLA.

Rohrabacher's references to the Albanian "majority" in Kosovo are offered without acknowledging that the majority in question was created, in large measure, through illegal immigration from the south. This is a curious omission, given that the congressman represents a district in California, a state under siege by illegal immigration from Mexico.

While THE NEW AMERICAN holds both Milosevic and the KLA in contempt, we must point out a crucial difference between them: Milosevic was a corrupt, bloodstained, Marxist thug who posed no conceivable threat to our nation; the KLA are corrupt, bloodstained Marxist thugs with ties to a terrorist network that just killed some five thousand Americans. Congressman Rohrabacher's constituents should demand that he explain his support for the narco-terrorist KM.