Should OSI’s mission include more than Nazi-hunting?

WASHINGTON -- Twenty years ago, the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations was created to hunt down Nazis and their collaborators who had slipped into the United States after World War II.

But now, OSI director Eli Rosenbaum and his staff may receive an additional mission: to hunt down suspects wanted in the torture and genocide perpetrated in such places as Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo.

Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Herbert Kohl (D-Wis.) introduced legislation earlier this month that seeks to expand OSI's mandate to allow its lawyers and investigators to prosecute and remove from the country any alien -- not just those involved in Nazi-era crimes -- who participated in torture and genocide abroad.

The legislation also calls for a boost in OSI's funding to allow it to take on the additional work while ensuring that it is able to fulfill its current mission.

"We waited too long after the last world war to focus prosecutorial resources and attention on Nazi war criminals who entered this country on false pretenses," Leahy said in introducing the Anti-Atrocity Alien Deportation Act.

"We should not repeat that mistake for other aliens who engaged in human-rights abuses before coming to the United States."

Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced the legislation in part because of reports that a Bosnian Serb suspected of serving in a paramilitary unit accused of atrocities in the former Yugoslavia is currently living near Burlington, Vt.

Leahy's office said the story of Zijad Music, who has denied the charges which are being investigated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, is not an isolated case.

The senator's office points out that the Center for Justice and Accountability, a human-rights group based in San Francisco, has identified close to 60 people living in the United States who are suspected of human-rights violations in places such as El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti and Yugoslavia.

Leahy wants that OSI, which has stripped 63 Nazis of their U.S. citizenship and has removed 52 of them from the country, to hunt down these latter-day human-rights violators.

"The success of OSI in hunting Nazi war criminals demonstrates the effectiveness of centralized resources and expertise in these cases," Leahy said. "OSI has worked, and it is time to update its mission."

Neal Sher, OSI's director from 1982 to 1994, said it is "an excellent idea" to expand the office's mission to include modern-day war criminals.

"There is no other office suited to do that," Sher said.

The Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee support the bill.

Stacy Burdett, the ADL's assistant director of government and national affairs, has consulted with Leahy's staff on the legislation.

"There was always the understanding that OSI had a finite mission just by the virtue of the passage of time. Eli's basic formula for catching people and deporting people works," she said, adding that OSI's expertise can be applied to these other cases.

Although Burdett said she does not believe the bill will be controversial, problems could arise when Congress is asked to find more money for OSI's budget.

Rosenbaum would not comment on the legislation, saying it is under review by the Justice Department. However, he indicated that he still has his hands full with Holocaust-era cases.

"Certainly our World War II work -- of biological necessity -- will come to an end," he said. "At the moment, we are swamped with that work. And even if we filed no additional World War II cases, it would take at least five to seven years to complete the litigation of the cases in court now."

Rosenbaum, who has nearly 20 cases in litigation and expects to file several more cases soon, is currently investigating 250 people. He is well aware that time is running out.

"We lose suspects to the grim reaper. That doesn't trouble me terribly. To borrow from the old Hebrew National ad, their cases have been referred to a lower authority. Tragically, we also lose witnesses; the mortality of the survivors is more in evidence."

Still, Rosenbaum adds that "we have conceded nothing to the grim reaper in this race. We are racing the clock, but our goal is to bring these cases as quickly as we responsibly can."

After devoting much of his resources, staff and time during the last two years to investigating the fate of Holocaust-era assets for two massive U.S. reports, Rosenbaum has been able to refocus his staff of nearly 30 on its primary work in recent months.

Since May, the OSI has removed from the country three men who served in various units of the Nazi-controlled Lithuanian police. And last month, a federal judge in St. Louis revoked the citizenship of Romanian-born Michael Negele, 79, a retired aircraft worker. Negele served in the SS Death's Head Guard Battalion as a guard of civilian prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin and at the Theresienstadt Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.

Rosenbaum and the OSI also are going after John Demjanjuk again.

Demjanjuk, 79, a retired auto worker from Cleveland, was extradited to Israel in 1986, convicted of crimes against humanity by an Israeli court and sentenced to death for being "Ivan the Terrible," a brutal gas-chamber operator at the Treblinka extermination camp.

However, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that there was reasonable doubt as to whether Demjanjuk was "Ivan the Terrible" after prosecutors found evidence suggesting that another man could have been the infamous guard.

Although the high court ruled that Demjanjuk was a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp and at the Majdanek and Flossenberg concentration camps, he was released and returned to Cleveland because he was extradited to stand trial on charges that he was "Ivan the Terrible."

While Rosenbaum would not comment on the case, a press release announcing the refiling of the denaturalization case against Demjanjuk accused him of being a guard at those camps and of being a member of the SS-run "Trawniki" unit that participated in the mass killing of Jews. Throughout the court proceedings, Demjanjuk has denied serving as a guard at any death or concentration camp.

Unlike Demjanjuk, who was put on trial in Israel, most of the suspects who are deported or leave the United States after refusing to answer questions about their wartime role are not prosecuted.

"Europe generally has abdicated its legal and its moral responsibility to pursue justice in these cases...years ago," Rosenbaum said.

He noted that there has not been a Nazi war-crimes trial in Austria since the early 1970s and that in Germany, where many Nazi war criminals still remain, officials have not made it a priority to go after them.