Lawyers cast doubt

on court findings

The American Civil Liberties Union produced a disturbing and uneven report on the murder of President Remeliik and the subseqaent trials of the three accused assassins.

The ACLU is an old liberal American institution run by lawyers who seek to ensure protection for unpopular and powerless minorities.

They stood up for blacks threatened by Ku Klux Klan lynch mobs in the thirties, objected to the forced relocation of the American Japanese population im mediately after Pearl Harbor, defended the victims of the Joe McCarthy hysteria and, more recently, prevented a small town outside Chicago from outlawing a parade mounted by a handful of native-born American Nazis.

Their interest in events in Palau and their point of view on the trials fits with their mainland role and history.

The report is strongest where it casts doubt on the weight of evidence used to convict the three accused.

Their point that the three are free on bail pending appeals against their convictions carries much weight on the mainland where people charged with shooting presidents tend to remain in jail even during the appeal process.

It is weaker when it seeks to draw larger conclusions, and it shows a lack of knowledge of island conditions and a perhaps over-generous faith in the abilities of their governments.

Their remarking on the fact that the three were tried without benefit of jury is such an example: trial by jury is an old Anglo-Saxon principle that has not spread to all of America’s possessions or ex-possessions.

And many people will have to swallow hard at least a couple of times while reading the suggestion that the mainland government encouraged Palau’s leaders into a too expensive power plant contract in order to bankrupt the island state so the US could keep it dependent on the flow of compact dollars.

The implied message is that island governments only make such mistakes and experience such temptations when encouraged by Uncle Sam. It does not show that the US interest in the islands as a military base, the murder and the power plant fiasco are necessarily linked. from David S. North in Washington.