25 thoughts on “Pakistani made out to be the new Willie Horton”

1. The new Willie Horton? But that would imply he was guilty:

   Governor Michael Dukakis believed that it was “rehabilitative” for prisoners to be allowed to roam the streets unsupervised in what was known as the Prison Furlough Program. That practice was finally outlawed by state legislators on April 28, 1988, after an enormous grassroots petition drive brought the issue before the people. Here are the cold hard facts about Governor Dukakis’ “experiment in justice,” which has received little coverage on campaign news broadcasts: * On June 6, 1986, convicted murderer Willie Horton was released from the Northeastern Correctional Center in Concord. Under state law, he had become eligible for an unguarded, 48-hour furlough. He never came back. * Horton showed up in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on April 3, 1987. Clifford Barnes, 28, heard footsteps in his house and thought his fiancée had returned early from a wedding party. Suddenly Willie Horton stepped out of the shadows with a gun. For the next seven hours, Horton punched, pistol-whipped, and kicked Barnes – and also cut him 22 times across his midsection. * When Barnes’ fiancée Angela returned that evening, Horton gagged her and savagely raped her twice. Horton then stole Barnes’ car, and was later chased by police until captured. * On October 20, 1987, Horton was sentenced in Maryland to two consecutive life terms plus 85 years. The sentencing judge refused to return Horton to Massachusetts, saying, “I’m not prepared to take the chance that Mr. Horton might again be furloughed or otherwise released. This man should never draw a breath of free air again.”

   The whole Willie Horton furor was basically about Bush 1’s “insensitivity” in pointing out that Michael Dukakis supported a furlough program that had enabled Horton to assault, rob, and rape.

2. Michael Dukakis supported a furlough program…

   Most governors support criminal rehab.

3. Point being:

   You are the one slandering Akhtar by comparing him to Willie Horton, if Akhtar is in fact innocent. And while he might not be a terrorist, it seems like he’s an illegal alien. From the article you link:

   In an indictment unsealed this week, Kamran Akhtar was charged with violating federal immigration and naturalization laws and making a false statement. Akhtar, who also goes by Kamran Shaikh, lives in New York City.

   And here:

   The criminal complaint alleges that Kamran Akhtar told immigration agents he entered the country illegally in 1991 at Tijuana, Mexico – an assertion Irfan Akhtar said he had believed was true. Now, he believes his brother came to the country in 1989 on a student visa to attend a university in Texas. He never attended, according to the statement… Kamran Akhtar told his brother that he had two driver’s licenses, one in his name and another using the last name Shaikh, a family name. He also has two Social Security cards and $200,000 saved in various banks accounts. While acknowledging his brother’s illegal immigration status, he said he is hopeful that the criminal charges would be resolved – and that his brother would be cleared of any ties to terrorism.

   So, let’s recap:

   -Two driver’s licenses in different names -Two social security cards -Illegal Alien from Pakistan -$200k in the bank

   Yeah, looks suspicious to me. Even if he’s not a terrorist, he is an illegal alien and should be deported. The 9/11 hijackers were mostly immigration violators from Muslim countries with populations known to be hostile to the US. I don’t particularly want to give the benefit of the doubt to illegal aliens from Muslim countries.

4. You are the one slandering Akhtar by comparing him to Willie Horton

   Look up the phrase ‘made out to be.’

   Even if he’s not a terrorist, he is an illegal alien

   That’s not what Vernon Robinson said, now is it?

5. Most governors support criminal rehab.

   Criminal rehab does not equal allowing convicted murderers on unguarded overnight furloughs. Dukakis had a bizarre, up-is-down mentality – criminals were the victims in his world.

   Anyway, the point is that Horton was a criminal, and comparing the issue to Willie Horton ignores the fact that the media was primarily complaining about an insufficiently PC treatment of race and crime. The long and short of it was that the Republicans were condemned for running an ad against a bad policy that happened to include a member of the group that commits the majority (see Table 43, PDF page 24) of murders in the US. I suppose they would have been better off if they’d picked an Asian female killer to illustrate Dukakis’ disconnect from reality 🙂

   By calling this guy the Pakistani Willie Horton you are signaling that Vernon Robinson was right and that he’s being attacked for PC reasons. Because the Willie Horton scandal was not about facts, but about PC denial.

   That’s not what Vernon Robinson said, now is it?

   Robinson may be wrong, but let’s not lose sight of the facts in our efforts to make Akhtar into an angel. His brother has testified that he is a felon. By all rights he should be deported. The circumstances of his arrest – hundreds of thousand in the bank, videotaping in multiple states, multiple DLs and Social Security cards – were omitted from your account.

   This is almost as bad a guy to hold up as an example of a South Asian innocently persecuted as Sami al-Arian or Maher “Mike” Hawash…both of whom turned out to be terrorists. It’s like gays rallying around Jim McGreevey – not a good idea.

6. By calling this guy the Pakistani Willie Horton you are signaling that… he’s being attacked for PC reasons.

   I suppose we see what we wish to see 🙂

   the Willie Horton scandal was not about facts, but about PC denial.

   Watch the Willie Horton ad. The Bush Sr. campaign took a single horrific incident of recidivism and called it ‘Dukakis on crime.’ It’s classic propaganda. They didn’t make a statistical argument here.

   The circumstances of his arrest… were omitted from your account.

   Most stories I saw concluded he’s basically guilty of overstaying a visa. He’s been in the U.S. for years and has been paying taxes. That’s a common reason why cops get evasive answers, it’s not terrorism, and thus Robinson is outright lying in calling him a terrorist.

7. The Bush Sr. campaign took a single horrific incident of recidivism and called it ‘Dukakis on crime.’ It’s classic propaganda. They didn’t make a statistical argument here.

   But that furlough incident WAS Dukakis’ record on crime. He went to bat for it repeatedly. It was totally fair to hang it around his neck! The guy was such an unrealistic Berkeleyite leftist that he defended furloughs for first degree murderers. Read the rest of the piece I linked:

   * Variations of this story were repeated on several occasions in Massachusetts. Confessed rapist John Zukoski, who had brutally beaten and murdered a 44 year-old woman in 1970, became eligible for furloughs and was eventually paroled in 1986. A few months later he was arrested and indicted yet again for beating and raping a woman. * The Massachusetts inmate furlough program actually began under Governor Francis Sargent in 1972. But in 1976 Governor Dukakis vetoed a bill to ban furloughs for first-degree murderers. It would, he said, “Cut the heart out of inmate rehabilitation.” * The program, in essence, released killers on an “honor system” to see if they would stay out of trouble. On the average, convicts who had been sentenced to “life without parole” spent fewer than 19 years in prison. By March 1987, Dukakis had commuted the sentences of 28 first-degree murderers. * Of over 80 Massachusetts convicts listed as escaped and still at large, only four had actually “escaped.” The rest simply walked away from furloughs, prerelease centers and other minimum-security programs. These convicts included murderers, rapists, armed robbers and drug dealers. * First-degree murderer Armand Therrien was transferred from a medium security prison to a minimum-security one, which made him eligible for a work-release program. He walked off and vanished in December 1987. * When citizens began to protest, Dukakis and his aides defended the program relentlessly. One commissioner stated that furloughs were a “management tool” to help the prisons. Unless a convict had hope of parole, he argued, “we would have a very dangerous population in an already dangerous system.” But, critics wondered, if armed guards can’t control dangerous killers inside locked cells, how are unarmed citizens supposed to deal with them? * It was through the efforts of a grassroots organization, Citizens Against Unsafe Society, that the issue was finally brought before the people. With mounting pressure from his own aides to sign a bill ending the program – for fear that it would hurt his presidential campaign – Dukakis signed the legislation in April of this year.

   As for Akhtar – Robinson would be wrong to call him a terrorist if he had already been released. But given that Maher Hawash and Sami al-Arian had similar calls of “racial profiling” and unjust imprisonment, and similar impassioned testimonies by friends and relatives before the hammer came down, I’ll wait till Akhtar is released before pronouncing him exonerated.

   On the larger point of whether illegal aliens from Mexico are in fact a security threat, Robinson is totally correct:

   WASHINGTON, DC (PRWEB) August 7, 2004 — Senior US counterterrorist and intelligence officials in Washington told Homeland Security Today Magazine in recent days intelligence gleaned as a consequence of the arrest in Texas of alleged Al Qaeda courier Farida Goolam Mohamed Ahmed, and the subsequent unreported capture by the CIA of two operatives of an Al Qaeda cell operating in Mexico for which she was ferrying “instructions” to suspected Al Qaeda members in New York, contributed significantly to the nationÂ’s capital, New York City and New Jersey being put on high alert Sunday.

   The silver lining: this issue may FINALLY get Bush to crack down on illegal immigration rather than giving amnesty to 20 million illegal aliens.

8. Horton is a long-dead horse, but how many convicts who were already slated to be released committed violent crimes on furlough?

   The heavily-used official Bush campaign ad showed convicts passing through a turnstile identified with the furlough program and marching toward viewers, an image juxtaposed with words like kidnapping, rape, murder, falsely implying that hundreds committed such crimes on furloughs during Dukakis’ tenure.

   This is Freudian on your part:

   I’ll wait till Akhtar is released before pronouncing him exonerated.

   In this country, we charge, try and convict before calling people terrorists. Perhaps you should’ve voted for Robinson.

9. In this country, we charge, try and convict before calling people terrorists.

   Please – as if bin Laden isn’t a terrorist till we convict him. Terrorism isn’t a law enforcement operation – it’s a military operation. Law enforcement is useful to a point, but let’s keep in mind that this is a CIA/FBI issue and not just a common criminal or thief.

   What a lot of lefties don’t understand is that the presumption of innocent till proven guilty only holds for a) American citizens and b) domestic incidents.

   Citizens of foreign powers accused of international terrorism are not subject to the protections of the Constitution. They are accused of levying acts of war against the citizens of the US. They don’t get all the nice stuff we have for citizens – because they’re not citizens.

10. Manish, the furlough program was a disaster, and hundreds of prisoners DID escape:

    The Dukakis prison furlough program has proven to be a political embarassment. He insists now that he inherited it from a Republican predecessor; however, during his first term he vetoed a bill to outlaw furloughs for first-degree murderers. There were an average of 388 furloughs a year to killers. Four hundred and twenty-six prisoners, including 11 first degree killers, disappeared on the furlough program according to The Wall Street Journal. One of these murderers, Willie Horton, was convicted of slaying a Lowell, Massachusetts, service-station attendant in 1974. Despite being cited for 11 disciplinary infractions, three of them drug-related, he was given 10 furloughs since his conviction in 1975. On the last furlough in 1987, he went to Maryland where he tied and tortured a man and raped his fiancée.10 Horton was captured and sentenced to two life terms to be served in Maryland. In explaining the sentence, the trial judge said, “With all due respect to … Massachusetts … Horton will never return there. I am not going to take the chance that he will be furloughed or released there.” Horton became a rallying cry for Bay state protestors demanding that the program be ended. Dukakis defended the program by saying, “I think a good, strong, aggressive correctional system requires a well-managed and responsible furlough program.” After irate citizens gathered 70,000 signatures for a referendum to end furloughs for those with life sentences, with opinion polls showing the question passing by a three to one margin, and a revolt in the legislature (which passed a furlough ban by a veto-proof margin), he reluctantly signed the measure. Staunchly against the death penalty, Dukakis vetoed a capital punishment bill during his first term and regularly testifies against the measure before legislative hearings. “I don’t think we’ve had a candidate for President so far who was against the death penalty,” said Griffin Bell, former attorney general for Jimmy Carter.

    Dukakis wasn’t just misguided – he was actively evil. Until the voters revolted, he fought and fought and fought for the rights of murderers, rapists, and robbers to take unguarded overnight furloughs. You can’t get much more soft on crime than that.

11. They don’t get all the nice stuff we have for citizens

    1. Legally incorrect. To oversimplify a bit, unless someone is actually captured on a battlefield, the courts apply U.S. law to aliens within the U.S.

    That Ashcroft is trying to change precedent and throw the accused into a legal black hole is a separate issue. Note that the Supreme Court b*-slapped him on this.

    1. Factually incorrect. Robinson says Akhtar is a terrorist. Law enforcement says that in fact, Akhtar is most probably not a terrorist. Thus, Robinson’s ad is known in technical terms as a ‘lie.’

    hundreds of prisoners DID escape

    Sir, I’m paying for this site 🙂 Please just answer the question: how many convicts (who were already slated to be released) committed violent crimes on furlough?

    And how does that rate compare to the failed-to-report-to-parole-officer rate?

12. Jon Breen, the paper’s executive editor and the debate moderator, told the engineer to turn off Mr. Reagan’s microphone – and the moment had arrived.

    “Mr. Green, I paid for that microphone,” the former actor thundered, referring to the fact that his campaign had agreed to underwrite the event.

    Not only did he botch the moderator’s name, but he also borrowed the line from State of the Union, in which Spencer Tracy railed against special interests. Few if any of us realized the origin of the line in the heat of the moment, but the result was a classic Reagan show of strength.

    🙂

    (sorry, couldn’t resist. manish inspired me, with the whole “Sir, I’m paying for this site.”)

13. Manish:

    Sir, I’m paying for this site 🙂 Please just answer the question: how many convicts (who were already slated to be released) committed violent crimes on furlough?

    We are talking about 428 escaped felons. 11 of them were first degree murderers. Are you seriously telling me that it’s only a problem if they didn’t kill another person when they get out of jail?

    You’re moving the goalposts. Now it’s only if they committed a violent crime outside – escaping from prison is a felony, but it doesn’t count. The point is that the furlough program allowed hundreds of felons back onto the streets before they served their time.

    You can’t salvage that point. Your position boils down to the ridiculous: “Well, ok, he DID let a murderer sentenced to life in prison out on an unguarded furlough. And it wasn’t an isolated case – hundreds of other felons escaped, including 11 more murderers sentenced to life in prison. But that’s not evidence that Dukakis was soft on crime”.

    Puh-lease.

14. Manish:

    Sir, I’m paying for this site 🙂 Please just answer the question: how many convicts (who were already slated to be released) committed violent crimes on furlough?

    We are talking about 428 escaped felons. 11 of them were first degree murderers. Are you seriously telling me that it’s only a problem if they didn’t kill another person when they get out of jail?

    You’re moving the goalposts. Now it’s only if they committed a violent crime outside – escaping from prison is a felony, but it doesn’t count. The point is that the furlough program allowed hundreds of felons back onto the streets before they served their time.

    You can’t salvage that point. Your position boils down to the ridiculous: “Well, ok, he DID let a murderer sentenced to life in prison out on an unguarded furlough. And it wasn’t an isolated case – hundreds of other felons escaped, including 11 more murderers sentenced to life in prison. But that’s not evidence that Dukakis was soft on crime”.

    That isn’t a tenable position.

15. sorry about the double post – i eliminated the excessive sarcasm in the first one, but it posted anyway. my bad.

    i ain’t mad or anything – i just think it’s kind of weird that there are people who claim the furloughs were at all defensible. we are talking about hardened criminals, guys sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, being offered unguarded weekends on the town! How many of them do you think are going to come back to jail? Obviously hundreds of them decided not to…

16. Legally incorrect. To oversimplify a bit, unless someone is actually captured on a battlefield, the courts apply U.S. law to aliens within the U.S. That Ashcroft is trying to change precedent and throw the accused into a legal black hole is a separate issue. Note that the Supreme Court b*-slapped him on this.

    The idea that war is only fought on battlefields is a 20th century concept. There are agents of foreign governments looking to blow up buildings in Manhattan. Treating them like common criminals rather than foreign agents with billions of dollars behind them is not a viable option. The Crips and Al Qaeda are very different organizations with very different purposes. Laws intended for the benefit of US citizens and signatories to the Geneva convention should not be used as weapons by non-uniformed terrorists against US citizens and soldiers. The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

    As for the Supreme Court, they just said that the detainees have to be charged with something, which will likely be in a US military court. They aren’t being released, and the Supreme Court agreed that we had the authority to detain them as enemy combatants:

    The high court supported the U.S. federal government in one important respect, ruling that Congress gave President Bush the authority to seize and hold a U.S. citizen, Louisiana-born Yaser Esam Hamdi, as an alleged enemy combatant. But the court ruled that Hamdi could use American courts to argue that he is being held illegally. (Hamdi case background) Additionally, foreign-born men held at a Navy prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, can also have their day in U.S. courts, the justices said in ruling on a separate case. (Guantanamo case background)

    Btw, Hamdi was a citizen on a technicality – his parents basically engaged in obstetric tourism and were not US citizens or legal immigrants.

    Law enforcement says that in fact, Akhtar is most probably not a terrorist.

    You’re jumping to conclusions. One unnamed cite in NY said he didn’t think he was a terrorist, but Homeland Security definitely hasn’t exonerated him:

    Besides Charlotte, videotapes found in his possession included footage of buildings and transit systems in Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, New Orleans and Austin, Texas, according to a federal criminal complaint filed last week. A high-ranking law enforcement official in New York said investigators there view Kamran Akhtar as a “video buff” with no links to terrorism. Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge on Wednesday said authorities were still studying the tapes.

    Given the suspicious circumstances – $200k in the bank, cash, for an illegal alien? – yeah, I think I’ll wait before declaring this guy a victim of “racism” (via the Horton reference, which itself was much more about PC refusal to accept that some murderers are black than any “racism” on Bush 1’s part.)

17. You’re not moving the argument forward.

    1. Prove there’s any significant difference in recidivism. They were going to be released shortly anyway.

    Here you demonstrate your copy and paste skills from your previous comment.

    AFAIK, there was no significant difference. Every state has parole. Every state has early release. Unless you’re going to pony up some massive tax money, those are facts. Bush I took a single incident of a scary-looking guy with an afro out of context to paint Dukakis as an accomplice to murder.

    1. You can have whatever suspicions you wish. It becomes illegal when you slander someone on TV as being a terrorist before trial and conviction.

    If you’re not going to be responsive, if you yet again paste in the same quote (which is entirely from a Republican site, from political opponents of Dukakis), don’t expect a reply.

18. Dishoom ! Dishoom!

19. And here’s how it turned out: Kamran Akhtar, falsely called a convicted terrorist, has only been charged with visa violations:

    “If there was any terrorism-related activity, the government would have charged him with it,” the defense lawyer said. But there isn’t.” Because he has no criminal record, Miller said, Akhtar likely only face a maximum of six months in prison on the charges…

    (via Half the Sins)

20. Dishoom ! Dishoom!

    holy…i thought only my dad said that…is that like a standard bollywood thing?

21. A New York court determined Akhtar was in the country illegally in 1998 and ordered him to leave; Akhtar was charged with failing to obey that order. He was charged with making false statements when he told authorities that he was in the United States legally, had a green card and had never been ordered deported. He also was accused of possessing false identification documents — a New York driver’s license and a Social Security card. Because he has no criminal record, Miller said, Akhtar likely only face a maximum of six months in prison on the charges, which carry a maximum sentence of 33 years.

    This guy was an illegal alien and a multiple felon, with all kinds of false IDs, a videotape of US landmarks, and hundreds of thousands in cash in the bank. He defied an order from a federal judge to leave the country 6 years ago. Yet you call that a technicality of “visa violations”, as if it was a matter of him missing a stamp on his passport or something.

    (perhaps this is why you’re so blase about Dukakis letting hundreds of felons escape…defining deviancy down…)

    It turns out that they’re letting him off unbelievably easy when they could have tossed him into jail for 3 decades plus. Not exactly an innocent guy.

22. You’re right GC. All candidates ought to say about people who came here illegally to work, and possess fraudulent papers, that they are here to kill you. That’s not a leap for a candidate at all.

23. GC: You don’t seem interested in due process, only in a specific case. You seem like a bright guy– I’m not sure why you’re defending the criminal system used by communists.

    This guy was an illegal alien and a multiple felon

    Cite and severity of crime? Google shows nothing about him being a felon. First you claim he was a felon, then you claim he was a multiple felon, in the next post I expect you’re going to claim him to be Goebbels.

    and hundreds of thousands in cash in the bank.

    From Middletown Journal:

    For the past fifteen years, Kamran Akhtar has socked away money, hoping to one day buy a house for his wife and three children, ages 5, 4 and 1, his brother said…
    
    With that application pending, Akhtar worked up to 19 hours a day and lived in apartments with as many as eight roommates, his brother said.
    
    “He was living the life of a pig. He worked hard because America was a dream,” Irfan Akhtar said. “He wanted to be an American.”

    GC continues:

    you’re so blase about Dukakis letting hundreds of felons escape

    Sure thing. I’ll eliminate the entire parole system if you’ll pay for it.

    they’re letting him off unbelievably easy when they could have tossed him into jail for 3 decades plus

    You’d love France. They’d be happy to mete out the kind of ‘justice’ you describe.

24. Ok, I don’t know enough about the case to know if this whole terrorism angle is way out of line. I sincerely hope he is not being railroaded by the system. It does seem silly to say he was ‘here to kill you’. Due process is important. But if in due process (is that how you lawyers use that term 🙂 ) he was found to be here illegally, well, shouldn’t there be consequences for that particular crime?

    If he was here illegally, why wasn’t he deported? I’m sorry, but why should I have sympathy for someone who jumps the line? People in my family waited for years and years to get proper immigration papers to the US. Is letting illegals stay fair to the people who play by the rules? The system is silly as it is now: just get in somehow and then get your green card anyway you can (like my ex did by marrying me. Charming, eh?) I think it would be much better to have a streamlined and better functioning system, so that people can come here legally and we don’t create this second class culture of illegals who come here and wink-wink, nudge-nudge, become legal. It is the worst possible system. We know we have lots of illegals and then we sporadically and belatedly enforce the immigration rules. Streamline the system and then treat everyone the same who breaks the rules.

25. he was found to be here illegally, well, shouldn’t there be consequences for that particular crime?

    I absolutely agree. Deporting a non-asylum visa violator is the right thing to do.

    Calling him a terrorist who’s here to kill you in a campaign ad is just asinine fear-mongering, emotional manipulation for political advantage.