by Jerome R. Corsi  http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=18721
Posted Jan 02, 2007

Film critic and talk show host Michael Medved has decided to put in print on Townhall.com the attack he has frequently broadcast on radio against those of us who are opposing the North American integration being pursued by the Bush Administration activity under the auspices of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America.

Without specifying exactly whom he is attacking, Medved uses his Townhall.com piece to launch into an emotionally charged diatribe against what he calls “a shameless collection of lunatics and losers; crooks, cranks, demagogues, and opportunists” who are whipping up a “mounting hysteria over the looming menace of a ‘North American Union.’” Medved then proceeds to characterize in equally emotionally charged language the argument as “a secret master plan to join the U.S., Canada and Mexico in one big super-state and then to replace the good old Yankee dollar with a worthless new currency called ‘The Amero.’” He further charges that criticism of the Trans-Texas Corridor is another “delusion” that “involves the construction of a ‘Monster Highway’ some sixteen lanes wide through Texas and the Great Plains, connecting the two nations on either side of the border for some nefarious but never-explained purpose.”

Serious readers for centuries are alert to recognize that ad hominem attacks generally mask an inability to counter an argument on logical or evidentiary grounds. In the days of Lenin, communist agitators took the ad hominem attack to a new level, perfecting techniques to discredit their opponents with the intent to discourage the public from listening to arguments that were serious and potentially fatal criticisms of communism. Medved appears to be taking the advice of the radical socialist activist Saul D. Alinsky, who articulated on page 128 of his 1971 book “Rules for Radicals” his rule No. 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”

Yet, from personal experience I know that judged on facts Medved has been found lacking. Medved has attacked me on his radio show over articles I have written on these subjects, but when Medved charged that I am anti-Semitic, I responded. I emailed Medved and in a subsequent phone call I explained to him that in my 25-year financial services career I created two mutual funds for the state of Israel, one with Bankers Trust and the other with New England Funds, both with the endorsement of B’nai B’rith. After writing “Atomic Iran,” I was invited to Israel to address the Knesset, which I did in June 2005. I asked Medved why he considered me anti-Semitic, especially when in Jerusalem I am widely regarded as a friend to Israel. I invited Medved perhaps to do some research of his own before going on the record against me, rather than simply believing one or more of the obvious attack pieces that have been circulated on the Internet by leftist apologists since I co-authored “Unfit for Command.”

Studying the tone of Medved’s recent piece in Townhall.com, I was reminded of the abuse my co-author John O’Neill suffered on Oct. 22, 2004, when MSNBC senior political analyst Lawrence O’Donnell began screaming “Liar! Liar!” at O’Neill during an appearance on “Scarborough Country.” Reading the transcript of that show, O’Donnell appeared to have lost his composure when he was unable to refute O’Neill’s defense of what we wrote in “Unfit for Command.” Similarly, Medved has reduced himself to spewing forth various strings of derogatory language boldly proclaiming, for instance, that “there’s no reason at all to believe in the ludicrous, childish, ill-informed, manipulative, brain dead fantasies about a North American Union.”

Who then, besides myself, are those who Medved calls on his readers to treat “with the derision and contempt they so richly deserve” for propounding “this paranoid and groundless frenzy” over the North American Union?

At the top of the list, we will proudly place Phyllis Schlafly, who was one of the first to write extensively about the plan to integrate the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. Lou Dobbs has devoted several segments of his CNN television show, “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” to a discussion of the North American Union. Resulting from a Freedom of Information Act request, Judicial Watch has obtained an extensive set of documents detailing the extensive trilateral working group activity going on in the executive branches of the U.S., Mexico, and Canada under SPP. These documents add to the nearly 1,000 pages of documents I received from SPP detailing the extent to which the SPP trilateral working groups are “integrating” and “harmonizing” our administrative laws and regulations with Mexico and Canada. Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus has joined with Schlafly and me in forming a coalition opposing North American integration.

Rep. Virgil Goode (R.-Va.) introduced H.C.R. 487 in the 109th Congress, “Expressing the sense of Congress that the United States should not engage in the construction of a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Superhighway System or enter into a North American Union with Mexico and Canada.” Co-sponsoring this resolution were Representatives Ron Paul (R.-Tex.), Tom Tancredo (R.-Colo.), and Walter Jones (R.-N.C.).

“Monster highway” was a term coined by veteran journalist Wes Vernon in an October 2006 article on the Trans-Texas Corridor. Vernon’s most recent article posted on Accuracy in Media thoroughly discusses the extensive research that has been done concerning North American integration.

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) openly discusses the plans of the Texas Department of Transportation to build over the next 50 years some 4,000 miles of Trans-Texas Corridor superhighways as having “as many as six lanes for passenger vehicles and up to four lanes for large trucks,” as well as “six rail lanes for high-speed passenger rail between cities, high-speed freight, and conventional commuter and freight transit,” and “a 61-meter (200-foot)-wide dedicated utility zone for water, oil, and gas pipelines, and transmission lines for electricity, broadband, and other telecommunications services.” In the same document, the FHWA openly discusses that NAFTA is the driving force behind the TTC project’s determination to remove 584,000 acres in Texas from public tax rolls and to throw some 1 million Texans off their homes, ranches, and farms, as these 4,000 miles of road are built over the next 50 years.

A Texas Department of Transportation website contains a Master Development Plan, which produces an artist’s drawing of the four football-fields-wide TTC-35, which TxDOT plans to build roughly parallel to I-35 from Laredo, Tex., to the border with Oklahoma. TTC-35 will be financed by the Spanish investment consortium Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte, S.A., and the comprehensive development agreement is available on the TxDOT official TTC website. Final public hearings on TTC-35 were held in the summer of 2006 and construction is planned to begin in 2007.

Medved minimizes the TTC, portraying it as business-as-usual road building. Yet no superhighway of this magnitude or scope has ever been constructed in the United States, or anywhere else in the world for that matter. Allowing foreign entities to control U.S. infrastructure does raise important questions, including national defense issues, as should have been amply demonstrated in the Dubai ports controversy. A brochure on the Kansas City SmartPort website discloses that the goal of the I-35 corridor as reconfigured by TTC-35 is to open Mexican ports such as Lázaro Cárdenas to container ships from China and the Far East. Kansas City plans to place a Mexican customs facility in the heart of their “inland port.” What is wrong with subjecting these questions to the bright light of calm, rational, public debate? The evidence we are discussing is all on public websites, many of them official governmental websites.

Regarding SPP, Medved correctly notes that there is no law or treaty. Yet, somehow, Medved misses the point. Our concern is that the absence of a treaty or law raises the concern that SPP is a process that violates the Constitution. Somehow, the Bush Administration is using what amounts to nothing more than press conference held in Waco, Tex., on March 23, 2005, as sufficient constitutional authority to integrate our administrative laws and regulations with those of Mexico and Canada.

Again, the public record on SPP displays much more than a “dialogue” between neighbor nations. The organizational chart obtained by the Judicial Watch FOIA request shows trilateral “working groups” that shadow U.S. government departments and agencies, reporting to three cabinet officers, who in turn report to the Homeland Security Council and the National Security Council, and ultimately to the President. A 12-page document I obtained from the FOIA request to SPP provided the names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses of the executive branch contacts in the three nations, as well as designating which working group each bureaucrat was assigned to as a member. The “2005 Report to Leaders” and the companion “2006 Report to Leaders” on the Department of Commerce SPP.gov website describe many different memoranda of understanding and other trilateral agreements that have been signed by the working groups. Yet, the vast majority of these memoranda of understanding and other trilateral agreements have not been submitted to Congress for oversight or for determinations regarding whether a treaty might be required for the agreement to be valid within constitutional restrictions. What is wrong with the 110th Congress scheduling some hearings to make sure Bush Administration has not exceeded constitutional authority?

Nor does Medved address our concern that the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America is following the continental integration plan that led Europe over a 50-year period from an initial coal and steel agreement to a European Common Market to full regional government, the European Union, with a regional currency, the Euro. Currently available documents, such as the memoirs of Jean Monnet, a key architect of the European Union, make clear his long-standing antipathy toward the notion of national sovereignty. Christopher Booker and Richard North’s 2003 book, “The Great Deception,” makes clear that the elite creating the European Nation knew that “it would be necessary to conceal from the peoples of Europe just what was being done in their name until the process was so far advanced that it had become irreversible.”

Still, Medved persists in claiming that the elite concepts of creating a North American Union or NAFTA Super Highway are just Internet conspiracy theories. He charges in intentionally undignified language that, “The same bastards and creeps and jug-heads and drunks and reprobates (yes, they are all of the above) who are now scaring you over SPP or NAU or the Monster Highway were busy 7 years ago peddling the Year 2000 computer bug crapola (which I consistently derided and denied on the air).” Again, I must take exception. Mr. Medved, I defy you to find one word I ever wrote about Y2k in any context. Why engage in ridicule, Mr. Medved, unless your intention is to follow Mr. Alinsky’s advice to discredit the arguments you can’t otherwise refute? Isn’t it possible, Mr. Medved, that the attention drawn to the Y2k problem in advance helped stimulate the massive expenditure of time, effort, and money that was necessary to correct the computer glitch worldwide?

Medved dismisses the idea that there are intellectual elitists whose globalist ambitions are advancing North American integration following the methodology of disguise and deception that proved successful in Europe. He offhandedly states that there was one article in the Council of Foreign Relation’s (CFR) Foreign Affairs journal “that suggested further reducing trade barriers and economic obstacles in the style of the European Union,” suggesting that the article drew “spirited opposition and condemnation” from CFR members. Again, Medved is deficient on his research.

The public record, which evidently Medved has not examined, shows an extensive and fully documented CFR effort aimed at advancing the North American integration agenda.

On Oct. 17, 2001, the Council on Foreign Relations held an Atlanta roundtable meeting under the title, “The Future of North American Integration in the Wake of the Terrorist Attacks.” The CFR followed up by creating an Independent Task Force on the Future of North America, announced on Oct. 15, 2004.

In March 2005, the CFR task force issued its first report, a Chairmen’s Summary titled, “Creating a North American Community.” The CFR report was issued jointly by the Consejo Mexicano de Asuntos Internacionales (COMEXI) and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE), two groups also on the record as supporting North American integration. This report was written to be published before the planned trilateral summit meeting to be held later that month, on March 23, 2005, at Waco. The report reflected the consensus of the task force’s three chairs and three vice-chairs:
 

To build on the advances of the past decade and to craft an agenda for the future, we propose the creation by 2010 of a community to enhance security, prosperity, and opportunity for all North Americans.
 

In May 2005, only two months after the Waco summit meeting, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) released the final task force report titled, “Building a North American Community.”

A co-chair of the CFR task force was Dr. Robert Pastor of American Union. For over a decade, Pastor has been writing extensively about the need to create a “North American Community,” the exact title that reappears in the above referenced CFR documents. In his 2001 book, “Toward a North American Community,” Pastor directly supports the proposal to create a new regional common currency, the Amero, as part of creating a North American Monetary Union. To implement this idea, Pastor calls on page 114 of his book for the creation of a U.S.-Canada-Mexico trilateral Central Bank of North America. The concept of creating the Amero originated in a paper by Canadian economist Herbert Grubel of the Simon Fraser Institute in Vancouver.

Again, in a almost unbelievably derogatory fashion, Medved suggests that those of us who are objecting to North American integration are motivated by intentions which would be fraudulent at a minimum and possibly even criminal. Specifically, he argues that:
 

The entire chimera has been conjured up to scare people over nothing— to solicit contributions to fight a non-existent threat, and then when that threat never materializes the exploiters and charlatans who have been lying to you about this can beat their chests and say, ‘Look at that! We stopped the globalists in their evil, diabolical plans to terminate American sovereignty—now send us even more money.’
 

As proof of this accusation, Medved cites a Washington Times article, charging that the article “exposed” the Minutemen as “blood-sucking exploiters.” The Washington Times wrote about the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC), the organization identified with Chris Simcox. The Minuteman Project (MMP) organized by Jim Gilchrist is a completely different and totally separate organization. Jim Gilchrist is my co-author on “Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America’s Borders,” and I have placed my SPP FOIA documents on StopSPP.com, a website managed by Jim Gilchrist’s MMP organization. While I have maintained friendly relations with Simcox and his MCDC organization, I have never been formally associated with either.

No Washington Times article has ever been written raising questions about fundraising Jim Gilchrist or his MMP organization have conducted. Once again, Medved might have done some research before leveling this broad accusation against “the Minutemen.” I am seriously considering joining Jim Gilchrist and Marvin Stewart in a contemplated MMP lawsuit against Columbia University for the riot that prevented our speaking at Columbia University on the evening of Oct. 4, 2006.

Perhaps Medved might have gotten his facts square before Gilchrist and his legal counsel had the opportunity to read his recent Townhall.com outburst in print. As we discuss thoroughly in our book “Minutemen,” Gilchrist volunteered for the Marines in 1967 and fought for 13 months in combat in Vietnam, just south of the DMZ. Of his company of 210 men, some 72 were killed in action, about 35%. Gilchrist founded the Minuteman Project out of a sense of patriotism, determined to call up the Minutemen once again, this time to do the job of security our border of Mexico that President Bush had been negligent in doing. Medved might want to explain to Gilchrist why he considers his true motivation in creating the Minuteman Project was to fundraise as a “blood-sucking exploiter.” I am sure Gilchrist’s blood will boil.

Ironically, by not naming names, Medved in his broad brush attack has demeaned and insulted dozens of other Americans whom I did not have room here to mention, many who are noted conservative commentators, all of whom have opposed in print or on the radio the push to North American integration that began under President George H.W. Bush, continued under President Bill Clinton, and is proceeding rapidly under President George W. Bush. I would like to see Medved explain to Joseph Farah that WorldNetDaily is not motivated for a love of the United States. Mr. Medved, is HUMAN EVENTS itself deserving of being treated with “derision and contempt and disregard” because the publication has chosen to print his rejoinder, as well as a series of articles I have written on the subject since May 2006?

Medved ends his piece by claiming that those of us opposing North American integration are “dissembling, and they know it, and they ought to be ashamed.” Again, I take exception. Everything I have written on this subject, including this rejoinder, is heavily documented, generally with Internet links to the original documents which substantiate my claims.

In conclusion, I view myself as a conservative who has no hesitation to criticize a Republican President when the administration does not rule in a conservative manner. I opposed Harriet Miers when President Bush nominated her to the Supreme Court and I oppose the North American integration we see proceeding under SPP.

I invite Medved to a public debate on these questions. In making this invitation, I am willing to take the risk that Medved’s tone in his Townhall.com piece does accurately reflect his true emotional state. I do not recall ever before reading a piece from a person who likes to represent himself as a responsible political commentator that contained so many vituperative epithets or such extended strings of invective, including invented words that are nowhere to be found, not even in a dictionary of slang.

If Medved is getting close to the Larry O’Donnell “liar, liar” stage when discussing North American integration, I will take even that risk in issuing a challenge to debate. On the questions that Medved shrilly characterizes as hysteria over a North American Union chimera, I am willing to stand by the research and study that have carried me through multiple decades of multiple careers, even if Medved is reaching the point where he is “Unfit for Debate.”

 

Mr. Corsi is the author of several books, including "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry" (along with John O'Neill), "Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil" (along with Craig R. Smith), "Atomic Iran: How the Terrorist Regime Bought the Bomb and American Politicians," and most recently, "Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America's Borders." He will soon author a book on the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America and the prospect of the forthcoming North American Union.