Dear Friends, Family and Colleagues,
Please support Professor Viet Dinh's nomination for Attorney General for Legal Policy by signing the online petition at the following URL: Professor Dinh's nomination hearing is Wednesday, May 9, 2001. The process is likely going to take a couple of weeks so please sign the petition and forward the URL to your friends, family and colleagues. I will forward the petition to the US Senate Judiciary Committee.
For more reference information please go to http://www.angelfire.com/home/qhbao Please note this page is under construction and will be updated frequently).
May 10, 2001
K.N. (in response to letter above)
I am curious to find out more about Professor Viet Dinh. Does anyone have any information on him and his take on issues? I followed the link below to the "Vietnamese progressive network" website which has information on the petition, a few articles on him, and little else, not even information on the website, or the people behind the website. The few articles focuses mainly on how's he's overcome the hardship of being a refugee to be where he is now and some mention of his conservative stance on affirmative action. I find it suspicious that a "progressive"(as I define progressive) network would support the nomination of someone who is conservative (from what little information in the articles I read, though I admit that it's not enough info to say in my view that he is "conservative") and also if the support is based mainly on the fact that Prof. Dinh is Vietnamese.
I don't believe in politically supporting someone simply because that person is of my ethnicity, so I would like to get more info on this. I realize that this may be a futile effort since it's already May 9th. My other reason for this inquiry is to find out more about the "Vietnamese progressive network". It would be great to know that such a website exist, though it would be horrible to find out that it's a masquerade for their (the people behind the website) own political purposes. I'm just weary of websites, which operate under false pretenses for their own political purposes. There are many examples of this within the field of abortion...like false planned parenthood websites, etc. Any info would be great.
June 19, 2001
J.C.L.
Here is the excerpt of the Judiciary Committee hearings from May 9, 2001 and other interesting items. In case if some of you don't have it. A little late but still interesting.
SEN. HATCH: You're welcome. Thank you so much for your testimony.
Professor Dinh, we will take you.
MR. DINH: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and Senator Leahy. Thank you very much for having me here today. And I really do sincerely apologize to you and to your staff for any inconvenience that my submission of my voluminous paper trail may have caused you, and the oversights were truly inadvertent.
I also want to thank Congresswoman Sanchez for introducing me, and Senator Domenici for those moving words of support. I know that Congresswoman Sanchez had recognized my parents, but I would like to take the opportunity to introduce them again because they really are the heroes of that story that Senator Domenici said. My parents are here -- my father, Dinh Hong Phong, and my mother, Nguyen Titu (ph) Nga. Thank you so much.
SEN. HATCH: We're so happy to have you here, and we are honored to have you in our presence.
MR. DINH: With your permission, I would like to start by telling them --telling you a little bit about their -- the reason why I consider them the heroes, not only in my life, but in the story that Senator Domenici has told.
My father was a government official in the government of South Vietnam. When the war ended in 1975, he was imprisoned -- put in a reeducation camp for three years. He escaped from that camp on -- in the morning of June, 1978, and he lived as a fugitive in that country for several years before he was finally able to escape that country. After 25 unsuccessful attempts, he was finally able to find freedom here in America in 1983.
At the same time that my father escaped from the camp, my mother took us, her children, simultaneously, on to a small boat to find freedom from Vietnam. After twelve days drifting at sea, you can imagine our joy and absolute elation when we finally saw land in the harbor -- in a harbor in Malaysia. But instead of encountering a warm welcome to freedom, what we encountered was a hail of bullets fired at us in warning, forcing us back out into international waters. Our boat was not seaworthy for another sea voyage over to Singapore, probably our nearest port, so in the middle of the night my mother decided that we should turn back into the beach – into a deserted beach in the middle of the night. And so, as we all -- as the boat beached onto the shore and we all swam to the shore, I turned back, and there alone on the boat was my mother, wielding an ax that was almost as tall as she was. She was using that ax in order to put a whole in the side of the boat to sink it so that the authorities would not be able to force us back on in the morning. That image of my mother destroying our last link to Vietnam really stands in my mind to this day as to the incredible courage she possesses, but also the incredible lengths to which my parents, like so many other people, have gone to in order to find that promise of freedom and opportunity -- a promise that so many people have lost their lives in order to obtain, and so many Americans have given up their lives to protect. And it is a belief in that promise of opportunity and freedom that has led me to devote my life to one living in the law, which has been so aptly described as a system of wise restraints that set men free.
My academic interest, while -- as Senator Hatch noted, has been varying and broad, has all centered on a common theme; that is, I have been interested in studying the institutions and mechanisms of governance -- those wise restraints that set us free. I am very grateful to the president and to the attorney general for this opportunity for me to repay the debt of opportunity that my family owes this great country of ours, and for me to have a small hand in helping to think about and work on those wise restraints that set us free.
As I contemplate the position to which I am nominated, I was thinking about how I would approach the job if I am confirmed by this committee and by the Senate. And to me, it seems to me that if I am confirmed as the assistant attorney general for Legal Policy, I will be guided by two abiding principles that, to me, serve as a foundation of this promise of opportunity and freedom in our country.
First, America makes that promise to all her citizens, and that all of her citizens -- all Americans -- should enjoy the equal protection of the law. I will work to ensure the privileges and burdens of law are accorded equally. Invidious discrimination affects me personally as a Vietnamese American, and offends me morally as an American. And all Americans, regardless of race, class, sex, religion, socio-economic status, or any other status, should enjoy the security that comes with the faithful and vigorous execution of the law. Such personal security is essential for individual freedom to flourish.
Second, governmental power should be exercised only according to legitimate authority. The Department has a tremendous responsibility to enforce the laws of the United States. It must discharge that responsibility faithfully and vigorously, but the same time the Department must make sure that it acts only when it may and not only -- not simply because it can; that government actions are based not on raw power, but on legitimate constitutional and legislative authority. Such respect for law fosters individual liberty and freedom from arbitrary governmental coercion.
Senators, I have personally experienced government that does not work, where law is non-existent and power exercised by arbitrary whim, by caprice, by personal will. That experience teaches me not to take our system of laws for granted, but to work constantly toward its improvement. I hope I will have the opportunity to work with you in that common endeavor, to listen to your concerns and those of others, and to find common ground among diverse viewpoints. This committee has a proud history of working to improve our legal system to meet new and constant challenges. And if confirmed, I promise to help you in any way I can to build on that tradition. Thank you very much.
SEN. HATCH: Well, thank you, Professor. I just am so impressed with both of you, and I know both of you well. And I really commend this administration for picking each of you for your respective positions. I'm very grateful to President Bush and others. I think it's -- you're going to bring a dimension to the Justice Department that I think it sorely needs at this time. So I'm very grateful to have both of you here. I think I'll turn to Senator Leahy and let him begin the questions.
June 19, 2002
M.N.
I remember someone posted about this fellow a while back when he was appointed. Looks like he's fitting right in at the Justice Department.
www.villagevoice.com/issues/0225/ridgeway.php
Viet Dinh, an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, is without question the leading figure in laying the legal fretwork for the war. Dinh graduated from Harvard Law, clerked for U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge Laurence H. Silberman and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and now teaches at Georgetown University. He was associate special counsel to the U.S. Senate Whitewater Committee, which fought unsuccessfully to bring down the Clintons. Born in Vietnam in 1968, Dinh was soon separated from his father, who was sent to a post-war retraining camp. His mother took the children and escaped on a crowded raft, traveling 12 days to Malaysia, where she purposefully sank the boat and made her way to freedom.
Despite having entered the U.S. as a refugee at the age of 10, Dinh has emerged as a hard-liner on the administration's 9-11 dragnet. What he says counts. Here he is in Naples, Florida, at a mid-January American Bar Association conference, setting the line on detainees. "We are reticent to provide a road map to Al Qaeda as to the progress and direction of our investigative activity," Dinh said. "We don't want to taint people as being of interest to the investigation simply because of our attention."
He added, "We will let them go if there is not enough of a predicate to hold them. But we will follow them closely, and if they so much as spit on the sidewalk, we'll arrest them. The message is that if you are a suspected terrorist you better be squeaky-clean. . . . If we can, we will keep you in jail." In the wake of September 11, some 2400 Muslim men currently sit behind bars, many on minor or no charges. The government waits for the guilty to break down and talk. For the innocent, it's their tough luck.
How did officials pick their suspects? "By the criteria Al Qaeda itself uses," he said. "Eighteen- to 35-year-old males who entered the country after the start of 2000 using passports from countries where Al Qaeda has a strong presence."
As for liberal complaints about discrimination, Dinh was blunt: "The U.S. does use racial profiling—not for identification, but for investigation."
June 19, 2002
D.V.
Thanks M. for posting this excerpt. I urge folks to read the entire article, which is many times more alarming. Viet is surely the youngest at the center of it all. Must be quite a thrill ride.
June 19, 2002
N.H.
Hi All,
I actually wrote about John Duong who's on the President's API White House Initiative. However, I know that both Duong and Dinh hang out. I'm going to see if I can find Duong's e-mail address again b/c I think it would be appropriate to flood his mailbox with protest regarding his lack of leadership in terms of racial profiling and the war on terrorism.
When I did see Duong last, by the way, he showed himself to be a pompous young man who cared more about playing golf than he did about people's concerns over immigration, welfare, or other social policies.
Anyway, I'm done ranting. Thanks for listening.
Take care and thanks for the article M.