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KIT GAGE, kgage@igc.org , http://www.ifconews.org/ncppf.html
National coordinator of the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom, Gage said: "The President's lawyers said it was fundamentally unfair that they were asked to defend him having seen only a small portion of the thousands of pages of testimony. This was secret evidence. They are right, but it is also secret evidence that Clinton's Department of Justice is using to deny bond and deport several dozen immigrants without due process. These individuals have been jailed for years while fighting deportation and yet they are not charged with any crime." She added that "no one, not the President, not any individual in the U.S., should face accusations using secret evidence. The use of secret evidence should be outlawed."

KEVIN GRAY
Author of the forthcoming "The Death of Black Politics" and a board member of the national ACLU, Gray said: "Jesse Jackson compares Clinton to Martin Luther King, but Clinton has manipulated images of King for his own ends. Clinton used Rosa Parks at the State of the Union address as a prop -- his speech contained no initiatives on civil rights.... Clinton's 'civil rights record' is purely symbolic. Consider Clinton's treatment of Lani Guinier and Jocelyn Elders; or his 'welfare reform'; or his continued double standards in the 'war on drugs'; or his outrageous proposal that citizens in public housing surrender their Fourth Amendment rights. Clinton benefits from the black community's deep mistrust of prosecutors. Meanwhile, black-white wealth disparity remains fixed and the gap between rich and poor expands. Black politics is at an all-time low because of the leadership's alliance with Clinton -- that must be challenged."

GWENDOLYN MINK, mink@cats.ucsc.edu
Professor of politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz and author of "Hostile Environment," a forthcoming book on sexual harassment, Mink said: "Clinton made trashing women the national pastime; every woman with a story to tell became a woman with a foul motive or a questionable mental state. Clinton also manipulated everyone, including leading feminists, into changing the subject from his obligation to tell the truth in a civil rights case to his right to sexual privacy.... He's stripped poor women of their privacy and coerced them into the labor market. What worries me now is the fallout of Clinton's defense and 'triumph' on women who need sexual harassment law. Unless women can be confident that the law is scrupulously fair, that their harassers must tell the truth, and that their harassment counts, the law will fall into disuse among women who most need its ballast: women who are compelled to take jobs in exchange for welfare; women who cannot quit their jobs because they are poor; women who must survive a gauntlet of sexual abuse in order to earn a living."

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