The OSI is running out of WWII Nazi-era war criminals.  They've hunted them down or they've died off.  So what does the OSI do now that the quarry of their quest for the past thirty years is becoming an extinct species?

Carrie Johnson writes in the Washington Post that the 28 staffers of the US Office of Special Investigations (OSI) are facing the need to reinvent their mission now that John Demanjuk has finally been deported.  

The subjects of their life's work -- people with Nazi ties who lied on citizenship forms to enter the United States after World War II -- are dead or dying. Current and former OSI employees say the unit is racing to extradite the few elderly Nazis still residing on American soil. Jonathan Drimmer, the lead trial lawyer in the government's case against Demjanjuk, said that Demjanjuk's expulsion is "a coda on a generation of work to bring major Nazi war criminals to justice."

Since the OSI began operations in 1979, it has won deportation orders against 107 people and prevented 180 more from entering the United States through its watch list. Yet it remains to be seen how the close-knit group of lawyers and historians, accustomed to combing document-rich archives in the Eastern Bloc for clues, will recast its mission from capturing Nazis to catching criminals who fled murderous conflicts in such diverse places as Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. The OSI focuses on revoking the citizenship of Americans who entered the country on false pretenses by lying about their involvement in war crimes, rather than targeting wrongdoers based overseas.

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/19/AR2009081902134.html>

It is indeed commendable that the careers 28 people have been devoted to making sure that the perpetrators of horrific crimes against humanity are not permitted to rest easy and end their days with undeserved impunity.  And there is no question that there are a long list of human rights abusers who ought to be brought to justice by the international community. The reluctance to allow Interpol or investigators actiing of behalf  of the  International Criminal Court to operate within the borders of the US is an incentive to keep OSI going in order to avoid embarrassing revelations that war criminals, past and present, may be living comfortably in the US.

According to the FBI's 2004-2009 Strategic Plan, the real and most immenent threat to the US from acts of terrorism emanates from within the US--extremist groups on both the right (gun-toting anti-government militias and anti-abortion extremists) and the left (eco-terrorists, particularly violent animal rights fringe groups).  The use of the internet to facilitate criminal and terrorist networking by violent groups, and the threat of cyberterrorism that acquires and exploits personal (and national security) information by accessing electronic databases (we all take for granted that they are secure whenever we swipe a credit card or withdraw cash from an ATM), are  also a major worries for law enforcement officials.      

This is where  resources now allocated to the OSI need to be redirected. The Holocaust lobby has had a long (and not unjustified) run.  Now it is time to meet the threats of today, rather than those of 70 years ago.

We are witnessing some frightening parallels with 1932-33 here in the US, with thugs implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) threatening the president of the US and trying to intimidate his supporters. We have raving lunatics like Orly Taitz being given free air time to work people into a frenzy with the false claim that Barack Obama can't be and isn't our president, and a military officer using this to reject his orders to deploy.  While the media is focused on these kooky and colorful characters, people with real assault rifles that can really kill people are slashing into and reshaping our public discourse.

Our police are watching helplessly as they do it, ironically on account of the second amendment to the constitution that clearly contextualizes the right "to keep and bear arms" as a predicate of the need for a militia for national defense in the absence of a standing army for national defense and a draft (which the US did not have at the time of the bill of rights): "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."  What is there about the implications of the term "well-regulated" that seems so elusive to strict constitutional constructionists who oppose any form of gun control?        

"Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it."   We need to worry much more about the threats of Nazi-type ideology in the present tinderbox environment, inflamed by hysterical talk show hosts on radio and television, than the remnants of Naziism of 60-70 years ago.  As for the human rights violators of today and of more recent decades, concerted and effective international action, including U.S. commitment to and support of effective international norms and institutions that could be far more effective in the long run than the self-perpetuating "let's find something to do now that all the WWII Nazis are dead" maxim that seems to be keeping the OSI in business.