REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Dan the Man
Three cheers for Chairman Burton, scourge of the Saudis.
URL:Saturday, January 4, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
opinionjournal.com
Congressman Dan Burton is the Beltway's Rodney Dangerfield: He gets no respect. This elite and media contempt nearly kept an issue the Indiana Republican has pushed almost single-handedly from getting the attention it deserves.
We're talking about the American children who have been abducted to Saudi Arabia and the oft-disdainful treatment their left-behind parents have received at the hands of the State Department. When 2002 started, barely anyone had heard of this issue. But today, thanks to five Burton hearings and one trip to Saudi Arabia, it has become one of the most public issues in the much-heralded special relationship between Riyadh and Washington. And as the hours left in his chairmanship of the Government Reform Committee tick away, it's worth considering what Mr. Burton has accomplished.
There's a view that battles between American and foreign spouses over their children are merely private custody disputes. That's long been the preferred lingo of the State Department, and it is exactly the language that Saudi spokesmen such as Adel al-Jubeir are careful to use when discussing these cases. The truth, however, is that most cases involve a Saudi father who married in the U.S., had children in the U.S., divorced in the U.S., and decided to take matters into his own hands when U.S. courts didn't give him what he wanted.
That contempt for American law is not merely a private affair. Saudi fathers who wish to spirit their children out of the U.S. need Saudi passports, which, as Mr. Burton pointed out in a tart letter to Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Prince Bandar, have been authorized by his embassy. The passports have been provided even when, as in the case of Joanna Stephenson Tonetti, a U.S. judge had specifically notified the Saudi Embassy of his order forbidding the children from leaving.
Mr. Burton's hearings exposed many of these horrible practices. And though no abducted American has yet returned home from Saudi Arabia, Mr. Burton's work has yielded some achievements. A decade ago Marines escorted a desperate Monica Stowers out of the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh when she sought refuge with her two small children; the present ambassador, Robert Jordan, vows that no American will be expelled from his embassy so long as he's there.
The hearings have also had a salutary effect on the State Department. At this moment the U.S. Embassy in Beruit is providing refuge to two American girls, one of whom claims their father in Lebanon (a naturalized American citizen) has sexually abused her. State insists the girls ought to be allowed to return to America with their mother, as they wish.
Thanks in part to Mr. Burton, the Saudis are beginning to understand the high price to be paid for molesting U.S. citizens. Already the growing public distrust of the Saudis has translated into a provision in the Homeland Security bill singling out Saudi visas for special scrutiny. The irony is that returning the abducted American children is probably the easiest and least costly way for them to establish good will.
Senator Blanche Lincoln (D., Ark.) has promised to keep the issue alive. But if these abducted American children ever make it home, they'll have Dan Burton to thank |
