Tom Campbell responds

As mentioned the other day, former Congressman Tom Campbell (now Dean of the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business) received a campaign contribution from Oil-for-Food bribee Samir Vincent. I e-mailed Dean Campbell for his reaction to this news. His response:

As you suspected, the news was a surprise. I do not know if Mr. Vincent has been convicted of any law violation; but I can tell you that I do not know him personally, nor do I remember ever meeting him. Hence, I do not know the specific reason he contributed. Since we had no communications of which I'm aware, I can assure you I took no contribution in connection with whatever anyone might have been doing with Saddam Hussein.

I was, however, proud to receive the support of many Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in my 2000 US Senate campaign. The reason for that support was as follows.

The practice of arresting individuals in America and keeping them in jail, sometimes for years, without sharing with them the evidence on which their detention was based, struck me as wrong. I introduced a resolution to end this practice; and in the Presidential debates, then-Governor George Bush promised to end it. I recall that, during President Clinton's time, of the 23 individuals kept in jail on the basis of secret evidence, 21 were Muslim or Arab-American. I was able to pass an appropriations rider to take money out of the Bureau of Prisons equal to the amount it cost to keep 23 people in jail for a year, and explained to my colleagues that this was a test vote on whether they supported the use of secret evidence or not. The appropriations rider won support of a majority of members of Congress, by quite a large margin. I was also able to prevail on the appropriate judiciary committee subcommittee chairman to hold hearings on this practice, at which several representatives of Arab-American and Muslim American organizations, and relatives of incarcerees, testified. They were grateful for what I did to bring attention to the plight of their brothers and husbands.

My 2000 US Senate campaign account is now closed. There is no surplus left over. Refunds from the small surplus I had were mailed to individual donors some time ago. Nor do I have any political committee of any kind. I did not "park" any money from my 2000 US Senate campaign in some other committee. It's all gone.

Furthermore, even were I to have the funds to return, it is an open question raised by one of the commentators to your dialogue-space as to whether the ethical thing is to return money to an individual under this kind of suspicion. In any event, however, there are no such funds to return.

That strikes me as a reasonable response. I always liked Tom Campbell and voted for him in various House and Senate races when I lived in California. I don't know whether I'd agree with his position on these specific detentions. (At least one was not an "Arab-American", but an undocumented immigrant accused of supporting a terrorist organization). But I imagine Campbell's stance was motivated by a principled concern for civil liberties and not out of any sympathy or naivete about what these detainees were accused of.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at April 26, 2004 10:36 AM