Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 2019, p. 73
By Sami Tayeb and Delinda C. Hanley
Elijah Cummings, 68, died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD, on Oct. 17 after battling with health issues in recent years. The Democratic congressman from Maryland and chairman of the of the House Committee on Oversight Reform was the son of Southern sharecroppers and Baptist preachers from South Carolina. While growing up in Baltimore during the 1950s and ’60s, at age 11 he worked to desegregate his neighborhood swimming pool. He and his friends protested being denied entry by marching up and down the street near the pool. They were attacked by adult opponents of integration who threw bottles and rocks.
Known by colleagues for his towering character and integrity, Cummings was first a trial attorney for 19 years before serving 13 terms in the House of Representatives. In 2002, he voted against authorization for the Iraq War and, more recently, Cummings was a key figure in President Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry. He also supported Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid in 2016 and backed her during a congressional investigation into her handling of the Benghazi terror attack that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in 2012.
While Cummings was largely against U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, he was, conversely, a proponent of Israel. In 1998, Cummings founded the Elijah Cummings Youth Program in Israel, a two-year fellowship that allowed high school youth in Maryland to visit Israel during their summer vacations. Additionally, one of his last votes in the House was in support of Resolution 246, which opposed efforts to delegitimize Israel and denounced the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against the State of Israel.
Speaking at a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) banquet in 2005, Cummings said, “No one group is superior to others...If one person in this nation is treated unfairly we shouldn’t be able to sleep at night...Some of us in Congress stand with you as brothers and sisters. All of us in America have a responsibility to stand up...What we do or don’t do today will impact this country for the next 100 years. This is our watch.”
Cummings is survived by his wife, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, two daughters and six siblings.
Joseph C. Wilson, 69, died from organ failure at his house in Santa Fe, NM, on Sept. 27. Wilson, a onetime diplomat who negotiated with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein before the first Gulf War, gained public attention when his then-wife, Valerie Plame, was exposed by syndicated columnist Richard Novak as an active CIA agent after Wilson’s opposition to the George W. Bush administration’s claims of Iraq obtaining “yellowcake” uranium from Africa, which was used as justification for going to war against Iraq in 2003.
After returning from a fact-finding mission in Niger in 2002, Wilson concluded that Saddam Hussein had not obtained uranium from the country and therefore was not a nuclear threat to the U.S. Shortly after the invasion, Wilson wrote a New York Times op-ed, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” The Bush administration leaked the information about Wilson’s wife to Novak as retaliation for his opposition.
Wilson is survived by four children, a brother and five grandchildren.
Paul Ramsey Malik, 57, a career member of the U.S. Senior Foreign Service, who served for 23 years in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe died after battling cancer, on July 23 in Washington, DC. Malik served as U.S. Consul General in Dubai from 2015 to 2018, and most recently Charge d’Affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan. He was also the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Muscat, Oman, in a addition to postings at American embassies in Lebanon, Greece, Ireland, Morocco and Tunisia, as well as multiple assignments in Washington.
Malik held a B.A. from Swarthmore College and pursued graduate studies at Georgetown University. He spoke Arabic, French and Greek.
He will be remembered for tirelessly working to promote increased cooperation between the U.S. and the Middle East, and for deepening cultural ties. He is survived by his spouse, Nicholas Samaridis, brother Peter Malik of Chagrin Falls, OH; He is predeceased by his parents, Boulos and Madelyn Malik, long-time friends of the Washington Report. His father enjoyed a 37-year career as a first Arab-American U.S. Foreign Service Officer.
James Robertson, 81, a federal judge who earned national attention for his ruling on the rights of a foreign detainee in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and for his 2005 resignation from a judicial surveillance panel in order to take a stand against warrantless federal wiretaping, died from a heart ailment on Sept. 7 at a hospital in Washington, DC.
Robertson served as a U.S. District Court Judge in Washington, appointed by President Bill Clinton, from 1994 to 2010. In 2004 he ruled in favor of a Yemeni prisoner, a driver for Osama bin Laden, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who was held at Guantanamo after being captured during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Robertson ruled that the government had neglected to determine if Hamdan was a prisoner of war as required by the Geneva Conventions. Hamdan was eventually released to Yemen in 2008.
Robertson’s resignation from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2005, three years into his appointment, followed revelations that the Bush administration had bypassed the court and failed to obtain warrants as it gathered information from U.S. electronic communications carriers in the “war on terrorism,” after the attacks on 9/11.
Before serving on the federal bench, Robertson worked as a corporate lawyer from 1965 to 1994. He represented the Automobile Manufacturer’s Association in the wake of car-safety violations uncovered by consumer activist Ralph Nader.
Robertson, also served as president of the DC Bar Association in 1991 and 1992, establishing a process for the hiring of young minority lawyers. He believed some of his most important cases were low-profile and set no universal legal precedent but related directly to everyday life and injustice in the rural South.
