Former New York City police chief Bernard Kerik, whom George W. Bush appointed to lead the Department of Homeland Security after Tom Ridge’s resignation, fathered an illegitimate daughter with a South Korean woman while serving on the peninsula in the 1970s, the Associated Press reported Dec. 2. Kerik abandoned the mother and 1-year-old when he returned to the United States in February 1976, and did not see them again until a few years ago, according to the Dec. 5 Korea Times. Kerik confessed to abandoning his child in his 2001 autobiography.
According to the Nov. 5 edition of Newsday, Kerik had reported for six months of duty in Iraq in 2002, yet returned to the United States after three months without explanation.
Kerik denounced domestic dissent of government policy in the Oct. 20, 2003 issue of Newsweek, saying, “political criticism is our enemies’ best friend.”
http://www.pulsetc.com/article.php?sid=1525<snip> Kerik, the son of a prostitute who abandoned him when he was 4 years old, was a high school dropout who dabbled in petty crime before he straightened his life out by joining the Army.
In New York, he had a reputation as a hard-charging cop who sometimes bent the rules. After struggling financially as recently as five years ago, he became a multimillionaire through the sale of stock in security-related firms that rely heavily on government contracts. <snip>
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/politics/10395748.htmKerik's conduct in Saudi Arabia questioned
By John Mintz and Lucy Shackelford
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — The autobiography of Bernard Kerik, President Bush's nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security, recounts a difficult time 20 years ago when he was expelled from Saudi Arabia amid a power struggle involving the head of a hospital complex where Kerik helped command a security staff.
In the book, Kerik described his discomfort at having to investigate employees' private lives but said it was necessary because of the Saudis' laws prohibiting drinking and mingling of the sexes in public. "It was challenging, negotiating such a closed, rigid system and trying to find justice in laws that, to an American, were unjust," he wrote. He was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1984, the book said, after an altercation with a Saudi secret-police official who was interrogating him.
Since he was nominated last week to be homeland security secretary, however, nine former employees of the hospital have said that Kerik and his colleagues were carrying out the private agenda of the hospital's administrator, Nizar Feteih, and that the surveillance was intended to control people's private affairs.
Feteih became embroiled in a scandal that centered in part on his use of the institution's security staff to track the private lives of several women with whom he was romantically involved, and men who came in contact with them, the former employees said. <snip>
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002112642_kerik08.html
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