~e l ti n at Eighty years of editorial freedom Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan 420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor, Mich Editorials printed in The Michigan or the editors. T SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1971 News Phone: 764-0552 Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers This must be noted in oil reprints., NIGHT EDITOR: DAVE CHUDWIN i CIVIl Librboard responds to the ban of a GLF conference SINCE LAST April, when President Rob- University facilities must be directe ben Fleming arbitrarily imposed a toward those specializing in that field ca ban on Gay Liberation's planned mid- only serve to further accentuate the par west conference on homosexuality, the chialism caused by the compartmentali move has meet with an ominous silence ed nature of the academic community. from most of the academic community. Fleming's contention that the confe In that context, the recent decision of ence would hurt the University's positio the faculty Civil Liberties Board to cross with the Legislature is also serious: Fleming and condemn the ban is a wel- questionable. The University has conti come sign. Hopefully, the board's state- ued to host a variety of controversi ment will help to renew and focus op- speakers and conferences (including t position to the president's policy. 1968 SDS national convention) witho Through his actions and statements, any resulting loss of legislative suppo Fleming has evidenced a willingness to, and there is little reason to feel th compromise the rights of homosexuals the situation would be different in th and to bend the concept of academic free- case. dom to his own purposes. The wiwde range of events that Flem In his initial response to the request ing has allowed to take place on camp for University facilities for the confer- also underlines the selectivity of the con ence, Fleming constructed a set of cr1- ference ban and the extent to which it teria never before applied to any organi- simply an attack on homosexuality. zation. These guidelines - that the event "If we are to prepare students to li be "clearly educational -in nature and in a free and open society where con directed at people who have professional troversy in the pursuit of truth is tole interest in the field" - were then used ated," the Civil Liberties Board state to justify the conference ban. "we must have a free and open Unive Two month later, Fleming seemed al- sity where the same values are espow most to discard this facade, when he jus- ed." tified the ban by citing "some very prac- . With regard to the rights of homose tical considerations" - possible adverse uals, at least, President Fleming h legislative reaction to the holding of a clearly indicated that he does not vah conference on homosexuality at the Uni- these principles highly. Hopefully, he an versity. the Regents, who have supported h stand on the issue, will receive increa WHILE THE University should be pri- ing pressure to lift the conference ba marily an educational institution, the from the students and faculty membe practice of defining "educational" in the who continue to be sensitive to the righ most limited academic sense can only of all individuals, regardless of their se serve to isolate the campus community ual practices or beliefs. from the full range of perspectives on social and philosophical issues. -MARTIN HIRSCHMAN And the notion that all activities in Editor Making pot a misdemeanor. Not an effective approach UNDER THE guise of reform, Mayor Dearborn ordinance differs from the An Robert Harris has proposed a city Arbor proposal as it includes all dru ordinance that would lower the penalty not simply marijuana. Moreover, in Dea for possession of marijuana to a misde- born more, not fewer, young people a meanor with a maximum jail sentence of going to jail for possession of marijua 90 days and a fine of $500. because local judges there apparently fi In fact, however, the enactment of the it easier to i m p o s e a city ordinanc ordinance would lead not to a "lessening Prosecutors, as well, find it easier to o of the penalties for possession of mari- ain convictions in small local courts tha juana" as Mayor Harris claims, but to a circuit court. the actual increase in the number of peo- In addition, the Ann Arbor ordinan ple sent to jail for the so-called offense would not deal with the most serious a of smoking marijuana. pect of the drug problem, since it h Under the envisioned ordinance the no provision for heroin. police would have the power to determine If the city sincerely feels that the dru whether charges should be brought under problem is not going to be solved by sen the terms of the city ordinance, or state ing young people through the courts, an law-a felony charge. inevitably into the jails, then it shou It is a valid fear that blacks and poor agitate at the state (and federal) levi people will continue to be charged with for the repeal of all narcotics laws. F felonies while young rich of Ann Arbor such laws do not treat addiction to th Hills and Barton Hills will escape with harder drugs as a medical problem, an only a misdemeanor against their name. they interfere with the freedom of in dividuals to do with their bodies as the HARRIS HAS cited the example of choose. Their repeal is a first step towa Dearborn w h e r e similar legislation alleviating the drug problem. has been enacted, as an argument in -JONATHAN MILLER favor of the proposed ordinance. But the ~ ciii9au auig Ten years after Editorial Staff MARTIN A. HIRSOHMAN, Editor f sho STUART GANNES JUDY SARASOHN Editorial Director Managing Editor AT 9:54 YESTERDAY morning, AlanI NADINE COHODAS ........ .....Feature Editor Shepard Jr. became the fifth hums JIM NEUBACHER.......... Editorial Page Editor ROB IERI............Associate Managing Editor being to stand on the surface of the moo LAURIE HARRIS ......... . Arts Editor JUDY KAHN ...................Personnel Director Quite an accomplishment. A tributet DANIEL ZWERDLING .............. Magazine Editor ROBERT CONROW ... ............ ..Books Editor American technology and engineeri JIM JUDKIS..............Photography Editor skill. It was also something of a rewar EDITORIAL NIGHT EDITORS: Jim Beattie, Lindsay for Shepard, who ten years ago becam Chaney, Steve Koppman, Pat Mahoney, Rick Perloff. NIGHT EDITORS: Jim Beattie, Dave Chudwin, Steve the first American to travel in "out Koppman, Robert Kraftowitz, Larry Lempert, Lynn space." Weiner. DAY EDITORS: Rose Berstein, Mark Dihllen, S a r a But what a difference between the Fitzgerald Art Lerner, Jim McFerson, Jonathan and now. That 20 minute sub-orbit Miller, Hannah Morrison, Bob Schreiner, W. E. Schrock. flight glued a whole nation and a go COPY EDITORS: Tammy Jacobs, Hester Pulling, Carla portion of the civilized world to the Rapoport. ASSISTANT NIGHT EDITORS: Juanita Anderson, television sets one fine spring mornin Anita Crone, Linda Dreeben, Alan Lenhoff, Mike in 1961. The news was splashed across th McCarthy, Zack Schiller, John Shamraj, Geri Sprung, Kristin Ringstrom, Gene Robinson, Chuck Wilbur, front page of every newspaper in th Edward Zimmerman, country and filled a good portion of th ed in 0- Z- r- Dn ly n- .al he ut rt at is n- us n- is ve n- s r- s- x- as ue ad is ,s- in ors Lts x- The By I.F. STONE Reprinted from I. F. Stone's Bi-Weekly with permission THE REVELATIONS of the Sy- mington subcommittee report on "Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad" would fall into better focus if it began by say- ing plainly that the U.S. since World War II has become the big- gest empire the world has ever known. The huge military and intelli- gence establishments required to maintain that empire become in- creasingly difficult to control. Their size and secrecy makes ours a par- tially closed society. The truth is that no one, not the President or the Secretary of Defense, or even the heads of secret service agen- cies like CIA, DIA, or NSA, much less the Congress can fully control these monstrous bureaucracies. In their murky depths moves are made which may turn out later to have set the course for disastrous military interventions. We are all trapped by the sheer inertial mass of the machinery re- quired to run the empire. In doz- ens of ways it frustrates free de- cision by freely elected govern- ment, and there is always the dan- ger that it may, if challenged or given the chance, apply at home the methods it employs abroad. Widespread Army spying on anti- war civilians may be seen as the application at home of the "pacifi- cation" techniques the military in- telligence apparatus has developed in Vietnam. As in ancient Rome, the price of empire may be the downfall of the Republic. "UNDER THE Constitution, the Congress, particularly the Senate," the report begins, "has a responsi- bility to keep itself fully informed about matters of foreign policy." The 28 pages are packed with ex- amples of how poorly informed- and often deliberately misinformed -the Congress has become. Senate leaders did not learn until the Sy- mington hearings that our bombing operations in Laos began, not with interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh trail, but in support of Royal Lao forces in Northern Laos. The Nixon Administration talks of improving relations with China but raids on the mainland continue from Taiwan, unmanned U.S. ,-e- connaissance planes still fiy over China, air bases on Taiwan have been enlarged to handle B-52 bombers and the Nationalist Army, dec line of the "despite U.S. efforts to "aake i% appear otherwise", still trains (with U.S. supplied equipment) for return to the mainland. Until the Symington hearings, no one knew that the U.S. had conducted joint military exercises with Franco's army to combat a hypotnetical up- rising. "Creeping commitments" spark new wars in fighting old ones. "After Thai approval of U.S. use of Thai bases for bombing in Laos and Vietnam, insurgent elements surfaced in Thailand. In turn, the U.S. increased its counter-insur- gency forces. In Ethiopia, to ob- tain the use of Kagnew Station (obviously for U-2 flights over the Soviet Union). the U.S. secretly agreed in the 50s to finance a 40.- 000-man army for Ethiopia. U-2 flights have been replaced by sa- tellites but Kagnew station is still in operation. It is now threatened by Arab-supported Eritrean guer- rillas, and the Soviets have reacted by supplying arms to Ethiopia's traditional enemy, Somalia. So cold war engulfs another part of the globe. EVERY businessman knows the problem of keeping tabs on what goes on in his own business. Ima- gine trying to ride he, d on the biggest business in the world: U.S. military and intelligeace opera- ticns. Nobody knows the full cost but it probably comes close to $100 billion a year. "As but one illus- tration of the incredible duplica- tion and waste," the report says, "at one time the three military services, along with AID, USIA and CIA, were each operating in- dependent counter-insurgeney pro- grams" in Thailand, The report discloses that no mechanism exists in the executive branch to eliminate duplication be- tween civilian and military snoop- ers and that even in the Pentagon there is no overall review of com- peting military intelligence pro- grams-this despite the establish- ment by McNamara yeas ago of a DIA (Defense Intelligence Agen- cy supposed to coordin e all Pen- tagon gumshoe work. The total cost of military intelligence in 170, the report reveals, was $2.9 billion, no bagatelle even in the Pentagon. The secret services are big enough to run their own s e c r e t wars. "Everyone recognizes," the report says, "that national secur- ity imposes limits on the disclos- ure of information. But the multi- million dollar support of a 30,000 man army can in no way be con- sidered an intelligence operation." The reference is to the CIA in Laos. There may be some benefits in secrecy. Considering the monumen- tal misjudgments of U.S. intelli- gence in the past two decades in Korea, in Cuba, and in Viet- nam, it's just as well that intelli- gence reports are confinad to a select circle. The Symington re- port has a lovely quotation from Walter Lippmann. He once wrote of the information funnelled into our policy makers that the men reporting to them realize "that it is safer to be wrong before it has become fashionable to be right." Every bureaucracy likes its intelligence apparatus to confirm its preconceptions. But couldn't this reassuring yesmanship be done more cheaply? THE PASSION for secrecy, and its use to hide misjudgments from those who must ultimately foot the bill in lives and money, was the main obstacle in this two-year in- vestigation. If ever there was a David-and-Goliath operation, this was it. A newspaperman, Walter Pincus, and a lawyer, Roland A. Paul, were the two-man staff of this special subcommittee of Senate Foreign Relations under Senator Symington. Their job was to survey commit- ments to more than 43 nations represented by 375 major, and 3.000 minor, U.S. bases abroad. They visited 23 countries and held 37 days of hearings. The published record fills over 2,500 heavily cen- sored but nevertheless revealing pages, The hearings were made possible by Symington's conver- sion in recent years from a pillar of the military establishment to one of its severest critics. The report deserves wider reading and closer study that it is likely to get. The subcommittee's greatest dif- ficulty was in dealing with the sub- ject of nuclear weapons. We seem to have scattered these all around the globe. Some day rebels against governments we support may "kid- nap" and use some of them for a kind of blackmail. A leak during the hearings disclosed that our military feared something like this in Greece. The danger to these sacred monsters we havetplanted around the globe may yet serve as additional rationale for helping a Chiang, a Papadapolous or a Franco to put down a rebellion against the lack of freedom in so many corners of our "free world." At one point "the Executive Branch claimedthat this subject is of such high classification that it could not be discussed before this Poreign Relations subcommittee under any circumstances." Subsequently it relented and agreed to a single-day world-wide briefing of the full Senate Foreign Relations committee but only on condition that there be but one transcript, and this to be held by the State Department! This is a long way from the Constittion, which begins to seem a quaint relic. THE BUREAUCRACY, with its gift for reassuring euphemism, sold the country long ago on "con- tainment." It sounded neat and sanitary. No one ever put the ques- tion, "Shall we sow instant death around the borders of the Soviet bloc and China by ringing them with nuclear devices and delivery systems?" This is what has been .S. empire going on since the 50s. The report to break out of the nuclear ring reminds us that the ZTS. went to that has been drawn around a the brink of nuclear war in 1962 them." "when faced with the possibility that the Soviet Union was putting NEW MISSILE crises may not missiles in a country 90 miles from be resolved as peacefully as in the U.S." 1962. How can Congress and the We must assume that "the Sov- country take preventive measures iets, as they view our placement when censorship blacks out so of tactical nuclear weapons in much of what we need to know? countries far closer to their bord- The full price of empire has yet ers than Cuba is to ours, will seek to fall due. Dick, John and Mel, tell it to S piggy By LINDSAY CHANEY DICK, JOHN AND MEL were sitting around in Dick's office waiting for Spiggy to show up. "Where can he be?" grumbled Mel. The door flew open and Spiggy tumbled in. After knocking over a wastebasket, and sweeping by John and Mel, he came to a stop at Dick's conference table. "Sorry I'm late fellas," he apologized. "I missed a turn by the Blue Room and got lost in the bowling alley." "Quite understandable," demured Dick. "It happens to the best of us." "Okay, let's get down to business," said Mel "RIGHT," replied John. "Now we all understand that the purpose of this meeting is to explain the whole Laos invasion episode to Spiggy so he won't spill the truth in his speech to the National Aardvark Society next week. So why don't we start by having Spiggy ask any questions he has about the whole thing." "Fine," said Spiggy. "First, what was the purpose of this news blackout or news embargo or whatever you call it. It seems to me that we would have more public support if we let everyone know how we're hard at work stopping the commies from coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail or whatever they were doing." "It's not that simple," replied Dick. "But first let me clarify the distinction between 'news embargo' and 'news blackout'. 'News blackout' means that no news about troop movements can come out of Vietnam. 'Embargo' means no news about the news black- out can be reported." t "BUT WHY?" Spiggy wanted to know. "The reason we announce publicly is that the secrecy was necessary for the national interest and to protect American lives, but . . . you know the real reason," said Dick, "I do?" replied Spiggy, quite astonished. "Sure," said John. "If we had let the newspapers report our invasion when it happened, liberals all over the country would say we were expanding the war and would be calling us nasty names. I hate to think what the radicals would be doing." "So we imposed the news blackout so no one would know what we were doing," said Mel. "BUT THE NEWS leaked out anyhow," interrupted Spiggy. "Exactly," said John. "Almost everyone knew or had a pretty good idea about what was goin on, but they didn't know for sure, so they couldn't make loud complaints and of course the liberal newspapers couldn't make a big stink about an 'alleged' invasion." "Then, when we finally lifted the news blackout and con- firmed everything that had already been known," continued Mel, "the news was almost a week old, and who can get excited about old news?" "Pretty clever,"marveled Spiggy. "And to be even more sure that no one gets too upset," added Dick, "we lifted the news blackout the day before the moon landing. This way, the papers are covering the landing and not the war." "YOU HAVE TO remember that this whole operation also sets a few precedents," said John. "If the people accept a temporary news blackout, it won't be long before they're accepting less tem- porary news blackouts, and finally, there won't be any news to black out." "No news is good news," said Mel. "That is, no news except for Radio Free America, the voice of the Great White Father," added John. "Of course, we can't call it censorship," said Dick. "We'll call it 'protective inaction' or something like that." "It's all part of the Plan," said Mel, confidently. Spiggy looked alarmed. "What's this Plan?" he asked. "You've heard of the Plan before," said John. "No I haven't," said Spiggy. "Well, then, if you haven't heard of it before, why do you want to know now?" asked Mel. John and Mel looked at each other. They both looked at Dick. Dick shrugged his shoulders and everyone looked at Spiggy. "Come on fellas," pleaded Spiggy. "You can trust me. I'm a white man," "YEAH, I GUESS SO," said Dick. "The Plan is really very simple. In Vietnam we make raids into Laos and Cambodia from time to time, and occasionally bomb North Vietnam. We always make up moralistic lies like 'saving American lives' for every- thing we do. Here at home we ignore commission reports, grad- ually impose newspaper censorship, and quietly do anything else that will enrage the vocal minority. Of course, we have to think of good excuses - that is, noble reasons - for everything we do. 'Main Street will not be turned into Smut Alley' and all that." "The silent majority will believe us," continued John, "and the vocal minority will get so used to our lies that they'll finally give up complaining and ignore us. "THEN," whispered Mel. "When no one is looking . . . we'll steal the country and we'll be rich, rich, RICH! } i n gs, ir- re na nd ce. ib- an ce .s- as ug d- .d Id el or he ld n- ey rd B. an n. to ng ,rd e Jer en al od eir ng he he he Foot soldiers for the empire LETTERS TO THE DAILY Students International won 't give re fund, To the Daily:. ON OCTOBER 29. 1970 we signed up and paid for three seats on a charted flight with Students International, scheduled to leave on December 20. We paid a total of $747.00. This flight was canceled by Stu- dents Internationalon November 25. and we were asked whether we to realize a trip for which we had been planning and saving a long time. It has now been more than two months since t h e charter flight was canceled. We have continued asking for o u r money, without success. It seems highly unfair to us, a student family. that Students In- ternational claims to be a non- real differences between Ann Ar- bor's Democratic city administra- tion and the new radical party which has been nominating candi- dates and adopting a platform for the city elections. Unfortunately the issues which exist are obscured by misleading portions of the new party's public statements. T h e flyer which I was handed in the Fishhowl aleges that M a y 6 r the headships of such departments as Personnel), and its successful campaign to win public approval for the restoration of the Huron River dams. The flyer notes that "the c it y government is still financed by an arachaic and regressive property tax system," which is true; but it fails to mention that in 1969 the Mayor' and fDemocr~atic Courncil- THE HARRIS administration has compiled a record of hard and imaginative work, and substantial accomplishment, in the raalm of social services. What the c i t y government can do In these areas has been, and will be, limited chiefly by its financial resources. The city's tax structure, in turn, is limited by state law and the reluctance of the electorate to vote