Eighty years of editorial freedom Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan 420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor, Mich. News Phone: 764-0552 Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1971 NIGHT EDITOR: DAVE CHUDWIN Opening the door to violence VIOLENCE returned to the University of Michigan yesterday, precipitated by an administration which exercised such incompetent judgment that it takes con- siderable restraint to discuss it calmly. If the University administration had sought an atmosphere that could not help but lead to a confrontation, physical bru- tality, and arrests, it could not have planned yesterday's Regents meeting bet- ter than it did. At 11 a.m. yesterday morning, 50 peo- ple (mostly students) stood outside the Administration Bldg. seeking admission to the Regents monthly public meeting. On the other side of locked doors, a contingent of plainclothes security men and Ann Arbor police stood guard, or- dered by the administration to allow only certain, specially listed people, to enter the "public" meeting. IT WAS only natural that this setting would amplify the sense of frustration felt by the demonstrators. Aware that the Regents meeting room is large enough to admit their relatively small group without difficulty, the demonstrators saw the locked, guarded building as poignant testimony to their separation from the University's decision-making p r o c e s s. Ironically, this is why they were there in the first place. It is appalling that the administration lacked the sensitivity to understand that its elaborate security measures, aimed at preventing a disruption, merely mani- fested to the students the very closed, guarded, decision-making process which prompts them to take disruptive actions. And sure enough, by 11:10, the admin- istration's security precautions-the lock- ed doors, the presence of police-had pro- voked the disturbance it was designed to prevent. Certainly, the administrators s h o u 1 d have forseen that when the locked en- trance was opened to admit someone, the students would attempt to gain entrance to a meeting they felt they should be allowed to attend. This was sure to bring them into con- tact with the police blocking the door- way, and, as has happened so many times before, the enmity which police and stu- dents feel toward each other accelerated the progression to violence. The administration has assuredly seen this happen before. Fleming, at least, should harbor some memory of the sum- mer evening in 1969, when he is said to have urged Sheriff Douglas Harvey to remove his men from South University Ave., where they were stirring up a large crowd. NEVERTHELESS, t h e administrators and Regents continue to display a poor understanding of the factors which cause and prevent eruptions within the academic community. The initial unrest will continue to be an outgrowth of the University's inequit- able governing system. What will inflame it will be the Regents' unwillingness to at least take the modest step of entering into good-faith discussions with students on issues both students and administra- tors believe are significant. Of immediate importance, if such in- cidents as yesterday's are to be avoided, is the opening of all Regents meetings to the public. This can be facilitated by holding the meetings in'a larger room to accommodate those who wish to attend. However, such a step must be accom- panied by a marked increase in the sensi- tivity of the administration and Regents to the frustrations felt by students at the University. While this would not correct the basic c a u s e of disturbances like yesterday's, which lies in the inequities of University governance, it would significantly damp- en the likelihood of violence and disrup- tion at future Regents meetings. -ROBERT KRAFTOWITZ Pow EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first artics a five-part series concerning North Vietn treatment of the more than 330 American p imprisoned there. The rest of the series, by author cf a Pulitzer-prize winning article or My Lai tragedy, will appear next week. By SEYMOUR M. HERSH WASHINGTON-On September 2, 1 Navy Lt. Robert F. Frishman, then held a news conference at Bethesda Ni Hospital just outside of Washington. had been released a month earlier fro: prison cell somewhere in Hanoi; he the first of nine pilots who had been f: by North Vietnam to speak out. It was, he said, an ordeal of horror. He was given insufficient medical trt ment for his arm that was serioi wounded when he crashed. He was kep solitary confinement. He was fed skimpy meals a day. He was forced to3 confessions against his will. He told what happened when a fel pilot, Lieutenant Commander Richard Stratton, refused to make a statement: "He's been tied up with ropes to sue degree that he still has large scars on arms from rope burns which became fected. He was deprived of sleep, bea had his finger nails removed and put solitary, but the North Vietnamese ins ed that he make the false humane tr ment statements and threw him int dark cell along for thirty-eight days think about it." It was a front-page story around the tion. Henry Cabot Lodge, then President I on's Ambassador to the Paris peace to cited the officer - "I can do no be than to repeat the words of Lieuter Frishman" - in a sharp attack on North Vietnamese at the next negotiai session a few days later. Similar atto outlined by the Geneva Convention: it did not permit a full flow of mail and pack- ages: it did not provide accurate lists of the number and location of prisoners; and it did not permit impartial inspection of its prison camps. Yet the solid evidence of systematic abuse of prisoners had always been missing. Even the intensive interro- gation of the six prisoners released by Ha- noi during 1968 provided no evidence of such abuse. The pilots reported that their biggest complaint was boredom and demoraliza- tion. The only serious manhandling came at the hands of local peasants after their plane crashed (the pilots were, of course, hated because of the heavy bombing) and occasionally at the hands of interrogators after reaching the federal prisons. Even those sessions were hard to evalu- ate, with treatment varying on which Viet- namese official was doing the questioning and the attitude of the pilot. "You have to remember," explained one State Department official close to POW affairs during an interview, "that much of this revolves over how men react to mis- treatment. For example, some children will cry over scratches; others w il1 tolerate broken ankles." THERE IS NO question that the pilots now in captivity are suffering serious de- privation - the mere fact that they are 12,000 miles from their homes and families would be agony enough. Yet, most of the evidence before Frish- man's return indicated that the food sup- plied to the prisoners meager as it was, was at least as plentiful - if not more - than the hard-pressed Hanoi regime was giving to its prison camp guards., In addition, the isolation reported by the six men was not as great as had been fear- ed. One returned pilot told how he shared living quarters with three other pilots. The men, he said, often noisily argued among themselves. Most of the captives appa-. ently were living in groups of two and four, although each group was carefully isolated from others. There is some evidence that military of- ficials were aware of the strained case that was being presented at the news confer- ence. In a private letter sent by the mili- tary on June 5, wives and parents of cap- tured and missing Air Force pilots were 1 told they would be given a personal brief- ing on the prisoner situation. The letter also enclosed copies of the materials supplied to the press, with this explanation: "The briefing was specifical- ly designed to bring the pressure of the world opinion to bear on the enemy which, hopefully, will result in more information about and better treatment for our downed personnel." The letter concluded with this remark- able sentence: "We are certain that you will not become unduly concerned over the briefing if you keep in mind the purpose for which it was tailored (emphasis add- ed)" DESPITE THE new Nixon Administra- tion emphasis on the prisoners, the issue still hadn't evolved into a major public de- bate by late summer, 1969, when Hanoi re- leased Frishman and two other prisoners into the care of anti-war groups. Even the wives and mothers of captured and missing men, who had begun to or- ganize in 1968 in protest over the Johnson Administration's quiet diplomacy, h a d failed to arouse broad interest with their 4 torture: U.. propaganda? occasional picketing of government build- ings and protests, "There was an absolutely valid case that somebody had to make" against the North Vietnamese, one State Department official said, recalling those days. "But we were always under an evidence problem. Frish- man truly was a godsend . ." After his appearance in Washington, Frishman was taken on tour by the Navy, making highly publicized visits to six ma- jor cities within five days to tell his story to the wives and families of captured and missing American pilots. He gave many television and newspaper interviews, and even published a first-person account of his experiences that appeared as a featur- ed article in the Readers Digest magazine for December, 1969. No o t h e r returned prisoner had been given such freedom tc speak out. Duringtestimony in mid-December be- fore the House Committee on Internal Se- curity, formerly known as the House Un- American Activities Committee, Frishman declared that the treatment afforded the pilots in North Vietnam was "generally worse" than that given to the crew of the Pueblo. The worst torture, however, was the iso- lation, he said. Encouraged by the commit- tee members to continue, Frishman added: "I don't know all the prisoners up there, but I would say there are a large percent- age that are in isolation and have been so for a long time." He himself had indicated to an Italian reporter during an interview in Hanoi that he had been in isolation for 18 months. IN HIS TESTIMONY before the House Internal Security Committee, Frishman reported how he had been taken on trips to war and art museums in downtown Ha- noi. He told at one point how, after an op- eration on his injured elbow, ". . . I could not even get up so they (the prison offi- cials) brought someone in; another pris- oner came in and he would more or less just take care of me like a nurse. He would get my food, empty my bucket, actuall feed me, wash my clothes, and things lik that. It was a tremendous help for me." Another indication that Frishman's iso! lation was not as severe as he had indi-" cated publicly was privately supplied by the Pentagon to a family that had report- ed the tentative identification of its POW A racist recruiting policy I IN DETERMINING a n e w recruiting policy for the entire University, the Regents have succeeded only in weaken- ing the existing Office of Student Services policy in a way that undermines all of its effectiveness. While the new policy approved yester- day seems to partially accept the idea that discrimination must be fought on the institutional level, it only exacerbates the procedural problems that critics di- rected at the OSS plan. Thus, it is likely to please no one. For example, the OSS plan, which bar- red recruiting by companies with sub- sidiaries in countries which legally en- force discrimination, was often crticized for being so broadly defined that it could not be enforced. There were, the critics said, too many companies in too many countries with too many laws to allow such judgments to be at all feasible. If the OSS policy was loose enough to let an occasional offender slip by, how- ever, the new regental plan is so dras- tically ill-defined that it will not only make mistakes, but be completely in- effective. The Regents new policy reads, "(No) placement service shall be made avail- able for the purpose of recruitment for employment in any country where dis- crimination is legally enforced .. ." BY THUS allowing companies to recruit for jobs in countries which supposed- ly do not enforce such discrimination (presumably the U.S., for example) the policy therefore bars no American com- pany from recruiting here. And this fact alone is enough to render the policy com- pletely ineffective in sopping the com- plicity of the University in sending work- ers to countries with such racist policies as South Africa. To be sure, the Regents' policy would prevent direct recruiting by officials of American subsidiaries in South Africa, but it certainly would not stop any com- pany that was seriously interested in getting workers from the University for its foreign offices. A company would only wittingly is irrelevant, since the whole problem could be avoided in the first place by adopting the original OSS policy that simply would have barred recruiting by companies with subsidiaries in such countries. A large part of the blame for the Re- gents' poor decision surely lies with efforts of President Fleming to keep the Uni- versity from "imposing" values concern- ing racism on its students. IN A STATEMENT released yesterday, he said, "It would seem to me quite proper to make known to the individual such in- formation as that the employer operated in South Africa . . ., or even to deny the right of an employer to recruit for em- ployes who are to work in a foreign coun- try which discriminates. In the last an- alysis, however, I would let the individual make' all other decisions." The correlation between the wording of the regental policy and Fleming's state- ment makes it entirely clear who really decided on the new policy. Fleming's statement continued, "It is not so clear to me that one (recruiting policy) is right and the other 'wrong.' Therefore, I am not willing to force on all the view of one side. I would prefer to see each, individual make his own decision." Fleming appears not to have had his way totally. For the regental policy, by banning "any organization or individual that discriminates in recruitment or em- ployment against any person . . ., or that does not maintain an affirmative action program to assure equal employment," does indeed attempt to take an institu- tional stand against discrimination, in form if not in actual practice. On closer scrutiny, however, it is clear that Fleming has won out completely. For, whether or not the University words its policy in such a way that it appears to be against discrimination, the real effects of Fleming's maneuverings have been to make the policy so ineffective that the University remains a part of the machinery that supports and reinforces racism in this country and abroad. were quickly made by U.S. representatives at the 21st International Red Cross con- ference in Istanbul, Turkey, and in the United Nations. IN CONGRESS, nearly 300 resolutions expressing support for the prisoners were introduced within two months of Frish- man's news conference. Frishman's testimony came at a critical time for the United States. The White House had approved a major change in policy on the prisoner issue just a few months earlier. No longer would American officials at- tempt to negotiate privately and with re- straint - as in the Johnson Administra- tion - for the release and safety of the more than 300 American pilots known to be captured by the North Vietnamese. On May 19, 1969, five months after tak- ing office, Secretary of Defense Melvin A. Laird made the prisoner issue public at a news conference, calling on Hanoi to re- spect the Geneva Convention on prison- ers of war, which that nation had signed in 1957. Photographs indicating that some pilots had lost weight while in capativity were distributed, along with a f a c t booklet questioning the medical care being pro- vided for others. "The North Vietnamese have claimed that they are treating our men humanely," the defense secretary said. "I am distressed by the fact that there is clear evidence that this is not the case." The defense chief had, as many officials later acknowledged, somewhat overstated his case. Hanoi had refused to abide by many of the standards for prisoner care L e t ers:0 To The Daily: Studer access t IN THE COURSE of the open even in meeting on University policy re- modest garding corporate recruiting I was, range o for a brief moment, struck by one made or of those rare Gestalt flashes when A suddenly one feels he has had an AND insight into a knotty problem. The a white moment came when the Dean of ably oc the Business School referred to the ed and "moral autonomy" various schools social st within the University should be political free to exercise vis-a-vis corpor- richest; ate recruiting. Just what were the try in t dissidents asking? The practical ing why effect of a University-wide adop- limited tion of the OSS policy would be which u to force some corporations to tional c spend a few thousand dollars to eral Mo rent and or buy services they now budget -' a na pp except t son in a national magazine article. "Lieu- tenant Frishman's debriefing," a dis- couraging letter to the family said, "pos- itively identified the photograph as that of a U.S. Air Force office (not their son) who had been Lieutenant Frishman's room- mate while in captivity. My interviews with government officials in late 1970 also prodiced the fact that Frishman and the two other returnees had been able to tentatively name more than three hundred pilots believed to be pris- oners of war in North Vietnam, another sign of some social contact. THERE WERE doubts about Frishman's account of prison life being expressed - privately - at various stages of the gov- ernment. Patrick J. McGarvey, now a Washington free lance writer, was then an analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) working on the North Vietnam desk. When the Frishman debriefing papers . came across his desk, he recalled, "I smelled a ringer right off. It just didn't jibe with everything else I h a d seen." McGarvey said he and others in the agency were con- vinced Frishman was telling "a song and dance story." Officials at the State Department con- cerned with prisoner matters also were surprised by the Frishnan statements. Al- though the military had been interrogat- ing the Navy officer for weeks, before the Sept. 2 news conference, none of the in- terrogation papers had been forwarded to State. There were further disturbing questions about one of Frishman's fellow prisoners who had been released with him, Navy Seaman Douglas B. Hegdahl, then 23. Hegdahl had been captured by the North Vietnamese in April, 1967 after falling off his destroyer while it was on duty in the Gulf of Tonkin. He appeared at the Bethesda news con- ference and told how he had lost 60 pounds and been kept in solitary confinement for more than a year during his 16 months of capitivity. YET' A FEW DAYS after the news con- ference, Hegdahl, who is from South Da- kota, returned home and told a Minneap- olis reporter the reason why he had lost so much weight: the prison authorities had taken away his roommate, so he went on a hunger strike for months to get another. He ate only part of the two meals of soup and bread he received daily, until "'the higher ups saw that I was skinny and I later got a roommate." Hegdahl ack- nowledged that the food served to him in North Vietnam "would have b e e n ade- quate" if he had eaten it all. At no time did the young sailor, or any government official, volunteer the infor- mation that his weight loss was directly due to a voluntary hunger strike. More than a year later I asked a gov- ernment official not involved in the in- terrogation of Hegdahl if he knew why the sailor had lost so much weight. He quickly replied that Hegdahl had gone on a hun- ger strike. I asked why that information hadn't been made available to journalists. "I don't know about that, but I had no trouble learning about it," was the re- sponse. C Reporters News Service -r I ' and corporate America nts would not be denied o corporate personnel nor convenienced. It is quite a proposal considering the f demands that could be n the issue. THERE stood Dean Bond, American male, comfort- cupying a highly privileg- influencial niche in the tructure, a member of the and economic elite of the and most powerful coun- the world, calmly explain- he opposed a policy, both a n d largely symbolic, would require an interna- orporate colossus like Gen- tors, who has an annual larger than every nation the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., well groomed, confident, and dis- armingly charming in his o w n way, juxtaposed against vivid pictures of black South Africans, among the most wretched and sup- pressed people of the earth. I am not usually given to dra- matic moral visions but for me this one was worth a thousand words. I do not accuse Dean Bond of dishonesty and, for the sake of generosity, I will even acquit him of acting at all disingenuous- ly; however, this increases rather than diminishes the moral weak- ness of his position. Often I have had difficulty describing exactly where I stand along the political spectrum. As long as men like Dean Bond consider themselves to any extent "liberals," I must de- clare mvslfr adical. discrimination from using the placement services on this cam- pus. While the people who favored such a policy w e r e allowed to speak without any heckling, this was not the case for those who did not agree w i t h this policy. By their childish actions, the heck- lers showed that they do not have the ability to listen to both sides of a question before making up their minds. Sitting at my right was one per- son who proceeded to ridicule ev- ery view which obviously did not coincide with his own. After threatening me and calling me a Nazi, he finally shut up when I told him I wasn't a Nazi but, face- tiously, a bigot. T h is obviously Tipping* To the Daily: I FEEL compelled to comment on an incident which I observed late Friday night in an expensive Ann Arbor restaurant. A group of six young couples, who were seated together, dined for over two hours and were graciously served by two conscientious waitresses. At the conclusion of the meal, the twelve patrons left a combined tip of just over $1.00 for both waitresses. The lack of social consciousness would have aroused anyon's indig- nation, considering the extent to which waitresses depend on tips for their income. However, the fact waitresses were white raises fur- that the patrons were black and the tho nvictn.