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OPINION
Page 4 Monday, March 21, 1988 The Michigan Daily


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Eie Michigan
Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan

Nuremberg upholds

By Sandra Steingraber

Vol. XCVIII, No. 114

420 Maynard St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Unsigned editorials represent a majority of the Daily's Editorial Board. All other
cartoons, signed articles, and letters do not necessarily represent the opinion
of the Daily.
U.S. troop mobilization - a dangerous gambit:
Propaganda invasion

WAR IS PEACE, PROVOCATION is
stability, and Honduras is a democracy.
President Reagan's foreign policy
rationale reached new heights of Or-
wellian perversion last Thursday with
his announcement that 3200 U.S.
troops would be sent to Honduras in
response to an "invasion" b y
Nicaragua. Naturally, he was requested
, to do so by the leader of the puppet
~government there - and never mind
that our troops were mobilized before
the invitation arrived. But after the ex-
posure of the Iran-contra crimes and
after seven years of interventionist ma-
neuvering carried out in the name of
democracy, it is unlikely the public is
"goingto be duped by this latest ploy to
" whip up fear of imagined hordes of
marauding Sandinistas.
Two things should be utterly clear to
anyone who is not comatose. First,
nothing like a Nicaraguan invasion of
Honduras has taken place. Second, the
timing of such a fabrication is most
certainly designed both to manipulate
Congress into passing more Contra aid
and to divert our attention away from
other very real political developments.
A military invasion is a forced entry
into a sovereign nation with the intent to
conquer or overrun. The real invaders
in this case are the CIA-created and
controlled Contras, who have with this
intention crossed the Nicaraguan border
from their nests in Honduras and Costa
Rica a thousand times.
When the Sandinistas cross the
Honduran border they are engaged in
hot pursuit of the retreating invaders.
Crossing borders in hot pursuit is rec-
ognized the world over as a technique
of warfare. Hot pursuit is not tanta-
mount to an intention to conquer or
overrun the inhabitants of Honduras.
In fact, there are virtually no Hon-
duran civilians living in the Bocay area.
The region was depopulated by the
U.S. long ago to allow the Contras to
maintain their base campus. This sit-
uation, of course, is in complete vio-
lation of the Arias Peace Plan. Hon-
duras has sacrificed its most produc-
tive, coffee-growing land to harbor an
army attempting to overthrow its neigh-
bor. This plainly indicates just to what
extent this impoverished country is a
pawn to Washington's designs.
Reagan does not mention that the
Sandinista-contra war has spilled over
Jhe Honduran border many times in the

past. Of all these, only three Sandinista
border crossings have been publicized
in the last two years - and each time
as a political gambit to whip up support
for the flagging contra army. The San-
dinistas crossed into San Jose de Bocay
last April, and neither the U.S. nor the
Honduran government responded in
any way. No troops were mobilized.
The current mobilization attempts to
reduce attention given to the upcoming
arraignments of the indicted members
of Reagan's main foreign policy players
and the veto of a landmark civil rights
bill. Congress is sent scrambling to
prepare another Contra aid package,
and it's a safe bet that "humanitarian"
will not be the key word. Meanwhile in
this drama of violence, the Honduran
air force fills in as a kind of Contra
understudy as American-made planes
bomb the border area in acts of deliber-
ate provocation.
The mainstream American press has
been lax in its responsibility both to re-
port this story objectively and to place it
in a political and historical context. On
Friday, most newspapers immediately
reported Reagan's claim of "invasion"
without independent confirmation.
We are being asked to rally around
the flag in order to escalate a policy of
terror. Hopefully the U.S. population
will be too wise to fall for these
jingoistic tricks. The streets have been
filled with politically diverse people,
willing to commit acts of civil-
disobedience, all in opposition to the
escalation of U.S. violence. Those
arrested over the weekend included
relatives of the GIs sent to the war
zone. These are people who remember
the deliberate provocation by U.S.
forces in the Gulf of Tonkin which
escalated our involvement in Vietnam
into a full-scale war. People who
believe in the dictates of the Arias Peace
Plan. People who are sick of seeing
rash military misadventures go forth
while education, housing, and health
care go wanting.
If there is a silver lining to this trav-
esty it is here. The waters are being
tested. How we respond now to Rea-
gan's moves will determine how
Congress will vote on the new bid for
Contra aid. And to denounce the cur-
rent contrivance for what it is sends a
powerful message to the next adminis-
tration that we refused to be so easily
manipulated.

Early one morning last November, I.
handed my teaching materials over to my
husband on the off chance that I was going
to be arrested. A few minutes later I was
shouting in a back room of the Career
Planning and Placement Center as thirty
other people and I attempted to disrupt the
activities taking place in an adjacent room.
In this room, guarded by many large men,
a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) re-
cruiter was interviewing University stu-
dents.
Our aim was simple: to stop the inter-
views. We were partially successful. The
more recent disruption of CIA interviews
at the Law School succeeded in both halt-
ing the interview process and prompting
the Law School to consider banning the
CIA from future appearances. Certainly
both protests have forced the University
community to think about the role of the
CIA as a potential employer of U of M
students and as an institution of terror
abroad
Unfortunately, some people have
reached conclusions about the appropriate-
ness of our actions based on fallacious
reasoning. First, Senate Advisory Com-
mittee on University Affairs (SACUA)
has argued that disruptive protests of the
CIA are wrong because the violate the
right to an uninterrupted job interview. As
Rackham Student Government has pointed
out, the use of public facilities and student
funds to host recruiters and to conduct job
interviews is a privilege, not a right,
granted to organizations whom the
Administration deems acceptable employ-
ers.
In the defining the CIA' as such, the
Administration is in grievous error. The
CIA is an unacceptable employer because
the CIA engages in illegal activities. Fur-
ther, these crimes are so gross as to vio-
late the tenets of the Nuremberg Princi-
ples, a framework of international law that
is binding on all governments. We are in
'fact obliged to work against the perpetra-
tors of such crimes. The fact that these
perpetrators remain unconvicted or are act-
ing as government officials does not re-
lieve them from responsibility under these
laws.
Now some gentle folk have pointed out
that statements about the crimes of the
Sandra Steingraber is a Daily opinion
page staffer.

CIA are, however valid, matters of opin-
ion. By interfering with CIA interviews,
are disruptive protesters not infringing
upon the rights of those who hold
dissenting opinions?
Of course, the atrocities committed by
the CIA are matters of opinions. But they
are also matters of fact. They are also
matters of public record.
Kurt Waldheim, leader of Austria, has
been accused of Nazi war crimes forty
years ago. If his role in such crimes can be
established by a court of law, does he have
the right to remain in office because the
horror of Nazi activities is a matter of
opinion? Because some revisionists claim
that the Holocaust never happened?
The CIA mining of the Nicaraguan har-
bors has been ruled a violation of interna-
tional law. And the Congressional pro-
ceedings of the Iran-contra hearings state
plainly that the CIA has engaged in illegal
activities by funnelling arms to the
Contras during a time when such actions
were prohibited by national law. The New
York Times, newspaper of record, refers to
the illegal activities of the CIA. Not
"illegal activities," not alleged illegal
activities, not illegal activities according
to so-and-so. Illegal activities. Period.
The litany of CIA crimes in violation of
national and international law is long and
includes crimes against peace, crimes
against humanity, and war crimes. Anyone
unfamiliar with the specifics should read
journalist Darrell Garwood's book, Under
Cover: Thirty-five years of CIA
Deception. The chronology alone requires
eight pages of small print.
I've been asked if I would disrupt job
interviews of other organizations whose
policies I disagree with, like IBM which
invests in South Africa. I have been asked
if I would support right-to-life protestors
who might disrupt Planned Parenthood
interviews based on their convictions
about fetal rights. Those who ask such
questions invoke the old slippery slope
argument, fearing that any public support
of interview disruptions would set a dan-
gerous precedent and send us sliding into a
gulf of chaos and anarchy.
They are wrong. A clear qualitative dif-
ference exists between disagreing with the
policies of lawful organizations and be-
lieving that institutions engaged in over-
throwing sovereign nations and training
torturers must be stopped. The former re-
quires non-disruptive, educational demon-
stration. The latter requires disruption. Not
to disrupt is to be complicitous with the

14
protest
commission of international crimes, a
violation of the forth Nuremberg Princi-
ple. As for Planned Parenthood, I would
not support the efforts of a right-to-life
disruption because abortion is guaranteed
by the law.
I have been asked why I, an ecologist,
am so concerned by the CIA. There are
three reasons. First, aside from their gross
violation of international law, the CIA is
responsible for gross violations of the
natural environment. Vast areas of
rainforest have been defoliated to facilitate
surveillance of peasant communities sus-
pected of revolutionary sympathies. 4
Second, the CIA is responsible for the
deaths of environmentalists. CIA-backed
Contras have targeted and killed 50 envi-
ronmental workers in Nicaragua. I would
hope that if I became a victim of assassi-
nation by a foreign intelligence agency
somebody would at least try to prevent
their recruitment efforts in the universi-
ties.
Third, the CIA is an abuser of science.
For example, through a front called the 4
Society for the Investigation of Human
Ecology, the CIA has spent millions
financing activities at 50 universities in
21 countries. At McGill University in
Canada, the CIA financed experiments in
mind control. that included exposing 53
unwitting patients to electro-shock, LSD,
and repeated recorded messages. The
victims have just won their seven-year
struggle to bring their suit against the
CIA to trial.
Anyone studying psychology should
pay special attention to this trial, which
begins in Washington on June 7. Anyone
in communications or the humanities
should be monitoring the CIA's disinfor-
mation and propaganda campaigns. Any-
one in medicine should know about the
CIA experiments in the techniques of tor-
ture. Anyone studying computers and
technology should find out what is done
with the information gathered by CIA
overflights in El Salvador.
The University is an institution devoted
to the disclosure of truth. The CIA is an
agency devoted to deception. Every aca-
demician should oppose the CIA's pres-
ence on campus and support disruptive
protests to that end.
Last week MSA reaffirmed their
commitment to human rights by passing a
resolution in support of student disruption
of CIA interviews. SACUA should
likewise reconsider their position.

Wasserman

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LETTERS

A Canadian's view of

To the Daily:
I am a PhD student from
Canada of "non-minority" sta-
tus (to use this country's racial
categorization) and feel moved
to comment on the recent inci-
dents that have occurred on
campus from a slightly differ-
ent perspective.
I came to this university be-
cause I thought it to be a
world-class institution in a
city I heard was one of the
most progressive in this coun-
try. Instead, however, of being
able to attend my studies in the
relative comfort of the stimu-
lating, open, intellectual envi-
ronment I had expected, I have
found myself witness ,over the
past year, to a series of inci-
dents exemplifying racism and
bigotry at all levels to a degree
that I did not think was possi-
ble in a civilized community.
To imagine that education,
however one conceives it, can
nror-o;n ia nnivecreity e

(since some of these events
have been televised on Channel
9 as well).
If this university wishes to
keep its hard-won reputation of
aspiring to high standards,
conducting excellent research,
and attracting the highest qual-
ity students and faculty of all
colors who are concerned about
contributing in s o m e
meaningful way to the wider

society, then it must send a
clear message to to its con-
stituents as well as to the na-
tion that it will not tolerate
incidents such as those which
have been occurring over the
last year. But perhaps more
importantly, this institution
must recognize the amply
demonstrated need for re-
education of its members so as
to get at the prejudicial atti-

icism
tudes and belief systems at the
root of this "most challenging
issue" it faces. Otherwise, we
will have the misfortune of
observing the University of
Michigan slide quickly from a {
position of widely recognized
distinction to one of equally
world-renowned mediocrity.
-Anna Vakil
February 13

Research requirement reasonable

Revive the Agenda

THE AGENDA, ANN Arbor's monthly
alternative publication, has not been
circulated for the past two months and
needs students' support to get back on
its. feet.
Reviving the Agenda benefits all
community members. Agenda provides

both local and national issues. Its angle
is original and its existence important
for information dissemination and dis-
cussion within the local community.
There will be a phone-a-thon for
Agenda Monday - Wednesday,
March 21 - March 22, from 6-9 P.M.
It will be at 4438 N. Ingalls. on the 1st

To the Daily:
I would first like to say that
the editorial "Pay for experi-
ments" (Daily 3/8/88) con-
cerning the department of
psychology's requirement for
students enrolled in an intro-
ductory class to participate in
four hours of experiments re-
flects an uneducated point of
view.
Tnra ir. l er Pof ev

in it, as well as allowing valu-
able research to continue.
True, a few experimenters
pay five to ten dollars per hour
for subjects; but those who can
afford it are rarely those who
use the subject pool. The re-
searchers who are given highest
priority in the subject pool are
not professors and graduate
students, but are the undergrad-

4

or exploitative. It is an effi-
cient way of providing both a
necessary experience to the in-
tro students and valuable re-
search materials to the experi-
menters.
-Theresa Trzaskoma
March 9

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