COMMENT
Comment the Progressive The Emperor's New Clothes If it's true that there's beauty in simplicity, then we've got ourselves one gorgeous President. Not since Richard Nixon's White House days has...
...Colonel North and General Secord "were basically good people who were boxed in by a vacillating Congress," said the orotund Henry Hyde of Illinois...
...Maybe Richard Nixon was an easier target than the Great Drooler...
...A: Democrat Harry Reid of Nevada, who objected to FBI investigations in his home state...
...And to Secord, Hyde gushed: "I just have a visceral feeling that you and Ollie North are the kind of guys the country turns to when it's in real trouble and it has a dirty job to do...
...It also can be much less expensive, for pesticides not only poison you, they rob you while they're at it...
...It's our fault, not yours, they plead...
...People returning from visits to Nicaragua have been closely questioned, and have had their personal notes and papers seized by customs inspectors who turned the material over to the FBI...
...The idea that people can be jailed because we are afraid they might do something bad tomorrow or the next day runs so counter to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights that most constitutional scholars are still in a state of shock...
...We still think that the product is effective and that its safety is consistent with other products in its class," a company spokesman said...
...And let's face it: Americans aren't ready to impeach this President...
...Painkiller's Demise When Johnson & Johnson suspended the sale of its painkiller Suprol in May, the pharmaceutical company bowed to pressure not from the U.S...
...If the American people knew what was being done in their name, they wouldn't stand for it, so we are consistently lied to and betrayed by our own Government...
...There you have it...
...It's not a good idea to have friends like that," the agents told her...
...H Now that the lives of thirty-seven U.S...
...Over the next few months, the FBI mounted a campaign of harassment against Cubias, visiting her repeatedly at home and at her workplace, calling her on the telephone, interviewing her friends...
...It was my idea to begin with...
...Otherwise, we will continue to graze in the cancer fields...
...Is that a declaration by the legislature of some Third World police state...
...There are alternatives...
...Pity...
...But they warned her that some of her friends were subversives: They assisted Central American refugees and provided medical aid to Nicaragua...
...The project, which involves detonating atomic explosions in space, is called Prometheus...
...You cannot pursue the goals of empire while adhering to the precepts of morality...
...As the Chief Justice reads it, "This Clause, of course, says nothing about whether bail shall be available at all...
...Will he next pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to protect the profits of the Mobil Corporation...
...To this writing, the hearings have, with only minor exception, been a spectacle of mushy rhetoric and empty posturing...
...The Soviet government says it's all a fabrication...
...Now that Ronald Reagan has wrapped himself in the mantle of royal prerogative, you know the country is in a pickle...
...Government from spending U.S...
...Has that transformation, in fact, already taken place...
...A: 94-to-l...
...Consent and Consent Late in 1984, Daisy Cubias had an unexpected visit at her Milwaukee home from two FBI agents...
...All this happened, of course, while William H. Webster was director of the FBI...
...Congress has wondrous habits of self-abasement...
...The agents said they could understand her resentment and assured her she had done nothing wrong...
...The regulatory agencies of our Government have atrophied during the Reagan Administration to the point where they are all but useless...
...Some communist dictatorship...
...There have been strong indications of FBI complicity in a series of break-ins at the offices of anti-contra groups...
...Whether in Korea or Vietnam, the Middle East or Central America, Indonesia or Chile, Zaire or the Dominican Republic, Guatemala or South Africa, Cambodia or Cuba, U.S...
...Certainly, the President deserves it...
...And so the Rehnquist Court philosophically aligns the United States with all those other places in the world where men, women, and children wallow in prison merely because someone in the Government thinks they are dangerous...
...The President had made clear that he wanted a job done," McFarlane said in language drawn from a Grade B gangster film...
...Unable to maintain any longer that our man in the White House was oblivious to the hanky-panky of his Administration, Reagan's latest handlers came up with a last-ditch defense: Admit knowledge, assert legality...
...foreign policy has pursued actions and interventions that are often illegal and almost invariably repugnant...
...policy and practice in the dock...
...Civil libertarians may, therefore, find the following catechism instructive: Q: By what margin did the United States Senate recently confirm Webster as director of Central Intelligence...
...But, as is all too typical in these cases, the FDA did nothing, even though it admitted receiving some 270 reports from doctors concerning Suprol-induced kidney damage, and even though virtually every other nation had banned the drug...
...A government of laws, not of men, becomes a government of men alone—and a particularly loutish and malevolent tribe, at that...
...The Soviet shipment was picked up at a Warsaw Pact base in Poland and flown first to Nicosia, Cyprus, and then on to Iran...
...One Big Family Here's how it worked, according to The New York Times: A French arms dealer, acting as broker for a German merchant (who maintains a residence in Coral Gables, Florida), offered to sell more than $ 18 million worth of advanced Soviet weapons to Iran...
...Yet pesticide manufacturers have successfully promoted their products as indispensable to American farmers, and American consumers have scarcely a choice...
...It just could be that the fundamental issue raised by the Iran-contra scandal, the issue of empire, is too knotty to dig up...
...A: No...
...preventing danger to the community is a legitimate regulatory goal...
...Hyde is right about that...
...Truth, legality, dignity are foreign substances to most of these legislators, and the rare politician on the panels who dares to ask a penetrating question is quickly corralled by the contra cowboys...
...It's not punishment, Rehnquist said...
...Sentence First, Trial After Congress declares that a person innocent of any crime may be jailed indefinitely, pending the trial of allegations which are legally presumed to be untrue, if the Government shows to the satisfaction of a judge that the accused is likely to commit crimes unrelated to the pending charges, at any time in the future...
...Sales were lagging, the spokesman responded...
...intervention in Central America constituted grounds for voting against the nomination...
...But impeachment is no panacea, and as political strategy it misleads more than it pinpoints...
...We won't come to terms with the revelations of the Iran/contra affair by unseating this or that President, or by putting some of his flunkies behind bars...
...For at bottom, the scandal enveloping the Reagan Administration merely adds another verse to the epic of empire...
...And the laws be damned...
...Under such dreary circumstances, it is tempting to climb into the belfry and clamor for impeachment...
...It so happens it doesn't legally apply to me," Reagan archly responds...
...They wanted to know why she had spoken out in criticism of the government of EI Salvador...
...And maybe Nixon's last triumph was to save Ronald Reagan's Presidency, for few of us seem willing to submit to another long national nightmare...
...The Cancer Fields In our chemical age, supermarkets are but toxic vendors, and the hungry consumer is left to pick among the poisons...
...After weeks of damaging Congressional testimony from disgraced former Administration officials and disputatious soldiers of fortune, all the President's men decided it was time to change the public-relations pitch...
...Taking a page from Dallas, the President would have us believe that all his denials of involvement in schemes to aid the contras over the past three years were just a dream...
...Wolfe cited numerous cases of kidney damage attributable to Suprol and noted that the drug was no more effective than aspirin...
...They expected the provision to be overturned when challenged...
...It is a description, penned by Justice Thur-good Marshall, of the Bail Reform Act of 1984, which the U.S...
...Not since Richard Nixon's White House days has anyone dared to suggest, with straight face and shrug of shoulders, that the laws of the land don't apply to the Chief Executive...
...the current scandal puts the entire course of U.S...
...One difference between Watergate and the Iran scandal is sheer breadth of involvement...
...Cheerfully, he rehearsed the new script: "As a matter of fact, I was very definitely involved in the decisions about support to the freedom fighters...
...Before it's too late, we need to remind ourselves that only three or four decades ago, we were surviving just fine without pesticides...
...It If the Congress of the United States will stand for such a gross usurpation of power that threatens to engulf not just our country but the entire Middle East and perhaps the world in a major conflagration, does the Legislative Branch still serve any purpose at all...
...But aggressive citizen action and consumer vigilance, as demonstrated by Sidney Wolfe and the Health Research Group, can succeed where the Government fails...
...to take on the whole lot would be an exhausting chore...
...Organic farming, for home use and the marketplace, is the healthy and sensible way to go...
...Supreme Court ruled in May, by a vote of 6-to-3, to be the constitutional law of the land...
...In its lead editorial of April 25, The New York Times addressed the neglected subject of Indonesia, observing that the regime of President Suharto 'isn't gratuitously brutal...
...he has so blatantly abused his powers, so flagrantly violated his oath of office, so shamelessly broken the law that our constitutional system is being shaken like a daiquiri...
...money to support the contras...
...No matter...
...But the answer to the ineffectiveness of the current probes may lie deeper still...
...Impeachment would also let the rest of the Reagan crowd off easy...
...Here are a few questions that come instantly to mind...
...But how in the world did the Persian Gulf get to be our sea...
...To deliver the goods, cargo aircraft were chartered in Israel, and their load was misidentified as industrial equipment bound for North Korea...
...To go after Reagan alone would leave the country in the sweaty palms of George Bush...
...Food and Drug Administration but from consumer activists...
...Does it make any sense at all to send ships into combat zones, or should these costly toys for admirals be retired to the yacht basin at Annapolis...
...Q: Did any Senator believe that Webster's systematic harassment of Americans opposed to U.S...
...Where are the Frank Churches and Sam Er-vins of yesteryear...
...To reach their decision, the Justices in the majority forgot everything they learned in Logic 101...
...This is the structural basis for the thuggery and tomfoolery of the Iran-contra arms scandal...
...The 1984 law allows the Federal courts to detain an indicted person without bail in certain circumstances, and about 2,500 people have been held since it took effect...
...Losing a war in Vietnam was a matter that was done extremely legally," the President's former National Security Adviser, Robert McFarlane, testified...
...Last September, Dr...
...It was arrogant of the ancient Romans to call the Mediterranean mare nostrum, but they had an excuse: It was, in fact, their sea, lapping up on their shores...
...Why then suspend the marketing...
...Dozens of Americans involved in the Sanctuary movement or in aid to Nicaragua have been similarly badgered by the FBI...
...If a company were selling fatal doses of arsenic to 20,000 Americans a year, that company would be run out of business...
...As for the argument that the law violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of excessive bail, that's easy...
...Cubias had no trouble answering the question: "Because my family was killed by the government," she said...
...They rejected the argument that the law holds punishment before trial impermissible under the Fifth Amendment: "The mere fact," wrote Chief Justice William Rehnquist, "that a person is detained does not inexorably lead to the conclusion that the Government has imposed punishment...
...It is the whole system of empire—the system we have fostered for decades—that must be rooted out...
...Marshall was among the dissenting three...
...When the profit is taken out of a product—as was the case with Nestle's infant formula and now with Suprol—the company will respond...
...the recent report only filled in the blanks...
...Sidney Wolfe, head of Public Citizen's Health Research Group, petitioned the FDA to withdraw Suprol...
...Administration's request...
...They still cling to his smile, and the Congressional investigators appear singularly reluctant to carry out any rigorous scrutiny...
...They cannot be relied on to protect the health and safety of the American people...
...Some authoritarian military regime...
...Should it be transformed into a ceremonial body that issues sonorous pronouncements from time to time...
...That's progress, we suppose: We cannot eat, drink, or breathe without poisoning ourselves...
...It wasn't until a civil-liberties lawyer lodged a formal protest that she was left in peace...
...Watergate involved Nixon's personal contempt for decency and law...
...Conservative legislators have used the hearings to belabor themselves and their colleagues for passing laws the Administration couldn't understand or for amending laws at the 'I think it's far better if the Iranians go to bed every night wondering what we might do than us telling them in advance.' —President Reagan, May 27, 1987 A secret Pentagon project focuses on developing a 'nuclear shotgun' that would pinpoint real warheads among incoming missiles...
...Memory is the first casualty of "progress...
...Evidence collected by Representative Ted Weiss suggested that the FDA should never have approved the sale of Suprol in the United States in the first place...
...Conservatives have made a circus of the hearings, using them as a springboard to champion the cause of the contras, lending new meaning to the old political practice of waving the bloody shirt...
...He would have preferred to win it illegally, and so would the whole Reagan crowd...
...sailors have needlessly been sacrificed, shouldn't we begin a serious examination of the Navy's role in the age of missiles and sophisticated electronic guidance...
...flag to Kuwaiti oil tankers, is there any entity, public or private, which he cannot promise to defend at the risk, perhaps, of all-out war...
...It was the task of consumer groups and concerned citizens to make those sales lag, and they performed their task well...
...We had to win this one...
...The names have been changed to protect the guilty, but the plot remains the same: America's imperial designs are marked by tactics and strategies that will not stand the light of day...
...The cast of characters in the current mess stretches clear across the Government: the President, the Vice President, the Director of Central Intelligence, the FBI Director, the Attorney General, the National Security Council staff, the Secretary of State and his deputies, and the Secretary of Defense...
...Can anyone think of a more comprehensive example of international cooperation...
...That's the upshot of a recent report of the National Academy of Sciences on the effects of pesticides on our dietary staples...
...Maybe today's politicians are more cowardly than those of a decade ago...
...It If the President can secretly and unilaterally extend the protection of the U.S...
...But next to nothing is being done about this appalling situation...
...Persian Roulette The Reagan Administration's course of conduct in the Persian Gulf is so fraught with folly and danger that one hardly knows where to begin enumerating its potentially disastrous consequences...
...And they have to be...
...Q: Who was the only dissenter...
...the demands of empire require global stealth, deceit, theft, assassination, and torture...
...That chemical pesticides and fertilizers are harmful is a fact that has been known for years...
...The Boland Amendment, as enacted in October 1984, prohibited any agency or entity of the U.S...
...The report noted that pesticide contamination may be responsible for as many as 20,000 cancer cases, and consumer activists put the number much higher...
Vol. 51 • July 1987 • No. 7
