April in Vienna

...Even this was apparently too bold a course for his superiors in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and last December Dr...

...Herbert L. Ley, Jr., the former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, who recently talked to the press about the "constant, tremendous, sometimes unmerciful pressure" to which he was subjected by major pharmaceutical manufacturers...

...If anything, the proposed $10 billion reduction was conservative, as new testimony before the Proxmire Subcommittee made clear only a few days after its report was issued...

...But far too many privileged sanctuaries were left untouched, and thanks to the energetic lobbying efforts of the special interests, some new sanctuaries were created in the process...

...Among the more positive achievements was the reduction-—from 27.5 per cent to 22 per cent—in that most obnoxious tax loophole, the oil depletion allowance, which had long been considered untouchable...

...At least a dozen Black Panthers have lost their lives in encounters with the police, and many more have been wounded or subjected to brutal treatment...

...Until the record is complete, one can only speculate on where the truth lies in the wildly differing accounts of the circumstances issued by the Panthers and the police...

...General Assembly in July 1969 . . . compiled by chemical warfare experts from all over the world...

...Thus, to cite one example, a stockpile of 20,000 "magic bullets" containing botulin, a deadly toxin given off by the bacterium botulinus, need not be destroyed...

...It is a book of urgent concern to all Americans, for as Professor Seymour Melman of Columbia University points out in an introduction, "When violation of the laws of war becomes government policy, this generates a crisis of integrity for American society, for the laws of war are, under the Constitution (Article 6) part of 'the supreme law of the land.'" Copies of In the Name of America are available at $2.95 (paperback) from regional offices of the American Friends Service Committee or from the publisher, E.P...

...His successor is Dr...

...We hope that the Congress, which last year finally began to apply a measure of skepticism to the Pentagon's spending requests, will not permit itself to be beguiled by the Administration's claims of vast "reductions" in military expenditures...

...No suspension of judgment is required, however, about the fact that the Panthers have been subjected, in the past two years, to an extraordinary campaign of official harassment...

...The Colonel, according to a Washington Post story cited by NARMIC, "said it would be 'fair to assume' that Detrick will continue to produce dangerous organisms that could be used offensively, since any defense against biological weapons involves the production of harmful agents that are potentially available to an enemy...

...In San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, the ACLU found, Black Panthers have repeatedly been arrested "for distributing papers without a permit...

...We now produce a 'chemical' agent extracted from live germs to induce the disease directly...

...and, in The Wall Street Journal's term, their "war on narcotics use among black youth," a war probably unique among politically militant groups...

...For those seeking further documentation of war crimes committed in Vietnam, we recommend In the Name of America, a somber compilation of published reports and official documents compiled by the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam...

...It will take some time—years, perhaps—before the full impact of the encyclopedic tax measure can be assessed...

...The NARMIC report concluded: "While the President's minor restrictions may help the world to breathe a microscopic degree easier, the overall effects of the speech may be the opposite...

...The former Commissioner has rendered a public service by speaking out, and we hope he is given a chance to elaborate on his experiences in office before the appropriate Congressional committees...

...More Relief Than Reform The tax reform bill that President Nixon signed into law at the end of 1969 has been described as "the first concerted attack on tax preferences in history...

...arsenal of CBW agents (the rest being chemical...

...One side effect of the persecution of the Panthers because of their revolutionary political pronouncements and actions is to obscure such admirable activities as their large-scale hot breakfast program for poor children in the inner core of our largest cities...

...There is little or no information on how this propaganda process is proceeding in the closed society of totalitarian Russia...

...Ley was forced out of office...

...will confine its biological research to defensive measures such as immunization and safety measures...

...America's War Crimes "Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of the armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely," states the Geneva Convention of August, 1949...

...Botulinum bullets, then, could be effective assassination or counterinsurgency weapons which need only to nick their victims to produce death by botulism...

...Officials of the GAO reported that thirty-eight major weapons programs, originally estimated to cost a total of $42 billion, are now expected to set the taxpayers back at least $62.9 billion...

...1 "The U.S...

...The Republican dissenters expressed particular objection to Senator Proxmire's recommendation of an immediate $10 billion cut in the swollen military budget—a figure that the minority charged was "plucked out of thin air...

...This Nixon statement is measured by NARMIC against conflicting pronouncements, including one by Colonel Lucien Winegar, deputy commanding officer at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the nation's BW research and development center...

...What seems clear even now, however, is that Congress has made a start ¦—but only a start—on the urgent task of introducing justice and equity into the privilege-riddled Federal tax structure...

...Meanwhile, if there is no plot to "get" the Panthers, why was Bobby Seale, another national Panther leader, indicted for conspiring with seven men—none of whom he knew—to incite to riot at the 1968 Democratic convention disorders—disorders marked by lack of participation by blacks, Panthers or otherwise...

...It works...

...As the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out in a special report late in December, "across the country law enforcement officials are waging a drive against the black militant organization resulting in serious civil liberties violations...

...The incipient "taxpayers' revolt" last spring that finally frightened legislators into addressing themselves to long-neglected responsibilities did result in the enactment of some past-due reforms...

...There are growing indications that the horrible massacre visited upon the villagers of Songmy was not the "isolated incident" denounced by righteous officials in Washington...

...Secretary General U Thant calls the "mad momentum of the arms race" is to be stopped...

...The thing that bugs me is that the people think the FDA is protecting them—it isn't," Dr...

...the Treasury Department estimates that by the end of this decade the new law will have reduced Federal tax collections by about $2.5 billion a year, while some economists place the revenue loss at ten times that figure...

...Cost overruns because of mismanagement, waste, and surreptitious profiteering are not the only or even the most important factor in the huge Pentagon budget...

...But they do raise disturbing questions about the Government's will and capacity to dispense even-handed justice and extend the protection of due process where the embattled Panthers are concerned...

...But the U.S...

...It will still be possible—though perhaps somewhat more difficult—for the affluent to pay far less than their fair share of the costs of the Federal Government...

...The practice of arrest, high bail and dropped charges is a familiar one to the black community...

...You take kids in Harlem, they sort of envy hustlers—guys who take numbers, push dope...

...Its report disclosed that the Pentagon was not surrendering anything in its arsenal of horrors that it really wanted to keep...

...Such worthwhile health programs and a concerted drive against drug abuse hardly fit Leonard's description of the Panthers as "nothing but hoodlums," nor the Vice President's epithet, "irresponsible criminals...

...Tear and lung gases still used in Vietnam "do not kill their victim directly but are used to drive him into the open" where he can be killed, the report pointed out...

...Commenting on these revelations, NARMIC noted: "Thus, far from being banned, as the President implied, the use of germs in warfare has merely been refined...

...Once again a parade of witnesses from the General Accounting Office and the Pentagon's own procurement agencies testified to the enormous cost overruns—a term now barred from the Defense Department's lexicon—that have enriched the arms manufacturers at the public's expense...

...The most valuable feature of the new law, in our view, is the elimination from the tax rolls of about 5.5 million of the poor and near-poor who have borne an increasingly disproportionate share of the Federal revenue burden in recent years...

...FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover has called the Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" among all the "violence-prone, black extremist groups...

...Another accomplishment was the enactment of a minimum tax on many forms of income given preferential treatment that has allowed hundreds of the nation's wealthiest citizens to avoid all payment of income taxes...

...An egregious example cited by the GAO witnesses was a Navy program for procurement of a deep-diving rescue craft originally priced at $36 million for a Raiding the Panthers Chicago Daily News reporter L. F. Palmer, Jr., describes as "typical" a raid carried out earlier this year: "The FBI went in on a fugitive-arrest warrant, failed to find the fugitive, and wrecked the office in the process...

...Such moderate civil rights leaders as Roy Wilkins and the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy have spoken up in defense of the Panthers' right to be free of official repression and intimidation...

...With our massive superiority in nuclear weapons, this initiative is a small risk for the United States to take to save the world from nuclear destruction...

...representatives are fully aware that they have not yet made a dent in the staggering problems involved in negotiating a deescalation, or at the least a moratorium in the nuclear weapons race, they expressed what newsmen on the scene characterized as sincere determination to accomplish this mutual mission...

...Black Panthers' Rights Jerris Leonard, the head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, has been quoted as saying that the Black Panthers "are nothing but hoodlums and we've got to get them...

...Senator Edward M. Kennedy deserves credit for calling to public attention the fact that a dozen or so new special privileges—-provisions couched in general language but carefully drafted to benefit particular interests and corporations—were tucked away in obscure corners of the unwieldy tax bill...

...The Journal cited Evord Connor, head of an anti-poverty center in Yonkers, New York, who told its reporter: "The news media never say how strong the Panthers are against narcotics...

...On the other hand, Congress failed to attack many of the preferential provisions that tend to make the tax system more regressive than progressive— the favored treatment for capital gains and the exemption of income from municipal bonds, for instance...

...Ivan Bennett, director of the New York University Medical Center, research contract director of the Army Chemical Corps, and an adviser to the Army on epidemiology and pathology...

...Among the acts "prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever" with respect to such persons are murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture, the taking of hostages, humiliating and degrading treatment, and violations of legal due process...

...Now that a beginning has been made, we hope Congress will find the courage to complete the job by eliminating depletion altogether from the tax code...

...Charles C. Edwards, a former executive of the American Medical Association, which has worked closely with the drug manufacturers in resisting every attempt to strengthen the nation's drug safety laws...

...While expressing some reservations, we lauded the President's action as a major "initiative for peace...

...Our regret is that he did not choose to display his courage while he still held office and had the opportunity to translate his brave words into actions that could have benefited the nation's beleaguered consumers...

...Another source, a Washington Post story published after NARMIC released its report, said "the purchase of tear gas for Vietnam has increased twenty-five fold in four years" and that "gas now has become a major combat weapon for the United States...

...The President announced he would seek Senate ratification of the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting "first uie" of CBW weapons...

...None of us can afford to do less...

...George Sams, the fugitive sought by the FBI, was later revealed to be an informer for the FBI and police...

...A true tax reform bill would provide not only relief to those who need it, but revenues to pay for the nation's unfinished work...

...It has also been called a fraud, a folly, and a fiscal disaster...

...The FDA, the largest of the Government's consumer protection agencies and perhaps the most important, has jurisdiction over matters of crucial importance to the health and well-being of every American...

...The brutalization of Americans serving in Vietnam was depressingly depicted in the letters from a GI published in last month's issue of The Progressive, and new and serious questions are raised in Erwin Knoll's article on Project Phoenix on Page 19 of this issue...

...NARMIC pointed out, however, that biological warfare weapons constituted "less than ten per cent of the U.S...

...For one thing, we had barely gone to press when the Defense Department acknowledged that toxins had been defined officially as chemicals and therefore were exempt from the President's announced ban on germ warfare...

...The President's speech may have served to disarm the President's critics more than to disarm the United States' CBW capacity...

...Defining the toxins as "chemical" rather than biological weapons means they are not subject to destruction under the President's order to dispose of biological warfare stocks...

...If President Nixon took this unilateral initiative for peace, his action would help disarm the hawks in the Kremlin and perhaps bring similar steps in the U.S.S.R., thus clearing the way for the SALT negotiators to resume their sessions with brighter promise of success...

...This magic with words was "one result of U Thant's report to the U.N...

...Ley's predecessor, the agency was known chiefly for its supine subservience to the industries it was supposed to regulate...

...Although both the Soviet and U.S...

...negotiation efforts and thus weaken, if not destroy, the prospect for a nuclear treaty that might restrict development, testing, and production of American and Soviet missiles...

...Sixteen days later, the charges were dropped...

...definition of "non-lethal" weapons, NARMIC emphasized, includes all gases—even mustard gas—except the nerve gases...

...The United States' level of military spending, in other words, reaches the height of absurdity...

...The returns are not in, at the time of this writing, from the six or eight official and unofficial investigations— one of them conducted by Mr...

...Ley, who became Commissioner in July, 1968, was a cautious administrator who attempted, according to his own testimony, to steer a middle course between the industry-oriented elements in his agency and "the Don Quixotes...

...Now, however, on the basis of later developments and a new evaluation, it turns out that the Administration's "renunciation" of some CBW weapons deserves more censure and less praise than it originally received...

...But the Panthers are telling kids from grade school level, don't mess with dope...

...Congress has not yet done its job...

...During this recess period, however, hope for success could be fatally eroded if the hawks on both sides succeed in arousing panic with fake scares of how the other side is "moving ahead" in first-strike kill capability...

...The extent to which these precepts of international law have been flagrantly violated by American forces in Vietnam is only beginning to come to public notice...

...f The United States, said Mr...

...A basic question of tax reform was all but lost sight of in the rush to provide relief to burdened taxpayers: Should not the object of the legislation have been to produce a net gain, rather than a net loss, in Federal revenues...

...Most of the funds saved by the reductions in manpower levels and Vietnam withdrawals are being diverted to new and fantastically costly weapons systems...

...Even the basic question of its impact on Federal revenues is in contention...

...What the Administration should do immediately, if the hopeful promise of the SALT negotiations is not to be crushed, is to refuse the Pentagon's demand to speed up the nuclear arms race and, specifically, to stop the testing and deployment of MIRV and ABMs...

...There is, in our judgment, some sound basis for all of these appraisals...

...We hope that the foregoing will help to straighten out the Nixon record on CBW for anyone we may have led astray, and help, too, to alert the forces opposing CBW that the battle has barely begun...

...What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it's doing are as different as night and day...

...Veteran observers at the first-stage talks in Helsinki were virtually unanimous in agreeing that this disarmament conference was off to a more hopeful start than any in many years...

...NARMIC quoted the President's statements and then evaluated them...

...And this latter figure, they noted, is probably an understatement, since costs are still subject to inaccurate or deliberately deceptive reporting...

...In more than 400 pages of closely printed text, this volume presents a damning indictment of the American military intervention...

...April in Vienna When American and Soviet representatives meet in Vienna in mid-April for the second phase of the strategic arms limitation talks (SALT), the world will be watching anxiously to see if the remarkably reasonable attitudes that marked the preliminary talks in Helsinki survive the winter...

...Vice President Spiro Agnew declares the Panthers are "a completely irresponsible, anarchistic group of criminals...

...Thereby, The Washington Post noted editorially, this multiple warhead missile "would be converted from a weapon the Russians could view as one designed to penetrate a heavy ABM defense around their cities, to a weapon designed, in Russian eyes, to knock out their ICBMs in a first strike...

...A more significant element is the military establishment's insatiable appetite for new, costly, dangerous, and utterly unnecessary weapons systems—an appetite that the Nixon Administration appears quite unwilling to restrain...

...They deserve continuing and intensified scrutiny of the kind Senator Proxmire has so usefully applied in recent months...

...Ley said in one of his post-dismissal interviews...

...I see no reason for legislating these special provisions in secrecy," the Senator said, and thanks to his disclosure some—but by no means all—were eliminated from the final version of the bill...

...It was soon after the disclosure of this major dilution of the Nixon announcement that the American Friends Service Committee's NARMIC project (National Action Research on the Military-Industrial Complex) completed a significant study analyzing the President's restrictions on CBW...

...Dutton & Co., 201 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y...

...The Pentagon, indeed, is now demanding actions which, if carried out, would not only add to the costly and terrifying buildup of U.S...

...Thus, Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird announced that Congress will be asked for funds to extend the ABM system, and another Pentagon official said President Nixon might seek $1.5 billion for ABM this year—including $90 million to continue the Montana and North Dakota installations that were part of the ABM measure passed by Congress last year, and $600 million for other Safeguard installations, possibly in the Northeast, Northwest, and at Washington, D. C. Equally alarming is the fact that the U.S...

...Leonard—into the December 4 Chicago police raid that resulted in the killing of two Panther leaders...

...It disarmed the editors of The Progressive more than it should have...

...the operation of free medical clinics, equipped and supplied by the cities' doctors...

...report, "which included the changed definition, was written by a team headed by Dr...

...These poisons produced by bacteria remain deadly even after the germs die...

...The Christian Century December 24, 1969 dozen vessels and now expected to cost $63 million for half that number...

...Persecution by law enforcement officers has not been confined to alleged criminal offenses, but to such activities as political speech-making and distribution of literature...

...Whether the ultimate annual reduction amounts to $2.5 billion or $25 billion, the effect of the new tax law will be to make it more difficult for the Government to meet its pressing obligations at home: to cope effectively with the urgent problems of poverty, pollution, urban blight, education, and health...

...James L. Goddard, Dr...

...Exposing the CBW 'Ban' President Nixon's statement of November 25 on chemical and biological warfare (CBW) won widespread commendation, including an accolade from The Progressive...

...Nixon, "shall renounce the use of lethal biological agents and weapons, and all other methods of biological warfare...

...On the basis of expert testimony, the Proxmire Subcommittee concluded that "based on our military outlays and economic strength, if we are six feet tall, the Russians by comparison are three feet tall and the Chinese are six inches tall...

...Of course there may well be a degree of risk involved, but the President must take some risk if what U.S...

...The Subservient FDA New testimony to the sorry state of the Federal "regulatory" agencies has come from Dr...

...Such official utterances, which match for extravagance the Panthers' own most extreme revolutionary rhetoric, do not quite substantiate the charge by Charles R. Garry, the Panthers' general counsel, that the Nixon Administration is "out to commit genocide" against the black militant organization...

...Some highlights follow: f The President said the United States "reaffirms its oft-repeated renunciation of the first use of lethal chemical weapons...

...The first chapter of the U.N...

...But although two-thirds of the nations that have signed the protocol—including the U.S.S.R.—consider that it bans tear gases and herbicides, the Nixon Administration, NARMIC reminded the nation, does not...

...Until it came under the direction of Dr...

...This allows us to apply the disease to selected targets rather than to rely on random infection...

...10003...

...Air Force has awarded a contract to a New Jersey firm to increase the accuracy and explosive yield of MIRV...

...But we suspect it is not much different from the goings-on at the Pentagon where alarmist statements are issued almost daily...

...The Quaker study disclosed how biological toxins escaped the ban by being redefined as chemical...

...Ley told a reporter of The New York Times, and he went on to note that his problems had been further complicated by Congressional pressure enlisted at the behest of the manufacturers...

...The Panthers, whose overall program combines such good works with a kind of primitive Maoist Marxism, number only a relatively small segment of black citizens in America— that segment that is most desperately disillusioned with the nation for its failure to make good on its long-deferred promises...

...Eight Panthers were arrested and charged with harboring a fugitive...

...Some days I spent as many as six hours fending off representatives of the drug industry," Dr...

...missile systems, but would create new Soviet suspicions of the sincerity of U.S...

...But the Panthers' right to espouse and advocate their program is a matter of urgent concern to all Americans...

...His staff included three Pentagon officials, and the first draft of Bennett's chapter was written by the Army's CBW experts, according to Representative Richard McCarthy, Democrat of New York," a leader in the fight against CBW...

...Absurd Military Appetite All four Republican members dissented from the recent report by Senator William Proxmire and a majority of the Joint Economic Subcommittee on Economy in Government which found that "defense expenditures can be significantly reduced without any impairment in national security...