NOTES in the NEWS

...TI The Secret Service has compiled a computerized data bank containing 100,000 names and 50,000 investigative dossiers—not only on potential assassins, but on persons who might "embarrass" or make "abusive statements" about high Government officials...

...It compiled two "blacklists" of troublesome individuals and groups, and it has a microfilm file containing the names of thousands of citizens, including Mrs...

...Each week, the computer disgorges its contents onto print-out paper which fills four two-inch-thick regional books that list every demonstration in the country, violent and nonviolent, along with its organizers and their political backgrounds...

...The Army Motion Picture Service took a second look and decided that M*A*S*H was a "farcical comedy" and not intended to show the military in a wrong light...

...Herbert Mitgang Editorial Board Member The New York Times Reflection on Wall Street There is no stock market in Moscow or any other Communist city, for such a devil's establishment is believed to symbolize the speculative, exploitative, mercenary nature of the capitalist, or profit, system...

...Despite its useful service—or, perhaps, because of it—the Commission's activities are being restricted by a lack of funds...

...Although the Army claims that its 1,000 counterintelligence agents are under specific orders not to engage in undercover activities in the civilian community, they regularly pose as students and newsmen at demonstrations and pose as interested participants by joining groups...

...Most spying now goes on under regulations promulgated by the spies themselves...

...The Commission fears that the President's statement well may have the net effect, though unintentional, of signaling a major departure from the policy of moving toward integrated schools and that open society of which he spoke so well in his statement...

...Consequently, it has had to absorb substantial Federal pay increases and other rising costs...

...This was the procedure that has just been rejected by the courts as a violation of the First Amendment guarantee of free political association...

...However, three young officers present laughed loudly...

...Citing chapter and verse on "deceptive and irresponsible action" in such episodes as last year's controversy over the marketing of cyclamates, the Nader report concluded: "It is fair to say that none of the students expected to find in the FDA the shocking disarray and appalling failure of responsibility that their investigations revealed almost daily...

...The Commission, whose status is still "temporary" and subject to periodic renewal by Congress, is strictly an advisory, fact-finding agency, with no powers of administration and enforcement...

...Nothing we have read in Cahiers du Cinema equals the military view and review of the picture: "Doctors play pranks on each other and chase nurses . . . they crack jokes in surgery though the surgery itself is accurate . . . the antics of the surgeons would undermine the average soldier's confidence in any medical treatment he would receive in combat . . . senior officers are depicted as bunglers and the viewer is left with no confidence in the system...

...More recently, in another thorough and thoughtful report, the Commission called for vigorous Federal and state action to correct what it described as a "bleak picture of the relationship between Mexican Americans in the Southwest and the agencies which administer justice in those states...

...It is his Songmy scoop and his investigative work in the field of chemical and biological warfare that identify him as the rare example of the digging, socially conscious newsman so different from reporters who rely heavily on handouts and on one-day sensations, however meaningless...

...Through four Administrations, its reports have served as stinging reminders of unfulfilled promises...

...He is Senator Sam Ervin Jr., North Carolina Democrat, whose strict constructionist view of the Constitution permits no bridling of the First Amendment and no invasion of privacy save through the legislative process...

...As the number of altered documents, misrepresented facts, and supressed studies began to mount, the students' initial skepticism changed to a deep doubt about all the agency's activities and finally ended in the conviction that most agency efforts were a failure...

...Nixon could save more than double that amount, and strike a blow for freedom, by decommissioning the SACB...

...Indisputably, it does, but Federal agencies are now using this responsibility as a pretext for infiltration, spying, and file-keeping on a scale that would dumfound even the redoubtable old snooper of the 1920s, the late Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer...

...That is as real and debilitating as any physical ailment—and part of the Gross National Product...

...All of its instincts, ideological and bureaucratic, impel it to construct the Kind of police state the radicals seek...

...In a sense, SDS bomb-throwers and J. Edgar Hoover's wiretappers are partners in accelerating us toward 1984...

...The problem is compounded by the attitude of official Washington...

...Nothing pleases the bosses more than grinding down the workers, preferably by unemployment...

...Ironically, publication of the report coincided with new pressures in Washington to resume full-scale American military aid to the Greek regime...

...According to Army Times, three generals and about twenty lieutenants colonel screened the movie and did not find it funny or "socially redeeming...

...In Marxist theory, profits soar, and the stock market thrives, with war and inflation...

...Without a doubt, there are criminals among U.S...

...But no word of criticism of the regime is tolerated, and hundreds—probably thousands—of Greeks remain under political arrest and subject to the humiliations and abuses described in the Council's report...

...They are substantially underrepre-sented on grand and petit state juries and excluded from full participation in law enforcement agencies, especially in supervisory positions...

...Even this volume of arms deliveries does not satisfy the American military, however, since they regard the Athens regime as a prized bastion of the "free world...

...In its feeble efforts to "police" the $125 billion food industry, the FDA has repeatedly knuckled under to business pressures, the Nader report declared...

...Richardson, an eminent biologist's memorandum recommending that "the use of cyclamates should be immediately curtailed" was retyped, without his knowledge, to delete the recommendation...

...Hersh is not the first recognition of his notable coup in the service of the independent and until then little known Dispatch News Service...

...Another had a reserved seat at the Democratic National Convention...

...This was the first film banned by the archaic Motion Picture Service (is this service necessary...

...In an effort to head off publication of the Council's report, or at least to mitigate its impact, the junta recently released some of its prisoners and proclaimed new, "liberalized" censorship rules for the press...

...The two big auto manufacturers, the bellwethers of American industry, report sharp drops in profits so far this year, the third company having already reported a loss...

...We're dealing with the criminal mind," one Presidential aide told Naughton...

...Hersh's achievement represented the finest in investigative journalism—a long, relentless pursuit of the facts capped by a brilliant recital of a story that was to shock the world, bring home to countless Americans some of the little understood meaning of what the United States is up to in Vietnam, and set in motion the ponderous machinery of military jurisprudence that might yet reveal the whole story and, conceivably, lead to major reforms...

...Attorney General John Mitchell has already authorized the use of "national security" wiretaps, requiring no court permission, on radical groups...

...Breaking up this partnership will require Congressional intervention in response to public demand...

...The decision to safeguard soldiers and airmen from this unseemly comedy that takes place in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (hence the title) during the Korean War was not made lightly...

...Abolish SACB Surely no agency of Government in the history of the republic has been rebuffed by the Federal courts as frequently and as decisively as the Subversive Activities Control Board...

...Once again the Board members—including that great hero of the lunatic right, Otto Otepka—are looking to Congress and the Administration for help in preserving their $36,000-a-year berths...

...Torture in Greece Anyone who assumes that the excellent motion picture Z portrays the true nature of the fascist regime that rules Greece is, unfortunately, mistaken...

...it has deliberately misled the public and Congress...

...On the one hand, the Nixon Administration's policies and' rhetoric contribute to the radicalization of students, blacks, and just plain citizens...

...The CSC files are available to other Federal investigating agencies...

...Some corporations do well from defense contracts, but the general picture of corporate earnings is bleak...

...The agency's food regulations "read like a catalogue of favors to special industrial interests...

...He was forever crusading, usually against what seemed like hopeless odds, to advance and multiply the rights and opportunities of all the people...

...In their determination to resume shipments of "heavy" arms they are making their own contribution to the continuing enslavement and torture of Greeks...

...Ervin cannot bear the burden alone...

...Repeatedly the Commission has bluntly criticized departments of the Executive Branch—and even the White House—for failing to promote the cause of racial justice...

...American military assistance is of crucial importance to the Greek junta, supplying it not only with the implements of repression but with the imprimatur of Washington's approval...

...The move is expected to save the taxpayers all of $200,000 a year...

...His paper was born in a shameless moment of our history— the wartime hate and hysteria of 1917...

...The 1,200-word study, unanimously endorsed by fifteen West European governments, tells a ghastly tale of murderous police beatings, electric shock, and water torture—of prisoners who had their heads squeezed in a vise, their genitals flogged, and their pubic hair ripped out...

...A Fine Choice Pulitzer prizes long ago lost much of their original glamor and distinction because of the unimaginative selections by some of the stuffed shirts who dominated the board of judges...

...In a separate action, the American Public Health Association and the National Council of Senior Citizens took the unusual step of accusing the FDA of failing in its basic mission—to protect the public from medicines that are dangerous, ineffective, and mislead-ingly advertised...

...On the other, the Administration is cracking back at the radicalization by "unshackling" the uniformed police and expanding the political police...

...The Council's European Rights Commission found that since April, 1967, when the military junta seized power in Greece, there has been "a practice of torture and ill-treatment...

...The Supreme Court was unmoved, and the Government's own argument now compels the conclusion that the Board should be abolished...

...Since the manner in which the FDA discharges its responsibilities is, literally, a matter of life and death for all Americans, the charges deserve immediate and vigorous attention...

...Long before many others saw the dangers that darken American life today, he was crusading for wide-ranging social and economic reform, for equality of opportunity for people of all races, for government responsive to the popular will, for the preservation and enlargement of our civil liberties and civil rights, and for an end to war...

...Summing up the findings, Commission Vice Chairman Stephen Horn said: "Our investigations have disclosed that Mexican American citizens are subject to unduly harsh treatment by law enforcement officers, that they are often arrested on insufficient grounds, receive physical and verbal abuse, and penalties which are disproportionately severe...

...More than any single person, except the members of the great LaFollette family, he was responsible for Wisconsin's worldwide reputation for clean, boss-free government...

...Its revelations on chemical and biological warfare, along with his book, Chemical and Biological Warfare: America's Hidden Arsenal, did much to arouse leading members of Congress to demand—and secure—some modifications of prevailing Pentagon policies and practices in this deadly business...

...The Board has always been devoid of useful functions...

...So must true conservatives, if their proclaimed commitment to preserve liberty is sincere...

...Total Collapse' at FDA Three times in recent weeks the Food and Drug Administration has been the subject of serious and well-documented charges that it is betraying the very consumer interests it is supposed to protect...

...Happily, in more recent times, the Pulitzer awards have been recapturing some of their original stature...

...He cannot hold them too soon...

...Ervin, who is a civil liberties hero and a civil rights rascal, is preparing hearings on a broad range of Government spying and suppression of dissent...

...Martin Luther King, Joan Baez, Julian Bond, and anti-war Admiral Arnold E. True...

...Nonetheless, some seventy-five per cent of its recommendations have been enacted into law over the years, and its data have been valuable to civil rights organizations...

...He founded The Capital Times as a public service enterprise in an era when so much of the nation's press was the venal tool of private corporate power...

...since one with an unnerving title, War Is Hell, seven years ago...

...Krondracke is a Washington correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times...

...Bill Evjue, who served for more than a decade as editor of The Progressive while he also directed The Capital Times, was a giant in his field, and his field was the people's right to know...

...The subject is one of current consideration," a State Department spokesman acknowledged on the very same day that the Council of Europe issued its findings on torture...

...At a time when the Government's civil rights efforts are falling victim to the Administration's policy of "benign neglect," Congress must strengthen the Commission by giving it permanent status and increasing its appropriation...

...Consider: The Justice Department's Interdivisional Information Unit daily receives hundreds of raw reports from the FBI, the Secret Service, and other agencies, and feeds them into a computer...

...The 1970 Pulitzer prize in international reporting pleased us most...

...Still other files are kept by local military intelligence groups headquartered in cities around the country...

...Others include the Post Office and the Navy on the Federal level, and "subversive units" of several local police departments, which share their information with Federal spies...

...And he shares June, 1970 9 with two generations of LaFollettes a significant measure of the credit for making Wisconsin the nation's leading laboratory for social and economic progress during the historic era of the Progressive movement...

...But his indomitable will and fighting editorship enabled The Capital Times not only to survive but to grow until it became the most powerful journalistic force in our state and one of the most widely admired newspapers in the nation...

...Through a variety of time-consuming devices, the FDA, the Commissioner, and the Secretary have violated the spirit and the letter of the statute and the regulations" governing useless and hazardous drugs...

...Liberals, many of whom have been curiously inactive, must mount a major campaign to resist and reverse the current trend toward a police state, while still providing adequate controls to enable the Government to deal with genuine threats of violence...

...To control the terrorists, however, we cannot rely on the Federal internal security establishment as it presently operates...

...It means recession...

...Bill Evjue fashioned the struggling paper in his own image—always militant, often tough-minded, and sometimes bull-headed...

...As for inflation, instead of spiraling upward with it, the stock market goes down...

...Yet this sorry throwback to the worst depths of the Joseph R. McCarthy era, conceived in hysteria and maintained in malice, continues to cling tenaciously to its existence as a haven for political hacks and a symbol of governmental thought-control...

...This spring, in a commendable display of forthright independence, the Commission's six members unanimously declared their dissatisfaction with President Nixon's policy statement on school desegregation...

...We have found them to be deprived of proper use of bail and of adequate representation by counsel...

...In the era of terror and panic that we seem to be entering, however, few Congressional voices have been heard...

...His Songmy disclosures had already won the George Polk Memorial Award and the Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award...

...One of its strike forces, the Army and Air Force Motion Picture Service, recently counterattacked a Hollywood movie and sent it reeling...

...As Spring arrived, the Pentagon brass had a change of heart...

...M*A*S*H, by the way, is rated "R," meaning that other soldiers and Americans over seventeen can see it in local movie houses—if, of course, accompanied by an adult...

...The Army was called into five cities in 1967 and 1968—none since—yet until recently it maintained two computerized data banks on civilians and still maintains one, at Fort Monroe, Virginia...

...Army's Nix Pix It is reassuring to know that the Pentagon is on the job in this time of new budgets and non-wars...

...Commission on Civil Rights has been unique among Federal agencies in its steadfast refusal to conform to the bland patterns of bureaucratic consensus...

...The "total collapse" at the FDA makes the need for such an inquiry all the more urgent...

...It went to Seymour Hersh for his report on the alleged Songmy massacre in Vietnam...

...Hersh's article, "Silent Death," appeared as the lead article in The Progressive...

...Bill Evjue's thundering editorials and his pioneering techniques of investigative journalism did much to keep politicians of every party, including his own, more honest and more responsive to the needs of the people...

...It is imperative that they lead to tough legislation prescribing what the snooping establishment can and cannot do...

...As disclosed by James Naughton of The New York Times, conservatives in the White House are determined to step up surveillance still further in the conviction that radical dissenters are not politically motivated at all...

...The problem of racial isolation in the nation's schools cannot be resolved solely through cautious adherence to a narrow construction of existing case law," the Commissioners said...

...Although restrictions on major U.S...

...f In the most unconscionable example of all, the Army has undertaken to infiltrate civilian political groups, report on them, and keep massive files on individuals who have nothing whatever to do with the military...

...Solicitor General Erwin N. Griswold, arguing in behalf of the Board before the Supreme Court, declared that failure to reverse the lower court's ruling would bring about "the frustration of the Subversive Activities Control Board's reason for existence...

...Its budget has not been reduced in recent years, but neither has it been expanded...

...Scientific findings have been revised or suppressed by bureaucrats who have no scientific training...

...William T. Evjue The recent death of William T. Evjue, editor and publisher of The Capital Times of Madison, has removed one of the most fiery and forward-looking spokesmen of the Progressive movement as it evolved in Wisconsin under the LaFollettes and grew to become a national force for the social and economic reforms which seemed so radical in their time...

...f As recently revealed by John Lang of the Associated Press, the Civil Service Commission employs seventeen clerks to read dissenting publications and clip the names of persons "favorably mentioned" for addition to the Commission's "subversive activities file," which now contains 2.5 million names...

...arms shipments have theoretically been in effect since 1967, Greece will have received about $45 million worth of American military aid in the 1970 fiscal year—including about $25 million in "light" weapons not covered by the ban and $20 million in "surplus" military goods that have been assigned to Greece without the consent—or even the knowledge—of Congress...

...Yet the Board, aided and abetted by champions in Congress and the Executive Branch, has managed to stay in business and on the public payroll...

...In response to criticism, the Army has justified this activity by referring to its need to move into situations of civil disorder when ordered to do so by the President...

...In a 292-page report based on an exhaustive study of the FDA's food protection programs, Ralph Nader's "Raiders"—the students who have rendered such important service in exposing the defects of the Federal regulatory apparatus—found that the agency has "misused" science for the sake of corporate profits and bureaucratic convenience...

...they were taking the risk of remaining lieutenants forever because of poor movie discipline...

...of persons arrested for political reasons...

...One agent took up residence at Resurrection City in 1968...

...This does not begin to exhaust the list of agencies now involved in the boom business of snoopery...

...Perhaps the most significant of these were proposals to provide recourse to injunctive processes in cases of discrimination, and to hold governmental bodies as well as officials liable for abuses...

...The Board sustained the latest in its interminable series of judicial reverses a few weeks ago when the Supreme Court declined to review a lower court's ruling that barred the Board from declaring individuals to be members of the Communist Party...

...There is war in Vietnam, and war in Cambodia, and the market is uncertain and depressed, not triumphant...

...As the stock market searches for a bottom, whatever the big board may represent in economic terms ¦—and some think it doesn't represent anything except a big parlor game with play money—it seems possible to infer that, in psychological terms at least, Wall Street reflects doubt, confusion, and lack of confidence...

...radicals who give not one whit for democratic procedure and who would be only too happy to see an orgy of fear and destruction result in the actual triumph of a police state...

...In May, 1969, Mr...

...In fact, only one legislator has had the temerity and the power to speak out consistently...

...The 116th Military Intelligence group in Washington for a while drove to demonstrations in a video tape truck marked "Midwest News...

...it has repeatedly succumbed to "destructive intervention" by Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Robert H. Finch...

...In one of his least creditable actions, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark acquiesced in it...

...The Pulitzer award for Mr...

...These statistics may have something to do with the fact that the Commission found it necessary to recommend "more aggressive investigations" and "less deference to local action" by the FBI where injustices to Mexican Americans are concerned...

...On the basis of studies conducted in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, the Commission found an ugly pattern of discrimination in the law enforcement process as applied to Americans of Mexican descent...

...Created in 1950 over President Truman's veto, the five-member Board was initially charged with responsibility for registering "Communist" individuals and organizations...

...And unemployment has not made American capitalists happy...

...Whatever causes the market's ups and downs—and they have been mostly downs lately—it would seem that exactly the opposite of Marxist belief is true...

...In 1968, when it seemed that the Board was finally faced with extinction, the late Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois contrived a scheme for its reprieve...

...The Commission also proposed a series of steps to be taken by the President, Congress, the Department of Justice, the states, and the localities to provide equality under the law for Mexican Americans...

...No earthly reason exists for granting their wish—unless it be a desire to preserve even an utterly func-tionless mechanism of repression...

...Alexander Kendrick CBS News June, 1970 11...

...The Commission specifically noted that among 772 FBI employes in the upper Civil Service grades in the five Southwestern states, only three are Mexican Americans, and there are three more among the 365 employes in the FBI's middle grades...

...Morton Kondracke (Mr...

...The agency has never exercised its right to declare a medicine "an imminent hazard to the public health," officials of the two organizations noted in a joint letter to FDA Commissioner Charles C. Edwards...

...The Pentagon has been eager for the past three years to help its brothers-in-arms in the junta...

...P.S...

...The villainous pattern of intrigue and assassination detailed in Z —and based on actual events in Athens—seems like mere good, clean fun compared to the horrors documented in the report recently issued by the Council of Europe on the treatment of Greek political prisoners...

...Of all the 1,811 FBI employes in the five states, only forty-eight—2.7 per cent—are Mexican Americans, though they constitute 11.8 per cent of the total population in these states...

...In one such case cited by Dr...

...If As uncovered by Robert Walters of the Washington Star, the Civil Service Commission is also considering guidelines which would forbid Federal employment to persons who "engage in violent campus demonstrations"—not necessarily those convicted of any crime or even formally charged...

...M*A*S*H was banned from military bases here and abroad and everybody could sleep a little easier that night...

...There "appears to be a policy of ignoring the special problems shown to be actually dangerous," they added...

...As of now, soldiers, sailors, and airmen can see it—unaccompanied—-because it is officially funny...

...With much fanfare President Nixon announced a month ago that he was decommissioning two of the three Presidential yachts for the sake of economy in Government...

...The Progressive has previously called on Congress to mount a sweeping investigation of the entire Federal regulatory structure, which gives every 10 THE PROGRESSIVE evidence of being held captive by the interests it is supposed to regulate...

...the latest court action stripped it of even its last useless one...

...Over the years, the courts have consistently held that the Board's functions and procedures were inconsistent with the guarantees embodied in the Bill of Rights...

...NOTES in the NEWS A Useful Commission Since its inception under the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the U.S...

...The Boom of Snoopery If the nation is threatened with bombings, bank burnings, violent demonstrations, and assassinations, doesn't the Government have a responsibility to find out who is up to such terrorism, and head it off...

...They cited the need for "courageous moral leadership from the President of the United States," and made it clear that in their view such leadership has not been forthcoming...