The Biggest Lie
The Biggest Lie In the mid-1960s, as the United States slogged deeper and deeper into the dismal swamp of its Indochina adventure, it gradually became apparent that the Johnson Administration had...
...it has been the fashion at least since John F. Kennedy's Administration to beat the drums for more weaponry by summoning up the specter of Soviet "superiority...
...Even the mass media, always reluctant to suggest that the emperor has no clothes, began to hint that there was something called "the credibility gap...
...This was a sympathetic act, a strong protest against the crime, a show of support for the rape victim, who has filed a lawsuit and will see her assailants prosecuted...
...Nuclear technology, tapping the most powerful force in the universe, is inherently unsafe...
...But on this occasion, both relays failed—the first recorded complete breakdown of an automatic shutdown system...
...Clark over slightly less atavistic State Department officials who lost face by suggesting that the Salvadoran government explore the unthinkable step of negotiating with the rebels...
...it seemed proud of the mischief our government was causing, and preferred to encourage the Nicaraguan government's apprehension that it will have more to fear from Washington in the months to come...
...She shouldn't have been there in the first place...
...The breakers used at San Onofre were built by General Electric...
...If the economy forges ahead in the next year, reducing unemployment to the 5 per cent range, the inflation rate will surely surge again as large corporations strive to widen profit margins in an expanding market...
...Freedom of speech, the presumption of innocence, and the protection of citizens against illegal search and seizure have been wholly ignored in these regulations...
...Now scores of other Federal agencies will have the same capricious authority...
...Conventional wisdom holds that the bigger the lie, the likelier it is to be believed—but Americans have learned a lot since the Vietnam years: Reagan's biggest lie is greeted with the greatest degree of skepticism...
...There is "a major drive to destroy guerrilla base camps and to separate civilians from the guerrillas, according to Salvadoran and American officials," The New York Times reports...
...All-American Crime The facts have been well publicized: On March 6, a twenty-one-year-old woman was gang-raped and sodomized for more than two hours in a bar in New Bedford, Massachusetts...
...All of these are contemptible manifestations of official deception—but they follow a familiar, well-worn track...
...The Wall Street Journal recently quoted a leading econometrician who, in assessing his profession's performance, called 1982 the worst year yet...
...But "prepublication review" is the most pernicious part of the plan, spreading throughout the Federal Government a censorship power that has previously been exercised only by the Central Intelligence Agency...
...interests...
...It's an old vaudeville trouper's dream—a polished act that takes its turn after four consecutive flops have been hooted off the stage...
...It was reinserted and the control rods were dropped...
...Six men have been arrested at this writing, all have pleaded not guilty, and two have been released on bail...
...And "rural pacification," that ever-popular Vietnam charade, is also enjoying a revival...
...This latest nuclear threat cannot be blamed on any one utility, model of reactor, or particular brand of relay...
...And we may never find out, thanks to new Federal secrecy procedures released by President Reagan the same week as the FBI guidelines: Now, if Clarkson ever writes an article or book about the flap (even years after he leaves the Department) he can be required to submit his manuscript to Washington for "prepublication review...
...If history occurs first as tragedy and repeats as farce, we've been watching dreadful reruns recently in Central America...
...The stock market, reacting to the good news, moved to record highs in March...
...For them to do it, she had to do something to them...
...One can easily imagine economic growth, instability in the Middle East, and a cold winter combining to produce a wholly different oil market—one that would send the United States into another tailspin...
...For the moment, we are the beneficiaries of an unexpected decline in oil prices, the result of political instability within O P E C and a sharp drop in oil demand because of the recession and an unusually mild winter...
...Three days later, the impossible happened again...
...But the all-American crime will claim more victims until we achieve a profound change in attitude that is, lamentably, not yet in sight...
...Markets reflect political and psychological factors that do not lend themselves to precise prediction and scientific analysis...
...It robs its victim of neither property nor life, but inflicts physical harm as well as severe damage to self-respect and emotional well-being...
...It worked for a while...
...The State Department barred Allende from entering the country in March because, officials said, her visit would be "prejudicial to U.S...
...In its intellectual poverty, the Administration hasn't even managed to trot out a new rationale for intervention...
...After Johnson's heavy-handed dissimulations and Nixon's squalid cover-ups—yes, and after Gerald Ford's vapid mumbles and Jimmy Carter's inept fumbles—comes Ronald Reagan, looking straight into the television camera's lens and saying, "Aw, shucks, folks, let me give it to you straight...
...Caldicott's public advocacy of nonviolent resistance is enough, under the new standards, to throw the FBI apparatus into high gear...
...A rape victim finds it difficult to move about freely in the world...
...The FBI rules, which do not require Congressional approval, are designed to re vive the Bureau's discredited tradition of monitoring—and confounding—political dissent...
...We have no crystal ball and no desire to play our own numbers game, but we see little reason to assume that the stagflation of the 1970s is behind us...
...Another expert told CBS that Reagan's ultimate "weapon for peace" has potential application as a space-based death ray...
...Except, of course, for the Russians, who might wonder what Washington would do when it was freed from the inhibiting restraints imposed by the fear of retaliation...
...Our expectation is that Reagan's nuclear arms rhetoric will grow more shrill, more frantic, more remote from any semblance of truth...
...No machinery is perfect— nor is any human operator...
...But in time it became evident to all but the adamantly obtuse that the Administration's claims about the intervention in Indochina—and, eventually, about many of its other policies and programs—were not to be believed...
...These are also the issues addressed by the three Canadian films to which the Justice Department awarded its seal of disapproval under a provision of the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act...
...Despite growing misgivings, most Americans continued to give at least tacit consent to the war, parting with their taxes, their sons, and ultimately their domestic tranquility to keep it going...
...In the movie, Caldicott urges a f group of concerned citizens to protest the arms race by shutting down a local Strategic Air Command base and setting "your naked toddlers loose in the Senate chamber...
...Instead, the clatter of falling dominoes is resonating once more in Washington...
...The corruption and brutality of the client regime in Saigon were screened by blather about our freedomloving ally...
...Once again the United States has set out to topple a leftist government, not in Brazil, Guatemala, or Chile, but this time in Nicaragua...
...The "somewhere they shouldn't have been" is everywhere...
...Indeed, within two weeks of the breach, similar circuit breakers failed—twice—during tests at the San Onofre, California, atomic plant...
...The demonstrations that spread more than a year ago to protest U.S...
...That quotation is from the President's major address on March 23, in which he unveiled his grand scheme for "defensive" space weapons—a trillion-dollar trifle that already has military contractors dreaming of endless cost-plus procurement well into the Twenty-first Century...
...And the State Department refused to issue its usual blanket denials...
...H Recruit informants and infiltrate organizations even before perceiving a "reasonable indication of criminal activities...
...In their usual creampuff style, they meekly went along with the idea of increasing military aid, quibbling only over the amount of money to be spent and tacking on only the vaguest of restraints...
...But the G-men may feel that Helen Caldicott no longer menaces the Republic...
...This is a trite and dreary script, performed by third-rate players...
...The nation is experiencing a resurgence of grass-roots political activity, especially in opposition to the nuclear arms race, and the Administration wants to have the machinery of repression in place...
...Even in today's depressed oil market, OPEC provides 40 per cent of "free world" oil...
...Reagan attains a new and unprecedented level of dishonesty when he talks about the nuclear arms race...
...Their willingness to cave in on El Salvador gave the Reagan Administration the assurances it needed to carry out its efforts to topple the Sandinista government of Nicaragua...
...Joseph Clarkson, the Justice official who set off a national storm by labeling three Canadian documentaries, including / / You Love This Planet, as propaganda, has yet to explain the criteria he used in reaching his decision...
...This time, residents of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D . C . , and points beyond were spared lethal exposure to radiation...
...During that time, he wrote, officials tried to "censor embarrassing, critical, or merely annoying information...
...The rising costs of the war were concealed by budgetary sleight-of-hand...
...The risks of cancer, incidentally, do not figure into the NRC's new safety goals at all...
...The Reagan mentality now working its mischief must be resisted vigorously as soon as it arises, for it will be with us long after Reagan is gone...
...Such a spirit is by no means without precedent, but it has not been so intensely expressed at least since the criminal Administration of Richard Nixon...
...Press coverage did little to make the story meaningful...
...Ignoring even the findings of the FBI, he continues to smear the critics of his policies as subversives "inspired" by the Soviet Union and determined to "pull the rug out from under our negotiators...
...Articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post focused not on the ugly phenomenon of rape in this country, but on the "shame" and "trouble" the incident had brought to the town of New Bedford, which, we were told, is attempting a renaissance of sorts...
...the ones at Salem were made by Westinghouse...
...Fear of Freedom Under new FBI domestic-security guidelines, antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott could be investigated—and her group, Physicians for Social Responsibility, could be infiltrated—because of statements she -onakes in the Canadian film / / You Love ?This Planet...
...We're not talking here about the Reagan Administration's efforts to stonewall and sidetrack the mounting disclosures of misfeasance and malfeasance in the Environmental Protection Agency and other sectors of the Federal regulatory apparatus, nor about the juggling of economic and budget data so that disastrous policies will be put in the best possible light, nor about the transparently fraudulent rationales being advanced for U . S . intervention in Central America...
...Reagan's March order stipulates that employees who hold security clearances—hundreds of thousands in sixty Federal agencies—must sign secrecy pledges, take lie-detector tests if asked, and submit all articles, books (fiction and nonfiction), speeches, and notes to Government censors before dissemination...
...According to a study prepared for the NRC last year, an accident at Salem, twenty miles south of Wilmington, Delaware, could kill more people than a comparable accident at any of the other seventy-three licensed reactors in the United States...
...According to Business Week, most energy experts expect oil prices to remain soft for several years, providing the impetus for a sustained recovery...
...Washington's revived obsession with El Salvador represents a victory for U . N . Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and National Security Adviser William "Where Is Zimbabwe...
...So much cynicism has set in since that it is difficult now to recall how many of our compatriots could hardly believe the President of the United States—any President— would deliberately lie to them...
...She was asking for it...
...Still, unemployed workers might be well advised not to hold their breath while waiting for the good news to trickle down to them...
...Instead, it said the dangers posed by atomic power should approximate those of other means of electrical generation...
...To help make that lie credible, the President resorts to other falsehoods...
...Before We Throw a Party The mass media are chock-full of cheery economic news these days: Factory orders are up, wholesale prices are down, housing starts are rising, and the recovery is under way...
...The military failures of several hundred thousand U.S...
...The Canadian film in question has, after all, been tagged as alien "political propaganda" by the Justice Department...
...It took former C I A agent Ralph MeGehee two years to get his book cleared INX / OLIVER WILLIAMS by the Agency's review board...
...troops and sophisticated U . S . technology against a rag-tag indigenous force were disguised by concocted "pacification" figures...
...What sets Reagan apart is his attempt to embark on incalculably risky escalation while portraying it as "a vision of the future which offers hope...
...Within a few years, though, their painful disillusionment was confirmed, first by the disclosures in the Pentagon papers and then by the ugly revelations preserved on Richard Nixon's White House tapes...
...George Orwell would be impressed by Reagan's unabashed eagerness to turn language on its head...
...they watched and cheered the rapists...
...Denton, director of the commission's Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, called the mishaps at Salem the most serious since the Three Mile Island accident in March 1979...
...Whether the scheme is real or fanciful, however, the Administration's reckless pursuit of the perpetually elusive goal of nuclear "superiority" is frightening, and the blatantly untruthful presentation is contemptible...
...At the time, the plant was running at 20 per cent power...
...Meanwhile, Hortensia de Allende, widow of slain Chilean President Salvador Allende Gossens, will be unable to see Caldicott's movie in the United States—or discuss human rights with the Catholic church officials who recently invited her to San Francisco...
...The N R C admitted as much in January, when it adopted a new statement of nuclear power safety goals over the objections of its own Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards...
...Reagan's fund request means full steam ahead for gunboat diplomacy: more helicopters, more machine guns, more U . S . military "advisers...
...intervention in Central America need to be organized again...
...When some 500 to 1,500 counterrevolutionaries parachuted into Nicaragua late in March, even Time magazine acknowledged that the United States was behind the invasion...
...All constituted, according to the Department, "an attempt to influence a segment of the U . S . public...
...U . S . strategists seem to have lifted whole chapters out of the old Indochina manual...
...Economic predictions based on elaborate econometric models have been less reliable than long-range weather forecasts...
...That was a mistake that should not be repeated...
...Rape differs radically from other violent crimes...
...But they represent much more: indisputable proof that the best laid technological plans—emergency reactor shutdown systems—can and do go awry...
...Fortunately, the plant was again operating at low power: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Harold Denton said full power would have been "right up to the conditions" for a meltdown...
...If a slow, sustained recovery does occur in the next few years—the favorite Reagan scenario—unemployment rates will remain considerably higher than they have been for most of the years since World War II...
...The American economy is lurching out of control down an uncharted road to an undefined destination...
...Reagan's assurance that no American troops will be sent to El Salvador—small comfort to the Salvadoran people—seems to have been enough to buy off liberal members of Congress...
...The most bullish corporate economists see little chance that unemployment will fall below 6 to 7 per cent in this decade—a figure that once would have been called recessionary but that Martin Feldstein, the President's economic adviser, now labels "noninflationary...
...We Almost Lost Salem On the night of February 22, something went wrong inside Reactor One at the Salem, New Jersey, nuclear power plant...
...And, of course, the devastation and death inflicted by U . S . guns and bombs, herbicides and napalm were obscured by Washington's earnest assurances that its sole interest was in "bringing the other side to the negotiating table...
...Though Salem's breakdown was unique, the conditions that led to it were not...
...The Biggest Lie In the mid-1960s, as the United States slogged deeper and deeper into the dismal swamp of its Indochina adventure, it gradually became apparent that the Johnson Administration had adopted deceit as its standard operating procedure...
...What we're talking about here—and I hate to use this word—is a 'Vietnamization' of the process, in which you start training at the lowest level and work it right up through the brigades," a State Department official told The Wall Street Journal...
...But most senior scientists in the field seem to doubt the technology is workable at all...
...Reagan's Star Wars scenario is by no means a new idea...
...The new rules empower the Bureau to: K Spy on groups that use their First Amendment rights to advocate breaking the law or to espouse engaging in violence as a way to "achieve political or social change...
...But our sense is that none of it is working...
...They seem incapable of understanding that OPEC—and the U . S . consumer—are not the simple economic automatons of classical theory...
...According to The New York Times, the President's secrecy order was precipitated by his "irritation" with disclosures that U.S...
...But these aren't reruns...
...In another foray against freedom, the Government is targeting Federal employees who try to question the official line or share information about public policy with the public...
...Would it not be better," Reagan asked, "to save lives than to avenge them...
...The events at Salem demonstrated the folly of a one-in- 10,000 standard...
...naval forces were deployed near Libya last February...
...Once again, to be sure, he is following in the footsteps of his predecessors...
...Today, as in the years when the Bureau committed its worst excesses in the COINTELPRO program, the Government's concern is not to control crime but to stifle dissent...
...In normal circumstances, the malfunction would have triggered a circuit breaker—or its backup—to stop the chain reaction by lowering "control rods" into the nuclear core...
...The President who pledged to "get government off our backs" has instead plunged headlong into the ugly business of thought-control...
...The hundreds of thousands marching in Europe for disarmament are being joined by rapidly growing numbers in this country who understand that peace is not to be achieved by another great leap forward in the technology of death...
...H Collect publicly available information on groups or persons not under investigation, and snoop indefinitely on organizations that were once thought to be parties to crime...
...El Salvador, after fading from America's front pages for the better part of a year, leaped back into the headlines when Reagan Administration officials requested $110 million to help the Salvadoran regime—that bulwark of democracy, that beacon of decency—inflict further savagery on its people...
...Tlie use of informers to probe suspect organizations is explicitly authorized...
...More than 200 rapes occur in the United States each day, to women of every age and background, at bars, in schools, at home, or on the streets...
...In other words, she might cast a bad light on the White House's efforts to embrace the Chilean junta and other murderous rightwing regimes in Latin America...
...The Administration has demonstrated more flagrantly than ever its contempt for constitutional guarantees—and for the American people...
...And that more and more of us will ask that most sensible American question, "Who are you trying to kid...
...they're real...
...When Nixon was forced to resign, when the Senate Select Intelligence Committee and other investigative bodies aired the cor rosi ve pattern of official abuse, when the most obnoxious transgressions were halted, many Americans assumed that their liberties were safe once and for all...
...The officials say the military and civic campaign, along lines similar to the ru- INX/ RANDY JONES ral pacification program by the United States in Vietnam, is tied to a sharp increase in aid" to El Salvador...
...An operator on duty, instructed to shut down the plant manually, reached for the "trip" control, but the handle broke...
...The commission abandoned a proposed standard that the risks of nuclear reactors "should be as low as is reasonably achievable...
...The commission's specific goal—one chance in 10,000 of a meltdown occurring during the estimated forty-year lifetime of a reactor—could not be met by six of fifteen plants studied last winter...
...The same two relays stuck and the plant had to be shut down by hand...
...While proceeding with plans to deploy new missiles in Europe, he offers empty proposals to the Soviets and describes these as "fair, farreaching, and comprehensive...
...Reagan's rhetoric is not the only ominous echo of Vietnam...
...Such inflation will lead to new calls for a "managed recession" to cool prices...
...Without the official warning, viewers would presumably have been unable to figure out that productions of the National Film Board of Canada were of Canadian origin...
...The Reagan Administration, hoping to ride the crest of recovery all the way to reelection in 1984, has indicated that it may revise its forecasts to show greater growth in the gross national product...
...So the Government has no intention of phasing out the nuclear menace, and the industry has no interest in flushing its massive investment down the drain...
...They replace guidelines issued by former Attorney General Edward Levi in 1976 after the tawdry record of systematic abuses by the intelligence agencies was exposed by Congressional hearings and media investigations...
...To suggest that advanced weaponry is the key to a decent, humane, and peaceful future is to tell the biggest lie...
...All in all, the month's events give dramatic proof of an official fear of democracy, a distrust of Americans by their own Government...
...On March 14, more than 2,500 women and men marched in a candlelight procession to the New Bedford City Hall...
...Once again the United States is committing its power, its prestige, and its military might in a Third World civil war, this time not in Vietnam but in El Salvador...
...Put another way, the nation's atomic watchdog asserted that nuclear power cannot be expected to be any safer than, say, burning coal—even though the destructive potential of the former demands that it be so...
...Patrons who witnessed the crime in Big Dan's Bar did not call for help...
...In this grim world, Reagan bore the most cheery tidings: Once we found a way to protect the United States from nuclear attack, using laser and particle-beam warheads in outer space capable of intercepting and defusing incoming missiles—why, there'd be nothing to worry about any more...
...With time, her trauma may recede—or it may not...
...The government of El Salvador is on the front line of a battle that is really aimed at the very heart of the Western hemisphere, and eventually at us," the President proclaims...
...Such "color" reportage deflects attention from the larger issue: Rape is a commonplace occurrence in America, and the New Bedford incident is a grotesque reminder that to many men this crime is still acceptable conduct...
...Two dealt with acid rain and one with the threat of nuclear war...
...A sexual assault is a profound invasion of privacy...
...These were the reactions of some New Bedford citizens, reflecting an all-toofamiliar attitude that persists even today in our society...
...The phone calls need to be made, the letters sent, the petitions signed, the pickets formed, the marches begun...
...The temptation is to switch channels, tune out, turn off the set...
...In one month, the Reagan Administration has severely damaged our rights to speak freely, watch whatever we choose to see, and listen to whomever we want to hear...
...But many of the same experts were totally unprepared for OPEC's initial success...
...Next time, they—or others across the country— may not be so lucky...
...But the time has come to state categorically, without evasion or euphemism, that Reagan is a liar, and that his efforts to deceive the American people have attained an DAVID SUTER order of magnitude that makes Lyndon Johnson's falsehoods about Vietnam seem, by comparison, to be no more than polite little fibs...
...That means the rest of us must do what the reactor emergency backup systems may not do: shut the plants down before it's too late...
...Unfortunately, the nation's political leadership—Republican and Democratic alike—seems eager to ride the false waves of euphoria instead...
...in fact, CBS's 60 Minutes quickly dug up a four-year-old interview with a former chief of U . S . Air Force intelligence who solemnly warned that the Soviets "have a head start in particle-beam weaponry...
...We could all live happily ever after...
...The revised FBI rules, issued in March by Attorney General William French Smith, give the Bureau carte blanche to investigate individuals or organizations when there are indications of "an apparent attempt to engage in crime...
...Had it been operating at full power, the delay could have resulted in a core meltdown—and thousands of deaths...
...That, of course, is exactly the kind of information to which Americans must have access—information about Government decisions that may be matters of life and death, not just for individuals and nations but for the planet...
...The decline of oil prices is good news, but it should be the occasion for altering national economic priorities and constructing a rational fullemployment economy...
...The nature and scope of the Soviet threat have always been inflated, just as the inherently aggressive stance of U . S . nuclear strategy has always been kept under wraps...
Vol. 47 • May 1983 • No. 5
