Comment

...invasion: Public outcry-organized, vocal, and unyielding—can inx / dave shannon shelve the war plans that lie on desks of Pentagon commanders...

...Civil Offense The popular image of Washington bureaucracy—that it's lazy and staid—doesn't fit the Federal Emergency Management Agency...

...The news from El Salvador was gloomy, but the news from Nicaragua was worse...

...He didn't choose to talk about the offenses committed at home and abroad by the FBI and the CIA...

...Aspin has some advice for aspiring polit-icos: "You do want to take advantage of your committees...

...With this award, the world is saying it recognizes that you have been peace-loving to a fault...

...They thought he was honest even when he was obviously uninformed or just dead wrong...

...This award is for you, the three-and-a-half-million of our people who have been uprooted and dumped as if you were rubbish...

...William Shakespeare "Lock 'em up, and throw away the key...

...for you who have marched against the pass laws peacefully and who, unarmed, have been shot, mown down, and killed...

...though the unemployment rate in this period of "recovery" is as high as it was in 1981...

...In sanctioning preventive detention, our representatives were following the lead of the states, twenty of which have authorized judges to consider a defendant's potential danger before setting bail...

...But I just decided I needed to get some bucks...

...Unfortunately, the lessons of the 1984 Presidential campaign need to be learned and applied now if we are to avoid a similar or worse fiasco at the end of Reagan's second term...

...Survivors of two of the victims were told by CIA officers who visited their homes that the men had died in an auto accident in Miami—not in a plane crash in El Salvador...

...A full-scale invasion appears so imminent that the Public Broadcasting Service may already have assigned a producer to detail the frightful events for its thirteen-episode 1994 series, "The Central American War: A Television History...

...Can't we just settle in for four more years of missile-rattling abroad and malign neglect at home, and try to do better in 1988, if there is a 1988...

...Mencken You can't fool all of the people all of the time, but if you can fool them once, it's good for four years...

...Her attorney told reporters, "The low levels of ionizing radiation, which the Government has claimed are safe for more than thirty years, are actually dangerous...

...As a good liberal should, however, he couched his actions in righteous rhetoric: In exchange for his support, said Aspin, he had extracted a promise from Reagan to be more flexible in negotiating arms agreements with the Soviets...

...But as only Ronald Reagan can, the President has dodged even this most noxious controversy...

...Exactly what the "advisers" are doing is not clear, but they may be giving the Salvadorans lessons in napalm application...

...International economic pressure against the regime "is the only alternative to violence," he declared...

...The pledge of full employment, once a staple of the Democratic platform, was discreetly discarded...

...The manual was chock-full of such helpful hints as how to explain "why it was necessary for the good of the people" to "neutralize carefully selected and planned targets," how to hire "professional criminals...

...Ruckelshaus's decision contravened the Clean Air Act, which obligates the Government to safeguard the public from any pollutant that "may reasonably be anticipated to result in an increase in mortality...

...Merrigan describes what happened: "When George and I reached a flagpole along the path, we paused to pray the 'Our Father' and the 'Prayer of St...

...I then confessed that I had in fact been praying and was immediately taken into custody...

...We're not likely to survive many more such defeats...

...Two years after leaving his post as a systems analyst, he ran for Congress, portraying himself as a critic of wasteful military spending...

...To Mondale, it was apparent, curbing the arms race was not a serious prospect but a campaign talking-point...

...Amid the uproar over who had published the manual and which pages had been deleted, one basic fact was neglected: The advice in the manual has been heeded...

...Tutu has used his platform to condemn not only the apartheid system but also the Reagan Administration's policy of "constructive engagement" toward South Africa...

...Tutu, the first black to be general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, ranks as one of South Africa's most outspoken critics...

...Our Government had to own up, however grudgingly, to the loss of four CIA employees who died in El Salvador when, according to the official account, their surveillance plane crashed in bad weather...

...Rumor has it that Aspin is gearing up for a Senate race in 1986...

...And so it always is that under the guise of protecting citizens, Congress takes aim at the Bill of Rights...

...Had the House of Representatives conducted hearings on the anti-crime package, someone might have noticed the omissions...

...The new law is unclear about how a detained defendant can rebut the presumption that he or she poses a danger, nor does it define what constitutes a dangerous suspect...

...they're eagerly preparing to impose martial law...

...The preference for warfare was put nicely by El Salvador's top combat commander, Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, whose troops were responsible for a massacre of 1,000 peasants in 1982...

...Can the Democratic Presidential nomination be far behind...

...Officials there don't sit around pushing paper...

...Merrigan was interrogated and driven off the island, "all the while being warned that should I reenter the Arsenal to pray, I would be 'subject to apprehension and prompt delivery to civil authorities for prosecution.'" But Merrigan could always appeal to a higher authority...

...As it was, the House affirmed the Senate version as an afterthought to the fiscal 1985 spending resolution...

...The military group is getting out more than they used to," one Pentagon official said...

...Home by Christmas...

...Rules were needed to cover uranium mining operations, Federal nuclear research facilities, and atomic bomb factories...

...After all the millions of words, after all the instant and delayed analyses, is there any point in asking once again why Ronald Reagan won—and won so decisively that his supporters can claim a mandate of sorts...

...Voters felt, and often said, that his commitments were less than skin-deep and would readily be revised whenever the pollsters suggested that a given stance might prove unpopular...

...Though the ranks of America's poor have increased by six million since Reagan assumed office...

...The contras may also have followed the manual's suggestion that they create a martyr to their cause—none other than Eden "Comandante Zero" Pastora...

...The award to Tutu comes at a time when internal pressure is growing steadily on the South African regime...

...But the Democrats never made a serious effort to appeal to idealism...

...The four deaths did not, however, spur the Reagan Administration to reconsider its interventionist policy...

...October 1984 will probably be remembered not for the Chicago Cubs' swoon or the lackluster Presidential debates, but for the almost inexorable march of U.S...

...But in the "get-tough" atmosphere that pervades Washington, justice found few friends...

...A Federal commission will develop sentencing guidelines...

...They still do...

...Onward, Christian Soldiers The armed forces of the United States don't have a prayer...

...Others say the attack may come a little later...

...FEMA only vaguely defines what it would take to declare an emergency...

...For the past four years, the Reagan Administration has insisted that its aim is not to subvert the Nicaraguan government...

...advisers" in El Salvador were beginning to ignore restrictions on their movements within that country...

...Tom Merrigan, a contributor to that newspaper, made the discovery while strolling with a friend...

...We do not seek its overthrow," President Reagan told Congress in April 1983...

...Monterrosa and three other Salvadoran officers were killed less than a week later when their helicopter crashed in rebel-controlled Morazan province...

...its members will be appointed by the President, so the quality of their mercy is likely to be strained...

...No Gentle Rain The quality of mercy is not strain'd...

...Last October, EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus scrapped his agency's proposed limits, saying he was concerned about "liability implications...

...But voters appreciated what they perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a deep sense of commitment on the President's part...

...Reagan may claim a mandate...

...More hopeful observers hold out one slim chance for averting a U.S...

...Well, I thought you might have been praying.' " 'Is that wrong?' " 'Well, 18 U.S.C...

...The legislation, tacked on to an appropriations bill and approved with only cursory deliberation, drew howls of protest from civil libertarians...

...A judge can jail a suspect—before trial—-if the accused has two prior convictions and appears to pose a danger to the community...

...This startling revelation came not from a high-level Pentagon briefing but from Via Pads, the newspaper of the Catholic Worker movement in Des Moines, Iowa...

...Francis,' whose first line is, 'Lord make me an instrument of Your peace.' George finished before I did and walked on ahead, but I was interrupted by a security officer who demanded some identification from me...

...Reagan's lame-duck Presidency is likely to pose extraordinary dangers...

...The new Federal law goes much further, however, and is likely to set the pace of future reform in state law (which covers the vast majority of criminal defendants...

...As he returns for four more years, the aggressive plans of his Administration are coming to a boil...

...The policy is an "unmitigated disaster," Tutu said...

...There are times when you have to make war to achieve peace," he said shortly after the talks ended...

...Another, even more telling, was his failure in the second Presidential campaign debate to answer two questions about the weapons systems that might be covered by a nuclear freeze...

...Radical solutions, Mondale's campaign strategists warned, would alienate the voters and send him down to ignominious defeat...

...Is something wrong?' I asked...

...Anonymous It only hurts when you laugh...

...But there's more to the law: It stiffens penalties for incitement to crime...

...On other military matters, too, Aspin has been carrying Reagan's bags...

...FEMA's plan is included in the draft of a bill to amend the 1950 Defense Resources Act, so it will require Congressional approval...

...Now that's driving a hard bargain...

...Otherwise, the Third World will again know the terrors of U.S...

...He has a reputation as a liberal, and he has earned every pejorative ever hurled at that tattered label...

...Many middle- and lower-level Sandinista officials have been assassinated by the contras, said Dewey Claridge, former head of the CIA's clandestine operations in Latin America...

...in fact, a majority of the electorate favored domestic and foreign policies diametrically opposed to some of the key components of Reagan's reactionary program...

...But nothing came of the session, and Duarte fell under extreme pressure from the Salvadoran Right as well as from zealots in Washington to concentrate on the battlefield...

...Implicit in this logic is the assumption that the residents of New Mexico deserve less protection than residents of Rhode Island...

...These developments will come as rude shocks to the many millions of Americans who allowed themselves to be lulled by Reagan's amiable image and soothing rhetoric, and who found no attractive alternative in the Democratic opposition...

...He addressed the crowd that welcomed him in Johannesburg: "This award is for you, you mothers who sit at railway stations trying to eke out an existence selling potatoes, selling mealies [corn], selling products...

...The polls never showed much public support for Reagan's policies...

...In the wake of Reagan's overwhelming victory, liberal commentators complained about a lack of "idealism" among voters— and particularly among the young...

...Those segments of the Left—of women's, labor, peace, civil rights, and environmental organizations—that shelved their principles and squandered their energies on the Mondale campaign should begin rethinking and regrouping right now to avoid repeating in 1988 the debacle of 1984...

...the government so fears him that it has revoked his passport on several occasions...

...To William Ruckelshaus, that's a trivial matter...

...meddling in Central America but for a "quarantine" of Nicaragua...

...Months before Reagan's canard, CIA officials assured Chamorro in unequivocal terms: "We are going to help you change the government in Managua and do it within a year," recalls Chamorro, who was paid $1,500 to $2,000 a month for his part in the plotting...

...troops into Nicaragua to help the people regain their freedom and independence," says retired Rear Admiral Gene La Rocque, who heads the Center for Defense Information...

...According to Datamation magazine, which obtained FEMA's plans under the Freedom of Information Act, an Office of Censorship will be established in time of war or national emergency to control messages leaving this country...

...The EPA acknowledges, in its grossly understated way, that at current emission levels, one person in 1,000 will die of radiation-induced cancer...

...There is no reason to assume that a Democratic campaign that offered a genuine alternative to Reagan's rancid and regressive program would have succeeded in denying the President a second term...

...EPA officials added that the risks of low-level radiation are "relatively trivial," since many atomic projects are located in sparsely populated areas...

...Damn the Constitution, full speed ahead...

...But Monterrosa was not the only casualty the U.S...

...For Congress, the presumption of innocence and constitutional guarantees of due process are quaint ideas that have no place in the Federal courts...

...All this knee-jerk legislating was meant to turn the fear of constituents into votes for the lawmakers...

...In the Western states, for example, some 175 million metric tons of uranium millings sat in piles, spreading cancer with the wind...

...I've never done a defense fund-raiser until this year," he told The Journal...

...Krumback, an employee of the Rocky Flats H-bomb trigger factory, contracted cancer of the colon as a result of exposure to "permissible" levels of radiation, according to the Colorado Industrial Commission, which awarded his widow $40,000 last April...

...military technology, and nightly body counts will reach once more into the living rooms of the American people...

...Ruckelshaus preferred to ditch the regulatory process rather than establish rules COMMENT that might provide ammunition for lawsuits against polluters...

...Though the Federal Election Commission's final numbers are not in, by late August Aspin had received some $20,000 from the political action committees of leading Pentagon contractors, according to The Wall Street Journal...

...That was a parting shot from the Ninety-eighth Congress, which passed a grab-bag of anticrime measures just before the politicians went home to woo voters...

...He called not for an end to U.S...

...One of the "best and the brightest," Aspin came to Washington in the mid-1960s— after earning degrees at Yale, Oxford, and MIT—to work as an economist in Robert McNamara's Pentagon...

...1382 prohibits public prayer on the Arsenal.' He went on to tell me that in the past, local peace groups had gathered about the flagpole to pray for peace but had since been barred from reentering the Arsenal...

...mass media, which had developed a fondness for Monterrosa...

...Even as news of the plane crash leaked out, U.S...

...Donald Hodel, head of the DOE, recently demonstrated his approach to safety issues by declaring that nuclear weapons plants pose a smaller health hazard than "living in high altitude locations like Denver...

...He and George Dean were walking along a public path at the Rock Island Arsenal, the giant munitions depot situated on an island in the Mississippi River...

...The Bishop's Message Opponents of the South African regime and its odious policy of racial discrimination could rejoice last month in the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Bishop Des-mund Tutu...

...Two years later, he had become the leader of the battle to begin MX production...

...La Rocque has flatly predicted that the 82d Airborne Division will invade Nicaragua on November 15...

...though only fervent prayer and dubious accounting practices keep the banking system from collapsing, Mondale offered only the pale palliatives of warmed-over liberalism—or less...

...When the Nobel decision was announced, Pretoria uttered a terse "no comment...

...In textbook CIA fashion, the circumstances of the deaths were obfuscated even to the bereaved families...

...Both Pastora and the Nicaraguan government had pointed the finger at the CIA, but Washington brushed off the charges...

...And before much time has elapsed, we will begin to see the collapse of the house of cards Reagan calls economic recovery...

...Everything is in place for what will be euphemistically described as the introduction of U.S...

...Unless, of course, FEMA has already declared an emergency...

...His flip-flop on the Grenada invasion—he opposed it in 1983, supported it in 1984—was one example...

...By 1980, he was meekly defending the MX missile from his post on the Armed Services Committee...

...Noting that he is but part of a mass movement of South African blacks seeking fundamental change, Tutu graciously shared his award with his compatriots...

...though no relief is in sight for the hard-pressed farmers of the Middle West or the workers of the devastated Northern industrial belt...

...Compared to Mondale's threadbare pragmatism, Reagan's platitudes sounded positively visionary...

...Instead, that dialogue will have to be built from scratch...

...But it is difficult to imagine that such a campaign would have done worse than Mondale's did—and it would certainly have set the stage for a serious national dialogue over the next four years...

...He went on to urge the international community to divest from South Africa: "What we have to say to those who invest in South Africa is that your investment is a moral as well as an economic choice...

...LeRoy Krumback lived in the Denver area, coincidentally enough, but the altitude wasn't what killed him...

...Salvador Defense Minister Eugenio Vides Casanova announced casually in October that the air force had some twenty-five napalm bombs—an embarrassing slip he quickly tried to cover by adding, with less than consummate credibility, "As far as I know, they have never been used, and the planes do not even have the equipment to fire or drop them...

...He recently voted for the Administration's El Salvador weapons package, again joining an abject flock of fleecy Democrats...

...Roger Price You can't beat somebody with nobody...

...Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, hinted broadly that the CIA and the contras were behind the bomb explosion last May that wounded Pastora, the thorny contra leader...

...This summer, blacks protested against apartheid in numbers and intensity not seen in years...

...intervention in Central America...

...Disarmament was a word that never crossed Mondale's lips...

...The CIA manual belies that pious claim, and so do the statements of Edgar Chamorro, one of the contra leaders...

...It was a great loss for American military strategists and for the U.S...

...The legislation also abolishes parole, puts a limit on prisoners' time off for good behavior, and restricts the use of the insanity defense...

...Ronald Reagan's chief Democratic ally on the issue, Aspin was instrumental in shepherding the MX bill through the House...

...it remains for the public to disabuse the Commander-in-Chief...

...A Liberal Shows His Colors The Democrats held on to some seats in the House of Representatives, but to our minds they kept at least one spot too many...

...While environmental groups try to reverse the EPA's action in court, the public is left with the porous radiation standards of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy...

...The arms race is sure to accelerate, exposing all humanity to unprecedented risks...

...The month began auspiciously enough as U.S.-backed President Jose Napoleon Duarte of El Salvador convened negotiations with Salvadoran rebels—the first such effort and a diplomatic coup for Duarte...

...The Government will be empowered to seize private computers and industrial plants—which comes as a surprise to companies covered by the scheme, to say nothing of those individuals who've read the Fifth Amendment's prohibition against confiscation "without just compensation...

...Among the contributors were PACs representing General Dynamics, McDonnell Douglas, Northrop, Rockwell, and Martin Marietta...

...Mondale, on the other hand, was seen as "wishy-washy" even when he was correct...

...We are almost certainly headed toward active military intervention in Central America and perhaps elsewhere in the Third World...

...Since 1971, Les Aspin has represented the first Congressional district of Wisconsin...

...But as the political winds shifted over the years, so did Aspin...

...Relatively Trivial Pursuit Five years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency began working on nationwide standards to regulate emission of low-level radiation...

...It is for you who, down through the ages, have said that you seek to change this evil system peacefully...

...These were the first CIA casualties in El Salvador—the first, at least, to which the Government admits...

...Among the lessons worth pondering, it seems to us, are these: Americans tend to prefer a candidate who holds strong, even passionate, convictions over one who seems to improvise policies from day to day to fit the shifting winds of public opinion...

...It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven...

...A person can be prosecuted for trying to persuade another to commit a felony, even if no crime comes out of such advocacy...

...The South African government responded in its usual brutal fashion, killing at least eighty demonstrators and wounding hundreds more...

...The revelation that the CIA had printed and distributed thousands of copies of a how-to terrorism manual to the contras fighting the Nicaraguan government momentarily placed the Reagan Administration on the defensive...

...The new laws authorize preventive detention for certain Federal noncapital offenses...

...military strategists suffered...

...to carry out selective jobs," and how to "create a martyr for the cause...