Comment

...Banal Brutality The atrocities committed by U.S.-supported troops in Central America mount so high that they lose their capacity to outrage and appall...

...NASA has long had a free ride from the press...

...The students of Farmington High have presumably learned the intended lessons: Don't question authority, don't criticize the status quo, and if you find yourself imprisoned, don't breathe a word...

...Thus the National Broadcasting Company and The Washington Post, as well as other major media, were subjected to repeated warnings against publication of "secrets" allegedly passed to the Soviets years ago by the alleged spy, Ronald W. Pelton...

...The missing page was cut out on instructions from the yearbook adviser, librarian Janice Boersma, who acted, in turn, at the direction of School Superintendent Myrl Massie...

...On various fronts and by various means, strenuous efforts are being made to dictate what we may say or write, see or read...

...With a fitting touch of deference to the past, the group is referred to as the "plumbers unit...

...Oblivious to the warnings against leaks issuing from other sectors of the Government, the Commission began leaking its report two months ahead of time...

...In the South, it maintains a separate and unequal system of black land-grant colleges and extension services, perhaps the last vestige of official Jim Crow in America...

...But our point here is neither to quibble with the Commission's definitions nor to dispute its findings...

...These are the troops that the U.S...

...In Geneva, the United States cast the only vote against a World Health Organisation decision to strengthen and expand the code restricting the marketing of powder substitutes for mother's milk...

...Just watch your step and you won't provoke the "real harsh feelings" of those in power...

...They are intrinsic to an agency that thrives on secrecy and is authorized to wage war and overthrow governments without our consent...

...He doesn't want to scare anyone, the way the Kennedy Administration did after the Berlin Wall crisis of 1961 and the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962...

...He keeps asking the people he meets where they will go and what they will do when the missiles are launched from Moscow, and all he gets in return are uncomprehending blank stares...

...The latest revelation, which seemed to settle snugly next to other quotidian items in the press, was that Salvadoran soldiers have been cutting off the ears of dead rebels...

...Comment Jim Crow Alive and Well More than two decades after passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Federal agricultural bureaucracy remains a bastion of racism...

...Do you know where your bomb shelter is...

...There are sixty-three photos from a magazine called Tri-Sexual Lust 'They were a fact-finding Commission,' said Commission spokeswoman Dee Kuhn...

...Only problem is, Becton says, he still hasn't figured out how to do an awareness campaign without frightening people...

...He hasn't revived the Reagan Administration's 1981 idea that 90 per cent of the American people could survive nuclear war if we only spent $70 billion on new hideaways...

...A plague of censors has descended on the land...

...Edith P. Thomas, a USDA nutritionist, publicly charged the Department with denial of nutrition assistance to low-income minority families...

...In Washington, meanwhile, the bureaucrats have squashed a whistle-blower...

...But the Department's equal-opportunity division, which is supposed to look into such charges, seems to be running out of money...

...He and other Reagan Administration officials have been criticizing the Congressional oversight committees for meddling in the CIA's affairs...

...Investigative funds are sought on a case-by-case basis, says division director Lawrence Bembry...

...The Government's obsession with secrecy is so pervasive—some twenty-two million documents were added to the classified files in 1985 alone—that almost any unauthorized disclosure can be characterized as a breach of security...

...The committees have no say...

...The bill passed 91-to-7...

...And if Government officials don't appreciate the role of the fourth estate, they can slink back to the shuttered corporate boardrooms where they might feel more at home...

...Had we been the yearbook adviser or the superintendent of schools, we might have offered Inman some friendly advice on the use of adverbs and adjectives—but Superintendent Massie is made of sterner stuff: He ordered out the scissors...

...There is nothing new, of course, about the Government's interest in controlling the flow of information and disciplining those in the news media who step out of line...

...In the first such protest reported from the Eastern Bloc, some 3,000 residents of the Northeast Polish city of Bialystok petitioned parliament to suspend construction of a nuclear power plant...

...In the assault on unauthorized publication of national-security news, earnest citizens express grave concern about disclosure of "secrets...

...Julius Becton, the retired general who runs the Federal Emergency Management Agency (civil defense, in non-bureaucratese), is worried because you don't...

...These stories tomorrow on the CBS Morning News...

...NASA's Nabobs If you're under fire, call your critics unpatriotic...

...Other studies have led to diametrically opposite conclusions...

...The grand innovation was unveiled on March 2, when Jennings honored Tip O'Neill...

...Could she have gone to school in Farmington, Arkansas...

...Sometimes in battle my men get excited and cut the ears off the dead terrorists," said the lieutenant commanding the unit...

...In this open season on foreign consumers, the Senate has voted to permit the export of unapproved drugs...

...pharmaceutical companies...

...The cutting edge, as is usual in these efforts, belongs to those who claim to be acting in the interests of "national security...

...we simply wonder what could possibly induce any American to entrust his or her freedom to a panel appointed by Attorney General Edwin Meese—or by any other Government official...

...This is part of the fact-finding.' So eager is the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography to enter the fray that it could not wait for the official publication of its report, scheduled for July...

...Her supervisors told her, she says, that the black schools should seek aid from the white schools rather than directly from USDA...

...Corporations are on the loose, and the public and the environment are at their mercy...

...It was done," he explained, "for the purpose of trying to prevent some real harsh feelings from the staff and teachers...

...John Bennett of the Scripps-Howard Newspapers reported late in May that the FBI had secretly formed "a team to investigate news leaks of sensitive Government information...

...As for the two Congressional oversight committees, all the President is required to do is drop them a line to say the operation is under way...

...Such scrutiny could cause "serious damage to the United States's technological, scientific, and economic leadership in the world...

...There is only one explanation for such irrational dithering: It has nothing to do with the protection of national-security information...

...Fletcher is upset with the criticism the space agency has suffered in the wake of the Challenger disaster...

...After ominous rumblings about possible prosecution of press miscreants, it turned out that the material in question was old news not only to the Russians but also to viewers of NBC News, who had been told the same story many months before without so much as a raised eyebrow from the Government...

...Even the Reagan Administration's wishy-washy Civil Rights Commission has accused the U.S...

...Make no mistake about it: The CIA traffics in murder and torture...

...The Reagan Doctrine to roll back communism is being carried out by intelligence operatives who report only to their clandestine colleagues...

...Open Season U.S...

...Abolish the CIA The CIA's effort to muzzle the media revives an old question: Can democracy coexist with the CIA...

...Now enough time has elapsed to encourage a revival of old and discredited news-management techniques...

...The Senators were apparently less concerned about the health of foreign patients and more concerned about the profits of the U.S...

...Well, finally, the drug companies have prevailed, at least in the Senate...

...OutofSight,OutofMind It's three minutes to midnight...

...She described, for example, a series of requests for her technical aid made by black universities and U.S...

...A few days after going public with charges she has been making internally since 1980, Thomas— who was the highest ranking black woman in the Extension Service—was offered $25,000 and a "clean record" if she would quit...

...Dust off the black-and-yellow signs on safe buildings and show people where the nearest one is...

...The most common official complaint against the news media, and the most transparently fraudulent, is the accusation that important "secrets" are being divulged...

...ABC's "World News Tonight" now treats current events as an international competition between personalities...

...trade deficit...

...Seems a gaggle of vicious reporters are out to get NASA—and sabotage America while they're at it...

...Across the board, the Reagan Administration has gutted the regulatory process—whether at EPA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission...

...Don't get him wrong...

...pretend that you're still free...

...When the President wants the CIA to engage in one of its covert actions, he just has to give the word...

...For years, they have urged Congress to allow them to circumvent the FDA and sell to overseas markets even if the FDA hadn't ruled on the safety of their concoctions...

...But even that seems to be too much supervision for CIA Director William J. Casey...

...Food and Drug Admin-stration is in granting licenses for new drugs...

...Thanks to the diligence and dedication of their teachers and school administrators, the youth of Farmington have been schooled in the realities of late-Twentieth-Century American citizenship...

...What has the EPA done about this health hazard to wildlife and humans...

...It's time to revoke this mafia's charter...

...All they could talk about was how the bill would help redress the U.S...

...While graduates elsewhere were being subjected a few weeks ago to the usual mind-numbing commencement-speech platitudes about democracy and The American Way of Life, the Class of'86 at Farmington High was being taught a practical lesson in applied political science: The yearbook was distributed with one page missing...

...Such efforts did not begin in the Reagan Administration, though they were dealt a serious setback in the Nixon years, when the Watergate Affair brought to light the machinations a President could mount to manipulate the news...

...Attorney General's Commission on Pornography contains a catalog of thousands of allegedly pornographic magazines, books, and films, including extensive excerpts and explicit descriptions...

...According to press reports, Bembry "refused to confirm or deny that his travel budget had been eliminated...

...All he has in mind is a big public-awareness campaign, a media blitz...

...The short answer is No...

...By now the dividing line between news and entertainment on these cotton-candy programs has been so hopelessly lost that the following promotion was aired with a straight face one evening in May: "Raymond Burr and the return of Perry Mason, and the Flintstones celebrate twenty years on the air...

...Not much...

...In May, two more incidents surfaced...

...The latest practitioner of the art is James G. Fletcher, NASA's administrator...

...The evening "news" programs are not much better...

...Bialystok is at the center of an area affected by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl...

...In 1984, the agency proposed banning dicofol, but when Rohm & Haas and other manufacturers offered to reduce levels of DDT, the EPA backed down...

...When it comes to so-called pornography, the hard-core Right has managed to find a distressing number of allies among liberals and even radicals...

...As it happens, those are precisely the lessons the Reagan Administration wants to teach the American news media and, for that matter, the American people...

...I believe that a small number of reporters have acquired a deep and unwarranted suspicion of NASA, its organization, its motives, and its peopie," he said in May...

...It finds even the pretense of democracy offensive...

...foreign policy is being run on covert pilot...

...it specializes in coups, assassinations, and destabilization...

...drug makers—those generous folks who've brought you the Dalkon Shield, Oraflex, Fel-dene, and infant formula—can't wait to peddle their wonder drugs abroad...

...It sows dissension, corruption, and hatred...

...They have sought to question every action, and to uncover its every perceived blemish and wart...

...With a little luck, you'll stay out of trouble...

...It's time the agency submitted to public scrutiny...

...Hogwash...

...That's two-and-a-half years too long...

...When the CIA mines the harbors of Nicaragua, trains and outfits a contra army, wreaks havoc in Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Angola, it is doing so in our name, though we and our representatives have had no chance to consider or vote on the policy...

...But he's working on it...

...What prompted the excision was an editorial by twelfth-grader Heather Inman which called the school stagnant and described it as a "prison of supposedly learning...

...Reporters who accompanied the Salvadoran army on what was euphemistically termed a counterinsurgency sweep saw a soldier hold up two ears from a body he had slain...

...It is the mafia of the U.S...

...The Los Angeles Times suspended the 'Doonesbury' comic strip for a week, charging that cartoonist Garry Trudeau 'grossly exaggerates the real and alleged transgressions of many Reagan Administration appointees.' It may seem like a long leap from allegations that the national security is being breached to assertions that the nation's moral fiber is being shredded by off-color magazines, books, and films...

...Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) discovered DDT concentrations as high as 10 per cent in dicofol...

...It is not something we order, but sometimes the excitement of the moment overcomes them...

...The Director of Central Intelligence, William J. Casey, has for weeks been in hot pursuit of major newspapers and broadcast networks, using private attempts at intimidation and public threats of prosecution...

...One major complaint that USDA officials exclude blacks and women from membership on the state's seventy-six conservation district boards is supported by the fact that the 380 local board members include one black and twelve women...

...Their repetition has become numbing, the brutality banal...

...The report of the U.S...

...Taking his cue from network sports-casters, who routinely select "players of the game" after each contest, Peter Jennings has adopted the vacuous practice of announcing a "person of the week" every Friday...

...On the Loose Don't look now, but DDT is back...

...The Administration is considering further diminishing the paltry oversight function of Congress by sponsoring legislation to abolish the current committees...

...We need something to prove we killed the terrorists," one sergeant explained...

...That's always been standard operating procedure in Washington...

...territories...

...This May, the agency gave manufacturers two-and-a-half years to reduce DDT levels to less than 0.1 per cent of the product...

...Department of Agriculture (USDA) of complicity in the loss of thousands of black-owned farms because of the loan policies pursued by the Farmers Home Administration...

...The Post actually suppressed some of its coverage after President Reagan made a personal appeal to chief executive officer Katharine Graham...

...The people mounting that threat are in dead earnest, and if they're allowed to prevail, the two-bit yearbook censors in Farmington, Arkansas, will have pointed the way for all of us...

...It's just that no one seems to hear them...

...There will be no drills for schoolkids to practice scrambling under their desks and no renovations of the backyard fallout shelters that were all the rage...

...The Soil Conservation Service in Arkansas is charged by black farmers and an employee in Forrest City—the town named for the founder of the Ku Klux Klan—with discriminatory practices...

...At the moment, U.S...

...I'm Forrest Sawyer...

...it has everything to do with conditioning the press to abandon even the few small efforts it now makes to engage in independent reporting on foreign and military issues...

...But a greater menace lurks than any posed by smut or spilled secrets: the formation of an official thought police to monitor and censor all communications...

...Subsequent "winners" include George Wallace, Margaret Thatcher, and Jackie Presser...

...In 1980, the U.S...

...It's a track many Americans unfortunately seem willing, even eager, to travel these days...

...The problems with the CIA, however, are not confined to this or that Administration...

...When she refused, Ex- > tension Service administrator Denzil Clegg fired her and gave her one day to clear out of her office...

...At the same time, it started sending warning letters to various businesses, cautioning them against further distribution of materials it deems unworthy...

...For years, they have whined about how slow the U.S...

...We have to get over the idea that 'covert' is a dirty word," Secretary of State George Shultz suggested recently...

...The Commission's course, as Barry Lynn of the American Civil Liberties Union has pointed out, is "the track of censorship...

...Responsible social scientists have voiced grave misgivings about the methodology that led the Commission to conclude that exposure to pornography "bears some causal relationship to the level of sexual violence, sexual coercion, or unwanted sexual aggression...

...Another pesticide, dicofol, happens to produce DDT through a chemical reaction...

...All requests were denied, although there were no limits on her dealings with predominantly white land-grant colleges...

...In the meantime, peregrine falcons may dwindle and consumers may be exposed to yet another carcinogen...

...The Reagan Administration may praise the human-rights record of El Salvador's government, but the ears don't lie...

...From time to time he has been assisted in these endeavors by such luminaries as the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, and even the President of the United States...

...But the newly revived crusade against "pornography" is of a piece with the Administration's crusade against the disclosure of "secrets": Both assume that the State should have the last word on what citizens Comment Comment may or may not read, see, hear, or—ultimately— think...

...Government outfits, finances, and trains...

...Banned in 1972, the toxic insecticide has returned through the back door...

...Government...

...It's not a dirty word if we want a country run by a cabal accountable to no one...

...the tactic is probably taught in a semester-length course at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government...

...But when officials get down to cases, it almost invariably turns out that the offense that sent the national-security apparatus into spasm is not a disclosure to the Soviet Union or some other alien power, but transmission to the American people of information already in the hands of real or imagined enemies...

...But if what we want is citizen control of Government, there's no filthier word in the English language...

...News from Nowhere Millions of Americans awake each morning only to be anesthetized by the babble of the morning talk shows...

...What motivates this censorship brigade is a yearning for what the Germans used to call gleichscha.lt-ung—a political order that brooks no dissent and allows no discussion of alternatives, especially when it comes to matters of military and foreign policy...