MEMO FROM THE EDITOR
MEMO from the Editor Secret Government Reagan Advisers Ran 'Secret' Government, read the banner headline in The Miami Herald on July 5. The story, which made front pages all over the country that...
...Readers may write to Gillam Kerley, whom the Government calls 01988-090.D1, at Box 1000, Leavenworth, KS 66048...
...Our May issue that year featured Keenen Peck's article, "The Take-Charge Gang," about FEMA's intentions to become America's "emergency czar...
...While new appeals go forward, he has been ordered to begin serving his sentence...
...Our March 1985 cover story was Gillam Kerley's "Do You Feel a Draft...
...almost from the day Reagan took office...
...It detailed the plans that have been made to institute conscription on short notice...
...But the Government successfully appealed the dismissal, and recently Gillam Kerley was convicted and sentenced to three years' imprisonment and a $10,000 fine—by far the harshest sentence yet imposed on any registration refuser...
...Peck, then an associate editor of The Progressive and now a member of our Editorial Advisory Board, didn't know about Colonel North's involvement—who had even heard of him then?— but the rest of his article was on target...
...Others on the Best Censored list were "Death by Prescription," Managing Editor Matthew Rothschild's report on the hazards posed by the best-selling drug Fel-dene, in the June 1986 issue, and "Base Maneuvers," Anthony L. Kimery's article about the "toxic soup" dumped into public waters by the U.S...
...He was himself a draft-registration resister who had been indicted and had entered a plea of "innocent by reason of sanity...
...FEMA's "crisis-management plan" was eventually sidetracked when Attorney General William French Smith raised objections...
...Kerley had more than a casual interest in the subject of his article...
...Air Force, which appeared in December 1986...
...And contributions may be sent to the Gillam Kerley Defense Fund, c/o The Committee Against Registration and the Draft, 731 State Street, Madison, WI 53703...
...It told how "some of President Reagan's top advisers have operated a virtual parallel government...
...Unfortunately, neither the intercession of former Attorney General Smith nor the more recent disclosures in the Iran-contra scandal have stifled the repressive impulses that seem to flourish in the Federal bureaucracy...
...Two years after his initial court appearance, the case against him had been dismissed because the Government refused to turn over documents that would help him prove he had been unfairly singled out for prosecution...
...Speaking of prisons—Michael Mc-Connell's "Locked Down in Lockup," a report of conditions at the Federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, which appeared in the Datelines section of our January 1986 issue, was one of three stories from The Progressive selected by Project Censored among the twenty-five most significant underreported stories last year...
...Just a few days ago, I received this note from Keenen Peck: "Recently, the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union provided me with a copy of a plan prepared by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to exclude aliens 'who are likely to be supportive of terrorist activity.' "The proposal refers to Iranians and Libyans, and some of its provisions are now being used to deport a group of Palestinians in Los Angeles who are accused, as it were, of being sympathetic to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine...
...The INS blueprint suggests that the Service round up aliens supportive of terrorism and imprison them in the 'Oakdale (Louisiana) Alien Detention Center.' The plan also proposes that the INS petition immigration judges to 'routinely' hold aliens without bond and exclude the public from hearings 'on the basis of national security.' " There's no end to the crimes against the Constitution committed in the name of "national security...
...Much of Chardy's detailed account focused on Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North's efforts to help the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) draft a clandestine scheme to impose martial law in case of nuclear war, insurrection, or massive military mobilization...
...Little of this should have come as news to subscribers who were reading The Progressive in the spring of 1985...
...ACLU lawyers point out that the Palestinians were in this country legally and had done nothing more than distribute leaflets...
...MEMO from the Editor Secret Government Reagan Advisers Ran 'Secret' Government, read the banner headline in The Miami Herald on July 5. The story, which made front pages all over the country that Sunday, was by Alfonso Chardy of the Herald's Washington bureau...
Vol. 51 • September 1987 • No. 9
