DATE LINES
Dreifus, Claudia & Blitt, Connie & Hopkins, Elaine & Nelson, Frank & Bernstein, Dennis & Bielski, Vince
DATE LINES Camp Oliver North Shuts Down BORDENTOWN, NEW JERSEY Humberto Alvarado is a tried-and-true anticommunist with a zeal for his cause that would surely earn him the high praise of...
...policy in Central America—a policy Ryan thinks is "violent, illegal, and immoral...
...At this point, Dr...
...The Brigade admits to having other training camps, including Camp Jeane Kirkpa-trick in northern New Jersey and another in Connecticut...
...The temperature at 10 Downing Street rose to white heat," Campbell says...
...We want you to feel that you're not alone...
...Apparently, there were no weapons in the camp, but Alvarado says he and many of the others already had military experience on which to draw...
...Once the physical problem is tended to, the emotional healing has a better chance...
...It's the poor man's choice," he says...
...Afghani refugees, they were middle-class, educated, left-wing opponents of the Soviet-supported regime in Kabul...
...Claudia Dreifus (Claudia Dreifus is a free-lance writer based in New York...
...It prohibits Campbell from reporting on government intelligence and communication matters for the rest of his life...
...We've had to resettle too many times," Mr...
...Leftists and so-called pacifists," he says, would make a scene if Anglo-Americans were going off to war...
...So are members of NorthGuard, the group instrumental in stopping proposals for a military-training site in northern Minnesota and low-level Air Force bomber training runs over the area...
...So says Jack Ryan, a forty-nine-year-old agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who believes he is the first of his profession to lose his job over matters of conscience...
...Newport News, a World War II-vintage cruiser, is slated to be the centerpiece of a tourist attraction called Patriot Park...
...There can be bodily symptoms, psychosomatic symptoms...
...James Dailey of the Navy League is unimpressed...
...I felt like a child, an abused child...
...A. will go to a psychiatrist who has worked with other Afghans and knows the culture...
...He can prove that the government knew he was working on a report about Zircon six months before the raid but did nothing about it...
...The FBI has begun such an investigation...
...As far as we are concerned, they have not violated any law...
...I expect that if the Justice Department learned of individuals who are training in the United States for the purpose of invading a country other than Nicaragua, an investigation, not to mention indictments, would soon be forthcoming...
...Campbell, whose specialty is military and intelligence matters, is in trouble for disclosing details of one of his nation's most closely guarded secrets, the Zircon spy satellite, in a thirty-minute documentary for the BBC...
...There are common patterns to post-traumatic stress syndrome," says Dr...
...The BBC settled for the easy way, giving the police Campbell's files and tapes for his six-part series on Britain, The Secret Society, which includes the segment on Zircon...
...Ryan was fired in September, after twenty-two years of service, when he refused to investigate a peace group opposed to U.S...
...If you send Puerto Ricans or Cuban-Americans, they're still not the boy next door, so we become disposable heroes...
...If the Navy League has its way, Duluth will also be known as the home of a retired Navy warship...
...And a Congressional subcommittee is looking into questions raised by the firing and the evidence it provides to support the numerous recent complaints that the FBI is back in the business of domestic spying on peaceful dissenters...
...A junior police officer went to the acting head of the BBC and told him, Campbell says, that "there's a hard way and an easy way to give us what we want...
...It all follows upon some observable stress...
...Alvarado says this is part of a strategy...
...According to Amnesty International, one-third of the countries of the world practice torture, even though it is strictly banned by international law...
...Would this benefit the communists in their attempt to destabilize and disorganize the United States...
...Banned in Britain SAN FRANCISCO "You think you have it bad here in America," said Duncan Campbell when he took the stage...
...The government prosecuted and convicted him of interviewing a soldier, though the decision was later dismissed on a technicality...
...According to Alvarado, the communists are already subverting the United States from within...
...The thirty-three-year-old Chilean painter was imprisoned, tortured, drugged, hooded, and held incommunicado for months...
...He says he was a medic with the First Ranger Battalion in Georgia...
...They are also waiting for more specific cost and revenue figures from the Navy League...
...The police here do not torture...
...The agent told his superiors how he felt and was asked to put it in writing...
...She was actually riding every hour or so up and down that street past the school," Lettiere says...
...Psychic numbing is very likely...
...Like North, Alvarado is haunted by fears of Soviet expansionism and the need to turn back the clock on the communists before the entire continent falls to the hammer and sickle...
...Robert Jay Lifton of New York's John Jay College, the leading international expert on the subject...
...My wife too...
...The would-be contras trained on an obstacle course, scaling a ten-foot wooden wall and moving along ropes suspended fifteen to twenty feet above the thick underbrush...
...They went in, occupied the offices, and disregarded entirely the rule of law...
...Yes, it would...
...Afterwards, I was depressed for weeks and couldn't do anything at all...
...Remove the disease if I couldn't get out the patient...
...This is why, perhaps, now the only people I can trust are children...
...What we do is show him that the world has become sensible again, predictable...
...When Muhammad and Sima A. came to the center, they were at the end of their emotional reserves...
...At 3:00 a.m...
...The Navy League, which is sponsoring the project, is a national organization dedicated to advancing the interests of the U.S...
...Then she makes suggestions...
...A British journalist, Campbell was speaking to a crowd gathered to honor the Center for Investigative Reporting for ten years of quality muckraking...
...As of early December, Torricelli had received no reply...
...Investigating this as domestic terrorism or domestic violence was absurd...
...later, as a member of the paramilitary group Alpha 66, he trained Mariel refugees in Florida who wanted to invade Cuba...
...Group therapy is just one project of this organization, an unusual community-based mental-health center that aids some 200 torture survivors annually...
...Sometimes," he says, "I'll see a strong light here and it will all come back to me...
...I am very afraid of policemen here, too...
...Ours is a mushrooming specialty," notes Dr...
...He had been jailed and tortured...
...This is normal—your fear, Juan," says the fifty-three-year-old psychiatrist who chairs the executive committee of CCIPT...
...Dr...
...He came to the tree line at the far end of the property and began "climbing and stretching" through briars and high weeds...
...Kids could have built something better," comments Bordentown Mayor Richard Lettiere, who is responsible for shutting down the camp last October...
...He followed instructions...
...By his scenario, the communists, led by the Russians, have collaborated with the peace movement to cause chaos and bring down capitalism in this country...
...Instead, the Thatcher government decided in late November to slap him with a gag order...
...Allodi and his colleagues at the CCIPT are pioneers in this new medical specialty, the rehabilitation of torture victims...
...You can't stop a group of men from running around in the woods in fatigues if they want to," said John Russell, a Department spokesman...
...In his home country, the customs police were doing the torturing...
...Lettiere headed into a thirty-acre farm directly across the street from the town's elementary school...
...I was kind of questioning myself," he says, "telling myself you're nuts, there's nothing here...
...Now you have to learn that it's okay in Canada...
...But he found the results unsatisfactory and decided to train those who were ready, as he was, to fight with the contras...
...I said I'm not going to do it based on my convictions...
...But the neighbors were not so sure...
...I fought this in-house," he says, but he lost the paper war...
...Ryan doesn't think the FBI should classify civil disobedience as terrorism...
...Connie Butt and Dennis Bernstein (Connie Blitt and Dennis Bernstein are producers of "Contragate," a daily investigative report on the Iran-Con-tra scandal on WBAI in New York City...
...Navy and gets much of its funding from the weapons industry...
...They used these crazy lights while they questioned me...
...The camp was run by Brigade One, a creation of the Committee, and funded primarily by Cuban businesses in the area...
...It's not your average person that wants to drive to Bordentown and train for war...
...Under the Official Secrets Act of 1911, it is a crime for a citizen to receive any information about the government which the government hasn't officially disclosed...
...The highest court of Scotland told them that general warrants were illegal...
...And the government did invoke the Official Secrets Act to justify the February raid...
...The hard way was that the police would occupy the BBC for as many days as necessary and take everything they wanted...
...The normal assumptions that a person had before are shattered by torture...
...In an adamant response to Attorney General Edwin Meese HI, the Congressman argues, "All signs point to preparation to engage in military action against a sovereign country...
...You undo some of it by showing them that not everyone is bad...
...When the mayor was tipped off that Camp Oliver North was in the neighborhood, he decided to take a walk and try to find it...
...What really defines post-traumatic stress is the problem of the survivor, who, having experienced a trauma, cannot absorb it or get rid of it...
...These people have suffered terribly at the hands of their fellow humans...
...A former British defense official told Campbell that Zircon was no secret to the rest of the world, since there's no way to hide a satellite from detection once it's in space...
...Allodi, who helped found the Center in 1980, spends much of his time showing patients that their new environment is safe...
...As the local newspaper editorialized, "The FBI may come to wish it had assigned Jack Ryan and his active conscience to another job and let him retire quietly...
...I understand them...
...Shelter for the Tortured TORONTO In the plant-filled office, four men—all political refugees—sit and talk among themselves...
...After his release, the family wandered for four years in Pakistan and India...
...Now that we are here, she does not wish to leave the bed...
...I'm here to show you what the bottom of the slippery slide looks like...
...Citizens' groups including Duluth Nuclear Freeze/SANE, Women Against Military Madness, Clergy and Laity Concerned, and the Social Concerns Committee of the Unitarian Church are involved...
...Whoever was responsible for the vandalism left signs protesting U.S...
...Patients sometimes have special physical problems as a result of torture," says Sim-alchik...
...Representative Robert Torricelli, Democrat of New Jersey, that these activities cannot be dismissed as "wholesome outdoor recreation...
...A. will see a psychologist, a Polish-Jewish woman who herself survived the Holocaust...
...Dr...
...Centers in Copenhagen and Minneapolis offer similar services, and a handful of doctors in Los Angeles and Boston are also helping to develop these special skills...
...When they took me in, I was certain I'd be tortured again...
...Ryan is appealing his dismissal, which came when he was just ten months short of retirement...
...Vince Bielski (Vince Bielski works with Pacific News Service and is a freelance writer in San Francisco...
...That way, the survivor gains the courage to open doors...
...one morning last February, government agents raided the BBC's Glasgow offices, where Campbell worked...
...We're still interested," says Kimball, "but we do have these questions that need to be answered...
...Some parents kept their children home from the adjacent elementary school...
...From a far corner of the room, Daniel C, a forty-twoyear-old Uruguayan who was drugged, beaten, and subjected to nonstop strobe lights during interrogations more than a decade ago, describes one of the most common problems survivors have: flashbacks on the trauma...
...And, the mayor recalls, one woman decided to patrol the school herself while her two children attended classes...
...Once in Toronto, I went to a dentist and he turned on the light and I ran out like a madman...
...You know, the military gave me drugs to make me tell about my friends—I could not tell them much because I didn't know about others...
...I don't want to be a part of it...
...But the Justice Department told the Bergen Record, the local newspaper, that prosecution is not warranted...
...What Campbell's report revealed was that the Thatcher government broke the law by making Zircon without the consent of Parliament...
...We're here for you...
...The symptoms, which can be very severe and life-debilitating, include various forms of anxiety—sleeplessness, nightmares, jumpiness, inability to concentrate...
...Comparing Britons' rights to those of Americans under the Freedom of Information Act, Campbell laments, "We don't have a right to know, we have a duty not to know...
...It is essentially illegal to do investigative reporting in Great Britain...
...There are about 450 defense contractors in this six-state region, employing some 60,000 people," Dailey says...
...Afterwards, no person can ever be certain that, if he opens a door, it will lead to a hallway...
...So far, military contractors have contributed $81,000 to the project, with the major gifts coming from Control Data, Honeywell, FMC, and Unisys...
...According to a report in The San Francisco Bay Guardian, the court order is unprecedented in British history...
...In fact, up until very recently, the thirty-eight-year-old Cuban-American was training Americans at a covert contra camp in central New Jersey named for the former National Security Council official...
...The injunction came a few weeks after Campbell's appearance in San Francisco, which he ended by saying, "I am jealous that reporters in this country are rewarded for social commitment...
...I get very depressed...
...Frank Nelson (Frank Nelson is a free-lance writer based in Superior, Wisconsin...
...I really didn't think they'd fire me, but I was threatened with it...
...But another veteran, one who opposes the Newport News monument, has a different opinion...
...In 1976, Campbell challenged the secrecy law by publishing an article about a clandestine intelligence outfit...
...They like to support this sort of thing to enhance their image...
...Elaine Hopkins (Elaine Hopkins is a reporter for the Journal Star in Peoria...
...Maybe the people at Camp Oliver North were just out on a fantasy dream and weren't that militant, but other people could have come in," says Mayor Lettiere...
...The fact that paramilitary training apparently continues at these locations underscores the contention of U.S...
...The controversy over The Secret Society has caused trouble for Campbell...
...Health professionals, volunteers, and victims work together to give torture victims renewed faith in life...
...But the basic freedoms of the press were born in struggle, and it is right that we have to take a little flak to maintain them...
...Allodi, "but I wish it were unnecessary...
...ABC News has also broadcast about one minute of the Zircon segment on World News Tonight—as an illustration of the Thatcher policy of tightly controlled information...
...You might remember that this is a vexatious issue that led, some 211 years ago, to a series of tumultuous events in Boston...
...I chose not to cover the lead," he says...
...A. explains...
...When a torture victim comes to the Canadian center, he or she talks with Joan Sim-alchik, a pleasant blond caseworker who begins by taking a history and arranging a physical examination with one of the center's cooperating physicians...
...What torture victims suffer is a malady psychiatrists call PTSS—post-traumatic stress syndrome...
...The coalition deplores the idea of turning a warship into a tourist attraction...
...Allodi, "are that we act like decent human beings...
...She wanted to go by and make sure nothing was going on...
...At the Canadian center, intake workers and cooperating physicians have, over the years, treated more than a thousand survivors...
...It also compels him to disclose secrets he has yet to report on, along with the names of American journalists to whom he has spoken about the clandestine army unit he uncovered in the 1970s...
...Duluth city officials are hesitant about embracing the project...
...The men were tortured in various Latin American countries and they have come here, to the office of the Canadian Center for the Investigation and Prevention of Torture (CCIPT), for special group therapy aimed at helping them reconstruct their lives...
...A Matter of Conscience for a G-Man PEORIA, ILLINOIS "What our Government's doing is wrong in Central America...
...We're willing to play that role...
...What a therapist must do is teach the victim how to feel again—and, ultimately, how to trust...
...The U.S.S...
...The mayors of both cities are enthusiastic...
...Two years ago, I was arrested in Montreal for drinking...
...You can't say that it's all caused by the Soviets," says Alvarado, "but you can, for example, notice how you go to a poor neighborhood and all the street signs are missing, and the house numbers are taken off...
...It is the same syndrome experienced by many hostages, victims of rape, battered women, and Vietnam veterans...
...The League sees it as a regional project, according to spokesman James Dailey of Control Data, Inc...
...Anibal V., a forty-five-year-old teacher who was tortured, beaten about the head, and jailed in the 1970s by Argentina's military government, has his own set of traumatic recollections...
...We veterans," he says, "don't question the right of our Government to defend our country...
...For several years, he tried organizing demonstrations, circulating petitions, and lobbying Washington with the right-wing Committee in Solidarity with a Democratic Central America...
...And they are concerned that the ship—716 feet long and 138 feet high-will dwarf the other features of their carefully planned waterfront...
...But Parliament would never have agreed to spend £500 million for such a frivolous project, so Thatcher had to sneak it through, hidden in the defense budget...
...If it appears, however, that the Navy League's ship is picking up steam, in Duluth or anywhere else on the Great Lakes, members say they will increase their effort to bring it to a halt...
...At Camp Oliver North, Alvarado instructed his recruits in hand-to-hand combat, punctuated with anticommunist call-and-response drills...
...A lot of survivors say the same thing...
...And they will be assigned a volunteer who will show them around Toronto and be there for emergencies...
...Alvarado is ready to put his life on the line...
...He will also get a complete physical to check for possible neurological damage from his tortures...
...The drugs, they are a very frightening thing and now I am very afraid of needles and doctors...
...The police raided not only the BBC offices but also his home and the offices of the New Statesman...
...While members debated what to do, Campbell published a written version in the New Statesman...
...For me," he says, "the worst part was not the physical pain, but the sense of being made into a child...
...For now, the Duluth coalition opposing Patriot Park is watching, and hoping the proposal dies a natural death from financial complications...
...Although the mayor thought the fears were largely groundless, he agreed to close the camp, officially declaring it to be in violation of residential zoning ordinances...
...It was all part of a systematic taking of revenge, to squash programs that the government found politically embarrassing," he says...
...Nearly all of Brigade One's recruits are Hispanic, some from the United States, others recent refugees from Central America...
...The easy way, he explained, was to rouse the staff from their beds now, at three in the morning, to give the police what they wanted...
...I got out of there real quick...
...The BBC has canceled all future contracts with him, and he was in fear of prosecution under the secrecy law...
...I once had a patient who was very frightened of the customs agents at the Toronto airport...
...If you don't have the millions, at least you have your blood...
...actions in Central America...
...I couldn't get my parents out of Cuba," Alvarado says, "so I had to see if I could get the communists out of Cuba, and now Nicaragua...
...The FBI knew of his sentiments but assigned him to the case anyway...
...Duncan Campbell makes the temperature rise at 10 Downing Street...
...The ship is a good symbol of America's peace-keeping effort," says Mayor Herb Berg-son of Superior...
...Navy Invades Lake Superior DULUTH, MINNESOTA Duluth is known as a center for shipping, trading, iron mining, and logging, and for having one of the world's most beautiful harbors...
...Then there was a clearing in the woods and I saw the scaling wall, the hurdles, the pad...
...The best memorial we can build for veterans of war," he says, "is a lasting peace...
...Joan Simalchik asks for the details and offers tea...
...At bottom, the report suggests, the Thatcher government had a bad case of satellite-envy...
...DATE LINES Camp Oliver North Shuts Down BORDENTOWN, NEW JERSEY Humberto Alvarado is a tried-and-true anticommunist with a zeal for his cause that would surely earn him the high praise of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North...
...Tens of thousands are affected every year, with Iran, Libya, Sri Lanka, Chile, El Salvador, and Guatemala being among the worst offenders...
...The British people have yet to see the report on Zircon, or another segment describing the government's disruption of the British antinuclear movement...
...Since you don't know many people in this country, the volunteer will be a kind of substitute cousin for you," says Simalchik...
...The FBI got a tip to check on the Rock Island man, and Ryan got the job...
...The therapy is done so the patient will be able again to function in the world," he says...
...The reports were shown, however, at the San Francisco event at which Campbell spoke—despite a threat from the BBC concerning copyright infringement...
...In September, Torricelli asked the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate Camp Oliver North, which is in his district, for possible violations of the neutrality law...
...Federico Allodi breaks in...
...The law covers not only military secrets but also such matters as how many cups of tea are consumed daily at the ministry of agriculture...
...The speaker belongs to a vanishing breed in Great Britain, that of investigative reporter...
...But events leading up to it show the raid to be directed more personally at Campbell...
...The BBC made a bold move by hiring him to produce The Secret Society, which surely would challenge the secrecy law...
...According to city planning director Gerry Kimball, they are still waiting to find out how the people feel about putting the warship in their harbor...
...Trouble arose in late 1986, when he was told to investigate a peace activist in nearby Rock Island, who was suspected of pouring gunk into door locks at a military-recruiting station in Chicago...
...I trust no one," adds Juan A., "and this is a good thing...
...Most of our therapy secrets," says Dr...
...He's dedicated to nonviolence...
...The push to place the warship in Duluth's harbor comes from its chapter in the Twin Cities, 150 miles south of Duluth...
...My jailers had absolute power over me and they never let me forget it...
...The agents," he says, "took out an unprecedented legal document called a general warrant for the search and seizure of anything they thought of interest...
...Having encountered public opposition and official hesitancy in Duluth, the Navy League has begun exploring other locations, including Superior, Wisconsin (across the bay from Duluth), and Two Harbors, Minnesota...
...National Security Agency for intelligence-gathering in space, the government simply wanted its own satellite to play with...
...And now, the thirty-five-year-old journalist is leading a rebellion...
...Torricelli is not persuaded...
...I know him personally," Ryan says...
...Not everyone thinks bringing the Newport News to Du-luth is such a good idea, and a coalition has been formed to oppose it...
...In January 1987, Thatcher pressured the BBC into keeping the report off the airwaves and then issued an injunction barring Parliament itself from viewing the report...
...And it objects to the Navy's proposal to open a recruiting station on board the tourist attraction, which it says romanticizes the military and obscures the reality of war...
...When the mayor came back with the police chief and other town officials the next day, they examined the training area and determined that Camp Oliver North was not an immediate threat to public safety...
...If we can divide a piece of the [tourist money] pie for ourselves at the same time, so much the better...
...if only this were so in Britain...
...Since Britain is dependent on the U.S...
Vol. 52 • January 1988 • No. 1
