Reed Irvine - Editor
Senator Dennis DeConcini of Arizona became the target of the wrath of some of the big guns of the media for having played the spoiler role in exposing the Big Lie that was being used to get the Panama Canal treaties ratified.
The influential Washington Post savaged Senator DeConcini in an editorial on April 13, saying: "Pity the historians who, looking back at the climactic moment of the Senate's consideration of the Panama Canal treaties, find themselves peering at Dennis DeConcini. How was it, they may ask, that their treaties, with their immense diplomatic and political freight, came to hinge on the ill-informed whims of a 40-year-old freshman senator of no previous renown, of no known international awareness, of little experience of any kind beyond minor administrative posts in Arizona? How could a supposedly responsible U.S. Senate in effect delegate its power, in a matter as sweeping as this, to a lightweight whom serious senators should regard as a institutional embarrassment? How was it that this obscure legislator came to be cultivated by the president... ?"
James R. Dickenson, a political correspondent for The Washington Star, took a similar line the following day, writing: "It is a political junkie indeed who normally would recognize DeConcini or Edward Zorinsky or Paul Hatfield on the streets. But now their egos are being stroked by being wooed individually by President Carter. Dynamite! Statesmen!"
What terrible thing had Dennis DeConcini done to bring such wrath down on his head?
It was a simple thing. He insisted that a reservation be attached to the Panama Canal Neutrality Treaty spelling out in clear, understandable language the right of the United States to act unilaterally after the year 1999 to keep the Panama Canal open and operating.
The Administration had insisted that the treaties gave us that right. When it became known last October that high Panamanian officials were saying that they did not interpret the treaties that way, a crisis blew up. They were saying this publicly in August, but Big Media did not tell us about this vital difference in the interpretation of the treaties until Senator Robert Dole released the text of a confidential
State Department telegram on October 4. This quoted Carlos Lopez Guevara, one of Panama's treaty negotiators, as saying, "Intervention is simply forbidden by international law. Panama cannot agree to the right of the United States to intervene."
The Administration tried to allay senatorial and public anger by having the Panamanian dictator, General Torrijos, drop off at the White House and issue an unsigned joint declaration.
This declaration noted that the treaties gave Panama and the United States responsibility "to assure that the Panama Canal will remain open and secure to ships of all nations." It added: "The correct interpretation of this principle is that each of the two countries shall, in accordance with their respective Constitutional processes, defend the canal against any threat to the regime of neutrality, and consequently will have a right to act against any aggression or threat directed against the canal or against the peaceful transit of vessels throughout the canal."
President Carter assured the nation in his televised speech on February 1 that this statement obviously meant "that we can take whatever military action is necessary to make sure that the canal always remains open and safe."
Many members of the Senate insisted that this joint declaration be attached as an amendment to the treaty to give it greater legal force, and this was done. The administration, the leadership, and Big Media all insisted that this was more than enough to nail down the right of the United States to intervene to keep the canal open and operating.
However, others disagreed. In the AIM Report for February 1978, Part I, we cited an opinion by Kenneth Merin, legislative attorney for the Library of Congress, who said, "It is not altogether clear that the statement would permit the United States to intervene in the event that the aggression or threat should result from Panamanian (as distinct from external) action."
Senator DeConcini felt that it would be wise to clear up this matter. As a condition for voting for the Neutrality Treaty on March 16, he insisted on having a reservation attached to the treaty that would spell out the right that President Carter assured the nation we had-the right to "take whatever military action is necessary to make sure that the canal always remains open and safe."
His wording was slightly different. His reservation said that if the canal were closed or its operations interfered with, "the United States of America and the Republic of Panama shall each independently have the right to take such steps as it deems necessary, in accordance with its constitutional processes, including the use of military force in Panama, to reopen the canal or restore the operations of the canal as the case may be."
The reservation was approved by the Senate on March 16 by a vote of 75 to 23. Three-fourths of the senators agreed with Dennis DeConcini that it made sense to avoid ambiguity and make it perfectly clear that the United States did retain the right to take military action, if necessary, to keep the canal open and operating after control of the waterway was turned over to Panama.
That did not appear to be such a shocking thing to do, since the proponents of the treaties, from President Carter on down, were saying that we had that right.
The fly in the ointment was that the Panamanians simply did not share that interpretation of the treaty or of the joint Carter-Torrijos statement. President Carter and the State Department knew this before the treaty was voted on by the Senate on March 16. President Carter discussed DeConcini's reservation with General Torrijos by phone the day before the vote, and that night Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher called Senator DeConcini. Ac- cording to The Washington Post of March 17, Christopher told the senator about Panama's unhappiness with the reservation and asked him to reconsider it. The senator refused to back down.
What Dennis DeConcini menaced was the Big Lie that the Neutrality Treaty gave us the right to intervene to keep the Panama Canal open after 1999 even if the threat to the canal came from an action by the government of Panama or those operating the canal.
One might think that an honest newspaper, dedicated to ferreting out lies and deception, would commend Senator DeConcini, not savagely attack him. He had the courage to resist the tremendous pressures put upon him and to insist on nailing down in writing our right to intervene to keep the canal open and operating. In doing so he succeeded in exposing for all to see the fact that this right is not accepted by the other party to the agreement, Panama.
The Administration, with the help of elements of the news media, is still pretending, as we go to press, that Panama has not rejected the DeConcini reservation. If you ask the State Department about Panama's reaction to the reservation, as we have done, you are told that Panama has said it will withhold comment until after both treaties are passed.
However, General Torrijos' feelings about the reservation are pretty clear. On March 28, Panama took the unusual action of submitting to the Secretary General of the United Nations a copy of the DeConcini reservation together with Senator DeConcini's supporting statement and an opposing statement by Senator Edward M. Kennedy. The note transmitting these statements avoids any direct statement of Panama's position on the reservation, but it quotes approvingly Senator Kennedy's statement that "we are asking Panama to accept an amendment which has the ring of military interventionism - not just during this century, but for all time." There follows a thinly disguised appeal for support from those who have aided Panama's "long struggle to reach a peaceful solution to the Panama Canal question based on recognition of her sovereignty over the totality of its national territory."
A letter addressed to 115 heads of state by Panamanian dictator, Omar Torrijos, expressing "deep concern" about the DeConcini reservation. Senator Howard Baker, a treaty supporter, said that he did not know the purpose of these letters, but he deplored their timing, since they would make it more difficult to get the second treaty ratified Columnist Carl Rowan said in a column on April 14, date- lined "Panama City," that "the Panamanians complained to the United Nations... because the American press in Panama went to sleep and did not report to the United States the rising tide of anger here over DeConcini's demand for a U.S. right of intervention." Rowan added: "No one told the American public that Mexico, Venezuela and other Latin countries were warning Torrijos that he would be a pariah in Latin America if he signed anything conceding a U.S. right to intervene in the affairs of her hemispheric neighbors." Rowan said that Torrijos "knows he would be hanged at dawn if he tried to accept DeConcini's reservation."
It is amusing that anyone would think it was sleepiness that explains why the American press failed to report the "rising tide of anger" in Panama over the demand that the right of the United States to act to keep the canal open be written into the treaty. Last fall, Big Media exhibited this same "sleepiness" in not reporting that the Panamanians did not accept our interpretation of the treaties with respect to our right to intervene and to obtain priority passage for our naval vessels in time of war. They ignored the story when it was reported by Human Events, the conservative Washing- ton weekly. It became big news only when Senator Dole went public with a confidential telegram.
That caused a crisis that was patched over temporarily by the Carter-Torrijos declaration. But the basic flaw remained. The United States and Panama simply did not see eye to eye on our right to intervene to keep the canal open and operating. This disagreement had not been ironed out when the treaties were negotiated.
For the media to have publicized the rising tide of anger in Panama over DeConcini would have exposed the depth of the disagreement that remained. How could Big Media do that when all the time they had been assuring the public that the treaties gave us all those rights that DeConcini insisted on spelling out?
The Panamanians upset the applecart by going public with their objections prior to the second treaty vote. That is why it became necessary to explain that there was not really a disagreement about what we could do. It was just the language that upset Torrijos.
James Dickenson of the Washington Star tried as hard as anyone. "Never mind," he wrote on April 14, "that such explicit language on 'intervention' is a buzz word of the first magnitude that rubs memories of gunboat diplomacy in Latin Americans' faces. (The reservation does not use the word "intervention")... Never mind that the language (of the treaty) is deliberately ambiguous to allow for face- saving on both sides, which is the very essence of diplomacy."
So Senator Dennis DeConcini will go down in history as the man who naively thought that the language of treaties should be as clear as possible in order to avoid future disputes. He will go down in history as the man who thought that it was proper to spell out in the treaty the rights that our President assured us were guaranteed by that treaty.
Most important of all, he will, or should, be honored as the man who formally smoked out the Big Lie about those sup- posed rights, a lie that prospered because Big Media were quite content to see the American people deceived in the interest of putting across what Big Media knew was best. That explains the fury of The Washington Post attack on Senator DeConcini.
The news media have said little about it. but the Justice Department of our "born-again" Christian President, Jimmy Carter, has recently taken a step which could lead before long to X-rated movies on TV.
Many viewers are already very unhappy with the increasing tendency of networks to introduce tasteless sex and blue humor into their programs in their battle for ratings. The programmers are still somewhat restrained by the frowns of the airwave regulators at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). They, in turn, are influenced by the angry protests of parents who don't like to see radio and television undercutting their efforts to raise clean, moral children.
But if the Department of Justice has its way, the ability of the FCC to contain the flood of filth will be virtually eliminated. The Justice Department has switched sides in an important legal case that is now before the Supreme Court. It has announced that it believes that the First Amendment protects the right of a broadcaster to air indecent language. In doing so, it pulled the rug from under the FCC, which is fighting to retain its legal authority to penalize those who permit indecent language to be broadcast.
This case had its origin back in 1973, when radio station WBAI of New York City broadcast in mid-afternoon a "sick comedy" routine by one George Carlin. The routine was built around seven dirty words, which ironically Carlin described as words that could not be said over public air- waves. WBAI played a segment of a record entitled "Filthy Words," which ran for nearly 12 minutes. Carlin focused mainly on two words, s--t and f--k. He managed to utter the former 68 times and the latter 29 times in various combinations.
This was assuredly not a work of high literary quality, nor was it an educational discourse. It was simply verbal graffiti of the type found in public lavatories. This was surely the type of thing that Congress had in mind when it enacted the law that provides for a fine of S10,000 and/or two years in prison for anyone who utters any obscene, indecent, or profane language by means of radio communications. The FCC is empowered to penalize broadcast licensees who violate that statute.
The FCC received a complaint about this broadcast. It responded by lightly tapping the wrist of the station, issuing a declaratory order to the effect that it had indeed broad- cast indecent language and that a note of this would be entered into its file. The Commission noted that it might penalize the station if there were other violations.
The licensee appealed to the courts in order to test the constitutionality of the authority of the FCC to impose any restraint on the broadcast of indecent language.
When this went to the Court of Appeals in 1976, the Justice Department sided with the FCC in defending the power of the government to ban indecent language from the air. The Court of Appeals ruled against the government by a 2 to 1 vote in 1977. The FCC appealed to the Supreme Court, and it agreed to hear the case.
But in the meantime a new team had taken over the Department of Justice, and the Carter appointees decided that Justice ought to be on the side of the dirty-word broadcasters. In a highly unusual action, the Justice Department deserted the FCC and filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to find for WBAI in this case. The Justice brief argues that the government would have the right to bar indecent language from the commercial airwaves only under the most unlikely and extreme circumstances.
They say it would be proper to bar "aggressive" indecent language, meaning language used in a way that was intended to insult the audience and arouse people to anger. Another possibility might be the use of dirty words on children's programs. If Captain Kangaroo were to swear, that might be a cause for action. Otherwise, it appears that anything goes as far as the Carter Justice Department is concerned.
If the Supreme Court agrees with the Justice Department and WBAI, striking down the present legal ban on indecent words on the air, the next logical step will be the televising of X-rated movies. The Court has ruled in the past that movies are entitled to the same first amendment privileges as speech. That being the case, it would be naive to think that the Court would bar dirty pictures from television if it sanctioned dirty words.
Might such movies be aired in prime time while the kiddies were watching? Indeed they might. The FCC argued that WBAI's dirty words might have been appropriate at a later hour, but that they could not be permitted in mid-after- noon when children might be listening to the radio. This was evidently a deliberate attempt to weaken the enforcement of the law in order to win broader support.
However, the Court of Appeals saw no merit in this. Judge Tamm quoted from an earlier opinion of Mr. Justice Powell of the Supreme Court which said: "Speech that is neither obscene nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them."
That seems to say that if Carlin's dirty words or X-rated movies are not ruled to be obscene, then no special laws may be invoked to keep them from children. Judge Tamm argued: "In its efforts to shield children from language which is not too rugged for many adults, the Commission has taken a step toward reducing the adult populations to hearing or viewing only that which is fit for children." (emphasis added). Judge Tamm, who spoke for the majority, was quite willing to leave the regulation of filth up to market forces, saying: "Broadcast media require majorities, or at least sizeable pluralities, to pay the bills. If they are correct, and if the Commission truly seeks only to enforce community standards, the market should limit filth accordingly."
AIM tried to find out from the attorneys at the Justice Department if they were aiming at opening the door to X- rated movies in prime time on TV. We could not get them to say whether or not they viewed this as the probable out- come of their efforts. They would not deny that it was a possibility. Mr. Louis Claibourne of the Solicitor General's office, appeared to agree with Judge Tamm that it would be sufficient to rely on market forces to restrain the flood of filth on television.
Does President Carter know about all this? Does he approve? We asked the White House press office about that. They doubted that the President was familiar with the case or its possible impact. But neither the press office nor the attorneys we talked to at Justice felt that it was their responsibility to call the matter to the attention of the President and ask him if he wanted his Justice Department to he seeking a ruling from the Supreme Court that could open television to X-rated movies.
Our news media have been sadly deficient in bringing this important case to the attention of the public. Letters to the editors of the papers and magazines you read would help alert the general public to what is going on. It is too late to change the position of the Department of Justice, but an aroused public opinion might awaken the President, Congress and even the Supreme Court to the baneful consequences of the Justice Department position.
HUCKSTERS OF NUCLEAR MISINFORMATION
In a recent column, Jack Anderson discussed an unreleased report of the House Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee, suggesting that sinister forces were trying to keep the report from the public. Anderson had no trouble getting a copy of the report from someone who obviously wanted its contents publicized.
What the columnist revealed was hardly new. The report was based on public hearings held by the subcommittee last September. Another columnist, Tom Wicker, anticipated Anderson by several months, having published three columns last fall about some of the testimony.
Two of Wicker's columns were devoted to the alleged high cost and difficulty of safely disposing of radioactive wastes generated by nuclear power plants. Anderson also took up this theme, saying, "After 30 years of atomic power, the federal government has simply failed to produce a solution to the problem of radioactive-waste disposal."
Samuel McCracken, assistant to the president of Boston University, discussed this question in an article published in the September 1977 issue of Commentary magazine. McCracken charged that the oft-repeated statement that we do not know how to dispose of high-level nuclear wastes is "the nearest equivalent... to a classic Big Lie."
McCracken explained that the technology for disposal of these wastes has been demonstrated in a pilot project in this country and has been used in Europe. The process revolves reducing the waste to a sand-like substance of greatly reduced bulk and then using this "sand" to make glass. The glass is radioactive but chemically inert. It can be buried in deep, geologically stable salt formations that have long been perfectly free of water.
McCracken says that the volume of wastes now in inventory is not yet large enough to make it economical to process them into glass. It therefore makes sense to keep them in temporary storage. In the meantime the disposal technology will no doubt be further improved. Three weeks before the Anderson column appeared, the Department of Energy announced that it plans to demonstrate a safe waste disposal system by 1988 and to have a fully workable permanent burial plan by the year 2000.
McCracken charged that the opponents of nuclear power want to perpetuate "the lie that wastes are an insoluble problem," because they feel it is the strongest argument that they now have going for them.
The waste problem should not be confused with the problem of disposing of spent nuclear fuel. The spent fuel can be reprocessed to yield valuable uranium and plutomum, which can be reused as fuel. There is currently a growing problem of storage of the spent fuel because of a shortage of reprocessing facilities.
According to Rep. Tom Kindness of Ohio, the real story behind the "secret" report discussed by Jack Anderson was the way in which the subcommittee chairman, Rep. Leo Ryan, stacked the hearings with anti-nuclear witnesses and then produced an error-filled, distorted report. Anderson swallowed the bait, hook, line and sinker.
NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF By Reed Irvine
How about some good news for a change? In our last issue we told how much of the media had failed to report the story of Frank Eramack, the American businessman who was held by Castro as a political prisoner in Cuba for over 14 years. Mr. Emmick was released and returned home at the beginning of this year. He held a news conference in Washington, D.C. on March 14 and told, for the first time, the way he had been mistreated and abused in Cuba. We singled out The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as the TV networks, for having failed to report what Frank Emmick had to say.
I am pleased to report that The New York Times and ABC News have made up for their failure to cover the news conference. Frank Emmick was interviewed on ABC's "Good Morning, America" program on Tuesday, April 11. The interview was a brief one, but he was able to tell something of the terrible conditions under which he was imprisoned. He also described how Congressman Fred Richmond tried to keep him from telling the truth about conditions in Castro's prisons.
The following day, April 12, The New York Times carried an excellent article by Frank Emmick on its "op-ed" page (the page opposite the editorial page). This was a condensation of Mr. Emmick's remarks at his Washington press conference. It gave an accurate picture of Emmick's sufferings and the way in which political prisoners in Cuba are deprived of elementary human rights.
We want to commend The Times and ABC News for having corrected their original errors of omission in not telling Frank Emmick's moving story. I think that we can also claim some of the credit in this case, because we did discuss Frank Emmick with top people in both organizations and found them receptive to our suggestion that his story was worth telling.
The Washington Post is another matter, I am sorry to say. Not only did they fail to carry any news about Frank Emmick, but they ran a sorry editorial on April 2 about Congressman Fred Richmond's unsuccessful efforts to muzzle Emmick. We sent Mrs. Katharine Graham, the chairman of the board of The Post, a four-page letter in which we analyzed the errors and distortions in this very unfair and misleading editorial.
This was sent two weeks ago, and we are still waiting for a reply. Perhaps we will have one by the time we write the next AIM Report. We may print the correspondence if space permits. I think you will find it interesting.
We have invited Mr. Emmick to attend the AIM Conference on April 21-22, and he has promised to come.
AND NOW FOR SOME UNHAPPY NEWS. PETER WORTHINGTON, EXECUTIVE EDITOR OF THE TORONTO Sun, and Douglas Creighton, publisher of the Sun, are on trial in Canada, charged with violating that country's official secrets act. Peter Worthington is a courageous, patriotic Canadian who has shown dedication to the cause of freedom in the world. His "crime" was that he had the temerity to warn the Canadian people in him column of March 7, 1978, that they were not being told of extensive espionage activity in Canada by the Soviet KGB. We will reproduce the column on the reverse side. You can see for yourself whether the publication of this information endangered or enhanced the security of Canada. Presumably the purpose of the official secrets act is to protect Canadian secrets from potential enemies, not to protect the secrets of enemies from disclosure to the Canadian people. The secrets being revealed in this case were Soviet secrets pertaining to their illegal spying activities in Canada.
This is of special concern to the United States because Canada has long been used as a base for Soviet espionage against this country. But our own media have been surprisingly quiet about the effort of the Trudeau government to muzzle a courageous editor and even to imprison him for daring to tell the public about Soviet spy activities.
I regret to say that we won't be able to reproduce the Worthington column here as promised above. A careful search of my badly cluttered desk has failed to turn it up (and the reverse side of these notes has already been printed). However, here is a summary of what he said.
Mr. Worthington criticized Prime Minister Trudeau, who had argued that the USSR was not an enemy of Canada even though its intelligence arm, the KGB, was. Mr. Worthington suggested that the Prime Minister take a look at a top secret document prepared by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and approved on March 24, 1976, which dealt with activities of Soviet espionage agents in Canada. He described the document as "a virtual catalog of Soviet crimes, or attempted crimes, against Canada and Canadians in business, academic, Journalistic, military and political areas."
The column recited many of the illegal activities carried out by Soviet agents in Canada, as described in this top secret report. These included the following:
1. A member of the Canadian armed forces in Moscow was induced to plant electronic bugs throughout the Canadian embassy.
2. The wife of a KGB agent, working as an Intourist guide, got a Canadian scientist to smuggle a highly classified new laser to the USSR.
3. A university professor was persuaded to collect and pass on to the Soviets scholarly papers presented at academic conferences, including classified material.
4. The Soviets a special deep-water submersible vessel which was barred for sale to Soviet bloc countries by arranging for a Vancouver company to ship component parts to Switzerland. They were then re-routed to the USSR.
5. Several cases were cited showing Soviet efforts to acquire American military and technological secrets from Canadian sources.
Mr. Worthington pointed out that it would be helpful to Canadians dealing with the Soviets if they could be armed with knowledge of such Soviet efforts to use Canadian businessmen and others for illegal purposes.
One of the items cited by Peter Worthington that particularly interested us was the case of a Soviet journalist in Canada who was expelled after persuading a Canadian journalist to twist articles the way the Soviets wanted them twisted.
The picture conveyed was one of very extensive Soviet activity in Canada to obtain secret information and technology and to plant agents of influence. Last fall the Toronto Sun published an interview with Igor Gouzenko, the former Soviet code clerk whose defection in 1945 led to the exposure of a top-level Soviet spy ring. Gouzenko told the Sun that this was only one of eight rings that were operating. The others apparently went on undisturbed. Do these disclosures pain Pierre Trudeau?