Reed Irvine - Editor
ABC News recently brought its viewers up to date on what has happened in Nicaragua in the year since the Sandinistas overthrew Smoza and began running that Central American country. What they produced was another outstanding example of the kind of "disinformation" that Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss expose in their best-selling novel, The Spike.
The Nicaragua story was aired as part of the ABC magazine program, "20-20," on June 26. This program prides itself on hard-hitting exposes of wrongdoing, but the team they sent down to Nicaragua did a puff piece, not an honest, realistic report of conditions in that country today.
Since the ouster of President Anastasio Somoza was supposedly provoked by discontent over the human rights situation, the natural question to be asked is what improvements in human rights have occurred in the past year. You might think that the first people ABC's hot investigative reporters would contact would be the Nicaraguan Permanent Commission on Human Rights. This organization had been a thorn in the side of Somoza because of its exposure of human rights violations. It is still in existence and it is still reporting on human rights violations committed by the new government.
The ABC team did not contact them. Indeed, the head of the team, David Marash, told me that he was unaware of the existence of the organization. Had he queried this commission he would have learned that it has on its books a list of 600 people reported to have been taken away by Sandinist security forces in the past year, never to appear again. They would have told him about the mass grave containing 60 bodies found near Granada who are thought to be the victims of a Sandinist mass execution. The ministry of the interior has refused to investigate this case.
Instead of asking the Human Rights Commission about human rights in Nicaragua today, ABC took the matter up with the Minister of the Interior, Tomas Borge, a Marxist-Leninist with close ties to Fidel Castro. ABC described Borge only as "the last surviving member of the Sandinista's original rebel leadership" and noted that he had been "tortured in Somoza's prisons." Nothing was said about the fact that he is well known as a hard-line communist. In fact. they didn't even mention that he is the Minister of Interior. with responsibility for the internal policing of the country.
Not surprisingly, Nicaragua's Interior Minister told ABC News that the system of justice in Nicaragua is just great. Commandant Borge told David Marash that the revolution was most generous in its treatment of its opponents. It had not executed any of them, he said. Marash accepted this as fact. He said: "Nicaragua's revolutionary justice system has been given near unanimous international praise."
Curious as to who was giving such praise to a country that holds over 7,000 political prisoners and which has acknowledged that some of them have been tortured, according to the State Department Human Rights Report for 1979, we called David Marash. He cited four organizations which he said had praised the system of justice in Nicaragua--the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International, the International Council of Jurists, and the World Council of Churches. He also mentioned the French leftist newspaper, Le Monde.
We discovered that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has said nothing about Nicaragua since the fall of Somoza. The government has invited them to send a mission down to do a study, but for some strange reason nothing has happened. The high-ranking commission official we spoke to wouldn't tell us whether this is because Nicaragua is dragging its feet or whether the U.S. State Department is not eager to have the mission go. This is in marked contrast to the record speed with which they mounted a mission and published a report on Nicaragua in 1978, a report that was highly critical of the Somoza government. Scratch one ABC source.
We told Mr. Marash that it would be hard to imagine Amnesty International praising a country that was holding over 7,000 political prisoners, and he modified his statement to say that he had talked to some Amnesty International staff member. Our check with AI's New York office confirmed that they had not issued a report on Nicaragua and that staffers could not commit the organization on such a mailer. Scratch another ABC source.
We were not able to check on what the other two organizations may have said. Since the World Council of Churches has a long record of supporting Marxist- Leninist revolutionary groups, it would not be surprising it if were praising justice in Nicaragua, however. The staff of Le Monde has recently voted in a pro-communist as their new editor, and so praise for Nicaragua from that source would be no surprise. This certainly does not add up to "near unanimous international praise."
Mr. Marash admitted that he had not seen the London Economist's excellent article on conditions in Nicaragua in its May 10 issue. This article contradicted almost everything said on the "20/20" program. It stated that only 300 of the 7,000 political prisoners have so far been tried. Only 10 had been acquitted and the others had been sentenced to between 15 and 30 years in jail. The Economist said that about 30 people are being arrested each month, charged with "associating illegally to commit crimes" and for "crimes against the international order." The Permanent Human Rights Commission says that only about one in 20 of the cases brought to it turns out to involve a common criminal. The commission has reported ten cases of torture. It says that the number of complaints it receives is low, because people are afraid to complain. One who did so had his house shot up during the night.
The Los Angeles Times on June 21 ran a story from Nicaragua about the trial of one of the former national guardsmen, a 30-year old former bricklayer with a 4th grade education. The charge against him was that he "belonged to the most repressive organization in Nicaragua, the genocidal National Guard." For that. he was accused of "delinquency and crimes against the international order." The prosecutor read a long list of incidents in which innocent citizens were allegedly killed or tortured by the National Guard. The prisoner denied any knowledge of these matters. "Did the prisoner know that the National Guard assassinated 45,000 compatriots (luring the last phases of the struggle for liberation?" the prosecutor asked. The prisoner shook his head. He denied knowledge of such things. saying. "I never went on patrol. I just pulled guard duty." It appeared that the crimes of the National Guard were to be treated as his crimes, regardless of whether he had participated in them or not. And the crime of the National Guard was resisting the efforts of the Santinistas to overthrow the government by force. For that the prisoner could be sentences to 23 years in prison.
The special courts trying these cases are mad up of a lawyer and two civilians representing Sandinista political organizations. They are responsible to the Sandinistas, not to the judicial authorities. ABC's investigative reporting team seems to have missed all of this
Journalists are supposed to have a particularly keen eye for restrictions on the press, but David Marash and ABC appeared to have missed what the Inter- American Press Association has described as "a climate of fear in Nicaragua which inhibits free expression in the media." Mr. Marash did not know, when we spoke to him, that a paper called El Plueblo has been closed down and the editor jailed earlier this year. Marash said that three politically different papers are sold in Managua, but he did not say that one is the Sandinista paper, the second is a slavishly pro-government paper, and the third is La Prensa, which recently resumed publication. It had been closed down by its employees to protest the effort by the owners to replace a pro-Sandinista editor. This paper had been a vigorous critic of the government under Somoza. It has not dared to be an equally vigorous critic of the new government.
ABC, which ought to be interested in the broadcast media, failed to note that all television stations are now government owned and 15 out of 20 radio stations are in the hands of the government.
AIM has sent a detailed critique of this program to ABC. asking that they present another program that will give a truer picture of conditions in Nicaragua. It would help if you would back us up. Write to Leonard H. Goldenson, Chairman. ABC, 1330 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10019
THE SCOOP THEY SHOULD HAVE SCOTCHED
A front page story in The New York Times of May 17, 1980, created panic and near hysteria among some 2,500 residents of Niagara Falls. N.Y. Headlined, "Chromo- some Damage Found in Love Canal Tests." the story reported that over 30 percent of 36 residents of the Love Canal area who had been tested had "exhibited very rare chromosomal aberrations." The story by Irvin Molotsky explained that "most scientists in this field believe that such chromosomal changes are frequently linked to cancer and should be taken seriously as a harbinger of the disease." Molotsky added that in adults they could lead to genetic damage in offspring.
The implication was that 710 families that live in the neighborhood of the old chemical dump at Love Canal may be suffering from a very high rate of chromosome damage, which could be indicative of cancer and genetic defects in offspring. Since these 710 families have been under considerable psychological stress because of fears that the dump might be harming their health, this story landed like a bombshell.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would immediately send teams to Niagara Fails to notify the persons involved in the test of the results. Mr. Molotsky saw in this confirmation of the extreme seriousness of this report, noting that this action came just 24 hours after the agency had been notified by telephone of the findings by a laboratory in Houston. Texas.
Since a lot of people tend to assume that if something is reported by The New York Times it must be true, especially if it originates from a government source, this front page story had an immediate impact. The alarmed residents of the Love Canal area demanded that the government evacuate them immediately.
At a press conference held the same day The Times published its scoop, Assistant EPA Administrator Barbara Blum, announced that the cost of such an evacuation would be between $3 million and $5 million. She said that they might have to move out 710 families, but that the decision would be made after independent experts from the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences had reviewed the laboratory report. That would take a few days.
The EPA spokesmen confirmed that the test results were as reported by the Times. They said that normally no chromosome damage of the type reported would be found in a sample of 36 healthy people. But in the Love Canal sample, there were 11 persons with such damage. Miss Blum termed the findings "alarming," but she thought it prudent to wait a few days before ordering an evacuation of all those people. According to the Times, she said. "It would be unfair to unduly alarm the residents of the area. Another two or three days is not going to make any difference." That would give a panel of scientists time to review the report.
The Times devoted over 100 column-inches to this story (including photos) on May 18, without a single mention of the fact that there was a possibility that this report of chromosome damage might not stand up to the independent scientific scrutiny known as peer review. The Times did report that a letter had been sent by the president of Hooker Chemical Company, which was responsible for dumping the chemical waste in the Love Canal, in which he warned that the evidence was inconclusive that the problems of chromosome damage had been caused by exposure to the chemicals in the dump. Times reporter Molotsky neglected to mention that both the EPA and Hooker emphasized that the results were preliminary. He did not mention that even the author of the study, Dr. Dante Picianno of Biogenetics Corporation, had said that it would be necessary to test a larger sample and use a control group before significance could be attached to the results of his study. Dr. Picianno warned that prudence had to be exerted in interpreting the results until those further tests were made.
With this kind of reporting, it is little wonder that Senator Daniel P. Moynihan was quoted as saying, "This is. of course, the most serious development we have yet had at the Love Canal. Everything the government can do will be done--must be done."
It soon became evident that the very first thing the government should have done was to have guarded against releasing a scientific study that could have such a disturbing impact before subjecting it to peer review. After the weekend media blitz, spearheaded by the New York Times, the outside scientists who had a chance to see the alarming, chromosome study immediately warned that it was very seriously flawed.
The first thing they noted was that there was no matched control group--a group of people living outside the love Canal area who were comparable in all other respects to the Love Canal area residents being tested. Such a control group is necessary for two reasons. First, it is needed as a standard of comparison for the group being tested. Second, it is needed so that the technicians examining the slides under the microscope won't know whether the slides being examined belong to persons in the test group. This guards against them seeing what they think the people paying for the test want them to see.
Next they noted that the persons selected for the test were not chosen at random, but were rather selected because they or members of their families had illnesses or defects that might suggest chromosome damage. They also noted that those doing the test had failed to collect case histories of the people being tested to determine if there were other reasons why they might suffer damaged chromosomes. It was found, for example, that one of the subjects had been taking chemotherapy for cancer. There are many causes of damaged chromosomes, including exposure to X-rays, chemicals and viral infections.
The scientists pointed out that chromosome damage in white blood cells is not as rare or ominous as seemed to be indicated. Interpretations of what is seen under the microscope can vary. The significance of this point was magnified when Dr. Picianno refused to permit the team of scientists sent by the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences to enter his Houston laboratory and see his slides and other material. He wanted to have a person of his own choice on the review panel, a request that the team quite properly rejected.
When an independent review panel headed by Dr. Roy Albert of New York University finally did get a look at Dr. Picianno's slides and data, it found that it could not confirm his findings. The panel did not find chromo- some irregularities in excess of those found in the general population. They could not verify the presence of excess material in the chromosomes, as Dr. Picianno had claimed. They found errors in preparing the cell material and possible misinterpretations. In conclusion, Dr. Albert found that the results of the test were indeterminate and of no use. In a June 12 editorial, the New York Times concluded that the study was not only flawed, it was a "dud."
An independent panel of three geneticists put together by Dr. Picianno to review his findings said that some of the people in the test group had chromosome aberrations beyond normal limits expected in 36 healthy people. However, since the group had been selected with an eve to focusing on persons with health problems and since the independence of this review group is suspect, this was a poor rebuttal of the findings of Dr. Albert's panel. One of the members of Picianno's panel was his former boss.
Just four weeks elapsed between the publication of Irvin Molotskv's first scoop on the grave danger to the 710 families living in the vicinity of the Love Canal and the publication by the Times of the findings of Dr. Albert's panel, which showed that the Picianno study was fatally flawed.
It took only four days from the publication of that first scare story till the decision by President Carter to authorize the relocation of those 710 families at public expense to temporary quarters. The cost of that move was estimated at between $3 million and $5 million. But that was only part of the price. The residents were, in the words of the New York Times, "driven to the edge of hysteria." Governor Carey of New York said that the release of the findings of the Picianno report was "devastating psychologically." Even though it was pretty well known by the time the evacuation was approved that the report was badly flawed, it was felt that the best way to deal with that psychological problem was to get the people who wanted to go out of the area.
The Times said that the residents were bearing "an intolerable psychic strain, made even worse by the Environmental Protection Agency's mishandling of recent pilot studies." The Environmental Protection Agency denies that it was irresponsible in disseminating the results of that study. The agency's top research scientist, Dr. Stephen Gage, said that they would not have released the Pitiann, report if the information had not been leaked. He said the May 17 news conference was scheduled after it was learned that the New York Times and environmental groups had obtained the findings.
A high level official was quoted as saying that the handling of this problem was a lesson in how public policy should not be made. It is also a lesson in how the media can be used to make public policy. Probably the only person who knew what he was doing and achieved his goal in this mess was the anonymous leaker. At least he or she was the only one to come out unscathed. The Environmental Protection Agency was made to look ridiculous. The people of the Love Canal area have been subjected to great additional emotional stress and physical discomfort. The taxpayers have been stuck with another heavy unnecessary expenditure.
All of this might have been prevented had the New York Times taken to heart the advice that Accuracy in Media gave it in April 1979, after it had published a story about another badly flawed scientific study that had flunked its peer review.
In a letter that we sent to the Times and which it published, we said. "Peer review of scientific papers of this kind is required to prevent the dissemination by the popular press of misinformation. General assignment reporters are in no position to judge the validity of claims such as these made by Dr. Johnson. It is unfortunate that in this case the Times exhibited unusual gullibility . . ."
Reporter Irvin Molotsky told us that he did not feel that he had been "used" by his source for the Love Canal story. Nor did he think that it would have been proper to refuse to publish this story on the ground that the study had not passed peer review. This may explain why only one of the nine New' York Times stories that discussed criticisms of the Picianno study bore Mr. Molotsky's byline. The single exception was a June 18 story which reported on the backing that Dr. Picianno's handpicked review panel gave to his study. It mentioned the critical analysis of the panel headed by Dr. Roy Albert in passing. It would appear that reporter Molotsky may share his source's interest in pushing the Picianno study. One might conclude that he doesn't feel "used" because he was a willing collaborator in the enterprise.
Responding to an AIM complaint. New York Times Vice Chairman Sydney Gruson said that while the editors defended having run Molotskv's "scoop." he personally believes the story should have been held up in order to get confirmation of the claims.
The willingness of the Times to run with the unreviewed and unconfirmed charges in the Picianno study leaves it with a large part of the blame for the, resulting mess. The leaker's operation couldn't have succeeded without the willing cooperation of a newsman. The Environmental Protection Agency made matters much worse by rushing to hold a press conference, in which it gave the Picianno study far more credence than it deserved.
The resulting stories in the papers gave a great deal of exposure to the charge that the Hooker Chemical Company was responsible for the great disaster at Love Canal. During this period there were a couple of stories that bore on this larger issue which did not get widely reported.
The first ran in the Metropolitan Section of the Times on May 30. It reported that government documents suggest that the Federal Government was dumping waste chemicals in the Love Canal during World War II. This would have preceded Hooker Chemical's use of the dump, which began in 1947. This charge is based on a preliminary report of a New York State Assembly 'ask force. It charges that the dumping was from chemical plants owned by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a government agency.
On June 19, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial and supporting documentation showing that Hooker had twice issued strong public warnings about the potential health hazards at Love Canal. The warnings came at a time when the Niagara Falls Board of Education was thinking of selling part of the Love Canal property to private developers. Hooker had sold the canal and surrounding property to the school board for $1 in 1953. An elementary school was built on the property, with part of the building being on the dump site. While Hooker did not object to the building of the school, it vigorously protested a proposed sale that might lead to subsoil construction and disturbance of the buried chemicals in 1957.
The Wall Street Journal observed that while these warnings did not necessarily absolve Hooker of all responsibility for what has since happened at Love Canal, they do put into perspective "various efforts to use the Love Canal mess as an opportunity to defame both Hooker and particular and profit-making corporations in general." We have not seen these warnings mentioned in any paper except the Wall Street Journal.
NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF By Reed Irvine
ON JUNE 12, 1979, THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF OF THE U.S. SOUTHERN COMMAND, HEADQUARTERED in Panama, told me that it would be terrible if the Sandinistas were to win in Nicaragua. Although he did not say so, Gen. Dennis McAuliffe, knew how heavily dependent the Sandinistas were on Cuba and what close ties they had with Castro. That came out in the open two weeks later when the Chicago Tribune broke the story of a secret CIA memo which detailed those ties. Nevertheless, five weeks later, with a powerful assist from the Carter Administration, the Sandinistas won.
A YEAR HAS PASSED, AND IT IS APPROPRIATE TO ASK WHETHER OR NOT THINGS HAVE TURNED out as badly as Gen. McAuliffe and others anticipated. ABC decided to do that on its "20/20" program on June 26. We discuss in our lead story in this report the kind of job they did. It was a sad performance. In our critique in this report we focused on human rights, but in the letter we sent to ABC we took up some other serious in- accuracies. I pointed out that the U.S. role in giving aid to Nicaragua had been misrepresented. It was implied that we had given very little to the new government. The fact is that we have given more aid to the Sandinistas since they seized power than has any other country. So far we have made available to them $25 million in new grants and $30 million in reactivated credits. We have also given them aid in- directly through the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank and the U.N., since we are a major source of funds for these organizations. The IDB has loaned the Sandinistas $187.5 million and the World Bank has loaned them $90 million.
IT IS TRUE, AS THE ABC PROGRAM INDICATED, THAT ADDITIONAL AID APPROPRIATIONS FROM the U.S. totaling $130 million have been stalled in Congress. But for ABC or anyone else to imply that our niggardliness has driven the Nicaraguans into the hands of the Soviets is utter nonsense. According to the State Department, the Soviets have so far given them nothing but some polio vaccine. From us, the international organizations, and other Western countries they have obtained loans and grants totaling $594 million. In all that I have seen and heard about Congress holding up aid to Nicaragua, I have seen no mention of the fact that the Sandinistas have made out very well indeed.
IN MY LETTER TO LEONARD GOLDENSON I ALSO STRONGLY OBJECTED TO A COUPLE OF STATEMENTS David Marash made on the program which suggested that the present regime in Nicaragua is not a dictatorship. He said, "The days of Latin American dictatorships are ending, and people's guerrilla movements are among the forces taking their place." He said that Nicaragua had "a despotic past, a revolutionary present and an uncertain future." The plain fact is that the rule imposed by the so-called "people's guerrilla movements" is a lot more despotic than the rule that preceded them in Nicaragua, Cuba, and Grenada. People like David Marash would like to have us believe that if a tyranny is labeled "revolutionary" that it is less a tyranny. The victims obviously don't agree. Neither did Jose Cardenal, an anti-Somoza businessman who had been picked as a vice president of the new State Council. He fled the country and at a Washington news conference on May 15, he said: "We know they are using us (the businessmen) because they need us now. When they don't need us anymore, they are going to cut off our heads." Cardenal said that the Sandinistas aspire to take over all Central America and that they are now giving training and arms to the Salvadoran guerrillas. He said that hundreds of Nicaraguans are already fighting in E1 Salvador, the country that is the next target for the communists.
CARDENAL PUT THE NUMBER OF POLITICAL PRISONERS IN NICARAGUA AT 12,000. HE SAID, "WE know they are torturing people." He said there were 10,000 Cubans in Nicaragua and that 2,000 Nicaraguan children are being educated in Cuba. He claimed that much of the international aid sent to Nicaragua had been diverted to Cuba. Private property is being confiscated every day, he said. Cardenal said that giving additional aid to Nicaragua would only reinforce Sandinista control of the country, ultimately hurting the people.
THAT SAME ARGUMENT AGAINST AID TO NICARAGUA WAS MADE BY MAJOR ROBERTO D'AUBUISSON, an anti-communist E1 Salvadoran activist, at a Washington news conference on July 2, sponsored jointly by the American Legion and the American Security Council. D'Aubuisson said that Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada had already been lost to the communists because of the naive thinking in the U.S. Department of State. El Salvador was now under attack, with the U. S. dictating policies that were ruining the country. He saw the removal of our ambassador to Guatemala, Frank Ortiz, as a sign that the same policies would now be imposed upon that country. D'Aubuisson said that the communization of Nicaragua was profoundly worrying El Salvadorans. He said there were already two Cuban bases in Nicaragua.
THIS SEARING CRITICISM OF AMERICAN POLICY IN CENTRAL AMERICA WAS LARGELY IGNORED by the media. The Washington Post did run a front-page story about D'Aubuisson. The headline read: "Salvadoran Rightist Eludes Ban Against Entering U.S." It said that D'Aubuisson's visa had been canceled and his name had been given to Immigration as a person not to be admitted to the U.S. The Post compared his entry to that of Chilean security agents who entered this country in 1976 and were later implicated in the assassination of Orlando Letelier. The Post was reaching deep into its bag of smear tactics to come up with that one. It also said that the State Department had labeled D'Aubuisson "a right wing terrorist." The writer of the story, Karen DeYoung admitted that was not true. She said it should have stated that a department official who declined to be identified had made that charge. It was Karen DeYoung who lectured on journalism at the far left Institute for Policy Studies this spring. She told her students that young reporters like to interview leftist guerrillas because it is presumed that they are the "good guys."
SPEAKING OF DISINFORMATION, AN ARTICLE IN THE JULY 11 ISSUE OF PARIS MATCH TELLS OF a French journalist who was recently sentenced to 5 years in prison for the crime of disinformation. His name is Pierre Charles Paths, and he was charged with taking articles from his Soviet control officer and planting them in French papers. He was caught in the company of his control officer. We haven't seen the story yet, but it would appear to be something right out of The Spike. The Spike, the novel about Soviet disinformation activities is selling very well. It is No. 4 on The New York Times bestseller list this week. You can get it from AIM for $10.35, postpaid.
ACCURACY IN MEDIA HAS FILED A COMPLAINT WITH THE FCC ABOUT AN ARRANGEMENT NBC NEWS worked out with Rep. John Anderson to have him interviewed on the Today Show each morning during the Republican National Convention. Anderson would be a kind of unpaid commentator, except that his "pay" would be exposure that he could not possibly buy. Our complaint is that this is a transparent subterfuge which would destroy the equal time requirements for political candidates if the FCC permits NBC to get away with it.
IF YOU ARE GETTING AN EXTRA COPY OF THE AIM REPORT, IT IS PROBABLY BECAUSE OF THE changeover we are making in the computer service firm that handles our mailing list. This has resulted in some temporary duplication of some names. We believe the new system will be a vast improvement, but there may be some bugs for a month or so. If you continue to get an extra copy after the August I issue, let us know.
OUR SURPLUS BOOK SALE WAS A GREAT SUCCESS. WE HAVE ONLY A FEW BOOKS LEFT IN STOCK on sale: The View from Sunset Boulevard, a fine book about the bias in TV entertainment shows by Ben Stein is available at $4. Also Coming Out of the Ice by Herman at $6. The only others left are the AIM Report indexes and the Beckmann $1 booklets.
Reed Irvine can be reached at ri@aim.org