Reed Irvine - Editor
Fidel Castro has taken a page out of Stalin's book in executing one of his top military commanders, Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez. Ochoa, an officially pro- claimed "Hero of the Republic," had commanded Cuban expeditionary forces in Ethiopia and Angola and is said to have been popular with veterans. Along with Ochoa, Castro ordered the arrest and trial of six other officers and dismissed Diocles Torralba Gonzalez, a former air force chief of staff who was the minister of transportation and vice president of Cuba's Council of Ministers. Torralba was linked to Ochoa, having studied together with him in Moscow in the 1960s. Two weeks later, Gen. Jose Abrahantes, the minister of interior, was purged. Abrahantes, who headed the security forces, ranked just below Fidel Castro and his brother Raul in the Cuban hierarchy.
Gen. Ochoa was accused of being involved in international drug trafficking, embezzling hard currency and dealing in ivory, diamonds and gold. In a country where the top leadership has been known for the last seven years to be involved in international drug trafficking and where high- level corruption is an open scandal, to charge Ochoa with high treason for such offenses is the height of hypocrisy. Cuban officials very close to Fidel Castro have been aiding drug traffickers for many years. One of them, Adm. Aldo Santamaria, the head of the Cuban navy, was indicted in absentia on drug trafficking charges in Miami in 1982. Santamaria is one of the 47 officers who signed the recommendation that Ochoa be tried for high treason and subsequently condemned him to death.
The feigned outrage over Ochoa's alleged involvement in drug trafficking was treated as genuine by some of our media, especially The Washington Post. The Post didn't even report the June 13 arrests until June 17, when reporters Julia Preston and Michael Isikoff wrote, "The drastic housecleaning appears consistent with the purist revolutionary policies Castro has pursued. Rejecting liberal reforms like those Mikhail Gorbachev has undertaken in the Soviet Union, Castro hopes instead to hold Cubans to the spartan, radically egalitarian communism of the early days of his three- decade-old revolution." They failed to note that the Cuban military has always been the province of Fidel and brother Raul Castro, who is defense minister, and that large-scale drug trafficking could not go on in their informant-ridden police state without their knowledge and approval.
The Post continued to take Castro's charges at face value throughout the trial. In reporting Ochoa's death sentence on July 8, The Post said, "It is still not completely clear what triggered Castro's harsh reaction against the officers, but abundant testimony from videotaped show trials in Havana and evidence from court records in Florida suggest that Ochoa's error was not his decision to enter the drug trade but doing so independently of Castro." By contrast, Bill Gertz of The Washington Times reported as early as June 15 that U.S. intelligence sources believed the arrests may have been a preemptive move by Castro to head off a military coup. The following day Gertz quoted former Cuban Brig. C-en. Rafael del Pino, Cuba's highest ranking military defector, as saying, "They are using the argument of corruption to conceal the true decomposition of the regime." Del Pino said that Fidel and Raul Castro and Interior Minister Abrahantes were more corrupt than other Cuban leaders. He described Ochoa as "an austere individual" and Torralba as an independent thinker and "the most intelligent figure in the Cuban government."
The same day, The New York Times published its first report on the arrests, saying, "American officials and other experts on Cuba said today that the action strongly suggested dissension at the highest levels of the Cuban armed forces." A State Department official was quoted as saying that Raul Castro was apparently "clearing the decks, removing potential rivals." The Wall Street Journal on June 23 ran on its op-ed page a detailed account of Cuba's role in drug trafficking, reporting that creation of a drug smuggling network had been discussed by top Cuban officials, including Ernesto "Che" Guevara, as early as 1961, according to a leaked DEA intelligence report. The author, Rachel Ehrenfeld of Freedom House, pointed out that Gen. Ochoa had been out of the country much of the time and it was doubtful that he was involved in drug running. She also noted that there was little chance that either he or his highest ranking co-defendant, Brig. Gen. Patricio de la Guardia, the commander of an elite Special Forces brigade responsible for Castro's security, could have been involved in trafficking without Castro's approval.
The Post continued to take Castro's charges at face value throughout the trial. In reporting Ochoa's death sentence on July 8, The Post said, "It is still not completely clear what triggered Castro's harsh reaction against the officers, but abundant testimony from videotaped show trials in Havana and evidence from court records in Florida suggest that Ochoa's error was not his decision to enter the drug trade but doing so independently of Castro." By contrast, Bill Gertz of The Washington Times reported as early as June 15 that U.S. intelligence sources believed the arrests might have been a preemptive move by Castro to head off a military coup. The following day Gertz quoted former Cuban Brig. C-en. Rafael del Pino, Cuba's highest ranking military defector, as saying, "They are using the argument of corruption to conceal the true decomposition of the regime." Del Pino said that Fidel and Raul Castro and Interior Minister Abrahantes were more corrupt than other Cuban leaders. He described Ochoa as "an austere individual" and Torralba as an independent thinker and "the most intelligent figure in the Cuban government."
The same day, The New York Times published its first report on the arrests, saying, "American officials and other experts on Cuba said today that the action strongly suggested dissension at the highest levels of the Cuban armed forces." A State Department official was quoted as saying that Raul Castro was apparently "clearing the decks, removing potential rivals." The Wall Street Journal on June 23 ran on its op-ed page a detailed account of Cuba's role in drug trafficking, reporting that creation of a drug smuggling network had been discussed by top Cuban officials, including Ernesto "Che" Guevara, as early as 1961, according to a leaked DEA intelligence report. The author, Rachel Ehrenfeld of Freedom House, pointed out that Gen. Ochoa had been out of the country much of the time and it was doubtful that he was involved in drug running. She also noted that there was little chance that either he or his highest ranking co-defendant, Brig. Gen. Patricio de la Guardia, the commander of an elite Special Forces brigade responsible for Castro's security, could have been involved in trafficking without Castro's approval.
The Washington Post studiously avoided reporting the expert opinion that the drug and corruption charges were simply a cover for the real reasons behind the arrest of Ochoa and his fellow officers. Even when it belatedly acknowledged that Castro himself had been involved in drug smuggling at least since 1982, it said only that this suggested that complicity between the Colombian drug lords and Cuban officials "may extend well beyond the Ochoa ring."
The TV networks showed little interest in the Cuban crisis. ABC and CBS first mentioned the story when the military tribunal formally charged the defendants on June 26, and NBC didn't report it until they were sentenced. ABC's Peter Jennings declared that this action "demonstrates for the first time that Cuba may be serious about curtailing drug traffic, a major problem to the U.S. that has been a major barrier to improved relations."
On the CBS Evening News reporter Juan Vasquez said, "Many believe the real issue is a power struggle over the role of the Cuban military overseas, that the Cuban hierarchy knew of the drug smuggling all along." That was interesting. When Dan Rather interviewed Fidel Castro in March 1985, he let Castro get away with this emphatic declaration: "This is a country with the cleanest history in the field of drugs...we have practically been the guardians of the Caribbean. All the ships, all the planes that have ever landed here with drugs are automatically seized and confiscated. I do not know of a single case, not a single case of a Cuban official who has ever been implicated or involved in the drug business."
When the verdict was handed down, NBC reminded viewers that in an interview aired on the NBC Nightly News on February 25, 1988, Castro had emphatically denied any Cuban involvement in the drug traffic. (He had asserted that Cuba was the "cleanest country in the world" as far as drugs were concerned and that the Colombians had "never, never" shipped drugs through Cuba.) NBC had followed that up with evidence showing that Castro was lying. But it also put on Castro's biographer, Tad Szulc, to muddy the water. Szulc claimed Castro was "too smart" to ever get involved with drugs. NBC also said, "Federal prosecutors have evidence of the direct involvement" of Raul Castro in drugs. It didn't describe that evidence, but in the February 1988 broadcast, it had mentioned videotape showing drug smugglers boasting that Raul Castro was protecting them. NBC also cast doubt on the authenticity of Cuban film given it in February 1988 purporting to show Cuban sailors seizing a drug ship bound for the U.S. NBC obviously didn't believe that the drug trafficking had come as a surprise to Fidel Castro. It said, "U.S. analysts believe nothing important happens in Cuba without Castro's knowledge...The trials are part of a campaign to improve Cuba's image."
In the case of The Washington Post, Castro's strategy succeeded. Rather than accept blame for the narcotics corruption he encouraged for years, Castro succeeded in getting The Post and some others in the media to give him credit for cleaning up the drug mess instead of holding him responsible for it. And, concurrently, most of the media failed to expose the realities behind the Ochoa trial.
The Reality Behind the Charade
The Washington Times noted that the arrests came "amid reports of growing disaffection" with Castro among Cuban troops returning from Africa. It also quoted Brig. Gen. Rafael del Pino Diaz, who defected from Cuba in 1987, as saying that disaffection with communism was widespread in the Cuban military. Del Pino said the corruption charges were merely a pretext to destroy Ochoa and Torralba.
There are abundant reasons for discontent in the Cuban military. Hundreds of returning veterans have been shipped to Soviet Siberia to cut timber. According to a Radio Marti report their colony "harvests timber for both the Soviet Union and Cuba." Raul Castro, Fidel's brother and the Cuban defense minister, mockingly told veterans complaining about housing in early June that if they were not happy in Havana, he could get them assignments in Eastern Europe.
The Cuban military have reason to want to get rid of Castro. The Soviets have long found him difficult. One of Castro's most ardent American apologists, Saul Landau of the far-left Institute for Policy Studies, has just deserted him, saying in a recent article in the leftist magazine Mother Jones that Castro has become an obstacle to the Revolution and it's time for him to move on.
Only last winter CBS hired Landau as a paid consultant to help produce a segment on the 30th anniversary of Castro's takeover. It turned out to be essentially pro- Castro propaganda. In his magazine article, however, Landau condemned inefficiency in the economy and corruption in government. His most biting words were about Castro's police state and the absence of even basic freedoms. The revolution, he said, offered "creative energies...utopian dream...historic fulfillment." But what has Castro delivered? Landau said: "Repression, faceless bureaucracy and economic folly...Instead of creating a country where the best minds concentrated on planning, culture and education, they instead fixed on the murky fields of national security."
Why the sudden turnabout? The answer may lie in Gorbachev's visit to Cuba last spring. The Soviet Union, facing its own economic problems, is weaning Castro, refusing to pour more money down a rat hole that has already absorbed an unrepeatable $34 billion. Pressed by Gorbachev to give Cuba a breath of glasnost and perestroika, Castro responded with more or less public insults during Gorbachev's visit. He is believed to have received a reaction from Moscow in the form of delayed aid payments, and he may see Landau's article as another such message.
In addition, Castro for the first time is hearing a sound fatal to either a dictator or a politician: derisive laughter. When his picture comes onto the screen in Havana movie houses, raucous youths begin singing the refrain from a popular salsa tune: "Este hombres loco." (This man is crazy!) These youths are tired of more than a generation of untilled promises. So, too, is the Cuban military. The 400,000 returnees from Castro's mercenary wars in Africa are said to be restive. In one recent instance Castro ordered a ship bringing troops home from Angola halted offshore. Security police went aboard and disarmed and discharged the soldiers before they were allowed to disembark. Many veterans have been put into "labor brigades" and shipped to Soviet Siberia to cut timber without pay.
General Ochoa, a popular commander in Africa, was listening to the complaints of the veterans. Raul Castro told the court martial of "receiving reports of his unlimited popularity in recent months." Ochoa also grew disillusioned with the idea of Cubans fighting on a distant continent. Raul Castro quoted him as saying, "I have been sent to a lost war [Angola] so that I will be blamed for the defeat." The "flash point" leading to Ochoa's arrest came after Castro met in early June with Manuel Solis Palma, the figurehead president of Panama. He had agreed to send thousands of Cuban veterans to Panama to help shore up Noriega's regime. Ochoa is said to have strongly disagreed, arguing that it would complicate relations with the United States and taint Cuba's reputation to give such support to a dictator involved in drug trafficking.
Such an outspoken, popular general was seen as a threat to Fidel and Raul Castro. It was not enough to fire him or to imprison him. Castro demanded nothing less than the death sentence from his kangaroo military court. And the drug-smuggling charge gave Castro what one intelligence analyst called a "twofer." He ridded himself of a possible political opponent, and he got undeserved credit in the U.S., from the State Department, some members of Congress and influential media, for "cracking down on drugs."
There was no comment on our networks and very little in the print media on a peculiar aspect of the Cuban TV footage used to illustrate their verdict stories. The speed of the legal process was reminiscent of Stalin's efficiency. A month after Ochoa was arrested, he was executed. Defendants were afforded no real defense, and foreign reporters were excluded from the trial. Video footage provided by the Cubans brought to mind the way Stalin prepared his victims for trial as described in Arthur Koestler's great novel, Darkness at Noon. The footage showed an obviously disturbed Ochoa. He picked incessantly at his clothes, as if searching for lint; with eyes tightly shut, he would direct his face at the ceiling. He had the earmarks of a man rendered insensible by drugs. He played his show-trial role well, that of traitor to the Cuban Revolution. "I despise myself," he said in a speech of self. Abasement. He said that if he died before a firing squad "my last thought would be of Fidel." Ochoa has three young daughters. Immediately after his death sentence they went into exile in separate East European countries, in what could be a quid pro quo for their father's willingness to take sole blame for Cuba's drug involvement.
Our media mentioned but did not delve into the significance of Castro's firing of his interior minister, veteran revolutionary Gen. Jose Abrahantes Fernandez, who ran the vast Cuban security apparatus. The 57-year- old Abrahantes was Castro's political officer in Mexico before the takeover and then, after being trained in Eastern Europe, he became a key security and intelligence officer. As interior minister he directed the "special forces of state security," the 5,000 man shock force replete with its own armor and air arm that protects the Cuban hierarchy against a coup. He also ran the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, the ubiquitous "block committees" that watch every aspect of Cuban life. Abrahantes' assigned blame was his failure to detect Ochoa's smuggling. His firing, two weeks after Ochoa's arrest, was necessary to lend credibility to the Big Lie that the Castro brothers did not know about all the drug trafficking. Five of the defendants, including two who were sentenced to death, Col. Antonio de la Guardia Font and Maj. Amando Patron, worked for Abrahantes. La Guardia testified that he turned the profits from the drug operations over to the ministry of interior. Abrahantes had to be dismissed for incompetence to preserve the fiction that he didn't know what was going on.
Other revolutionary kingpins also fell without media scrutiny. Diocles Torralba, also a Sierra Maestra veteran, held high posts including the sugar ministry, head of the air force, and (lastly) transportation minister. Castro dismissed him for "corruption," although he has not been put on trial. Osmany Cienfuegos, a top Castro aide, dropped from sight and was reported to have sought asylum in the Venezuelan Embassy. A brother of revolutionary hero Camilo Cienfuegos, who died in a suspicious air crash in 1959, Osmany has handled the millions of "unofficial" dollars channeled to Fidel Castro from smuggling and other illegal activities. A Reuters' reporter was expelled for reporting he had taken asylum, but Castro has not produced Cienfuegos or any evidence to prove the story wrong.
Evidence of Cuban involvement in drug trafficking at the highest levels dates from 1961 to the present. Some of the most interesting revelations surfaced in sworn testimony in a 1983 trial in U.S. District Court in Miami, which resulted from the indictment of 14 individuals on charges of facilitating the smuggling of drugs into the United States. They included Vice Admiral Aldo Santa- Maria Cuadrado, a Castro confidante and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba; Rene Rodriguez-Cruz, a member of the Central Committee and president of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the People; Fernando Ravelo Renedo, Cuban ambassador to Colombia; and Gonzalo Bassols-Suarez, minister- counselor of the Cuban embassy in Colombia. Castro refused to extradite any of these officials and their careers continued to prosper.
What is particularly interesting about the testimony at this trial is that it confirmed that Castro's interest in smuggling drugs into the U.S. was not confined to making money.
Mario Esteves Gonzalez, who had been trained by the Ministry of Interior and dispatched to Florida in 1976 to infiltrate Alpha 66, a leading anti-Castro group, testified that on returning to Cuba in September 1980 he was ordered to make contact with marijuana and cocaine smugglers in Bimini. Lieutenant Colonel Nelson, one of his superiors, told him, "It is important to fill up the United States with drugs." Within months he was arrested and became a Federal witness.
Another witness, a Colombian lawyer and drug smuggler named Johnny Crump, testified he was part of a combine that agreed to pay Cuba $500,000 for each boatload of drugs shipped through Cuban waters. Ambassador Fernando Ravelo was the official who would receive the money. When Crump made drug trips to Cuba, officials took him through customs and immigration without any formalities and gave him a government car and driver. Asked about Cuba's motivation during the 1983 hearings, Crump replied, in his imperfect English, "I don't believe that was make money. I believe that was try to hurt the United States."
Smuggler David Lorenzo Perez, Jr. described a meeting with three Cuban officials in a Cuban port during a mission involving the smuggling of ten million quaaludes. One of the Cuban officials said he was "happy" so many drugs were going to the U.S. Admiral Aldo Santamaria was at this meeting, although he had little to say. Perez's boss, Colombian drug lord Jaime Guillot Lara, told him he could bring drugs through Cuba because "he was paying money to the Cuban government for their protection."
How could Castro not have known of his government's drug smuggling? For international audiences, Prensa Latina, Castro's propaganda arm, blamed a favored whipping boy, the CIA, for not informing Cuba of drug deals it detected!
Castro has been allowed to get away with his old claims that Cuba has never been involved in drug smuggling and his new claims that it was all the work of the Ochoa ring and that he knew nothing about it. The media have shown very little interest in the Cuban drug connection, with a few exceptions, notably The Washington Times and The Miami Herald. Hearings on the subject held by the Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism under Sen. Jeremiah Denton in 1983 were totally ignored by The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC and CBS.
The Ochoa trial provided an excellent opportunity for the media to expose Castro's latest Big Lie, but that opportunity has been largely muffed. As a result, members of Congress, including the chairman of the House Select Committee on Narcotics, Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., are showing signs of being taken in by Castro's recent requests for talks with the U.S. to find ways of stopping "intolerable" smuggling flights into Cuban air space.
Send the enclosed card or your personal letter to Donald E. Graham, publisher of The Washington Post. A card is enclosed to send to your Congressman and one for McDonald's. See the notes.
AIM REPORT is published twice monthly by Accuracy In Media, Inc., 1341 G Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005, and is free to AIM members. Dues and contributions to AIM are tax deductible. The AIM Report is mailed 3rd class to those whose contribution is at least $15 a year and 1st class to those contributing $30 a year or more. Non-member subscriptions are $35 (1st class mail).
AIM Report NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF
THIS AIM REPORT IS ABOUT DISINFORMATION AND THE GULLIBILITY OF MUCH OF OUR MEDIA when confronted with a very obvious effort to mislead them. It has been known for years that Castro has been raking off large payments from the Medellin drug lords for providing them with a safe haven that could be used to transship their merchandise to the United States. It has also been known for years that his motivation was not limited to raking in easy money. Flooding the U.S. with drugs with the objective of corrupting and demoralizing our population has been a major objective of the Soviet Union and its satellites for at least 30 years. Joseph H. Douglass, Jr., a highly respected intelligence analyst, lays out the evidence in his forthcoming book, RED COCAINE. He reveals that Raul Castro participated in a meeting in Czechoslovakia to discuss expansion of drug trafficking efforts in 1967. The main goal was "the crippling of bourgeois society." Castro told the group that could be accomplished in 35 years by targeting high school students and children. His source is Gen. Jan Sejna, a high level Czech government and party official, who participated in the meeting. Sejna defected in 1968.
WE CITE IN THIS REPORT SWORN TESTIMONY AT A 1983 TRIAL DESCRIBING THE CUBAN interest in using drugs to demoralize the U.S. You can add to that this statement by Gen. German Barreiro, the head of the Cuban DGI: "Drugs are the best way to destroy the United States." He said by undermining American youth, the United States could be destroyed, explaining, "The foundation of any army is the youth and he who is able to morally destroy the youth, destroys the army." Douglass's source for that is a Cuban intelligence officer who defected in 1987, Maj. Juan Rodriguez Menier.
THIS SHOWS HOW SILLY IT IS TO REPORT AS VALID CASTRO'S FEIGNED OUTRAGE OVER THE discovery that some of his senior officers have been involved in the drug trade. In this report we have given credit to The Washington Times and The New York Times for pointing out that the drug charges were probably not the real reason Gen. Ochoa and his fellow defendants were tried, but even these papers felt obliged to report the story in terms of the official Cuban charges as it progressed. The Washington Times was using wire service stories from Reuters and Agerice France Presse, which accepted the Cuban charges at face value. I discussed this with the editor, Arnaud de Borchgrave, an expert on disinformation, and he saw that material was added to each of the wire stories used by his paper pointing out that the charges of involvement of high level Cubans in the drug traffic went back to 1982 and had always been denied by Castro. In reporting the executions on July 14, The Washington Times again reminded its readers that Cuba experts had suggested that the real reason for this extraordinary trial was Castro's fear that Ochoa might lead a coup attempt. This was tacked on to a 16-paragraph wire story that cast no doubt on the validity of the official charges.
THE WASHINGTON POST STUCK TO ITS POLICY OF REPORTING ONLY THE OFFICIAL CUBAN disinformation to the very end. The New York Times did the best job. Much of its story by Robert Pear of its Washington bureau cast doubt on the official Cuban charges. Pear pointed out that evidence presented at the trial actually corroborated the charges that Fidel and Raul Castro had been involved in the drug trafficking for many years. He noted that many experts believe the trial was staged for political reasons and quoted one as saying that a major purpose was to "protect Castro's image from forthcoming revelations in U.S. courts about" his ties to the Medellin drug cartel.
WHAT ALL THE MEDIA MISSED WAS THE OPPORTUNITY TO USE THIS DRAMATIC STORY TO inform the American people that our enormous drug problem has been actively promoted not only by Fidel Castro, but also by the Soviet Union and its other satellites as well as by China. This is something that those who are urging the State Department to accept Castro's overtures to cooperate in controlling drug smuggling should bear in mind. It should also be high on the list of matters to be discussed with Mikhail Gorbachev.
A YEAR AGO I WAS TRYING HARD TO GET THE MEDIA TO PUBLICIZE THE GRAVE INJUSTICE that would be done to senior citizens with taxable income by the Catastrophic Health Insurance bill that President Reagan was about to sign. I did get The Wall Street Journal to do an excellent editorial on the matter, but I could get nowhere with Nightline and MacNeil/Lehrer, which had already plugged the new legislation in one-sided programs. The warnings I wrote in the AIM Report and my newspaper column alerted many people to the fact that they were going to be hit with a special "old age" tax that was fraudulently labeled an "insurance premium." The 40 percent of us who are 65 or older and have taxable income will be forced to pay the entire cost of the new program. The first year the bill will be as much as $1,600 per couple and it will go up. Reagan signed the bill, and most of the victims of this legislation discovered what they were in for too late to stop it. But as the day of reckoning draws near, Senators and Congressmen are hearing from their angry senior citizen constituents. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, prime mover of the legislation and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has been forced to begin hearings to determine what, if anything, should be done to correct this injustice. Since so many AIM members are affected by this and since the media let us down so badly in failing to alert the people to the problem last year, I will include with this Report a card that you may wish to send. I suggest that you send it to your Congressman and copy it or write your own message to send to your two Senators.
"60 MINUTES" IS PROVING TO BE A VERY COSTLY PROGRAM. ON JULY 7, IT WAS announced that the Department of Agriculture would spend $15 million to buy up Washington state apples that have become surplus because of the drop in apple sales after "60 Minutes" created the great apple scare with its programs on Alar. The price that growers are getting for their apples has fallen by half, and growers say they might as well give the fruit away. It is estimated that growers have lost over $100 million, and unlike Exxon, which is compensating the fishermen in Alaska who suffered from its oil spill, CBS hasn't offered to pay any compensation. Because of their plight, the apple growers and processors appealed to Uniroyal Chemical to halt domestic sales of Alar, which it announced it would do on June 2. This was done to allay public fears, not because any evidence had been found to show Alar-treated apples to be a health risk. Alar will continue to be sold overseas, but CBS has spread hysteria as far as Thailand. A photo in a Bangkok newspaper showed men wearing gas masks and protective clothing dumping apples into an incinerator because they contained Alar in excess of 20 parts per million.
CBS HAS BEEN STONEWALLING THE CRITICS OF ITS SECOND PROGRAM ON ALAR, THE ONE Laurence Tisch, Howard Stringer and Don Hewitt all promised would be accurate and fair. Dr. Bruce Ames, the head of the biochemistry department of the University of California/Berkeley, who was interviewed for the program, has sent Hewitt a scorching letter. He said, "I assume that such an egregious mistreatment of a scientific issue was made by '60 Minutes' in order to buttress its previous scientifically flawed coverage of the Alar issue, rather than to pursue the truth." Tom Barrett, CEO of Goodyear Tire and Rubber, has responded to AIM members who wrote about that program saying, "[I] wonder whether some of the groups and reporters in the world are truly interested in the welfare and advancement of society, or have other objectives in life." He said Goodyear would review its advertising commitments to "60 Minutes." Two companies that advertised on both Alar programs, McDonald's and AT&T, have stonewalled us. Please send the enclosed card to Fred Turner, McDonald's CEO, urging him to intercede with CBS.