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Ending the Cold War at Home
A National Conference

American Civil Liberties Union, Washington, D.C.

"Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be
charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad." 
	-- James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, May 13, 1798

Proceedings of
Ending the Cold War at Home:  A National Conference

Winter 1991, Washington Plaza Hotel, Washington, D.C.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Steve Daitz and Christina Nicolosi for their invaluable
assistance in the preparation of this report. 

Copies of this report, and the companion report, "Ending the Cold War at
Home: A Public Policy Report," are available for $5/copy or both for
$8.50. Prepaid orders should be sent to: 

Publications Department
American Civil Liberties Union
122 Maryland Avenue, N.E.
Washington, D.C. 20002
(202) 544-1681

Copyright 1992 by the American Civil Liberties Union. All Rights Reserved. 
ISBN 0-86566 0581

Table of Contents

I.	Introduction

II.	Welcoming Address

III.	Special Conference Addresses

	Mary Frances Berry: The Bicentennial of the Bill of Rights and the
	End of the Cold War: Time to Dismantle the National Security State

	Konstanty Gebert: The Resurgence of Democratic Ideals Around the World

	Hon. Ronald V. Dellums: Achieving the Democratic Ideal

IV. The Domestic Legacy of the Cold War

	Morton H. Halperin: The Legacy of Cold War Restrictions on Civil
	Liberties

	Lillie Albertson: McCarthyite Persecution: A Personal Account

	Milton Schwebel: Comments on the Cold War and the Human Mind

	Gerald Horne: The Cold War's Impact on the African American Community

V. Unlocking the Doors to Government Information

	Page Putnam Miller: Secrecy and the Accurate Recording of History

	Roger Pilon: An Insider's Story

	Turna Lewis: The Impact of Secrecy on Federal Government Workers

	Tim Weiner: Exposing the Pentagon's Secret Budget

VI. A Constitutional National Defense

	Harold Koh: The War Powers Debate

	Michelle Benecke: Discrimination Against Women and Homosexuals in
	the Military

	Prexy Nesbitt: The Government's Secret Wars

	Rev. Bill Yolton: The Selective Service System

VII. Free Trade in ideas - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

	Choichiro Yatani: An Unexplained 44 Days of Detention

	John Terzano: Restrictions on Travel to Vietnam

	Bari Schwartz: Legislating the Free Flow of Information

VIII. Government Surveillance and Erosion of the Fourth Amendment

	Mark Lynch: Erosion of the Fourth Amendment

	Judith Krug: The FBI's "Library Awareness" Program

	Nkechi Taifa: The FBI'S Covert Operations Against the Black Movement

	Jinsoo Kim: The CISPES Investigation

IX. New Threats to Civil Liberties

	Gara LaMarche: Press Censorship

	Gregory Nojeim: Targeting of Arab-Americans

	Robert Borosage: From Cold War to "New World Order"

X. Looking Toward a Post-Cold War America

	Hodding Carter III: The Media in an Open Society

	Ron Daniels: Fighting for a Peace Dividend

	H. Jack Geiger: Cleaning up the Environment

XI. Building A Movement to End the Cold War at Home and Resist New Threats
to Liberty

	Steve Rickard: The Legislative Agenda

	Anne Braden: A Grassroots Approach

	Loretta Williams: The Need for Unity

Appendix A. Selected Bibliography

Appendix B. Glossary of Sponsoring Organizations
__________________________________________________
Ending the Cold War at Home:  Introduction

While the end of the Cold War abroad has opened new possibilities for U.S.
foreign and domestic policy, the national security state erected in its
name remains very much in place, hindering democratic decision-making and
infringing on our civil liberties.  Recognizing the need to eliminate Cold
War era laws and practices that impair constitutional rights, more than
sixty civil liberties, civil rights, professional, peace, labor, religious
and student organizations joined with the ACLU to sponsor a National
Conference on Ending the Cold War at Home. 

The Conference was convened in February, 1991, bringing together over 250
participants to examine in depth the many restrictions that were imposed
in the name of national security which remain in effect. Participants
considered broad strategies -- including legislation, litigation and
public education -- for removing these restrictions and for resisting new
threats to liberty arising in the post-Cold War period. 

The Conference was the first step in the development of an ongoing ACLU
Project on Ending the Cold War at Home. Other components include the
dissemination of a Public Policy Report, and work with a coalition of
groups that emerged from the Conference. This volume contains the
abbreviated text of the speeches and papers presented to the Conference.
__________________________________________________

Welcoming Address:  Norman Dorsen
Outgoing President, American Civil Liberties Union

This conference has a very simplistic message. The issues are familiar:
government secrecy, restrictions on travel, security clearances with
excessive requirements, government surveillance of civilians, covert
operations and more. There is the familiar litany, in other words, of
violations of civil liberties with varying degrees of intensity to which
we have grown, I am afraid, too accustomed over the many years of the Cold
War. 

The purpose of this conference is to explore these issues on the, I hope,
not too optimistic assumptions that the Cold War is in fact over. We have
learned over the last eighteen months there seems to be no end of
surprises that the world has in store and I have no doubt there will be
further surprises. 

So many of the issues we are talking about today are, most regrettably,
vestiges of the McCarthy era in American history. The government, while it
has learned some lessons, has not learned the right lesson -- to eliminate
these vestiges, to eliminate everything that stands in the way of a truly
free society. 

As we meet, of course, there is the unexpected wild card of the Gulf War.
The ACLU, takes no position on the war itself, although we took a very
strong position on ensuring its constitutionality. We all know that civil
liberties suffer in cold war and they most assuredly suffer in hot wars
as well, with government management of news, restrictions on travel,
ethnic and racial targeting and a host of other civil liberties issues
with which we have just begun to grapple. 

For so long we used to quote the supposition that if the Bill of Rights
were put to a vote of the American people it would not carry. In a sense
that should not be surprising, because the Bill of Rights is not a
majoritarian document. The whole point of the Bill of Rights is to
protect the dissenter and the minority. And yet it tugs at my heart that
so small a percentage of the American people recognize that they are not
receiving all of the news that they should be receiving, even during
wartime.
__________________________________________________

III: Special Conference Addresses
Keynote:  The Bicentennial of the Bill of Rights and the End of the Cold War
Dr. Mary Frances Berry

I 'm so pleased to see so many of you here today. When I told one of my
colleagues who serves with me on the Civil Rights Commission -- who is not
of the same political persuasion that I am -- that I would be late to a
meeting today because I had to speak at this conference, he said, "Well,
that's ridiculous! Why should you people be doing that when we're in the
midst of a war? Why don't you have a conference to rally around the flag,
support the troops in the Gulf and to say that right now you ought to be
tightening restrictions on freedom of expression rather than on national
security." So I guess from his perspective it is a matter of great courage
for anybody to show up at a conference like this and have the temerity to
speak at it. 

I believe that while some think this is the worst of times to be
discussing these issues, it is probably the best of times, which is what I
told him. In addition, as I reminded him and I am sure all of you are
aware, most of us here are accustomed to being embattled. That's nothing
new. 

I think there are two things that ought to come out of this conference.
One is to determine how we end the restrictions on freedom of expression
and the steps that can be taken to do that. There's another one, which is
to figure out how to gird our loins, so to speak, for the struggle that is
ongoing and will intensify as the war goes on -- to confine people who
want to express their point of view. That is an urgent crisis. 

We have a war which I, as an historian, think about in terms of something
Barbara Tuckman said in the March of Folly, which is that "old men will
continue to make decisions to go to war in which young men and women will
be killed" and that we should remember that our enemy yesterday is our
friend today and the enemy today that we must pull out all the stops to
defeat, tomorrow will be the country that we will be trying to support and
make strong for some geopolitical reasons. But I, as an historian, know
something else, which is that the only thing we learn from history is that
some people refuse to learn anything from history. 

***

Ironically, as we come together to discuss how to end the Cold War at
home, we find ourselves in the midst of a "hot war" abroad. As hostilities
escalate on both fronts, it is easy to forget that this time last year we
were breathing a sigh of relief at the end of the Cold War, one of the
most traumatic periods in our nation's history. It is also easy to forget
that a few short months ago people were talking about the dream of a
"peace dividend." They asked me to be on a public television show to
discuss the peace dividend. I said to them that they wouldn't want me to
come because I'll explain how we won't have one. We are also in the midst
of celebrating the Bicentennial of the Bill of Rights this year. 

***

This is a harrowing moment in history. But it didn't start on August 2,
1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait. It did not begin on November 8, 1990 when
President Bush unilaterally changed the mission of U.S. forces deployed in
Saudi Arabia to an offensive one, nor on January 16, 1991 when that
offensive began. The shaping of this moment in history has been in the
making for nearly fifty years, which is the 'why' of this conference. 

For nearly fifty years we accepted many dubious practices as necessary to
deal with this enemy that Ronald Reagan later called the "evil empire."
These practices have become bad habits that create excessive behavior in
wartime and unacceptable behavior in times of peace. Bad habits that are
manifesting themselves in this hot war, and if we don't start breaking
them, will continue to undermine our democracy long after Saddam Hussein
is just a dim memory. For nearly fifty years we waged an 'ideological' war
which was at the core of every foreign policy decision and many domestic
decisions as well. For nearly fifty years we demonized the enemy until it
became the evil empire. This demonization of the enemy, which has
historical antecedents, was easily adapted to a new enemy in the persona
of Saddam Hussein. 

For nearly fifty years the fabric of the Cold War has been deeply
entrenched in our national life, woven through all of our institutions,
distorting the democratic process and defining the limits of political
discourse. Using claims of national security as an incantation to
overwhelm all reason and opposition, the executive branch concentrated
awesome political power in its hands. What has happened is a dramatic tilt
in the constitutional balance of power. 

We are here today in this hot war because the Cold War has not ended at
home and its domestic effects are being exacerbated. One concern is
presidential power to engage the nation in offensive military action
without the prior approval of Congress, which has become commonplace. One
can see when the president began to commit troops to Saudi Arabia, that
the results were almost a foregone conclusion as the steps were taken one
by one. If you follow the path of the decision, you will see that before a
single vote was cast in Congress, the debate was framed as one of "support
for our troops in the desert." And what answer can anyone give after that
commitment has been made. 

A second concern that troubles me deeply as an historian is
institutionalized secrecy. It even goes so far as presidents deciding to
conceal information from Americans until after elections, as Mr. Bush did
about his decision to commit us unilaterally to this war. Because, in the
name of national security, Congress has allowed the President to take the
nation to war secretly, through covert paramilitary operations in Asia,
Africa, and Latin America, we have found ourselves involved in a series of
hot wars as regional conflicts heat up.

Because, in the name of national Security, the FBI and other intelligence
agencies controlled by the executive branch have amassed tremendous
extra-constitutional powers, the FBI felt it could, with impunity, target
Arab-Americans for questioning and surveillance. Because in the name of
national security, protesters against US. policy in Central America,
Southern Africa and the Middle East have been systematically harassed,
spied upon and subjected to secret counterintelligence investigations,
including warrantless searches of their homes and offices, people who
oppose the Gulf War ought to be prepared to have the same thing happen to
them. War, by definition, expunges human life. War is also the greatest
threat to civil liberties. 

Another thing that concerns me very greatly is the government taking
actions to preempt popular opposition to this war through censorship of
the press. Pentagon censorship is keeping the American people from knowing
the real nature of the war that is being fought in their name. Also
concerns about the targeting of Arab-Americans by the FBI could have the
effect of intimidating and silencing many potential critics of
Administration policy. 

We also know that civil liberties of Americans serving in the Gulf have
been infringed. The military is administering experimental drugs to
soldiers without their informed consent. The government has been extending
the term of service of volunteers and reservists without their approval.
Service persons are discouraged from participation in religious
activities. Also, mail to and from Saudi Arabia is censored. And when the
shooting stops, U.S. citizens could still be prohibited from traveling to
Iraq if the economic embargo remains in place, and Iraqis could still be
refused visas on "foreign policy" grounds to deliver speeches here in the
U.S. to tell us about their views. 

First Amendment freedoms in this country were a major casualty of the
ideological war against communism. It follows that among the first victims
of "Operation Desert Storm" have been the guardians of the First
Amendment. Under the Pentagon's rules for press coverage we have combat
"pools" that go out with the units in battle and then have to submit their
reports to the authorities before they're transmitted. 

***

It is precisely in times of national crisis such as war that the freedom
of the press and the public's right to know is most critical. Despite the
massive volume of coverage, if you try to keep track of content, you will
find there is very little. We have no sense of the human toll of the
attack on Iraq. We're not sure how many people were killed or injured in
Saudi Arabia or Israel. Press restrictions enable the White House and the
Pentagon to manage the public's perception of the war. We are receiving a
government-shielded version of the hostilities: what we see is a
triumphant, high-tech war fought on bloodless battlefields. From military
and government spokespersons we receive confusing and contradictory
reports that frequently conflict with statements that we were assured
were true only the day before. 

The reason for restricting the press seems alarmingly obvious: fear that
reports and pictures of combat in a desert war would have an adverse
impact on public opinion. Hiding behind "security" concerns, the
government seeks to minimize the political price of sending American
troops into combat, and to protect the military from criticism and
embarrassment. As a result, the haunting and unforgettable images of
battle will be deceptively blurred. 

There were no such restrictions on the press in place during the entire
Vietnam war. One of the things I did in my life was to be a reporter in
Vietnam one summer. I was at Michigan and was in the anti-war movement and
I decided to go see for myself. So I got accredited as a reporter by a
bunch of newspapers and I went to Vietnam and traveled all over the
country. I know how much we laughed in Saigon when the "Five o'clock
Follies" came out every day from the Defense Department to give us a
briefing about what had been going on that day. And we laughed because
there was always some reporter in the room who had just come from wherever
that was and who knew that what they were saying was not the truth. 

The modern-day precedent for censorship was set by the Reagan
Administration's handling of the media during the 1983 invasion of
Grenada. The invasion was documented by Army reporters and military
cameramen completely, and the civilian press was kept out.  Following in
the footsteps of his predecessor, Bush portrayed the 1989 invasion of
Panama as a flawless, nearly bloodless conflict. Not a single photograph,
strip of film or eyewitness account was published about the actual combat.
More than a year later , we still don't know the cost of "Operation Just
Cause" in Panamanian lives. I guess we're not even supposed to care. As
for "Operation Desert Storm," it has been decided that there will be no
solemn arrival ceremonies -- and no press coverage -- for people who are
killed in action. A military spokesman defended this decision by saying,
"There would be too many ceremonies," and therefore they don't want anyone
to cover them. 

Another concern is these interviews of Arab-Americans which are a shameful
and ominous aspect of the Administration's war on civil liberties. If one
watches all the things they are doing with Arab-Americans it increases the
likelihood of people stereotyping Arab-Americans and there have been acts
and threats of violence which have multiplied exponentially since the
beginning of this crisis. 

***

When we examine the FBI's explanation for why it is doing all this it says
they're trying to protect them from possible violations of their civil
rights. Those of us who have been around a while think about another
haunting specter, the post-war experience of African American activists,
whose protection was also within the FBI's jurisdiction. We also think
about the civil rights movement and the people who were involved there and
what happened to them. 

For, when Viola Liuzzo was gunned down in Alabama while on a Freedom Ride
in March 1965, one of the men in the car brandishing a gun was an FBI
informant. When William Bergman was beaten and crippled four years
earlier, the FBI furnished the information that made the attack possible
and stood by, knowing that the local police had made a deal with the Klan
giving them fifteen minutes to attack. When Martin Luther King made his "I
Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 the FBI was there,
not to protect him, but to assess the danger he posed to "the established
political and social order." The next day J. Edgar Hoover convened what
can only be described as a council of war to discuss how to deal with what
the Bureau called the demagoguery of Dr. King. 

By then the FBI had been at war with the civil rights movement for several
years. Its objective, spelled out most clearly in the memorandum
establishing the special Counterintelligence Program dubbed "COINTELPRO -
Black Nationalist," was to "prevent the cohesion and growth of the
African-American movement, to keep it from gaining respectability, and to
prevent the rise of a Black Messiah," someone who could unify, electrify
and lead the movement. 

The most intense operations were directed against groups like the Black
Panther Party, SNCC, CORE, the Nation of Islam, the National Welfare
Rights Organization, the League of Black Revolutionary Workers, the
Republic of New Africa, Black student unions, the Dodge Revolutionary
Union Movement and many local Black churches and communist organizations
struggling for decent living conditions, justice, equality and empowerment
-- all in the name of national security and the fight against communism. 

As is true in so many other contexts during the Cold War era,
anticommunist ideology was so pervasive that it set the terms of debate on
all sides of the civil rights issue. On the one hand, people who opposed
desegregation defamed civil rights advocates by calling them "subversive"
and "red" and "pinkos" and worse. Many of the measures used against
Communists, such as the Internal Security Act, were adopted on the state
level in the South to use against Blacks. On the other hand, while
constitutional rights were being trampled upon by all three branches of
the federal government in the name of fighting communism, the U.S.
Attorney General filed a pro-civil rights brief in Brown v. Board of
Education. This is anomalous unless you understand it was filed by the
Truman Administration in this case because of the view that "it is in the
context of the present world struggle between freedom and tyranny that the
problem of racial discrimination must be viewed." 

While the global situation we face -- the hot war in the Gulf and the
Soviet crackdown in the Baltics -- may appear to be a major obstacle to
our call to end the Cold War at home, it still may be possible to move
forward. A month ago, for the first time in half a century, the President
sought Congress's express authorization to go to war. That's the glimmer
of hope. 

While asking Congress to vote was clearly politically expedient for Bush,
a not irrelevant consideration was the fact that, while he was proclaiming
to the world the prerogative of the United States to defend international
law, he was disregarding our own Constitution. So that vote, whatever
one's view of the outcome may be, marks our first victory in ending the
Cold War mentality at home. Maybe it will be more difficult in the future
for presidents to credibly assert unilateral war making authority. 

President Bush has said that the goal of his Gulf policy is to put in
place a "new world order." I think he picks these terms indiscriminately
without any awareness of context. He never learned what Howard Thurmond,
the distinguished Black theologian, said in his time: "Text without
context is mere pretext." Bush doesn't put anything in context. But his
new world order, and its "kinder, gentler" domestic counterpart, bear
striking resemblance to the old Cold War modalities. 

If we are to realize the goal of the drafters of the Bill of Rights -- to
protect individual liberty against governmental tyranny -- then we must
end the Cold War at home. We must dismantle the national security state,
and we must renew our demand for a peace dividend because it is moral and
it is just. 

It is precisely at crucial moments like this that our work is most
desperately needed. There is never a wrong time to fight for the Bill of
Rights. 
______________________________
Mary Frances Berry is a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She
is a founder of the Free South Africa Movement and a Professor of American
Social Thought and History at the University of Pennsylvania. 
____________________________________________________________

III: Special Conference Addresses
The Resurgence of Democratic Ideals Around the World
Konstanty Gebert

The title of my address strikes me as possibly over-optimistic. At least
twice over the last 45 years, we have witnessed global transformations
which were then interpreted as proof of the "resurgence of democratic
ideals," but which later disappointed those who had invested their hopes
in them. 

***

This time, however, the prospects for a resurgence of democratic ideals
seem so much brighter. For the first time national self-determination,
social change and democratic development seem to be in harmony, and
mutually supportive.... The end of the Cold War has instilled hope in
those who struggle to expand democracy and deepen social change in their
own countries. 

***

Power politics was not an invention of the Cold War, but preceded it and
has survived it. The international environment is more supportive of
democracy than before, but certainly this does not mean that the future of
democracy is assured. 

Democracy itself is a risky proposition.... It is about means, not ends.
It is a good method for avoiding certain undesirable outcomes, but does
not promise much in the way of a better future. The appeal it has for
long-oppressed populations has more to do with their rejection of
oppression than with their endorsement of democracy as such. 

I would like to expound on that, drawing on the Polish experience. Over
the last five decades, the immense majority of Poles have been deprived of
basic civil and sometimes even human rights.... Not until 1989 did Poland
concede basic rights to its citizens.

Solidarity emerged as the victor of a long struggle, fought under the
banner of democracy. Democracy was simply understood as the rule of the
majority; as long as the vast majority of Poles rejected Communism and
supported Solidarity, this caused no theoretical or practical problems.
But Solidarity's unity was intimately connected with the existence of the
Communist enemy. With the enemy gone, unity disappeared, and the question
arose: Who speaks for the majority of the Polish people? 

The simple democratic answer is [to] hold an election and find out. The
results are inconclusive, and worrying. In the semi-free parliamentary
elections of 1989, Solidarity won an astounding victory, taking all but
one of the parliamentary seats it could stand for under the restrictive
law. But the election was more of a plebiscite: it was about what the
country did not want -- Communism -- and not about what it wanted.... More
important still, forty percent of eligible voters did not bother to go to
the polls.

***

In the absence of a clear-cut electoral majority other spokesmen claim to
speak in the name of the Polish people. The Catholic church is one. It
represents the major element of continuity in Poland's tormented
history.... It grants itself a right to intervene in all aspects of
national life in order to keep them consistent with its teachings. 

***

The effects are there for all to see: a law banning abortion has been
passed by the Senate; religion has been reintroduced to the schools; there
is talk of banning divorce. 

President Walesa presents himself as the embodiment of Solidarity's
struggle, and of Poland's age-long struggle for independence. He has
embarked on a course of political changes, which are as sweeping as they
are unconstitutional. 

Democracy in Poland is in even deeper trouble than these remarks would
imply.... When democracy became political practice, the passion it
inspired was gone, and people started turning to other ideologies....
Nationalism and religious fundamentalism are two such ideologies.

I believe some of my remarks can be applied to countries other than
Poland.... And to avoid dampening the enthusiasm we feel as we observe
entire nations moving to democracy, we must also be aware that though the
odds are better than before, the stakes are just as high.
______________________________
Konstanty Gebert is a political columnist and contributor to several
Polish newspapers and magazines. He was one of the most important voices
in the underground press after martial law was declared in Poland in 1981,
writing under the pen name of David Warszawsla.
__________________________________________________

III: Special Conference Addresses
Achieving the Democratic Ideal
The Honorable Ronald V. Dellums 

I want to speak against the backdrop of the Persian Gulf War which, in my
opinion, is the latest manifestation of the national security state and an
extraordinary threat to the achievement of democratic ideals in our
society. 

I came to Congress against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, the
Vietnam War, the struggle for the liberation of women, the struggle for
the preservation of the environment, the struggle for the protection of
consumers and workers. And my constituency sent me here having made a
solemn contract to walk on the floor of the United States Congress, and in
the context of that institution, struggle as diligently as I could for
peace and for a just society -- economic and human justice. 

The first two years I served on the Foreign Affairs Committee because that
was the only opening I could obtain. I'm a social worker by training. I
really, in one sense, came to Congress to write new programs to address
the problems of human misery because many of us in the Black community
wanted to go forward to challenge and to change policy so we could reach
back to our communities and help our fellow sisters and brothers. So I
really came to write new policies to eradicate poverty, hunger, disease,
homelessness, hopelessness, unemployment, the myriad of human problems
that confront people and force them to experience great human misery. 

I got up on the floor many times trying to raise my voice as strongly and
effectively as I could for peace and for radically altering the nature of
American priorities. But on numerous occasions my colleagues would come up
to me after I had finished speaking and would say I spoke eloquently to
the priorities and the human condition, but you are extremely naive about
the dangers of the world. You are extremely naive about the communist
menace, the domino effect. Yes, we do want to solve the problems of people
in this country but these problems pale in the wake of the threat of the
Soviet Union, the threat of communism over-running the planet. We have to
get on with that business before we can deal with the priority issues that
you so powerfully raise. 

Then when I was re-elected in January 1973, I now had two years seniority.
I now had the opportunity to seek other assignments. I thought about a
principle I had learned in graduate school in social work-- you start
where people are, not where they ought to be. This country is not going to
address these problems until we deal with the notion of the national
security state, until we deal with the notions of the Cold War that has
masqueraded as American foreign policy for over forty years. After some
serious deliberation I sought membership on the House Arms Services
Committee. But I didn't come to Congress to get in bed with MX missiles
and Trident submarines and cruise missiles and B2 bombers. I came to do
something very different but I realized I could never get back to that
until I challenged them where they were. So I decided that I would never
let any other member of Congress define me as naive about the world, naive
about the needs of our military, so I went on the Arms Services Committee
to learn Pentagonese and missile capability and strategy. To be as
competent as possible in these arenas, to challenge them in the citadel of
militarism. So I went on the Arms Services Committee to raise my voice in
the name of peace, to try to challenge increasing military budgets,
greater militarization of America and re directing the human priorities of
this country. 

For eighteen of the twenty years I have been in Congress I have been
marching up that hill. In 1971 only a handful of members of Congress were
willing to stand in opposition to the Vietnam War. Public opinion had not
arrived at being in opposition to the war in Vietnam so debate in the
Congress was virtually silenced. But some of us continued to raise our
voices, in concert with other people who were the dissenters and the
protesters and the educators. We struggled and we educated America to the
point where we affected public opinion, and public opinion, in turn,
forced the Congress of the United States to end the war in Vietnam by
ending its funding base. 

We started to march forward. But then came Ronald Reagan with massive and
rapid expansion of our military budget. In 1971 the military budget was 79
billion dollars against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. When Ronald
Reagan left office we were spending in the neighborhood of 300 billion
dollars a year on the military budget. We saw a nation move from the
policy of nuclear deterrence to nuclear war-fighting capability where we
embraced the ultimate oxymoron -- winning a nuclear war. We see draconian
cuts in social programs, massive step-back from a commitment to address
the human misery of our fellow human beings. 

***

Then last year the most incredible thing [happened]. We started to win.
The Berlin wall came crumbling down. Eastern Europeans and Western
Europeans started to marry each other. Unification. We had an invasion of
Eastern Europeans into Western Europe not to wage war, but to shop. For a
moment all of us said we finally lived long enough. We see the Cold War
crumbling. We saw Margaret Thatcher, no left-wing extremist by any stretch
of the imagination, saying that the Cold War was over. We started to quote
her. The chair of the Armed Services Committee accepted the Dellums
Amendment to kill the B2 bomber, my heart swelled. Tears came to my eyes.
We were about to win. And maybe after a while I can get back to why I
really came to the Congress. Because if the truth be known we are on the
verge of losing an entire generation of our young people, killing and
dying in the streets of America. 

So there's a great ray of hope. But then Saddam Hussein crossed the
borders into Kuwait. President Bush discovers Saddam Hussein in a very
different way. A year ago not one of you in this room would have accepted
a bet that we would be at war. We were drunk with the idealism that
finally our perspective was beginning to win, that the reality of the Cold
War was crumbling. President Bush put American troops into Saudi Arabia,
garnered a coalition ostensibly stopping the aggression beyond that point.
a early all of us have a responsibility to raise our voices in opposition
to the aggression because any sane and rational human being must challenge
force and violence and aggression as a way of solving problems. Then
President Bush took it to the next step. He escalated the troops. I knew
then that we were going to war, that our nation was engaging in what I
perceive to be the immoral strategy of brinksmanship -- threatening war as
a way of achieving peace. A high-stakes gamble because if you lose,
hundreds of thousands of people are placed in harm's way. 

On October 9, after sitting down and writing what I would like to think
was a very articulate letter to the President, 31 members of Congress
joined me in sending that letter to the President. In that letter we
raised concern about this escalation of troops, about using brinkmanship
as a tool of foreign policy, about moving from a defend-and-deter posture
to offensive military options. We said that we should rely more heavily on
sanctions, engage in greater aggressive diplomacy, that we ought to use
international institutions such as the International Court of Justice and
the United Nations as a way of attempting to solve these problems without
force and violence and without war. And we said to the President that our
reading of the Constitution said that you do not have the power to take us
to war. I didn't receive an answer from the President until November 6.
The letter read, in part: "sanctions are working effectively." I called
together a meeting of concerned members of Congress and reached out to
members to talk about where we were and what our response should be to it.
And I remember in the room I referred to myself as a peace activist and I
started to give my thumping speech about peace and our responsibility to
challenge this madness. One of my colleagues' original response was to
recoil from that comment. 

At that moment I had to mature very quickly because it wasn't about Ron
Dellums taking a posture, it wasn't about the handful of us who had the
courage or the tenacity or the freedom to stand up and speak out without
compromise, but it was whether we had the capacity to pull together a
coalition strong enough to actually to stop this war. Using social work
skills I appointed all of the dissenters in the room and the people who
had questions as drafters of the statement that the coalition could rally
around. Later that evening they came back with an extraordinary statement.
I knew that I could sign whatever they wrote but I wasn't sure some people
could sign whatever I wrote. These folks wrote that they opposed the
offensive use of force in the Persian Gulf, we question this incredible
build-up, we think sanctions ought to work, we think greater diplomacy
ought to be used, and finally we say unequivocally that if you choose to
use force you must come to us under Article I, Section 8 of the
Constitution. Eighty-two people signed that letter in the waning days of
the Congress. We simply ran out of time. We asked for an emergency meeting
with the Speaker, which we were granted. We gave the Speaker that
statement and wanted him to present it to the President of the United
States and let the President know that there is a concerned and
considerable voice in the Congress (a) in opposition to war in the Persian
Gulf, (b) in support of economic sanctions and diplomatic efforts, and (c)
who state resolutely that the President does not have the power alone to
take us to war. Then the Congress adjourned and we went our various ways. 

***

One day my special assistant called me and delivered a message from one of
my significant others in the Congress that it was his considered opinion
that he thought this Administration was marching to war. I told him to get
in touch with the Center for Constitutional Rights. I said I'm not a
lawyer but have them look at the question of whether or not I would have
standing, either alone or with a group of my colleagues, to file for
declarative relief and injunctive relief on the other hand to stop the
President from going to war on the grounds that to do so would violate my
rights and prerogatives as a member of Congress under Article I, Section 8
of the Constitution. And to my pleasant surprise the lawyers came back and
said this was a fantastic case. That most of the time we are litigating
after the fact and this was now before the fact. 

Let me tell you what my strategy was. One, I wanted to throw a
monkey-wrench into the process because millions of American people were
being marched down the path to think that war was inevitable. Two, to
focus the American people's attention on the reality that this is a
constitutional form of government because if we could demand rigid
adherence to the Constitution with respect to the declaration of war and
that the decision would come to the Congress of the United States, the
Congress would weigh the mail, count the phone calls, send out
questionnaires, spend money polling public opinion every day. I felt alone
we could not stop the President from going to war because in many ways the
President is insulated from public opinion, but I knew that the Congress
was not. I knew that if we could ever force the President to have to ask
and that the Congress would debate the question, the probability of
victory would increase at a tremendous level. 

The judge, while he didn't give us injunctive relief, did say (a) the
court was not prepared to read out of the Constitution Article I, Section
8, (b) that the Congress alone had the right to declare war, (c) that for
the U.S. to attack offensively would, in his estimation, be a definition
of war under the Constitution. He didn't give us the injunctive relief
because at that moment the court didn't see what I saw: the imminent
nature of this war, but he did underscore our position. Then he went
further to say that while the Congress has the power as a practical
matter, sometimes the Congress sidesteps its constitutional
responsibility, for politically-sensitive or expedient reasons chooses not
to implement its constitutional prerogatives. He thought that while the 54
of us were significant, that we did not comprise the majority of the
Congress. So that if the majority of Congress joined me in the lawsuit, or
passed a resolution saying we want to exercise that prerogative of
deciding for or against the use of force, that would signal to the court
that the Congress in this instance was prepared to deal with it. 

On that level I want to say to you that we won. We forced the President to
ask for the authority to use force and we forced the Congress to debate
the issue. Then I was hoping on America because I want to come to a very
painful point. We missed an incredible moment. Because our strategy worked
to that point. We didn't educate and mobilize quickly or effectively
enough, maybe because many of us thought that going to war with Iraq was
so crazy. For whatever reason, we didn't quite get the young people
mobilized quickly enough. On the vote on exercising constitutional
prerogatives, we are now on record saying we reserve unto ourselves the
constitutional prerogatives. The President presented his request for the
right to use force. We lost 250 183. A 67 vote difference. Thirty-four
votes the other way and the Congress of the United States would have gone
on record opposing the use of force. If you look at history, we came
close. We lost an important moment. What my lawsuit was designed to try to
do was to say to you: get mobilized quickly. I believe we will look back
at this moment and realize we lost an incredible opportunity. I believe
the consequences of this war are so ominous and so far-reaching. We were
trying to say to America that it's easier to stop a war before it starts
than after it starts. Here we are on the verge of a land war that has the
capacity to kill at a level that would stagger the imagination. 

I continue to believe that there is an alternative to killing and dying as
a way of solving international disputes so I mounted the podium during
that debate and challenged war. I said to the Congress to be neither fool
nor knave. The decision we're about to make is tantamount to a declaration
of war. Each member ought to vote on the basis of his or her conscience.
The test of conscience is the greatest test because it asks the most
fundamental question: what is right. 

In the aftermath of this war what will they seek? Smarter bombs? More of
them at the expense of resources that we desperately need to address the
human misery of our people? Even though public opinion is not with us at
this moment and even though the point of view that I articulated is in the
minority, we have a political and moral imperative to continue to raise
our voices to stop this war. Every day that it goes forward the potential
devastation increases and the near-term and long-term implications expand.
We must now begin the painful effort to educate American people. It will
be more difficult now than it was before the war started. Now you have
this "who are these unpatriotic people dissenting. These people in the
streets don't represent the majority." Well who ever said you have to be
in the majority in order to dissent? Protest and demonstration and dissent
is an integral part of American life and we must demand the right to
continue to do that. How can you applaud the Chinese who put their lives
on the line in Tiananmen square? How can you applaud the people in Eastern
Europe who brought down the Berlin Wall by the sheer power of their
numbers and their desire to gain control of their own destiny, and then
suddenly turn to our own people and say 'You cannot dissent." There's
something fundamentally contradictory in that. We must educate our
community about the havoc and the death and destruction. We use
euphemisms. Rather than killing we call it "collateral damage." 

American people need to know that war at its basis is suffering and dying
and killing and stench and bleeding and breaking. We must say to America
that censorship denies you as a people in a democratic society the right
to know what you need to know to make rational and intelligent decisions. 

Our job will be more difficult, sisters and brothers. But we have no other
alternative but to stand out there, to continue to raise our voices, to
continue not only to talk about peace in the Persian Gulf but to withdraw
from the mentality of war. We now have the opportunity to look at the
future right now. We are seeing modern warfare and we have to educate
American people not to become enamored of the technology but to be
frightened of it. We have to take the world to a better place. 

Here's our chance to say there's a better way. To say that solving the
problems through peace and diplomacy and international cooperation and
international institutions is the way to go and that high-tech weaponry
will not be our salvation but our demise, and that big military budgets
will not be our salvation but our demise. 

Do not construe my remarks to mean that we should not continue to remain
resolute, optimistic and idealistic. We can still bring change. 
______________________________
The Honorable Ron Dellums represents California's 8th Congressional
District in the House of Representatives. Dellums was the principal
plaintiff in the lawsuit to enforce the constitutional mandate granting
Congress the authority to declare war. 
__________________________________________________

IV:  The Domestic Legacy of the Cold War
The Legacy of Cold War Restrictions on Civil Liberties
Morton H. Halperin

The one way it is clear the Cold War is over is that the Soviet threat and
the view of the international communist conspiracy has receded. It is
difficult now to argue that we face the same threat that was used to
justify previous restrictions. 

Congressional hearings and reports during the Cold War led Americans to
believe we were surrounded by an international communist movement which
threatened the very survival of our nation. 

Some of the worst restrictions were removed as the McCarthy era ended but
some are being used in the Gulf War, which clearly illustrates the danger
of allowing such restrictions to remain in effect. 

The FBI has vastly stepped up its program of surveillance targeted at
Arab-Americans [who] engage in lawful political activity, because the
Bureau assumes, as it previously assumed with the civil rights and
anti-war movements, that anyone who engages in lawful political activity
will "so quickly become frustrated that they will turn to illegal and
terrorist activity." 

This program includes Fourth Amendment rights violations in the form of
wiretaps, illegal searches, and harassment of people in the Arab-American
community. Such FBI power is based not on legislation but on Attorney
General guidelines which authorize the Bureau to engage in domestic
security investigations and foreign counter-intelligence investigations. 

What are needed, as has been clear in reports of the House and Senate
Intelligence Committees, are guidelines enacted by Congress. These
guidelines need to be public and need to be based on two basic principles:
(1) the government only investigates criminal activity, and (2) the
government may not investigate or collect information about lawful
political activity. These principles certainly are not in the operational
procedures and activities of intelligence agencies. 

Another area is the war powers question. Forcing the Congress to vote --
which is literally what happened in the Gulf because of public outcry --
was a relatively small victory because that vote came late in the process.
The Constitution requires that security commitments be made by Congress
either through legislation or treaties. Neither were done. 

The President dispatched troops to the Middle East to defend a country
with which we had no treaty, without consulting the Congress and without
public debate. We have come so far that the initial deployment of troops
to the Persian Gulf elicited no concern that the President was violating
constitutional powers. 

We have the legacy of covert operations. I believe that behind every
international crisis of the Cold War period was a triggering event of a
covert operation. If you go back to events that led first to the Iran-Iraq
war and then to the current crisis, you will find some covert operations
we know about and others we do not know about which we will later learn
played a critical role, as it did in the Korean War and a number of other
episodes. 

We have let the environment be corrupted by national security claims. For
years nuclear weapons production facilities were exempt from environmental
protection laws and the Supreme Court upheld a general exemption from
environmental protection laws when the government mumbled "national
security." 

Congress authorized the President to waive environmental laws when
"necessary for national security." The Pentagon has been given the
authority to avoid normal requirements of environmental impact statements. 

The way the Supreme Court has dealt with this issue is but one
manifestation of a very serious deterioration of the Court's willingness
to take on the executive branch when it invokes claims of national
security. There has come to be a tradition in the judicial branch that
when the nation is at war, courts will defer.

Finally, there is pervasive secrecy and acceptance of prior restraints in
the press and acceptance of the closing of a base where bodies return,
along with an acceptance that the government can tell us which reporters
can cover the war. 

All this makes it dear that the legacy of the Cold War restrictions are
having an important effect on the way the public can learn about, and
dissent from, the current policies in the Persian Gulf. 

There are two tasks which we have: (1) fight those restrictions now, and
(2) come away with a determination that we will remove the legacy of the
Cold War and the way that it has poisoned the political and constitutional
processes of this country. 
______________________________
Morton H. Halperin is Director of the Washington Office of the ACLU and
the Center for National Security Studies. He was a senior member of the
National Security Council staff in 1969. 
__________________________________________________

IV: The Domestic Legacy of the Cold War
McCarthyite Persecution: A Personal Account
Lillie Albertson

The history of any struggle is made up of numerous small stories. Mine is
just one of many. 

My husband, William Albertson and I were members of the United States
Communist Party. I joined the Party in 1948. Bill had been a leading
figure and functionary in the Party for many years. He had joined the
Party in 1927 as a student at the University of Pittsburgh.

Because we had chosen to join a left wing movement committed to socialism,
our family and friends were constantly harassed, persecuted and prosecuted
by the United States government. We broke no laws except the unwritten
rule against advocating for socialism.

Our telephones were tapped for years. Bill and I were followed. FBI agents
would approach us, our co-workers and bosses, telling them that they had
"Reds working for them." Not surprisingly, we would be let go with no
explanation. 

My role in the party was relatively unimportant. Bill, on the other hand,
was on the national committee. This singled him out for special attention
by the FBI. My husband was hounded constantly. 

In 1953 he was prosecuted under the Smith Act on a warrant issued from
Pittsburgh and was one of the "Pittsburgh 6" Smith Act victims. Bill was
sentenced to 60 days in jail for contempt of court during the trial, for
refusing to name others present at a meeting. He told the court: "My wife
and I have tried to raise our children in the best traditions of the
American labor movement. We have given them a hatred for spies, stool
pigeons and scabs. I could not look my children in the face if I violated
those traditions." My husband's words were ironic in their prophesy. 

Bill was convicted, along with four other defendants, on the Smith Act
charges of conspiring to teach and advocate the violent overthrow of the
government. The convictions, based on the testimony of seven FBI
informers, were later reversed by the Supreme Court when the government
admitted that its key witness lied under oath. The witness wasn't
prosecuted for perjury and the government chose not to retry the case.
Essentially it took four years, sixty days in jail for Bill, and who knows
how many tax payer dollars for the government to admit that the charges
against my husband and the others were falsehoods they created. 

In 1962, Bill was hauled before the Subversive Activities Control Board by
then Attorney General, Robert Kennedy. This was the first step in a
proceeding under the McCarran Act requiring Bill to register as a member
of the Communist Party. 

Since Bill had broken no laws, the government turned to harassment instead
of indictment. This was a deliberate and secret attempt to silence us. You
can fight charges in a court of law, but how does one fight a secret army
who uses harassment, slander, rumors and forgery as their weapons of
choice? 

Finally, one June evening in 1964, it all came to a head. Three men from
the party came to our home. They were co-workers, friends, comrades of
Bill's. They took my husband for a walk. They would not speak in the
house. Upon their return I could see something was terribly wrong. My
husband was not the same man that had walked out with them earlier. 

They stated they had positive evidence that Bill was an informant for the
FBI. They showed me a note, claiming it was Bill's handwriting. It had
been found in a car in which Bill had been a passenger a few days earlier.
Although the writing was similar, I knew it was not Bill's. I had known
Bill for 15 years, but I could never read his writing. Whoever wrote this
letter had taken great pains to make sure it was legible. 

The note was addressed "Dear Joe," and appeared to be an informer's report
to his FBI contact. It was signed "Bill." They insisted this note proved
Bill was guilty and that I must take our child and abandon him. Knowing
the character of my husband, I knew these accusations were false. Bill
would sooner die than inform on others. 

Bill, his 80 year old mother and I were expelled from the party. Bill was
publicly identified-Informer, Stool Pigeon, Police Agent-in the world
press. 

We were spat upon, threatened and assaulted by our former friends and
associates. Bill was fired from his job. Our child was also threatened.
Our home was burned. Friends would have nothing to do with us, for fear of
guilt by association. 

We were totally alone...isolated. The emotional effect this had on our
family was catastrophic. Bill researched, wrote, pleaded and appealed to
the party--doing everything humanly possible to vindicate himself and be
reinstated. One of the most painful experiences of my life was watching a
destroyed man try to save himself - especially when I knew that the truth
may never be known in our lifetime. 

My husband was crushed. He grew more and more despondent. I was afraid to
leave him alone. His life had been taken from him. Even his mother said,
"It would have been better if they had killed you, like in the old
country." Devastated, he agreed. However, he was alive and the only thing
to do was fight to clear himself of the most despicable charge that can be
leveled at a political activist: that of a police spy. 

The FBI would contact us with offers of money if Bill would serve as an
informer: "After all, the party has thrown you out, why should you persist
in your loyalty?" The IRS made a similar offer. When Bill refused, we were
harassed with fraudulent income tax charges at a time when our total
family income was $3,400. Because no one would give Bill permanent
employment, I was the only provider. 

In 1972, my husband died, ending his misery. In 1975 I received a phone
call from Frank Donner, an attorney and a family friend. A document that
had surfaced under the Freedom of Information Act came into his hands
proving the FBI had framed Bill. Frank told me that in 1973 the Attorney
General had been required to turn over documents describing the FBI's
COINTELPRO activities. 

Buried in the documents was a report dated January 6, 1965: Communist
Party USA - Counter-Intelligence Program - Disruption of Hate Groups. The
second paragraph begins with a deleted name and then goes on to say, "The
most active and effective functionary of the New York District, Communist
Party USA and leading national officer of the party, through our
counter-intelligence efforts has been expelled from the party...." 

***

The report discussed the effects of the FBI operation, saying it has
discouraged many dedicated Communists from activities and discredited the
party in the eyes of the Soviets. In the course of processing these
documents, an FBI clerk apparently eliminated Bill's name at the beginning
of the report and neglected to do so when it recurred near the end. 

The truth had finally surfaced.... But what could I do with this new
information? I was put in touch with the ACLU. With their help I was able
to fight back. It was the beginning of 14 years of litigation.... At every
turn our efforts to gain information were met with a cloak of darkness
under the guise of "national security." Eventually we gained access to
30,000 pages of documents concerning our family. Verbatim conversations of
phone calls, years of surveillance, copies of private medical records,
bank records, pictures and more.... Was it really a national security
issue that Bill thought Willie Mays was a better center fielder than
Mickey Mantle? 

In addition to the 30,000 pages that I have received, I am told there are
over 50,000 more in existence. Although much is blacked out in the files,
several things are clear -- J. Edgar Hoover personally approved the
operation against my husband. 

They had used my husband as the test to see if they could duplicate
handwriting well enough to frame a high ranking adversary and then attempt
to turn him into an informant once he had been ostracized. This is called
a "Snitch Jacket Operation." J. Edgar Hoover wrote compliments for a job
well done to the agents responsible for this COINTELPRO operation. 

In the fall of 1989, as we were preparing to go before the Supreme Court,
the Justice Department offered to settle this case. I accepted their offer
of $170,000. Fourteen years is too long a fight. It was time to let my
husband's memory rest. He had been vindicated. 

The FBI admitted no wrong. To this day they refuse to acknowledge what
their own files so clearly state: That they framed my husband and
disrupted our lives, simply because we exercised our lawful right to
engage in political activity and association. 

I must say it would not have been possible for me to carry on this fight
without the dedication and unfailing support of the American Civil
Liberties Union and the volunteer work by a number of generous lawyers and
law firms. 

My story is only one of many. If it were not for a clerical error, the
truth may never have been told. We who are here today have a
responsibility to keep others from suffering my husband's fate. 
______________________________
Lillie Albertson is employed by the University of Massachusetts. 
__________________________________________________

IV: The Domestic Legacy of the Cold War
Comments on the Cold War and the Human Mind
Milton Schwebel

McCarthyism was the Cold War at its worst.... These years set a pattern of
intimidation and thought control that has had enduring effects.
McCarthyism was a magnified form of what had been the rather typical
political climate in America from about 1870. Yet it did come as a shock;
after all, our country had just fought a costly war for freedom,
participated in the creation of a United Nations and witnessed people
world-wide struggling to liberate themselves from the yolk of colonialism.
One way or the other, the Cold War intruded upon the consciousness of all
people. 

***

Einstein defined academic freedom as the right to search for the truth and
publish and teach what one holds to be true. A 1956 study of the "academic
mind" reveals how eroded this right was. Lengthy personal interviews with
2,451 randomly selected college social science professors yielded the
following results: 61 percent reported that an F.B.I. agent talked with
them one or more times in the previous year; 40 percent worried [that]
students might give a warped version of what was said in class which would
lead to false ideas about the teacher's political beliefs; 25 percent said
they went out of their way to refrain from expressing certain opinions or
participating in certain activities. How strangely totalitarian this
sounds. 

The obvious effect of intimidation is the conscious avoidance of
controversy. The less obvious result is the gradual elimination of
controversial topics from one's lectures. This response to a sustained
assault on academic freedom is so very damaging because even after the
impetus for it subsides, the unconscious behavior persists. 

Today, long after McCarthyism, an organization known as Accuracy in
Academia claims that it knows the truth better than teachers. Its goal is
to use students to monitor classroom teaching for the purpose of detecting
"error." Ordinarily such intimidation falls most heavily on non-tenured
faculty, on those who teach the larger proportion of undergraduate
students. 

One important Cold War development has been the
academic-government-industry linkage. Today the research of many
professors at leading universities is supported by federal funds. A very
substantial amount supports studies and consultation for the military.

The result of such Department of Defense predominance goes deeper than the
funding. When, in 1987, the biology department at MIT voted to reject
Pentagon funds, the MIT administration compelled the faculty to reverse
their decision by threatening to deny them Institute support. An end
result is noted by an engineering professor: "It is hardly surprising that
military research in the university leads to military-centered
undergraduate curricula." 

***

Which priorities the nation chooses will depend upon the public's
knowledge about the actual policies of its government. But the public
still suffers from what has probably been the greatest cost of the Cold
War -- reduced access to reliable information.

The assault on the news and cultural media during the McCarthy period
instituted the kind of safe conformity that denies citizens the diversity
of opinion and dissent from government positions that is vital to rational
decision making in a democracy. This process leads to two fateful results:
(1) the public catches on too late to spare lives and resources. and (2)
the public feels helpless and apathetic and does not even bother to vote. 

The Cold War influenced our psyche in other subtle ways. It compelled us
to live with the knowledge that all life could be extinguished through
error or human folly. During times of crisis, as in the early 1960s and
1980s, many children and teenagers lived with fear. It does not take a
great leap of logic to connect such awareness with a tendency to live fast
and engage in so-called adult activity -- sex, alcohol and drugs. 

The atomic/nuclear age is coterminous with the Cold War. The external
threat was used to frighten the population, rationalize bloated defense
budgets and, all in all, turn the nation's attention away from policies
that have as their goal something so simple and ordinary as human happiness.
______________________________
Milton Schwebel is Senior Research Scholar with Harvard Medical School's
Center for Psychological Studies in the Nuclear Age and Professor Emeritus
at Rutgers University. He is the author of several books and articles, and
is a member of the editorial board of seven journals.
__________________________________________________

IV: The Domestic Legacy of the Cold War
The Cold War's Impact on the African American Community
Gerald Horne

The Cold War and its close companion, the Red Scare, had a contradictory
impact on the struggle for civil rights. We had an expansion of civil
rights in the 1950s at a time when civil liberties were being restricted.
Washington found it difficult to win hearts and minds in the world and
point to Moscow as a violator of civil liberties when Blacks in this
country were being treated as second class citizens. This helped create a
dynamic which led to an expansion of civil rights. 

***

The civil rights movement, in turn, helped to undermine the domestic basis
of the Cold War. After the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 some of the
first High Court decisions emerged that retreated from the toxic impact of
McCarthyism. 

So the Cold War did create conditions allowing civil rights concessions to
emerge, but the price paid - breaking with the Black left - was so high
one has to question whether it was worth it

***

For example, we know that the affirmative action Executive Order issued by
FDR came in the context of the build-up to WWII and the threat by A.
Phillip Randolph to have a march in Washington. On the other hand, we
recognize that part of the Cold War involved a need to oust Blacks on the
left from preeminent positions in the civil rights movements; so we saw
the blacklisting of Paul Robeson and the ouster of W.E.B. DuBois from the
NAACP in 1948. This tended to weaken the struggle for civil rights and
weakened efforts by Blacks on the left to focus on issues of
redistribution of wealth.

***

Certainly it set the stage for narrow-nationalism and centrist attitudes
in the Black community that made it difficult to struggle against the Cold
War and weakened allies of the Black community -- the labor and peace
movements in particular. 

The domestic attack on dissent that accompanied the Cold War tended to
strengthen the right wing which helped to tilt the political balance
toward militarism and plunging the U.S. into militarist solutions to
sensitive diplomatic and political problems. Part of the basis for the
attack on domestic dissent is the notion that dissenters were basically
the fifth column from Moscow and that any social upheaval was an
expression of the "hand of Moscow." Right-wing forces used anti-communist
hysteria to destabilize anti-racist reform itself and particularly to
destabilize any critical approach to U.S. foreign policy. This reached its
apotheosis during the 1988 presidential campaign when even the idea of
being a 'liberal" was considered outrageous. 

Well, we see that that particular thesis has been weakened because Moscow
has retreated; yet we still see social upheaval taking place in the world.
One would wonder when people in the State Department are going to
recognize that the premise and predicate of many of their policies has
been eradicated. 

***

Finally, with regard to this new world order that is allegedly emerging,
it seems that part of this new order may involve the erosion of this
500-year trend of global white supremacy which also has significant
effects for the Black community, the civil rights movement and this country.
______________________________
Gerald Horne is the Chairman of the Department of Black Studies at the
University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Black and
Red: W.E.B. DuBois & the Afro-American Response to the Cold War,
1944-1963. 
__________________________________________________

V: Unlocking the Doors to Government Information
Secrecy and the Accurate Recording of History
Page Putnam Miller

As an historian and as an advocate for the historical profession, I am
going to speak from the perspective of three basic presuppositions. 

First, I believe that an understanding of the history of American foreign
relations should be a clear priority for the present and for future policy
makers, as well as for scholars and citizens. The bedrock of foreign
policy information and for the conduct of foreign policy should rest on an
accurate record of what has gone on before. 

Second, there are legitimate national security needs that must receive
considerable consideration. However, we are concerned that this
consideration and the claim for national security has been an enormous
argument that has become the grounds for extreme over-classification. We
believe the extent to which scholars and citizens are denied access to
information and the duration of denials-how long these records continue to
be withheld -- should be kept to a minimum. 

A third point: our ability to understand post World War II history is
being seriously hampered by over-restrictive access to historical
documents. 

We have a system that encourages classification to the extent that there
are now probably over a trillion classified documents. The method for
declassifying these records is basically a page by page review, and the
amount of money being spent on declassification is really very small. The
National Archives is basically given this responsibility and they have a
staff of only a handful working full-time on declassification. 

***

I'm speaking here of systematic declassification of older records. This is
as opposed to the Freedom of Information Act, which of course historians
use and have to rely on because the basic systematic declassification of
older records is occurring at such a slow pace. 

With these three points in mind, historians have been extremely frustrated
over the last decade. We have passed resolutions, we have written letters
to members of Congress, we have talked with legislative aides, and very
little has happened. 

***

Let me review for you briefly how historians gain access to information
and have done research, particularly in the field of diplomatic history.
Before the 1930's, most history was written by scholarly gentlemen and
they simply went to the State Department with their credentials and were
allowed to see necessary documents. In the mid-30's the National Archives
was established and most State Department records were transferred
there.... Documents were declassified in a fairly orderly manner. However,
we did not have a policy for declassification until 1972 when President
Nixon issued Executive Order 11652. Based on that order, records were to
be declassified after 30 years, given certain exceptions. 

Then we had a Carter order soon after that, and then in 1982 there was the
Reagan Executive Order 12356, which eliminated the time period. The
message of the Reagan order was basically that when in doubt, records
should continue to be classified.... The problem of getting access to
documents has become increasingly difficult. 

***

Now let me turn to a glimmer of hope, which involves the Foreign Relations
Series of the State Department, a collection of documents that gives us an
idea of the basic development of our foreign relations. 

There was legislation introduced this past summer that dealt with this
Series.... It included a section that called for all State Department
records over thirty years old, with a few exceptions for extremely
sensitive information, to be declassified.... This legislation gave us a
vehicle to say to the public . . . our concerns about declassification. 

We are feeling good about this bill because the ranking members of both
the majority and minority sides of the Foreign Relations Committee in the
Senate have supported this legislation. They feel the public does have a
right to know and that the State Department has been far too secretive and
restrictive in their access to records. 

* Editor's Note: The proposed legislation is now part of the Foreign
Relations Authorization Act, FY 1992 and 1993, signed into law by
President Bush on October 28, 1991. The law requires that the series be
"thorough, accurate and reliable," and reestablishes the thirty-year rule
for declassification. 
______________________________
Page Putnam Miller is Director of the National Coordinating Committee for
the Promotion of History. She is the recipient of a Distinguished Service
Award from the Society of American Archivists for her work in restoring
the independence of the National Archives.
__________________________________________________

V: Unlocking the Doors to Government Information
An Insider's Story
Roger Pilon

What I am here to do basically is tell you a story of my own experience in
being the subject of an espionage investigation while I was serving in the
Reagan Justice Department. 

Let me begin with probably the place to begin, namely, I got a call from
the Security Officer at the Justice Department . . . early in January
1988, telling me that two men from the FBI wanted to speak with me . . .
Well, since my wife had gotten a similar call the day before in connection
with a background investigation that was being done on her in connection
with her appointment to be Assistant Secretary of the Interior for
International Affairs, bells went off.... My suspicions were confirmed
shortly thereafter. The background investigation on Juliana had been
proceeding for probably five months. 

I sat down with the two agents. We discussed what I had done during my
service at the State Department: the officials I had met, whether anybody
asked to see classified documents, and so forth. Then one put a document
down. "Did you ever see this?" I looked at a classified report to Congress
on the activities-communist influence on activities -- of the ANC, I
believe. I looked at it and said, "I don't know. I saw scores of these
every day. It doesn't ring any bell." He responded: "You gave that
document to your wife, and your wife gave it to officials of the South
African government. You want to tell us about it?" And I said, 'What makes
you think that?" 'We're not going to tell you." That line is very
important, because that was the line that was repeated from there on out.
It was a positively Kafkaesque nightmare in which the allegation is made,
but you're never told what the basis of the allegation is. 

My wife had gone through the same experience with her interview, and she
too was flabbergasted and she too was told nothing about the basis of
it.... We headed over to a lawyer and began to lay out the situation. The
thing the agents wanted most was to get us into the polygraph
situation.... I was put on administrative leave, where I remained for nine
months ... with orders to report my comings and goings from home. I was
essentially under house arrest. For months this went on. We couldn't get
any information.... We started trying to piece together what this case was
all about, simply from the interviews that had taken place. This was in
January. In April, Juliana was denied the appointment. The White House
withdrew it simply because they wouldn't give her the security clearance.
In June the proposition was put to me by the department: either resign or
we'll terminate you. 

I told my lawyer who was Terry O'Donnell, now the Defense Department's
general counsel, a magnificent lawyer ... Terry put a proposition to the
Justice Department. He had a security clearance because he was Ollie
North's number two lawyer.... He said, "Look, I've got a security
clearance. Let me see what you've got. I will then advise my client,
telling him nothing about what I've seen, whether to press on or to give
up at this point and then I will resign from the case, because I can no
longer represent them in good faith." After a month and a half the Justice
Department accepted. 

The case was, as we had expected, tangential, conclusory, drawing straight
lines from A to B to C when there were a thousand other hypotheses that
could be drawn. By narrowing things down we thought there was only one
point of contact. Juliana had a meeting a year earlier when she was with
the Heritage Foundation, in New York, for ten minutes, at the South
African mission, after which, interestingly, she had a meeting with the
FBI. There was an agreement that there would be an exchange of documents
between the mission and her organization.... There was a call that came in
from a guy at the South African mission who was their press officer.... We
thought, probably, that call was intercepted. After all, I had been at the
State Department, had top secret code word clearance, I was then at the
Justice Department with top secret clearance.... It did not surprise me
that we might have covered the mission in some way or other
electronically. This is not something one says in public but one knows it
in this town.

***

Anyway, they must have intercepted a conversation. They must have been
talking about an exchange of documents; she was supposed to send him a
paper she was doing on Soviet influence at the U N. and he was supposed to
send her the items in their file. They put this together with the fact
that this document, which was circulating on the Hill, the biggest sieve
in town, must have gotten into the hands of the South Africans. And with
me working at the State Department at the time, they had a connection. 

***

We prepared a long rebuttal about the implausibility of that thesis. In
any event, Terry prepared a classified rebuttal and told us to press on.
And he told us nothing about the case. It went to Ed Meese, who was deeply
troubled by this case because he knew me personally and he didn't think
remotely I had been involved.... Then he (Meese) got Terry's classified
rebuttal and said, "Terry, you've done one heck of a job for your client.
You've raised all kinds of questions none of us here have considered. I've
simply ordered a de novo review of the case to try and address some of
those questions...." 

In a short period of time, they sent me a letter and said I was to be
restored with a full security clearance and they thanked me for my
outstanding cooperation. That, we thought, was the end of it.

A year passed. We thought the case was behind us. Then, the Office of
Professional Responsibility issued its 1988 annual report in November of
1989. Not only did they put the case out in the public realm for the first
time, not naming me by name, but they egregiously misstated the results of
the case. 

***

It appeared the next day in the paper. They had said ... I resigned in the
face of termination proceedings, which was just about as wrong a statement
of the outcome as it could possibly be. It took eight more months to get
this thing cleared. The then Deputy Attorney General issued a letter
saying they had gotten a second de novo review and the OPR report was
indeed wrong. 

We thought then, it was now July, that this was done. Lo and behold, in
October, another leak broke in the case. We are now in suit, and as we
speak our response to the Justice Department's answer is being filed in
the district court. 

***

Let me draw some things together from this case. The securities network in
this country is the consummate old boy network. It is as tight and as
closed a network as you can ever imagine, for understandable reasons in
part. . . 

A second point I wanted to draw is that oftentimes this national security
and sources and methods objection is more often than not a screen behind
which the greatest incompetence and corruption can hide. 

***

And the final point is that there is, and we must not underestimate this,
a systematic bias among government functionaries to protect and expand
their own interests. 

***

I urge you then to encourage the open procedures that will enable,
consistent with national security, people to get at the kind of
information that may have been behind the case such as ours. 
______________________________
Roger Pilon is Director of the CATO Institute's Center for Constitutional
Studies. He served in five senior posts in the Reagan Administration
including Director of Policy for the State Department's Bureau of Human
Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. 
__________________________________________________

V: Unlocking the Doors to Government Information
The Impact of Secrecy on Federal Government Workers
Turna Lewis

The story that Roger [Pilon] just relayed to you is not the exception, but
typically the way that investigations are conducted.... There needs to be
a balance between the valid government interests of national security and
ensuring that employees have certain individual and privacy rights that
are not intrusively encroached upon. 

***

The law regarding security clearance procedures and free speech rights of
employees is unsettled.... How should the government determine suitability
for a security clearance? What is the proper subject of inquiry? What
constitutes impermissible invasion of an employee's privacy? Government
typically maintains that employees have no entitlement to a security
clearance, and therefore they should not be entitled to any due process.
Obviously, that's not what individual advocacy groups or unions advocate. 

***

Did you know that if you want to work for the Departments of Justice,
State or Defense that you have to undergo a background check, and all
employees are required to have at least a secret clearance. The basis for
requiring a background check of all employees is Executive Order 10450,
signed by President Eisenhower in 1953. The order basically provides the
authority for government agencies to establish their own security
clearance procedures for applicants. 

***

Some of the things the government looks at that we think are inappropriate
are lifestyles or ideology.... Every employee who works for the federal
government is required to submit to a background check. It might be
Standard Form 85 or Standard Form 86, which goes into every place you've
ever lived for the past ten years, positions, what membership
organizations you belong to, and whether or not you've been under the care
of a psychiatrist. 

***

Does the government really need to know the information they are asking?
They also ask questions regarding illegal drug use over the past five
years, yet the form does not provide any provision that employees will not
be the subject of any civil or criminal action for answering this question
honestly. Another problem with the SF-86 is that there is a broad grant of
authority that the employee is required to sign for the release of
information. 

***

The next issue is what happens when a security clearance is denied to an
employee or to an applicant. Right now the case law is such that courts
grant great deference to executive agencies.... Courts have said that no
one has a right to a security clearance and therefore you're not entitled
to any kind of due process. It is their argument that security clearances
require an expertise which is not reasonably possible for an outside body
[such as the courts] to have. 

The internal process is shrouded in secrecy.... It is a situation where
employees may be walking the halls for months, or maybe for years, while
the State Department decides what they want to do. 

This is because there are no procedures which require that an agency
process a request or review a case within a certain period of time.
Generally, when this is done, the State Department wants the employee to
simply resign. 

***

Minimum due process should include a written explanation of reasons for
the denial and a right to appeal, including a hearing, to an independent
body. We also think that minimum due process for employees should include
time limits on the suspension of a security clearance and a time limit on
the length of the investigation. 

***

I want to now address the SF-312 nondisclosure agreement. The issue is
sometimes over-classification of documents, and under what conditions it
is appropriate for an employee or for someone who has signed a
non-disclosure agreement to disclose that information. If employees do not
sign, they risk losing their security clearance and their job. 

***

One of the concerns about the SF-312 is the definition of classified
information, which is defined as being marked or unmarked. It can be oral
communications.  It can be unclassified information which meets the
standards for classification and is in the process of classification and
termination. What this does is cause the employee not to know if
information is classified or not -- so the effect is to chill
communication between employees. 

***

AFSA [American Foreign Service Association] filed a lawsuit regarding the
Standard Form 312 on these grounds. As a result of the lawsuit,
legislation was passed which required amending the SF-312. Congress said
the form must be amended so that it includes language which specifies that
in conflicts between secrecy requirements and free speech, free speech
supersedes the former.... We'll have to see exactly how that's going to be
implemented. 
______________________________
Turna Lewis is General Counsel for the American Foreign Service
Association where she handles matters related to security clearances,
security investigations and the due process rights of federal employees. 
__________________________________________________

V: Unlocking the Doors to Government Information
Exposing the Pentagon's Secret Budget
Tim Weiner

One of the enduring ironies of the Cold War is that our open and robust
and contentious society took on a few of the sullen and secretive and
closed aspects of the society it was trying to defeat.... I have been
working off and on for five years off of ... the public budget of the
Pentagon, which is in essence a false document because hidden in that
document in many creative and inventive ways, some obvious, some not, is
between 35 and 36 billion dollars a year of public funds, that works out
to roughly a hundred million dollars a day. This is known inside the
Pentagon and increasingly outside the Pentagon as the "black budget." 

In essence, the black budget is the secret treasury of the President, the
Director of Central Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense. It funds
each of the eleven major U.S. intelligence agencies and also funds
research and development and procurement of some of the most expensive and
least sensible weapons in the Pentagon's arsenal. 

There are two separate issues here. One is the whole notion that you can
have a classified budget. The question arises from Article 1, Section 9,
awes 7 of the United States Constitution: "No money shall be drawn from
the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law and a
regular statement and account of the receipts and expenditures of all
public money shall be published." Simplicity outsell The framers did not
envision a secret budget. Now the Cold War changed that. 

***

Something transformed the black budget in the 1980s, and that was the
masking of the costs of some of the most expensive weapons the Pentagon
creates. My good friend Ernie Fitzgerald often says there are two stages
in the life of a Pentagon program:  too early to tell and too late to
stop. When you add to this equation, too secret to debate, you run into
some serious problems. I want to run past a few of them. 

We had poured close to 25 billion dollars into the B-2 Stealth Bomber
before a single word of public debate was ever heard on the floor of
Congress. To date we have committed 32 billion dollars to this program. We
have produced two planes. They have performed three percent of the
requisite flying time of their tests. It's unclear what is going to become
of this program, but the best possible result from a fiscal perspective is
that we will produce a wing of planes, each of which, at 70 tons of
weight, will cost more than if it had been built of solid gold. They used
to talk of gold-plated weapons at the Pentagon. This is a solid gold
bomber, and it is a nuclear bomber which will most likely gather dust in
its hanger unless a full-tilt nuclear war with the Soviet Union begins. 

Another much less known program is MILSTAR, which stands for the Military
Strategic Tactical and Relay System. This is envisioned as a constellation
of eight satellites in space and a network of ground terminals on earth at
a cost of 35 to 40 billion dollars that will -- after a strategic nuclear
war with the Soviet Union, after Washington is gone, after the Pentagon is
reduced to smoking, radiating ruins, after the government as we know it
ceases to exist will weave together what remains of our strategic nuclear
forces so that we can go on fighting the Soviets, not for days or weeks,
but for six months. Now, public debate on such a program, and at such a
cost of 35 to 40 billion dollars if completed, is in the interest of the
United States. But it can't be debated because it's too secret. 

***

What you have when you have a secret weapons budget is a realm in which
public debate cannot intrude, the press is severely circumscribed, and the
Freedom of Information Act is totally useless. We must begin to ask
ourselves: "Who are we protecting this information from?" I argue in my
book, Blank Check, that the costs of weaponry, not the technologies, not
the designs, and in some cases not even their names, but the costs of
weaponry is information that properly belongs to the citizens of a
democracy. 

We must gain more information in this realm and increase public debate, as
has been suggested by the Rockefeller Commission on the CIA, the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence in the 70s and, in fact, every executive
or legislative commission that has ever examined this. If we could unmask
some of the costs of weaponry we could have a more intelligent debate on
what we are spending in the name of national defense and national
security. 

***

If we continue to spend 300 billion dollars and more a year on the
Pentagon's budget, and if we don't address other national security needs,
we, I submit, will follow the Soviets into the abyss into which they
plunged. 
______________________________
Tim Weiner is the Washington correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer
and author of Blank Check, a book about the secret intelligence budget.
His series about secret government spending won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize
for national reporting. 
__________________________________________________

VI:  A Constitutional National Defense
The War Powers Debate
Harold Koh

The War Powers debate of January 1991 demonstrated that it will be a long
time before anybody seriously makes the argument that the President can
enter a large-scale premeditated, potentially sustained war against an
aggressor nation without the approval of Congress.

In our history there are 211 occasions where the President committed
troops without congressional approval ... and only five examples of large
scale wars where the President received such authorization: the two World
Wars, Vietnam, Korea and Iraq. In four of the five cases, except Korea,
the President came to Congress. [For] the two World Wars he got a
declaration; in Vietnam he got the Gulf of Tonkin, however he managed to
get it; and in the current case of Iraq he got the resolution from
Congress. 

Congress recognized that it was going to give up its prerogative to
declare war unless it asserted it, and began debate even before the
President came to Congress on January 10 of this year. The courts also
seem to have finally recognized this, as seen through Judge Greene's
decision in the Dellums case, Dellums v. Bush .... The judge adopted both
the view that the President did not have the authority to commit troops
without congressional approval and that this was a question that a court
could decide .... The important thing to recognize was that this was a
very powerful statement by a court -- a warning to the President. 

***

The President, Congress and the courts have now all accepted this
proposition. This issue may have subsided simply because it will become
more and more ridiculous to even conceive of having begun a war like this
without congressional approval. Seventy-five thousand people were in D.C.
protesting the war a week ago. If there had been no congressional
approval, there would have been 750,000. 

The Wall Street Journal, days before the resolution, discovered in a
massive poll that 71 percent of Americans thought congressional approval
was required. We had a moment of national constitutional debate of the
kind we have had only a couple times in recent memory ... and the majority
answer was clear. 

***

That's the good news. The bad news is that the decision to go to war was
made very badly. We should all be embarrassed about our national
institutions and frightened for the future. The President should have come
to Congress on at least three occasions. In August, September and in
November, after the escalation. Or he could have called a special session.
But he didn't do any of these things. 

That does not mean that Congress escapes blame. Congress could have
demanded that he come and could have invoked the War Powers Resolution to
prevent the escalation from happening, or at least to challenge it.
Neither of these courses of action were taken. Instead it waited until the
absolute last minute to address the question... 

[T]he declare war debate is really part of a much broader debate regarding
our foreign policy. The problem has two alimonies: a constitutional
element and a policy element. 

Constitutionally we have gotten ourselves into a situation where the
system is out of whack. The President acts secretly and delegates power to
unaccountable institutions. Congress has every incentive to avoid
responsibility. And the courts have every incentive to avoid passing
judgment. As a result, we have a system where the President acts, Congress
does nothing, and then the courts refuse to rule on the legality of his
actions. I think that is both unconstitutional and bad policy because the
President is a victim of the system as much as he is a villain in it. He
does not have the long-term political strength that comes from having
congressional support and he does not have the kind of validation that
comes from getting judicial approval. 

This problem has cropped up across the foreign affairs spectrum also, with
regard to emergency economic power, military aid, covert action,
intelligence oversight and treaty affairs. I saw it when I worked at the
Justice Department from 1983-85 and again in the Iran-Contra affair. 
People viewed the Iran-Contra affair as an aberration, not a systemic
problem, and so Congress did nothing. 

***

What about press access? How can we judge what's happening if our press
can not find out what's going on? As an Asian-American. discrimination at
home against Arab-Americans is something that deeply concerns me, and
which I see happening again. 

I think if we are serious about a new international legal order, then we
have to urge our governmental officials to actually follow the predicate
of an international legal order. I think that's the real peace dividend. 
______________________________
Harold Koh is a professor at Yale Law School specializing in the U.S.
Constitution and Foreign Affairs. Koh served with the Office of Legal
Counsel of the Department of Justice in the Reagan Administration. 
__________________________________________________

VI:  A Constitutional National Defense
Discrimination Against Women and Homosexuals in the Military
Michelle Benecke

I want to go over the legal framework which permits formalized
discrimination against women, gay men and lesbians [in] service, and ...
to expose fallacies on which the military's policies are based. 

***

The military is granted exceptions to laws which mandate access to public
forums, i.e. you cannot picket or leaflet on military bases. The military
is granted an exception to general rules which allow non-harmful religious
practices, such as the wearing of yarmulkes or other religious symbols
while in uniform.... The military has also been granted exceptions to
strict judicial scrutiny of discrimination on the basis of race during
wartime and [to continuing] womens' exclusion from the draft. . .
Additionally, every court challenge brought by lesbians and gays against
the military policy on constitutional grounds has failed. 

***

I think it is both timely and important to mention the combat exclusion
policy, given that over 11 percent of our forces in the Gulf are women....
Even though we now recognize that women are there, Americans fail to
understand what women are being asked to do. The term combat exclusion
would lead one to believe that women are not involved in combat. But the
Patriot missile crews who have women crew members and the Marine woman who
may have been taken POW yesterday morning would vehemently protest that
implication.

In fact, the definition of combat has been a semantic game in the Defense
Department for at least a decade, with the definition linked more to the
availability of manpower and the social/political climate of the time than
to the actual capabilities of women -- which is offered as the rationale
for the policy.... When men have been available, definitions of combat
have broadened to encompass more jobs and to exclude women from them; when
men have not been available the definition has narrowed. 

When I was in the military women were admitted because there was
difficulty in recruiting and retaining men in the post-Vietnam era.... So
women were recruited to fill the missile specialties within my branch. At
the same time women started filling these specialties, those jobs were
re-coded from combat to noncombat without changing the mission or the
purpose of the units to which women were assigned. This is not just my
branch; this has been a typical pattern. 

At the Third Armored Cavalry regiment in Fort Bliss, Texas, which is now
in the front lines in the Gulf, women were assigned to fill support and
supply positions because men were not available. When the Pentagon found
out, it ordered the removal of women from the units. But local commanders,
recognizing that the unit could not function without the support, got
around the requirement by assigning the women on paper to a non-combat
unit but leaving the women in the combat positions. 

***

Also, it's an established military doctrine to first take out command
control communications, supply lines, and nuclear and biological and
chemical assets. This is where the combat exclusion policy assigns our
women, setting them up to be casualties in any initial strike.... The
combat exclusion policy serves to preserve prestigious fields in the
military which are required for advancement for men, at the same time
denying the truth of what women do in the service. 

The rationale behind banning gays and lesbians is that their inclusion
would hurt the discipline, morale and good order of the services.... The
case of Perry Watkins should be cited here. Watkins was inducted during
the Vietnam era despite the fact [that] he notified the military he was
gay and continued to notify them through the entire 16 years of his
service. Watkins commander said in court he was one of the most trusted
and respected men in the unit and that he did not wish to see him
discharged. This is not atypical. Gays and lesbians have consistently
furnished outstanding performance records and testimony that their
presence did not hurt discipline or morale. 

In its implementation, the policy [against homosexuals] has been used
disproportionately, against women.... The 1980s was characterized by a
wave of investigations against women ... by picking up those who were
suspected or rumored to be gay and threatening them with prison if they
did not name other lesbians.

***

The impact of such policies has been to force women to act in gender roles
that are traditionally sanctioned.... Women have to try to find a fine
line between accepted femininity to ward off suspicions they might be gay,
but they can't be so pretty that they are not taken seriously. This places
a tremendous amount of stress on women in the system to conform. 
______________________________
Michelle Benecke served in the U.S. army from 1983-1989 as Battery
Commander and Air Defense System Officer. She is the author of "Women in
Nontraditional Fields," and is presently a student at Harvard Law School. 
__________________________________________________

VI:  A Constitutional National Defense
The Government's Secret Wars
Prexy Nesbitt

In mid-1949, the covert action arm of the CIA had about 300 employees in
seven overseas field stations. Three years later there were 2,800
employees in 47 field stations. In the same period their budget grew from
4.7 million to 82 million dollars. 

***

By 1953 the CIA had major covert action programs underway in some 48
different countries, consisting of propaganda, paramilitary and political
action operations, and other tactics.... And with post-World War II,
covert action took off to a new level, with the "Third World" being the
special target of U.S. covert activities. 

***

What do we mean by covert activities? In 1968 Richard Bissell, former
deputy director of clandestine services for the CIA, listed them as
follows: 

(1) political advice and counsel;

(2) subsidies to an individual;

(3) financial support and technical assistance to political parties;

(4) the support of private organizations: labor unions, business firms,
cooperatives, churches; 

(5) covert propaganda;

(6) private training of individuals and exchange of people;

(7) private economic operations;

(8) paramilitary or political action operations designed to overthrow or
to support a regime; 

(9) media operations, including disinformation activities.

I would add to this initial list the following -- bank and banking
operations -- and would particularly cite the role of the CIA in working
with the First National Bank of Maryland from 1981 to 1985 to help in the
payment of some 23 million dollars in covert weapons purchases for Chad or
Angola in Africa. 

In particular let us look at the record in this very brief time of the
Bush Administration. In 17 months the ex-CIA director Bush has used
military force to invade and overthrow the government of Panama, without
congressional approval. He has also helped to sustain and to further a
pattern of sending in repressive military force in the name of fighting
drugs. 

We can also look at the increase in arms shipments and advisors.... There
was the financing, equipping and training the special anti-Khaddafi army
that was based in Chad and has operated until this last year. There was
the special air-sea operation in August of 1990 into Monrovia, Liberia.
Very few people know that we sent 255 US. Marines that helped attack
helicopters and jets to evacuate allegedly some 61 Americans.... It was
linked to another operation aimed at protecting classified U.S. materials,
communication and intelligence facilities all over Liberia. 

***

The current reality of CIA and covert actions is an annual budget of
somewhere around 10-12 billion dollars. But when you look at the aggregate
budget of CIA, counterintelligence in the FBI, the National Security
Agency and the various military intelligence agencies, it is an annual
budget somewhere between 30 and 35 billion dollars a year. No one knows
where those figures end up. 

One of the clear patterns is a tremendous growth in the amount and scale
of covert actions through the years. 

In 1980 there were about 14,000 CIA employees. By 1986 it was closer to
23,000. In 1976 there were some 300 identified CIA operations. By 1981
there were well over 1,000 operations. In 1978 there were 12-14 major
operations... but 44 by 1988. 

Throughout this same period we see a growing collaboration between the CIA
and [the] Army.... It becomes even harder to get information about the
military. Many of their operations fall into an arena that has limited
oversight by either the intelligence committees or the military
committees. 

***

Operating within US. foreign policy is a fundamental and trans-partisan
assumption that the U.S. government and/or its operatives retain the right
and obligation to intervene overtly or covertly in the affairs of Third
World nations anew time it deems necessary. I believe this notion is
derived from the twin roots in U.S. history of racism and of imperialism.
It has resulted in and [still] results in incalculable terror, death and
ruin being visited upon the lives of the peoples of Africa, Asia, Latin
America, the Caribbean and the Pacific. 

Whether it's our marines or whether it's our dollars to hire someone else
or someone else's destabilization arsenals, the end effect is a
large-scale and sustained war for the peoples of the Third World.... I
think that makes the U.S., either directly or indirectly, the ultimate
killer nation.... I predict that after the Gulf we are going to have many
other scenarios like the one we see unfolding now. 
______________________________
Prexy Nesbitt is the senior consultant in the U.S. for the People's
Republic of Mozambique. Previously he was Associate Director of the
American Committee on Africa. 
__________________________________________________

VI:  A Constitutional National Defense
The Selective Service System
Reverend Bill Yolton

I want to talk about three levels in which the selective service system
serves non-military purposes. The system is at this moment a very
interesting paralegal entity. It is not really a set of laws, and it has
the lowest standard of proof of any other system of law in the U.S.,
except for the condition of prisoners. All you need in the selective
service system is any basis in fact and there's no court review. 

***

The system is conceived, therefore, as an emergency system in which most
of the constitutional guarantees are, in a sense, set aside in order to
allow the nation to respond in great emergency. But actually it does other
things. It serves civil religion. It helps [maintain] control in this
society. Jerry Schanck's study of the local board in the First World War
shows how that board, with the sheriff as the chairman, managed to keep
all the Blacks in that community successfully down on the plantation. The
informal control system now had federal law on its side. 

Of course there is always the fine of five years and/or $250,000 for young
men who fail to register. These young men are encouraged by "it's quick,
it's easy, it's the law, break-dance down to your nearest local post
office and sign up for the draft." Except in this society nobody can
breakdance down to the nearest post office and sign up to vote. It's much
more important in this society that people sign up to kill people than to
sign up to exercise their democratic responsibilities. 

And deviation in the system is subject to the whims of local boards, with
few controls.... Since registration was begun, there have been no
oversight hearings by Armed Services [congressional committees]. The only
place we get our foot in the door is to attack the budget through a House
committee that reviews the budget annually. 

Otherwise, this system has had a new set of regulations put in place which
even the memoranda from the Pentagon indicated in the 1970's would require
major revisions of the statute in order for these to be implemented. 

It's very interesting to see how the draft will work and what methods will
be able to be effective in challenging the authority system when it
finally begins to act.... With the classifying authority having been
removed by statute from the local board ... power has now been given over
to the Pentagon to make those decisions. 

So the system is ready to go at any moment. Once the declaration of war
comes, the President can invoke the draft again and it can operate
immediately. The next day the computer will issue the mailgrams to the low
lottery numbers from the lottery the night before and people will go
quickly, not to pass go, but straight to the induction center. That's a
ten day time sequence we're talking about. 

***

What we have is a system which has a very low standard of democratic
rights present within it. At a second level it has always served
red-baiting -- it's part of the anti-communism spirit of the society.
Turnage says... the draft is as much a weapon in our arsenals as any
missile or bomber. It's designed to help people share in certain values in
society. Understandably, the recruitment of local board members tends to
be out of ex-veterans and people who are "patriotically" willing to see
this thing run. 

***

The liberties of young men who are conscientious objectors are very
limited.... The Solomon Amendments basically say that that person is
excluded from opportunities for higher education or job training or
employment in the executive branch of the government. That's most jobs at
the federal level. So these persons are essentially shunted aside from
exercising their freedom about their own consciences.... [This is] one of
those terrible dilemmas that young people are in at this time who want to
look at this issue seriously.

***

So this is the system that is currently in operation and to which our
young people will be subject when it comes into operation at that very
quick time schedule. We fear that because the changes have not taken place
in the system before it goes into action, under the wartime constraints it
will be very hard to remedy the problems with it. 
______________________________
The Reverend William Yolton is Executive Director of the National
Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors. his critique, A
Short History of Selective Service and Why it Should be Ended is in
publication. 
__________________________________________________

VII:  Free Trade in Ideas - An Idea Whose Time Has Come
An Unexplained 44 Days of Detention
Choichiro Yatani

[When I was detained], aliens from all over the world wondered why I was
there. I could not answer why. Simply, the government never explained why
they were arresting and detaining me for 44 days. But when I was released
from detention, according to the New York Times, one U.S. official said,
"This is a troublemaker from Japan. There's no more benefit to keep him in
detention, so let's release him." 

Let me explain what happened to me. In 1986 I went to Amsterdam because my
research paper on antinuclear activism was invited by the organizer of the
international [academic] conference.... I attended and talked about [the]
nuclear issue. 

***

When I returned to New York City the government officials stopped me and
took me to the detention. I asked them, 'Why are you doing this to me?"
[They said], "We don't know yet...." So I thought they are kidding me....
Three weeks I was there without knowing why. Then they explained that I
was involved in a big crime and that I was a national security risk. 

What concerned them most was something political I had done a long time
ago. And when I went to court, the court said I had no judiciary power
because the State Department revoked my visa two weeks before. Therefore,
without a visa I had to leave.... Why, I asked? No explanation was
necessary [in their view]. 

***

Fortunately, the Lawyers' Committee, the New York Times, the Washington
Post and other publicity described it as Kafkaesque. Nobody knew why this
happened. I thought this couldn't be happening particularly in the country
of U.S.A., because everybody knows this is the most democratic, most open,
free society in the world. 

I told everybody that I was an anti-war activist during the 1960's and
70's. I was arrested and convicted, but that happened to everybody.... But
what was the crime, according to the U.S., I don't know because they
continue to refuse to disclose the files. Although everything is
speculative, I guess my anti-war activism in Japan and the anti-nuclear
research I have done contributed to the government charges that I was a
"national security risk." 

The last 25 years we have been totally blind from the reality in the world
because by the Cold War mentality many American people are totally branded
by the government. 

***

Mr. Bush himself declared the Cold War over. But I cannot accept his
declaration unless he initiates the repeal of the McCarran-Walter Act and
my name is removed from State Department "Lookout Lists of Undesirable
Aliens." In January I filed a suit to a federal court against the State
and Justice Departments [demanding] that they remove my name from their
lists because of the 1990 Immigration Act. This is the first legal
challenge of its type. 

According to a recently published book by [the] Lawyers' Committee for
Human Rights, over 300,000 foreigners are listed in that government
blacklist. It is not merely inconvenience and denial of travel rights
which are of concern, but rather the U.S. government's denial of American
principles and benefits to its citizens. 

The government does not like to show the reality. So what can we do to end
the Cold War?... Three things: (1) repeal the McCarran-Walter Act;... (2)
remove all names from government alien lists, and... (3) we have to
establish a new world order, not by the government, but by the people. 

I hope my legal challenge will benefit others charged by the government
and will contribute to ending the Cold War at home so that we, Americans
as well as many in other countries, can make the international community a
better and more secure world. 
______________________________
Choichiro Yatani is a lecturer at SUNY/Stonybrook and at St. Joseph's
College. His lawsuit is the first legal challenge to government alien
blacklisting since the Immigration Act was enacted in November 1990. 
__________________________________________________

VII:  Free Trade in Ideas - An Idea Whose Time Has Come
Restrictions on Travel to Vietnam
John Terzano

In 1981, I was a member of the first group of combat veterans to return to
Vietnam since the end of the war. I have subsequently made several trips
to Vietnam and Cambodia. I understand the powerful effect the experience
of traveling to Vietnam can have, not only on the American veterans who
have returned, but also on the Vietnamese people themselves.... This free
exchange of ideas has enabled veterans to lead the way to assist the
Vietnamese people, to rebuild their country and provide them with
humanitarian assistance. 

While the current law does not prohibit Americans from traveling
individually to Vietnam, the ban on organized trips effectively bars
Americans from visiting the countries of Indochina, and these restrictions
complicate the process of obtaining visas and arranging in country travel
and accommodations. 

***

There are two categories of individuals that most often express the desire
to return to Vietnam: Vietnamese-Americans and American veterans. Both
groups have valid reasons and needs for returning, however, neither group
has a professional medium to arrange or enable them to carry out their
intentions because organized travel has been banned. 

Perhaps the most poignant information an individual learns during a trip
to Vietnam is that, for the Vietnamese, the war is over.... And yet,
America continues to treat Vietnam as the enemy.... The effects of the
embargo and the current isolation imposed on Vietnam have severely
hindered Vietnam's ability to rebuild their country, and as a result
Vietnam is often unable to provide even the most basic of needs to its
citizens. 

This is a sharp contrast to the way that America has treated other former
enemies. Following World War II, the United States helped Japan become one
of the most powerful industrial nations in the world and rebuilt Germany
with the Marshall Plan.... Even after Korea, the American veteran
community supported reconciliation efforts. 

In President Bush's inaugural address he stated, "the statute of
limitations on the Vietnam War has been reached," and that "no great
nation can afford to be sundered by a memory." The President's rhetoric,
however, does not match his policies. It is ironic that President Bush has
consistently defended his China policy by claiming that he does not "wish
to isolate China by no contact and set back the clock...." It is difficult
for me to reconcile the difference in the policies this Administration
applies to China and Vietnam. 

It is through the free exchange of information and ideas that tremendous
changes in the world can take place. Although it may sound somewhat trite,
I fully believe that rock-and-roll and blue jeans did more to bring the
Berlin Wall down than the trillion dollars spent on a defense budget. 

Unofficial dialogue between nations has a special relevance in a democracy
where public opinion has a great effect on policy making. Indeed, Justice
William Douglas recognized this some 34 years ago when he wrote in Kent v.
Dulles: "The right to travel is part of the liberty of which a citizen
cannot be deprived without due process of law under the Fifth Amendment.
Freedom of movement across frontiers in either direction was a part of our
heritage.... It may be as dose to the heart of the individual as a choice
of what he eats or wears or reads. Freedom of movement is basic in our
scheme of values." 

Justice Douglas went on to quote Zachariah Chaffey, a writer on the First
Amendment who stated, "Travel abroad enables American citizens to
understand that people like themselves live abroad and helps them to be
well informed on public issues.... In many different ways direct contact
with other countries contributes to sounder decisions at home " 

This view of travel was once not only an ideal, it was once our law. It is
time that we as a nation returned to these core values and principles and
allow once again the free and open exchange of ideas and the right of U.S.
citizens to travel abroad. 
_____________________________
John Terzano is president of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation.
He was a member of the first delegation of combat veterans to return to
Vietnam since the end of that war. 
__________________________________________________

VII: Free Trade in Ideas - An Idea Whose Time Has Come
Legislating the Free Flow of Information
Bari Schwartz

I want to give you an overview of the law in the area of [restrictions on
the right to travel and exchange information] and on the more cheerful
side tell you what some members of Congress are trying to do about this. 

***

Congressman Berman has specialized in the travel issues. I think many of
you are familiar with the fact that Congressman Barney Frank has worked on
the McCarran-Walter issues of entry of people into the United States.
Senator Moynihan is very much involved and concerned in this area. There
are a number of members that are involved in this effort. 

I want to bring you greetings from Congressman Berman.... He definitely
will be introducing a bill in the next month or so to remove the authority
for travel restrictions under the ambit of economic embargoes.... I have
to tell you that the prospects for this legislation standing alone are
dubious. 

***

Even under the current law there is no reason why the regulations have to
go as far as they do. It's the Office of Foreign Assets Control in the
Treasury Department that administers and implements any sort of economic
embargoes that the President declares against particular countries....
But, we very strongly suspect it's the State Department that conveys to
the Treasury Department what the foreign policy objectives are that we're
trying to pursue. We will continue our on-going discussions with both the
State Department and Treasury to try to get them to ease up as far as they
will in terms of the regulations. 

Coming back to the legislation itself, there is always the possibility of
trying to break off pieces of Congressman Berman's larger travel bill for
inclusion in other vehicles that might be coming through the pipeline in
Congress. 

That is exactly what happened on the issue of the import and export of
informational materials. Several years ago Congressman Berman's bill
included, in addition to the travel issue, a section that deleted from the
President's economic embargo authority the ability to impose restrictions
on the import and export of informational materials.... We did succeed in
the 1988 trade bill in getting that provision, with Administration
support. 

Since then, we have had continuing problems, [the Treasury Department has]
taken the most restrictive reading of what "informational materials" means
in the implementation of the Berman Amendment. They insist on excluding
telecommunications from the definition of informational materials. CNN had
to fight the Treasury Department for the ability to broadcast in Vietnam
under the embargo.... That was finally resolved favorably. 

***

In the area of defining informational materials, the [Treasury
Department's] Office of Foreign Assets Control takes the position that
paintings are expressive materials.... Mr. [Ramon] Cernuda is a
Cuban-American and he likes to collect Cuban paintings. Well, it was felt
that this was currency going to Cuban nationals. 

***

U.S. Marshals went into his apartment and seized 200 paintings. There was
litigation over this and it was determined in the court in Miami, Florida,
that the Berman Amendment regarding informational materials does cover
paintings. OFAC refuses to consider this a case of nation-wide impact, so
there's another lawsuit pending in New York.*

***

On the travel issue generally, I think many of you may know that it's the
International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Trading with
the Enemy Act that gives the President the basic authority to impose
economic embargoes, and it's pursuant to that authority that the
President, with regard to a number of countries, has imposed currency rest
Actions that in the case of Cuba, Libya, Iraq and Kuwait, pretty flat out
make it impossible for Americans to travel there. On the other hand, in
the Vietnam, Cambodia, and North Korean cases, the restrictions are less
onerous.  Nonetheless they still remain. 

***

Congressman Berman's bill, again, would delete the authority under these
economic embargo statutes to impose currency restrictions on travel. And,
in trying to advance this bill, the kinds of arguments we make are that we
have found it is absolutely essential to separate that for which we're
trying to argue from the merits or demerits, foreign policy-wise, of any
particular economic embargoes. 

***

The fact of the matter is these restrictions impinge on the civil
liberties of Americans and their right to travel. So it should be
[prohibited] irrespective of the merits of any particular embargo. 

*Editor's note: This lawsuit was settled, and the Treasury Department
agreed to amend the regulations to permit the importation of Cuban
paintings. However, artwork from other embargoed countries, such as
Vietnam, still may not be imported without a Treasury Department license. 
______________________________
Bari Schwartz is the Legislative Director for Congressman Howard Berman of
California and has worked on his "Free Trade in Ideas" legislation. 
__________________________________________________

VIII:  Government Surveillance and Erosion of the Fourth Amendment
Erosion of the Fourth Amendment
Mark Lynch

Effectively, the Fourth Amendment is the protection we have against
government searches and seizures of our houses, persons, papers and places
which are deserving of privacy. Yet day in and day out the Fourth
Amendment, for a great number of our citizens, simply has no meaning.

***

There is no place this is clearer than in the criminal courts which have
steadily enlarged existing exceptions. One example is that of protective
sweeps. 

It used to be acknowledged that when you arrested someone you could make a
search of the things in the immediate vicinity of the arrestee. That's
been recently expanded to justify a search of an entire dwelling place....
Also, clerks, without any formal training in the law, can issue warrants. 

***

Courts have also weakened the principle of probable cause so that it has
been transformed from a fixed quantum of evidence to a highly flexible
standard that can be manipulated on a case-to-case basis. You now hear
phrases such as "there was substantial basis to believe that evidence
could be uncovered" or "there was a fair probability that evidence could
be uncovered." This is obviously a retreat from the principle that held
sway under the old understanding. 

Another technique has been to expand the number of so-called lesser Fourth
Amendment intrusions that do not require warrants and can be based solely
on reasonable suspicion rather than probable cause. 

The Court has also manipulated with considerable dexterity the concept of
reasonable expectation of privacy.... Perhaps the best example of this has
been the cases involving aerial surveillance of open fields.... If an
airplane can see your action, flying overhead, then the Court reasons, you
have exposed the activity to the public, and you have no reasonable
expectation of privacy. 

***

Aerial surveillances not only of fields but of areas close to one's house
have been denied the status of having a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Even trash, carefully wrapped and thrown away in the wrapper, has been
held to be something in which you don't have a reasonable expectation of
privacy. 

***

There has also been an expansion of the notion that there are special
governmental interests which justify searches.... The Court held that
blood and urine tests could be required of government, or people in
certain positions in the government, or people applying for those
positions. 

More recently, the Court sustained the practice of police conducting
random sobriety checkpoints.... Finally, and perhaps most importantly, in
the criminal courts the effectiveness of the exclusionary rule has been
drastically reduced by the application of the so-called "good-faith"
defense. 

There was a law review article written by a professor at Georgetown named
Silas Wasserstrom in 1984 which he entitled "The Incredible Shrinking
Fourth Amendment." And that title is incredibly apt. The whole coverage of
the Fourth Amendment has been narrowed down and then even within the area
that it still covers, the protections have been watered down. 

I think that one of the challenges, if we're going to talk about
resuscitating and reviving civil liberties in this country ... is reviving
the Fourth Amendment and restoring it to its proper place. I think the
only way that this can be done is through a legislative program. I'll
admit the prospect of trying to revive the Fourth Amendment is a rather
grim and daunting one. But ... it could indeed happen. 

Now, I'm going to turn in the last two minutes available to me to the
question of national security searches. Should the government be able to
undertake physical searches of a person's home or papers under a national
security exception in situations where the target of the search is thought
to be the agent of a foreign power? It appears to be the case that the
Justice Department and the FBI, with some regularity, do conduct these
kinds of searches.... The public policy issue is whether this lawless
regime of national security physical searches should be brought under the
statutory regime that now governs national security electronic
surveillance? My own view is that it should not; at least until the
Supreme Court clearly holds that there is a national security exception
for physical searches. 

There has been no United States Supreme Court case saying that a [warrant
less] physical search for national security purposes is permissible, and
until that happens, I don't think that we should submit national security
physical searches to the FISA regime; in other words, we should make the
government work for its exceptions before we get Congress to correct them. 
______________________________
Mark Lynch is a partner with Covington & Burling. He formerly litigated
cases involving government surveillance and secrecy agreements for the
National Security Project of the ACLU, and cases under the Freedom of
Information Act for the Public Citizen Litigation Group.
__________________________________________________

VIII:  Government Surveillance and Erosion of the Fourth Amendment
The FBI's "Library Awareness" Program
Judith Krug

This program came into public view in June of 1987 when two FBI agents
went into the library at Columbia University and asked the clerk at the
circulation desk to, not only give them the names of "funny-sounding
foreigners," but to henceforth monitor the reading habits of funny
sounding foreigners, and to inform the FBI as to what these people were
reading. 

The clerk directed the agents to [a colleague], who said "I'm not giving
you anything." In fact, she gave the FBI agents a lecture on our position
vis-a-vis confidentiality, the importance of privacy, and then sent them
on their way. 

She then called me.... She went on to explain that the agents had told her
they were most concerned with individuals, from hostile foreign. countries
such as the Soviet Union, reviewing materials in libraries that dealt with
high technology, particularly, and then, math and science in general. Why?
Because they were sure that such activities were contrary to our national
security. 

Subsequently, we had more complete guidelines from the FBI as to the type
of individual we, the American library community, should be looking for.
First, suspicious-looking foreigners.... Second guideline, individuals
making hard copy from fiche.... And, the third guidepost, people stealing
materials from libraries. 

***

The library community was appalled.... Why were we upset? First of all, we
believe that the right to receive information is protected by the First
Amendment.... We also believe that the right to receive information is not
only protected, but is your business.

***

Many years ago we entered a campaign to have privacy and confidentiality
of library records codified into state statute. Now, we have 44 states
which do protect the privacy and confidentiality of library records, and
the District of Columbia has a similar statute.... It is not only a basic
policy of the association, it is an integral part of our code of
professional conduct. 

***

We told all of this to the FBI. They told us the program has been in
existence for more than a decade, and through it the FBI had documented
instances of, and I quote: "hostile intelligence officers who have
exploited libraries by stealing proprietary, sensitive and other
information, and have attempted to identify and recruit American and
foreign students in American libraries." They said that there had been
hundreds of libraries who had cooperated happily. Our response was simply
"prove it." Naturally we didn't get any information. As a result, in
October of 1987 the American Library Association (ALA) filed its first
request for documentation under the Freedom of Information Act.... This
request was made very easily because we piggybacked on a request filed in
July of that year by the National Security Archives. Again, there was no
response, and so, ALA filed a second FOIA request December 31, 1987. 

We did eventually have some success with the FBI. In 1988, the
Intellectual Freedom Committee, my policy- recommending body at ALA ...
started writing to the FBI asking for a face-to-face meeting. 

***

We spent two hours while the FBI droned on and we kept asking questions
and they would turn the questions around and re-drone the same thing,
which was a justification of the FBI's program and its importance to
national security and how we were standing as roadblocks.

***

One good thing that came out of this meeting was an agreement by the FBI
with the Intellectual Freedom Committee for each of us to prepare a
statement that would explain where we're coming from and why, and to share
it with the other.... We prepared it and sent it to the FBI. We never got
anything from the FBI. 

We did eventually receive 1200 pages of documentation of the FBI Library
Awareness Program. Unfortunately it was heavily censored.... ALA really
had no choice but to file an administrative appeal and we did.... There
was no response. 

***

In July of this year we received a letter from the FBI indicating that
they were closing our appeal file because the National Security Archives
lawsuit was still in progress and they promised that we would get all the
documentation that comes out of the NSA challenge.

***

I believe the FBI program is operating underground and that it will
resurface the moment the FBI believes they have a legitimate reason to
utilize libraries as investigatory tools or t-h-at we are far enough away
from the public that they can get away with it without any response.

They are not about to get any information out of this country's
librarians. But this is an instance where eternal vigilance is and will
continue to be the price of liberty. 
______________________________
Judith Krug is director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom and Freedom
to Read Foundation of the American Library Association. 
__________________________________________________

VIII:  Government Surveillance and Erosion of the Fourth Amendment
The FBI's Covert Operations Against the Black Community
Nkechi Taifa

"To expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize the
activities of Black nationalist organizations and groupings and their
leadership, their spokesmen, their membership and their supporters." 

In the FBI's own words, that was the purpose of the [Counterintelligence
Program] COINTELPRO directed against the Black movement. Never meant to be
read or disseminated to the public at large, these millions of pages of
documents reveal a coordinated national program of war against Black
people. 

The FBI memorandum expanding the program described the long range goals of
COINTELPRO as:

"(1) to prevent the coalition of militant Black nationalist groups. In
unity there is strength. An effective coalition of Black nationalist
groups might be the first step toward a real Mau-Mau in America. The
beginning of a true Black revolution. 

"(2) to prevent the rise of a Messiah who could unify and electrify the
militant Black nationalist movement.... 

"(3) to prevent violence on the part of Black nationalist groups. This is
of primary importance and is a goal of our investigative activity. Through
counter-intelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential
troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for
violence. 

"(4) to prevent militant Black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining
respectability by discrediting them to three separate segments of the
community: the responsible Negro community, the white community,... and
the Negro radicals (the followers of the movement).

"(5) our final goal should be to prevent the long-range growth of militant
Black nationalist organizations, especially among the youth...." 

***

According to the congressional committees which investigated the
activities of the FBI in the 1970's, its counterintelligence program
code-named COINTELPRO was an "illegal and unconstitutional abuse of power
by the FBI...." 

***

The Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at
preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and
association. Millions of pages of documents reveal the harrowing nature of
the FBI's neutralizing campaign directed against such groups as the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Revolutionary Action
Movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther
Party, the Nation of Islam, the Republic of New Afrika, as well as
countless others: civil liberties, civil rights, peace, labor and social
action groups. 

The history of the FBI's counterintelligence and repression against the
Black liberation movement... began with the establishment of the Bureau in
1919 and it continues today. 

***

As early as 1960, the FBI started a comprehensive program designed to
disrupt and neutralize the Nation of Islam. Released documents show that
one of the primary purposes of this program was to exacerbate the tension
between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammed.  The information gathered by the
FBI's informant network was augmented by activities such as illegal
wiretaps, letter openings, burglaries of homes and offices, secret
examination of bank records and physical surveillance. 

At the FBI and other government offices, vast files containing the
political policies of organizations and opinions of individuals were
catalogued according to their degrees of presumed dangerousness in the
FBI's secret security index. Thousands of individuals in the FBI index
were targeted for roundup and detention in case of a "national emergency,"
although it is still unclear as to what constitutes this national
emergency. 

Although the claimed purpose of the Bureau's COINTELPRO actions was to
prevent violence, many of the FBI's tactics were clearly intended to
foster violence and many others could reasonably have been expected to
cause violence. This effort included mailing anonymous letters and
caricatures to organizations such as the Black Panther Party, ridiculing
the local and national Black Panther Party leadership with the express
purpose of creating violence between the Panthers and other groups. 
______________________________
Nkechi Taifa is Chair of the Washington D.C. chapter of the National
Conference of Black Lawyers. She is also an author, educator and political
activist, and recently joined the staff of the ACLU Washington office. 
__________________________________________________

VIII:  Government Surveillance and Erosion of the Fourth Amendment
The CISPES Investigation
Jinsoo Kim

I 'd just like to introduce a little bit about the Movement Support
Network . . . It was a special project that was initiated in 1984 by the
Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in light of all the new executive
orders and all the new kinds of repression that was coming out of the
Reagan-Bush administration in the 80s. 

As we started beginning to hear about incidents of break-ins, of FBI
visits, of harassments at the customs, of IRS visits and harassment, we
felt that there was a need for a project to be set up so that we can
document and monitor these kinds of developments so that we can let
everybody knows what are the patterns that are emerging and that also we
can start to come up with ways to fight back this kind of repression. And,
in the last six years or so we have already documented almost 500
different incidents of this kind of harassment, which include about 110
break-ins prior to the Persian Gulf crisis, as well as 140 separate FBI
visits that have been documented, mainly of critics and dissidents of U.S.
foreign and domestic policies. 

***

I assume that many of you are already familiar with the CISPES
investigation, so I'm not going to go into too much detail, but just to
summarize the main points that came out of this massive FBI investigation
of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, as well as
100-200 other organizations who had been working to denounce U.S. foreign
policy in Central America. 

***

So, let's just start in 1980 when Reagan came into power and the whole
Reagan-Bush administration started implementing some of their policies. .
. . They spent major emphasis on developing and implementing a series of
repressive measures designed to prevent criticism against its domestic and
foreign policies. 

***

The investigation that happened around the CISPES during the early 80's
was a five-year investigation that involved all 59 field offices of the
FBI. And the CCR has begun to receive FBI files [through] the Freedom of
Information Act and one of our rooms is filled with all the documents that
have come in from these kind of investigations. And in order to justify
their investigation, because they couldn't prove any kind of criminal
activity or any kind of breaking of law committed by any of the solidarity
organizations and religious organizations, so, in order to justify this
investigation, the FBI utilized two rationales: (1 ) the positive
existence of a covert program and (2) it resurrected a 1950s favorite, the
concept of the front group. 

These two notions were extremely useful, because by positing a covert
program, the FBI headquarters was able to reason away the lack of findings
in investigations conducted by the field offices. So, when a field office
reported that a local CISPES chapter pursued only such projects as
teach-ins, slide shows, and pickets, the headquarters would remind the
field office of the covert program. This, the headquarters explained, was
known only to a few CISPES members, but represented CISPES' true
intentions and activities. So they would caution the field office not to
be deceived and urge it to dig deeper and deeper. And the deeper the field
office dug, with no results, then clearly, reasoned the FBI, the deeper
they needed to dig. And, when the field offices cabled the headquarters to
inform it that they had located no CISPES chapter, but had found a Central
American solidarity committee or a Latin American human rights group or a
sanctuary church, the headquarters would recommend aggressive
investigation and explain that CISPES operated through fronts, in which
respectable people were duped for its terrorist purposes. Thus, as any
organization which ever worked with CISPES, signed a petition,
co-sponsored a demonstration or an event, or had a single overlapping
member, might be a front, and as any legal activity might be a cover for
the covert program, there was no limit to the depth or breadth of the
investigation. 

The very logic of these rationales increased the pressure to expand the
hunt for fronts and intensify the search for covert activities. And this
is how the FBI justified a five-year investigation of over 200 groups and
thousands of individuals. And just in terms of the broad array of
information gathering techniques [the FBI used] in its assault on the
Central American movement, you've heard about one range of techniques that
was used during the COINTELPRO operations. 

But, even within the small fraction of documents that were released during
that period of time, CCR was able to document the use of informers;
undercover agents infiltrated into organizations; the physical
surveillance of people, campuses, residences, and meeting places; the
surveillance of demonstrations; license plate checks; and the use of
government records. 

This is all based on the files that were released by the FBI, and we're
not even talking about the deletions and exemptions and materials that are
being hidden. This is all documented in what the FBI has released to us.
So, for example, in Houston, Texas, on April 20, 1985, 400 people attended
an orderly demonstration for peace, jobs and justice. The FBI took 104
photographs and disseminated them to agents in three states with
instructions to identify the demonstrators. And, agents attended church
services and recorded the homily portion of the masses and they went to
conferences and recorded dinner speeches as part of a comprehensive
program against "international terrorists." 

***

The favorite line from the FBI was one: that it never happened, or two:
that they deserved it. But, with the CISPES investigation they couldn't
really do too much with that, so they said, this was an aberration, you
know, this was just a fluke, it just sort of, some agents sort of stepped
out of their boundaries and they maybe need to be slapped on their wrists,
but that's all that it was. And I think, to the progressives familiar with
the history of the FBI, the attempt to portray the CISPES investigation as
essentially a slight error, is ludicrous. 

From the Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920, when the FBI rounded up thousands
of suspected radicals, to the Counterintelligence Programs, the
COINTELPROs of the 1950s and 1960s, the FBI has always gathered
information about political activists and used it against them. The
reformed FBI of 1975, following Watergate and the Church Commission,
admitted to targeting no fewer than 1,100 organizations as suspected of
being communist fronts in their command field program. So, this just sues
us a background in terms of what happened during the 80s, and I know my
time is almost up, so I'm just going to go briefly [into]f what we have
seen of the 1990s. Even after the CISPES investigation ended, supposedly
in 1985 or 1986, in late 1989 when we saw the November offensive in 1989
of the FMLN in El Salvador, we saw an outbreak of all the different
break-ins and FBI visits, and other threats to movement organizations
during that period of time. 

***

And we also discovered a State Department document released in 1989, which
says basically . . . this is what a CISPES organization is and these are
the groups that they work with and this is the fund raising activity that
they are planning. And, at the end of that document it says, this
information should be shared with local law enforcement officials, as well
as the Salvadoran government officials. And, this was disseminated during
that period of time, so we know that this kind of investigation and
surveillance of movement groups [are] definitely still happening. 
______________________________
Jinsoo Kim is the Director of the Movement Support Network of the Center
for Constitutional Rights. 
__________________________________________________

IX:  New Threats to Civil Liberties
Press Censorship
Gara LaMarche

The title of this panel, "New Threats to Civil Liberties," is an
interesting one. I'm not sure there's any such thing as a new threat to
civil liberties having worked in the field for 15 or 20 years. What is new
and one of the reasons we're here is that as new rationales, or new
excuses, for violating civil liberties come up the forces of repression
are endlessly inventive. But the threats, I think, are always pretty much
the same. 

***

Given the developments in the Soviet Union.... [it seemed] that we might
finally, in this country, be able to deal with some of the civil liberties
problems that have been spawned by that period. That premise turned out
not to be true.... I have to say that I'm a little bit of a cynic where
these matters are concerned. My theory of civil liberties [is], "It's
always something." 

***

What I want to talk about is censorship relating to the coverage of the
war.... Earlier this week the Fund For Free Expression issued a 14 page
briefing paper on freedom of expression and the war. It covers the Desert
Shield press restrictions.... It retraces the history of relations between
the media and the military since World War II. It talks about the
effective press restrictions on coverage of the war.... And also talks
about other curbs of expression on U.S. service personnel. 

***

I want to talk for a few minutes about what I view as the most important
of these issues, and that has to do with the restrictions on the press in
the Persian Gulf. There has been a late development here, that Victor
Navasky's magazine, along with a number of others, is a plaintiff in a
lawsuit against the Department of Defense. 

***

The Pentagon, I think it is fair to say, felt that the press lost the
Vietnam War for them. That the relatively free access that the press had
to what was going on in Vietnam and the absence of official military
censorship contributed to a decline in public support for the war. And
apparently they were determined never to have that happen again and they
decided to do something about that in the Grenada conflict. 

Inspired by Margaret Thatcher's almost total control of a very servile
British press during the invasion of the Falklands in 1982, the Reagan
Administration decided in Grenada they would try the same thing, and it
worked. 

***

In Panama formal policies were adopted by the Department of Defense about
press coverage of the war which considerably cut back on the scope that
the press had in previous conflicts. And in the Panama invasion which
lasted only a couple of days the press never got anywhere near any of the
fighting in the early and important stages of the invasion. And because of
that we still really don't know a great deal about what happened during
the invasion of Panama. 

Unfortunately, in both Grenada and in Panama there was very little outcry
from either the general public, or I'm sorry to say, the so-called
mainstream press about their exclusion.... And opposition never really had
a opportunity to mobilize. Opposition that is, to the blanket curbs on
coverage. 

***

Let me just briefly say that what the Pentagon is doing in the Persian
Gulf is limiting access. Reporters can only travel in pools that the
military selects. They, I understand from the point of view of the working
press... cannot talk to any member of the armed services without a
Military Public Affairs escort present. 

And finally, as anybody who reads the Washington Post and New York Times
knows, military censors screen all reports that are filed by members of
the pool. Now there was a lawsuit filed a couple of weeks ago by a variety
of organizations -- press organizations, alternative press organizations
led by the nation to challenge these restrictions. first thing to say
about that is that the Washington Post and the New York Times and CBS
News, the Wall Street Journal and all the other so called major forces for
the news media in this country are not part of that lawsuit and express no
interest in that lawsuit. 

***

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in New York and drew a judge named
Leonard Sand. Leonard Sand happens to be a very nice judge to draw for
such a matter because he has a very expansive view of what freedom of
speech is all about. 

***

Apparently there are new rules, even more restrictive than the ones that
we discussed.... I think that ought to be the occasion to correct the
mistake made the first time around and to have not only all of us in this
room converted, but the press (broadly speaking) across the spectrum in
this country finally do its job and say, "This is not acceptable." 
______________________________
Gara LaMarche is Executive Director of the Fund for Free Expression. He
has written more than 60 articles on civil liberties and human rights, and
is also on the Board of Directors of the ACLU and the National Coalition
Against Censorship. 
__________________________________________________

IX:  New Threats to Civil Liberties
Targeting of Arab-Americans
Gregory Nojeim

I think that the best function I can serve here on this panel would be to
give kind of a field report on what appears to be the latest, most blatant
assault on civil liberties and constitutional rights by the FBI through
its program of interviewing ... Arab-Americans. Particularly those who are
chosen because they're leaders. 

***

I'd like to break down these interviews into three different stages so I
can make it clear that all the interviews aren't being called for the same
purpose.... Our office had received a number of calls from people on
January 4th saying, "Hey, I had an FBI agent at my home and he didn't
announce that he was coming. Suddenly there he was asking me questions
about terrorists and about the views of the community on the war and such
topics. What's going on? And then the FBI decided it was time to come out
with a statement.

The interviews had two stated purposes, first, to find out anything and
everything that could be found out about the possibility of a terrorist
attack here...We've spent a lot of time trying to convince the FBI that
there is no terrorist gene and that there is no cultural tendency to know
something about terrorists or to have special knowledge about terrorism.
I'd say that on that score we've failed. 

***

The agents would typically enter a person's home by indicating that they
were there to tell them should there be any instances of anti-Arab
backlash that the FBI was there to protect them and to prevent that kind
of thing. Once inside they would ask, "Do you know any terrorists? Do you
know anyone who might commit a terrorist act?" 

***

The questions that were most offensive, and I might add most showing, were
those that dealt with people's own political beliefs and the political
beliefs of the people that they associated with. 

[T]he questioning has now moved into what I call phase two, [which]
includes what I call the hunt for overstays.... If you've received an
Iraqi visitor for the past three years ... you will receive a visitor from
the INS and the agent will... say, "We have a record that so-and-so
visited you from Iraq in 1987, we don't have a record that they left.
Where are they?" 

Now stage two and a half started at about the same time stage two
interviews started.... [It] was an approach to at least two universities
where the local law enforcement officials together with the FBI, went up
to the administration of the university and said, "We want a list of all
the Arabs here." 

***

Now we're in the third and hopefully the final phase of the FBI interview
program, it's what I call the scintilla of evidence interviews. In these
interviews some agent has heard from some other agent that something
happened somewhere that might give someone some reason to believe that a
particular Arab-American may possibly have some information that might be
helpful in a potential, possible investigation of a particular, possible
act of terrorism. And it appears that the tie does not have to be very
strong.... These interviews are happening right now.... the FBI is out in
force talking to Arab-Americans. 

Finally I'd like to turn to some of the effects of these interviews....
People who would normally be the first ones to jump up and speak out about
this are often standing back trying to stay uninvolved because they don't
want to draw more attention to themselves...[or] be subject to the
instances of anti-Arab backlash that are occurring. 

The second effect has been a certain stigmatization of Arab-Americans. The
very hate crimes that the FBI said it wanted to prevent have, I believe,
increased in part because they have stigmatized the whole group to the
rest of the country and suggested that these are the people with special
knowledge of terrorists, these are the people to watch. These are the
people who we have to fear. 

***

And the third effect I think has been kind of an increase in the
vulnerability of Arab-Americans to all kinds of problems. There have been
instances where a person held a personal grudge to someone else, and they
would call the FBI and say, 'Hey, anonymous tip, I heard that so-and-so is
going to pollute the water supply of the whole city." Well so-and-so is
going to get a visit from an FBI agent. If the visit happens at work, the
effect on that person at work is dramatic.... and [at home] the effect on
a child of having Daddy questioned by the FBI is dramatic. It's difficult
to convince a child that an interview by an organ of the state is one just
to gather information about something that Daddy didn't really know about. 
______________________________
Gregory Nojeim is Director of Legal Services for to American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee. 
__________________________________________________

IX:  New Threats to Civil Liberties
From Cold War to "New World Order"
Robert Borosage

Obviously if truth is the first casualty of warfare, then civil liberties
are right next in line. 

***

I want to try to back up from hot war and talk about a broader question
because civil liberties are not only at risk when the war is hot and on,
as it is in the Middle East, but they are at risk when the war is
permanent and cold. We shouldn't forget that now. For 45 years we fought a
Cold War and we organized our society to fight it. 

The nature of the national security state was an assumption that you could
create wartime institutions that would be permanent for the peace that
would exist within the constitutional republic and not undermine that
republic. And would be able to operate a global contest with the Soviet
Union, a totalitarian power, in the imitation of that power. With the
ability to do anything that we assumed the evil other would undertake.

And so we created the secrecy system: the CIA, the Pentagon, the Pentagon
procurement system, the black budget for these operations. A whole set of
institutions grounded on laws that relate to wartime operating under
Executive authority outside, really, of the range of Congress, outside of
the range of normal legal order. 

And throughout the Cold War period we found obviously that the Cold War
systematically caused an erosion of civil liberties. From the early days,
and Truman scaring the hell out of the American people to get support for
the Cold War, the loyalty and security oaths, the congressional
committees, McCarthyism, all through Watergate, through Iran-Contra we
have seen in systematic ways the way institutions have operated again and
again and again. Across the bounds of our Constitution to erode civil
liberties and civil rights.

Then last year, suddenly, the Cold War ended. This extraordinary event...
there is that moment when there was a sense that anything was possible. 

***

[T]he real peace dividend was the possibility of transforming this
permanent wartime state and dismantling it so that you can return to the
constitutional republic and you could open the possibilities that had been
dosed by the vise of the Cold War. A different political discussion, a
different set of possibilities at home, a different way to think about how
we order ourselves in the world. All of that can suddenly open up. 

***

The greatest hole of the national security state in the Cold War... was
the incredible pall it put on American politics. It was the ideas that
were not mentioned because they were unmentionable. It was the thoughts
that couldn't be conceived, it was the possibilities that were simply fore
dosed, and it was a set of priorities that defined us very different than
every other advanced industrialized country. 

***

What happened with the end of the Cold War? Well the national security
state like bureaucracies everywhere mobilized to meet the threat of peace.
And it is interesting to review what they did. The first response,
illustrated in the campaign of 1988, was simply denial...[T]he
Administration did its much heralded security review in its first year and
it came up with the "status quo plus" as the President described it which
would be their security posture. After the revolutions in Eastern Europe
it was pretty hard to not realize something was going on. And so there was
a scramble.... The military, which had always been disdainful of the drug
war suddenly became a volunteer enlisting in the war on drugs and seeking
a four billion dollar program to set up bases in the Andes.

Senator Nunn suggested that army green could become environmental and that
the military labs could be used to lead the war on the environment. But in
the course of this scramble, I think with remarkable rapidity for a large
institutional structure totally dedicated to anti-communism in the Cold
War, a new rationale was develop and a rationale for all of the
institutions of the national security state redefined. 

***

America would police a new world order....[T]his mission is going to
define what they see as threats abroad, and therefore what they see as
threats at home. What's the new world order? Well the President was very
explicit, the world remains a dangerous place. We need forces to be able
to respond to threats in whatever corner of the world they may appear.
Economic threats, terrorism, hostage taking, renegade regimes, and
unpredictable rulers. Sources of instability. 

***

General Grey of the Marine Corp was somewhat more explicit as marines are
tended to be .... he said, "The underdeveloped world's growing"
dissatisfaction over the gap between rich and poor nations creates a
fertile breeding group for insurgencies. These have the potential to
jeopardize regional stability and our access to vital resources. And
therefore in the military terminology, we need a credible military power
projection capability with the flexibility to respond to conflict across
the spectrum ...." 

This is the infrastructure that .... sustains the secrecy, the procurement
mechanisms, the intelligence agencies, the black budgets, etc. 

***

I think there is a great problem here that has to be mentioned, which is
the "R-word," the scud missile of American politics: race. What
characterizes the Third World, our new enemy that we are going to
police.... They tend to be people of color. Then if you think terrorism in
the Third World, instability, drugs, renegade regimes are the new threat
to the United States and you organize the national security state to
address it ... this is only the beginning of an internal security
operation that will be directed at peoples of color in the United States. 

Now people of color, as you know from Martin Luther King, and from
COINTELPRO, have always been a particular target of the national security
apparatus, so this will not be a new departure, it will simply be a
reinforcement of old trends and a continued development of them. And so I
think that the argument on civil liberties cannot simply be about the
specific violations and the specific concerns, even though we have to
fight each one of those as they come. We have to argue about America's
role in the world.
______________________________
Robert Borosage is a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
__________________________________________________

X:  Looking Toward a Post Cold War America
The Media in an Open Society
Hodding Carter III

I wish that I ... had a number of original things to say. I think speaking
to this group, however, I will be saying some of the obvious for the sake
more than anything else of trying to remind us that post-Cold War, or Cold
War, or wartime, the problems of my particular area, which happens to be
the media in an open society, the problems are consistent over time. And
the solutions, rather than being particularly original, are as old as the
Republic. 

Thinking of old statements and cliches, something that Senator Hyrum
Johnson said in 1917, and which became the title of an excellent book
called, The First Casualty, pertains today and this moment of war, but it
has in fact pertained for the entire Cold War as well. And the statement
was, "The first casualty when war comes is truth."That goes with the
territory. Then there's another quotation I'd like to offer, less because
I agree with it because I don't, but because it reflects one of the
problems in the society when it comes to the press actually exercising its
power, more to the point, its responsibilities. 

The late Theodore White said of the press that "its power is primordial,
it sets the agenda for public discussion, a sweeping power unrestrained by
any law. It determines what people think about and write about. It is an
authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests and
parties." Sad quotation. 

Well the reality has been for a very long time, and it's one of the
enduring legacies of the Cold War that the agenda in this nation rather
than being subject to considerable debate and intense conversation within
the press has been largely a function of the government determining and
announcing what is important and the media responding to it. All
politicians, all spokespersons, of which I was once one, like to complain
that the press gets in the way of the nation's business. The fact of the
matter is that the press for the most part in this country for the last
few decades has been part of the government's business. We like to pretend
that we initiate, I would suggest to you that there's hardly anything of
any importance in which the public dialogue was initiated by the press.
That you can almost determine what it is that we are going to focus upon
depending upon what government has told us is important. And when
government says it is no longer important, either by not speaking of it or
by moving its attention, we cease to focus on it as well. Barring of
course, natural calamities. Barring, of course, the absolutely unavoidable
scandal which leaps out and subsumes both government and media. 

But these are rare and few and far between. For the most part Central
America becomes an issue when the government says it is and vanishes when
the government says it isn't. Terrorism becomes an issue when government
says it is and ceases to be when government says it isn't. Drugs become an
issue when government says they are and cease to be when government no
longer says so.... Except again when finally the force of events, of
gathering storm, of pent-up absolute unmet demands becomes too great, and
here again it becomes a matter of both government and the press being
surprised. The Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Movement, the anti-war
movement again and again coming out from people an agenda emerges which is
neither guided by government nor anticipated by the press.

***

I, having worked inside, have to tell you, all evidence to the contrary, I
continue to believe that government does not consistently lie. I have to
tell you that government consistently does not tell the truth. Which is to
say that the information that is not released is more important that the
information which is. And to the degree to which press behavior feeds
government's behavior, that is to the degree upon which the press ....
decides that the source of information can, and should be, the
spokesperson, to that degree the press is not functioning as a free press
in an open society. And I would tell you the habit of minds in the media
today, which lead them, essentially, to a beat reporter approach to the
news is in contradiction to the needs of an open society.

What the establishment of any order has to say about reality is an
imitation of reality constructed for the benefit of the establishment....
Power does not speak truth, power speaks power. And when you go to power
spokes people for truth, you go to the wrong well. Now that doesn't mean
you don't go there, it just means that isn't where you stop. I am also
reminded that in almost all moments of crisis, the line which is supposed
to separate the press as a distinct constitutional entity from the
government ... tends to blur. And so when the best of our journalists on
television begin saying "we" when speaking of what the nation is doing you
begin to understand the difficulties, because they are not speaking of the
nation, they are speaking of the government.

***

Most of the American media today are the creatures of massive corporate
power. If those corporations, in fact, had the interest, let us say in
press freedoms that they have in the bottom line, that interest mobilized
would get the attention even of this government. Even of this government
after ten years of the most systematic building up of barriers to press
access and press freedom that we have seen in any non-wartime period, I
think, in American history. But of course, these corporations are not in
the business, at their top, of news but in the business of business
itself. And so as a fact we have seen this creation of massive barriers
with virtually no noise at all. 

Finally to quote that well known liberal, Saulsi Netzen, writing to the
writers union of the Soviet Union, some years ago, the first time in fact
that the word Glasnost had any apparent register upon us let alone upon
them. He said something that the media's had a hard time remembering and
continues to have a hard time remembering, he said, "Publicity and
openness, (which in Russian was Glasnost) honest and complete is the prime
condition for the health of every society. The man who does not want
publicity and openness for his fatherland does not want to cleanse it of
its disease but to drive them inside so that they may rot there." 

We love that when applied to the Russians; we do not like it when applied
to our own society. It is not a prescription that gets you on the talk
shows in the evening or Sunday morning. It is not what gets you on the
op-ed page of our major newspapers. It is of course precisely what the 
press ought to be about in an open society. 
______________________________

Hodding Carter III was the State Department spokesman during the Carter
Administration and former Associate Publisher of the Democrat-Times in
Greenville, Mississippi. Currently, Carter is an op-ed columnist for the
Wall Street Journal and a regular participant on "This Week with David
Brinkley." 
__________________________________________________

X:  Looking Toward a Post Cold War America
Fighting for a Peace Dividend
Ron Daniels

Let me begin by three quotes from Martin Luther King. This presentation
again will not break any new ground. Some of it may be controversial, but
certainly as Mr. Hodding Carter suggested today it's not so much a matter
of generating new ideas but perhaps reminding us of some of the old ideas
that we need to continue to hold steadfast to in this period. 

King said: "A nation that continues to spend more money on military
defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
It occurs to me that the protest and dissent over the war in the Gulf at
this particular moment is another chapter, another part of the struggle
for America's heart and soul. And King was about that as he dissented
against the Vietnam War. Secondly he said: "We must rapidly begin to shift
from a thing oriented society to a person oriented society." When machines
and computers and profit motives and property rights are considered more
important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and
militarism are incapable of being conquered. Then finally he said: "True
compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that
an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." 

As we take a look at America today I will say a litany of things we
already know but they speak to the kind of edifice that we have in America
today and what that edifice is producing. 3-6 million homeless people, 37
million people without health insurance, the phenomenon of the working
poor which is not very often talked about where people in fact are
gainfully employed and fully employed and yet are living in poverty. Some
60 million people in America who are illiterate, 30 million of whom are
functionally illiterate and 30 million of whom are absolutely illiterate
in these United States of America. And when you turn to the community I
come from, the African American community, half of our children live in
poverty, one-third of our women live in poverty, one-third of the senior
citizens in the Black community live in poverty. 

Blacks today are 2-3 times more unemployed than white America. The income
gap, despite the civil rights movement, still remains large and is
growing. 56% of the income, blacks visa-vis white, $18,000 for
African-Americans and $32,000 for white. And when it comes to the crisis
of black males, one in four black males today are in prison or under some
form of correctional supervision. Between 1976 and 1986 there was a 46,000
decline in the college black male enrollment. But in a three year period
from 1985-89 [an] 86,000 increase in the prison population. 

Blacks suffer more than anyone else in this society from premature death,
that is to say die from illnesses that other people don't die from simply
because they have access to health insurance or health facilities. And
increasingly we're finding islands of destitution in America where Blacks
and Chicanos and others live where this is not the case. African-Americans
are the only group in this society since the 30's that have experienced an
absolute decline in life expectancy. And of course we must say that
racism, given all that we have seen, is still alive and well in America
today. 

And so if we want to talk about moving beyond the Cold War, that notion,
that concept must translate into an end to racism or the end of the war of
the races and it must translate into an end of classism or the
exploitation of the many by the few. One is reminded that today after the
obscenities of the 80's that one half of one percent of the people of this
country control maybe 30% of the total wealth. And that the top 10%
controls nearly 70% of the total wealth in this society. And so really it
seems to me what we ought to be talking about is not just America as is
obvious but something that we talked about at the historic Gary [Indiana]
Black Political Convention in 1972. The concept of a new society, the
conceptualization of something beyond that which we currently have. 

In that regard it seems to me that there are several concepts which are
important. Concepts that we need to drive home, into our own
consciousness, and into the consciousness of this nation as we seek to
perfect the imperfect union, as we seek to finish the unfinished
democracy. 

One is the notion of a socially responsible economy. That our principles
and politics must be guided by that notion. That it is the duty and
responsibility of [an] economy to provide jobs and income and housing and
education and health care, energy sufficiency and a clean environment. And
a part of that notion relates particularly to the inner city areas of this
country .... It is the notion of a domestic Marshall Plan. That a
rationally planned economy would see the demise of the inner city, the
urban areas, as major priority, and that this country would move to a
domestic Marshall Plan to begin to deal with the urban malaise in this
society. 

A corollary concept is the notion of economic democracy. We must continue
to drive for corporate accountability. The rich in this society and the
corporate sector must pay its fair share. There must be a sense of
responsibility to communities where corporations operate, both
domestically and internationally. 

We need to continue to talk about reversing the incentives for
corporations to invest abroad. Part of the problem that we see in terms of
the current demise of some of the commercial banks is because they
recklessly and irresponsibly invested abroad as opposed to investing their
dollars here in the United States. We need to talk about health
competition. It's odd that we have to talk about competition within the
context of a capitalist society. But what we need is more competition, a
part of which means to me the innovation and pressing forth [of]
community-worker ownership that when plants shutdown in communities we
need an alternative and community-worker ownership is one aspect of that. 

The need for greater employee stock ownership with a democratic voice for
the workers in terms of setting policies, an emphasis on community-based
economic development particularly in rural areas and inner city
communities, and of course fighting to protect and defend the right of
workers to organize. Another major concept that we need to deal with
particularly as it relates to the concept of racism, and chauvinism, and
sexism in this society is the education for a new society. Education
becomes a vital aspect of what we need to talk about. But not just the
technical component of education, not just the academics of the matter. We
need a curriculum of inclusion and this term is being talked about all
over the country these days -- a multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual
education ought to be seen as a priority in a post-Cold War America. 

I close by saying the real task before us is indeed to finish the
unfinished democracy.... And in that regard it seems to me that in this
period of danger in our democracy that it is important to remind ourselves
that the real patriots have been those who fought against slavery, but yet
were in the minority very often, those who fought the protracted struggle
to organize labor, but very often were in the minority, but who dared to
dissent. 

Those who fought for womens' suffrage were patriots even though they were
initially in the minority and fought against the prevailing view of the
establishment. And certainly those who fought for civil rights who very
often were in the minority and had to go up against all kinds of
characterizations as communist agitators and nigger-lovers and such. And
of course the heroic struggle against the Vietnam war. It seems to me that
these were the real patriots, because in a real sense they were struggling
to stop the kind of spiritual death that Martin Luther King talked about. 
______________________________
Ron Daniels is the President of the Institute for Community Organization
and Development in Youngstown, Ohio and a convener of the African American
Progressive Action Network. 
__________________________________________________

X:  Looking Toward a Post Cold War America
Cleaning Up the Environment
H. Jack Geiger, M.D.

Somebody in the comments that have been made so far talked about the need
for relentless struggle if we are going to have a post-Cold War America.
And I wrote the word down in my notes because I think that we are going to
have to be relentless to indicate that the forces and difficulties we are
confronting and opposing are relentless. 

To illustrate, very briefly, in the remarks that I'm going to make these
forces and these practices are built now into the very fabric of a wide
variety of institutions in our society and it's not just a matter of a
short campaign for today's issues or today's headlines or the like. 

Let me illustrate that with a couple of examples that stem from the work
my colleagues and I have been doing over the last three or four years in
particular. Mention has been made of the Department of Energy and nuclear
weapons production. There are half a dozen nations at least that make
nuclear weapons and all of them attend that process with secrecy and all
of them, so far as we can determine or as is known or as we can deduce,
have had major accidents of one kind or another. 

But to my knowledge, the United States of America is the only government
that has on a considerable variety of occasions deliberately irradiated
its own citizens. I refer of course to what happened in Hanford where on
at least three different occasions, not just the so-called green run that
people know about, as an experimental process hundreds of thousands of
curies of radioactive iodine were released on an unsuspecting countryside
and an unsuspecting citizenry.  Nominally this was done in an attempt to
determine whether the sensor system was working, but with what would
appear to be significant consequences now and we may never know the full
dimension of those consequences, because we really started looking so many
decades later, to the public and particularly to those exposed in
Washington state and Idaho who were children at the time. 

This happened because there had been from the beginning secrecy built into
the fabric of the agencies of our government that produce nuclear weapons.
Of course nuclear weaponry has always been one of the most wonderful
excuses for every kind of secrecy whether relevant or not, needed or not,
or relevant to nuclear weapons or not. Our government has always taken a
position that not only is it necessary to keep secret the details of how
to make a nuclear weapon, or the nuclear weapons we're making or the new
improved better products, or the mechanisms of production, but also to
keep secret on national security grounds the health data with regard to
workers, the health data with regard to citizens of surrounding
communities, and the environmental data with regard to contamination of
air, ground water and soil. 

[This is justified] on national security grounds, as if any adversary or
potential adversary were somehow to gain from this. It is perfectly clear
from whom the secrets were being kept. These secrets were being and are
being kept from the American public, from the citizens of surrounding
communities and from the workers themselves. 

The data, not just what happened, but the data on the consequences were
and are to a considerable extent being kept secret. The only people who
could study these phenomena by law, at that time, were the Department of
Energy and its subcontractors. And so the Department of Energy
simultaneously had responsibility for producing nuclear weapons and for
the health and environmental consequences of that production. And finally
had control of all the information. 

I suppose it's not unprecedented to have the fox guarding the chicken
coop, but it is relatively unprecedented at the same time to give the fox
the exclusive right to report on morbidity and mortality in the chicken
coop. And that's what we have done for so many years. 

I have been with my colleagues looking at the epidemiological record,
looking at all these publications that the Department of Energy and its
subcontractors have published over the last twenty years or so. We're
still trying to gain access to those that they haven't published, which in
the classic mold look to be the more significant ones. There is a
consistent tendency in those studies of dismissing positive findings, of
being careful not to go back and look three or four years later at the
same populations of workers, and showing no biological inquisitiveness,
and defending in effect and covering up at all times. 

Indeed, we know that one researcher finally mustered the courage to come
forth, Greg Wilkinson in Los Alamas, studying a cohort of workers at Rocky
Flats and finding excesses of brain cancer and pancreatic cancer and
proposing to publish that in the American Journal of Epidemiology. He was
called in by his superiors at Los Alamas and told: "What are you trying to
do -- wreck the nuclear industry? Your job is to please the Department of
Energy not a bunch of peer reviewers." We can only guess how many times
that has happened that we don't know about. 

***
______________________________
H. Jack Geiger, M.D.is Professor of Community Medicine at the University
of New York Medical School. He is President of Physicians for Human
Rights. 
__________________________________________________

XI:  Building A Movement to End the Cold War at Home and Resist New
Threats to Liberty Introduction

This panel is probably one of the most important sessions that we've had
at this conference. This is where we need to begin talking about our
strategy: How will we address the myriad of problems that we have been
discussing this last day and a half. How will we in fact build a movement
to both end the Cold War at home and resist the new threats that we can
see already emerging in this period. 

I'd like to start off this discussion by identifying the three broad
themes that have come out in the deliberations so far. First of all, the
urgency of the moment: the fact that any violations of civil liberties are
easily justified in times of war and that we have seen and can expect
further erosions of the civil liberties which were taken away from us
during the Cold War, in this period of hot war. 

The second theme is that this period also provides a new impetus for
change, especially if we continue to point out the interconnections
between what we are experiencing today and the legacy of the Cold War --
the entrenchment of power in the Executive Branch and the national
security state apparatus that we are left with in the wake of the Cold
War. 

The third theme is the need for unity; the need to overcome the divisions
that were perpetrated and consciously sown in the cold war period; the
need to unite the constituencies that are concerned about these issues
including religious groups, labor, the peace movement, African Americans,
Arab Americans, Hispanics, native Americans, women, gays and lesbians, and
other groups who can unite, at least on the issue of fighting against
incursions against civil rights and civil liberties. 

Bob Borosage said in his very excellent talk that one of the tragedies of
the cold war is that there appears to have been a loss possibilities, a
'loss of vision," and I think that the participation and enthusiasm at
this conference indicates that there are indeed new possibilities in this
period. Our task at this session is to begin to discuss how we can take
advantage of those new possibilities, how we can advance the struggle for
civil rights and civil liberties, and how we can in fact realize the
objectives of the drafters of the Bill of Rights in this 200th year of its
existence. 
______________________________
Jeanne Woods is a legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties
Union in Washington, responsible for work in the area of free trade in
ideas and ending the cold war at home. 
__________________________________________________

XI:  Building A Movement to End the Cold War at Home and Resist New
Threats to Liberty

The Legislative Agenda
Steve Rickard

Senator Moynihan recently asked the following questions on the floor of
the Senate. He said, "The time has come to ask, with the Cold War over,
can we purge the vestiges of this struggle from our laws, our bureaucracy,
and most importantly from our way of thinking. Can we muster the will to
redefine ourselves?" As I understand it, this panel will attempt to
address that question. How do we build a movement to end the Cold War at
home? I will try to discuss this question from the viewpoint of Capitol
Hill. 

On January 17, 1991 Senator Moynihan introduced S. 236, a bill to end the
Cold War at home. The bill would abolish the CIA as a separate standing
entity and transfer its functions of gathering intelligence and analysis
to the State Department where it rightfully belongs. 

It would require that the government publish at least, at a minimum, a
single figure for the total amount spent on intelligence, which we have
not done. I think for those of you who heard Tim Weiner's remarks [on the
secret budget], you can see how important that is. 

It would require the government to purge once and for all its ideological
lookout lists of aliens who have "unacceptable" opinions and abolish the
authority that the Executive Branch currently has to exclude those persons
from the United States. 

It would prohibit privately financed diplomacy, the sort of tin cup
diplomacy we saw in the Iran Contra affair, and it would place once and
for all the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy fully under
our environmental regulations. 

[A]s sweeping as some people may view the parameters of the Act, it is
really just a beginning. There is so much more that needs to be done, but
the question that we need to ask in looking at even this first step is,
what are its chances. What are the chances that Congress will take this
bill and turn it into law? Well, as Yogi Bera once said, "Sometimes you
can observe a lot just by watching." [I]f we observe. we will see that
what we have been watching is perpetuation of our Cold War modes of
behavior. 

***

The Cold War ended, and we increased our defense, on average, rather than
decreasing it over that period of time. The Senate did propose killing two
weapon systems; the House proposed killing three different weapon systems.
So they had a conference, and they decided to compromise: Let's keep them
all. 

***

Why have we found it so difficult to translate this tremendous development
of the end of the Cold War . . . into a domestic legislative agenda that
can return us to our traditions of free speech and most important [the]
principles of our Constitution? 

First, of course, there are entrenched interests. There are people whose
livelihoods, whose careers have been based in and upon the principles of
the Cold War. . . And I think you see examples day after day of Cold War
institutions searching for new missions, new ways to justify their
existence. For several years the military said they didn't want to have
anything to do with the drug war and it should be kept out of that -- it
wasn't its function. But with the end of the Cold War I think you saw a
surge of people in the military saying this is what we can do for youths
is how we can help interdict drugs. Recently the intelligence community
more and more has been talking about the importance of economic
intelligence and economic counterintelligence. 

There are new threats and new problems that people will raise to justify
the continuation of Cold War organizations. Right now the one that we hear
the most about is terrorism. . . But we obviously can go overboard with
this problem. Again to paraphrase Yogi Bera, the recent harassment of Arab
Americans is deja vu all over again. You would think that after the
problem we had with the internment of Japanese Americans that we would be
forever vigilant against harassing loyal Americans because of their ethnic
ancestry, but apparently not. 

There is also the problem of inertia. It's always very difficult to get
anything done on Capitol Hill with 535 members of Congress, each with
their different interests. You've got a lot of items on the agenda. 

Another very real problem is the divided committee jurisdictions on
Capitol Hill. There is no single committee that will be taking a
comprehensive look at this issue, and that's a very real problem. 

[H]aving the right ideas isn't enough; you have to translate that into
muscle. And again, I think Yogi Bera said it all. He said, "Baseball is 90
percent mental, but the other half is physical." I think that this
coalition has the mental part, it has the best ideas, it has the right
ideas, the ideas that are most consistent with the best American
traditions. 

What about that other half, the physical part? How do we translate that
into muscle? Well. I can only tell you that from my perspective as a
staffer on Capitol Hill that you have to do everything you can to put
burrs under our saddles. [W]hat I suggest is that you work very, very hard
at creating incentives for your elected representatives to back
legislation to repeal the Cold War at home. Make it easier for them to do
it than to do nothing. 

***

[M]ail to members of Congress are read, they are kept track of. You have
to come up with responses. 

***

Well, I'm going to close with the last of my "Beraisms," probably his best
known. And that is, "It ain't over till it's over." And when it comes to
the end of the Cold War at home, it most definitely is not over. 
______________________________
Steve Rickard is the Legislative Assistant for Foreign Affairs and Defense
for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York.
__________________________________________________

XI:  Building A Movement to End the Cold War at Home and Resist New
Threats to Liberty

A Grassroots Approach
Anne Braden

I am going to come at this challenge that we face today from a different
direction from the one outlined by Steve, but I really want to make it
clear that this is not because I don't think that what he has said is
important. The legislative struggles here in Washington are tremendously
important, and I think we should all support them. I think we should all
go home and support this bill that he is talking about. In addition to the
legislative he mentioned, there is a struggle that already has wide
support for HR 50. That is the bill that would bring the FBI under some
sort of control and make it recognize the First Amendment. 

***

I think we need to remember that most of the battles we have won for
legislation that broadens human rights were won first in the streets of
our country. And I use the term "in the streets" figuratively, because it
wasn't just street demonstrations. We got out, we gave people information,
we organized, we created an atmosphere, and then the principles that we
struggled for were written into law. And, of course, sometimes the very
campaign around a struggle for law is an organizing tool to organize
public opinion in the streets.

Thus, I think the question [is] whether we can now move away from the grip
of the Cold War or whether we're going to move backwards now that we're in
a hot war. I think the place where that question is really going to be
decided is in the court of public opinion in this country, in communities
across this nation where all of us live. It will be determined by the
movements you and I build across this country for the broadening of
democracy in our land for turning this country away from the negative
forces that hem us in and I see those negative forces as basically three:
racism, militarism, and economic injustice and inequity and sexism -- and
as we build movements for humane policies, which include meet[ing] the
needs of the people, the people who have not benefited from the Cold War,
have not derived economic justice from the Cold Warned I believe there are
more of us than there are of them who benefited. And then I think as we
build those movements in all the communities of our land, the fears and 
the repression, the restrictions of the Cold War, will fall of their own 
weight.

And as documentation of how this can work, I think we only need to look at
the 60s. Those of us old enough to remember know that the worst of the
Cold War fears as we knew them in the 50s began to dissipate in the 60s
because there was a tremendous movement for human rights in this country
and ultimately against war. The atmosphere changed, so the weapons of the
witch hunt lost power. Look, for example, at the battle before the House
UnAmerican Committee (HUAC). Many of us worked long and hard to abolish
that committee. Frank Wilkenson, who led that battle, is here with us this
weekend. And eventually in 1975, I believe it was, legislation was enacted
that indeed abolished HUAC. But long before that legislation was passed
that battle had been won in the streets, figuratively speaking, because
people just weren't afraid of that committee anymore. That had happened
partly as a result of the organizing that Frank and others did, but it
happened partly because of the massive civil rights movement, the anti-war
movement that simply changed the atmosphere in this country. 

***

So I think that we must be about building the movements that can change
the atmosphere today to where the Cold War cannot go on and cannot be
revived. And in that context I want to make three points, and I'm going to
try to make them briefly. 

First, it seems to me that one of the most tragic results of the Cold War
years is that so many people somewhere along the line quit putting forth a
vision of what this country could really be like if it turned its
resources to meeting human needs. An example: I always think of Frank
Wilkenson and the story he tells about how he got involved in civil
liberties, and I'm sure a lot of you have heard him tell it, when he was
in public housing work in Los Angeles. At that time before the attack came
the people working on public housing in Los Angeles had a plan and money
coming from Washington for it that they said would have made Los Angeles
the first city in America free of slums. Of course that went down the
drain after Frank got caught in the witch hunt. 

But how many people today talk about freeing our cities of slums, of
rebuilding our cities. We talk about building a few houses here and there.
We talk about patching up our health care system. We talk about patching
up the educational system. But how often do we talk about really putting
our resources to work and revamping these institutions entirely that can
make life good? Not very often. We fight defensive battles. We've been
doing that, and I think that's a result of the Cold War. I think it was
because the Cold War injected the idea into the atmosphere that there is
something subversive about a total change in the society and the values
that got it. 

Now I wrote this this morning, cause I knew I'd go overtime if I didn't
write it out, before I heard Ron Daniels on the panel this morning. And I
thought, you know that's not true, people had still been putting out a
vision -- some people had. Read Martin Luther King's Riverside Church
speech in 1967; he put forth a vision which Ron quoted from this morning.
I had forgotten until Ron reminded us that the Gary Indiana Black
Political Convention in 1972 projected a vision for a new society. The
Urban League has been saying since 1960: Let's rebuild our cities with a
domestic Marshall Plan. I think that's the wrong characterization of the
Marshall plan, but they say, "rebuild our cities." 

Interestingly enough, a lot of these visions come from the African
American community, and one problem is that us white folks don't always
hear what African Americans say. The press sort of thinks they should just
be talking about civil rights -- we don't always hear those visions. 

But there has been a clamp down. We've been forced into defensive battles,
and I think we have to reclaim the right to project visions of what this
country can be and go out and organize around it. I don't mean esoteric
things sitting in a room somewhere but some realistic goals. I think they
are realistic, and I think a good place to start is with a struggle for
the peace dividend. Now, Mary Berry said yesterday that she knew a year
ago there wasn't going to be any peace dividend. Well there won't be
automatically, but I think we can struggle for it. I'm not willing to give
up on that. I worked with all through the South are saying the same thing.
It's something that can unite a lot of people. I think a struggle can be
mounted around that today regardless of the hot war that is using that
peace dividend every day, and I think we have to be about doing that. 

That may not be the job of this conference, but one thing related to it
is. Yesterday the representative from the National Conference of Black
Lawyers gave a graphic history of the 40-year attack on the black
liberation movement in this country. It was part of the Cold War, it went
on into the 60s, it intensified in the late 60s when they set out to
destroy that black movement. It has never stopped. It has continued. It
takes its form today in a consistent pattern of attack on African-American
elected officials and other leaders. 
______________________________
Anne Braden is a long-time activist for civil rights, civil liberties, and
social justice. She is currently the Co-chair of the Southern Organizing
Committee for Economic and Social Justice. 
__________________________________________________

XI:  Building A Movement to End the Cold War at Home and Resist New
Threats to Liberty

The Need for Unity
Loretta Williams

We have forgotten the ways by which the climate was changed in the 50s and
60s ... Images were created that were inclusive images, that were hope
filled. Certainly we moved people into the streets by giving them
information, but we moved people into the streets because there was a
sense of hope that you could do something. 

Along with the information deficit, it is important that all of our
organizations help fill the hope deficit in this country. Cynicism
abounds. It is pervasive. And in so many ways, the messages that our
organizations are putting out fall into the trap of listing the litany of
horrors, not the "vision thing," not talking in terms of . . . that hope
of human unity. And in any way that we get into we-them, superior-inferior
thinking, whether people are citizens of the United States or whether they
are not, we are crazy to get into that frame of reference. 

So again, not only this conference but what is happening over in the
Persian Gulf is an opportunity for us to rethink, relook, and reframe the
words we use, reframe talk of saving the soul of the Americas. And I would
say the Americas, because we must remember our full history. 

Looking at all the isms, all of the isms are connected and must be framed
in terms of oppression. Whether the oppression is by class, by
imperialism, sexism, homophobia, it's oppression, and that's very useful.
I think Anne is correct that we must remember that embedded in the very
soil of this country and woven into the fabric of this country is the
color line. W.E.B. Dubois, prominent sociologist in 1904, first told us
that the issue, the problem of the 20th century, is the color line. The
fact that you will find the least of the best, the most of the worst for
people of darker skin color. Whether you measure it by access to
education, median income, infant mortality, presence in the front line
troops in the Persian Gulf, you will find people of darker color who have
the most of the worst whatever your indices It has been that way, it will
be that way. 

We in that period of the 50s and 60s, and I say we meaning all of the
people of the United States, allowed the issue to become framed from
racial democracy, from transformation, from liberation. We gave up those
words, and we spoke about integration. When you talk about integration,
what does that say about who's controlling the structures of society? It
says that the structures remain the exact same way they were before, and
you let a few people more into this. I am arguing that the rallying cry
that we used in terms of integration with hindsight was a mistake. I would
argue in terms of the women's liberation movement. We don't even talk
about the women's liberation movement anymore. We don't use the word
liberation; that's a very big mistake. 

***

And we were talking about community 20 years ago. We were not talking
about the exact correct analysis, dotting the i's and crossing the t's. We
were talking about what we the people could do together, and the "we the
people" that we talk about now must be "we the people of the globe,"
because that color line shows up all around the globe. 

But what is it that we are going to do, we who are in this room? ...
Certainly we will work for passage of the legislation. But if we are
talking about the harassment of Arab Americans increasing ... could we ...
mobilize and jam the White House public opinion line demanding a statement
from President Bush. Could we agree that we are going to ... use the
phones and do the fax, do the letters to Pan Am [objecting to] the policy
of no longer carrying anyone who is Iraqi or anyone who might possibly be
from the Middle East.

***

So what I think I am saying is very similar to what my colleagues have
said. We've got to think about the ways by which we get people out in the
street again, we get people smiling again, we get people remembering that
we do have the power to bring about change. And we need to do covenants
with each other in terms of networking-alliance building, so people can
pull our coattails when we don't see the connection, when we don't see
that the language and the very air we breathe divides us, so that we talk
of black holes, so that we talk of black listing, so that we don't fall
into those same tracks that divide us so that there is a we and then there
is a them, the them being African Americans, the them being Arab
Americans, the them being Iraqis, the them being Africans. 

Let us build upon our hope of human unity, and we the people can bring
about change. 
______________________________
Loretta Williams is a sociologist and activist. Dr. Williams is the
founding Chair and current Co-chair of the National Interreligious
Commission on Civil Rights. 
__________________________________________________

Appendix A:  Selected Bibliography

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Dream. New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1986. 

Bamford, James. The Puzzle Palace. Inside the National Security Agency,
America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization. New York: Penguin Books,
1982. 

Baxter, John. State Security, Privacy, and Information. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1990. 

Beck, Melvin. Secret Contenders: The Myth of Cold War Counterintelligence.
New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1984. 

Blackstock, Nelson. COINTELPRO: The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom.
New York: Vintage Books, 1976. 

Borosage, Robert and John Marks. The CIA File. New York: Grossman
Publishers, 1976. 

Churchill, Ward and Jim Vander Wall. The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents From
the FBI's Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent. Boston: South End Press,
1990. 

Churchill, Ward and Jim Vander Wall. Agents of Repression. The FBI's
Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian
Movement. Boston: South End Press, 1988. 

Cimbala, Stephen and Sidney Waldman, eds. Controlling and Ending Conflict:
Issues Before and After the Cold War. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. 

Cole, Lester. Hollywood Red. Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts Press, 1981.

Cruelly, Richard. The FBI v. The First Amendment. Los Angeles: The First
Amendment Foundation, 1990. 

Csorba, Les, III. Academic License: The War on Academic Freedom. Evanston,
IL: UCA Books, 1988. 

Curry, Richard. Freedom at Risk: Secrecy, Censorship and Repression in the
1980's. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. 

Davis, James Kirkpatrick. The Politics of Counterintelligence. New York:
Praeger, 1992. 

Dellums, Ronald. Defense Sense: The Search for a Rational Military Policy.
Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Pub. Co., 1983. 

Demac, Donna. Keeping America Uninformed: Government Secrecy in the
1980's. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984. 

Demac, Donna. Liberty Denied: The Current Rise of Censorship in America.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. 

Diamond, Sigmund. Official Stories, Little Secrets: On the Trail of the
Intelligence Agency-University Complex, 1945-1955. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992. 

Donner, Frank J. The Age of Surveillance. The Aims and Methods of
America's Political Intelligence System. New York: Vintage Books, 1981. 

Donner, Frank J. Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression
in Urban America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990. 

Dorsen, Norman. The Evolving Constitution. Essays on the Bill of Rights
and the U.S. Supreme Court. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
1986. 

Dorsen, Norman. Our Endangered Rights: The ACLU Report on Civil Liberties
Today. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 

Dudziak, Mary L. "Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative." (1988) Stanford
Law Review 41:61. 

Feldman, Jonathan. Universities in the Business of Repression. Boston:
South End Press, 1989. 

Foerstel, Herbert. Surveillance in the Stacks: The FBI's Library Awareness
Program. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. 

Gaddis, John Lewis. The United States and the End of the Cold War:
Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991. 

Garrow, David. The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From "Solo" to
Memphis. New York: Norton, 1981. 

Garrow, David, ed. The Martin Luther King, Jr. FBI File. Frederick, MD:
University Publications of America, 1984. 

Gelbspan, Ross. Break-ins, Death Threats and the FBI: The Covert War
Against the Central America Movement. Boston: South End Press, 1991. 

Glick, Brian. War at Home. Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What
We can Do About it. Boston: South End Press, 1989. 

Goldstein, Robert Justin, "The United States," International Handbook of
Human Rights. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. 

Gora, Joel M., David Goldberger, Gary M. Stern and Morton H. Halperin. The
Right to Protest. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press,
1991. 

Greenwald, David S.; Steven J. Zeitlin. No Reason to Talk About It. New
York: Norton, 1987. 

Haines, Herbert. Black Radicals and the Civil Rights Mainstream.
Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1989. 

Halperin, Morton H. The Lawless State. The Crimes of the U.S. Intelligence
Agencies. New York: Penguin Books, 1976. 

Halperin, Morton H. National Security and Civil Liberties: A Benchmark
Report. Washington, DC: Center for National Security Studies, 1981. 

Hernon, Peter; Charles McClure. Public Access to Government Information.
Issues, Trends and Strategies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Pub. Corp., 1988. 

Hoffman, Daniel N. Governmental Secrecy and the Founding Fathers: A Study
in Constitutional Controls. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981. 

Hoffman, Frank. Intellectual Freedom and Censorship: An Annotated
Bibliography. Mutation, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1989. 

Horne, Gerald. Black and Red: W.E. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response
to the Cold War, 1944 1963. Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 1986. 

Horne, Gerald. Communist Front?: The Civil Rights Congress, 1946-1956.
Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988. 

Horne, Gerald. Thinking and Rethinking U.S. History. New York: The Council
on Interracial Books for Children, 1988. 

Hull, Elizabeth. Taking Liberties: National Barriers to the Free Flow of
Ideas. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1990. 

Information Access Group. Official Secrets: National Security, Government
Information, Executive Privilege, and Intelligence Services: A
Bibliography. Monticello, IL: Vance Bibliographies, 1986. 

Inglis, Fred. The Cruel Peace. Everyday Life in the Cold War. New York:
Basic Books, 1991. 

Jayko, Margaret. FBI on Trial: The Victory in the Socialist Workers Party
Suit against Government Spying. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1988. 

Corinth, P.M. Executive Privilege versus Democratic Accountability: The
Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs,
1961-1969. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1982. 

Kelley, Robin. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great
Depression. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. 

Koh, Harold. The National Security Constitution. Sharing Power after the
Iran-Contra Affair. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. 

Kupferman, Theodore. Censorship, Secrecy, Access and Obscenity. Westport,
CT: Meckler, 1990. 

Kupferman, Theodore. Privacy and Publicity. Westport, CT: Meckler, 1990. 

Lazarsfeld, Paul F. and Wagner Thielens Jr. The Academic Mind: Social
Scientists in a Time of Crisis. New York: Arno Press, 1958. 

Linfield Michael. Freedom Under Fire: U.S. Civil Liberties in Times of
War. Boston: South End Press, 1990. 

Marchetti, Victor and John D. Marks. The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence.
New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1974. 

Marsh, Dave. 50 Ways to Fight Censorship: And Important Facts to Know
About the Censors. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991. 

McCuen, Gary. Secret Democracy: Civil Liberties vs. the National Security
State. Hudson, WI: G.E. McCuen Publications, 1990. 

McIntosh, Toby. Federal Information in the Electronic Age: Policy Issues
for the 1990s. Washington: Bureau of National Affairs, 1990. 

Navasky, Victor. Naming Names. New York: Penguin, 1981.

O'Reilly, James T. Federal Information Disclosure: Procedures, Forms, and
the Law. Colorado Springs, CO: Shipyards/McGraw Hill, 1990. 

O'Reilly, Kenneth. Racial Matters: The FBI's Secret File on Black America,
1960-1972. New York: Free Press, 1989. 

Peterzell, Jay. Reagan's Secret Wars. Washington DC: Center for National
Security Studies, 1984. 

Powe, Lucas. The Fourth Estate and the Constitution: Freedom of the Press
in America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991. 

Robins, Natalie. Alien Ink The FBI's War on Intellectual Freedom. New
York: Morrow, 1991. 

Rubin, Barry, ed. The Politics of Counter-Terrorism: The Ordeal of
Democratic States. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. 

Russett, Bruce. "Democracy, Public Opinion, and Nuclear Weapons,"
Behavior, Society and Nuclear War. New York: Oxford University Press,
1989. 

Sadofsky, David. Knowledge as Power: Political and Legal Control of
Information. New York: Praeger, 1990. 

Schwebel, Milton. "Constructions of Reality in the Nuclear Age," Political
Psychology, vol. 11 (1990). 

Schwebel, Milton. Mental Health Implications of Life in the Nuclear Age.
Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1986. 

Shetreet, Shimon, ed. Free Speech and National Security. Boston: M.
Nijhoff Publications, 1991. 

Simons, Thomas. The End of the Cold War? New York: St. Martin's Press,
1990. 

Snow, Donald. The Shape of the Future. The Post-Cold War World. Armonk,
NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1991. 

Stern, Gary. The FBI's Misguided Probe of CISPES. Washington: Center for
National Security Studies, 1988. 

Strohm, Paul. "Convocation on Current Threats to Academic Freedom,"
Academe, vol. 72 (January-February 1986). 

Theoharis, Athan. From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover. Chicago: Ivan
R Dee. 1991. 

Theoharis, Athan. The Truman Presidency: The Origins of the Imperial
Presidency and the National Security State. Stanfordville, NY: E.M.
Coleman Enterprises, 1979. 

Threats to Freedom of Information. Washington, DC: Media Institute, 1985. 

Washburn, Patrick Scott. A Question of Sedition. The Federal Government's
Investigation of the Black Press During World War II. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986. 

Weiner, Tim. Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget. New York: Warner
Books, Inc., 1990. 

Woodward, Patricia. "How Do the American People Feel about the Atomic
Bomb?" Journal of Social Issues, vol. 4 (1948). 



Congressional and Executive Records

Attorney General's Office. "Attorney General Guidelines for FBI Foreign
Intelligence Collection and Foreign Counterintelligence Investigations."
April 18, 1983. Amended September 4, 1989. 

Dellums, et al. v. Bush, No. 90-2866 (D.D.C., filed Nov. 19, 1990).
Opinion issued December 13, 1990. 

Executive Order 10290: "Prescribing Regulations Establishing Minimum
Standards for the Classification, Transmission, and Handling by
Departments and Agencies of the Executive Branch, of Official Information
Which Requires Safeguarding in the Interest of the Security of the United
States." September 24, 1951. 

Executive Order 10450: "Security Requirements for Government Employees."
April 27, 1953. 

Executive Order 12333, Section 2.4(b): Authorizing "Unconsented Physical
Searches in the United States" by the FBI. Immigration Act of 1990. Rep.
No.101-955, St. Congress, Sections 601-602. October 26, 1990. 

Government Accounting Office Report, September 1990. "International
Terrorism: FBI Investigates Domestic Activities to Identify Terrorists."
Information Security Oversight Office. 1989 Report to the President. March
26, 1990 (at 9). 

United States Congress. CISPES and FBI Counterterrorism Investigations:
Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the
Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 100th Congress, June
13 and September 16, 1988. Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1989. 

United States Congress. Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreements:
Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the Committee on
Post Office and Civil Service, House of Representatives, 100th Congress,
October 15, 1987. Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1988.

United States Congress. Congress and the Administration's Secrecy Pledges:
Hearing Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations,
House of Representatives, 100th Congress, August 10, 1988. Washington:
U.S. G.P.0., 1989. 

United States Congress. Court Secrecy: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on
Courts and Administrative Practice of the Committee on the Judiciary,
United States Senate, St. Congress, on Examining the Use of Secrecy and
Confidentiality of Documents by Courts in Civil Litigation, May 17, 1990. 
Washington: U.S. G.P.0., 1991. 

United States Congress. The Effect of Changing Export Controls on
Cooperation in Science and Technology, Hearings Before the House Committee
on Science, Space and Technology 101st Congress. (Testimony of John
Shattuck, Vice President, Harvard University). Washington: U.S. G.P.O.,
1990. 

United States Congress. FBI Counterintelligence Visits to Libraries:
Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the
Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 100th Congress, June
20 and July 13, 1988. Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1989

United States Congress. Federal Employee Secrecy Agreements: Hearing
Before the Legislation and National Security Subcommittee of the Committee
on Government Operations, House of Representatives 101st Congress,
December, 1989. Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1990. 

United States Congress. Hearings Before the U.S. Senate Select Committee
to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities,
Vol. 6, FBI Memorandum, August 28, 1956, 94th Congress. Washington: U.S.
G.P.O., 1975. 

United States Congress. International Terrorism: FBI Investigates Domestic
Activities to Identify Terrorists, Report to the chairman of the
Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, Committee on the
Judiciary, House of Representatives, 102nd Congress, September 1990.
Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1990. 

United States Congress. Investigation of the Environmental Protection
Agency: Report on the President's Claim of Executive Privilege over EPA
Documents, Abuses in the Superfund Program, and Other Matters by the
Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Energy
and Commerce, House of Representatives. Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1984. 

United States Congress. Meeting the Espionage Challenge: A Review of
United States Counterintelligence and Security Programs: Report of the
Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate. Washington: U.S.
G.P.O., 1986. 

United States Congress. Preliminary Joint Staff Study on the Protection of
National Security Secrets, House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and
Constitutional Rights and House Post Office and Civil Service Subcommittee
on Civil Service, October 25, 1985. Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1986

United States Congress. Prepublication Review and Secrecy Requirements
Imposed Upon Federal Employees: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Civil
and Constitutional Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of
Representatives, 96th Congress, July 2, 1980. Washington: U.S. G.P.O. 
1981. 

United States Congress. Presidential Directives and Records Accountability
Act: Hearing Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Government
Operations, House of Representatives, 100th Congress, August 3, 1988.
Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1989. 

United States Congress. United States Counterintelligence and Security
Concerns -- 1986: Report by the Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence, House of Representatives. Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1987. 

United States Department of Justice. Attorney General's Memorandum on the
1986 Amendments to the Freedom of Information Act: A Memorandum for the
Executive Departments and Agencies Concerning the Law Enforcement
Amendments to the Freedom of Information Act. Washington: U.S. Dept. of
Justice, 1987.
__________________________________________________

Selected Books by Conference Participants

Berry, Mary Frances. Why ERA Failed: Politics, Women's Rights, and the
Amending Process of the Constitution. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1986. 

Carter, Hodding. The Reagan Years. New York: G. Bristlier, 1988. 

Halperin, Morton H. Nuclear Fallacy: Dispelling the Myth of Nuclear
Strategy. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Pub. Co., 1987. 

Halperin, Morton H.; Schelling, Thomas. Strategy and Arms Control.
Washington: Pergamon-Brassey's, 1985. 

Miller, Page Putnam. Developing a Premier National Institution. A Report
from the User Community to the National Archives. Washington: National
Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, 1989. 

Taifa, Nkechi. Shining Legacy: A Treasury of "Storypoems and Tales for the
Young so Black Heroes Forever Will be Sung." Washington: House of Songhay
II, 1986. 

Williams, Loretta. Black Freemasonry and Middle-Class Realities.
Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1980.
__________________________________________________

          Appendix B:  Sponsoring Organizations

American Civil Liberties Union 
122 Maryland Avenue, N.E. Washington D.C. 20002 202/544-1681 

The ACLU is a non-partisan organization of 300,000 members that works to
defend and enhance civil liberties. Through the Center for National
Security Studies, a joint project of the ACLU and the Fund for Peace, the
organization combats government actions which violate civil liberties and
constitutional procedures in the name of national security. 

American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee 
4201 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 500 Washington, DC 20008 202/244-2990 

The AADC is a non-sectarian, non-partisan service organization dedicated
to the protection of the civil and-legal rights of people of Arab decent,
including resistance to racism, discrimination and stereotyping of
Arab-Americans. 

American Association of University Professors 
1012 14th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005 202/737-5900 

The American Association of University Professors represents the interests
of college and university faculty members nationwide. Founded 75 years
ago, the AAUP attempts to protect academic freedom and faculty rights by
voicing their concerns, giving advice, mediating, and intervention when
appropriate. 

American Committee on U.S. - Soviet Relations 
109 Eleventh Street, SE Washington, DC 20003 202/546-1700 

The American Committee on U.S.-Soviet Relations is an independent,
nonpartisan, educational organization established in 1974 to improve
official and public understanding of U.S.-Soviet relations with
information and expert analysis. The Committee's objective is stable
relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. 

American Friends Service Committee 
1822 R Street, NW Washington, DC 20009 202/483-3341 

AFSC is an independent Quaker organization which carries on programs of
service, development and peace in the areas of disarmament, social and
economic justice, civil rights and international development- The
Washington Office strives to bring AFSC insights and advocacy to bear on
policy-makers and diplomats. 

American Historical Association 
400 A Street, SE Washington, DC 20016 202/554-2422 

Founded in 1884, the American Historical Association is the country's
oldest and largest professional organization for historians. The
Association has been a leading force in efforts to provide greater public
access to historical records. 

American Immigration Lawyers Association
1000 16th Street, NW Washington, DC 20036  202/331{)046

Americans for Democratic Action 
1511 K Street, NW, Suite #941 Washington, DC 20005 202/638-6447 

During its first decade, ADA confronted McCarthyism and fought violations
of civil liberties and prosecutions under the Smith Act. The organization
actively lobbies Congress on a wide variety of liberal issues. 

Association of National Security Alumni
21 00 M Street, NW, #607  Washington, DC 20037

Campaign for Peace & Democracy/East & West
P.O. Box 1640 New York, NY 10025  212/666-5924

Center for Constitutional Rights 
666 Broadway New York, NY 10012 212/614-6468, 614-6424 

The Center for Constitutional Rights is composed of a group of attorneys
dedicated to the creative use of law as a positive force for social
change. The group works not only in law, but also through education
projects and publications. 

Center for Cuban Studies 
124 West 43rd Street New York, NY 10011 212/242-0559 

The Center for Cuban Studies was organized in 1972 by a group of scholars,
writers and other professionals who hoped to counter the effects of
dangerously short-sighted U.S. foreign policy. The Center holds firm to a
belief in the constitutional right of access to information and attempts
to bridge the gap between the U.S. and Cuba. 

Center of Concern 
3700 13th Street, NE Washington, DC 20017 202/635-2757 

The Center for Concern is an independent, interdisciplinary team engaged
in social analysis, theological reflection, policy advocacy and public
education on issues of justice and peace. 

Christic Institute
1324 North Capitol Street, NW Washington, DC 20002  202/797-8106

The Christic Institute is a non-profit interfaith center for law and
social policy that specializes in public education and organization around
issues concerning covert operations. 

Committee of Mothers & Relatives of the Disappeared, Assassinated &
Political Prisoners of El Salvador (Commodores)
945 G Street, NW Washington, DC 20001 202/393-0126 

Members of Commodores are the mothers and relatives of people who have
been imprisoned, murdered, or disappeared by the government of El
Salvador. 

Communications Workers of American (AFL-CIO, CLC)
1925 K Street, NW Washington, DC 20006  202/434-1100

Covert Operations Working Group
3053 Ordway Street, NW Washington, DC 20008

Democratic Socialists of America 
15 Dutch St., Suite 500 New York, NY 10038 212/962-0390 

Democratic Socialists of America work toward a society based on democracy,
justice and freedom. Involved is many issues of social justice, such as
racism, reproductive rights and the labor movement, the organization works
for reform of a better society. 

Drug Policy Foundation 
4801 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite 400 Washington,DC 20016-2087 202/895-1634 

The Drug Policy Foundation was founded in 1987 by people who were opposed
to the "war on drugs." It is not a pro-drug or legalization organization,
rather it seeks pragmatic and workable alternatives to the war on drugs. 

Federation of American Scientists (FAS) 
307 Mass. Avenue, NE Washington, DC 20002 202/546-3300 

FAS works for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and the retiring of
existing warheads, as well as controlling biochemical and nuclear
materials. 

Friends Committee on National Legislation 
245 Second Street, NE Washington, DC 20002 202/547-6000 

The organization advocates policies promoting nonviolent, negotiated
solutions to conflicts; arms control and disarmament; increased
international cooperation; and non-interventionist foreign policy. 

Fund for Free Expression 
485 5th Avenue New York, NY 10017 212/972-8400 

The Fund for Free Expression is a division of Human Rights Watch which
works to monitor and combat censorship around the world and in the United
States. 

Government Accountability Project
25 E Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001  202/408-0034

Institute for Policy Studies
1601 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20009  202/234-9382

Inter-Community Center for Justice & Peace
20 Washington Square North New York, NY 10011 212/475-6677 

A coalition of 38 Roman Catholic Orders of Sisters, Brothers, and Priests
in the New York area, it attempts to make the connections between military
spending and the "war on the poor." 

International Human Rights Law Group 
1601 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 700 Washington, DC 20009 202/232-8500 

The International Human Rights Law Group is a nongovernmental, public
interest law center which mobilizes the skills of the legal community to
promote and protect human rights. 

League for Innovation in the Community Colleges 
1495 Newton St., NW, Apt. 102 Washington,DC 20010 202/234-1245 

A national association to facilitate new ideas and projects in community
college education. 

Clarence Mitchell, Jr., Fund
1239 Druid Hill Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217  301/523-6275

The Nation Institute 
72 5th Avenue New York, NY 10011  212/242-8400 

A non-profit organization that researches, plans conferences, seminars
and educational programs with an emphasis on civil liberties, social
justice, and peace. 

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 
4805 Mt. Hope Drive Baltimore, MD 21215-3297  301/358-8900 

The NAACP is the oldest and largest civil rights organization, with some
500,000 members.

National Black Women's Political Leadership Caucus 
3005 Bladensburg Road, NE, Suite 217 Washington,DC 20018 202/529-2806

National Committee Against Repressive Legislation 
236 Massachusetts Avenue, NE, #406 Washington, DC 20002 202/543-7659 

NCARL seeks to prevent FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies from
undertaking investigations that threaten the exercise of First Amendment
freedoms. 

National Conference of Black Lawyers c/o National Prison Project 
1875 Connecticut Avenue, NW, #400 Washington,DC 20036 202/234-4830 

The National Conference of Black Lawyers is an activist legal organization
whose members consist of lawyers, judges, and legal workers. The NCBL
views itself as the legal advocate for people of color and engages in
advocacy work to remedy race and class oppression. 

National Drug Strategy Network
2000 L Street, NW, Suite 702, Washington, DC 20036  202/835-9075

National Educational Association
1201 16th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036-3290  202/833-7700

National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee 
175 Fifth Avenue, #814 New York, NY 10010 212/673-2040 

The National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee is a non-partisan
organization, founded in 1951, that initiates and supports court cases to
safeguard existing civil and political rights. 

National Lawyers Guild
55 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013  212/966-5000

National Lawyers Guild Immigration Project
36 Melrose Street, Boston, MA 02116  617/227-9727

National Mobilization for Survival 
45 John Street, #811 New York, NY 10038 212/385-2222 

The central goal is to stimulate, through public education, an awareness
and understanding of nuclear energy, alternative sources of energy, arms
control and budgetary expenditures. 

National Security Archive 
1755 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite 500 Washington, DC 20036 

The National Security Archive provides scholars, journalists, librarians,
students and other researchers with unclassified and declassified
government documents that are indispensable for research and informed
public debate on important issues. 

National Writers Union 
13 Astor Place New York, NY 10003 212/254-0279; 212/927-1208 

The National Writers Union is a seven year old union whose membership
consists of published, experienced writers building a progressive force
for change and working for their rights. 

New Jewish Agenda 
64 Fulton Street, #1100 New York, NY 10038 212/227-5885 

New Jewish Agenda is a grassroots organization founded in 1980, with 5000
members who represent Jewish perspectives in progressive coalitions and
bring progressive values to Jewish concerns. NJA has a history of
organizing local activities and national programs promoting peace and
justice in the Middle East and Central America. 

The Newspaper Guild (AFL-CIO, CLC) 
8611 2nd Avenue Silver Spring, MD 20910 301/585-2990 

A trade union devoted to promoting the economic interests of news-industry
employees through collective bargaining and organizing, improving working
conditions and advancing work-related interests, including the First
Amendment and other civil and human rights. 

Nicaragua Network
2025 I Street, NW, Suite 202, Washington, DC 20006  202/223-2328

Organization of American Historians
1000 Vermont Avenue, NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20005  202/337-2017

Pax Christi USA 
348 East Tenth Street Erie, PA 16503  814/453-4955 

Pax Christi, USA focuses on building peace and justice through the ideal
of Christian nonviolence. It actively promotes disarmament, alternatives
to violence and universal human rights. 

PEN American Center 
568 Broadway New York, NY 10012 212/334 1660 

PEN American Center was founded in London in 1921 to foster understanding
among people of letters in all countries. PEN is the only worldwide
organization of writers, and its members work for freedom of expression
when it is endangered. 

Quixote Center/Quest for Peace  
3311 Chauncey Place, #301, Mt.Ranier, MD 20712  301/699-0042

Refuse & Resist 
1601 17th Street NW, #363 Washington, DC 20036-3701 202/265-3585 

Refuse and Resist is a national organization that advocates mass
resistance and non-cooperation with right-wing political and social ideas.
It unites people of many viewpoints to defeat the New World Order at home. 

Students Organizing Students 1600 Broadway, Suite 404 New York, NY 10017
212/977-6710

Students Organizing Students is a nationwide student organization
committed to reproductive rights and reproductive freedom for women.
S.O.S. works on educating, organizing, and mobilizing junior high, high
school and university students. 

Theater Communications Group
355 Lexington Avenue New York, NY 10017  212/697-5230

Founded in 1961, TCG is the national organization for the nonprofit
professional theater, and encourages mutually supportive networks and
attempts to increase public awareness of the theaters societal role. 

Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations 
100 Maryland Avenue, NE Washington, DC 20002 202/547-0254 

The UUA monitors public policy and legislative issues to provide
information to members and to represent the UUA's general resolutions to
the Congress, Executive branch, and other agencies of government. 

United Electrical Radio & Machine Workers of American 
1800 Diagonal Road Alexandria, VA 22314 703/684-3123 

An independent labor union representing approximately 80,000 working
people, primarily factory workers in electrical equipment, metal working,
machine tool & plastic industries. 

United States Student Association
1012 14th St., NW, Suite 207 Washington,DC 20005  202/347-8772

War Resisters League 
339 Lafayette Street New York, NY 10012 212/228 0450 

The War Resisters League rejects the use of violence for national defense
or revolutionary change. Instead they advocate the use of education and
nonviolent direct action. 

Washington Office on Africa Education Fund, Inc. 
110 Maryland Avenue, NE Washington, DC 20002 202/546 7961 

WOA seeks to influence American public opinion by providing commentary and
educational material to the public, government officials, church
organizations, labor unions and anti-apartheid activists

Washington Office on Haiti 
110 Maryland Avenue, NE, Suite 310 Washington, DC 20002 202/543-7095 

The Washington Office on Haiti, founded in 1984, is a nonprofit,
independent, ecumenical agency. It is a voice in Washington supporting the
Haitian people's struggle for social justice and democracy. 

Women Strike for Peace 
105 2nd Street, NE Washington, DC 20002 202/543-2660 

WSP is an activist, primarily volunteer, organization, which was founded
in 1961 as a protest against atmospheric nuclear tests and for a
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. 

Women's International League for Peace & Freedom
710 G Street, SE Washington, DC 20003  202/544-2211

World Peacemakers 
11427 Scottsbury Terrace Germantown, MD 20876 202/265-7582, 301/916-0442 

National religious-based peace organization that emphasizes pulling
together small church groups.

------------------------------------------------
(This file was found elsewhere on the Internet and uploaded to the
Radio Free Michigan site by the archive maintainer.

 Protection of
Individual Rights and Liberties. E-mail bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu)