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University Daily Kansan, July 6, 1981
Opinion
City stops for summer
Summer brings out the best in Lawrence. Not that the rest of the year isn't pleasant or exciting, but there's something about a Lawrence summer. The city transforms itself into a small town. Stop lights change to flashing yellows, the roads are less crowded and those who stay here year round can experience the small-town flavor that fades each fall when thousands return to share the restaurants and laundromats.
Lawrence will always be a university town, but in the summer, it is especially a Midwest town, simply trying to while away the hot summer days. Children splash in the pools, play in the parks, and ride their bikes on tree-lined streets, past old homes that have lovingly been spared the ravages of time.
The Arts Center, the museums, the libraries and the area's lakes entice the grown-ups. Music envelopes South Park's bandstand, the University beckons with
plays and exhibits in cool buildings. People read their newspapers on ample front porches and under the blue-blue sky and white sun the vegetation seems lusher.
In the evenings, as you approach Lawrence from any highway, the University, perched on its hill, looks like a medieval fortress, its red roof tiles absorbing the glow of the setting sun. The buildings are quiet now, home to only a few students, but still representative of the security and hope people associate with learning.
In the stillness of a Lawrence summer, the world can seem very far away, although that sense of peace is only illusory. The world's problems and catastrophes still hang out in the headlines of the local newspaper.
But under the Kansas sun, as you eat a New York frankfurter at Ninth and Massachusetts streets, or listen to the children squel in the municipal pool, Lawrence seems so damned civilized.
Letters to the Editor Divestment money better used locally
To the Editor:
For three years now, Todd Seymour, president of the KU Endowment Association, has given the same lame excuse when arguing against divesting monies from South Africa. He used the term 'slowdown' to the Kansas, claiming, with a straight face, that investments in South Africa help the people there.
Let us here establish who the people of South Africa are. Who is it who welcomes foreign investments? Who passes laws decreeing that foreign divestment will be a crime punishable by death? It is no other than the oppressive, white-minority regime. And who are those South Africans who risk their lives calling on foreign countries to cut off all economic ties with South Africa? They are the leaders of the oppressed black and colored majority.
In recent years, their appeal to the world to isolate South Africa economically and politically has been bold and clear. They include the two major liberation movements, the ANC and the PAC, the Black Consciousness Movement, the venerable Bishop Desmond Tulu, whose passport was confiscated recently after he exiled in support for divestment while abroad, the Soweto government and many of the black trade union leaders. The Seymour listening to when he says that investments in South Africa help the South African people?
Not only Seymour, but many American corporations with operations in South Africa also have a presence in a ludicrous situation. More than a hundred companies withdraw from South Africa, have agreed to sign
But last December, dissatisfied with the signatories' progress, Sullivan handed the American companies an ultimatum. "You're not going to let them stop applying any longer as a cover for your inadecuacy."
the so-called Sullivan Principles, pledging to initiate non-discriminatory practices in their South African subsidiaries. The principles were drawn up by the Rev. Leon Sullivan, a black member of the General Motors board of directors.
In March this year, Sullivan held a press conference jointly with the president of the National Council of Churches, publicly campaigning against all bank loans to South Africa. We do hope that Todd Seymour will stop citing the Sullivan Principles as his excuse for investments, now that Sullivan himself has debunked them.
About 2,000 public and semipublic U.S. institutions have already divested, involving huge sums of money. The $8 million that the KU Endowment Association has linked to South Africa is paltry in comparison. From Citicorp alone, Harvard recently divested $1 million.
More than a dozen state and major city governments not only have passed legislation requiring public employees' pension funds from South Carolina to be invested these funds instead in their local economies.
In a time of drastic federal budget cuts, this movement is gaining rapid momentum. Why can't the Endowment Association help address it in the same way by divesting from South Africa?
Anita Chan
KU Committee on South Africa
Timerman exposes Argentine terror
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New York Times Special Features
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.-Jacobo Tirmerman, expelled from Argentina and stripped of his military rank, and now of his property by the military regime, demonstrating that writing well is the best revenge.
In a searing document, his book "Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number," he has revealed the secret world of terror in Argentina. The book is so powerful that he has made me think I thought impossible. He has made the people of the United States care about Argentina.
Etching in blood, sweat and tears the torture he underwent in mind, body and soul, through a year's imprisonment and subsequent house arrest for a total period in captivity of 30 months; grabs grabbed public opinion by the scruff of its neck and taken it to where the totalitarian beast lives.
Tirmerman has torn off the flimsy veil of respectability with which the upholders of the new orthodoxy in U.S. foreign policy hoped to dress up the Argentine regime. The smiling authoritarian generals have been revealed in his book and in a series of dramatic news-media encounters, as the keepers and the captives of the totalitarian beast that lurks in the darkness of the security forces where Nazism lived on after World War II.
President resurrects controversial plane: Is the new B-1 expected to bomb again?
By GORDON ADAMS and MICHAEL D. MANN
New York Times Special Features
NEW YORK—Old bombers never die—they just hang on until a new administration comes in.
The B-1 is coming back in a new version four years after it was shelved by President Carter. The Reagan administration has resurrected the plane as a symbol of a commitment to a stronger America and as a corrective to what it believes its weakness in Jimmy Carter's defense policy.
While this revival has met Reagan's electoral objective, the bomber itself ought to be shelved in favor of a cruise-missile capable of carrying a Soviet frontiers, which fully integrates the latest "stealth" technology--that is, technology that makes it virtually invisible to enemy radar.
The B-1 variant is not able to penetrate Soviet air defenses, is not needed to carry cruise missiles, is too expensive to serve as a conventional bomber, and would be on duty for only
two years before the stealth cruise-missile carrier could be available. It is a perfect example of defense waste: $20 billion for a weapons system that would soon be an albatross and would siphon resources away from truly needed defense technology.
Penetration bombers are a thing of the past. When President Carter canceled the B-1, it was able to fly and could not accomplish its principal mission — it could not air space— as well as the new cruise missile could.
The Air Force and the Defense Department themselves have repeatedly argued that the B-2S can serve as a cruise-missile until well into the 1980s. By the time the Air Force would have had to upgrade its missile system as a successor to the B-2S, using stealth technology could loiter off Soviet frontiers in near-security.
Denied the penetration mission, the fallback position of the Air Force is to argue that the B-1 carries the cruise missile. This convenient attempt marry the B-1 to its nemesis is premature.
Since the B-1 variant appears to have no strategic future, the Air Force has invented a
conventional warfare justification. The altered B-1, it argues, would carry out Vietnam-style bombing raids as needed in such "hot spots" as the Persian Gulf. Unfortunately, many other less expensive aircraft already in the inventory can do the same thing.
Clearly the Air Force has not been able to invent a mission that justifies buying the B-1. Moreover, even in an era of rapidly expanding defense spending, the minimal military contribution of the B-1 is overshadowed by his role as a combat commander. Gen. Richard Ellis, the Strategic Air Command officer in February: "Oping for the B-1 at this time could preclude a more advanced aircraft by 1980." Harold Brown, Jimmy Carter's secretary of defense, provided a glimpse of that aircraft when he unveiled stealthy technology to the U.S. military from radar by rounding off surfaces, using new materials, and reducing engine visibility, among other changes.
The B-1 is not a stealth aircraft and, according to the Defense Department, cannot be made into one without large-scale and even more costly reworking. The stealth cruise-missile carrier, it will be ready for production at the beginning of the next decade and serve well past the year 2000.
It is a new kind of totalitarianism. It does not strut. It skinks. There are no swastikas on armbands for public view. No mass rallies or ranting speeches. The dreaded symbols—the portraits of the emperors and chamber and cell blocks, where only the prisoners, victims of the new fascism, can see them.
Timerman has revealed the nature of the regime. Can a regime that has sent at least 6,000, probably 10,000, and maybe more people through secret death camps be described as authoritarian? When the torturer turns up the voltage because he has a Jew on the bedsprings, or a guard gives another Jew a methodical kick every time he passes his bound form, are these acts merely characteristics of "a moderately repressive regime"?
American national security does not depend on manned penetration bombers. The B-I wasn't the right system in 1977, when it was canceled. It isn't. Instead of trying to have some kind of bombing team in every year, the Air Force should move directly to technologies that meet long-term security needs.
Clearly Timerman must be discredited. Otherwise the pretty little theory that, for foreign-policy purposes, the world can be divided up into clear categories, goes by the board. The new orthodoxy under which tyrannies that appear to be anti-communist can be euphemistically described as authoritarian is dangerous for the United States and the world because it demands witting or unwitting self-deception.
To consider the Argentine government authoritarian denies reality. If labels must be applied, Argentina could best be described as feudalistic and anarchic; it is divided by the rivalries of the separate fieldmats represented by the armed forces, with their various freeweeping intelligence services and the powerful pressless presidency. The tragedy stems from the fact that national morality, and the responsibility that goes with it, has never been established by the moderates in the military who have held nominal power since the March 1978 coup.
Self-deliction in Argentina is understandable. In a country cowed by justified fear, it is safer to hope for the best and to pray that the moderates win out and establish the moderately representive regime that the new U.S. foreign-policy orthodoxy would like to persuade us already exists.
(Gordon Adams directs research on government relations at the Council on Economic Affairs.) Mamm is assistant to the director of the Federation of American Scientists, in Washington).
It is unmasked reality, not misled jargon, that U.S. foreign policy must address—this is the message that public opinion has extracted from Timerman's testimony. The reservations extend to the doctrine that would make the defense of the doctrine that would make the defense of the ween totalitarian and authoritarian regimes crucial to the administration's human-rights policy are irrelevant to the central issue of Timerman's revealed truth. But if some lobistboy seems to be working up a campaign of characterizing the handling understandable doubts, I would like to try to clear up some of these peripheral questions.
Like most people with more than a passing acquaintance with Argentina, I too was astonished that in his book Jacob Tirmerman made no mention of David Graiver, who was his friend and financial backer at La Opinion, the newspaper that Timerman published. Graiver had to have died in a plane crash in Mexico in 1976, or acting as a financial agent for the leftwing terrorists called the Montenones, and most of his close relatives are still in jail in Argentina. The military has never revealed what has been proved against Graiver and the charge against him remains in the realms of supposition, no more reliable nor damaging than the rumor that he resisted. I. Gen. Roberto viola, was given a good chance by the military would make public the results investigations into Graiver's activities, the sewer of slander and libel that has sullied many prominent Argentines would be cleared up and the country would be healthier.
Letters Policy
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and not exceed 800 words. They should include the writer's name, address and telephone number. If the letter is affixed with a flag, it should include the writer's class and home or town faculty or staff position. The Kansan reserves the right to edit letters for publication.
The truth is that the allegation that Graiver handled the terrorists' blood money led the Naziminded hard-liners in the military to the conviction that there was a Jewish-Marxist-liberal (in the Argentine sense, a liberal) as a civilized conservative) conspiracy linking all their enemies. Timmerman was kidnapped when this collective psychosis was at its height, and scores of completely innocent and very some eminent for a short time. Timmerman, although all charged for it, remained in prison, where he was probably unaware of the intensity of the smear campaign launched against him because of his perfectly legitimate relationship with Graiver.
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Another charge against Timerman is that he exaggerates. His critics call his torturers thugs, as though they were unrepresentative. then he saw he saw Gen. Carlos Iuzarez Mason, then the historian and poet Jorge larrison, watching a torture session. I can recall for the lunatic fervor with which Timerman's tormentors pursued their anti-Semitic quest for proof of the Jewish-conspiracy theory because I was an astute observer throughout his ordeal and what they told me then encircled completely with the account in the book.
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Timerman's political views, which have always been "parlor pink," seem to be as annoying to the right as Aleksandr I. Solzenhitsyvian to the left. He was not a democrat and emerges as a committed democrat and as a profound humanist. He is a man who has always, as far as I know, had an equal loafing for all nationalitarian. I have never heard him call any nationalitarian. I have nationalized authoritarian, for example.
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The totalitarian nature of the military regime will prevent his book and his message, which is that the respect for human rights transcends ideology, from reaching the Argentine people. The worst form of censorship—self-suppression—has been imposed by state terrorism for five years. So the Argentine people rulers are the men who harm the children and operate torture machines. Even the doomed but weak military leaders at the top seem to live in fear of the creatures of the Argentine netherworld.
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A few days ago, I received a letter from a couple whose son was kidnapped by security forces in August 1979. About a dozen young people disappeared then, but this was a case with a difference. The young people were allowed to telephone from their secret jails from time to time and gave letters to their families. Two young mothers were allowed one day to visit their children. These communications continued until March 1980, and then stopped abruptly.
Before I left Argentina, at the end of 1979, I tried to use quiet diplomacy on behalf of the missing young people. I spoke to the interior minister, the army's secretary general, even the president, Lt. Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla. I left lists of their names and the circumstances of their abductions with top government officials. I published nothing because the families believed that the government and military leaders would transfer their children from the secret death houses to courts, military or civil, if they were allowed to do so. One couple concluded that the son has been deferred. Now they have asked me to publicize the case. I will not name them because I fear that they might be driven from Argentina or murdered by the real totalitarian rulers.
If an authoritarian government is established, the pro and cons of the "K Doctrine" (for Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, its originator) can be debated. Timerman's ideology of concern for human rights and opposition to both leftist and rightist extremists may have a role on a compelling experience of evil whose very horror lies in the fact that no authority in Argentina will even acknowledge its existence.
Can Washington afford to support a regime that—three years after the defeat of left-wing terrorism, in a country that has not suffered a major左 wing terrorist attack since late 1979—has the built-in instability of secret killers loose in its security organizations?
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