OPINION
November 1, 1984 Page 4
The University Daily
KANSAN
The University Daily KANSAN
10
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily Kanon (USP) 600-6400 is published at the University of Kansas, 111 Staffer Flint Hall, Lawrence, Kanon 60043, daily during the regular school year and Wednesday and Friday during the summer session, excluding Saturday, Sunday, holidays and final periods. Second class postpaid mail at Lawrence, Kanon 60043 Submits by mail are for $15 or six months or $2 a year in Douglas County and $10 for six months or $3 a year outside the county. Student postpaid mail is available at Lawrence, Kanon 60043 Address changes to the University Daily Kanon, 111 Staffer Flint Hall, Lawrence, Kanon 60043
DON KNOX Editor
PAUL SEVART VINCE HESS Managing Editor Editorial Editor
DAVE WANAMAKER Business Manager
DOUG CUNNINGHAM Campus Editor
LYNNE STARK MARY BERNICA Retail Sales National Sales Manager Manager
SUSANNE SHAW
General Manager and News Adviser
JILL GOLDBLATT
Campus Sales Manager
JOHN OBERZAN Sales and Marketing Advise
Indira Gandhi
Indira Gandhi is dead, and the cause of violence has once again been served. What one side sees as retribution for injustice has become the ultimate injustice, the taking of a public life as a political act.
Radical Sikhs, members of a minority religious group who are fighting for autonomy in India, saw Gandhi as "India's Hitler." Spokesmen for the World Sikh Organization praised the killing as "justice done by God's grace," and predicted that a civil war for an independent Sikh state in the Punjab would follow.
Gandhi was a tremendously stabilizing influence in a turbulent country, and she ran India with a sometimes heavy hand. In 1975 she began to use sweeping emergency powers to jail her opponents and implement sterilization programs. She was turned out of office two years later, but returned after three years of ineffective rule. If the voters of India didn't like her, they certainly have had their chances to find someone better.
However, the Sikhs, like the Irish Republican Army, don't want to work within the democratic system. They want to speak with the voices of machine guns and bombs. It is possible for separatist movements to be heard within the system, as those working for an independent Quebec have shown. But the killing of a world leader has hurt, not helped, the cause of the Sikhs.
The seeds of violence have been around too long for anyone to know their origin. In June, Gandhi's response to Sikh extremist violence was to send troops to storm the sacred Sikh temple, where radical Sikh leaders were holed up. Some Sikhs say her death was in retribution for that action, in which more than 600 people died.
EDITORIAL BOARD
The University Daily Kansas editorial board meets at 6 p.m. Sundays and 7 p.m.
Wednesdays to discuss editorial policy of the paper.
Members of the board are Jennifer Fine, columnist; Vince Hess, editorial editor; Charles Himmelberg, assistant editorial editor; Don Knox, editor; Michael Robinson, columnist; Margaret Sarafen, columnist, and Paul Sewart, managing
The board invites students and members of University or local groups who want to discuss editorial concerns to attend a board meeting.
Call the editorial editor to make arrangements.
Utilize Freedom of Information Act
The Freedom of Information Act is one of the most valuable and important public-interest tools in our society.
Enacted in 1966 and amended and strengthened in 1974, the law enables citizens to obtain documents from the federal government.
FOIA requests have helped document such scandals as Watergate and the My Lai massacre.
Information obtained through FOIA requests has helped expose such health hazards as Agent Orange, mercury in fish, toxic shock syndrome and defective automobile gas tanks
Upholstery and shameless government practices have also been
- The CIA had, but scrapped, a plan to induce heart attacks and strokes in nursing home residents.
- Government operatives loosened the lug nuts on the car of a black singer and political activist.
- Mind-altering drugs were used on unrecognised personnel
who had been the editor of a college newspaper, triggered a full-blown FBI investigation.
Using FOIA and the Privacy Act, a law which allows a citizen to obtain records regarding himself, Ted Frederickson, KU journalism professor was able to solve the 19year-old case why he had denied an summer job with the U.S. Information Agency's Voice of America.
Frederickson had reported on a student radical group and had called in editorials for a moratorium on the Vietnam war. From this information,
A security check of Frederickson,
Staff Columnist
In 1982 a historian received 30-year-old declasified Air Force documents through FOIA. The Air
the agency created a file on him full of erroneous remarks and unsubstantiated allegations, Fred enkson learned through his request
But despite the successful use of the law, the administration of FOIA has had its flaws.
In 1881 a university professor made a $10,000 payment for 300,000 pages of what the FBI originally described as “break-in documents,” as reported in First Principles, a magazine on civil liberties. The FBI returned his payment and said the documents were not related to his request. An FBI official told him that the file he had requested had been destroyed.
In 1982 I requested information regarding the overexposure of an atomic worker in Kansas. The document that I received was a copy of one I had previously received, except that in the duplicate the worker's name and radiation dose had been removed
Force then tried to reclassify the records.
In 1983 a Nuclear Regulatory Commission official told me that the agency had no documents related to my request concerning an Oklahoma nuclear fuels plant. Nine months later, I discovered that the NRC had supplied some of those documents to another person. Follow-up requests netted previously unreleased records that documented several nuclear explosions that severely burned, disfigured or killed plant workers.
I wrote to the Internal Revenue Service requesting KU Endowment Association tax returns and received the reply, "The Form 990 information you requested will not be released to you under the Freedom of Information Act since it is available to the public."
A follow up request to the IRS yielded. "We are very sorry about the delay in furnishing you a copy of the requested return. We have a record of the return; however we are unable to locate it and make a copy."
Government agencies also withhold much information through the broad exemption provisions of FOIA
The Federal Trades Commission has perhaps the broadest exemptions because of exemptions added by the FTC General Improvement Act of 1980. The act for all practical purposes governs the records from disclosure, Dolly Aponte, an FTC official in Washington, D.C., recently told me.
When agencies can't find an arguable reason to withhold the information, they often threaten to charge outraged fees for searching and reproducing documents.
In 1983 a Department of Energy official wrote me that I would be charged $200 to $10,000 for search and reproduction costs for documents that I had requested. He stated, "We are formally initiating the search but we have no operational limits you would like to plan on the session please notify me."
1 was forced to rescind that request, but later was able to receive some DOE documents through other requests.
Most people have some topic that interests them. Why not write to the appropriate agency and request information.
Sometimes one has to fight for the documents, but the results can be well worth the effort.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
'What . . . are baboons men?'
To the editor:
Concerning the recent article "Animal lovers protest 'torture of operation:'
That poor helpless baboon. If only he had lived, who knows what great things he may have accomplished .
Wake a minute, what am I saying? Am I really concerned about the life of the innocent young baboon who was sacrificed in the noble attempt to save the life of a dying child? Something is serious. Is it the supposed "animal rights" I have always grown up to respect?
Obviously, mice and swine are not human-looking enough to deserve our sympathies. Something is wrong with our society when men and women care more for the life of an animal than for the life of a suffering, human child. Does the fact that a child has little hope of surviving forfet or her chance to lead a meaningful life? Can this really be called child abuse?
W who cries for the thousands of albino white mice who meekly die in the name of cancer research? W who cries for the noble pig who donates his heart valves so that men might live?
Of course I believe that animals deserve protection from human cruelty. Animal abuse cannot be tolerated. In this case, I hardly see that the term "abuse" really applies.
On what grounds, then, do these animal rights activists deplore the operation? Dr. Donald Doyal is
quoted as saying that he will pray for the now dead baboon Javier Burgos spoke of "an atroctly beyond words." What are these people trying to say? Are baboon men? Should all primates, indeed, all animals be eligible for welfare protection? Is it a conservation? Maybe we should give the baboon's family survivors benefits
I am not as afraid of the "spare parts mentality" as Burgos is. Many have already benefited from the revolutionary techniques of organ transplants. If a suitable animal donor could be found, doctors would not have to wait for the infrequent human donor when a patient is in need. In this light, the "senseless killing of the baboon" does not appear so senseless after all.
On vandalism
John Majerle
Prairie Village senior
Paul Vant Benthem
Schenectady, N.Y. senior
So vandalism is great sport, to be condemned and lauded by the Kansan if done by the right people, at the right time, and in the right place. The perpetrators can even get their photos on the front page.
To the editor:
If a group of Lawrence residents went into the stadium, to dore down an expensive goal post and dumped it into Potter's Lake.
they'd be arrested, fined and probably locked up in jail. What's the difference? Isn't "vandalism vandalism" regardless of who does it?
Or are students' actions to be overlooked, along with those of small children and mentally incompetents — not responsible for what they do! I guess, when as University students they destroy the property of their own University, they do fall into the same category. It would seem that the team deserved better.
KU, take a bow!
Thos. C. Ryther
Lawrence residen
Lawrence resident
In a recent visit to the Holy Land and Rome, I met distinguished people from Australia, India, South Africa, Israel, Poland, Rome, London and Paris. They asked me where I was from. I told them Lawrence, Kansas. They asked, "Where is that?" I answered simply, "I am from the University of Kansas." "To this reply they said, "Oh yes, the University of Kansas is a great university." All spoke highly of the University.
To the editor.
KU, take a bow! I felt great pride in hearing people from different and distant lands speak so bigly of good ole KU
Charles J. Laskowski Lawrence resident
The palatability of pigeons
One man would throw some breadcrumbs on the ground to lure the neeons to him.
A woman strolling through the park on a recent Sunday was horrified to see two men stalking pigeons.
When the pigeons gathered, the other man would sneak up on them and slam a long handled fishing net over their heads. They would stuff them into a canvas sack.
She asked the men what they were doing. Neither man spoke much English, and they had difficulty understanding her. But finally one of them smiled happily, pointed at the sack, and said, "Eat, eat!"
"They caught more than a dozen pigeons just while I was watching," the woman said.
"Can you imagine?" the woman said. "They were catching the pigeons to eat them. It's unbelievable."
Not really. People have been snatching pigeons out of the parks and eating them ever since there were pigeons in the parks.
The police say the practice has always been most popular among more recent born European-born immigrants and some Asians who eat pigeons in their homeland.
When I told the woman that, she said, "Then it must be illegal. And isn't it unhealthy? I mean, they're such flibly little things."
No, it is not illegal to catch and eat a city pigeon, unless it happens to be someone's trained homing pigeon. And in that case, it's doubtful that the owner would know you had eaten his trumpet. He can fly away because doesn't have enough sense to go home, then he has to face the consequences.
I asked the Chicago Park District's main office if there is any law against
catching pigeons, and spokesman Ben Bentley said: "The pigeons go in the park, but we're not responsible for them. We have enough to worry about with the muggers without trying to keep an eye on the pigeons.
As for their being unhealthy, that is not true. The city's health office says that there is nothing harmful about eating a city pigso, long as you remember to remove its feathers and don't swallow the bones. Or the beaks.
"Oh, my God, that's terrible" said the squeamish woman who brought this matter to my attention. "They're
MIKE ROYKO Syndicated Columnist
like pets — little tame things. How can anyone eat something that's almost like a pet?"
I'm sure many people share her feelings. And I find their attitude ridiculous. That's wrong with eating something that's like a pet? People
After all, many fish keep tropical fish or goldfish in their homes. They feed them, make sure they have enough air bubbles in the tank, and change the water. These fish are treated like pets.
paddle happily around a lake, sticking its rear end up ever so often, just like a tourist.
But they will go to a restaurant and eat fried smelts, although those little creatures are just as cute and wiggly as their tropical fish.
People cat duck all the time, although the duck is, in my opinion, a far more likable bird than the city pigeon. All a duck wants to do is
Compare the temperament of the lamb to that of the cat. Cats are reallyicious. They kill little birds, squirrels, tiny mice, and anything else that is defenseless. If a cat doesn't like your looks, he sinks his claws into your arm. My elderly, anuts all swore that if you dared sleep with a cat in the house, he would surely pluck out your jugular vein some dark night. Cats give people the evil eye.
Lambs never do any of those terrible things. But people are always eating lambs. They eat there, too. There are different parts of these little dears.
Yet, these same lamb devouring people would turn green if you were like them.
I don't see why. I've never eaten a cat. At least, not yet. But there are some parts of the world where cats are eaten when they are available.
They're supposed to taste pretty good, if prepared properly, although I still haven't found a cookbook with a recipe for cats.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not recommending that anybody go to the park and catch themselves as Thanksgiving dinner, although there are many excellent recipes for pigeon — and I assume you would cook up a city pigeon the same way as a commercial bird.
Nor do I recommend that anyone cat a cat — theres or anyone else's. Whether one cats a cat or nut is a good way to distinguish it from away one way or another.
But if you do, there is one obvious cooking tip: Always remember to remove the bell from the cat's collars before cooking. You don't want to make a tinkling noise every time your burp
.