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June 24, 2002
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
June 21, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
Over England:
The Gaucho's Wild Ride
John Borowski
Stossel
and Disney's Crimes Against Nature
Chris Floyd
Southern
Cross: The US Takes Aim at Brazil
David Martin
Of Lies
and Oil: an interview with Rahul Mahajan
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
at War: a Tour of the US Military/Industrial Complex
Jacob Levich
The War
on Terror is
Not a Suicide Pact
Mark Weisbrot
What
are They Doing to Argentina?
Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Cheney's Diary:
Cakewalking Through Minefields
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
June 18, 2002
David Vest
Raise the
White Flag in Terror War?
Ben White
Is It Possible
to "Understand" the Rise in "Anti-Semitism"?
Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
June 17, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Watergate
and All That
Philip Farruggio
A Maximum
Wage Law
Ron Sullivan
Law
and Orders:
The Assault on Trial by Jury
Rev. Charles Booker-Hirsch
Taking
on the School
of the Americas
Joan Smith
G.W. Bush:
The Man is Stupid
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
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Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
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Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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June 24,
2002
Will the War on Terrorism Follow
the Path of the Cold War?
by Jo Freeman
On June 9 the San Francisco Chronicle
published an 8-page special section on the FBI's "wide-ranging
and unlawful intelligence operations at the University of California."
The FBI's activities, and those of other governmental and non-governmental
organizations "to harass liberal students, faculty and
regents" over several decades were justified by the Cold
War. Not until that War was over was some of the collateral
damage revealed. Most of the destruction done to ordinary Americans
who were simply living their lives and exercising their Constitutional
rights may never come to light.
Since September 11 our government has
mobilized for another undeclared war of uncertain duration against
an unseen enemy -- this time on terrorism. Like its predecessor,
the War on Terrorism aims at a powerful and pernicious enemy
who could wreak enormous havoc at any minute. Like the Cold
War, the War on Terrorism is being used to justify a variety
of security measures which can potentially cause more harm to
Americans than anything the enemy can do. Unlike the Cold War,
we know we aren't sure who the enemy is; it's bigger than al-Queda,
but beyond that, who is it?
In the Cold War we identified members
of the Communist Party as the enemy -- even when they were law-abiding
American citizens -- and looked for them under every bed. But
that definition quickly spread to include almost anyone who
did, said or even knew some one who proposed an idea that even
remotely sounded like something a Communist might favor. Everyone
"liberal" -- and a lot who weren't -- were potential
targets for the anti-Communist brush.
To wage a war without causing more damage
to ourselves than our adversaries we need to know what we did
wrong in the Cold War. Let's start by looking at some of the
casualties.
The Chronicle stories were based on thousands
of pages of FBI files finally released by the FBI after years
of litigation. They highlighted the FBI's efforts to fire Clark
Kerr from his position as President of the University from
1958 to 1966. I was a student at Berkeley from 1961 to 1965;
very much engaged in the social protests of those years. Upon
graduation I went South to work for the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, for a year of voter registration in South Carolina,
Alabama and Mississippi. My work in the civil rights movement
gave me my own small niche in the FBI's archives.
In 1975 I obtained my personal Headquarters
file from the FBI, without much delay. In 1993 I requested files
on the University of California and various student groups for
a memoir, as well as more pages on myself from the FBI's regional
offices. It was seven years before I got anything, and what
I finally paid for was a small fraction of what the Chronicle
got after 17 years of litigation. Obviously the FBI didn't think
that the court rulings applied to other requesters; over time
it has become very adept at thwarting the purpose of the Freedom
of Information Act. In the meantime I did research in the University
archives and other places.
What I learned from all this is that
Clark Kerr was not a victim of the FBI. He was a victim of the
anti-Communist culture created by the Cold War. The War on Terrorism
threatens to repeat this history and with it the wanton destruction
of the rights which make us proud to be Americans.
Indeed the FBI was only a minor player
in the downfall of Clark Kerr. It was a cop, one enforcer, of
the culture of anti-Communism. That culture was created by our
government and reinforced by the actions of private individuals.
It created a climate of fear that was used to compel conformity
not only to political ideas but to social and cultural ones.
It used government agencies -- taxpayer money -- to punish
those who did not do so.
A key player, probably the key player,
in the harassment and downfall of Clark Kerr was an official
committee of the California legislature -- the Senate Fact-Finding
Subcommittee on UnAmerican Activities (SUAC). Created in 1940
as one of seven state committees modeled on the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC) of the U.S. Congress, it waged a
thirty year war on the University of California to purge it
of people who might be deemed subversive. As it did so, its
conception of subversive expanded way beyond a concern with
membership in the Communist Party.
SUAC's chairman from 1949 to 1970 was
Hugh Burns. Between 1957 and 1969 he was also President pro
Tem of the California Senate, with a great deal of influence
over the University's budget. Burns wanted to discredit Kerr
because he "was unimpressed with his diligence in ferreting
out subversive activities on the campus." (Burns oral history)
Working behind the scenes, so far behind
that few knew he existed, was Richard Ellis Combs, counsel to
SUAC from its beginning. He maintained a file of 20,000 names
of "subversives" on 5 x 8 cards at his home in rural
Tulare County. Once Burns became Chairman SUAC ceased to hold
hearings; instead it met with officials to urge actions that
it wanted, published reports and issued press releases excoriating
whoever failed to comply. These reports were written by Combs,
based on extensive reading of material provided by his network
of informants throughout the state. His source at Berkeley was
William Wadman, who was promoted from head of the campus police
to University-wide "security officer" in 1952.
Twice in 1952 Burns and Combs met with
the Presidents of California colleges to request campus liaisons
who would provide SUAC with the names of faculty and staff who
were candidates for hiring or promotion so they could be checked
by Combs against his files. Robert Gordon Sproul, then President
of UC, asked each campus Chancellor, including Berkeley's Clark
Kerr, to be the "contact man" for his campus. However,
Kerr did not provide SUAC with any names. Unknown to Kerr, Combs
was getting his information from Wadman, who reported to Vice
President James H. Corley. Under Corley's supervision, Wadman
also furnished the FBI "information contained in personnel
files of students and employees as well as information relating
to subversive activities on the campus."
Corley had been the University's lobbyist
for many years. He maintained his influence with the legislature
through a strategy of anticipatory appeasement. Sharing SUAC's
passion for anti- Communism, in 1949 he persuaded President
Sproul to require that all faculty sign a loyalty oath disclaiming
membership in the Communist Party or any other organization
which advocated the overthrow of the Government by force or
violence. The faculty rebelled; twenty percent refused to sign.
The controversy did not end until 1952 -- after 31 professors
had been dismissed -- when the California Supreme Court declared
that a state loyalty oath passed in the interim pre-empted a
special one for University personnel.
In October of 1958, soon after Kerr was
inaugurated as President, Combs held a confidential meeting
at his home to discuss how to remove him as head of the University.
Present were Wadman and Bay Area police offers who were heads
of their respective Red Squads. Combs had compiled a dossier
on Kerr and wanted help from those present in getting even more
information that could be used to discredit him.
Once Kerr became President, Corley could
no longer cover for Wadman. Kerr reduced Corley's job and influence
and had Wadman reassigned. As SUAC stated in its 1965 Report,
Wadman was assigned "so much insurance work that his counter-subversive
operation was smothered" and Kerr "again disclosed
his aversion to loyalty investigations in general."
SUAC went ballistic at the loss of its
campus source. Its 1961 report contained a lengthy attack on
student groups at the Berkeley campus. "Reds on campus"
blared headlines all over the state of California. SUAC succeeded
in getting one Berkeley student organization kicked off campus
that wasn't Communist, but was something of a campus gadfly
(the official reason was that it called itself a campus political
party when campus political parties weren't permitted).
On September 14, 1961 and again on January
17, 1962 Burns and Combs met with Kerr and select Regents to
urge the discharge of two Berkeley faculty members they thought
were subversives and to protest Wadman's reassignment. When
Kerr did nothing, Burns tried to get the Regents to remove him
by revealing a "rumor" that Kerr had been observed
by the Central Intelligence Agency to engage in "undesirable
contact and associations during a South American trip."
Over time, Kerr's refusal to conform
to the dictates of the anti-Communist culture piled up as evidence
against him. Until 1963 the University of California had a "speaker
ban." Another product of the anti-Communist culture, it
prohibited from speaking on a University campus anyone "who
would use it as a platform for propaganda." That meant
all known Communists and anyone else deemed controversial by
a campus administration. Malcolm X, Nobel laureate Linus Pauling,
and Harold Laski, a professor at the University of London and
Labour Member of Parliament, were among the many non-Communists
whose invitations from student or faculty groups were canceled.
No one running for public office, including the Governor running
for re-election, could speak on a University campus (though
they could speak at the state colleges).
Of course the speaker ban didn't apply
to registered students. Bettina Aptheker, a student at Cal the
same years I was there, could speak her mind, but when the Berkeley
History Department invited her father, a <Ph.D>. in history
and an editor of the Communist Party journal Political Affairs,
to participate in a symposium in the area of his scholarly expertise,
the entire event had to be moved off campus.
Polls showed that the California voters
supported the speaker ban. They thought it wise to protect vulnerable,
young minds from deceptive ideas. When a student group successfully
sponsored a campus talk by someone accused -- but not proven
-- of being a Communist organizer, three dozen carloads of Bay
Area citizens went to Sacramento to complain directly to Governor
Brown. The scope of the Speaker Ban was an issue in the 1962
gubernatorial campaign; challenger Richard Nixon wanted to broaden
it.
After Brown won, he and Kerr lobbied
the Regents of the University to abolish the speaker ban; this
was accomplished in June of 1963. It didn't go quietly. The
Regents were inundated with letters objecting to the idea that
students should be free to listen to just any one, especially
on a state campus.
One Regent added a long letter to the
official record which argued that "to allow an agent of
the Communist Party to peddle his wares to students of an impressionable
age is just as wrong, in my estimation as it would be to allow
Satan himself to use the pulpit of one of our best cathedrals
for the purpose of trying to proselyte new members."
Needless to say, SUAC saw the freedom
of students and faculty to invite anyone to speak on campus
as a security threat. Both privately and publicly SUAC continued
to attack the University and especially its President, Clark
Kerr. Its golden opportunity came in the fall of 1964 when students
at Berkeley formed the Free Speech Movement (FSM) to challenge
a new application of an existing rule that prohibited student
groups who engaged in any kind of off campus political activity
from meeting on campus, passing out literature, collecting money,
or even advertising their off campus membership meetings on
the campus proper. Like the speaker ban, this rule was a product
of the anti-Communist culture. Because the administration feared
recriminations if a student group met on campus which could
be accused of Communist influence or a few Communist members,
it prohibited all student groups with any interest in off campus
politics (including the Young Democrats and the Young Republicans)
from doing pretty much anything on campus.
I was the official representative of
the University Young Democrats to the FSM Executive Committee.
Our concern wasn't Communism but civil rights. Inspired by the
Southern Civil Rights Movement, we had recruited students to
participate in civil rights demonstrations in San Francisco
the Spring before. We saw the new application of the old rule
as a threat to our ability to raise money and bodies for the
civil rights movement. The Berkeley students and faculty strongly
agreed with us. By the time the dust settled (if it ever did),
773 persons had been arrested for occupying the administration
building, the campus administration had been removed, and the
Regents had agreed to let the First and Fourteenth Amendments
of the US Constitution apply to the University campus. Since
then student groups of all political persuasions have been able
to meet on campus, as well as pass out literature, collect money
and proselyte.
SUAC was ecstatic, but not about the
new student freedoms. Its 1965 report almost gleefully raked
Kerr over the coals for shirking his responsibility to discipline
errant students. Kerr was soft on Communism, it implied, and
that was why he was so easily taken advantage of by the Communist-led
FSM.
After Kerr released a 42-page critique
of the Report's inaccuracies and distortions, Burns and Combs
retaliated with an unprecedented 162-page Supplement, at a cost
of $36,000 to the California taxpayers (including my mother).
This attack was so vehement that the Regents stepped in and
negotiated a truce. Only then did SUAC's public attacks cease.
But SUAC's accusations were already being used as political
ammunition. What happened at Berkeley was a campaign issue in
the 1966 gubernatorial race, helping to defeat Governor Brown.
At Governor Ronald Reagan's first Regents meeting Clark Kerr
was fired. He was finally felled by the culture of anti-Communism.
The impact of the Burns report didn't
stop at the California borders and it wasn't confined to the
prominent and the powerful. It followed me throughout the South.
I got four honorable mentions in the 1965 Report, all innocuous,
three of which were true. Someone pasted those four paragraphs
onto a page with other excerpts on "Communists in the
Rebellion." Titled "MISS JO FREEMAN, WHITE FEMALE
PROFESSIONAL COMMUNIST AGITATOR," it was circulated in some
of the small Alabama towns in which I worked.
That particular piece of paper didn't
reappear in SCLC's voter registration project in Grenada Mississippi
in the summer of 1966. Instead, on August 18, 1966, the Jackson
Daily News, which called itself "Mississippi's Greatest
Newspaper," exposed me in an editorial headlined "Professional
Agitator Hits All Major Trouble Spots." It cited the Burns
report as its major source of information, even for things it
did not say. It implied that I was a Communist, though it didn't
specifically say so (which would have been libel per se). The
editorial was accompanied by five photographs, including one
taken on December 3, 1964 of my speaking from the second floor
balcony of the administration building. As soon as my boss,
Hosea Williams, saw that editorial he put me on a bus back to
Atlanta. "That thing makes you Klan bait," he said.
"We don't need more martyrs right now."
For years I assumed the FBI was behind
this story. It had all the earmarks of an FBI plant, requiring
connections between California and Mississippi. My belief was
reinforced when the FBI's Cointelpro actions against the Civil
Rights Movement in general and its persecution of Dr. Martin
Luther King in particular were revealed. Not until 1997 did
I discover that the actual source of the editorial and photos
was the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission (MSC), an official
state agency of which I was completely unaware in 1966. And
only after reading many pages in the MSC files at the Mississippi
Department of Archives did I realize that I and others like
me were not just foot soldiers in the civil rights movement,
but cannon fodder in the Cold War.
After years of litigation by the ACLU,
in 1994 a federal court ordered Mississippi to open the MSC
files and notify "victims" through public advertisements
that we could obtain copies. When I got the pages on which my
name appeared I discovered that the MSC had its own spy on the
Berkeley campus. Edgar Downing, a welder from Long Beach who
came from McComb, MS, took photos of me and many others and
sold them to the state of Mississippi for its own extensive
files. Mississippi's interest in California was sparked by
the couple dozen Berkeley students who had participated in Freedom
Summer a couple months before the FSM. The summer 1966 Grenada
project brought Downing back to Mississippi, where he took more
photos and sold them to Erle Johnston, Jr., Director of the
MSC. Johnston, who had been a professional publicist before
joining the MSC, arranged for the Jackson Daily News to publish
the editorial and the photos which made me "Klan bait."
Although full of falsehoods and innuendos,
the newspaper published the editorial as true, even though HUAC's
Chairman responded to a query from a Mississippi Congressman
that there was no record of my having an "association with
officially cited Communist or Communist-front organizations."
Why did it do so? Because the culture of anti-Communism permeated
the South. Implying that civil rights workers were Communists
associated two evils with each other and reinforced Southern
beliefs that "outside agitators" were a foreign as
well as a domestic threat.
The Jackson office of the FBI clipped
the page from the newspaper and sent it to Headquarters. This
began a feedback loop. Reports from the Jackson FBI office state
that (name blacked out) contacted them, and identified JO FREEMAN
as a demonstrator in Grenada, Miss. "(__) who has furnished
reliable information in the past, advised that FREEMAN is ....
also listed by the Un-American Activities Committee of California
as a subversive." The fact that California thought I was
a subversive shows up on several pages in my personal FBI file,
even though the San Francisco FBI office repeatedly says that
"No subversive activity is known." The Burns report
didn't say I was a subversive. I realize that to the State of
Mississippi all civil rights workers were subversives, but it
is California that is credited with my designation as such.
Mere mention in the Burns Committee report was enough.
I will probably never know all the "subversive"
files my name appears in. After Burns left the California Senate
and Combs retired, the new President Pro Tem discovered himself
and "more than a score" of legislators in Combs' cardfiles.
He promptly abolished SUAC, sealed its five hundred cubic feet
of material and consigned it to permanent storage in the State
Archives. It's not open to the public, or to those listed on
its cards, and may not be in my lifetime. I will also never
know the personal consequences of having an FBI file or a listing
in the 1965 Burns report. But based on what I do know, I'm reasonably
sure there were some consequences, none of them salutary. These
consequences harmed thousands and thousands of good American
citizens. It did not matter if you were a powerful President
of a major University, or a foot soldier doing voter registration,
once you were labeled by the anti-Communist culture as a subversive,
or a possible subversive, or someone who might participate in
activities which other possible subversives also participated
in, you were labeled forever, without even knowing it.
What does this portend for the future?
Nothing good. Will our fear of terrorism take us down the same
path as our fear of Communism? If we are to fight this war without
shooting ourself in the foot -- and the knees, and the abdomen,
and the chest -- our security agencies need to be very open
about everything they do and everything they find. Secrecy
creates corruption of purpose. Real protection requires accountability,
oversight, and transparency. If we ask the fox to guard the
henhouse, we have to keep a steely eye and a heavy hand on the
fox.
Jo Freeman
is an attorney, political scientist, and author of several books.
For more information go to http://www.JoFreeman.com.
Freeman can be reached at: jfrbc@hotmail.com
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