A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  The whole off-leash thing cranked up nationally about five years ago. I can’t verify my instinct here, but I think it has been at least in part the consequence of organizing work of mid-life radicals bringing the war home, discovering that winning a little leg room for Fido is one cause whose fruition is something we might see in our own lifetimes.

  The usual gripes of the anti-off-leash forces? They try to seize the high moral ground by giving us the old Either/Or. Why should we be seeking playgrounds for dogs when we aren’t giving them to children? Answer: Civilization is not a zero sum game. Let’s have both. Kids and dogs. Dog poop? Dogs on leashes do it as much as dogs running free, and surveys show that, once they win their off-leash area, dog lovers self-police with all the vigilance of a neighborhood committee of public safety in the Paris of Robespierre and Saint-Just. The off-leash area in César Chávez is probably the cleanest acreage in the East Bay.

  A dog that can run free is a happy dog, uplifter of domestic morale. Owners are healthier too, dashing along after dogs like Jasper.

  May 16

  Now it’s Al Gore, crime fighter, outlining his plans in a recent speech in Atlanta. The erstwhile dope smoker from Tennessee fears the erstwhile cocaine user from Texas has the edge on the crime issue. Hence his dash for the low ground. Among the Atlanta pledges: The minute he’s settled into the Oval Office and signed a pardon for the former incumbent, President Gore will be calling for 50,000 more cops (more half-trained recruits like the ones who shot Amadou Diallo) and for allowing off-duty cops to carry concealed weapons (which almost all of them do anyway).

  No, it’s unlikely President Gore will endorse medical marijuana, despite his erstwhile post-Vietnam therapy with opium-laced marijuana in the days when he worked for the Tennessean. In the words of his friend John Warnecke (who imported the Thai sticks from the West Coast), Al “smoked as much as anybody I knew down there, and loved it.”

  Among Gore’s other big plans to combat crime: He wants to target telemarketers who prey on seniors. What about telemarketers who prey on people sitting down to dinner?

  Gore knows all about addiction. His sister Nancy, as he reminds us from time to time, was killed by cigarettes, unable to kick the habit even as she was breathing with one cancerous lung. He also knows about congenital dispositions. His wife, Tipper, is a depressive. He knows about therapy too, having communed with shrinks when he was having the midlife sag that partly prompted his 1992 book Earth in the Balance.

  June 18

  We’re just about thirty-one years away from the great Stonewall riot, which set the tone for years of defiant gay insurgency. So where’s this spirit of defiance today?

  Here’s a clue. In early June, we were able to read in our national newspapers that about sixty gay employees of the CIA were joined by a busload of intelligence workers from the National Security Agency for an event designed to evince gay pride. Present were top officials, including George J. Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence. Addressing the gay spooks was Barney Frank, the noted gay Rep. from Massachusetts.

  Taste the ironies. The gay spooks, albeit proud, were still unidentifiable, and then returned to their tasks of planning the sabotage of the Cuban economy, the undermining of Libya, and other staples of the Agency’s daily fare. How would the Stonewall rioters of the late ’60s have reacted to that?

  Gays have always had an uneasy relationship with the state and with the authorities, for sound reasons. Down the decades they’ve been hunted, entrapped, arrested, sentenced, persecuted. With increasing vigor and effect since Stonewall they’ve fought back. But now we have the repugnant spectacle of many prominent gays and gay groups oblivious to this long history. Take the death penalty. There’s no more glaring expression of the inequities of race and class than the manner in which the death penalty is operated in our society, yet many gay rights groups have been silent on capital punishment, including the richest and biggest of them all, the Human Rights Campaign. They’re mute as the state hauls off the poor and the black to die, and save their lungs for “hate crime” laws, for longer prison terms, for more repression by the state.

  Listen to Richard Hymes, of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project: “Hate crimes legislation would remove the decision making process regarding plea bargaining and reduced or dismissed sentences out of the judges’ hands because they set a benchmark of punishment for each offense which cannot be pleaded, bargained away or dismissed.” In other words, the zeal to deal with anti-gay violence now leads to advocacy of laws which threaten justice, due process and civil liberties.

  Years ago a great criminal court judge in Detroit—Justin Ravitz—explained the criminal justice system as America’s “only working railroad.” And now many gays are toiling to make sure that the railroad runs on time, even on overtime. About half the states now have hate-crime laws that include language on sexual bias. Not a word in any of those laws in any of those states will stop a gay person being attacked, not a word will reduce discrimination in our society, not a word will erode the repression against which those Stonewallers fought thirty-one years ago.

  July 18

  A Democrat in the White House is no guarantee of a liberal on the Court. Gerald Ford picked John Stevens, one of the Court’s current liberal champions and indeed the only justice to rule against two oil companies in one of the recent batch of Supreme Court decisions. Nixon’s nominee, Harold Blackmun, wrote the Roe v. Wade decision. Twenty years later Bush Sr.’s nominee, Souter, probably the most liberal justice today, wrote the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision in 1992 reaffirming the “essential holding” of Roe v. Wade, and arguing that “choice” was now installed in the national culture. The Court echoed that view in its recent upholding of the Miranda rule.

  And why had choice become thus installed, why was the “essential holding” being reaffirmed? Through the activity of social movements, through the political pressure of millions of people. The idea that our moral fabric, the tenor of our culture, the texture of our freedoms derive from the US Supreme Court, and therefore somehow depend on whom Gore or Bush may or may not nominate, is ludicrous. The US Supreme Court, like all ruling state institutions, bends in a benign direction only under the impulse of powerful social movements.

  Throughout the nation’s history the US Supreme Court has generally been a reactionary force and it will no doubt be so whether Gore or Bush is elected in November, or whether the Democrats or Republicans control the Senate. A partial exception was the Warren court, which had the coincidence of three great justices, Black, Douglas, and the Eisenhower-appointed William Brennan, and which was prompted by the rise of the civil rights movement and the political assertion of black people to try and head off more drastic social explosions. In so doing it buttressed a federal government that was unflinchingly hostile to the interest of working people, minorities and the environment. Reynolds v. Sims, in 1966, turned many rural counties into Third World latifundia.

  August 30

  In AD 193 the Roman Praetorian Guard murdered the Emperor Pertinax and proceeded to auction off the imperial throne to the highest bidder. Until this year the most strenuous emulation of this feat by the US military came in 1980, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff took bids on the White House from the ramparts of the Pentagon. Despite fierce bidding by Jimmy Carter, the Chiefs had no hesitation in accepting Republican pledges and in proclaiming that only Ronald Reagan would keep the Empire strong.

  We are in the climactic moments of the 2000 auction.

  September 22

  The collapse of the government’s case against Wen Ho Lee last week represents one of the greatest humiliations of a national newspaper in the history of journalism. One has to go back to the publication by the London Times of the Pigott forgeries in 1887 libeling Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish nationalist hero, to find an equivalent debacle.

  Yet not a whisper of contrition, not a murmur of remorse, has as yet agitated the editorial pages of the New York Times, which now ri
ghteously urge the appointment of a “politically independent person of national standing to review the entire case.”

  No such review is required to determine the decisive role of the New York Times in sparking the persecution of Wen Ho Lee, his solitary confinement under threat of execution, his denial of bail, his shackling, the loss of his job, the anguish and terror endured by this scientist and his family. On March 6, 1999, the Times carried a report by James Risen and Jeff Gerth entitled “Breach at Los Alamos” charging an unnamed scientist with stealing nuclear secrets from the government lab and giving them to the People’s Republic of China. The espionage, according to a security official cited by Risen and Gerth, was “going to be just as bad as the Rosenbergs.”

  Two days later Wen Ho Lee, an American of Taiwanese descent, was fired from his job. Ahead of him lay months of further pillorying in a racist witch hunt led by the Times, whose news columns were replete with further mendacious bulletins from Risen and Gerth, and whose Op Ed page featured William Safire using their stories to launch his own calumnies against Wen Ho Lee and the Clinton administration.

  Guided by Safire, the Republicans in Congress pounced upon the Wen Ho Lee case with an ardor approaching ecstasy. By the spring of 1999 their effort to evict Bill Clinton from office for the Lewinsky affair had collapsed. They needed a new stick with which to beat the administration and the New York Times handed it to them.

  In Safire’s insinuations, the Clinton White House was an annex of the Middle Kingdom, and the transfer of US nuclear secrets merely one episode in a long, dark narrative of treachery to the American flag. Former US Senator Warren Rudman went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and declared flatly, “The agenda for the body politic is often set by the media. Had it not been for the New York Times breaking the story of Chinese espionage all over the front pages, I’m not sure I would be here this morning.”

  The most preposterous expression of the Republican spy crusade against the Clinton administration came with the release of the 900-page report named after California Rep. Christopher Cox, filled with one demented assertion after another, including the memorable though absolutely false claim that “the stolen information includes classified information on seven US thermonuclear warheads, including every currently deployed thermonuclear warhead in the US ballistic missile arsenal.”

  Yet Risen and Gerth’s stories had been profuse with errors from the outset. Their prime source had been Notra Trulock, an embittered security official in the Department of Energy intent upon his own vendettas within the DoE. Risen and Gerth eagerly swallowed his assertions. From him and other self-interested officials they relayed one falsehood after another: that Wen Ho Lee had failed a lie-detector test; that the Los Alamos lab was the undoubted source of the security breach; that it was from Los Alamos that the Chinese had acquired the blueprint of the miniaturized W-88 nuclear warhead.

  Had the New York Times launched its campaign of terror against Wen Ho Lee at the height of the cold war, it is quite likely that Wen Ho Lee would have been swept to his doom, most likely with a sentence of life imprisonment amid vain efforts of his defenders to get the scientist a fair hearing. It is doubtful that US District Judge James Parker in New Mexico would have had the courage to denounce the Justice Department for a shabby case and to order the release of Wen Ho Lee after harshly criticizing the fifty-nine-count government indictment and the “demeaning, unnecessarily punitive conditions” in which Wen Ho Lee had been held.

  But we are no longer amidst the fevers of the cold war. And though the Pentagon has wanly tried to foment a budget-boosting campaign to suggest that China represents a fearsome military threat, it has not been taken with any great seriousness. The exaggerations of Chinese might are simply too egregious.

  So, in these post-cold war years, Wen Ho Lee did have his sturdy defenders. Some were government officials evidently appalled by the Times’ campaign. Some commentators, most notably Lars-Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News, were scathing about the case against Wen Ho Lee. In July of 1999 the New York Review of Books published a long piece by Nelson which explicitly criticized the witch-hunt and noted the malign role of the New York Times. Nelson pointed out how many of the supposedly filched “secrets” had been publicly available for years. By September of 1999 the New York Times had evidently entertained sufficient disquiet to publish a long piece by William Broad which decorously—though without any explicit finger-pointing—undermined the premises of Risen and Gerth’s articles.

  None of this helped Wen Ho Lee escape terrifying FBI interrogations in which an agent flourished the threat of execution. He was kept in solitary, allowed to exercise one hour a day while shackled, kept in a constantly lit cell.

  Even near the end, when it was plain that the government’s case was falling apart, US Attorney General Janet Reno’s prosecutors successfully contested efforts to have Wen Ho Lee released on bail. And when Judge Parker finally threw out almost the entire case the prosecutors continued to insist, as has Reno, that their conduct had been appropriate throughout.

  The New York Times, without whose agency Wen Ho Lee would never have spent a day in a prison cell, perhaps not even have lost his job, is now with consummate effrontery urging an investigation of the bungled prosecution.

  In an extraordinary breach of conventional decorum the President of the United States has criticized his own Attorney General for the way Wen Ho Lee has been maltreated. Yet the editors of the New York Times can admit no wrong. Risen and Gerth are not required to offer reflections on the outcome of the affair.

  When the forgeries of Richard Pigott, described in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica as “a needy and disreputable Irish journalist,” against Parnell were exposed, he fled to Madrid and there blew out his brains. The London Times required years to efface the shame of its gullibility. Would that the New York Times was required to admit equivalent error. But it won’t. Next year it will no doubt preen amid whatever Pulitzer awards are put its way by the jury of its friends. This is no-fault journalism.

  September 24

  Newt Gingrich had the first take on George W.’s pick for veep: “Dick Cheney is even more conservative than me.” Leave it to the Bush crowd to allow the Democrats to resurrect Gingrich once more in their campaign ads. Of course, Newt has always been misclassified by the political taxonomists as a conservative. Underneath the bluster, Gingrich is a closet neoliberal and a technophile, fully marinated in the argot of third-wavism and cyberspeak. It’s not surprising that he and Al Gore (frequent dining companions during their days in the House) are both disciples of Alvin Toffler and Carl Sagan and share the belief that getting urban America wired up to the internet is a fast-track out of poverty.

  November 2

  A political culture is under siege. Hear the panic as the waters pour into Atlantis.

  Jesse Jackson cries out that “Our very lives are at stake.” Paul Wellstone quavers that George W. Bush will “repeal the twentieth century.” Martin Peretz, owner of the Gore-loving New Republic, writes furiously that “Naderism represents the emotional satisfaction of the American left at the expense of the social and economic satisfaction of women, blacks, gays, and poor people in America.”

  Somewhere in the third week of October the Gore crowd woke up to the clear and awful thought that they might not make it, that maybe it wasn’t their time any more and that the man to blame is Ralph Nader. Gore had bombed in the debates. The Greens had organized a whole string of Nader super-rallies across the northern half of the country from Seattle and Portland, through the upper Midwest to New York. In Minnesota Nader was polling over ten percent on some counts. In Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Maine, maybe even California, Nader could make enough of a dent to put Bush over the top.

  And so the Get-Ralph campaign began in earnest.

  I’ve always seen Ralph as our Robespierre, having to make do with class-action suits instead of the guillotine. Years ago the late Jim Goode, at that time editor o
f Penthouse, used to look across the piles of pin-ups with a shudder of distaste (he was gay) and snarl at me, “Alex, is your hate pure?” “Yes, Jim.” Ralph’s hate is pure. He’d no doubt prefer to be running at over 30 percent, but short of that, the privilege of being able to influence the race in at least six states is exactly what Nader had been waiting for all along: the power to remind the Democratic Party it can’t take for granted the progressive slice of the country.

  Even if the Nader/Green run vanishes off the margin of history by the end of the year it still will have given many young folk a taste for the excitements of radical political organizing. People carry such hours and days with them for the rest of their lives, as the inspiring leaven in our business-as-usual loaf.

  November 9

  Yes, Nader didn’t break 5 percent nationally, but he should feel great, and so should the Greens who voted for him. Their message to the Democrats is clear. Address our issues, or you’ll pay the same penalty next time around. Nader should draw up a short list of Green non-negotiable issues and nail it to the doors of the Democratic National Committee.

  By all means credit Nader, but of course Gore has only himself to blame. He’s a product of the Democratic Leadership Council, whose pro-business stance was designed to regain the South for the Democrats. Look at the map. Bush swept the entire South, with the possible exception of Florida. Gore’s electoral votes came from the two coasts and the old industrial Midwest. The states Gore did win mostly came courtesy of labor and blacks.

  Take Tennessee, where voters know Gore best. He would have won the election if he’d carried his home state. Gore is good with liberals earning $100,000–$200,000. He can barely talk to rural people, and he made another fatal somersault, reversing his position on handguns after telling Tennessee voters for years that he was solid on the gun issue. Guns were a big factor in Ohio and West Virginia too. As for Nader holding the country to ransom, what’s wrong with a hostage taker with a national backing of 2.7 million people? The election came alive because of Nader.