A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  Wouldn’t you describe Fink’s tone here as one of ghoulish glee?

  Leonard Frank outlined the economics of ECT succinctly in testimony: “ECT is a money-maker. An in-hospital ECT series can cost anywhere from $50,000–75,000. Using a low figure of 100,000 Americans who are electroshocked annually, most of whom are covered by private or government insurance, ECT brings in $5 billion a year. ECT promoters are its stakeholders—they include device manufacturers, hospitals and practitioners.”

  The malpractice verdict was against the referring doctor, Eric Lewkowicz. The jury could not return a verdict against the other two doctors because of one holdout vote for acquittal. The hospital settled its liability for an undisclosed sum early in the trial.

  Former patients have reported devastating, permanent amnesia and cognitive impairment since ECT was first invented in 1938, but that has not hindered the treatment’s popularity with doctors. The first lawsuit for ECT amnesia, Marilyn Rice v. John Nardini, was brought exactly thirty years ago, and dozens of suits have followed. While there have been a few settlements, including one for half a million dollars, no former patient has won a case until now.

  In fact, defiant ghoulishness seems to be a stock in trade of the ECT lobby. “For forty years,” Dr. Milton Greenblatt told a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Miami in 1976, “the therapeutic value of convulsive therapy has been recognized. My personal recollections go back to 1939 shortly after the introduction of metrazol when, as a medical student, I was allowed to inject metrazol into chronically ill patients at Worcester State Hospital—against their terrified and frightened resistance, which, I might add, was overpowered by several burly attendants. In those days we required only the approval of next of kin for the procedure, and had few qualms about proceeding against the patient’s resistance.”

  Greenblatt goes on to describe how ECT was initially hailed as a marvelous substitute for metrazol, since there were no “awful preseizure sensations” and patients “were fortunate to have a period of amnesia after the treatment.” It’s like saying bleeding via leeches was a big step forward from opening a patient’s vein and having his blood splash all over the bed.

  The 1950s found Dr. Greenblatt overseeing research into LSD, in a program funded by the CIA.

  August 24

  These are triumphant hours for Pat Robertson. His standing as America’s senior ayatollah is becoming firmer as Billy Graham and even Jerry Falwell yield the prime-time pulpit to the smooth-tongued maestro of the Christian Coalition.

  A decade ago CNN would sooner have given half an hour’s air time to the leader of North Korea, but last week Wolf Blitzer poked a stick through the bars, and nodded respectfully as Robertson raved on about the End Time:

  BLITZER: You see what’s going on in the world today in Pakistan, in India, Afghanistan, an earthquake, maybe 20,000 people dead, maybe twice that number; we don’t have a count. Hurricanes in the United States and around the world, a tsunami a little bit less than a year or so ago in Southeast Asia. What’s happening?

  ROBERTSON: Wolf, I might say you’re very perceptive to pick up the key in this. If you read back in the Bible, the letter of the apostle Paul to the church of Thessalonia, he said that in the latter days before the end of the age that the Earth would be caught up in what he called the birth pangs of a new order. And for anybody who knows what it’s like to have a wife going into labor, you know how these labor pains begin to hit.

  I don’t have any special word that says this is that, but it could be suspiciously like that. These things are starting to hit with amazing regularity.

  Blitzer wagged his head like a mental hospital attendant placating a noisy inmate, and then poked his stick through the bars again:

  BLITZER: But what does that mean? Explain that in more simplistic terms so I can understand what you’re driving at?

  ROBERTSON: Well, what was called the blessed hope of the Bible is that one day Jesus Christ would come back again, start a whole new era, that this world order as we know it would change into something that would be wonderful that we’d call the millennium. And before that good time comes there will be some difficult days and they will be likened to what a woman goes through in labor just before she brings forth a child.

  More placatory nods from the hospital attendant:

  BLITZER: So you think we’re at that moment right now perhaps?

  ROBERTSON: It’s possible, Wolf. I don’t have any special revelation to say it is, but the Bible does indicate such a time will happen in the end of time. And could this be it? It might be.

  BLITZER: All right. Let’s move on to something that we perhaps can understand a little bit better, which would be Harriet Miers.

  After chiding James (“Focus on the Family”) Dobson for hyperbolic language, Robertson closed out the interview a few minutes later by claiming that Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez, whose assassination he had recently recommended, was building a nuclear arsenal and had sent Osama bin Laden a million dollars after September 11.

  The sobering part of all this is that all the same words could have come out the mouth of the President, whose relationship to Jesus and expectations of the End Time are probably more intense than Robertson’s, since the latter is a seasoned professional, rather than an inspired amateur.

  Reagan used to talk about the End Time equably too, once stressing that it could occur in “our lifetime.” Journalists like Blitzer should raise the issue more frequently, both to ayatollahs of the Apocalypse like Robertson and to the President. It would give press conferences a certain gloomy zest.

  The only mystery is why, given his Apocalyptic expectations, Robertson fusses about the threat of Chávez and calls for his murder by the CIA. He surely cannot think that the Venezuelan leader will be spared the Lord’s coming wrath, when the saved rise up in the great celestial spiral and the damned are consigned to the pit. Why ask the CIA to do what the Almighty will soon take care of?

  August 27

  Each time some loudmouth calls for the CIA to murder an inconvenient foreign leader, the tut-tuts of the State Department get more and more casual. When Pat Robertson called a few weeks ago for a CIA hit on Venezuela’s Chávez, the best the State Department could manage was a softly murmured “inappropriate.” Maybe it’s finally being acknowledged that, just like torture, assassination has long been standard US policy.

  Standard? Start, in the post–World War II era, with the bid on Zhou Enlai’s life after the Bandung Conference in 1954. An in-flight bomb blew up the plane scheduled to take him home, but Zhou had switched flights. Now move to the efforts, ultimately successful, to kill the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba. The CIA tried several times to kill Iraq’s General Kassem. The first such attempt, on October 7, 1959, was botched badly, and one of the assassins, Saddam Hussein, was spirited out by the Egyptian Mukhabarat to an Agency apartment in Cairo. There was a second Agency effort in 1960–1 with a poisoned handkerchief. Finally, they had Kassem shot to death in the coup of February 8–9, 1963, that brought Saddam to the fore.

  Kassem was a very impressive man, as Roger Morris recently reminded me: an Arabized Kurd from Kut with a Shia mother and a Sunni father, a practicing Sunni who knelt at the sickbed of the Grand Ayatollah of his mother’s faith, in a symbolism every Iraqi understood. Kassem even embraced the Kurds (whom he’d fought as a soldier) until the Brits bought them back to rebellion, as usual. As Morris remarks, “Kassem was just what poor sick GW needs in Baghdad now, of course.”

  November 11

  Did the White House slip Judy Miller money under the table to hype Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction? I’m quite sure it didn’t and the only money Miller took was her regular Times paycheck.

  But this doesn’t mean that We The Taxpayers weren’t ultimately footing the bill for Miller’s propaganda. We were, since Miller’s stories mostly came from the defectors proffered her by Ahmad Chalabi’s group, the Iraqi National Congress, which even as late as the spring of 2004 was getting
$350,000 a month from the CIA, said payments made in part for the INC to produce “intelligence” from inside Iraq.

  It also doesn’t mean that when she was pouring her nonsense into the NYT’s news columns Judy Miller (or her editors) didn’t know that the INC’s defectors were linked to the CIA by a money trail. This same trail was laid out in considerable detail in Out of the Ashes, written by my brothers, Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, and published in 1999.

  In this fine book, closely studied (and frequently pillaged without acknowledgement) by journalists covering Iraq, the authors described how Chalabi’s group was funded by the CIA, with huge amounts of money—$23 million in the first year alone—invested in an anti-Saddam propaganda campaign, subcontracted by the Agency to John Rendon, a Washington PR operator with good CIA connections.

  Press manipulation was always a paramount concern of the CIA, as with the Pentagon. In his Secret History of the CIA, published in 2001, Joe Trento described how in 1948 CIA man Frank Wisner was appointed Director of the Office of Special Projects, soon renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the very first in its list of designated functions was “propaganda.”

  Later that year Wisner set up an operation codenamed “Mockingbird,” to influence the domestic American press. He recruited Philip Graham of the Washington Post to run the project within the industry.

  Senate Armed Services Chairman John Warner said recently, apropos the stories put into the Iraqi press by the Lincoln Group, that it wasn’t clear whether traditionally accepted journalistic practices were violated. Warner can relax. The Pentagon, and the Lincoln Group, were working in a rich tradition, and their only mistake was to get caught.

  December 8

  I remarked after reading Pinter’s Nobel acceptance speech that it’s a sign of the inability of the American Empire that its agents didn’t manage to kill off his nomination, or—having failed at that—to kill Pinter before he was able to record his remarks.

  Consider the CIA’s probable poisoning, at a fraught political moment, of Paul Robeson, the black actor, singer, and political radical. As Jeffrey St. Clair and I wrote a few years ago, in the spring of 1961, Robeson planned to visit Havana to meet with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The trip never came off because Robeson fell ill in Moscow, where he had gone to give several lectures and concerts. At the time, it was reported that Robeson had suffered a heart attack. But in fact Robeson had slashed his wrists in a suicide attempt after suffering hallucinations and severe depression. The symptoms came on following a surprise party thrown for him at his Moscow hotel.

  Robeson’s son, Paul Robeson Jr., investigated his father’s illness for more than thirty years. He believes that his father was slipped a synthetic hallucinogen called BZ by US intelligence operatives at the party in Moscow. The party was hosted by anti-Soviet dissidents funded by the CIA.

  Robeson Jr. visited his father in the hospital the day after the suicide attempt. Robeson told his son that he felt extreme paranoia and thought that the walls of the room were moving. He said he had locked himself in his bedroom and was overcome by a powerful sense of emptiness and depression before he tried to take his own life.

  Robeson left Moscow for London, where he was admitted to Priory Hospital. There he was turned over to psychiatrists who forced him to endure fifty-four electro-shock treatments. At the time, electro-shock, in combination with psychoactive drugs, was a favored technique of CIA behavior modification. It turned out that the doctors treating Robeson in London and, later, in New York, were CIA contractors. The timing of Robeson’s trip to Cuba was certainly a crucial factor. Three weeks after the Moscow party, the CIA launched its disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. It’s impossible to underestimate Robeson’s threat, as he was perceived by the US government as the most famous black radical in the world. His embrace of Castro in Havana would have seriously undermined US efforts to overthrow the new Cuban government.

  Another pressing concern for the US government at the time was Robeson’s announced intentions to return to the United States and assume a leading role in the emerging civil rights movement. Like the family of Martin Luther King, Robeson had been under official surveillance for decades. As early as 1935, British intelligence had been looking at Robeson’s activities. In 1943, the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II predecessor to the CIA, opened a file on him. In 1947, Robeson was nearly killed in a car crash. It later turned out that the left wheel of the car had been monkey-wrenched. In the 1950s, Robeson was targeted by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist hearings. The campaign effectively sabotaged his acting and singing career in the States.

  Robeson never recovered from the drugging and the follow-up treatments from CIA-linked doctors and shrinks. He died in 1977.

  2006

  January 3

  Sanora Babb died on December 31, aged ninety-eight. Harry Magdoff died on New Year’s Day, at ninety-two. Frank Wilkinson died a day later, at ninety-one.

  My line has always been that to get really old it pays to have been a Commie or at least a fellow traveler. In younger years they tended to walk a lot, selling the party paper. They talked a lot and, above all, they never stopped thinking. The quickest way to kill someone is to send them off to quasi-solitary, torn from their comfortable nest and thrown into a nursing home or into managed care, where people talk about them at the tops of their voices, referring to them in the third person. You can see them dying before your eyes, their brains turned to mush. It takes about a year to kill them off, unless a “surprise birthday party” wipes them out even earlier.

  Trotskyists tend to be more feverish and stressed out, hence less likely to turn the bend into their nineties. As for Maoists (over here), I don’t know. As Zhou Enlai answered, when asked what he thought of the French Revolution, “Too soon to tell.” The ex-Maoists I know are mostly still in their mid-sixties.

  I don’t know whether Sweezy and Magdoff ever took a day’s exercise. When I used to see them in the editorial offices of the Monthly Review they looked as though they’d been marinating in tobacco smoke there for decades. They certainly thought a lot, to great effect. They liked Mao too.

  Frank Wilkinson was a feisty soul. He led the fight for public housing in Los Angeles in the late 1930s and ’40s, which earned him the savage enmity of the Chandlers and thus of the Los Angeles Times. If his plans had gone right, we’d have public housing built by Neutra instead of Dodger Stadium. He did time for refusing to testify before Congress, then went on to be a great campaigner for the First Amendment, just like his friend and fellow Communist, Dick Criley, who died a few years ago up in Carmel Highlands, also in his high nineties. Dick’s sister, Cynthia Williams, is still peppy after a tremendous ninetieth (NOT a surprise) birthday party last fall in Carmel Highlands. Her wonderful piece of advice to the partygoers: “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.”

  Sanora Babb obviously didn’t weaken, though she endured some zingers in her long span, the worst being the fact that she wrote a novel about migrant workers in 1939 that was to be published by Random House, until Random House’s other novelist on migrant workers, John Steinbeck, scored a huge hit with The Grapes of Wrath. Bennett Cerf cancelled Babb’s novel, Whose Names Are Unknown. It had to wait sixty-five years until it was published to great acclaim in 2004. Babb thought she was a better writer than Steinbeck and some smart people agree with her.

  March 9

  Americans are in a fever about possible “Arab control” of mainland ports along both coasts of the United States. The whole storm is ludicrous. When it comes to America’s national security and penetration of the mainland by foreign capital, there are bigger worries. This very week, the week of the Chicago Auto Show, the widely read magazine Consumer Reports lists the ten safest cars sold in America this year.

  They are all Japanese, mostly Hondas, and mostly made in US-based plants put up after Japanese and other
foreign automakers were welcomed in thirty years ago, partly as a way of undercutting the Union of Autoworkers. This same month the headlines here have been full of stories about the collapse of the top two US automakers—General Motors and Ford—in the face of foreign competition. Well over 100,000 American workers are to lose their jobs, thus vastly increasing US insecurity. Hundreds of thousands more US workers have already lost their jobs to India, China, Mexico, and other low-wage nations because that is the way American business, backed by the US government, wants it.

  March 15

  Miloević’s death in his cell from a heart attack spared Del Ponte and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (itself a kangaroo tribunal set up by the United States with no proper foundation under international law or treaty) the ongoing embarrassment of a proceeding where Miloević had made a very strong showing against the phalanx of prosecutors, hearsay witnesses, and prejudiced judges marshaled against him.

  There are now charges and countercharges about poisons and self-medications. Miloević’s son says his father was murdered. The embarrassed Court has claimed Miloević somehow did himself in by tampering with his medicines. But no one contests the fact that Miloević asked for treatment in Moscow—the Russians promised to return him to The Hague—and the Court refused permission. As the tag from the poet A. H. Clough goes, “Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive Officiously to keep alive.”