| Ivo Skoric on Sun, 30 Jan 2005 15:25:21 +0100 (CET) |
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| <nettime> ivogram: censored art, yuschenko, iraq/kosovo, slaves, atrocities, CIA students |
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"Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net>
Art Censored in America
Yushchenko Won (but Bush did not loose)
Kosovo Revisited
Re: Direct Action <<>> Slaves of the 21st century
NY Times: Raves for Authors With a Solid Grasp of Serb Atrocities
Re: Cloak-and-Dagger in the Classroom
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From: "Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net>
Date: Sat, 25 Dec 2004 22:29:12 -0500
Subject: Art Censored in America
An electronic billboard at the entrance to New York City's Holland
Tunnel to New Jersey, December 22, 2004 with an image of a painted
portrait of U.S. President George W. Bush with a 'Censored in NY'
banner over it is projected. More than 400,000 drivers are expected
to see the billboard each day for the next month.
Painted by artist Christopher Savido, the work 'Bush Monkeys,'
painted using monkeys to form the image, was banished from an art
show in New York last week: a small acrylic on canvas created the
stir last week at the Chelsea Market public space, leading the
market's`managers to close down the 60-piece show.
It was originally priced at $3,500 in the show's catalog. Presently,
it is auctioned on Ebay with part of the proceeds donated to the
artist' 'Art for Armor' cause to help parents of U.S. soldiers
wishing to supply their sons and daughters with body armor in Iraq.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1214-03.htm
ivo
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From: "Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net>
Date: Mon, 27 Dec 2004 16:47:43 -0500
Subject: Yushchenko Won (but Bush did not loose)
Making the world safe for big business. Considering that the same
pattern was followed in other East-European societies following the
fall of communism, there is nothing surprising and unpredictable in
what is happening in Ukraine with a little help of Mr. Dollar and
Herr Euro...
ivo
------- Forwarded message follows -------
- A prominent and respected independent political activist in the
Ukraine was offered a *hundred thousand* to speak at the opposition
protest rallies in Kiev. (People who still believe in the stork,
Santa Claus, and the Easter bunny may believe that this money was
collected from the Ukrainian man-in-the-street.) But when she said
that what she would say in her speeches was probably not what they
wanted to hear, they dropped the idea.
- The opposition coalition includes right-wingers who openly display
anti-Semitic slogans and sing anti-Semitic songs.
------- End of forwarded message -------
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From: "Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net>
Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2005 23:24:21 -0500
Subject: Kosovo Revisited
Despite the claims made by international community about the
'genocide' on Kosovo - claims that were used to justify the bombing
of Yugoslavia - once Kosovo was taken under the control of
international troops, almost no mass graves were found, putting that
justification in question. But what if massacres really ocurred, and
bodies were carried and burried in Serbia thereafter?
ivo
------- Forwarded message follows -------
from: "Naida Dukaj" <naidadukaj@sbcglobal.net>
to: <KAN-Info@alb-net.com>
date sent: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 22:04:03 -0800
copies to:
subject: [KAN-Info] Serb Officials Admit Involvement
[ Double-click this line for list subscription options ]
*** Kosova Action Network News & Information ***
KOSOVA ACTION NETWORK
January 1, 2005
INTERNATIONAL ACTION CAMPAIGN FOR RETURN OF MISSING
"WE ARE ALL MISSING THEM"
SERB OFFICIALS ADMIT INVOLVEMENT
INTL. KAN Statement:
Another 44 bodies were returned from the morgue in Belgrade to the
Rahovec morgue in Kosova (full article below), however the issue is
still a long way from being resolved. Hundreds of bodies remain,
inexplicably, in the hands of the Serb police authorities. All bodies
should be returned without delay. As they were in East Timor, Rwanda,
and Bosnia, high level UN leadership fails to represent and implement
the most basic human rights of people in which they have temporary
stewardship over. This failure to demand justice and an end to the
cover-up of the war crimes involved in the transport of bodies from
Kosovo to Serbia in April, 1999, is the result of regional and
international passivity and cowardice.
Now, in 2005, the time has come to demand a Truth Commission, since
neither the UN nor the government of Serbia nor the ICTY has fully
addressed the issue of investigation into the heinous crime of the
transport, burial, and alleged incineration of more than 1,000 Kosovar
Albanians. Local Serbs have been coerced into keeping terrible secrets
for years. Lack of justice is a source of corruption and destabilization
on both sides of the border. RETURN THE KOSOVAR BODIES IMMEDIATELY!
------------------------- -------------------
----------------- ARTICLES ----- ------------
------------------------- -------------------
Balkan Briefs
Thursday December 30, 2004
Serb prosecutor admits massacre during Kosovo war
BELGRADE (AFP) - Some 800 ethnic Albanians exhumed from a mass grave
near Belgrade following the 1998-99 war in Kosovo were the victims of
mass executions, Serbia=92s war crimes prosecutor said yesterday, in the
first such admission from a Serb official. "In (the Belgrade suburb of)
Batajnica were found the remains of people who had been victims of mass
executions in Kosovo," prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic was quoted as saying
by Beta news agency. Vukcevic=92s statement confirmed long-held claims
by non-governmental organizations as well as Kosovo Albanian officials
that ethnic Albanians were the victims of mass executions during the
conflict. "Following the exhumation and autopsy, it has become clear
that those people were not killed by bomb explosions, but their wounds
showed that they had been executed," Vukcevic said. The prosecutor said
his office "will this year make public what happened there."
------------------------------------------
>From Humanitarian Law Center, Belgrade
December 28, 2004
Humanitarian Law Center
Research and Documentation
Nata=9Aa Kandic, the executive director of the Humanitarian Law Center
The cover-up of the war crimes committed in Kosovo in 1998 and during
the NATO bombardments was, above all, a police activity carried out by
the most trustworthy men of the late of the head of Ministry of Interior
Affairs of Serbia, Vlajko Stojiljkovic, of the former President of the
Government of Serbia, Nikola Sainovic, of the one time head of the
Public Security, Vlastimir =D0ordevic, and the former head of the State
Security, Rade Markovic. In the south of Serbia, the trustworthy person
was Dragomir Tomic, a high official of the Government and the Parliament
of Serbia at the time of Slobodan Milo=9Aevic, the owner of Simpo
Company today, whose understanding and support were essential for the
organization and transport of the corpses from Kosovo to the area of
Vranje and Surdulica. In the implementation of this "patriotic duty",
from Kosovo via Bujanovac, members of the Special Operations Unit [Red
Berets], local heads and chiefs of the State Security, and the director
of the Mackatica factory, its owner today, took part. In Surdulica,
everybody knows that, in the said factory, during NATO bombardment,
corpses from Kosovo were incinerated. (full report below)
------------------------------------------
Parts of UNMIK Local Media Monitoring
28 December 2004
Body Remains of Kosovo Albanians Exhumed in Serbia to be Repatriated
in January
The human remains of 44 Albanians that have been exhumed in Serbia will
be handed over to members of their families on January 15. A total of
836 bodies were exhumed from several mass graves in Serbia during 2001,
out of which 398 have so far been handed over after the process of
identification. UNMIK took over 44 bodies from the Serbian authorities
in mid-December. The Forensic Medicine Institute in Orahovac will hand
over these bodies to their families. There are still 3,192 people
missing in Kosovo, and out of this number 2,460 are Kosovo Albanians,
523 Kosovo Serbs and 203 are members of other ethnicities.
http://www.unmikonline.org/press/2004/mon/dec/lmm281204.pdf
------------------------------------------
LOCAL PRESSURE CONTINUES- PRISHTINA
KAN and family groups staged a demonstration in front of UNMIK
administration buildings posting photographs of missing persons
------------------------------------------
###
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From: "Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net>
Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 09:37:41 -0500
Subject: Re: Direct Action <<>> Slaves of the 21st century
Quite amusing. But it is no better in New York either. It simply
SUCKS having babies in cities like London and/or New York. That's why
it is easier to find pet food than baby food in most of New York
stores. Either one of the parents have to quit job - and then the
family would not be able to pay mounting bills - or they have to hire
someone to look after their small child while they are working. There
is no third. Daycares are SO expensive that they are out of range for
working poor, low-income earners, and for most of the middle class in
New York (the cheapest I found is $125 a day, more than I earn...).
That's where the au-pair class comes in handy. There are several
solutions: 1) mandatory daycare pay by the employer, 2) cheaper,
state subsidized daycare, 3) agencies that bring au-pairs to raise
funds to help bring au-pair's earnings to a livable wage. Otherwise,
the situation will not change. Illegal nannies are not the exception -
they are the standard of the American society.
ivo
On 9 Jan 2005 at 21:45, Predrag Tosic wrote:
[ A portrait of the modern-day Western "humanitarians" and "liberals",
this time around among the ordinary folks, not the politicians of
other types of high-profile gangsters. ]
January 06, 2005
Slaves of the 21st century
by Urban Fox, Times online correspondent
If you want ruthless cruelty, find a London mother of small children
and ask her about her childcare arrangements
If you want ruthless cruelty, find a London mother of small children
and ask her about her childcare arrangements. The sweet-faced madonna
smiling beside the crib, or cooing at her little darlings in the
playground, instantly turns into something altogether redder in tooth
and claw.
The emergence of a whole new batch of countries from which to source
au pairs (hooray for the collapse of communism) has proved a godsend
for hard-pressed parents in one of Europe's most expensive cities.
Cheap, cheap labour, in the hugely exploitable form of young girls
unsure what people in this country consider hard work, and what is
frankly no better than abuse, is flooding into London. There are no
controls. And complete freedom over a 50-a-week [Sterling Pound]
skivvy is going to the heads of my hitherto blamelessly humanitarian
friends. One by one, they're turning into the kind of racist,
bullying, heartless employers whose appalling behaviour they would
indignantly condemn if they came across it in any other walk of life.
"I'm getting a Serb from Kosovo," Friend A confided at the end of the
summer, with a devilish glint in her eyes. "She wept in the interview
when I asked her how her parents would get along without her once she
came to live in London. It turned out I'd reminded her that her father
had been beaten up by Kosovan teenagers the other day. But I figure
coming from a war zone is good. She'll be too freaked out to want to go
out in the evenings. That means more babysitting and cleaning for us.
The downside is that she might go around crying all the time and get on
our nerves. But I've sorted that out too. I've told her she's not
allowed to cry in the house. And she's banned from using our phone to
call home." She beamed happily.
Friend B, meanwhile, having picked a series of apparent innocents who,
within seconds of being in the house, turned into drug-taking,
fag-stubbing, pole-dancing, child-hating menaces - or at least failed to
do the mountains of washing up, cleaning, ironing, feeding, folding and
separating of psychotic small boys brandishing swords that made up her
list of duties - fired the lot and turned for her next wee slavey to a
German Catholic religious agency. "Fabulous," she gloated. "They'll be
practically nuns.
They won't drink. They'll have been properly brought up, and know how
to wash up and fold clothes. And they won't ever have fun or go out -
too virtuous. Which means more free babysitting for us."
The London mummy's au pair of choice, it appears, is an abject victim.
Friend C chose a Russian girl from a ghost town near a nuclear power
plant in Lithuania, though she was worried that "she might glow in the
dark and irradiate us all". Friend D picked a "chavvy" Hungarian girl
from the wrong side of the tracks in Budapest. Friend E suggested I only
employ au pairs who were too fat to attract a social life. "I find that
roughly twice the normal weight guarantees you endless babysitting," she
said sagely.
When these business relationships go wrong, no one could be more
surprised and upset than the mothers. Their eyes widen innocently as
they list the young miscreant's crimes. "She threatened to walk out,
just because I was kept a couple of hours late at work again and forgot
to call her!" they bleat, or "She had the cheek to give two weeks'
notice - just two weeks before the Christmas holidays!"
All five of the au pairs I mention above have, of course, been fired -
and all in very similar ways. When the Serb from Kosovo tried to hand in
her resignation, pleading homesickness, and begged to be allowed to go
home after the two weeks agreed in her contract, Friend A threw her out
in the street on the very same December evening, her possessions
following half an hour later, in a black binliner. "She'd ruined my
Christmas! I wasn't having her staying in the house a moment longer!"
Friend A raged. "I don't know where she went! And I don't care!"
Friend B, who had been disappointed to discover that the German
religious agency supplied just the same pretty, leggy, party-minded
teenage girls as all other agencies, lost her temper when her latest was
discovered having a fag in the back garden. She got her husband to have
the row and fire the girl, but the result was the same - au pair ejected
by nightfall, black binliner in hand, with no notice.
Friends C and D also "lost" their au pairs in the space of an evening.
Friend C joined forces with her husband for a row over the au pair's
excessive use of the shower ("twice a day, can you believe?"), and out
she went into the night. Friend D lost her temper with the au pair by
phone, on a motorway, at midnight, when the au pair called to see what
time her employer was likely to get home and relieve her from
babysitting. "How dare you call me so late?" Friend D screamed; the au
pair was parked on the doorstep by dawn.
Luckily for the au pairs, they aren't always the victims their
employees take them for. However little time they've been in a new
country, most of them will have made friends, through English classes
or friends from home. So they aren't completely destitute. They turn
up, with their black bags and alarming stories, and sleep on a
friend's floor (if the friend's boss will let them). And then,
resilience and good temper miraculously restored, they go back to
their agency and get another job.
History is full of examples of casual cruelty by employers to their
staff. Black women keeping house for white families in colonial Africa,
never seeing their own children growing up in faraway villages; ayahs
brought back from imperial India with the family whose children they'd
raised, only to be abandoned on the streets of London once they'd
outlived their usefulness.
But it's a bit unnerving to find the same tyranny flourishing in
London's liberal suburbs in the 21st century.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-16149-1428074-16752,00.html
<...>
---
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with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies,
and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let
its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market
is a nation that is afraid of its people." (John F. Kennedy)
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From: "Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net>
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 11:38:42 -0500
Subject: NY Times: Raves for Authors With a Solid Grasp of Serb Atrocities
Well, I guess Legija will have time to write many more books, now
that he is in prison. I am more disturbed with Karadzic's unhampered
publishing successes. How is it possible that someone who is sought
by the international crimes tribunal for war crimes and lives in deep
hiding for more than a decade, publishes FOUR books in the meantime?
That sounds like a bad joke. What the hell is Serbian police doing?
Surely, they are not doing their jobs.
ivo
On 25 Jan 2005 at 8:47, Selma Avdicevic wrote:
BELGRADE JOURNAL
Raves for Authors With a Solid Grasp of Serb Atrocities
By NICHOLAS WOOD
Published: January 21, 2005
BELGRADE, Serbia - Milorad Ulemek, a first-time novelist, has been quite
a success. In just two weeks, his novel about the war in Bosnia, "Iron
Trench," has sold close to 70,000 copies, a record in Serbia, according
to the publisher, Mihailo Vojnovic.
While pleased with sales, Mr. Vojnovic, the director of M Books,
concedes that the novel's success may have less do with its content than
with its author's notoriety.
Milorad Ulemek is Serbia's most infamous paramilitary soldier, a man who
rights groups say was responsible for some the worst atrocities in the
Yugoslav wars of the 1990's. He is more commonly known by his nom de
guerre, Legija - literally "of the legion," from his time in the French
Foreign Legion. He also occasionally adopts the surname Lukovic, which
he took from his former wife.
As a nationalist writer, though, he faces some competition. Dr. Radovan
Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the 1992-95 Bosnian
conflict and the man most wanted by the United Nations war crimes
tribunal, has also written a novel. And just this week, another former
president of the Bosnian Serb republic, Biljana Plavsic, who is in a
Swedish prison serving a sentence for war crimes, released her book
about the war.
While Ms. Plavsic's book is the only one that sheds any light on the
events of the war, it is the other two that have prompted the most
acclaim here. Nationalist admirers of Mr. Ulemek and Dr. Karadzic have
declared their works masterpieces of Serbian literature, comparable in
style to the works of Albert Camus and James Joyce. Dr. Karadzic's "The
Miraculous Chronicle of the Night," published in October, was
short-listed for Serbia's top literary award, the Golden Sunflower.
Such comparisons have provoked indignation among more liberal
commentators. Dr. Karadzic, a psychiatrist by profession, is widely
regarded by diplomats and historians as the chief architect of ethnic
cleansing in Bosnia, while Mr. Ulemek is seen as one of the policy's
principal executioners.
Most commentators are agreed on one thing: the rave reviews for both
novels reflect the near mythic status still accorded here to the
nationalist figures of the 1990's, men who helped tear Yugoslavia apart
in wars that killed more than 250,000 people.
Both authors managed to produce their books while on the run from
various authorities. The war crimes tribunal in The Hague believes Dr.
Karadzic has been on the move between Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro. It
is not clear how the manuscript found its way to the publishers.
Mr. Vojnovic says Mr. Ulemek's common law wife passed on the manuscript
shortly after he surrendered to the Serbian police last year in
Belgrade. A former commander of the Serbian secret police's military
branch, the Red Berets, Mr. Ulemek is on trial not for war crimes but
for the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, who was shot and
killed outside his office in March 2003.
Neither the accusations nor Mr. Ulemek's war record have deterred
readers like Ljiljana Tanic. "It's a philosophical novel, quite similar
to Camus's 'Plague,' that shows Ulemek's understanding of human
suffering," said the bespectacled 67-year-old, who works in a Belgrade
bookstore.
The novel tells the story of a Serbian soldier lying critically wounded
in a trench. While blatantly anti-Muslim in tone, it questions what was
gained by the war in Bosnia. The dedication reads, "To all my
compatriots, those who are gone and those who live questioning the
meaning of their sacrifice."
The book appears to reveal a previously unrecognized intellectual streak
in Mr. Ulemek, although some critics have questioned whether the former
paramilitary actually wrote it. "I think the last piece of writing
Legija did was his school homework," said Zarko Trebjesanin, a
psychology professor at Belgrade University.
Dr. Karadzic's reputation as a writer is more firmly established. "The
Miraculous Chronicle of the Night" is his fourth publication since he
went into hiding in 1996. Other recent works include a children's book,
a selection of his poetry and a play. This is his first novel, and is
centered on Sarajevo in 1980-81. The hero is an engineer who, like Dr.
Karadzic, is sent to prison at the time of Tito's death.
"It's like Joyce's 'Dubliners,' " said Momo Kapor, an artist who
illustrated Dr. Karadzic's children's book and a member of the Committee
to Protect the Truth of Radovan Karadzic, a Karadzic support group. "It
is equal to the best pages in Serbian literature."
Mr. Kapor said he sees Dr. Karadzic as belonging to a long tradition of
writers like Ezra Pound or Oscar Wilde, brilliant authors who were
frequently condemned by their contemporaries.
"We would have lost many precious pieces of literature if we ignored
condemned authors," he added.
Praise like this has angered rights activists, concerned that almost a
decade after the end of the war in Bosnia accused war criminals are
being treated like heroes. Natasha Kandic, director of the Humanitarian
Law Center, a rights organization based in Belgrade, said foreign
publishers should have boycotted the Belgrade book fair in October to
protest the venue being used to launch Dr. Karadzic's novel.
However, for readers like Ms. Tanic, the two novels provide a view that
echoes their own, depicting Serbia as the victim of an international
conspiracy.
"People abroad don't know about us," she said. "They are representing us
as wild people. They don't know who we really are. These books tell the
truth."
According to Ms. Kandic, that sense of victimization will linger as long
as the government refuses to confront Serbia's role in the wars of the
1990's. "We don't have a strong enough public opinion that will offer an
alternative story, or politicians who can offer an alternative view of
Serbia," she said.
As for Mr. Vojnovic, Mr. Ulemek's publisher, he believes sales of "Iron
Trench" can only increase. "When he is sentenced there will be an even
bigger demand," he said. Two more books by Mr. Ulemek are due to be
published this spring.
---------------------------------
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From: "Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net>
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 10:02:44 -0500
Subject: Re: Cloak-and-Dagger in the Classroom
In communist countries, this was just a fact of life. Like long lines
for meat. University professors just learned to be careful to veil
their opinions in language that, usually poorly educated, secret
police fellows would not entirely comprehend. The spies were
everywhere, though. If you studied sociology or political science,
you could be certain that in the classroom of 20 at least one student
was there on assignment. The operative word for that policy was
"workers liberation". Communists in ol' Yugoslavia liked the sound of
word "freedom," too. For them, it meant their victory over Nazis, and
more importantly, their installment in power. For the sake of
preserving that liberty won, they did not shun to throw thousands of
people in prison, for a mere sentence uttered against them. I hope
the US does not intend to move in that direction.
ivo
On 28 Jan 2005 at 15:14, CERJ@igc.org wrote:
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch, in whose latest issue Dr. David
Price writes about the PRISP program (available through the web site
www.counterpunch.org). Dr. Price can be reached at
dprice@stmartin.edu.
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/2/2005/1051
The CIA's new campus spies
by Alexander Cockburn
Friday, January 25, 2005
After disclosure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's effort to set
a new and spectacularly unaccountable version of the CIA in the
Pentagon, the sprouting forest of secret intelligence operations set
up in the wake of 9/11 is at last coming under some scrutiny. Here's
a sinister one in the academic field that escaped scrutiny until this
week.
Dr. David Price, of St. Martins College, in Olympia, Wash., is an
anthropologist long interested in the intersections of his discipline
with the world of intelligence and national security, both the CIA and
the FBI. Now he's turned the spotlight on a new test program, operating
without detection or protest, that is secretly placing CIA agents in
American university classrooms. With time, these students -- who cannot
admit to their true intentions -- will inevitably pollute and discredit
the universities in which they are now enrolled.
Even before 9/11, government money was being sluiced into the academies
for covert subsidies for students. The National Security Education
Program (NSEP) siphoned off students from traditional foreign language
funding programs and offered graduate students good money, sometimes
$40,000 a year and up, to study "in demand" languages, but with payback
stipulations mandating that recipients later work for unspecified U.S.
national security agencies.
When the NSEP got off the ground in the early 1990s, there was some huff
and puff from concerned academics about this breaching of the supposed
barrier between the desires of academia and the state. But there wasn't
even a watch-pup's yap about Congressional approval for Section 318 of
the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act, which appropriated $4 million
to fund a pilot program known as the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars
Program (PRISP), named after Senator Pat Roberts (R.-Kan., Chair, Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence).
PRISP is designed to train intelligence operatives and analysts in
American university classrooms for careers in the CIA and other
agencies. The program now operates on an undisclosed number of American
college and university campuses. Dr. Price has discovered that if the
pilot phase of the program proves to be a useful means of recruiting and
training members of the intelligence community, then the program will
expand to more campuses across the country.
PRISP participants must be American citizens who are enrolled full time
in graduate degree programs. They need to "complete at least one summer
internship at CIA or other agencies," and they must pass the same
background investigations as other CIA employees. PRISP students
receive financial stipends ranging up to $25,000 per year, and they are
required to participate in closed meetings with other PRISP scholars and
individuals from their administering intelligence agency.
Dr. Price has determined from his inquiries that less than 150 students
a year are currently authorized to receive funding during the pilot
phase as PRISP evaluates the program's initial outcomes. PRISP is
apparently administered not just by the CIA, but also through a variety
of individual intelligence agencies like the NSA, MID or Naval
Intelligence.
Secrecy is the root problem here, with the usual ill-based assumption
that good intelligence operates best in clandestine conditions. Of
course America needs good intelligence, but the most useful and
important intelligence can largely be gathered openly without the sort
of covert invasion of our campuses that PRISP silently brings.
Anyone doubting the superior merits of open intelligence has only to
study the sorry saga of the nonexistent WMDs, whose imagined threat in
vast stockpiles was ringingly affirmed by all the secret agencies while
being contested by analysts unencumbered by bogus covert intelligence
estimates massaged by Iraqi disinformers and political placemen in
Langley and elsewhere.
Dr. Price says, "The CIA makes sure we won't know which classrooms PRISP
scholars attend, this being rationalized as a requirement for protecting
the identities of intelligence personnel." But this secrecy shapes
PRISP as it takes on the form of a covert operation in which PRISP
students study chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, anthropology
and foreign languages without their fellow classmates, professors,
advisors, department chairs or presumably even research subjects knowing
that they are working for the CIA, DIA, NSA or other intelligence
agencies.
"In a decade and a half of Freedom of Information Act research," Dr.
Price continues, " I have read too many FBI reports of students
detailing the 'deviant' political views of their professors." In one
instance elicited by Dr. Prince from files he acquired under FOIA, the
FBI arranged for a graduate student to guide topics of 'informal'
conversation with anthropologist Gene Weltfish that were later the focus
of an inquiry by Joseph McCarthy). Today, Dr. Prince maintains, "These
PRISP students are also secretly compiling dossiers on their professors
and fellow students."
The confluence between academe and intelligence is longstanding and
pervasive. In 1988, CIA spokeswoman Sharon Foster bragged that the CIA
then secretly employed enough university professors "to staff a large
university." Most experts estimate that this presence has grown since
2001.
But if the CIA can use PRISP to corral students, haul them along to
mandatory internships and summer sessions, and douse them in the ethos
of CIA, then it can surely shape their intellectual outlook even before
their grasp of cultural history develops in the relatively open
environment of their university.
Academic environments thrive on open disagreement, dissent and
reformulation. As Dr. Prince writes, "The presence of PRISP's secret
sharers brings hidden agendas that sabotage fundamental academic
processes. The Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program infects all
academia with the viruses dishonesty and distrust as participant
scholars cloak their intentions and their ties to the cloaked masters
they serve."
==================================
CERJ@igc.org wilmerding@earthlink.net
-------------------------------------------
John Wilmerding, Convener and List Manager
Coalition for Equity-Restorative Justice (CERJ)
217 High Street, Brattleboro, VT, USA
ZIP: 05301-6073 Phone: 1-802-254-2826
CERJ was founded in New York in May, 1997.
-------------------------------------------
"Work together to reinvent justice using methods
that are fair; that conserve, restore, and even
create harmony, equity and good will in society."
-------------------------------------------
To join (or leave) the CERJ email list, kindly send
me an email message at wilmerding@earthlink.net
or at cerj@igc.org. I'll need your first & last name,
your email address, and your state, province or
country of residence. Thank you! -- John W.
==================================
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