December 15, 2010 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • Page 19 as Nazi sympathizers, but the coating usually crumbled. Hamilton Fish led black troops in World War I, was decorated by the United States and France, and spent decades in the U.S. House of Representatives advocating an anti-lynching law to protect Southern blacks from being murdered on accusation without a fair trial. Guy Gillette was a World War I veteran, his wife was Jewish, and he was the best friend Israel had in the U.S. Senate. These guys couldn’t be framed easily. Norman Thomas and Bruce Barton were Christian pacifists. Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, and Frank Lloyd Wright were popular heroes of vast achievement, despite Ford’s nasty anti-Semitism and Lindbergh’s avowed Darwinian anti-Asian racism. Before and during World War II, a flamboyant eccentric and vicious malcontent named William Dudley Pelley had irritated the Roosevelt administration first through opposition to the New Deal, later by advocating complete neutrality in the war between Britain and Germany. Pelley was an anti-Semite and an anti-communist. His name and views contaminated those people who didn’t share his racist views, but simply wanted to stay out of a war they viewed as none of America’s business – particularly after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union and Britain was no longer at serious risk, but Stalin was. Fish and Gillette never came close to supporting the Nazi movement, but Pelley doted on it. Pelley – targeted by Roosevelt and the FBI before the U.S. entered the war – dropped his isolationist stance after Pearl Harbor, just as Fish and Gillette did. However, in 1942, he charged that the devastation of the fleet at Pearl Harbor was far worse than the government admitted. Pelley was factually accurate and should have been protected by the First Amendment, but he was arrested for treason and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He didn’t get out of prison until the Democrats lost the election of 1952. Pelley probably belonged under psychiatric incarceration anyway, but his prison term resulted from a fact that may have been treasonous but was absolutely true. The damage at Pearl Harbor was so bad that the White House kept the actual figures and ship losses under wraps for years, and Pelley blew the whistle on them. Some people commit treason inadvertently. One of them was William Calley. Acting under what he said were orders, Calley and some – not all – of his platoon moved into a South Vietnamese village where there was no resistance and murdered about 500 civilians. In her new book, “Atrocity and American Military Justice in Southeast Asia: Trial by Army,” Professor Louise Barnett of Rutgers University documents the My Lai massacre and provides a scathing look at the cover up that followed as various Army officers either tried to cover up the mass murder or distance themselves from any blame. Calley and those of his men who “were only following orders” shot women, babies, and old men at ranges so close that no mistake as to age or gender would have been possible. Other soldiers refused to participate. “I couldn’t go through with it. These little defenseless men, women, and kids,” Private James Dursi said. Another soldier reportedly shot himself in the foot and asked to be evacuated rather than pull the trigger. A helicopter pilot named Hugh Thompson protested the murders and was able to rescue several civilians. A soldier named Ronald Ridenhour, who hadn’t been at My Lai but had heard some of the killers boasting about what they had done, stuck his neck out and wrote 19 letters to prominent Americans, including Richard Nixon describing the incident. Nothing happened until Seymour Hersh broke the news story. What was America’s response? Tim O’Brien, a soldier who had served honorably in Vietnam, said, “A bunch of people committed murder, 504 murders, on a terrible March Saturday morning in 1968. We know who they are. They’ve confessed, many of them. The evidence is overwhelming, and not a damn thing happened to most of them.” Of the 15 commissioned officers implicated in the massacre or the cover up, only six were tried. All but Calley were acquitted. Calley was found guilty and served three years of house arrest. The White House was deluged with thousands of letters expressing indignation that Calley had been convicted for “doing his job” -- which was all that Adolf Eichmann was convicted for. Some 79 percent of Americans saw no war crime in the mass murder at My Lai. Then-Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter urged voters in his state to drive with their lights on to protest the guilty verdict. Governor George Wallace paid Calley a friendly visit. The New Jersey legislature joined Arkansas, Kansas, Texas, and South Carolina in urging clemency. Who was the traitor here? Was it the dunce who contaminated the worthwhile cause of anti-communism by shooting an old man and a baby? Or was it the American soldiers, and later the reporters, who had the conscience to rescue people or to reveal the atrocity to the American public? The whistle-blowers were my heroes. The fact that people rise up screaming to protest the news that secondhand cigarette smoke and asbestos cause cancer in children shows that some people will do anything for a buck, or to defend their own idiocy from exposure. Were the workers who complained about constant safety problems at BP paid Saudi spies? Or were they honest Americans who didn’t want to die for a crooked corporation’s profits? If the latest leaks get people who love and support freedom and justice murdered, those leaks are clearly treasonous. If they keep America out of more wars where 79 percent of the voters can’t understand why shooting babies is a criminal act, they are clearly heroic. We’ll have to wait and see. A leak that is one person’s treason may or may not be another person’s treasure. Some of the information that has trickled out more than suggests that the U.S. Secretary of State urged members of the diplomatic corps to verge over into the sort of activities that are supposedly confined to spies. Others have suggested that Arab leaders urged the United States to bomb Iran. The Chinese appear to have written off North Korea and might tacitly support a unified Korea somewhat affable to the United States. Various foreign leaders are depicted as showoffs, scoundrels, or buffoons, but I think the newspapers and computer news services got there first on most of these. Leakage of some information is traitorous. For instance, if somebody who claims to be a loyal American reveals the names of foreign-born intelligence agents working for the United States so these agents are killed, that person has committed treason. This has happened: Joseph Kennedy, founder of America’s celebrated and tragic dynasty, once provided information to American correspondents about a group of men conspiring to overthrow a very dangerous and evil tyrant in the hopes of who-knows-what, and put their lives at risk. Read “The Dark Side of Camelot” by Seymour Hersh. If somebody hands over American secret codes so other countries can read our diplomatic messages, that is surely treason. Conversely, if somebody tells the other side that we are reading their messages, that is surely treason. When Eleanor Roosevelt found out that the Army Signal Intelligence Service was reading the Soviet diplomatic code during World War II – and learning that a number of U.S. government officials were Soviet agents – she indignantly ordered the Army Intelligence Signal Service to stop. They didn’t. Read “The Venona Secrets” by Herbert Romerstein. Some leaks cannot be helped. On June 4 and 5, 1942, three American aviators crashed their damaged, outmoded aircraft into the Pacific Ocean in the middle of the Japanese fleet and were hauled out alive. They talked instantly, before the Japanese even had a chance to torture them. Given the position of the American fleet through their interrogation, the last remaining Japanese aircraft carrier was able to launch a oneway strike that crippled the U.S.S. Yorktown, which, with its escort, the destroyer U.S.S. Hammond, was later torpedoed by a Japanese submarine, the only major ships the United States lost at the battle that turned the course of the war. I think that no one can judge these hapless young men because they were put in a terrifying situation due to their own previous courage and to the obsolescent aircraft they were issued. But the fact that they betrayed information under what could have been duress if they had held out a little longer undoubtedly cost the lives of many of their buddies. One doubts they would have been tried for treason, or convicted if they had been, but we will never know. The Japanese threw the aviators over the side as soon as they had the facts they needed. Some acts of treason are malicious, and some prosecutions for treason might also be construed as malicious. Opponents of the Roosevelt administration were sometimes slandered Some leaks are treason and others are treasures Rate hike (continued from page 7) or just put the vote aside until you have the proper information for the decision.” Landell said the Ridgewood Water Company paperwork over the past several years indicated $2,805,000 for “indirect expenses” and questioned whether water customers in Glen Rock, Midland Park, and Wyckoff should be defraying expenses for items other than the delivery and monitoring of the water system. “You need to indicate what expenses are being funded through the water department,” Landell said. “Many of the costs bear no relation to the operation of the water operation,” Higgins said. Higgins said the Ridgewood Water Department had 37 employees, including administrators, engineers, clerks, and meter readers, and should be substantially autonomous, yet was billing for outside services that should have been conducted in-house. He questioned why a department whose purpose was to provide and monitor water should have spent $177,000 in the 2010 budget for the police force, $50,000 for the paid fire department, $64,000 for the police and fire pensions, $20,000 of the council, $78,000 for the village manager, $63,000 for clerical work outside the water department, and $84,000 for the engineers outside the water department. Displaying two large charts, Higgins said that if these nonwater expenses were deleted, the water company could roll back to the water fees of 2009. “There’s no need for a five percent increase on top of a 21 percent increase,” Higgins asserted. He said Ridgewood police and firefighters didn’t serve any need of residents of the three neighboring towns and implied that billing Glen Rock, Midland Park, and Wyckoff residents for Ridgewood police and firefighters was unfair. Glen Rock Mayor John van Keuren, Borough Administrator Lenora Benjamin, and most of the Glen Rock Council joined Midland Park Mayor Monahan and Wyckoff Township Committeemen Christopher DePhillips, Thomas Madigan, Kevin Rooney, and Brian Scanlan and Township Administrator Robert Shannon in the audience. Mayor van Keuren said he opposed the rate increase. “I think that a better option would be a teeter approach to put more of the burden on the customers who use the water excessively and less of those who use it sparingly,” he commented. Glen Rock Councilman Pazan said that Ridgewood Water tastes bad, and the lead content is barely acceptable. He added that some of the tanks show exterior mold, and he could not imagine what they look like inside. Pazan also said the summer sprinkler restrictions are annoying, and that Ridgewood should find new ways to meet demands instead of raising prices. Wyckoff Mayor Rudy Boonstra, unable to attend the Ridgewood meeting due to a late Wyckoff Planning Board meeting, learned of the Ridgewood vote the morning after: “I think it’s unfortunate,” he said. Ridgewood’s official position is that the increase is necessary to cover expenses of delivering water to all four towns. The Ridgewood Water Company, while responsible exclusively to the Ridgewood Village Council, has a testing center in Midland Park, a treatment plant on land Ridgewood owns within the borders of Glen Rock, and a large number of wells in Wyckoff.