The Berkshire Eagle from Pittsfield, Massachusetts • 43

The Berkshire Eagle, Sunday, July 26, 1992 E3 Outlook Don't block justice in El Salvador By Cynthia J. Arnson WASHINGTON ess than a month from now, the peace accord signed in January between the Sal- Barbara Cummings Letter Home Free will, choice and the church El Salvador in 1983 to present a list of individuals known to be involved in death-squad activities? That the information was on target was evidenced in the reduction of death-squad killings after the removal or transfer of officers on Bush's list vadoran government and the FMLN guerrillas will be put to a test fraught with possibilities for failure. On Aug. 15, a report is due from a three-member civilian commission established by the peace accord to evaluate the records of the entire military officer corps, with an eye toward purging the armed forces of those with blemished human-rights records. The commission's work has been hampered by the fact that the United States its Defense Department and CIA is the single most important source of information about the Salva-doran military, and the Bush administration has so far kept that information to itself.

The importance of the commission's task cannot be overstated. The military's numerous atrocities against the civilian population helped give rise to and sustain the guerrilla insurgency. An amnesty that was proclaimed earlier this year all but ensures that those guilty of war crimes will never be brought to trial. Another civilian panel, the "truth commission," will soon begin investigating human-rights abuses on both sides, and it most likely will recommend prosecution of select cases. But it is doubtful that the Salvadoran court system will prove capable of securing convictions of powerful military leaders.

The Bush administration has so far kept vital information about El Salvador to itself. That year Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the Catholic Church's condemnation of "artificial birth control." It was widely ignored in this country, Canada and Europe. From there it wasn't much of a leap to figure out that having been wrong about this the pope wasn't so infallible after all. LARCHMONT, N.Y. In early July before the anointing of Albert Gore, my daughter Clare was having a fit because of speculation that Sen.

Harris Wofford, was going to be Bill Clinton's running-mate. Wofford, who is her senator, waffles on the crucial issue of choice, she said. Clare does not She wears her view on a button: "Woman by nature. Mother by choice." She began making that point during a conversation in the College of New Rochelle chapel with guests who'd come to her son Matthew's baptism. Standing in the middle aisle, Clare stopped talking and bit her lip.

"Should we be talking about this here?" she asked. What better place? It's the moral issue of our time. By Nancy Q. Keefe percent of American Catholics think that abortion can never be a morally acceptable choice and should be illegal under all circumstances. The flip side is this: 52 percent think it should be legal in "many" or "all" circumstances; 70 percent believe they can in good conscience vote for candidates who support legal abortion; a whopping 81 percent believe they can be good Catholics and disagree publicly with church teaching.

I know. The Catholic Church is not run by opinion polls. But don't such dramatic numbers suggest something at work in the church? The odd thing, as the Rev. Andrew Greeley says, is that the church leadership has chosen "to fight abortion on the legal battlefield. Clearly, it does not have majority support among its own people for legislation that would outlaw all abortions." Then Greeley wonders if the bishops' decision to emphasize the legal battle led them to neglect the moral side, with this result: "Could it be that having rejected the leadership's legal stand, many Catholics have also turned against the church's moral teaching?" Greeley, the sociologist, says the answer isn't easy to find.

But the novelist James Carroll, a former Paulist priest, sees clearly what happened, dating back to 1968. U.S. Catholics see, in addition, a selective morality. American bishops fight fiercely in public against abortion and condoms in schools, and for public funding of parochial schools. But, Carroll says, where are the bishops on issues such as women's rights and "the virulent anti-Semitism" of some Irish Catholics? We know how to think, people decided.

That doesn't mean morality is relative, but it can be individual. Isn't that part of what free will is all about? In this light, some of what we have come to think is that the Catholic Church should not call on government to do what the church itself has failed to do on its own. Abortion is not just about an unborn baby. It's also about the travails of a pregnant woman. And the responsibilities of society for both of them.

That's how we need to talk The need to protect U.S. sources is a more compelling reason to withhold intelligence. But in these sensitive cases, actual documents need not be shared directly. During the trial of former National Security Council official Oliver North, the defense prepared a summary of information based on classified documents that U.S. agencies had refused to fully declassify.

The compromise protected sources and methods while allowing pertinent, and even astonishing, information to enter the public record. There is no reason that a similar model could not be adopted for El Salvador, thereby allowing the commission access to U.S. files. Aside from the technical problems, a more corrupt rationale may lie behind the U.S. reluctance to come forward with what it knows.

U.S. policy toward El Salvador was a spinoff of Cold War anti-communist concerns. Consequently, the United States protected officers with horrendous human-rights records because they were efficient in prosecuting the war against leftist guerrillas. Now, the United States appears to be protecting senior officers it deems vital to the peace process, despite their involvement in major crimes. Such inverted logic poses a mortal danger to El Salvador's future.

By sanctioning the continued service of tarnished officers, the United States forestalls the possibility that the military can be transformed into a truly democratic institution. Los Angeles Times At a congressional hearing, Assistant Secretary of State Bernard Aronson pledged "to cooperate as fully as possible" with the commission. But it appears that the administration has drawn an extremely limited definition of what it considers "possible." U.S. officials have cautioned that the amount of information in U.S. files should not be overestimated, and, because military careers are at stake, judgments should not be based on the "hearsay" that sometimes passes for intelligence.

Both arguments are specious. The United States gave El Salvador $1 billion in military aid between 1980 and 1992, trained thousands of officers and enlisted men, and at times had at least a hundred military and intelligence advisers in the country. Intelligence operatives used El Salvador as a staging ground for the contra war in neighboring Nicaragua and, at Congress' urging, gathered information in the early and mid-1980s about death-squad activities. The hint that U.S. files do not contain much information suggests only that they have been cleaned out.

The warning about information being based on rumor also fails to hold up to scrutiny. It is clear that the United States over the last decade cultivated sources in and around the Salvadoran armed forces that it considers reliable and trustworthy. How else, for example, could then-Vice President Bush have traveled to The Salvadoran army's own human-rights office compiles no information on human-rights abuses by the military. Human-rights and religious organizations have documented thousands of abuses, but their knowledge of command structures and individual responsibility has been limited to a handful of cases. The U.S.

government alone holds the key to a genuine reform of the military. This unique opportunity must not be lost in a maze of official excuses. Cynthia J. Arnson is associate director of Americas Watch, based in Washington. Phyllis Goldman of Scarsdale, president of the Westchester chapter of the American Jewish Committee, was in the conversation.

She found it a defining and enlightening moment. "There was no doubt," she said later, "that serious liberal Catholics are alive and well." A fine compliment But it goes beyond us. American Catholics generally think choice is a morally acceptable position. A Gallup poll conducted in May for Catholics Speak Out found that only 13 in church about these things and in the world. Wahconah Park endures, endears By Dan Valenti conah.

You don't have to be a baseball fan to understand and appreciate this wonderful mix of architecture, art, construction and play. Turn Your Advertising Message into Front Page News with ads ESgle faMfi property would be needed." But Hibbard proved to be a prophet. Ten years later, in 1919, the city purchased the empty bog from Mrs. Samantha L. Burbank for $10,000.

Shortly after, Pittsfield began the arduous process of filling in the swamp, although that still remains an uncompleted task, as any heavy rainfall will attest. Sometime in the '20s, a diamond was built for city baseball leagues. In 1927, extensive bleachers were installed. Wahconah Park's continuing wetness played a small part in getting Pittsfield through the Depression. In 1930, the city filled in and graded the park using 1,300 unemployed men in three shifts.

The project, completed for $25,000 no small amount in post-Crash dollars demonstrated the city's seriousness in protecting, preserving and improving what was becoming an increasingly valuable asset The next logical step would be a roof overhead the installation of a proper grandstand. In 1946, Mayor James Fallon commissioned a study. The results weren't good. It concluded that the boggy soil would not support a steel foundation. Fallon publicly worried about a collapse "with a possible toll of injury and death." Talk of death and images of twisted limbs seemed to doom the grandstand.

A controversy ensued. Some officials and citizens argued against throwing good money after bad, urging the city to forget the grandstand. But others persisted and won. More conclusive tests were done. The subsoil, though wet, consisted of clay and hard pan, with a substrate of ledge.

The finding of the ledge meant, amoung other things, that piles could be driven to anchor the grandstand. The designers went to work, and in 1949, the city PITTSFIELD Wahconah Park has the three requisites of any great baseball park: intimacy, character and an evocation of the past This latter quality doesn't necessarily have anything to do with time. For example, compare Baltimore's beautiful Camden Yards, the new home of the Orioles opened this year, with the sterile expanse of New York's Shea Stadium, circa 1964. Evocation has to do with conjuring up baseball tradition; when it comes to putting up a stadium, it's the part of architecture that makes it more art than science, and the part of the building that makes it more craft than Construction. Pittsfield's chummy ballpark exudes its friendliness and charm in an almost automatic way.

As Sports Illustrated put it in a July 1990 story, Wahconah Park "entertains by its very presence." Not the least of its enchantments are Death Valley, which results from a preposterous but delightful plunge of the right field wall from 334 feet down the line to 430 feet in the right center, and the anachronistic old grandstand. How did Wahconah Park come about? The beginnings go back to 1909, when Judge Charles L. Hib-bard, a pioneer of Pittsfield's parks and playground system, urged the city to purchase swamp land between Wahconah Street and the Housatonic River. At that time, the land served as an otherwise vacant abode of red-wing blackbirds and mosquitoes. Hibbard's call puzzled some, and even the judge admitted "it might be 50 years before the Writer Dan Valenti is the author of 12 books.

Ruth Degen-hardt of the Berkshire Athenaeum's local history department helped in the research of this piece. hired Williamstown contractor David McNab Deans to build the blueprints of Pittsfield architects Prentice Bradley and Douglas Gass. In early October 1949, the 36-foot spruce piles were trucked into Pittsfield from Hancock, N.H. During the third week of October, Deans hammered in the piles with driver, shaking the ground surrounding the neighborhood with a low rumbling that one resident compared to a mild earthquake. Once the piles were pounded in place, each was encased in a corrugated steel casting.

The castings were driven around the butt of the spruce 'pilings, then filled with cement. Pittsfield had itself a modern steel-and-concrete superstructure. The stadium's steel work began on Nov. 5, continuing through December and beyond. In the spring, workers installed seats and seat backs made of 2-by-10 pressure-treated Douglas fir provided by the Hussey Co.

of Berwick, Maine. After a paint job, the only thing left was the ump's call to "Play ball!" Total cost of the grandstand they feared couldn't be built: $114,000. The grandstand made its official debut the third week of April, 1950, for the opening game of the Pittsfield Electrics of the: old Can-Am League. The grandstand defied the odds. By the conventional wisdom of the time, it shouldn't have been built, but was.

Since then, each day of its life has been a gift, and not one of those days should be taken for granted. Perhaps this helps explain Wahconah Park's allure, both enduring and endearing, and the warm "feel" that one instantly has when stepping inside. The park has another thing going for it: minor league ball. Think about scale as it pertains to a stadium and professional baseball. In the minors, the grandstands are so much smaller.

Not only does this give players an approachable scale that disappears on the big-league level, but provides individual fans 'With a proportionately greater role in the proceedings. Have you ever heard a leather-lung critic or a two-fingered whistle sound louder than in a small ballpark? In a big-league game, you only have importance as a fan because of sheer number. You are just one of the 30,000 or 40,000 others. At Wahconah Park, you are a plurality of one. Keep this in mind the next time you take in a Mets game at Wah Put your message on the front page of "City and Town" section with our affordable Eagle Instant Ads.

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Friday at 4:00 for Sunday and Monday. TheB: Eagle Leslie Noyes Berkshire Eagle Staff Batter up at Wahconah Park..