The Danville News from Danville, Pennsylvania • 4

PAGE 4 THE DANVILLE NEWS, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 19M Washington Merry -Go-Jt on nrt Federal merit bonuses go to the same old gang News Views I ton D.C. regional office $3,500. Kallaur was the subject of a Justice Department investigation in 1978 for his activities when he was on loan to the Carter-Mondale transition team. He and an associate cooked up a way to get around GSA regulations as a means of paying transition team members until they were officially on the government payroll. Kallaur admits to using a shortcut but denies there was a Justice Department investigation.

He says Justice looked at the system he had devised to pay salary advances, and concluded there was nothing wrong. Edward Scott, former assistant secretary, Department of Transportation $20,000. Scotts brainchild was a costly scheme to replace secretaries (the clerical kind, not department heads) with TV-sized computer terminals that would receive, store and dispense messages while busy executives were out to lunch or otherwise absent. Scott took the bonus and then left government service. William S.

Heffelfinger, chief of administration at the Energy Department $2,500. One-time Nixon at DOT, Heffelfinger has come under congressional scrutiny on charges he falsified his job resume, lied to DOE investigators and shredded government documents. DOEs inspector general referred the charges in 1978 to the Justice Department, which recommended administrative action instead of prosecution. Justice's handling of the case is being investigated by the Senate Judiciary Committee. WATCH ON WASTE: Officials at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, believe in taking care of their employees health no matter how much it costs the taxpayers.

For the past 14 years a private firm has provided occupational and environmental health services for the facility, at a current cost of $1 million a year, what the space cadets in charge have chosen to overlook, however, is a U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, which has been functioning across the road from the space center since 1978. Copyright, 1980, United Feature Syndicate, Inc. A Word By JACK ANDERSON WASHINGTON When Jimmy Carters civil service reform legislation was enacted two years ago, the White House ballyhooed it as the greatest boon to governmental efficiency since the invention of the paper clip. Competent public servants were to be rewarded, not just with a iscai ty handshake and" a Scroll, but with cold cash in the form of bonuses.

Whistleblowers would be given incentives, protection and public recognition for exposing waste" and mismanagement of the taxpayers money. Unfortunately, this Mary Poppins scenario wasn't the way things worked out. In practice, the cash bonuses were handed out to entrenched senior bureaucrats with political clout some of whom were actually involved in retaliation against lower-echelon whistleblowers. Virtue is still pretty much its own reward for the working stiffs in federal government. The handling of the bonus idea has turned so sour, in fact, that disillusioned employees refer to the program as Cash for Croniesv My reporters Indy Radh-war and Gloria Danziger have reviewed a long list of the recipients of cash bonuses some $3 million worth, ranging from 53,000 to $20,000.

Heres the sorry rundown on just a few of these bureaucratic bonus babies: Marion Finkel, assistant director for new drug evaluation, Food and Drug Administratiion $10,000 bonus. For years, she has been accused of harassing FDA scientists who were deemed "adversarial to the interests of drug companies. A special panel of federal investigators concluded in 1977 that Finkel and FDA management had concealed the truth and given incomplete and misleading testimony in a case involving the railroading of an FDA whistleblower, the report found Finkels conduct "unacceptable and recommended a reprimand. Jack Stempler, general counsel of the Air Force $20,000. Appointed by President Nixon, Stempler directed the Air Force response to charges by cost analyst A.

Ernest Fitzgerald exposing a $2 billion cost overrun in the C-5A transport plane program. Fitzgerald was smeared, fired and when he won reinstatement after a long court fight shunted into a db-nothing job. The Senate Judiciary Committee is investigating Stempler's role In the Fitzgerald harassment. Whats ironic is that Carter, campaigning in 1976, repeatedly mentioned Fitzgerald as the kind of public servant who would be rewarded in a Carter administration. Instead, the $20,000 reward went to one of Fitzgeralds persecutors.

Claude J. Farinha, another high Air Force official $20,000. Farinha was the brains behind Project Max, a multimillion-dollar computerized management system that congressional watchdogs concluded was as worthless as it was expensive. The Air Force, with Farinhas knowledge, continued to lavish money on the program until it was quietly scuttled after critical hearings by the Senate Appropriations Committee in 1977. Erich von Marbod, deputy chief of the Defense Departments security assistance agency $10,000.

Von Marbod came under congressional fire in 1977 foe providing defective intelligence information at a time when the Carter administration was selling sophisticated radar-equipped planes to the shah of Iran. Von Marbod gave incorrect assurances that the shahs security forces were capable of keeping, the highly secret equipment from falling into Soviet hands assurances which were completely, and correctly, contradicted by the CIA. Walter Kallaur, chief of the General Services Administrations Washing Avenue of Flags brings hope to hostages families In the great purge trials ot the mid-1930s, Andrei Vishinsky the Public Prosecutor of the U.S S.R raged and ranted at Stalin's victims as counterrevolutionaries. Japanese spies, and wreckers. One by one the Old Bolsheviks in the dock confessed to these and other mind-boggling offenses.

leaving Western fellow -travelers marvelling at Stalin's genius in surviving such plots. Vishinsky put on an inquisitorial spectacle that made the notorious English hanging judge Bloody Jeffreys" sound like a. Quaker elder. Stalin in return awarded him various sinecures, among them membership on the Allied Control Commission in the Mediterranean during World War II After the capture of Sicily, a number of young fascists were rounded up and tried for various offenses. Vishinsky expressed in IS Schlafly ss I I Xi n.

Jf.) Lacn. confessions were not extracted by some eerie brand of brainwashing as suggested by Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon but by old-fashioned terror. A number of Old Bolskeviks refused to confess to patent lies: they were shot without trial. The ones who appeared in the dock had been promised leniency, for their families if not themselves; a promise Stalin ignored. Yet the question remains: Did Vishinsky actually believe his pitch? The answer is unquestionably' No! Vishinsky was a cynic, passing out the Party line to some innocent American colonel.

He just picked the wrong listener, but the woods were full of innocents more than prepared to believe this drivel. TTiis memory tape has been run because we are about to Hear about a similar exercise in Marxist-Leninist justice, this time with a Chinese venue. The Gang of Four, led by Jiang Qing, Mao's widow, and a batch of military leaders once associated with Maos then chosen heir Lin Biano, are to be given state trials in the Peoples Republic. The question of innocence or guilt is nut before the house. As Deng Xiaoping casually observed, if they werent guilty, they wouldnt be tried.

If a judicial mockery of this sort were to take place in Massachusetts, Alabama, Idaho, or California, or Israel, the news coverage would be savage. But what do we find in the American press about this Chinese lynching? For starters, a solemn piece in the New York Times announcing that one of Chinas most prominent criminal lawyers has been appointed defense attorney. Then much background on this counsel, Ma Rongjiao, with a brief paragraph noting a lawyers role in China is normally confined to urging leniency for his clients do not challenge the states case, or act as adversaries." Finally auef'uiorepp7 quote from Harvards Professor Jerome Cohen that Ma is an articulate, vivacious, animated man who takes obvious pride in his legal craftmanship. Unlike Vishinsky, his task is never to win a case! Copyright 1989 by King Features Syndicate, Inc. TRUE IhlMttE R)E put away the worst crew of spies, saboteurs, and traitors that ever existed.

Have you heard of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Radek just to name a few? My friend, dead pan, admitted he had heard the names and asked if Vishinsky had encountered any trouble dealing with such tricky characters they obviously had fooled Lenin. Vishinsky became positively paternal. He reached over, patted the colonels arm and said) "They may have tricked but J- never lost a tease. Do you know why I never The who was beginning to wonder what world he was in, said No." My dear colonel, I owed my complete success to thorough legal preparation for that they is no substitute." Subsequent revelations by Khrushchev and other high apparatchiks indicate the that happen, the tanker traffic to and from the oil ports in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait will come to a halt The flow of IS million barrels a day will stop, and the economy of the entire free world will tremble. Nor would patrolling, minesweeping and surveillance by U5.

or allied forces be sufficient to stimulate normal tanker traffic until the fighting comes to a halt And this, given the depth of the antagonisms involved, seems a remote prospect This explosive setting appeals to the Soviets, and it is clear that they are hard at work feeding the smoldering fi playing both sides of the street They are maintaining their shaky relations with Iraq, whose armed forces are heavily dependent on Soviet material support while, at the same time, helping Syria and Libya to stiffen war machine with infusions of Soviet equipment That material support offers the Russians a fine opportunity to improve their position with Iran so that without fighting for it they might be able to open up a short route from their newly won positions in Afghanistan, only 500 miles from Hormuz Strait to the critical Persian Gulf. This careful political maneuvering embodies little cost and no risk to the Russians and, lamentably, there little that we can do about it. Our relations with Iraq are poor, with Iran they are worse. We are at odds with Jordan and Syria. Libya despises us ami even Saudi Arabia, that should be our fnend.

is turned off by our timidity. In short, our posture in the Middle East turmoil is one of a nation stewing in the juice of its own sick foreign policy. THE MIDEAST WAR Made to order for the Kremlin By SKIP WACHTER HERMITAGE, Pa. (UPI) Some of the American flags flying in Hillcrest Memorial Park to commemorate the days of captivity of the hostages in Iran have been tattered and shredded by the elements. But their meaning was driven home to Richard Hermening when he hoisted flag No.

366 at the cemetery Monday in honor of the hostagqs- first-year an-Atliversary in confinement. It struck. hard in me, said the father of hostage Kevin Hermening. "When you see all those flags waving, you think of America, the land of the free. I just hoped that all the hostages will soon be free.

Hope oli Policy Studies in Higher Education in 1979. In the face of such failure, the same people keep demanding more new federal programs. They are now supporting President Carters proposed $2 billion youth and education employment program. Half of the money would go to pay salaries, naturally. The other half would be spent on programs to fill thq huge gaps in achievement that have left youngsters unable to handle the studies normally expected of high school students.

Supposedly, the genesis of the new program was the discovery of the remarkable fact that unemployment difficulties are related to deficiencies in schooling, and that the ability to read, write, add and subtract is necessary to marketable job skills. So the plan is to use career motivation in order to teach reading- to high school students who can't read. Logic tells these agents of the bureaucracy that teaching students to read involves the same methods whether the student is age 6 or 16. But it isnt so. The child has an eagerness to learn at Report card on schools By J0K9I P.

ROCHE terest in attending a session of this trial and American Military Government provided a car, a translator, and an escort officer. The lieutenant colonel assigned this task was a veteran American democratic socialist ho had spent much of the 1930s fighting Stalinist efforts to infiltrate the labor unions. Fortunately Vishinsky was unaware of this background or he never would have chatted as he did. They attended the trial, remined for a few hours, and then, on the way back in the car. Vishinsky who.had a few drinks aboard became quite cordial.

You know, he said, I used to be a prosecuting attorney. My friend allowed as how he was familiar with the name, but could not recall the details. "Oh. continued Vishinsky expanding. "1 tried some of the biggest cases in the historv of the Soviet Union.

I Palestine Liberation Organization have declared for Iran. The battle, meanwhile, has shown the Iraqi armed forces to be far less competent than expected. About half of their ground strength perhaps 50,000 men is committed against poorly organized and inadequately supplied Iranian forces, and still nothing truly decisive has emerged. The Iraqi forces have occupied the east bank of the contested Shatt-al-Arab waterway, but the principal population centers and much of the road net of northwest Iran are still in Iranian bands. In the air, the Iraqi air force should have been able to make short work of an Iranian air arm that is hungry for spare parts and technical maintenance but, to date, the air war has probably favored the Iranians.

Bombing operations by both sides have been little more than hit-and-run attacks, producing no decisive results. In any case, the continuing conflict is destabilizing, and grows more so as it festers. Iran threatens to mine the Strait of Hormuz and, as a reaction to Saudi Arabias hostility, threatens to bomb refiner ies and pipelines or to occtT py critical islands in the strait Whether Iran can do these things or not the effect is to intensify the existing turmoil and, should the fighting continue there is little reason to expect that the Persian Gulf itself will long escape the conflict There have already been threats of naval action by Iran. Should That was what this day was all about Hermening and his wife. Pauline.

came from Cudahey. to join families of two other hostages and hundreds of local sympathizers in a daylong ceremony of hope and prayer that honored the hostages That support was shown through two programs, one that included the raising of the 366tji Hag and the lighting of 52 whitelumlnaefes one for each hostage as the sunrise broke shades of grey, blue and gold over the Shenango Valley. The other was a sunset tribute featuring the 367th flag to mark the beginning of their second year in captivity and a candlelight procession by the more than 500 people in attendance along the cemeterys pine-shrouded "Avenue of Flags and over the darkened grounds. "It's been a long year, its been a bad year." Gary Cooke of Pittsburgh, brother of hostage Donald Cooke, told the evening crowd. "But through adversity we grow learn We don't have to look far to see how wonderful this country and its people are.

"It's hard to keep our hopes up We're going to hang in there until the end. We hope you'll stick with us We love you all very much." Outside the circus-like tent, a commemorative flame continued to burn. It will be extinguished only when the hostages return home. A letter from Gov. Dick Thornbureh was read, designating Nov.

4 'istage Freedom Day Penn-sy Kama It dedicated to the hostages and the servicemen who died the aborted rescue attempt in April. The ceremonies along with the recent developments in Iran gave the hostages' families renewed hope that their loved ones will soon come home. But Mrs. Eleanor Kupke of Fran-cesville, mother of hostage Frederick Kupke, didnt want to get hers too high. "I'm not going to get too optimistic at this point, she said, her voice wavering.

You have to protect There have been too many ups and downs all year. Its been a bad time for all of us. But Mrs. Kupke admitted that watching the 366th banner go up on that Avenue of Flags did something to her, too. "I just thought God bless America, she said.

I'm glad Im an American. 7 It is probable that the real problem is not so much what students didnt learn in high school, but what they didnt learn in the first grade. What they should have learned in the first grade was how to read. It didnt seem so important to learn to read in the first grade because children get promoted to the second grade whether they can read or nob That's under strange theories of the educationists such as social promotions and getting the child to accommodate himself to the group rather than learning basic skills. But if the student either cant read or cant read well at age 18 to 20, he is permanently handicapped.

For an increasing percentage of young people, the inability to read means that they cannot even get a job. To the kind of people who have brought us to this sorry state of learning, there is only one solution: big federal money for new and bigger federal programs. More than $20 billion has been spent by By PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY Copley News Service The Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) are supposed to be a kind of a report card on the aptitude-achievement of college-bound high school students. Even more, they are a report card on the schools themselves. The 1980 SAT scores dropped again for the 17th straight year, hnd teachers and school administrators have begun their annual series of excuses and explanations for why todays high school seniors have" learned less in school than last years crop, and much less than those of the decade before.

The steady drop in verbal scores from 478 in 1963 to 424 this year, and in math from 502 in 1963 to 466 this year, is a source of embarrassment to educators who are now trying to claim that the scores dont measure students academic ability or the quality of the schools. But thats exactly what the scores should measure and, if they dont, then why take them? By VJL KRULAK Copley News Service To win a thousand victories in a thousand battles is not the acme of skill. To win a victory without fighting there is the acme of skill. Sun Tzu, 500 B.C. The timeless wisdom voiced by the great Chinese philosopher has never been better exemplified than by the behavior of the Soviet Union in todays Middle East crisis.

The Russians understand Sun Tzu and. using his strategy, are moving patiently and skillfully to establish control over the petroleum lifeline of the developed world. It must be admitted that developments in the Iraqi-Iran conflict to date have played directly into Soviet hands. While the crisis might hare been defused quickly with a victory by either side, it has become a stalemate which threatens to broaden in multiple directions all hazardous to the free world and equally beneficial to an opportunist Soviet Union. The war, to begin with, has intensified existing antagonisms in the Middle East Jordan has given di-roiiinnort tolraq, furnishing supplies, port faciiiues and transportation.

Saudi Arabia, while providing no material aid, has left no doubt that her sympathies are with the Iraqis. On the other side, both Libya and Syria halve openly supported Iran, airlifting help in the form of supplies and Sovet-made surface-to-air missiles and artillery. And to polarize the issue still further, Yasir Arafat and his the federal government on giant is made compensatory educated eech -Whe. that the drop in SAT scores elementary schools since year after school year pass- 1965. But that hasnt solved the problem.

In some cities, 68 percent of the students reach high school reading two years or more below grade level. About one-third of our youth are ill-educated, ill-employed and ill-equipped to make their way in American society, warned the Carnegie Council is because so many more economically disadvantaged youths are now taking them and beading for college. However, only about two-thirds of college students took the SAT, and the College Board estimates that, if all took them, the average scores would be significantly lower, namely, 368 in verbal and 402 in math. age 6 which diminishes with.