Darling Lori Berenson; Kicking Dick Nixon; The Torturable Classes; Queen Mum, Et Al.

The Torturable Classes Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union faded into history despite their reliance on torture, but history doesn't impinge on our world's policemen. The annual reports of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, the U.S. State Dept. and others attest that torture is expanding like McDonald's into the global marketplace?new outlets, new techniques, new slogans. American law nonetheless forbids sending aid to regimes that use torture. Colombia's torturers are about to receive the biggest package of cocaine-stained dollars ever from the Clinton administration. The flacks assure the public that the Colombian cops and martinets torture fewer people than they used to. So all is well. The cops' excuse, in just about every country on Earth, is the ticking bomb. Only scientific (and humane) torture can compel a suspect to disclose where he placed an explosive that could kill or maim hundreds of innocent children. Faced with that, wouldn't you torture the bastard? The number of people tortured each year grows exponentially, as does the waiting list for treatment at London's respected Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. Yet are the cops really stopping that many bombs?

If Bill Gates knew where the bomb in the Seattle Space Needle was ticking away, no cop would lay an electrode on him. However, if some Guatemalan farmworker talks back to a county sheriff, he can be pretty sure of a whack across the face. Guatemalan migrant laborers, unlike Bill Gates, belong to what Graham Greene in Our Man in Havana called "the torturable classes." His Cuban secret policeman, Captain Segura, told the erstwhile British spy Wormold who could be tortured: "The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable..."

Immunity to torture is, in theory, acquirable. Nothing does the trick like an American passport. But not always, as a man in Florida named Anwar Mohamed discovered a couple of years back. He's still trying to find out why the U.S. State Dept. did so little for him when, as he tells it, he was beaten, shackled to a chair with a piss-moistened sack over his head and loud music blasting at his ears.

Nobody asked him about ticking bombs, he says. All he remembers being asked was to sign a confession that he couldn't read. Why couldn't he read it? It was in Hebrew, and Anwar Mohamed reads English. Oh, and unfortunately for him, Arabic.

He is in that special category of Americans who are, it turns out, torturable in certain circumstances. He's an Arab-Muslim-American. Born in the West Bank town of Silwad in 1971 to an American father, he emigrated to the U.S. with his family when he was 16. On completing school, he went to work with his brothers in Miami at their Haifa Pizza Parlor. It seems he made two mistakes: giving $25 a month to a West Bank orphan through a charity called the Holy Land Foundation (often investigated, but never charged, by the U.S. government for Hamas connections); and permitting Miami black Muslims to raise money for a mosque in the restaurant he was managing. Neither activity is illegal.

Anwar went to visit his relatives in Silwad in October of 1998, and, as he was about to leave via the bridge to Jordan, Israeli border police arrested him. He was taken to the Russian Compound, a security complex in Jerusalem, for interrogation. That much is admitted by everyone, including the Israeli authorities and the U.S. consul general in Jerusalem. What happened next is subject to dispute, although most accept that when he came out of the compound 40 days later he was 40 pounds lighter. Anwar says the questioning was brutal. He recalls an interrogator telling him, "Your American passport doesn't mean nothing to us. You're gonna die in here."

The U.S. consul sent its Arab employees to see Anwar twice during his detention, but Anwar's lawyer says no one from the consul attended his appearances in military court. The consul general refused to discuss it with me when I was in Jerusalem, admitting only that there is little his office could do when Arab-Americans are detained. He did say, and this checked out, that the State Dept. warns Arab-Americans that they will be treated differently from other Americans in Israeli custody.

A year after Anwar's release, the Israeli High Court banned all the methods of torture Anwar alleged he suffered. After the court heard from courageous Israeli defense lawyers what hundreds of (non-American) Palestinian Arabs had suffered at the hands of torturers, Justice Moshe Landau warned interrogators that they were acting without legal authority. Since then, torture has decreased noticeably. Likud member of Knesset Reuven Rivlin has meanwhile introduced a bill to enshrine torture in law. His rationale? The ticking bomb.

The weekly tv newsmagazine CNN & Time is broadcasting a report about Anwar on Sunday, Sept. 10, at 9 p.m.

Claus Von Bulow Feature Queen Mum, Et Al. This week I will start with some name-dropping and finish with some more. In the middle there will be some of my usual raves about the London theater. I am giving this tour itinerary so that those who have difficulty reading will know what to expect. And reading is what I want to write about. The dumbing-down electronic media and discount emporiums wage a relentless war against the old-fashioned civilized bookshop. In Central London there is still one left: Heywood Hill is where Nancy Mitford used to sell books before she started writing them. The principal stockholder was her brother-in-law, the Duke of Devonshire. Every year he underwrites the munificent Heywood Hill Literary Prize and invites two score literati, et al., for lunch and the award ceremony. This year the prize went to Charles Causley, a poet and a former Cornish schoolteacher and, judging by his verse, a lovely man. Flushed with champagne and pride at being amongst the "et als," I foolishly greeted a New York scrivener with the words, "Ah, I see they let you in," and, quick as lightning, he meekly responded, "Yes, and I see they let you out."

Chastened (if you believe that), I will now revert to my theaters. Tennessee Williams was well represented by Helen Mirren in Orpheus Descending at the tiny Donmar Warehouse, and a splendid Baby Doll transferred from the National Theatre to the West End. Both plays are lapidary images of Small Town intolerance brought to a boiling point in that sunny climate of the American South. (There has been no warm sun in London this summer.) Arthur Miller's All My Sons, also at the National, indicts the American dream with a rage that no man who has shared Marilyn Monroe's bed should be allowed to feel.

One of my favorite current French playwrights is Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. When I saw his Enigmatic Variations in Paris with Alain Delon in the lead, I hated it, as Delon clearly cannot handle acting onstage. I recently went back for the London production with Donald Sunderland, and loved it. The story has more twists and surprises than a thriller. Maybe it is heading toward Broadway.

Barry McGovern and the Gate Theatre from Dublin have brought us a 90-minute solo marathon, built out of three Beckett novels: Malloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. A parade of theatrical fireworks to upstage any St. Patrick's Day parade. I dined with some friends afterward who noticed that I was unusually taciturn. I was still communing with all those Irish poets, storytellers, goblins and deities, and offering thanks.

New Yorkers have been fortunate to have the current transfer of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, and, if they are smart, they will also try to import the revival of Peter Nichols' Passion Play. Both plays tell you all you need to know about temptation, clandestine infidelity, concomitant mendacity and hurt. They are clever and wickedly funny, dark and profound.

Gitta Sereny's biography of Albert Speer has been followed by a brace of plays about this Nazi charmer. The first one, at the tiny Almeida, starred Klaus Maria Brandauer. The more recent one really starred Trevor Nunn as the director, who hijacked the huge Lyttleton stage at the National, which was almost big enough to contain Speer's megalomaniac projects for Berlin. Sereny and the two playwrights are all preoccupied with the question of whether Speer lied about his claimed ignorance of the Holocaust. But Speer was not an absentminded professor. He was the Nazi armaments chief who supplied the weapons for his beloved Fuhrer to wage war on some dozen friendly neighboring countries, causing millions of civilian deaths of many different denominations. There have been other fascinating portrayals of creative artists or intellectuals whose spoons may not have been long enough when they supped with the devil.

I promised I would end with some more name-dropping. Will the Queen Mother do? The events celebrating her centenary have been the kind of theatrical spectacle the Brits do best. It was as great a box office success as the government's miserable millennium show was a flop. It started with a service in St. Paul's, whose dome by Christopher Wren stood up to Hitler's bombs, and which will be standing long after the horrid £800 million Greenwich Dome has disappeared. Pomp and circumstance was followed some days later by a huge walk-past in Horse Guards Parade. For hours representatives from the more than 300 of the Queen Mother's favorite charities saluted her, and were followed by floats representing each decade of her 100 years. As tribal a show of loyalty as any Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and naturally both the present government and the biased BBC chose to ignore it. The cost was paid by private benefactors. One of the last groups was the children from the Chicken Shed Theatre, many of them suffering disabilities. This wonderful charity has taught thousands of children to act and sing and dance. I just blubbered, but then I am good at that.

Taki LE MAÎTRE Terror's Tools As a father of two, I sympathize with Mark and Rhoda Berenson, the New York couple who have turned from professors into crusaders for their daughter's freedom. If any of you missed it, Lori Berenson is the 30-year-old American woman who in January 1996 was convicted by a Peruvian military tribunal of conspiring to attack the Peruvian congress. She received a life sentence and has been in prison in Peru ever since. But paternal instincts and faint hearts apart, concessions to the gun and the bomb are no way to run a country. Lori Berenson was associated with the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, a blood-soaked guerrilla group that took over the residence of Japan's ambassador to Peru and held it for four months. She has publicly acknowledged her complicity with terrorist groups, although while in prison continues to distance herself from them. This, of course, is natural. A Peruvian prison must be no picnic, but, as they say, if you can't do the time, don't do the crime. Lori Berenson is a throwback to the 60s. Plant some bombs, shoot some pigs, stick up a bank or two and then go on television and claim you did it for the good of mankind. Her parents claim she's a political prisoner. She's nothing of the kind. She went to Peru on her own free will, joined a murderous Marxist group, organized or took part in violent action against the state, got caught and is now crying uncle.

In the meantime, her parents have appeared on every television news report, have held news conferences with Jesse Jackson and been guests on Oprah. But what I'd like to know is the following: Would the news reports, Jesse Jackson and Oprah have made their good offices or themselves available for, say, a mother of a poor Peruvian cop or soldier who was murdered while on duty by the very people darling Lori aided and abetted? Would the father of an innocent Peruvian peasant caught in the crossfire be invited to state his case for justice to, say, Tim Russert? Don't bother to even think about it. Peasants and poor cops and soldiers don't count with the media.

Mind you, the Peruvian government has overturned the terrorism conviction against La Berenson, and she's about to have a new civilian trial. I suspect the fix is in to ease the government's embarrassment over alleged gun-running by a few Peruvian officers, and pressure from Uncle Sam. This despite President Fujimori's pledge that no terrorism cases would be reviewed. After all, the thousands of innocent Peruvians who have died as a result of terrorism do not really have a say. Ours is not to reason why... They have always been cannon fodder and always will be. Long live the revolution!

Terrorism, needless to say, can be a two-way street. Last week we had the Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi, no small-timer where blowing up people and commercial airlines are concerned, taking much-publicized credit for the release of hostages held by the Abu Sayyaf gang, a bunch of murderous Philippine thugs posing as Muslim independence fighters. The gang has since upped the ante after capturing an American. Ten million dollars for every Yankee. Kidnap for ransom makes sense as long as the victims are Europeans and Americans. And as long as the kidnappers are posing as freedom fighters. I wonder which side Lori Berenson would be on were she free and on the resort island of Sipadan, where most of the kidnapping took place?

Which brings me to Jesse Jackson. The egregious Jackson is a friend of Foday Sankoh, the Sierra Leone terrorist whom the Clinton administration, advised by Jackson, foisted (as vice president) on the elected government of Sierra Leone. Now just get this. Here's a gangster whose Revolutionary United Front had waged war on the government, mutilated thousands of civilians by chopping off the arms of women and children, raped and murdered and committed more atrocities than a dozen Qaddafis ever could?and Jackson, Albright and Clinton persuaded the government to name him veep?or else.

What in hell is going on here? Sankoh was put in charge of the diamond mines, for which he and his gang had been fighting for many years. This is what the mutilations and the murders were all about. Diamonds. In fact, this is what Africa is all about. Oil, minerals, diamonds. Sankoh and as his bloodthirsty villains owe no allegiance to anyone or anything. Just to drugs and moolah. Yet Foday Sankoh has been backed by Jackson, Albright and Clinton, not to mention the Blair government. I would be considered a very suspicious person indeed if I asked whether any of the blood money has found itself in Jesse's greedy paws.

But again. If Lori were free and in Sierra Leone, which side would she be on? Foday Sankoh heads the Revolutionary United Front. Back in Peru its equivalent calls itself Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. Perhaps because I've been away all summer from New York I've missed the demonstrations in support of the thousands murdered and mutilated in Sierra Leone in the name of the revolution. As I can't get Oprah in Gstaad, I also missed the appearance of all those parents who saw their children slain by the friend of Jesse Jackson in Sierra Leone. But now that I'm back, I'm sure I'll catch up.

George Szamuely The Bunker Kicking Dick Toward the end of his appallingly self-congratulatory speech at the Democratic National Convention, Bill Clinton put forward a bizarre thesis: "I graduated from high school in 1964. Our country was still very sad because of President Kennedy's death, but full of hope under the leadership of President Johnson. And I assumed then, like most Americans, that our economy was absolutely on automatic? And then, before we knew it, there were riots in the streets? The leaders that I adored as a young man?Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy?were killed? And then we had an election in 1968 that took America on a far different and more divisive course, and, you know, within months after that election, the last longest economic expansion in history was itself history." So everything was wonderful in America until that terrible man Richard Nixon came along to spoil it all. America's subsequent economic problems had nothing to do with the vast expense of the Vietnam War that LBJ had refused to raise taxes to pay for. Three days later, Al Gore parroted his boss' startling insight: "I finished college at a time when?our nation's spirit was being depleted. We saw the assassination of our best leaders. Appeals to racial backlash. And the first warning signs of Watergate. I remember the conversations I had with Tipper back then?and the doubts we had about the Vietnam War." Gore's observations were a little more opaque than Clinton's. What exactly were the "first warning signs of Watergate"? What were his "doubts" about the Vietnam War? That it is wrong to pulverize a small country? Or that it is only wrong to do so when said small country knows how to fight back and has powerful friends?

Vietnam, Watergate, Nixon?the official liberal version of history must be told and retold with the regard for factual accuracy of a high school textbook from the Stalin era. According to official history, Americans, instead of falling on their knees in gratitude to leaders like Clinton and Gore?and obviously Kennedy and Johnson?fall for the wily machinations of a Richard Nixon. It is the theme of Anthony Summers' trivial and ill-written new book, The Arrogance of Power. The sense of decorum, which had prevented The New York Times?today's chief purveyor of official history?from repeating Juanita Broaddrick's allegation of rape against Bill Clinton, was notably absent as it retailed gleefully Summers' ludicrous story of Nixon beating his wife.

The hacks were too busy high-fiving one other in joy at the prospect of four Gore years to wonder if there was not something bizarre about two men, who boast proudly of the number of people they have kicked off the welfare rolls, attacking as "divisive" a president who had once proposed a federally guaranteed minimum income. The same president had also sought to introduce a comprehensive health insurance plan more than 20 years before Clinton. Nixon's HMO Act of 1973, incidentally, institutionalized the system of modern managed care. Nixon also created the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. He launched the nation's "affirmative action" program with his Executive Order 11,478, which required all federal agencies to prohibit discrimination and provide equal employment opportunity. And he introduced the concept of "goals and timetables" to ensure that federal contractors would have a racially "diverse" labor force. In addition, Nixon's "war on drugs," unlike Clinton's, did not involve spraying the fields of other countries with herbicides or training killers masquerading as an army to go out and slaughter unarmed civilians. Nixon expanded methadone programs and other forms of drug treatment. Whatever one may think of the programs of the Nixon administration, it towers in legislative achievement next to Clinton's inconsequential White House tenure. Yet this is not how official history tells it.

More than 25 years after Nixon's resignation one is still supposed to shudder at the mention of his name. Imagine?Nixon had asked the CIA to lean on the FBI to curtail their investigation of the Watergate break-in! Now, that is a violation of the oath of office; that goes beyond the bounds of constitutional propriety; that is an impeachable offense. Ordering the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro as the Kennedys did, on the other hand, falls well within the purview of the oath of office. Ordering the CIA to overthrow the legitimate governments of Iran and Guatemala is also apparently well within the constitutional prerogatives of the presidency.

The United States bombs Iraq on an almost daily basis to enforce the so-called "no fly zones." Neither the bombing nor the "no fly zones" have ever been authorized by any United Nations Security Council resolution. During last year's bombing spree on Yugoslavia?also a violation of international law?Clinton explicitly targeted President Slobodan Milosevic. This is a violation of U.S. law, which forbids the assassination of foreign leaders. Clinton bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan to distract the public's attention from his lies about Monica Lewinsky. The media cheered Clinton throughout.

Official history will have us believe that Nixon should have simply pulled U.S. troops out of Vietnam the moment he took over. Almost four years after all U.S. troops were supposed to have left Bosnia, they are still there, with no prospect of withdrawal anytime soon. U.S. troops in Kosovo are also there to stay. This elicits almost no protest. The purveyors of "official history" are only "troubled" by foreign entanglements against tough opponents like the Vietnamese. Beating up weaklings like Noriega or Slobo or Saddam is so much more fun.