Banner Graphic, Volume 10, Number 70, Greencastle, Putnam County, 24 November 1979 — Page 5

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ARMY RECRUITS: New rule will allow them to keep their heads warm naturally

Today's Army? Problems said 'blown out of proportion'

A By SUSAN FOGG Newhouse News Service WASHINGTON The Army recruiting scandal has been blown out of proportion by critics who want to sandbag the volunteer Army and reinstate the peacetime draft, according to Army Secretary Clifford Alexander. “There’s no doubt about it,” Alexander said in an interview with the New house News Service when asked if the scandal involving at least 324 recruiters and 12,700 enlistees since Oc- ; tober 1977 was being used to attack the volunteer Army. ; “I think it’s important to separate out the recruiting scandals or irregularities from the volunteer Army,” he said, “As far as the recruiting scandals go, the complaints we investigate number in the thousands each year.... It’s not a new problem. “We’ve (enlisted) half a million people” since the draft was ended in 1973, Alexander said. “When you’re dealing with those numbers, you are going to get some who abuse the system.” "• About 75 percent of the irregular recruitments the Army is now investigating involve falsified education records. The rest involve illegal coaching for intelligence tests or concealment of problems and criminal records. ■** So far, 324 recruiters and supervisors including five officers have been removed from their jobs as a result of the Army investigation, which is expected to be wrapped up by Dec. 20, ac- • .cording to Maj. Gen. Robert yerkes, Army deputy secretary for personnel, who sat in on the interview with Alexander. The Army investigates an average of 1,300 recruiting com-, plaints a year, of which 200 are found to involve irregularities. _ Of the latter, an average of 70 a year result in such action as ; removal of a recruiter from his job. • 1 Of critics of the volunteer Army, Alexander said: “There are some people who don’t like the income levels of the volunteer Ar7 my. There are others who want to make it easy to meet Army • manpower goals. “Then there are those who say for sentimental reasons, perhaps ‘lt was the draft in my day; it - should be the draft now.’ “Some don’t like the fact that the Army is blacker than it used to be. Others say it’s a dumb Army. “Unfortunately, few people ask how well the volunteer Army has helped us meet our needs for national security.” Bringing back the draft a proposal that has been pushed by Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., who has chaired hearings on the recruiting scandal before the Senate Armed Services Manpower subcommittee would create more problems than it would solve, said Alexander, the nation’s first black secretary of the Army. “The negative image of the uniformed services” growing out of the Vietnam war has finally begun to improve, he said, and resumption of the draft would only worsen that image again among the nation’s 20 million 18- to 26-year-olds in the draft pool and among their families and friends. Draft resistance would resurface, Alexander said, and the military would have to bring criminal action against large numbers of young people.

Quake kills at least 35

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) A powerful earthquake that shook the mountain cities and towns of western Colombia has killed at least 35 persons, injured more than 400 and toppled scores of buildings, authorities reported. The Rev. Jesus Emilio Ramirez, director of the Geophysical Institute of the Andes, said the Friday evening quake “was the strongest recorded in Colombia in the past 20 years.” He said the quake was centered off the coast in the Pacific between Colombia and Panama. If it had been inland, he said, it would have destroyed

Zambians protest vs. British embassy

:-UNITED NATIONS (AP) - th 4 U.N. Security Council Friday condemned Zimbabwe Rhodesian raids into Zambia and cabled on Britain, as the administrative authority for its breakaway colony, to stop them. A resolution adopted by the lunation council at an urgent session requested by Zambia also called on “responsible authorities” to pay compensation iqi damages and loss of life in the attacks, which have cut rpad and rail lines into the landjocked southern African nation.

whole cities. The National Earthquake Center in Golden, Colo., said the quake struck at 6:40 p.m. EST and measured 6.4 on the Richter scale, putting it in the class of a tremor capable of causing severe damage. Red Cross officials said the 90-second tremor pummeled a 350-mile belt along the western slope of the Andes mountains, leaving about 50 cities and towns without power. Hardest hit was Pereira, a city of about 250,000 some 100 miles west of Bogota, the capital. The Red Cross said 20 persons were killed in Pereira and

The resolution was approved by a consensus of the council but was not put to a formal vote. As a permanent member of the council, Britain could have vetoed the resolution. British Ambassador Sir Anthony Parsons announced after the consensus decision that his country had gone along in order to avoid jeopardizing the current London conference negotiating independence for Zimbabwe Rhodesia and an end to that nation’s seven-year war with black nationalist guerrillas.

Other legal problems would arise, in the form of law suits arguing that a peacetime draft is in itself a constitutional violation of personal liberty, he said. And unless women were drafted on an equal footing with men, the military soon would face lawsuits brought by men charging sex discrimination. The energy, time and money the Army is devoting to enlisted personnel’s housing problems, new tank and armored personnel carrier development and other current top priorities would become secondary to the problems of the draft, Alexander said. “The point is that we can meet our end-strength goals through volunteer recruiting,” he said. “I didn’t come here as an advocate of the volunteer Army. I’m a lawyer and I don’t like to prejudge the issue. “The evidence is that it works, it’s the unanimous opinion of command that it’s as fine as Army as we’ve ever seen.... “A bunch of snobs are worrying about the income level of the soldiers, as if a rich soldier were a good soldier and a poor soldier were bad. “The Army has never been a complete cross-section of society.... In Fact, there is only a few thousand dollars differential between the average soldier’s family income and society at large.” Turning to critics who point to the high proportion of blacks in the Army (36 percent of recruits and 30 percent of the standing force of 770,000), Alexander said that in the Navy blacks are underrepresented compared wish their proportion in the American population 8 percent of Navy personnel are non-white, compared with 12 perceQtof the general population. In terms of education, Alexander said, 86 percent of current Army personnel have a high school degree or its equivalent, compared with 36 percent during World War 11. Added Maj. Gen. Yerkes: “The 770,000 soldiers in today’s Army are as fine as any we’ve put in uniform. There are super men and women out there. “He (today’s soldier) is as smart as, if not smarter than ever. “He does have contemporary problems. He has a reading problem that’s a result of problems in our high schools.... He has a drug problem, and some insensitivity on race.... “But in our little sub-unit of society that is the Army, we think we do a heck of a lot better job of dealing with these problems than the general society.” Alexander and Yerkes maintained that a shortage of funds to run the Army’s recruiting program contributed to the current scandal. “We are confident that if we get the resources we can meet our recruiting goals,” said Yerkes, who added that the recruitihg budget had dropped from S3OO million in 1975 to S2OO million in 1975. The budget reduction came at a time when the Army had scaled down its recrliiting goals, when the need to boost recruitment arose in the last two years, it caught the Army short of funds, Yerkes said.

its suburbs and more than 100 were injured. Most of the casualties were blamed on falling buildings. Police Col. Luis Francisco Ospina said at least six persons were killed and more than 70 injured in the towns of Cali, Sevilla Trujillo and Ansermanuevo, all south of Pereira. Hundreds of residents of Bogota, a city of 5 million, rushed into the streets in panic as buildings swayed, walls cracked and power failed briefly. No deaths were immediately reported in the capital. The Richter scale is a measure of ground motion as record-

Parsons said his government joined in the consensus even though it regarded the resolution as one-sided and intemporate in some of its language. The resolution did not identify the “responsible authorities” who were called upon to pay damages. But Nigerian Ambassador B. Akporode Clark, in introducing the resolution, said its sponsors believed those responsible to be Britain and South Africa. In addition to Nigeria, the

ed on seismographs. Every increase of one number means a tenfold increase in magnitude. An earthquake of 3.5 on the Richter scale can cause slight damage in the local area, 4 moderate damage, 5 considerable damage, 6 severe damage. A 7 reading is a “major” earthquake, capable of widespread heavy damage; 8 is a “great” quake, capable of tremendous damage. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which occurred before the Richter scale was devised, has been estimated at 8.3 on the Richter scale.

resolution was sponsored by five other council members Bangladesh, Gabon, Jamaica, Kuwait and Zambia. Sir Anthony apologized to the council for delaying its decision while he sought instructions from the British government. The British ambassador said the matter had to be decided by the “highest levels” of the British government and its acceptance of the resolution was evidence of sincere desire to achieve agreement in London.

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Carter warns of grave consequences if any hostages harmed at Tehran

c. 1979 N.Y. Times News Service WASHINGTON President Carter said Friday that the consequences would be “extremely grave” for Iran if even one of the remaining 49 American hostages in Tehran was harmed. Responding to the latest threats by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian leader, to the safety of the American embassy personnel, in their 20th day of captivity, Carter stepped up the polemics slightly as he again underscored United States concern over the safety of the hostages. On Thursday, in the mounting war of words between Washington and Tehran, Khomeini said that he could not prevent the student captors of the hostages from destroying the embassy and the prisoners if the United States attacked Iran in a rescue attempt or punative attack. The ayatollah was reacting to American movements of Naval forces toward Iran and suggestions on Tuesday by the White House that military force might be used if the hostages were not freed. On Friday morning, Carter met with his top foreign policy and military advisers for 2 hours and 20 minutes at Camp David, Md., where he is spending the Thanksgiving week, to review the Iranian situation, the subject which has preoccupied Washington for the last three weeks. Later, Jody Powell, the White House spokesman, said that Carter had asked him to relay the message that “the last American hostage is just as important to the United States as the first.” “The consequences of harm to any single hostage will be extremely grave,” he said. The president’s comment, aside from its political significance in keeping pace with the ayatollah’s rhetoric, did appear to clarify the question of under what circumstances military force might be used. The initial White House statement issued on Tuesday spoke

Joint Chiefs debate military moves

c. 1979 N.Y. Times News Service WASHINGTON Government officials said Friday that after an extensive study of the problem, the Carter administration has failed to come up with an acceptable military plan for freeing the hostages in Tehran. As a result, the administration is now said to be examining various options for launching retaliatory strikes against Iran, possibly directed at the country’s oil facilities. The officials said that at President Carter’s request, the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon had discussed several possible plans for using military force to free the hostages, including spraying the embassy in Tehran with riot-control gas and then sending in American paratroopers. However, the administration this week is said to have rejected all rescue plans on the ground that they posed unacceptable risks to the lives of the 49 Americans held at the embassy. “You can be sure that each and every contingency plan was exhaustively examined before it was rejected,” one official said. Although officials confirmed that military planners were now concentrating on drawing up possible retaliatory strikes against Iran, they declined to discuss the military moves under study. But one official involved in planning for the crisis said that “plausible targets” for military retaliation included Iranian oil production and transportation facilities. “Oil-related targets would offeTone means of causing grief to the Iranian authorities,” the official said, “without killing too many innocent civilians.” The official, as well as other

Only 285 Iranian students will leave U.S.

c. 1979 N. Y. Times News Service WASHINGTON The Immigration and Naturalization Service said Friday that only 285 of 2,218 Iranian students found to be subject to deportation had agreed to leave the United States voluntarily. David L. Crosland, acting commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said that immigration officers had interviewed 17,685 Iranian students from Nov. 13 to 22. He said that 13,411 had been found in compliance with the terms of their visas, 2,218 had been found out of compliance and 2,056 required further checking. The immigration service, he said, has started deportation proceedings against more than 1,361 of the students and so far has sent three of them back to Iran under deportation orders. Seventeen of the 285 who agreed to leave voluntarily have already left, Crosland added.

End ordered to training of Iranian pilots

c. 1979 N.Y. Times News Service WASHINGTON Secretary of Defense Harold Brown Friday ordered the Air Force and the Navy to stop flight training of Iranian pilots and navigators in the United States as the Carter administration continued its deliberate pace of response to the crisis in Tehran. Pentagon spokesmen said that ground training and academic schooling for the 251 pilots, navigators and communications officers would continue so that they would not be forced to return to Iran. Congress had urged the administration to halt the flight training. A resolution expressing the sense of the House, introduced by Rep. Lester L. Wolff, D-N.y., went to President Carter early this week with 235 signatures. Wolf contended that the United States should not be training Iranians who could be a national asset to an adversary and might one day be enemies of American fliers. Friday he said: “I am very pleased to see that the president and the Department of Defense have responded to congressional pressure by ending the flight training of Iranians.”

November 24,1979, The Putnam County Banner Graphic

of “remedies” that might be applied if a diplomatic solution failed. But it was so ambiguously drafted that it was unclear whether the United States was reserving the right to use force if the hostages went on trial or until they were harmed. On Wednesday, officials said privately that force was contemplated only in retaliation for harm to the hostages, and that was made explicit in the president's comments. Powell declined to say just was the “extremely grave” consequences might be. Officials said they did not want to specify what military steps might be undertaken, although a number of options are being studied. The Iranians have reiterated the hostages would be harmed if the Americans attacked. The United States has now said that if the hostages are harmed this might produce an attack. The net result appeared to produce a rhetorical standoff. Both sides, in effect, are now warning of severe retaliation but only if the other strikes first. As a result, even though the situation is still regarded as highly volatile by administration officials, sources close to the situation seemed more relaxed, saying that there was enough time to try to fashion a diplomatic way out, even though up to now a solution has eluded the two sides and many intermediaries. Within the administration there also was the impression that Khomeini had been put on the defensive by the worldwide condemnation of the holding of diplomatic hostages and was now turning his attention to trying to line up support in other Moslem countries to back him, and trying to capitalize on the anti-American riots in Pakistan. There seemed to be more concern in Washington Friday about the possibility of Khomeini stirring up anti-American trouble through his broadcasts to other Middle Eastern countries than over the possibility of sudden harm befalling the hostages.

aides, added that while the increase in American naval forces in the Arabian Sea provided Washington the ability to carry out punitive strikes, the situation in Iran would have to grow worse before a decision was made by Carter to actually use military force. Officials also said that so far, the administration had not decided on any specific course of action in the event that a decision to launch a retaliatory attack were taken. In particular, they denied a report Friday saying that the Pentagon had agreed on a plan calling for a “precision strike” against Kharg Island, the Iranian island in the Persian Gulf which serves as the country’s major port for shipping oil. While acknowledging that an attack against Kharg Island was an alternative under discussion, officials said that other facilities associated with Iran’s oil industry appeared more attractive as potential targets. On Capitol Hill, members of Congress who asked not to be identified said it was their impression that an economic blockage of Iran, backed up by American naval forces, was the most likely military option. Discussing the feasibility of punitive strikes against Iran, Pentagon aides remarked that Iranian armed forces were in great disarray and that the United States would have little problem in prevailing in any military contest. There have been unconfirmed reports that the Iranian navy could attempt to mine the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic waterway connecting the Persian Gulf with the Indian Ocean, but a senior Pentagon aide was quoted Friday as saying that “the Iranian navy is a joke.”

Crosland said there had been “good compliance” with requirements of the reporting program, under which all Iranian students are supposed to disclose their location and academic status to the immigration service. There are believed to be about 50,000 Iranian students in American colleges and universities, by far the largest group from any foreign country. Some constitutional experts have questioned the propriety of singling out Iranian students for immigration checks. President Carter instructed the Justice Department to review the immigration status of Iranian students in this country a week after students in Tehran occupied the United States Embassy and took 62 Americans hostage on Nov. 4. A Justice Department spokesman, John K. Russell, said that the government was asking the deported to pay for their flights out of the United States. But he added that “we usually pick up the tab” if they cannot or will not pay.

Sen. John Tower, R-Texas, had written to Brown asking that the training, much of which took place in Texas, be halted. A tape-recorded message in his office Friday said that no one was available for comment. A Pentagon spokesman said that the decision to halt the flight training but to continue ground schooling was a compromise between continuing the program and canceling it and sending home the Iranians. Most of those studying here were selected during the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who favored the air force branch of the military and spent large sums of money to equip it. Because of the shah’s favor,these fliers might be in jeopardy if they returned to Iran. There was also the question of where they could get funds for the trip since Iran’s assets have been frozen. When the crisis broke out in November, 273 Iranians were training here, including 189 Air Force and 23 Navy pilots. Since then, 22 have finished their training but remain at United States bases.

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