ruin upon any who associated with him:
   First character-revealing incident - how Kosinski attempted to elicit a declaration of love.
   Meanwhile, matters had come to a crisis in the affair with Dora Militaru. He insisted that she profess her love for him, and when
   she refused, he hit her repeatedly. Dora broke off the affair. Their relationship soon resumed as a friendship - in January he
   would grant her his only TV interview, for Italian TV, undertaken within two years of the Village Voice episode - but his physical
   assault ended their relationship as lovers.
   (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 391)
   Second character-revealing incident - how Kosinski had fun behind the wheel.
   On the long straightaway crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge, he opened it up to 120, pure exhilaration for a boy who had been told
   always to do things carefully, legally, and correctly. A little farther along they found themselves stuck on a two-lane road behind a
   slow driver. As a man who would one day drive Formula One race cars, David was astonished at the fluidity and skill with which
   Kosinski finally got around the recalcitrant ahead of him - and entertained mightily when Kosinski then slowed to a crawl and
   used those skills to prevent the car from passing him. He was more than a little shocked, however, when Kosinski persisted with
   the game in the face of an oncoming truck, causing the other car to run off into a ditch.
   (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 150-151)
   Third character-revealing incident - how Kosinski played a little joke on one of his students.
   Kosinski looked at the young man severely. "You know, the very first time I saw you I got the feeling you were going to die
   young," he said. "In the past twenty years I've had the same feeling about several people and each time I've had it, they died. Of
   course, I could be wrong this time."
   The young man, who was afraid of being drafted and sent to Vietnam, started to cry.
   (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 287)
   Fourth character-revealing incident - how Kosinski exposed Yale students to the intellectual contributions
   of the Neo Charles Mansonists.
   As part of the class, the Yale undergraduates were required to write about their own deaths. To stimulate their thinking, Kosinski
   brought in members of the Process Church of the Final Judgement - a group of Satanists who arrived dressed in gray. They
   saw themselves as having some sort of tenuous link with Charles Manson's Helter-Skelter family. Proselytizing in Kosinski's Yale
   classroom, they urged the students to "accept and embrace evil within themselves." This notion was uncomfortably close to
   Kosinski's own claim to Krystyna Iwaszkiewicz that he could achieve revenge upon his enemies because of a pact with the Devil
   [...]. The classroom episode took an unexpected turn when a young Jewish student went off with the Satanists, prompting an
   exchange with the student's parents over the pedagogical appropriateness of this classroom activity.
   (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 300-301)
   Fifth character-revealing incident - how Kosinski entertained his dining partners.
   One day, when the three couples had planned to have dinner in the city, Rose Styron arrived first and was persuaded to be his
   accomplice in a prank. Kosinski would hide in his apartment on Seventy-ninth Street, and the others would look for him. They
   came, looked, failed to find, and began to grow cross; Sadri was ready for dinner, and didn't find the prank so funny. Kosinski
   finally unfolded himself from behind the cabinets in his darkroom.
   (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 262)
   Sixth character-revealing incident - what Kosinski did to Marian Javits's dog - from which some might
   conclude that Jerzy Kosinski was not only the kind of man that you would not leave alone with your
   daughter, and not only the kind of man that you would not leave alone with your son - he was the kind of
   man that you would not leave alone with your dog.
   Marian Javits, in particular, was charmed by him, and she continued to be his friend even after his stories and eccentricities had
   become familiar - this despite the fact that one of his eccentricities had to do with her dog. Lying in bed recovering from a leg
   injury received while riding, she was startled when her dog ran furiously across the room, dripping urine. A moment later Kosinski
   appeared at the door. Later a friend told her that Kosinski had been observed abusing the dog in a way that would engender such
   behavior.
   (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 263)
   HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 866 hits since 9May98
   T.R. Reid Washington Post 9May98 60 Minutes gullibility
   The program featured dramatic footage of a drug "mule" said to be smuggling several
   million dollars' worth of heroin to London for Colombia's Cali drug cartel. The Guardian
   reported, though, that the "mule" actually carried no drugs, that his trip to London was
   paid for by the documentary's producers, and that many of the report's dramatic
   moments were faked.
   The instance of 60 Minutes credulity documented in the T.R. Reid Washington Post
   article below occasions the following reflections, some of which demonstrate the
   relevance of the article to Ukrainain affairs:
   Successful Criminals Do Not Make Public Confessions. The 60 Minutes drug
   smuggling broadcast whose title I will assume was The Mule shows individuals who
   cooperate in a documentary exposing their own highly lucrative criminal activities
   which is an incongruity. Successful criminals do not make public disclosure of their
   crimes because this hastens their getting caught. I have discussed this self-evident
   principle at length in Impossibilities of a TV documentary - whose focus is an ABC
   television Prime Time documentary titled Girls for Sale featuring this same incongruity
   of successful criminals disclosing their crimes, in this case the crime of employing
   Slavic girls as sex slaves in Israel. One may say, then, that television news
   sometimes demonstrates almost childlike insensitivity to incongruity, which is the same
   as saying that it demonstrates almost childlike credulity, and that one incongruity
   that it appears particularly insensitive to is that of successful criminals making
   public confession of their crimes.
   Television News Overlooks Many Diverse Incongruities. The earlier 60 Minutes
   broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom is similar in that it was loaded with palpable
   incongruities, though not the incongruity of criminals publicly confessing their
   crimes. For example, while host Morley Safer is describing a pogrom which was supposed
   to have taken place in Ukraine in July of 1941, the scene being shown is of bodies
   lying on the ground in snow. Multiply this sort of incongruity a hundredfold - I do
   not exaggerate - and you create the 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom.
   The explanation may be different each time. In each case, some explanation of
   such incongruities is called for, and in each case the explanation may be different.
   In the case of the 60 Minutes story The Mule, the explanation seems to be that a
   fraudulent story advanced the career of a documentary filmmaker. In the case of the
   ABC TV Prime Time story Girls for Sale, my speculation is that the story was true and
   that it advanced Israeli interests. And in the case of the 60 Minutes story The Ugly
   Face of Freedom, it is evident that the story was false, my speculation being again
   that it advanced Israeli interests.
   North American News May be Particularly Susceptible to Corruption. We have
   three reasons for suspecting this, two of them coming from Reid's Washington Post
   article below: (i) Reid describes London journalism as "furiously competitive" where "a
   dozen newspapers and four TV networks regularly investigate - and savage - one
   another's reporting" and contrasts this with the United States where "newspapers and TV
   networks generally don't go on the attack against the other guy's story." (ii) The
   British government's Independent Commission requires TV news to demonstrate "a respect
   for truth," whereas in the United States, the accuracy of news reporting is not subject
   to any official review. (iii) We see Israel Shahak repeatedly offering the observation
   that North American news shows a unique degree of submission to Jewish control, as for
   example in the following statement:
   The bulk of the organized US Jewish community is totalitarian,
   chauvinistic and militaristic in its views. This fact remains
   unnoticed by other Americans due to its control of the media, but is
   apparent to some Israeli Jews. As long as organized US Jewry remained
   united, its control over the media and its political power remained
   unchallenged. (Israel Shahak, Open Secrets: Israeli Nuclear and
   Foreign Policies, Pluto Press, London and Chicago, 1997, p. 139).
   CBS News Does Not Investigate Itself. Although an admission from 60 Minutes seems
   imminent that its story of The Mule was fraudulent, CBS did not discover this fraud,
   and is not undertaking any investigation of its own. Rather, there appear to be a
   "series of investigations," possibly all British, including one by Carlton Television
   which originally financed and broadcast the documentary, and including a study by the
   British government. One may hypothesize, then, that CBS does not place high priority
   on the acknowledgement and correction of its own errors, and that it will do so only
   when forced to by public disclosure of these errors by some other agency. For this
   reason, the acknowledgement by 60 Minutes that its story The Mule was entirely
   fraudulent cannot be taken as offering hope that CBS is any closer to acknowledging
   that its story The Ugly Face of Freedom was entirely fraudulent.
   American Competence Gap? Mention has often been made in the Ukrainian Archive
   of the existence of competence gaps as these relate to brain drains and gains. The
   observation of a startling degree of credulity in the highest levels of the American
   Press constitutes one such competence gap, although in this case it is not a gap that
   leads to any brain theft from other nations, as the gap is largely hidden from the
   American public. Perhaps the American public has its own competence gap - one in which
   the people watching the news are as blind to incongruities as the people who are
   broadcasting it.
   Below are excerpts only. The complete Washington Post article is purchasable online
   from the Washington Post by anyone who cares to first set up an account with the
   Washington Post.
   Acclaimed Expose Questioned as Hoax
   British Drug Documentary Was Featured on "60 Minutes"
   By T.R. Reid
   Washington Post Foreign Service
   Saturday, May 9, 1998; Page A01
   LONDON, May 8 - That powerful expose on "60 Minutes" last summer about Colombian drug
   runners was [...] quite possibly, false.
   After a lengthy investigation, London's Guardian newspaper has charged that the
   award-winning documentary "The Connection" [...] was essentially fiction.
   The program featured dramatic footage of a drug "mule" said to be smuggling several
   million dollars' worth of heroin to London for Colombia's Cali drug cartel. The
   Guardian reported, though, that the "mule" actually carried no drugs, that his trip to
   London was paid for by the documentary's producers, and that many of the report's
   dramatic moments were faked.
   [...]
   When the report was shown on "60 Minutes," CBS reporter Steve Kroft said that the mule
   had "no problem" slipping past British customs with the heroin in his stomach.
   "Another pound of heroin was on the British streets," the "60 Minutes" report said.
   But the Guardian, which says it found the "mule," reports that he actually swallowed
   Certs mints, not drugs. It says the flight to London took place six months later, and
   was paid for by the filmmaker. And it says the "mule" was actually turned back at
   Heathrow because he had a counterfeit passport, and thus never entered Britain.
   [...]
   The documentary included a highly dramatized segment in which reporters under armed
   guard were taken to a remote location for an interview with a figure described as a
   high-ranking member of the Cali drug cartel. "60 Minutes" reported de Beaufort had to
   travel blindfolded for two days by car to reach the scene of this secret rendezvous.
   The Guardian [...] said the secret location was actually the producer's hotel room in
   Colombia.
   [...]
   The British government's watchdog group, the Independent Television Commission, has
   launched a study of its own. Unlike the United States, where government has no power
   to police the content of news reporting, there are official regulations here requiring
   that TV news demonstrate "a respect for truth."
   CBS has not undertaken an investigation of its own, but will report to its viewers on
   the results of the British investigations [...].
   HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 1254 hits since 20Oct98
   Buzz Bissinger Vanity Fair Sep 1998 Old Liars, young liar
   Trouble was, he made things up - sources, quotes, whole stories - in a
   breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in modern
   journalism.
   The topic of lying in the media is of central importance on the Ukrainian Archive
   because of the frequency with which the media uses the opportunity of reporting on
   the Slavic world in general, and on Ukraine in particular, to instead calumniate
   them. Three prominent examples are Jerzy Kosinski's career as Jewish-Holocaust
   fabulist and Grand Calumniator of Poland, TIME magazine's wallowing girl photograph
   of 22Feb93, and Morley Safer's 60 Minutes story The Ugly Face of Freedom, broadcast
   over the CBS network on 23Oct94.
   From such examples as the above, however, it is difficult to estimate the prevalence
   of misinformation and disinformation in the media. It may be the case that
   distortion and calumniation are limited to a few topics such as the Slavic world or
   Ukraine, and that otherwise the media are responsible, professional, and accurate.
   The value of studying the case of Stephen Glass, however, is that it suggests
   otherwise - that perhaps the media operate under next to no oversight, that they are
   rarely held accountable, and that only egregious lying over a protracted interval
   eventually risks discovery and exposure. Had Stephen Glass been just a little less
   of a liar, had he more often tempered his lies, more often redirected them from the
   powerful to the powerless, he would today not only still be working as a reporter,
   but winning prizes. Thus, the example of Stephen Glass serves to demonstrate the
   viability of the hypothesis that misinformation and disinformation in the media is
   widespread, and that the three examples mentioned above, and the many more documented
   throughout the Ukrainian Archive, may not be exceptional deviations at all, but
   rather the tip of an iceberg in an industry which is largely unregulated, which is
   largely lacking internal mechanisms of quality control, which is responsive not to
   truth, but to the dictates of ruling forces.
   Another question which may be asked is whether Stephen Glass is the product of some
   sub-culture which condones or encourages lying, or which even offers training in
   lying.
   The following excerpts, then, are from Buzz Bissinger, Shattered Glass, Vanity Fair,
   September, 1998, pp. 176-190. The quoted portions are in gray boxes; the headings in
   navy blue, however, have been introduced in the UKAR posting, and were not in the
   original. I now present to you Stephen Glass largely on the possibility that our new
   understanding of Stephen Glass will deepen our existing understanding of other
   record-breaking, media-manipulating liars that have been featured on the Ukrainian
   Archive, ones such as Yaakov Bleich, Morley Safer, Neal Sher, Elie Wiesel, and Simon
   Wiesenthal.
   One precondition of exceptional lying may be an intellectual mediocrity which puts a
   low ceiling on the success that can be achieved through licit means. Thus, Stephen
   Glass, although performing well in high school, began to perform poorly in University,
   and when he began work as a reporter, was discovered to not know how to write:
   Glass began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990 on a pre-medical
   curriculum. According to various accounts, he held his own at the beginning. But
   then his grades nose-dived. He apparently flunked one course and barely passed
   another, suggesting that he had simply lost interest in being on a pre-med track,
   or had done poorly on purpose to shut the door to any future career in medicine.
   Glass ultimately majored in anthropology. He reportedly did well in this area of
   study, but given his inconsistent performance in pre-med courses, his overall
   grade-point average at Penn was hardly distinguished - slightly less than a B.
   "His shit wasn't always as together as everyone thought it was," said Matthew
   Klein, who roomed with Glass at Penn when he was a senior and Glass a junior.
   There were indicators to Klein that Glass was not doing particularly well
   academically, but Glass never acknowledged it. "He always said he was doing fine,
   doing fine," said Klein. (pp. 185-186)
   Those familiar with his early work said he struggled with his writing. His
   original drafts were rough, the prose clunky and imprecise. (p. 186)
   A second precondition of exceptional lying may be growing up in a subculture which
   encourages lying, or merely condones it, or at least does not actively work to
   suppress it. The Bissinger article offers us next to no information on this topic, except
   for the following brief statement:
   Harvard educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot spent a good deal of time at Highland
   Park High School researching her 1983 book, The Good High School: Portraits of
   Character and Culture. She was impressed with the school's stunning academic
   programs but noted that values such as character and morality were sometimes
   little more than brushstrokes against the relentlessness of achievement. (p. 185)
   The first steps on the path to high achievement in lying will, of course, be timid and
   cautious, but when the lack of repercussions is discovered, will become bolder:
   At first the made-up parts were relatively small. Fictional details were
   melded with mostly factual stories. Quotes and vignettes were constructed to add
   the edge Kelly seemed to adore. But in the March 31, 1997, issue of The New
   Republic, Glass raised the stakes with a report about the Conservative Political
   Action Conference. Eight young men, Glass claimed, men with names such as Jason
   and Michael, were drinking beer and smoking pot. They went looking for "the
   ugliest and loneliest" woman they could find, lured her to their hotel room, and
   sexually humiliated her. The piece, almost entirely an invention, was spoken of
   with reverence. Subsequent to it, Glass's work began to appear in George, Rolling
   Stone, and Harper's.
   But challenges to Glass's veracity followed. David A. Keene, chairman of the
   American Conservative Union, called Glass "quite a fiction writer" and noted that
   the description of the Omni Shoreham room littered with empty bottles from the
   mini-bar had a problem. There were no mini-bars in any of the Omni's rooms. (p.
   189)
   The young liar next discovers, to his amazement, that the exposure, scandal, and
   punishment that he feared do not materialize. Questions concerning the veracity of
   his work can simply be brushed aside. The chief consequence of his lying is dizzying
   success:
   At 25, Stephen Glass was the most sought-after young reporter in the nation's
   capital, producing knockout articles for magazines ranging from The New Republic
   to Rolling Stone. Trouble was, he made things up - sources, quotes, whole stories
   - in a breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in
   modern journalism. (p. 176)
   Because this, after all, was Stephen Glass, the compelling wunderkind who had
   seeped inside the skins of editors not only at The New Republic but also at
   Harper's, George, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and Mother Jones.
   This was the Stephen Glass who had so many different writing contracts that his
   income this year might well have reached $150,000 (including his $45,000 New
   Republic salary). This was the Stephen Glass whose stories had attracted the
   attention not just of Random House - his agent was trying to score a book deal
   but of several screenwriters. (p. 180)
   There arrives a time when the young liar begins to feel himself invincible. He finds
   that no matter how big his lie, he is not exposed, and he extrapolates to imagine that
   he leads a charmed life and that his good fortune will continue forever. In view of his
   perceived impunity, he sees no need to moderate lying, and so he escalates it:
   Stephen Glass rode the fast curve of instant ordainment that encircles the
   celebrity age of the 90s; his reputation in the incestuous world of Washington
   magazine journalism exploded so exponentially after a few of his better-than-true
   stories that he could basically write anything and get away with it, regardless of
   the fact that his reporting almost always uncovered the near incredible and was
   laden with shoddy sourcing. His reports described events which occurred at
   nebulous locations, and included quotes from idiosyncratic characters (with no
   last names mentioned) whose language suggested the street poetry of Kerouac and
   the psychological acuity of Freud. He had an odd, prurient eye for a
   department-store Santa with an erection and evangelists who liked getting naked in
   the woods. And nobody called his bluff. What finally brought Stephen Glass down
   was himself.
   He kept upping the risk, enlarging the dimensions of his performance, going
   beyond his production of fake notes, a fake Web site, a fake business card, and
   memos by pulling his own brother into his fading act for a guest appearance.
   Clearly, he would have done anything to save himself.
   "He wanted desperately to save his ass at the expense of anything," said
   Chuck Lane. "He would have destroyed the magazine."
   The saga of Stephen Glass is wrenching, shameful, and sad. His actions are
   both destructive and self-destructive, and if there is an explanation for them,
   his family has chosen not to offer it. Repeated attempts to interview Stephen
   were rebuffed, and all his father, Jeffrey Glass, said in a phone conversation was
   this: "There's a lot unsaid. You can do whatever you want to do. There's no
   comment." (p. 182)
   But the result of such a course, at least in some perhaps rare cases, is discovery and
   discredit:
   Nothing in Charles Lane's 15 years of journalism, not the bitter blood of
   Latin America, nor war in Bosnia, nor the difficult early days of his editorship
   of the fractious New Republic, could compare with this surreal episode. On the
   second Friday in May in the lobby of the Hyatt hotel in the Maryland suburb of
   Bethesda, near Washington, nothing less than the most sustained fraud in the
   history of modern journalism was unraveling.
   No one in Lane's experience, no one, had affected him in the eerie manner of
   Stephen Glass, a 25-year-old associate editor at The New Republic and a white-hot
   rising star in Washington journalism. It wasn't just the relentlessness of the
   young reporter. Or the utter conviction with which Glass had presented work that
   Lane now feared was completely fabricated. It was the ingenuity of the con, the
   daring with which Glass had concocted his attention-getting creations, the subtle
   ease with which even now, as he attempted to clear himself, the strangely gifted
   kid created an impromptu illusion using makeshift details he had spied in the
   lobby just seconds earlier - a chair, a cocktail table, smoke from a cigarette.
   (p. 176)
   The New Republic, after an investigation involving a substantial portion of its
   editorial staff, would ultimately acknowledge fabrications in 27 of the 41 bylined
   pieces that Glass had written for the magazine in the two-and-a-half-year period
   between December 1995 and May 1998. In Manhattan, John F. Kennedy Jr., editor of
   George, would write a personal letter to Vernon Jordan apologizing for Glass's
   conjuring up two sources who had made juicy and emphatic remarks about the sexual
   proclivities of the presidential adviser and his boss. At Harper's, Glass would
   be dismissed from his contract after a story he had written about phone psychics,
   which contained 13 first-name sources, could not be verified. (p. 180)
   Post-mortems of how so much lying had succeeded in entering the media paint an
   image of a cunning malefactor eluding stringent quality-control mechanisms.
   However, perhaps it is the case that such post-mortems serve to delude the public
   into imagining that Stephen Glass is a rare aberration, and not the tip of an iceberg.
   Perhaps the reality is that right from the beginning any intelligent and critical superior
   could have seen - had he wanted to - that Stephen Glass was a simple and
   palpable fraud, and not the cunning genius depicted below:
   For those two and a half years, the Stephen Glass show played to a captivated
   audience; then the curtain abruptly fell. He got away with his mind games because
   of the remarkable industry he applied to the production of the false backup
   materials which he methodically used to deceive legions of editors and fact
   checkers. Glass created fake letterheads, memos, faxes, and phone numbers; he
   presented fake handwritten notes, fake typed notes from imaginary events written
   with intentional misspellings, fake diagrams of who sat where at meetings that
   never transpired, fake voice mails from fake sources. He even inserted fake
   mistakes into his fake stories so fact checkers would catch them and feel as if
   they were doing their jobs. He wasn't, obviously, too lazy to report. He
   apparently wanted to present something better, more colorful and provocative, than
   mere truth offered. (p. 180)
   HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 1017 hits since 9Dec98
   Jeffrey Goldberg Globe and Mail 6Feb93 Fabricating history
   Mr. McConnell, along with a Buchenwald survivor and a second member of the
   761st, was flown to the camp in 1991 to film what turned out to be one of the
   most moving - and most fraudulent - scenes of the documentary. As the
   three men tour the site, the narrator speaks of their "return" to the camp. Mr.
   McConnell now says: "I first went to Buchenwald in 1991 with PBS, not the
   761st."
   The Globe and Mail, Saturday, February 6, 1993, D2.
   FILM FRAUD
   The liberation
   that wasn't
   A PBS DOCUMENTARY CLAIMS A BLACK U.S. ARMY UNIT
   FREED JEWISH INMATES FROM GERMAN CONCENTRATION
   CAMPS. NICE STORY, BUT NOT TRUE, SAY THE SOLDIERS
   BY JEFFREY GOLDBERG
   THE NEW REPUBLIC
   NEW YORK
   It was a rare moment: Rev. Jesse Jackson, surrounded by white-haired Holocaust
   survivors, embracing Leib Glanz, a bearded Hasidic rabbi, on the stage of the
   Apollo Theater in Harlem. The occasion was a black-Jewish celebration of the
   Liberators, the PBS documentary about all-black U.S. Army units that, according
   to the film, helped capture Buchenwald and Dachau. The sponsors of the
   screening, Time Warner and a host of rich and influential New Yorkers, billed
   the film as an important tool in the rebuilding of a black-Jewish alliance.
   But the display of brotherhood turned out to be illusory. The next night
   Rabbi Glanz was nearly chased out of synagogue by angry Hasidim for the
   transgression of consorting with Mr. Jackson. More significantly, the film's
   backers and the press failed to point out that the unit featured most
   prominently in the Liberators had no hand in the capture of either Dachau or
   Buchenwald in Germany. "It's a lie. We were nowhere near these camps when
   they were liberated," says E. G. McConnell, an original member of the 761st
   Tank Battalion. He says he co-operated with the filmmakers until he came to
   believe they were faking material.
   Mr. McConnell, along with a Buchenwald survivor and a second member of the
   761st, was flown to the camp in 1991 to film what turned out to be one of the
   most moving - and most fraudulent - scenes of the documentary. As the three
   men tour the site, the narrator speaks of their "return" to the camp. Mr.
   McConnell now says: "I first went to Buchenwald in 1991 with PBS, not the
   761st."
   'It's totally inaccurate.
   The men couldn't have been
   where they say they were
   because the camp was 60
   miles away from where we
   were on the day of liberation'
   Nina Rosenblum, who co-produced the film with Bill Miles in association
   with WNET, New York's public television station, admits that the narration of
   the scene "may be misleading." But she says Mr. McConnell can't be trusted.
   "You can't speak to him because he's snapped. He was hit on the head with
   shrapnel and was severely brain-damaged." Mr. McConnell, a retired mechanic
   fro Trans World Airlines Inc., laughs when told of the statement. "If I was so
   disturbed, why did they use me in the film?" he asks.
   His claim is supported by a host of veterans of the 761st, including the
   battalion's commander, the president of its veterans' association, two
   sergeants and two company commanders, among them the black commander of C
   Company.
   Two of the company's soldiers assert in the film that they liberated
   Dachau. Yet a statement issued by historians at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
   Museum states they could find no evidence that the 761st Battalion helped free
   either camp.
   "It's totally inaccurate," says Charles Gates, the former captain who
   commanded C Company. "The men couldn't have been where they say they were
   because the camp was 60 miles away from where we were on the day of
   liberation."
   Paul Bates, the colonel who commanded the battalion, confirmed Mr. Gates's
   account. "In our after-action reports, there is no indication that we were
   near either one of the camps," Mr. Bates says. According to him, tanks of the
   761st were assigned to the 71st Infantry Division, whose fighting path across
   Germany was 100 to 160 kilometres away from the two camps. "The 71st does not
   claim to have liberated those camps," he says.
   Several Holocaust survivors are quoted in the film and in the companion
   book published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as saying they were liberated by
   blacks of these units. But Christopher Ruddy, a New York writer who has
   conducted extensive research on the film, says two of the survivors featured in
   the Liberators told him they were no longer sure when they first saw black
   soldiers.
   One of the survivors who appeared with Mr. Jackson at the Apollo confirmed
   that he too was unsure of what had happened at Buchenwald. "It's hard to say.
   I know there were black soldiers in the camp, but I don't know when exactly,"
   says the survivor.
   Ms. Rosenblum angrily denounces the film's critics as Holocaust
   revisionists and racists. "These people are of the same mentality that says
   the Holocaust didn't happen," she says. In the course of a telephone
   interview, she declares: "There's tremendous racism in the Jewish community.
   How people who have been through the Holocaust can be racist is completely
   incomprehensible. To think that black people are less, which is what most
   Jewish people think, I can't understand it."
   She adds that racism of the type exhibited by the film's critics is what
   kept all-black combat units from receiving proper recognition in the first
   place. "The 761st fought for 33 years to get the Presidential Unit Citation.
   People don't want the truth of our history to come out," she says. WNET says
   it stands by the film's veracity.
   The Liberators' focus on events that appear never to have occurred seems
   all the more perplexing considering the true achievements of the 761st. Among
   other accomplishments, it played an important role in the liberation of
   Gunskirchen, a satellite of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, and
   its performance at the Battle of the Bulge was exemplary.
   The documentary approaches accuracy, the veterans say, when it focuses on
   the unit's heroic battles both against Germans and discrimination in its own
   Army. But the unit citation eventually awarded to the veterans by president
   Jimmy Carter does not list the liberation of either Buchenwald or Dachau as an
   achievement of the unit.
   "It's no great accomplishment to liberate a concentration camp, not
   compared to fighting the German army," says Philip Latimer, president of the
   761st veterans' organization. "What we're concerned about is our combat
   performance. The unit has a lot to be proud of ... and I don't want to see it
   blamed for this documentary. I don't want the unit to be hurt."
   Questions have also been raised about the 183rd Combat Engineer Battalion,
   which the filmmakers say played a role in the liberation of Buchenwald. The
   unit's commander at the time, Lawrence Fuller, a former deputy director of the
   Defense Intelligence Agency, says the 183rd only visited Buchenwald after its
   liberation, when General George Patton ordered units in the sector to see proof
   of German atrocities. Mr. Fuller says the documentary's producers never
   contacted him to discuss the unit's history.
   Leon Bass, a retired school principal who served in the 183rd, calls
   himself a liberator in the film and in the frequent lectures he gives on the
   Holocaust. But Mr. Bass says he does not remember exactly when he entered the
   camp. "I don't know whether we were first or second ... We didn't go in with
   guns blazing," he recalls. "There was just a handful of us. I was only there
   for two or three hours. The rest of the company came later."
   The Liberators, fuelled by the public-relations success at the Apollo, is
   gaining momentum. The Rainbow Coalition is sponsoring a similar gala in Los
   Angeles in March. Ms. Rosenblum tells of a packed calendar of showings with
   co-sponsors ranging from the Simon Wiesenthal Center to the American Jewish
   Committee.
   Copies of the documentary will be distributed to all New York City junior
   and senior high schools, according to board spokeswoman Linda Scott. The cost
   of the schools project, Mr. Rosenblum says, is being picked up by Elizabeth
   Rohatyn, the wife of investment banker Felix Rohatyn, who co-sponsored the
   Apollo showing, although Ms. Scott says that several philanthropists are vying
   for the honour of buying the tapes for the schools.
   According to a memorandum on the documentary circulating at school-board
   headquarters, the film will be used to "examine the effects of racism on
   African-American soldiers and on Jews who were in concentration camps ... to
   explain the role of African-American soldiers in liberating Jews from Nazi
   concentration camps and to reveal the involvement of Jews as 'soldiers' in the
   civil-rights movement."
   The documentary continues to be supported by a number of influential Jews.
   PR guru Howard Rubenstein, who is a vice-president of New York's Jewish
   Community Relations Council (and who also flacks for radio station WLIB, known
   for the anti-Semitic invective it regularly airs), worked pro bono on the
   Apollo event and continues to plug the documentary, despite having heard that
   it is misleading.
   "I have no reason to distrust Nina [Rosenblum]," he says. "She seemed very
   able and honest. I hope and pray it's accurate."
   Peggy Tishman, a former president of the JCRC and a co-host of the evening
   at the Apollo, is sticking by the documentary too. Ms. Tishman says the
   documentary is "good for the Holocaust."
   "Why would anybody want to exploit the idea that this is a fraud?" she
   says. "What we're trying to do is make New York a better place for you and me
   to live."
   She claims that the accuracy of the film is not the issue. What is
   important is the way it can bring Jews and blacks into "dialogue." There are a
   lot of truths that are very necessary," she says. "This is not a truth that's
   necessary."
   Jeffrey Goldberg is New York bureau chief for The Forward.
   The above Jeffrey Goldberg article was accompanied by two photographs, the
   captions of which were:
   U.S. soldiers, both high-ranking officers and
   enlisted men, view a scene of horror at a death
   camp. Concentration-camp prisoners were murdered
   as a last act by departing German guards.
   A black U.S. soldier guards German prisoners in
   France during the last weeks of the war.
   Comments on the above
   Jeffrey Goldberg article
   Where's the harm? The Liberators incident is relevant to several of the
   topics discussed in the Ukrainian Archive. The Liberators has been somewhat
   arbitrarily placed with 60 Minutes documents because it demonstrates the power
   of the media to fabricate history. In the case of the 23 Oct 1994 60 Minutes
   broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom, the disinformation served to calumniate
   Ukrainians; in the case of the PBS documentary, the Liberators, the
   disinformation appears to be oriented toward improving relations between Jews
   and blacks. Thus, whereas the 60 Minutes disinformation will readily be viewed
   as destructive by all who learn of it, the Liberators disinformation may be
   viewed by some as innocuous or even benevolent.
   However, there are reasons for not viewing the Liberators disinformation
   leniently or indulgently:
   (1) Black grievances against Jews may be founded on genuine exploitation of
   Blacks by Jews, and the Liberators may be an attempt to quiet opposition to
   that exploitation and so allow it to continue.
   (2) Setting the precedent of conniving at disinformation such as that offered
   in the Liberators offers disseminators of disinformation the prospect of
   impunity for manipulating public opinion to their own ends, and these ends vary
   on the benevolence-malevolence continuum. Whereas inducing people who had
   never been at Buchenwald to simulate returning to Buchenwald for PBS cameras
   may seem harmless, the buildup of tolerance for such chicanery makes it easier
   to similarly induce people to falsely testify in war crimes proceedings
   concerning Holocaust events, with the result that the lives of innocent accused
   are disrupted, shattered, and even lost.
   "Capturing" and "liberating"? Referring to Allied forces "capturing" or
   "liberating" the camps is inflating what really happened - which is that Allied
   soldiers peacefully walked into camps that German forces had abandoned days
   previously. In the words of Philip Latimer, president of the 761st veterans'
   organization, "It's no great accomplishment to liberate a concentration camp."
   In other words, the Liberators film leaves the impression of Jews attempting to
   get black fighting units to falsely take credit for non-accomplishments.
   Unreliability of eye-witness testimony. We have already had occasion to notice on
   the Ukrainian Archive the unreliability of eye-witness testimony, as in the
   cases of falsely accused Frank Walus and John Demjanjuk. The Liberators film
   reminds us once again how easy it is to get some old men to say whatever you
   want them to. Thus, we find that "two of the company's soldiers assert in the
   film that they liberated Dachau," when we know that this could not have been
   the case, and we find that "several Holocaust survivors are quoted in the film
   and in the companion book published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as saying they
   were liberated by blacks of these units," again when this is an impossibility.
   Of course upon less biased questioning, some of these old men will recant: "But
   Christopher Ruddy, a New York writer who has conducted extensive research on
   the film, says two of the survivors featured in the Liberators told him they
   were no longer sure when they first saw black soldiers."
   Responsible Jews and non-Jews oppose irresponsible Jews. It cannot escape
   our attention that foremost among those challenging the disinformation in the
   Liberators are the apparently-Jewish writer Jeffrey Goldberg, and
   possibly-Jewish historians at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. This
   reinforces a point introduced earlier in the Ukrainian Archive during the
   discussion of Warsaw's 1905 Alphonsenpogrom, to the effect that what may be
   taken at first glance to be an expression of antagonism toward Jews may in
   reality be an expression of opposition by responsible Jews and non-Jews alike
   against irresponsible elements among Jews, and that it is the responsible Jews
   themselves who may be in the vanguard of the attack against irresponsible Jews.
   We have seen this to be the case repeatedly, not only during Warsaw's
   Alphonsenpogrom, but in many prominent incidents - for example, Israeli defense
   attorney Yoram Sheftel must be given a large share of the credit for exposing
   the duplicity and incompetence of the Israeli justice system, and thereby
   saving the life of John Demjanjuk, a case in which other Jews such as Phoenix
   attorney William J. Wolf also played leading and heroic roles. The prominent
   role played by responsible Jews in opposing irresponsible Jews should not be
   surprising - the irresponsible Jews injure all Jews because their
   irresponsibility attaches in popular thinking to Jews generally, and thus
   serves to smear the good name of all Jews.
   Important to note in the Liberators case, then, is that the friction does not