The National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency historian that during the Tonkin Gulf episode, which helped precipitate the Vietnam War, N.S.A. officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence to cover up their mistakes, two people familiar with the historian's work say.
The historian's conclusion is the first serious accusation that communications intercepted by the N.S.A., the secretive eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, were falsified so that they made it look as if North Vietnam had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash. President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the supposed attack to persuade Congress to authorize broad military action in Vietnam, but most historians have concluded in recent years that there was no second attack.

The N.S.A. historian, Robert J. Hanyok, found a pattern of translation mistakes that went uncorrected, altered intercept times and selective citation of intelligence that persuaded him that midlevel agency officers had deliberately skewed the evidence.

Mr. Hanyok concluded that they had done it not out of any political motive but to cover up earlier errors, and that top N.S.A. and defense officials and Johnson neither knew about nor condoned the deception.

Mr. Hanyok's findings were published nearly five years ago in a classified in-house journal, and starting in 2002 he and other government historians argued that it should be made public. But their effort was rebuffed by higher-level agency policymakers, who by the next year were fearful that it might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq, according to an intelligence official familiar with some internal discussions of the matter.

These days, John Hope Franklin spends more time in the greenhouse behind his home than in library stacks.

"It's my favorite haunt," the historian says as he steps inside the hothouse, gray gravel crunching underfoot. "I come out here three or four times a day - not necessarily to work, but just to look and see and enjoy."

The humid air is alive with lacy ferns, spiny bromeliads and cascading streptacarpella. But they are only window dressing to his true passion - his collection of more than 300 orchids. Hanging from a piece of cork is an Aerangis, an orchid from Madagascar whose pale beige blossom is the size of a small spider. Nearby, a vanilla plant snakes 7 feet up a wooden support.

And then there are his pride and joy: Phaelanopsis Aurelia Franklin, a diminutive yellow orchid, "long-suffering and tolerant," named for his late wife; and Laeliocattleya John Hope Franklin, a long-stemmed, lavender-blossomed hybrid that he says is like himself, "big and ungainly."

Franklin fell in love with orchids because "they're full of challenges, mystery" - the same reasons he fell in love with history.

"To grow orchids, you have to be persistent, patient," he says, picking a dead, yellow bloom from a plant. "And to do the right kind of history, the kind of history I think is worth doing, of course, you have to be persistent AND patient and work hard."

His autobiography, "Mirror to America," which comes out this week, reveals a man who has been as much a participant in history as a chronicler of it.

Franklin helped Thurgood Marshall on the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. He became the first black historian to assume a full-professorship at a white college, and chaired President Clinton's Initiative on Race.

But it is his works, more than his deeds, that have earned the 90-year-old historian 137 honorary degrees ("obscene, don't tell anyone"), the NAACP's Spingarn Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. His landmark "From Slavery to Freedom," published in 1947 has sold more than 3.5 million copies and remains required reading in college classrooms.

"I would compare him to Carter Woodson and W.E.B. Du Bois," says Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Leon Litwack, who served as a graduate assistant when Franklin taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956, and has remained a fast friend.

"What he did was to demonstrate to a very skeptical and rather sometimes indifferent profession ... that the history of black Americans was a legitimate field for scholarly inquiry and investigation."

Congratulations: To history blogger Josh Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo is featured this week by the Washington Post. Josh is a Princeton graduate with a doctorate in early American history from Brown. Launching his blog just after the presidential election in 2000 has led him to a very promising career in journalism. If not for that, Marshall says that he would probably still be in academia. After all, he still reads more history than current affairs, but his blogging and journalism entrepreneurship has recently created an impressive current affairs site, TPM Café, which features several regular and many guest contributors.

It's one thing to write about history as Douglas Brinkley has done for more than two decades, often to much fanfare and acclaim. It's quite another to be swept up with your young family by its fast-moving and unpredictable currents.

With Hurricane Katrina bearing down on the Gulf Coast, the 44-year-old Tulane University professor decided to stay in New Orleans not to bear witness to a national tragedy -- although that's precisely what happened -- but simply to avoid getting stuck in bumper-to-bumper evacuation traffic.

Along with his wife and their two children, then both younger than 2, Brinkley's plan was to "evacuate vertically" into a riverfront high-rise -- designed by his father-in-law -- that was built to withstand a Category 5 hurricane. And there from the 15th floor, the telegenic historian, a popular guest on cable news programs, watched as his adopted home became the news story of the year.
...
The stranded "would be panicking and suddenly the lightbulb would go on," recalled Brinkley, a prolific author of popular works on such diverse subjects as John Kerry, Rosa Parks and Henry Ford. "They were like, 'Get me out of here, get me out of here.... [Hey, are you] Sean Penn?' I think it actually reassured them."

It all sounds like a movie, but actually it's going to be a book.

Analysis and oral histories

It's called "The Great Deluge" and Brinkley expects it to hit the bookstands around Aug. 29, 2006, the one-year anniversary of Katrina's hitting New Orleans. Published by William Morrow, the book will be filled with hundreds of oral histories as well as a critical analysis of the local, state and federal response to the crisis.

"There's going to be a cottage industry of books about Katrina almost like a Gettysburg or an Antietam," said Brinkley, who put aside a project on Theodore Roosevelt and conservation to focus exclusively on the upcoming book. "It will be reinterpreted in books for decades, even centuries.

"There's no way it's going to be definitive," added Brinkley about his upcoming book. "But hopefully it might be an opening salvo in the scholarship."

[Editor's Note: This is a short excerpt from a much longer piece. Please see the LA Times for more.]

Marshall Clagett, who died on October 21 aged 89, was an expert on the science and mathematics of ancient Egypt and Greece and on the way in which the texts of antiquity were interpreted by later scholars.

His first study, Greek Science in Antiquity, published in 1955, set out the broad themes of his academic career, providing an overview of the origins of Greek scientific knowledge in medicine, biology, mathematics, physics and astronomy and its flowering in the Hellenistic period, in which scholars such as Archimedes, Euclid and Apollonius lived and worked. He then explored the way in which Greek scientific ideas were transmitted, interpreted, used and abused by scholars in the Roman and medieval periods.

Robert H. Johnston, an archaeologist who helped develop a way to read ancient texts blackened or faded by time, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, died last Wednesday at his home in Brighton, N.Y. He was 77.

He spent more than a month in the hospital recently after several minor falls followed by infections and minor strokes, said his wife, Louise, but she could not point to a single cause of death.

Mr. Johnston, who for two decades was a professor and administrator at the Rochester Institute of Technology, worked in digital imaging to tease out ancient text, often minute fragments of individual characters, that had not been seen for as long as 2,000 years. This involved manipulating technology first used for medical diagnosis and enhancing pictures taken from military satellites.

Along with the Dead Sea Scrolls, texts from the time of Christ, Mr. Johnston decoded parts of a 10th-century parchment copy of a famous treatise by the Greek mathematician Archimedes that had been used as the fabric for a 13th-century prayer book, among other projects.

Mr. Johnston's team often extracted only tiny but critical bits. Examining a red-ink scroll of the Old Testament book of Samuel yielded only one previously unknown character. The team found only 18 new characters in their examination of color photographs of the Temple Scroll, which at 28 feet is the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Some goatskin scrolls had disintegrated into 100,000 fragments, some as small as a baby's fingernail. Sometimes all that could be seen was a dark-red scrap of material. But once it was digitalized and the background lightened,"the characters just pop out," Dr. Johnson said in 1993 in an interview with The Globe and Mail, the Toronto newspaper.

Canada has been keeping up with the United States in producing considerable numbers of flaky academic extremists. But it is doubtful that any are as bizarre as David F. Noble.*

Noble teaches at York University in Toronto, Canada’s third-largest school. Originally a graduate from the University of Florida, Noble is today a full, tenured professor of “social and political thought” in the Faculty of Arts at York. Interestingly, he is the ONLY professor in that department. Evidently, after recruiting him Noble was such an embarrassment that York had to build a one-man separate department to house him, removing him from his previous position in its history department. Noble has built a career mainly upon his obsessive opposition to all forms of technology. He is literally a 21st century Luddite and he is quite proud of that fact. (Don’t bother trying to look up his personal web page or his email address because he ideologically opposes such things!)

Noble embodies a strange hybrid of Marxism and crackpot Luddism. He proudly proclaims himself to be a “critical historian,” which is PC Newspeak for “Marxist.” Among other things, he has published Progress Without People: In Defense of Luddism and Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation, both books devoted to the theme that technology is an evil plot by the “capitalist class” to oppress workers. Machines are simply things used to force down the wages of the worker. Noble’s conclusions in these books are that the best defense of workers is to suppress modern technology altogether. Noble dismisses all anti-Luddist people, and if you are reading this on a computer screen then I regret to inform you that YOU are one of those blinded “technophiles” and “technozealots”.

Now if you are anything other than a devout member of an Amish sect, you might find all this a bit confusing. I would bet a month of my own technology-enhanced wages that there is nearly a perfect POSITIVE correlation between the number of machines around and the wage level of workers. That is - the more machines, the higher the wage rates of workers! Similarly, I venture to guess that there is almost a perfect correlation between the number of technological innovations and the level of wages. Moreover, a wonderful thing about technology in one country is that it raises wages even in other societies where few technological innovations are being created (such as when measured by patent registrations).

In Noble’s theories, much of the blame for the curse of technology is assigned to Christianity. According to him Christianity, going back to the Middle Ages, did not have enough good sense to oppose technology. It should have prevented scientists from setting themselves up as demigods of technology. Moreover, Christian thinkers actually had the temerity to suggest that machines and innovations could be used to better mankind and might even be part of God’s master plans. Part of Noble’s “proof” that it was “all Christianity’s fault,” by the way, is his claim that Werner von Braun from NASA was a born-again Christian. Noble’s anti-Christian ideas are expounded at length in one of his other books, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. He also blames Christianity for the relative dearth of women in science. And now, in his latest book, he more even-handedly blames both Christianity and Judaism for “globalization,” his current bogeyman.



In another Noble book, Forces of Production, he claims to explain how technology is often instigated, connived, and shaped by the military, corporations, universities, and other “mighty institutions.” Noble claims that “capitalists” are plotting to impose their views coercively upon students via institutions of higher education. How exactly this works is not clear. Noble seems to be unaware of the hegemony of leftists over most North American institutions of higher learning. So if those evil “capitalists” are plotting to brainwash hapless students by means of their “commercializing” higher education, as Noble insists over and over, they are doing a darned lousy job of it!

Back in 1983, Noble co-founded the National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest, together with Ralph Nader (and Al Meyerhoff), to try "to bring extra-academic pressure to bear upon university administrations who were selling out their colleagues and the public in the pursuit of corporate partnerships." Noble claims his aim has been to “have chronicled and fought against the commercialization and corporatization of higher education.” He also claims he is fighting “commodification” of higher education. We have no idea what “corporatization” and “commodification” are supposed to mean. Like most leftists, the principal methodology of analysis used by Noble is the manufacture of senseless polysyllables.

One would think that most mainstream leftists and liberals would seek to distance themselves from Noble’s anti-technology crackpot views. But for someone who dismisses universities as captives of the evil business class, Noble gets an awful lot of invitations to speak on assorted campuses. Many among the chic chattering classes seem to adore him. When he got canned from MIT, a group of 44 British academics rushed out, publicly defended and endorsed Noble. However, not everyone on the Left appreciates him. Even Noble’s supporters often describe him as polemical in his writings and abrasive in his manner. After Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of far-leftist The Nation, commissioned Noble to write a piece for the magazine, she had the uncharacteristic good sense to refuse to run it.

*A bit ironically, there is another David F. Noble, who writes books singing the praises of technology and computer word processing, but the two should not be confused....

Aline Gubbay, the historian, architectural photographer, author and social worker who chronicled the social and architectural history of Westmount and Montreal in four books, died in her apartment of pancreatic cancer Friday.

She was 85.

...

In the preface to Gubbay's last book, A View of Their Own, The Story of Westmount, the city's former Mayor Peter Trent described her writing as "a delicate work of love" that "deftly limns the city's gentle history and modestly allows places, characters and buildings to speak to the reader directly. "

Marilynn Vanderstaag, a columnist with the Westmount Examiner said Gubbay was "a great, gracious graceful lady, so detail oriented."

"She not only wrote, but she published, photographed and promoted her books," Vanderstaag said,

"She always carried her books in the trunk of her car. She was a photographer and always had darkrooms to develop her pictures in her house."

A silk merchant's daughter, Alice Helfer was born in Alexandria, Egypt on June 20, 1920. Her mother was Turkish, her father, a Russian Jew from Georgia.

WHY should a distinguished classical scholar like Victor Davis Hanson provide us with yet another book about the Peloponnesian War? He is in no doubt: he is writing a tract for the times. "Perhaps never," he insists, "has the Peloponnesian War been more relevant to Americans than to us of the present age."

This Greek civil war, between Athens and her allies and Sparta and her allies, lasted 27 years, from 431 to 404 B.C., and ended with the capitulation of Athens and its occupation by Sparta. Its interest for Hanson is in comparing Athens to the United States. At the outset of the war, Athens was the richest city in the world and, within Greece, the sole superpower, with an omnipotent navy. Athens was also a democracy, anxious to export her political system and way of life throughout the Greek world, if necessary by force. The war was fought because Sparta, a military oligarchy, feared Athenian imperialism and cultural dominance, and persuaded other Greek cities to join with it in an attempt to cut Athens down to size. Hanson sees the United States as sharing Athenian hubris and inviting nemesis by trying to export democracy to countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact that Hanson himself supports American policy gives his book an ironic twist.

My old tutor at Oxford, A. J. P. Taylor, always insisted, "The only lesson of history is that there are no lessons of history." He would have laughed at Hanson's book: "Such learned nonsense!" But Taylor was, characteristically, exaggerating. History has many lessons to teach, provided we don't push the comparisons too far. In the 19th century, the English ruling classes, educated at Oxford and Cambridge, were obliged to study Athens in detail, in the original Greek texts, to discover what lessons could be learned in the management of Britain's enormous world empire, and indeed in the conduct of the parliamentary democracy. There were some, even in the 18th century, who foresaw America's greatness and drew parallels with fifth-century B.C. Greece even then. Hanson quotes Thomas Paine: "What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude."...

The Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN reported yesterday that Grand Ayatollah Yasub al-Din Rastgari (born [1927]), a leading Shi'a religious leader and scholar, is detained for publishing a book on Islamic history which is allegedly critical of the policies of some historic characters and "denigrates the sanctity" of some Wahhabi sect personalities.

PEN first learned of this case in June 2005, and exact details remain difficult to confirm. International PEN seeks confirmation of the charges and sentence against him, and calls for his immediate and unconditional release if held in violation of Article 19 of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a signatory. International PEN is seriously concerned at reports that Ayatollah Rastgari is in poor health and held incommunicado without access to his family. PEN seeks immediate assurances that he is being given any necessary medical treatment in prison, and demands that his basic rights in detention are respected.

According to PEN's information, Grand Ayatollah Yasub al-Din Rastgari was arrested in his home city of Qom on 27 April 2004 after the publication of his book, The Reality of Religious Unity. His two sons were also arrested with him and the book's publisher closed down. He is accused of "insulting Islam" and "causing schism" in the book, which is allegedly critical of the policies of some historic characters and "denigrates the sanctity" of some Wahhabi sect personalities. The book is reportedly addressing points raised in another published book. It is thought that Grand Ayatollah Rastgari has been secretly charged, convicted and sentenced to four years in prison by the Special Court for the Clergy, which is known to violate internationally recognised standards of fairness to which Iran is a state party. Further information on the Special Court for the Clergy in general and human rights violations against Shi'a religious leaders in particular have been documented in detail by Amnesty International (www.amnesty.org).

Grand Ayatollah Rastgari is said to be a highly respected and renowned Muslim scholar who has written over 100 works. He is aged 78 and said to be in frail health, suffering from diabetes and heart disease. He is thought to be held by the secret service in the city of Qom although his exact whereabouts, charges against him or sentence have not been confirmed. He has reportedly been previously detained on several occasions, most recently in 1996, when he was sentenced to three years in prison and a period of internal exile for his activities against the regime.

SEND APPEALS TO AUTHORITIES:

**expressing serious concern about the detention of leading Shi'a religious leader and scholar Ayatollah Rastgari, apparently for publishing a book on Islamic history;

**seeking details of the charges and sentence against him, and urging that he is immediately and unconditionally released if held in violation of Article 19 of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a signatory;

**seeking assurances that he is receiving all necessary medical treatment and urging that his basic rights in detention are respected.

APPEALS TO:

Head of the Judiciary
**His Excellency Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi **Ministry of Justice **Park-e Shahr **Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran
**E-mail: irjpr@iranjudiciary.org (mark "Please forward to HE Ayatollah Shahroudi")


If possible please send a copy of your appeal to the diplomatic
representative for Iran in your country.

For further information, contact Cathy McCann at the WiPC, International PEN, 9/10 Charterhouse Buildings, Goswell Road, London
EC1M 7AT, U.K., tel: +44 207 253 3226, fax: +44 207 253 5711, e-mail: cmccann@wipcpen.org, Internet: http://www.internationalpen.org.uk

Rodney Loehr, a retired University of Minnesota history professor and a former Army historian who attended the Yalta Conference in 1945 and a post-World War II clandestine investigator, died of natural causes Saturday in Bloomington.

He was 97.

About 1946 and '47 he worked for an organization that was a predecessor of the CIA, said Raymond Ploetz of Maple Grove, a retired colonel in the Army Reserve.

"His cover story was that he was an interrogator for the State Department. I deduced that he was actually hunting Nazi war criminals," said Ploetz, who had served in the Army Reserve's 483rd Strategic Intelligence Detachment, which Loehr commanded from the mid-1950s to 1963.

At one point he was pursued by assailants, but didn't tell his comrades who they were. "He actually fled for his life at one point" and used a safe house and a change of clothes to elude his pursuers, Ploetz said.

Loehr, who was born in Albert Lea., Minn., misled others about his age when he was 14 and enlisted in the Minnesota National Guard, serving for seven years, said his grand-nephew Steve Loehr of Edina.

Loehr earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1938 and became an American history professor there that year.

In 1942, he was commissioned as an Army officer and became historical officer for the unified high command that eventually became the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington.

He attended the Yalta Conference in February 1945, when Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin decided which superpowers would control various parts of the globe.

During the late 1940s and early '50s, Loehr returned to the Army and worked on relaunching banking operations in Germany.

A former professor at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville will receive $215,000 from the institution in return for dropping a discrimination lawsuit that she originally filed in 2000.

Linda S. Schilcher, who was an untenured professor of history in the Middle East-studies program until the university dismissed her, in 1999, alleged in the lawsuit that she had been fired because she is not Arab and because she spoke out about problems within the program.

Charles Kester, Ms. Schilcher's lawyer, said, "We're pleased that, after all these years, everyone was finally able to get this amicably resolved."

The payments consist of $160,802 in damages for the professor's alleged emotional distress and physical illness and $54,198 in lost wages. In the settlement, Ms. Schilcher agreed not to disparage the university, its programs, or people named in the suit, while the university agreed not to disparage her.

In the lawsuit, Ms. Schilcher said officials had made disparaging comments about her gender and race (she is white). She also asserted that an official had ordered that a favorable review of her be made less positive, and that another official had put a false letter in her personnel file. She is now a goatherd in California.

Gwenn Okruhlik, a former associate professor of Middle East studies at Fayetteville, made similar complaints of discrimination. She charged in a separate lawsuit against the university that male colleagues had made discriminatory comments about her. A jury awarded her $351,000 in 2002, but the verdict was later overturned.