BEWARE OF BUREAUCRATS BARRING GREEKS

It's a rare thing when journalists join with classicists. Perhaps that's why a standing-room-only crowd jammed into Columbia University's journalism school to see a panel on "Dissenting Journalism: Greece, the CIA, and the USA." The evening was jointly sponsored by the classics department and the journalism school's Delacorte Magazine Center, and the featured speaker was to be Christos Papoutsakis, editor of the Greek dissenting magazine Anti. We say "was to be" because at the last minute, the Bush State Department denied Papoutsakis a visa. Anti, founded in May 1972 as "a magazine of resistance" modeled itself on the American magazine Ramparts, and the panel included San Francisco Examiner managing editor Warren Hinckle, Ramparts's troublemaking editor, whom Papoutsakis looked forward to meeting. (Both magazines took repeated swipes at the CIA.) Other panelists included Victor Navasky and Christopher Hitchens of The Nation and Frances Stonor Saunders, author of The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (see review in the June 12, 2000, Nation). The NYCLU and PEN, among others, sent letters protesting the State Department's exclusion of Papoutsakis. As NYCLU attorney Arthur Eisenberg wrote in protest to Secretary of State Colin Powell and the US Ambassador to Greece, the First Amendment's "strong presumption against government restricting the expressive opportunities of individuals...should also extend to circumstances where individuals seek to enter this country from abroad in order to participate in academic and communicative enterprises." Because the US Consul General in Athens failed to identify the grounds on which Papoutsakis, aged 70 and a respected journalist, had his visa denied, one wonders whether the State Department is reverting to the bad old days of McCarthy-McCarran-Walter. And equally troubling, why the barring of Papoutsakis, front-page news in Greece, is missing from the US media. Perhaps they were too busy celebrating George W. Bush's first week in office to notice.

PREJUDICE AND DR. PENDERGRAFT

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