The 21st century attack on privacy by the NSA, FBI and CIA casts the hearings by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Otis Pike (D-N.Y.) during the early 1970s in a new light as a path to needed reforms.
Hero whistleblower Edward Snowden told interviewers after he revealed widespread NSA warrantless searches that “I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity, or love, or friendship is recorded. And that’s not something I’m willing to support. It’s not something I’m willing to build. And it’s not something I’m willing to live under.”
Snowden doesn’t stand alone in history. Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) investigated intelligence agency excesses and said essentially the same thing 40 years earlier on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air…. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left – such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”
The Experience of the Church and Pike Committees
The Church and Pike Committees were companion intelligence committees in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, respectively, that investigated U.S. intelligence agencies in the mid-1970s, including the CIA, FBI and NSA. They also investigated misuse of the IRS auditing function by officials of the Nixon administration. The committees revealed to the American people that U.S. intelligence agencies had engaged in warrantless surveillance of Americans through wiretapping, mail-opening and the planting of listening devices, despite clear requirements by the Fourth Amendment that all searches are “unreasonable” and illegal unless they are under a court warrant with “probable cause” and contain a specific description of what is being searched and what will likely be found by the search.
The hearings also revealed that the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO, had engaged in clandestine operations of deceit and intimidation against critics of both American foreign policy and racial policies in the South. Moreover, the CIA had engaged in policies of assassination, gun-running, and military coups d’etat in foreign countries – generally without even informing the President. In short, they revealed America had a secret government that had operated outside of constitutional boundaries and without either the consent or knowledge of elected officials in both the legislative and the executive branches of government.
The Pike Committee found that even though the Constitution requires that all federal spending be approved by Congress, “GAO accountants on loan to the Committee had concluded that the foreign intelligence budget is three to four times more costly than Congress has been told.” In other words, the intelligence agencies were spending three to four times more than they were constitutionally authorized. The Pike report provided anecdotal evidence of vast waste, noting that budgeting in the CIA and other spy agencies “to range somewhere between cursory and non-existent.”
Perhaps most importantly, the Church and Pike hearings revealed the tactics of how intelligence agencies court legislative friends and blunt criticism, and provide an example of how legislatures can curb intelligence agency powers substantially.
At the height of the constitutional violations, in 1970, President Nixon authorized the Huston Plan, a scheme to violate the Bill of Rights with impunity in the name of national security and “internal security.” Nixon withdrew authorization for the Huston Plan days after authorizing it, and Tom Charles Huston (the plan’s author) also played the contrite role in Church Committee hearings. Huston told Senator Gary Hart (D-Colo.) that the executive branch had been essentially operating under the Huston plan for decades on an ad hoc basis, with each department violating the constitutional restrictions of the Fourth Amendment independently without Presidential approval or knowledge:
“The COINTEL Program – apparently even the Justice Department did not know about that. If they had told me, it was obvious that the word would have been out. So it seems to me that many of these agencies just kind of operated in their own world, and had their own programs going. They did not want anyone else to know it. And the thing that intrigues me is that I always was under the illusion that the purpose of intelligence was to provide policymakers with information upon which to make policies. But if the policymaker does not even know that there are sources of information available, I do not know what in the world good it does anybody except the people who are operating it for their own gratification.”
In short, Huston wanted to centralize constitutional violations in the President’s office, where these violations had been committed independently and without presidential authorization up until that point. The Church Committee concluded of the Huston Plan that: “Some provisions of the plan were clearly unconstitutional; others violated Federal statutes…. Five days after the President approved the plan, he revoked it at the insistence of the FBI Director and the Attorney General – to the dismay of those CIA, NSA, and FBI representatives who had helped Huston develop it.” And the Church Committee stressed that “the Huston plan itself was only an episode in the lawlessness which preceded and followed its brief existence.” Nobody else came forward to document the lawless attack on the Constitution publicly. And the committee also found with regard to the Huston Plan that “even though the President revoked his approval of the Huston plan, the intelligence agencies paid no heed to the revocation. Instead, they continued the very practices for which they had sought presidential authority, expanding some of them and reinstating others which had been abolished years before.” This was part of what Church labeled a “continuous effort by the intelligence agencies to secure the sanction of higher authority for expanded surveillance at home and abroad.”
After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Congress unwittingly gave the legislative seal of approval on the 21st century version of the Huston Plan. The Huston Plan also anticipated the formation of the National Director of Intelligence, calling for “A permanent committee consisting of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA and the military counterintelligence agencies should be appointed to proved evaluations of domestic intelligence, prepare periodic domestic intelligence estimates, and carry out the other objectives specified in this report.”
But the Huston Plan, along with the ad hoc attacks on the Constitution, went awry in the wake of the Church/Pike hearings. Representative Otis Pike (D-N.Y.) ran his committee with an antagonistic approach toward the intelligence agencies, and ran up against overwhelming bureaucratic “Deep State” resistance. He was never able to get a report of his investigations declassified to the public because he could never get consent from the executive branch to declassify the information (a key flaw in the law that unreasonably favored – and continues today to favor – executive branch Deep State secrecy). Eventually a committee staffer leaked one of the Pike Committee reports to New York City’s Village Voice newspaper.
Senator Church took a more cooperative approach to his hearings and was able to get several reports published in declassified form, and conducted several open hearings for public scrutiny. Consequently, historians generally conclude that the Church Committee was more successful because of its public results. But the reality is probably more complicated; Pike played the “bad cop” in the legislative good cop/bad cop investigative team. It’s likely that the legislative pressure generated from the contentious House Intelligence Committee hearings forced intelligence officials to cooperate with more friendly Senate Intelligence Committee negotiators in order to avoid what would have likely been more severe legislative restrictions that would have been the inevitable result had they further stonewalled congressional investigators from both chambers.
The legacy of the Church and Pike Committees was enactment of clear restrictions on intelligence agencies that remained largely in force for more than a generation until passage of the USA Patriot Act, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. For example, Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978, which required a warrant for any surveillance that could involve incidental spying on Americans when foreigners are targeted for surveillance. And President Ford signed Executive Order 11905 banning the use of assassination as a foreign policy tool in 1976.
Stonewalling legislative oversight
A key tactic of intelligence Deep State bureaucrats to maintain their power is to declare everything a “state secret” and engage in obstructionism whenever any information is requested by legislative branch investigators who are charged with oversight of the national security state apparatus. Leashing the bureaucratic Deep State begins with genuine transparency and meaningful legislative oversight.
Both the Church and Pike committees noted the tendency of intelligence agencies to declare everything a state secret. After a lower-level State Department employee in the Ford administration’s Cyprus office was silenced before the committee under the excuse of “executive privilege,” Pike sarcastically wrote that “The authority invoked by the Secretary of State was neither ‘classification’ nor ‘executive privilege,’ but a new doctrine that can best be characterized as ‘secretarial privilege.’” The leaked Pike Committee report cited Pike concluding that:
“Those who argue for secrecy do not mention the Constitution. They do not mention taxpayers. Instead, they talk of rather obscure understandings the Russians might derive about some specific operation, even if all the Russians knew was a single dollar total which would be in the billions of dollars and would cover dozens of diverse agencies. How the Russians would do this is not clear. The Committee asked, but there was no real answer. What is clear is that the Russians probably already have a detailed account of our intelligence spending, far more than just the budget total. In all likelihood, the only people who care to know and do not know these costs today are American taxpayers.”
Indeed, the phrase “executive privilege” appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution, though the Congress is given plenary power to require information from the executive branch. In fact, the Constitution requires the President to volunteer that information up to the legislature under Article II, Section 3: “He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union.” Instead, intelligence agencies have specialized in foot-dragging even under threat of lawsuits. “When legal proceedings were not in the offing, the access experience was frequently one of foot-dragging, stonewalling, and careful deception,” Otis Pike complained in the Pike Committee Report, as published in the Village Voice on Feb. 23, 1976. “If this Committee’s recent experience is any test, intelligence agencies that are to be controlled by Congressional lawmaking are, today, beyond the lawmaker’s scrutiny.” What Pike warned about in the 1970s is a reality today, at least in part, as evidenced by then-Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein’s complaints on March 11, 2014 that:
“In May of 2010, the committee staff noticed that [certain] documents that had been provided for the committee’s review were no longer accessible. Staff approached the CIA personnel at the offsite location, who initially denied that documents had been removed. CIA personnel then blamed information technology personnel, who were almost all contractors, for removing the documents themselves without direction or authority. And then the CIA stated that the removal of the documents was ordered by the White House. When the committee approached the White House, the White House denied giving the CIA any such order.
“After a series of meetings, I learned that on two occasions, CIA personnel electronically removed committee access to CIA documents after providing them to the committee. This included roughly 870 documents or pages of documents that were removed in February 2010, and secondly roughly another 50 were removed in mid-May 2010.”
CIA officials – all the way up to Director John O. Brennan – initially denied CIA officers had maliciously hacked into the Senate’s computers, and later acknowledged the hacking and deletion of files took place. No one was ever disciplined for this serious separation-of-powers offense, or for the very public lies denying the offense took place. This is because they were doing what the Deep State leaders wanted.
But America had been down that road long before Feinstein, if not quite as blatantly. Pike complained in his leaked report that “On September 12, 1975, the President, or someone using his name, cut off the Committee from all classified information. As if that were not enough, his action was accompanied by a demand that we immediately turn over all classified materials from our own internal files.” Assistant Attorney-General, Civil Division Rex E. Lee, the author of the memorandum, testified to the committee that “the President’s responsibilities for the national security and foreign relations of the United States leave him no alternative but to request the immediate return of all classified materials heretofore provided by any department or agency of the executive branch and direct all departments to decline to provide the Select Committee with classified materials, including testimony and interviews which disclose such materials, until the Committee satisfactorily alters its position.” Lee later admitted he hadn’t even troubled himself to read the committee’s position before penning the letter.
Pike explained that “If this Committee could not have received testimony from CIA officers or FBI agents about advice or options they presented to senior officials, it would have had no choice but to shut down. Oversight would be dead.” But, of course, that was the intent behind intelligence bureaucratic foot-dragging from the beginning.
Pike complained that “the words [of the CIA and other intelligence agencies] were always words of cooperation; the reality was delay, refusal, missing information, asserted privileges, and on and on.” So it is today, as CIA Director John O. Brennan told the Council on Foreign Relations (an interventionist New York City think-tank from whose tiny 3,000-fold membership has been drawn virtually every CIA Director since its 1947 founding) on March 11, 2014 that the “CIA has tried to work as collaboratively as possible with the Committee on its report. We will continue to do so, and I have talked extensively to Chairman Feinstein and Vice Chairman Chambliss about the report and the way forward.” Brennan said this, even as his lie denying CIA hacking into Senate computers was ongoing.
Another means of obstruction used by intelligence committees has been to formulate internal jargon as an excuse to avoid presenting information demanded by congressional subpoenas. Pike explained that:
“Perhaps the most difficult question in developing information about intelligence activities is knowing the right question to ask. As an illustration, Committee staff obtained the names of CIA proprietaries, after lengthy negotiations. Some time later, staff members noticed that certain names were not on the list. The explanation was that those were ‘fronts,’ and we had not asked for fronts; Nor was this sort of semantic contest confined to staff inquiries. In one public hearing, Congressman Stanton and the FBI’s Raymond Wannall consumed more than five minutes drawing distinctions among ‘surreptitious entry,’ ‘burglary,’ and ‘illegal break-in.’…
“Astonishingly, while the Committee was in the midst of objecting to this past project, CIA was obtaining approval for re-instituting the same type of project in the same country. The CIA never told the Committee about this renewal. When newspapers revealed the new project, Committee staff asked the CIA why it had not been told. The response was ‘You didn’t ask the right question.’”
This, of course, is the same tactic used today. Congressman Justin Amash (R-Mich.), an heroic critic of NSA warrantless surveillance, has complained of NSA briefings:
“What you hear from the intelligence committees, from the chairmen of the intelligence committees, is that members can come to classified briefings and they can ask whatever questions they want. But if you’ve actually been to one of these classified briefings – which none of you have, but I have – what you discover is that it’s just a game of 20 questions.
“You ask a question and if you don’t ask it exactly the right way you don’t get the right answer. So if you use the wrong pronoun, or if you talk about one agency but actually another agency is doing it, they won’t tell you. They’ll just tell you, no that’s not happening. They don’t correct you and say here’s what is happening.
“So you actually have to go from meeting to meeting, to hearing to hearing, asking questions — sometimes ridiculous questions — just to get an answer. So this idea that you can just ask, just come into a classified briefing and ask questions and get answers is ridiculous.
“If the government – in an extreme hypothetical, let’s say they had a base on the moon. If I don’t know that there’s a base on the moon, I’m not going to go into the briefing and say you have a moonbase. Right? [Audience laughs.] If they have a talking bear or something, I’m not going to say, ‘You guys, you didn’t engineer the talking bear.’
“You’re not going to ask questions about things you don’t know about.”
Obstructionism of congressional investigators in the 1970s went to extreme lengths. State Department personnel were told on the personal orders of Henry Kissinger not to discuss either classified information or the decision-making process with committee members – not even in executive session – and Kissinger personally defied subpoenas issued by the committee, and nearly faced a contempt of Congress indictment on that basis.
Intelligence infiltration of media and Congress
Kissinger and his friends in the intelligence community then engaged in a public smear campaign against the Pike Committee, accusing it of “McCarthyism,” and a compliant mainstream press – liberally strewn with “former” CIA and intelligence officials – jumped in to help. The Pike Committee report noted that “Facts seemed to make no difference. Within days of the innuendo being raised by Dr. Kissinger and his reply, newspaper columns and editorials were reporting their charges of McCarthyism.”
Intelligence agencies had melded with mass media in an attempt to maximize agency influence even in the 1970s. The Pike Committee report noted that “Full-time correspondents for major U.S. publications have worked concurrently for CIA, passing along information received in the normal course of their regular jobs and even, on occasion, traveling to otherwise non-newsworthy areas to acquire data.” The CIA issued guidelines to its employees in the wake of the Church/Pike hearings that they should not pose as members of the media, but it’s unclear this restriction is still in place.
And networking with members of Congress on how to defeat legislative oversight was also on the agenda. The Pike Committee report actually contained an internal CIA memorandum where Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.) was advising the CIA on how to escape scrutiny from the Church Committee. Of course, CIA corruption of members of Congress is a serious breach of separation-of-powers. If Americans think that the far-larger intelligence agencies of today aren’t doing the exact same thing, but on a much more massive and subtle scale, they’re kidding themselves. The “intelligence community” has learned from its mistakes of the Church/Pike era, and has actively courted members of Congress with their sweet lies in order to head-off the same kind of restrictive legislation.
How to get out of the mess that we are in
The difference between the Church and Pike committee era and the congressional oversight committees today is that today’s committees are staffed by congressmen who are far more compliant with the Deep State, as Pike mentioned in this part of his hearings:
“Chairman Pike: If it is your position that we may never disclose information, how can we carry out our responsibilities?
“Mr. Lee: The same way, Mr. Chairman, that for decades other committees of Congress….
“Chairman Pike: That is exactly what is wrong, Mr. Lee. For decades other committees of Congress have not done their job, and you have loved it in the executive branch. You tell us that Congress has been advised of this. What does that mean? It means the executive branch comes up and whispers in one friendly congressman’s ear, and that is exactly what you want to continue, and that is exactly what I think has led us into the mess we are in.”
After the Church/Pike hearings, which were regarded as disastrous to the Deep State functionaries, more compliant members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees were courted. Thus, it’s no surprise that House Select Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) led floor debate against ending the unconstitutional warrantless metadata program in the House of Representatives in 2013. As supervision – if it can be called that – has loosened, intelligence officials have become emboldened, as evidenced by the Feinstein/Senate computer hacking debacle that nevertheless involved no repercussions against intelligence agencies or officials.
Moreover, the Church and Pike Committees give additional insights into how lawlessness at the federal level trickles down to lawlessness at the state and local level. Former Houston Police Department narcotics officer Anthony Zavala “recounted that wiretapping had become ‘second nature to us all,’ and ‘that it was all discussed freely, and that everyone knew it was going on.’” And state and local police across the nation today use “stingray” aircraft to surveil citizens, also without warrants or probable cause. As the federal government ignores constitutional restraints, other branches and levels of government are also empowered to violate the privacy of Americans.
America’s Felix Dzerzhinsky, former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden, began his long defense of the American gulag archipelago of secret CIA prisons and unlimited NSA/CIA surveillance in 2013 by claiming of Edward Snowden’s revelations represented “undeniable operational effect of informing adversaries of American intelligence’s tactics, techniques and procedures.” In short, he claims that revealing intelligence publicly empowers America’s enemies.
But, of course, if information empowers the enemies, information also empowers citizens. This was something that the father of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison, noted: “A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
Other early Americans also pointed out the truism that knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and that government officials often seek to shield themselves from supervision by the public, to the disaster of the public. Edward Livingston wrote in his 1823 report on the Louisiana criminal code that: “No nation ever yet found any inconvenience from too close an inspection into the conduct of its officers, but many have been brought to ruin and reduced to slavery by suffering gradual impositions and abuses which were imperceptible, only because the means to publicity had not been secured.”
The question is: Shall the government empower citizens and enemies alike, or trust government officials alone with such information? All people familiar with world history know that the greatest threats to large and powerful nations like the United States come from their own government, insulated from public control, and not from external threats.
That means restraints upon intelligence agencies is essential to Americans enjoying continued freedoms in the future (full abolition of the intelligence apparatus is not politically practical), and it will only happen through a coordinated coalition effort by liberty advocates with the political left, along with several specific reforms. The basic rules of winning reform include:
1. Don’t follow traditional party politics. As a rule, Republicans are not going to be the friends of reform of intelligence agencies and general left-right and Republican-Democrat political distinctions don’t matter. In the 1970s, the biggest obstacles to reform were “conservative” Senators Barry Goldwater of Arizona and John Tower of Texas. But liberal Republican Jacob Javits was on the right side of the issue. In the 21st century, the lines will be even more blurred, with many libertarian-leaning and some Tea Party Republicans being advocates of reform. Essentially, the core leaders of the reform movement will be the Liberty and Progressive caucuses of both houses, with some exceptions in each.
2. Control over the congressional intelligence committees is key.
Any reform of the surveillance state necessarily involves replacing the members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees who have proven to be loyal sycophants of the Deep State intelligence bureaucracy. This involves targeting those congressmen in their districts at election times, and marginalizing them – to the extent possible – in party caucuses.
3. The “Deep State” will disclose nothing voluntarily.
Everything is a “vital” secret to the surveillance state, even if the people labeling intelligence documents as “vital” don’t know the definition of the word “vital.” Thus, documents need to be more readily declassified, and not just by courageous whistleblowers and leakers outside of the formal legal process.
Here’s how:
4. Congressional committees need to have the legal power to declassify executive branch documents.
The executive branch monopoly on the classification of information is a key source of its power, and it needs to end. Knowledge is power, and the legislative branch will never again be the equal of the executive branch if it does not also have the power to declassify documents. At a minimum, a law should be enacted to give the Intelligence Committees of both houses of Congress the power to declassify executive branch documents by majority vote. Additionally, each chamber should have the power to declassify documents by majority floor vote, independent of each other chamber.
In this quest to get public information, the progressive left will occasionally be the friend of liberty. During the Church Committee hearings Sen. Walter Mondale (later the Democratic nominee for President) noted in testimony on declassifying Operation SHAMROCK that “I just wanted to comment briefly on what I thought I heard to be the argument, that somehow the classification and determination of the executive department should govern how this committee decides to release or not to release information to the public. I do not think we can accept that definition for a moment. If we do, I think we are no longer a coequal branch of Government.” And “conservative” Republican John Tower of Texas responded: “Yes, there is a right of the people to know, but that must be balanced against the fact that when these matters are made public, they are available also to our enemies.” Tower, a sell-out to the surveillance state, explained: “Public inquiry on NSA, I believe, serves no legitimate legislative purpose, while exposing this vital element of our intelligence capability to unnecessary risk, a risk acknowledged in the chairman’s own opening statement.”
5. The “Deep State” will fight back, and use dirty tactics.
Henry Kissinger’s character assassination tactics against the Democrats who then controlled congressional intelligence committees stand as a warning that the Deep State will stop at nothing to maintain its power. But it’s also important to keep in mind that Kissinger’s attempts, although abetted by legislators like Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, did not succeed in the 1970s. If these techniques could be overcome and exposed in the 1970s, the same could happen in the 21st century.
6. Restore the FISA Rule and end the ex parte nature of warrant requests.
For libertarians and classical liberals, this is a weak standard. The FISA law [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978] allowed for warrants after the fact (up to 60 days after the surveillance took place), and in practice very few surveillance requests were refused by compliant judges who had been appointed by the executive branch. But it’s an important, albeit minimalist, first step. The FISA standard violated the letter of the Fourth amendment, but it was a quasi-sincere effort to maintain a minimum protection of American citizens from Deep State overreach.
In addition, FISA court applications have been exclusively ex parte proceedings, which explains the reason more than 99 percent of requests have been approved by FISA judges. Congress should pass a law requiring appointment of an attorney to argue against each request on constitutional and practical grounds.
7. Don’t count on those charged with enforcing the law to actually apply the plain meaning of the U.S. Constitution to limit the Deep State.
There will be no silver bullet in this war to de-fang the surveillance state, such as a magical unicorn in the form of a Supreme Court who would actually rule on the plain text of the Fourth Amendment. The amendment defines a “reasonable” search as one which contains (1) a warrant by a judge, (2) signed under oath, (3) with “probable cause” evidence and (4) particularity, describing what you’re looking for and where you expect to find it. The federal court system, including the Supreme Court, will not enforce the plain text of the amendment.
Even the proponents of quasi-reform such as Ford Administration Attorney-General Edward Levi, claimed in testimony before the Church Committee “Having attempted to provide something of a factual base for our discussion, I turn now to the Fourth Amendment. Let me say at once, however, that while the Fourth Amendment can be a most important guide to values and procedures, it does not mandate automatic solutions.” To this, one might have replied: “Yes, Mr. Attorney-General, it does. Let me read the text of the amendment back to you.” Yet even Levi issued guidelines prohibited surveillance of persons or groups not under investigation for crimes, a sensible set of guidelines roundly condemned by the neo-cons of the 1970s.
Levi’s counter-factual claim about the infinite flexibility of the Fourth Amendment (it was actually written to be inflexible) was carried out in a far more malignant form when Alberto Gonzales took over as Attorney General during the Bush administration.
Senator Church warned that:
“If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”
America has already begun descending into that abyss Senator Church described. But there is still some time to return from that abyss, if the liberty movement partners with the progressive movement to check the Deep State by taking control over the legislative branch again, as it did in the 1970s.
Thomas R. Eddlem is a freelance writer who has been published in more than 20 periodicals. He is the author of Primary Source American History, and wrote the introduction to the forthcoming book by William Norman Grigg No Quarter: The Ravings of William Norman Grigg.
