A bitter quarrel over an embattled exile's testimony
Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number (TIME, June 15) is a riveting tale of a man who underwent unspeakable torture and survived. In horrifying detail, exiled Argentine Publisher Jacobo Timerman, 58, details the sadism, brutality and anti-Semitic abuse he suffered during 30 months of imprisonment in Argentina between 1977 and 1979. His recently published book is also a devastating indictment of Argentina's junta, which the Council on Hemispheric Affairs has called the most flagrant violator of human rights in Latin America.
Initial reviews of Timerman's memoir were generally favorable. Now, however, an increasingly acrimonious quarrel has erupted over Timerman's testimony, involving prominent U.S. intellectuals and leaders of both the Argentine and American Jewish communities. In part, the arguments have arisen because of Timerman's political impact. On U.S. television, he has criticized President Reagan's low-key human rights policy and the Administration's efforts to improve relations with Argentina's military dictatorship. Last month Timerman was a silent but nonetheless potent presence at Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Reagan's nomination of Ernest W. Lefever as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. Timerman, who has become an Israeli citizen, was not invited to testify at the confirmation hearings, but he had evidently become a symbol of liberal opposition to Lefever's view that human rights questions should not interfere with U.S. alliances. When Committee Chairman Charles Percy introduced Timerman at the hearings, the applause was loud and demonstrative. Democratic Congressman Richard Ottinger of New York even wrote Timerman that if the committee rejected the Lefever nomination it would be "clearly attributable to your efforts."
The first resounding volleys against Timerman were fired by conservative intellectuals who also happen to be supporters of Lefever. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, the neoconservative political scientist Irving Kristol characterized Timerman as a "Solzhenitsyn of the left" whose liberal partisans prefer to castigate friendly "authoritarian" regimes like Argentina's rather than hostile "totalitarian" governments like the Soviet Union's. Kristol also questioned Timerman's assertion that he had been imprisoned and tortured primarily because he was a Jew and a Zionist. According to Kristol, the real cause was Timerman's association with David Graiver, a mysterious Argentine financier who allegedly looted two U.S. banks of some $40 million while serving as a bagman for the Montoneros, Argentina's leftist guerrillas. Kristol expressed astonishment that Timerman's book makes no mention of Graiver, who had been part owner of La Opinion, the newspaper published and edited by Timerman before his arrest. Still, Kristol conceded that there was "no evidence" that Timerman had known about Graiver's alleged misdeeds.