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not up to par. In other words, I am unwell, and as a result I do not drink.

Please mark well what I have just done - I have reversed the cause-effect conclusion

that you had come to. You concluded that not drinking causes deteriorated health, but

what I am proposing to you at the moment is that deteriorated health can cause not

drinking. The insight that I offer you is that when we observe a correlation, we don't

know what caused what, and one of the possibilities to be considered is that the causal

direction may be the opposite of our first impression, that a situation in which we

first conjectured that A causes B may prove upon more thoughtful examination to be a

situation in which B really causes A. In short, it may be the case that people who are

destined not to live as long as others tend to find themselves unable to drink alcohol.

That's all that the French Paradox may have discovered, and that's not a very good

reason for anybody to follow your recommendation to go out and start drinking.

Common sense alone invalidates The French Paradox conclusion. In other contexts, a

correlation being misinterpreted to mean that drinking promotes either health or

longevity will be obviously laughable. For example, a researcher who observes that

hospitalized patients don't drink will not conclude that teetotalling causes

hospitalization. Or, a researcher who visits death row and discovers that the inmates

don't drink and do have short life expectancies will not conclude that teetotalling

shortens life. In such examples, anyone with a modicum of common sense instantly

recognizes that a correlation between zero wine intake and either poor health or short

life does not mean that zero wine intake causes either poor health or short life. All

that is required to recognize the invalidity of your conclusion in The French Paradox is

to apply this same common sense to an only slightly more subtle case.

Are there not other studies? Undoubtedly there exist in the literature a large number of

studies that have some less direct bearing on the question that we are discussing, and

many of these studies will be genuine experiments which do permit cause effect

conclusions. I am thinking in particular of experiments that may demonstrate that

ingredients found either in grapes or in wine have a certain physiological effect. With

respect to such other studies, I make the following observations: (1) Your chief

conclusion was based not on such experiments, but on one or more correlational studies.

(2) An experiment in which subjects ingest an ingredient of grapes or of wine may

witness a certain effect, even while actually eating grapes or drinking wine produce a

different or an opposite effect. This could happen because in whole grapes or in real

wine, the ingredient with the beneficial effect could be offset by some other ingredient

which has a harmful effect, as by pesticides or nitrates that might be found in wine, or by the alcohol itself in wine. Unless an experiment actually has subjects drinking

wine, no conclusions concerning drinking wine are possible. (3) An experiment

demonstrating a physiological effect of something ingested is likely to be of short

duration, and is not likely to measure the effect on longevity. However, demonstrating

a physiological effect that appears to be beneficial (say a heightened level of HDL, as

mentioned by Kim Marcus above) is not the same as demonstrating increased longevity,

since the relation between the observed effect and longevity is speculative.

In short, the only research that can prove that prolonged drinking of three to five

glasses of wine per day can extend life is the non-feasible experiment that we have

already discussed above in which subjects are required to drink different amounts of

wine over an extended period of time, and the effects on longevity noted.

The Harm That You May Have Done.

What the above reasoning leads us to, then, is that you were without justification for

promoting the conclusion that you did - that drinking three to five glasses of wine each

day extends life. Quite possibly, your conclusion had the effect of increasing the

consumption of alcoholic beverages, particularly wine, and possibly, the effects of this

increased consumption have been uniformly bad.

These may be among the damaging effects of your advice. The level of alcohol

consumption that you advocate slows reaction times and interferes with coordination and

impairs judgment, and therefore invites accidents. Certainly no airline pilot would be

permitted to consume a fraction of your recommended daily intake and still be allowed to

fly, and certainly every driver should recognize that he is putting himself at risk

drinking as much as you advocate. We recognize the damage that your advice may have

inflicted when we take into account that except for infants and the aging, accidents are

the leading cause of death.

The level of alcohol consumption that you advocate interferes with, or makes quite

impossible, difficult mental work. Thus, a university student who follows your advice

and has a couple of glasses of wine with his dinner is finished for the day - he might

as well head out to a pub after that, because he will find his calculus homework quite

incomprehensible. A chemistry professor who follows your advice and has a couple of

glasses of wine with his lunch will find himself making mistakes as he tries to lay out

the electron configuration of aluminum for his class - he had better find some simpler

topic to treat in that lecture if he doesn't want to embarrass himself in front of his

students. A lawyer arguing a complex case who follows your advice and has a couple of

glasses of wine with his lunch will find himself losing the thread of his argument in

court - he had better let his junior take over that afternoon if he wants to maintain

his reputation.

The level of alcohol consumption that you advocate may damage health. The level of

alcohol consumption that you advocate possibly saps energy and depletes motivation,

possibly leads to more time spent in small talk and in television viewing, and less in

productive work and creative effort. Undoubtedly, the level of alcohol consumption that

you advocate promotes outright alcoholism. Yours has been a call based on

pseudo-science to abandon sobriety and embrace intoxication - hardly a direction that

American culture needs to be pushed in.

The French Paradox and The Ugly Face of Freedom were equally flawed. And to return to

the comparison of your 23Oct94 broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom to your 5Nov95

broadcast The French Paradox, I do see a striking parallel. In both cases, you didn't

know what you were talking about, but stepped forward and talked anyway. Given that you

had not studied the subjects to which you addressed yourself, given that you had not

thought about them, given that you were capable of nothing better than passing along the

most superficial, man-in-the-street, off-the-top-of-my-head conclusions, the truly

remarkable thing is that you would have the arrogance to think yourself worthy of

standing up in front of tens of millions of people and telling them what was your

opinion. Yet that is what you did, and in each case, you got it wrong. Your many

conclusions in these two broadcasts ranged from totally opposite to the truth to totally

unsupported by the evidence. The Ugly Face of Freedom for which you will always be

remembered in the Ukrainian community was wrong and destructive. The French Paradox

which judging from its Internet prominence appears to be your best-remembered broadcast

among your total audience - was also wrong, and also destructive.

A word concerning self-help. If you yourself subscribe to the prescription of drinking

three to five glasses of wine each day, then I would recommend that you attempt to break

yourself of the habit, and substitute for the many hours of inebriation thus avoided

some sober study. Had you substituted for many hours of inebriation the sober reading

of history, you might have spared yourself the fiasco of The Ugly Face of Freedom. Had

you substituted for many hours of inebriation the sober study of scientific method, you

might have spared yourself the fiasco of The French Paradox. Perhaps you have no more

than to look at these two pratfalls in your own career to see how damaging is the effect

of making a habit of indulging in alcohol.

Disclosure would be a step toward restoring professional credibility. As enthusiasm for

your French Paradox broadcasts seems to have its source in the wine industry, and as

your integrity has been brought into question on the matter of The Ugly Face of Freedom,

I wonder if your professional standing would not be enhanced by your assuring 60 Minutes

viewers that you have received no benefits from the wine industry in gratitude for the

increased sales that your French Paradox broadcasts have brought it. The absence of

such an assurance will invite some 60 Minutes viewers to construe your French Paradox

broadcasts more as infomercials than as investigative reporting.

Lubomyr Prytulak

cc: Ed Bradley, Jeffrey Fager, Don Hewitt, Steve Kroft, Andy Rooney, Lesley Stahl, Mike

Wallace.

HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE SAFER 1553 hits since 26Apr99

Morley Safer Letter 8 26Apr99 One out of 40 escaped shooting

It looks very much, Mr. Safer, as if on your 60 Minutes broadcast of 23Oct94, The Ugly

Face of Freedom, your chief witness testifying to Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis

was himself a war criminal of substantial proportions, a former Gestapo agent with the

blood of many on his hands, perhaps much of it Jewish blood.

April 26, 1999

Morley Safer

60 Minutes, CBS Television

51 W 52nd Street

New York, NY

USA 10019

Morley Safer:

I bring to your attention the following excerpt from an article by L. A. Ruvinsky

published in the Ukrainian Historical Journal in 1985:

After the end of the Second World War, the former head of the Lviv

Gestapo, P. Krause, replying to a question put by the writer V. P.

Bieliaev, testified: "If on our side, in the Gestapo, there had not

worked several agents from among the Zionists, we would never have been

able to capture and destroy such a large number of Jews, who were

living under false documents and assumed names." For example, in July

1941, Zionist Simon Wiesenthal, together with 39 other representatives

of the Lviv intelligentsia, found himself in prison. Somehow, as a

result of a "mysterious confluence of circumstances" all the arrested

except for himself were shot, and he was freed. It is not surprising

that after this, this Zionist provocateur became a regular Nazi agent.

Polish journalists have established this as an indisputable fact. That

is why the Hitlerites did not throw Wiesenthal into prison, which he

frequently confirms, but rather sent him there to organize subsequent

provocations. Evidently he was not lying when he said that he passed

through 5 Nazi prisons and 12 prison camps. In any case, it is not

difficult to imagine how many innocent victims are on the conscience of

this impenitent Zionist provocateur. It is such loathsome services for