bdh3
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Irangate -or- Contragate pt. II
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Oct 31 07:08 UTC 2000 |
October 31, 2000
Top Hill Republicans
reject Albright offer
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The House speaker and Senate majority
leader yesterday rejected an offer from
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright for
limited access to classified government
documents concerning a secret arms deal
between Vice President Al Gore and his
Russian counterpart.
Mrs. Albright offered
to let congressional
leaders view — but not
copy — some of the
documents as part of a
congressional
investigation into a 1995
pact between Mr. Gore
and Viktor Chernomyrdin,
the Russian prime
minister.
"We categorically
reject your proposal to
allow solely the four
leaders of the House and Senate to read, but
not retain, a small fraction of the requested
documents," Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of
Illinois and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott
of Mississippi said in a letter sent yesterday.
Without the documents, the Republican
leaders said, Congress cannot properly
investigate the matter.
"The elected representatives of the
American people are certainly entitled to the
requested documents in order to assess the
extent of damage inflicted on America's
credibility and security interests by the vice
president's ill-conceived and
counterproductive foray into the world of
secret diplomacy.
"Madame Secretary, administration
stonewalling and obstructionism of legitimate
requests for relevant documents must stop,"
they wrote.
A group of 10 senators, including senior
members and leaders, had imposed a deadline
of noon yesterday for the documents,
threatening to subpoena them if they were not
produced.
A spokesman for the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee said yesterday that
senators were still discussing whether to issue
subpoenas. "This is totally unacceptable,"
Marc Thiessen, the spokesman, said of Mrs.
Albright's latest offer.
The secret deal between Mr. Gore and Mr.
Chernomyrdin was intended to halt Russian
conventional arms sales to Iran and in
exchange, the United State agreed not to
impose penalties under U.S. nonproliferation
laws.
Lawmakers are also investigating a second
document, a 1995 letter from Mr.
Chernomyrdin to Mr. Gore that outlines
Russia's nuclear transfers to Iran and calls on
the vice president to keep the arrangement
secret from Congress. The documents were
first disclosed by The Washington Times and
the New York Times.
At closed House and Senate hearings last
week, State Department officials refused to
provide the documents or discuss their
contents, angering members and prompting
threats to subpoena the material.
The Clinton administration is refusing to
provide the documents and has dismissed
lawmakers' requests for copies of the
documents and detailed explanations of their
contents as election-year politics.
House and Senate members have said the
secret dealings with Russia appear to violate
U.S. laws, including legislation on
conventional arms sales to Iran, nuclear
transfers to Iran and laws governing the
submission of agreements to Congress.
"We have offered to provide the leadership
of the Senate with access to the key documents
at their convenience, and we'll see how that
materializes," State Department spokesman
Richard Boucher told reporters.
Mr. Boucher said because the matters
involve sensitive diplomacy, the department is
insisting on being "exceedingly careful" about
releasing the information to Congress.
He said publicizing the documents could
undermine U.S. efforts to curb the spread of
nuclear weapons.
"We have an obligation to sustain a policy
that has improved the national security of the
United States over the last six years by
limiting the number and quality of weapons
that are gone to Iran," Mr. Boucher said. "We
are trying to meet the congressional requests in
a manner that doesn't simultaneously destroy
our policy, which would not be in our national
interest."
Mr. Hastert and Mr. Lott said in their letter
that "it is grossly inaccurate and misleading to
assert, as your letter does, that 'As a result [of
the secret agreements], the security of U.S.
forces and those of our allies in the region has
been substantially enhanced.' "
"In fact the record of the past eight years
demonstrates a dramatic increase in the threat
posed to U.S. military forces and interests, and
those of our friends and allies in the Middle
East, as a result of Iran's burgeoning nuclear,
missile, and conventional weapons
capabilities — capabilities enhanced
primarily by Russian arms sales made in spirit
of the Gore-Chernomyrdin agreements."
The leaders requested that the documents
be furnished to the House and Senate oversight
committees "immediately."
Portions of the 1995 Gore-Chernomyrdin
agreement, called an "aide memoire," were
published by The Washington Times. A
second classified document, a letter from Mrs.
Albright to the Russian foreign minister sent in
January, also was published by The Times. In
it, Mrs. Albright states that the 1995 aide
memoire kept the United States from imposing
sanctions on Russian as required by U.S. law.
Several senators have said the documents
show the Clinton administration appears to
violate the law.
Numerous U.S. intelligence reports have
shown that Russia is continuing to sell
conventional and nuclear technology and
goods to Iran despite the secret agreements
with the United States.
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There was 'no controlling legal authority'...?
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