TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/87/87capcon.6

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 6KB | 115 lines

                J+                                                            ╚November 23, 1987

IRAN-CONTRA

Where the Buck Finally Stops


The Iran-contra committees lay the blame on the President


The President's responsibility is firmly fixed in the
Constitution: "He shall take care that the laws be faithfully
executed."  In a stinging 450-page report certain to trigger
heated controversy, a majority of the congressional Iran-contra
committees this week will charge that Ronald Reagan failed to
fulfill that solemn obligation. Says Warren Rudman, the feisty
New Hampshire Senator who was one of three Republicans to join
the majority:  "The report deals with the responsibilities
of the presidency, and I think it's fair."

During the hearings on the sordid Iranian and contra deals this
summer, members of the committees were able to work together in
unusual bipartisan harmony. But reaching a consensus on their
final report was more difficult:  all six Republican House
members and two of the five Republican Senators refused to sign
the majority report because they thought it too tough on Reagan
and his men. They will instead issue a 150-page dissent.

The majority report deals with Reagan far more harshly than the
Tower commission did last February; it blamed Reagan's lax
"management style" for the scandals. The congressional report
concludes that Reagan probably knew more than he has admitted
about the arms sales and contra-funding efforts; if not, he is
to be equally faulted. Without flatly rejecting Reagan's
repeated assertions that he knew nothing of the diversion of
Iranian profits to the contras, the majority report says that
issue is unresolved. Thus it indirectly questions the
credibility of former National Security Adviser John Poindexter,
who swore that he approved the diversion and intentionally did
not inform the President.

The report does not cite specific ways in which Reagan failed
to uphold the law. But it raps him for allowing the National
Security Council rather than the CIA to conduct covert
operations and then failing to monitor the activity closely to
see that it was kept within the boundaries of the law. NSC
staff members were "out of control," the report says, with
Oliver North and Poindexter "privatizing" foreign policy and
allowing retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord and his
business partner, Albert Hakim, to handle American negotiations
with Iran and control huge sums of money from the transactions.

The original purpose of the Iran deals, the report says, was to
trade arms for hostages. But the arms flow continued even
though Iran did not release the American hostages. Why?  The
committee concludes that North and others came to believe the
hefty arms-sale profits could serve as an ongoing source of
funding for the contras.

Although earlier drafts of the majority report accused the
Administration of a cover-up, that term is not included in the
final version. However, the report details the bumbled
investigation by Attorney General Edwin Meese, which allowed
North and his secretary, Fawn Hall, time to destroy documents.
It criticizes efforts by North, Robert McFarlane and others to
falsify testimony that former CIA Director William Casey was to
deliver to Congress. Says a staffer:  "Even if it doesn't say
'cover-up,' the majority report makes clear that people were
trying to keep other people from knowing what had been going
on."  The report does note that the White House cooperated with
the congressional investigation, but seven House Democrats plan
to issue a separate addendum saying they disagree with this
assertion.

The three Senate Republicans who signed the majority report are
Rudman, Maine's coolly independent William Cohen and Virginia's
Paul Trible, whose unrelenting pursuits of the arms-money trail
surprised Administration loyalists. But other Republicans felt
the final product was, in Utah Senator Orrin Hatch's words, "too
political." Claims Henry Hyde, the fiercely partisan Illinois
Congressman:  "The majority report is polemical in the extreme.
It is impossible to sign."  He argues that the report ignores
what he believes was the true intent of the arms deals:  to seek
better relations with Iran. The majority report, in fact, cites
various pieces of evidence to refute this theory, most notably
Reagan's original 1985 "finding" (it was destroyed by
Poindexter, but a copy was retained in CIA files) that describes
a clear arms-for-hostages rational for dealing with Iran.

Cohen concedes that in the weeks of hauling and tugging by the
two committees' 26 members, much that was political got into the
report. "Some House Democrats tried to put everything in the
worst possible light."  He told them, "You can make a point
without pulverizing it." After dozens of drafts and revisions,
a compromise was reached that was able to attract the three
Republican Senators.

Cohen credits the committee with having traced the arms-sales
money, something neither the Tower commission nor the Senate
intelligence committee was able to do. He notes that the
committee discovered the "off-the-shelf" covert operations
directed by North and reveled the extent of Administration
efforts to fund the contras after Congress had refused further
aid.

The committees could not answer all questions about the
Iran-contra affair. Testimony of different witnesses is
contradictory. Documents were destroyed. Former CIA Director
Casey died before he could be interrogated. Poindexter used
variations of "I cannot recall" 184 times during his five days
of testimony. Israeli witnesses were prohibited by their
government from testifying. Nevertheless, the committees'
majority report is clear on the most central point:  the
President's protestations of ignorance do not absolve him from
responsibility for what went on at his behest and in his name.

By Hays Gorey/Washington