Democrat Foreign Policy Scandals
Brock, David
David Brock DEMOCRAT FOREIGN POLICY SCANDALS They involve congressmen with peculiar sympathies for Communist causes. F orget, for a moment, that riveting Iran-contra inquisition. Another...
...Delegate Walter Fauntroy and Lynn Cutler, vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee...
...One Network letter signed by Schroeder said, "If you can afford a gift of $200 or more and want a tax deduction, please join me as a sponsorof the Nicaraguan Network . . ." But according to IRS records, the Nicaraguan Network has never been granted tax-exempt status...
...The cable also noted that a fundraising request for another "FMLN support activity," the U.S...
...Conyers, Dellums, and Dymally hosted a Washington reception for the group in July 1986...
...The number of globetrotting, self-appointed congressional "ambassadors" has been on the rise in recent years, and the net effect of their missions is almost always detrimental to U.S...
...These groups regularly overlook the widespread abuses of the Communist regimes in Nicaragua and Cuba...
...Also named as sponsors of the group were Reps...
...The morning after Hasenfus's release, Dodd was on ABC's "Good Morning, America" explaining that Hasenfus was pardoned because "it is the Christmas season" and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega was "humane...
...the Democrats to head the Western Hemisphere subcommittees of the Senate Foreign Relations and the House Foreign Affairs committees after last November's elections...
...The Mobilization was formed in the late 1970s with the help of the Soviet World Peace Council...
...In December, Dodd, whose latest offensive against the Reagan Administration's Elliott Abrams is on the "credibility" issue, was in Managua as the centerpiece of an elaborate Sandinista disinformation campaign...
...The network has sent hundreds of American volunteers to work and possibly fight for the Sandinista government...
...While the other delegation members protested, Wright maintained that Gorbachev had been "misinterpreted...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987...
...What is the legal status of the Nicaraguan Network or Medical Aid for El Salvador or U.S...
...And the subterranean activities of the apologists for Communism will surely continue with impunity, until they ultimately triumph...
...The first is that the Administration has not presented a coherent case in defense of its policies...
...In the Senate, the Sandinista cause has been well served by Senators Harkin and John Kerry, who traveled to Managua shortly after both were elected in 1984...
...Both Dymally and Garcia serve on the House Foreign Affairs Committee...
...Apparently several members of Congress could use a refresher course in history...
...The Washington Times has reported that one former Kerry aide, Ron Rosenblith, wrote a $2,000 personal check to a witness to pay the legal fees of Steven Carr, a Florida mercenary...
...the Boland Amendment trespasses on the President's constitutional prerogatives to act in foreign policy...
...The use of private parties to carry out the high purposes of government makes us the subject of puzzlement and ridicule...
...What is more serious, as chairman of a House panel, Crockett and his staff now have increased access to classified U.S...
...The legislative branch, even before the presidency was wounded by the current round of show trials, was winning the battle...
...Claiborne Pell, the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
...Tom Harkin...
...Telegrams of support for the conference came from Reps...
...tax code and obstruction of justice...
...Newt Gingrich called for a congressional inquiry...
...In 1982, an ethics complaint was lodged against Representative Dellums for allowing Grenada's government—under Marxist Maurice Bishop—to review a draft of Dellums's Armed Services subcommittee report on the Point Salines airfield in Grenada...
...In 1985, Rep...
...Dellums had been assigned to determine the airfield's purpose, military or commercial...
...The Nicaraguan Network and Medical Aid for El Salvador are but two of dozens of private groups raising money for the Sandinistas or the Communist guerrillas in El Salvador...
...Congress does not investigate itself nor allow anyone else to investigate it...
...Other House members, like Sam Gejdenson of Foreign Affairs, Peter Kostmayer, and Bonior, regularly lend their names to reports from groups like the Washington Office on Latin America and the Council for Hemispheric Affairs concerning alleged "human rights" violations by the government of El Salvador and the contras...
...Nor, for that matter, by anyone so empowered...
...In April, House Speaker Jim Wright led a congressional delegation to the Soviet Union, only to be confronted with a suggestion by General Secretary Gorbachev that the United States create separate living areas for blacks to solve its racial problem...
...But that didn't stop Dodd from undermining U.S...
...For this scandal is not a scandal at all in the eyes of the would-be prosecutors in Congress and the media...
...A written endorsement came from Sen...
...of an effort to misinform Congress...
...John Conyers, George Brown, Ronald Dellums, Julian Dixon, Mervyn Dymally, Thomas Foglietta, Robert Garcia, Mickey Leland, Parren Mitchell, Pete Stark, Bruce Vento, and Sen...
...George Crockett, who were installed by David Brock is a writer for Insight magazine...
...In 1982, Rep...
...Finally, why is it legal (even though the Constitution says otherwise) for individual members of Congress to conduct their own foreign policies but illegal for the President to conduct his...
...Kerry's obsessive campaign against the contras often has exceeded the bounds of propriety...
...Solarz says the meeting was meant to be "off the record," but soon after it broke up, the NPA, delighted that Solarz had conferred legitimacy on their movement, spread the word...
...Their current goal is to raise another $100 million to offset U.S...
...This summer's inquisition, playing as scripted, will surely brand 011ie North & Co., the anti-Communists, as scoundrels or worse...
...Dan Mica, to become Dodd's counterpart in the House...
...Dodd wasted no time using his new clout...
...S ome legislators have gotten more personally involved...
...It's at best unwise, at worst illegal...
...In May, the public got its first taste of how the House Western Hemisphere subcommittee will operate under Crockett...
...Christopher Dodd and Rep...
...Perhaps the ultimate congressional power grab was in May, when Sen...
...Schum was removed from Schroeder's payroll in December after the arrangement was reported in the local press...
...According to a report in the Washington Times, Schroeder's network activities were coordinated by a paid aide in her Denver office, Sister Agnes Ann Schum, the Rocky Mountain regional director of the Nicaraguan Network and a national board member...
...The only charge of which the Administration is guilty is that it by-passed unconstitutional congressional restrictions in an effort to prevent the consolidation of another Soviet-backed Communist government in our hemisphere...
...For them, a conspiracy by members of Congress to aid the Communist cause in Central America should either be applauded or simply swept under the rug...
...In compiling the report, Kerry's aides used tactics that other Capitol Hill investigators have criticized, including writing private checks to pay legal fees for their sources, posting their bond, and offering witnesses other financial incentives...
...Communist Party...
...In a section explaining the "interlocking relationship of various front groups," the U.S...
...Before leaving Washington, Dodd made it known that the public relations benefit from springing Hasenfus would help his effort to defeat contra aid...
...Peace Council Conference, an affiliate of the Soviet World Peace Council...
...In the 1960s, Crockett was identified in media reports as a registered agent for the government of Cuba (government records were not kept on foreign agents at the time, so this can't be verified...
...Look, for example, at some of the personal diplomacy undertaken so farthis year...
...Hasenfus, of course, was convicted in Nicaragua for participating in a war the U.S...
...Dodd, Kerry, and Harkin are the tip of the iceberg...
...But he admitted he would "probably lose thosevotes if I started talking about economic aid for the Sandinista government...
...Major Owens, Barbara Kennelly, and Bruce Morrison...
...officials to keep the contras going constitutes a "conspiracy," why not find out if the congressmen who aid the groups sending Americans to Nicaragua to work for the Sandinistas are conspiring to break any laws...
...The Democrats' scandal even has its own cover-ups...
...During the Iran-contra hearings, Lee Hamilton, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, observed that the "privatization of foreign policy is a prescription for confusion and failure...
...Linder charged that the U.S...
...The roster of speakers at the event included Democratic congressmen David Bonior, John Conyers, and Ted Weiss, D.C...
...The practical effect has been the government's inability to investigate pro-Communist activities on the part of American citizens, including public officials...
...cable says that the activities of Medical Aid for El Salvador are coordinated by the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, a "KGB active measure...
...Patricia Schroeder, a ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, has been a fundraiser and advisory board member of the Nicaraguan Network, a U.S.-based Sandinista "solidarity committee" with close ties to Cuba's intelligence service...
...documents...
...of possible abuse of the U.S...
...Compare, say, the number of news columns devoted to the CIA's "illicit" activities in Central America to reports of activities of the KGB...
...According to a State Department report, "The Soviet Union, through the CPUSA, provides funding for NCASF operations...
...John Hull, a Costa Rican rancher who supports the contras, summed it up best when he wrote in a complaint to the Senate Ethics Committee that Kerry's staff "came down here and offered aid, influence and money to get the kind of testimony he wanted—false George Crockett, chairman of the House Western Hemisphere subcommittee, has a long history of associating with the U.S...
...El The practical effect has been the government's inability to investigate pro-Communist activities on the part of American . . . public officials...
...Mica failed the Democrats' litmus test: he supports contra aid...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 19 testimony...
...Before the Mobilization day convened, John T. Joyce of the Bricklayers and Allied Craftsmen union warned his members that "anyone who knows or remembers the popular fronts put together by the Communists in the 1930s will know precisely how the April mobilization works and what it is all about...
...Hamilton has askedsome tough, and justifiable, questions of the Administration in these past weeks...
...and of ideological fervor run amok...
...Hasenfus was apparently carrying supplies to the contras...
...interests...
...When Wright and nine of his Democratic colleagues (including Boland, Solarz, and Lee Hamilton) penned the infamous "Dear Comandante" letter to Daniel Ortega in 1984 applauding his steps to "open up the political process," an enraged Rep...
...group New El Salvador Today, was signed by Conyers...
...The Kerry staffers were looking for information to include in a report Kerry released on alleged contra drug smuggling activities last October...
...It is a peculiar twist of fate that Hull's charges against Kerry will not likely be pursued...
...Charles Hayes led a workshop at a U.S...
...Jim Sasser dispatched himself to tour the Persian Gulf after an Iraqi plane shot up an American frigate...
...But today its members have assumed key policy-making positions in Congress, especially dealing with Central America...
...of nefarious foreign governments manipulating naive American officials...
...Wright did not want anything to stand in the way of what he called the "new attitude" of the Soviet leadership, or of an arms control pact...
...Rosenblith is now the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee...
...Crockett invited David Linder, the father of Benjamin Linder, an American working for the Sandinistas who was killed in a Nicaraguan combat zone in April, to testify...
...Communist Party, edged out the senior subcommittee member, Rep...
...Stephen Solarz, head of the House subcommittee on Asia and Pacific Affairs, took it upon himself to become the first American official to meet with the leaders of the Communist New People's Army, a gang whose murderous modus operandi closely parallels that of Pol Pot...
...A cable from the U.S...
...C rockett, who has a long history of associating with the U.S...
...N one of these questions is likely to be answered, or even posed, for several reasons...
...No note was made of the fact that the Sandinistas have given conflicting accounts of how Linder died, nor that Linder had crossed the line dividing civilians and combatants by toting an assault rifle and traveling with Sandinista militiamen...
...Out of Central America, all of which send money and supplies to the Sandinistas or the FMLN...
...Congress had endorsed...
...the spooked informant stopped cooperating with the FBI...
...At the demonstration, a large contingent of Communist Party members marched openly under CPUSA banners...
...Foglietta and Dellums are on Armed Services, Dixon is on Foreign Operations, and Conyers serves on Government Operations, all influential and sensitive posts...
...Lately, Schroeder has been talking about running for President...
...Congress as a "friend of the revolution," Dodd told the Associated Press in May that he has the votes to defeat contra aid this fall...
...Like Iran-contra, this is a tale of secret fundraising for a ragtag bunch of Central American guerrillas...
...Paul Simon, recently endorsed the Campaign for a People's Peace Treaty, an initiative of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, Inc...
...Marine Embassy guards the previous June...
...Officials of the FBI have charged that Kerry staffers, in their efforts to discredit the contras, have interfered with a major FBI narcotics investigation...
...or her allies...
...government had killed his son...
...Others carried the banners of the Pledge of Resistance, Witness for Peace, and various inter-religious groups involved in the sanctuary movement to harbor illegal immigrants from Central America...
...government's fact-finding team was arriving on the scene...
...policy and negotiating with the Sandinistas to serve his, and their, ends...
...The Iran-contra scandal, and the other side of the coin, the Democrats' scandal detailed here, are of course part of a struggle since at least the Vietnam war between the executive and legislative branches over primacy in foreign policy making...
...Why must contra supporters like Ellen Garwood be cross-examined by Congress when the fundraisers for the Sandinistas or the Salvadoran guerrillas go unidentified and unquestioned...
...This letter clearly violates the constitutional separation of powers...
...While in Congress he has advocated lifting economic sanctions against Cuba...
...But unlike Iran-contra, this is a scandal that will not be probed by an "independent counsel" or a special congressional committee...
...Today, national security charges against public officials can go only to the post-Watergate ethics committees, which deal vigorously with drunk driving but shy away from graver matters...
...And the center is also funding [Kerry] staff expenses for work outside Washington...
...Have they violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act...
...While the Boland report mentioned the Chandra visit, no note was made of his dealings with members of Congress...
...If an effort by U.S...
...Described in a 1982 Sandinista government primer on how to manipulate the U.S...
...And those who have the power to define what makes for a hot Washington scandal have never been on the side of the small-d democrats...
...Sasser was making public statements even as the U.S...
...After being told not to cash the Rosenblith check, Carr's attorney was given a $2,000 check drawn on the International Center for Development Policy...
...But Sofia Clark, a spokesman for the Nicaraguan embassy in Washington, told the Washington Post in a candid moment that Hasenfus would do the Sandinistas more good testifying before Congress and giving press interviews than he would in a Sandinista jail...
...The "law" which the Administration's prosecutors say was broken was unconstitutional when passed...
...aid to the contras...
...In April, thirty-five organizations that claim to have raised over $30 million for the Sandinista regime convened a National Mobilization day in Washington and San Francisco...
...Another Democratic presidential contender, Sen...
...In 1981, Romesh Chandra, then the chairman of the World Peace Council, was hosted on Capitol Hill by a group of Democratic congressmen...
...Crockett has been a sponsor of the Civil Rights Congress and an officer of the National Lawyers Guild, both widely thought to be Communist front groups...
...Five years ago, this radical underworld was rather marginal, even in Democratic councils...
...In the wake of this country's last orgy of self-flagellation in the mid-1970s, Congress disbanded the last of the congressional committees charged with internal security and the FBI shut down its domestic investigations unit, gutting the government's domestic counterintelligence capacity...
...These free-lance forays raise serious ethical and legal questions...
...First things first...
...Rep...
...In August 1985, Medical Aid for El Salvador sent a team to San Salvador to perform surgery on Nidia Diaz, a leader of the FMLN faction that had killed four U.S...
...On a trip to the Philippines in January, Rep...
...Even though the Constitution explicitly denies the House any role in the formation of treaties, upon his return Wright successfully tacked on to an appropriations bill a requirement that Reagan comply with the unratified SALT II treaty...
...After Bishop's review, Dellums issued a report concluding that "nothing being done in Grenada constitutes a threat to the U.S...
...The ethics committee never investigated the matter...
...Crockett, over the objections of his colleagues, allowed highly tendentious "medical data" from the Sandinista government about the circumstances of Linder's death to be introduced...
...The pair met with Daniel Ortega and returned to Washington carrying the message that Ortega was willing to consider a cease-fire—on his own terms, of course...
...The center's literature says it has paid for "witness travel to Washington to meet with House and Senate investigators...
...At the head of this new class: Sen...
...In a report on the influence of the far-left Institute for Policy Studies on members of Congress, the Heritage Foundation said, "It can be argued that this group is hardly representative of the ideological mainstream of the House of Representatives...
...Some of these payments were funneled through the International Center for Development Policy, headed by Robert White, President Carter's ambassador to El Salvador...
...Another earthshaking Washington foreign policy scandal is poised to blow...
...but it must also be conceded that many of these men and women have been among the most vocal and visible members of the House in recent years...
...The second reason is that inquisitions are reserved exclusively for use against the executive...
...Crockett staffers attempted to have J. Michael Waller of the conservative Council on Inter-American Security struck from the witness list, but Republi18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 can objections staved off the move...
...In one case, Kerry staffers took an FBI informant from Miami to Massachusetts to questionher about the contras...
...Allan C. Brownfeld and J. Michael Waller report in the book The Revolution Lobby that "Boland's staff allowed some of the evidence to be doctored to prevent the public from knowing of the collaboration of some Democratic congressmen and the Soviet World Peace Council...
...Embassy in San Salvador dated December 1986 identified Crockett and a dozen other congressmen as sponsors of Medical Aid for El Salvador, which collects funds for "social projects" in Salvadoran zones "liberated" by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), the principal Cuban-supported umbrella group for Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador...
...He omitted evidence that the Soviets and the Cubans had supported the project financially...
...The final reason is that all of these scandals boil down to subjective questions of politics and morality, not to objective ones of legality...
...This influx of cash frees up FMLN funds for more weapons to be used in their campaign of terror...
...They have formed a left-liberal grouping that has managed to achieve a degree of influence in certain specific areas and which has been especially active in the national defense-national security area...
...But his release was not the result of spontaneous diplomacy...
...Edward Boland, then the chair-man of the House Intelligence Committee and the author of the much-vaunted anti-contra Boland Amendment, released a report on Soviet active measures in the U.S...
...Dodd negotiated with the Sandinistas to secure the release of Eugene Hasenfus, an American apprehended by Nicaraguan authorities after his plane was shot down...
...In addition, Kerry's endorsement has been used in fundraising materials for the center...
...But these same questions ought to be aimed at the Democrats and their pro-Communist Central America network...
Vol. 20 • August 1987 • No. 8
