No Loose Cannon

IF there was ever any doubt that President Bush and former President Reagan were intricately involved in running the covert operation to arm the Nicaraguan rebels during a Congressional ban on such aid from 1985-86, government documents released last week should help dispel it. The documents strongly suggest that Bush, while vice president, played a more direct role in covertly arranging aid for the Nicaraguan Contras than he has previously acknowledged.

Throughout last year's presidential campaign, Bush insisted that he had no personal involvement in efforts to aid the Contra rebels. In written response to reporters' questions last year, Bush asserted that he "knew nothing of the shipments by the so-called private network of arms dealers to the Contras." Indeed, Bush premised much of his campaign on the United States's resurgence to a position of global strength during the 1980s.

The new documents for the first time show that Bush backed a 1985 plan to increase Central Intelligence Agency aid to Honduras as an incentive to encourage the Honduran government to support the Contras. They also identify Bush as the emissary from the United States who informed Honduran President Roberto Suazo Cordova that the Reagan Administration was expediting delivery of more than $110 million in economic and military aid to the Contras. Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D.-Me.) said Thursday that such quid pro quo arrangements "were clearly inappropriate, possibly illegal, and involved the United States in a way in which our country should not be involved."

AND it also appears that Reagan was not as befuddled a president as his advisers and the media had us believe. From the time the Iran-Contra scandal broke in the fall of 1986 until Reagan left office in January. the Reagan Administration insisted that the president had no knowledge of the diversion of taxpayer funds to the Contras. The fault, said the Tower Commission, lay not in the president, but in his hands-off "management style," thereby absolving him of personal responsibility for the scandal.

However, the newly-released documents reveal that Reagan and his senior associates actively coordinated elaborate efforts to encourage third countries to give military aid to the Nicaraguan Contras in return for aid from the United States.

It thus makes clear that Lt. Col. Oliver North's efforts to assist the Contras was part of a secret Administration effort to circumvent the Congressional ban and not the actions of a single zealot gone wild, as the administration repeatedly asserted.

IF the evidence cited in this document does indeed prove any legal transgressions, Reagan and Bush should be held accountable for violating the law. The top two officials of the United States government and their subordinates condoned and even practiced deception, both towards Congress and the American people, the shredding of government documents and the misuse of taxpayer money.

In light of this new evidence, Congress should appoint a committee to fully investigate the administration's attempts to sidestep the Congressional restrictions, with the possibility that impeachable offenses may have been committed. The Justice Department should also investigate whether there are possible criminal charges that can be brought against former President Reagan.

Although North alone may take the fall in court for the disastrous foreign policy decision of an entire administration to sell arms to Iran and divert the funds to help the Contras, it is now abundantly clear that this gung-ho lieutenant colonel was hardly a "loose cannon," but merely one cog in a comprehensive administration policy to subvert Congressional authority and deceive the American people.