REP. GEJDENSON IS GOOD AT POINTING OUT OTHERS’ ROLE IN ARMING SADDAM, BUT BETTER AT CONCEALING HIS OWN

(Washington, D.C.): Rep. Sam Gejdenson
(D-CT) is giving the term “smoke and
mirrors” new meaning. In a press
conference on 23 September he properly
castigated President Bush and former
Secretary of State James Baker for
failing to tell the truth about the U.S.
role in enhancing Saddam Hussein’s
nuclear missile and chemical weapons
capabilities. While partisan politics
were an obvious motivation for this
event, a less transparent but no less
real consideration seems to be
Gejdenson’s desperate need to distract
attention from his own odious role in
this affair.

Of all the Members of Congress, Rep.
Sam Gejdenson is arguably the one most
responsible for the shambles to which
U.S. export control policies and
practices have recently been reduced.
Time and again, he has championed
overseas sales of sensitive American
goods and technologies irrespective of
the risks of such transactions for the
national security. He has, moreover,
assiduously championed the Commerce
Department’s handling of U.S. export
control matters despite its demonstrated
incompetence and non-performance.

Among Rep. Gejdenson’s dubious
contributions to the sorry record of U.S.
assistance to Saddam Hussein’s (and
others’) ominous weapons programs are the
following:

As the author of H.R. 4653, the
Export Facilitation Act of 1990, Rep.
Gejdenson has vigorously
advocated: the automatic removal
of dual-use technologies from the
Control List, regardless of their
military value; the
elimination of on-site visitation
requirements; a substantially
diminished role for the national
security community in reviewing
export licenses; an exclusive
role for the Secretary of
Commerce in determining what
should or should not be
controlled for national security
purposes; and the expanded access
by Third World countries, the
then-Soviet Union, and Eastern
Europe to militarily-sensitive
dual-use technologies (including
supercomputers).

In a 6 June 1990 letter to the
Speaker of the House signed by
Secretaries Cheney, Baker, and
Mosbacher, these Cabinet
officials stated that Gejdenson’s
bill “undermines the
President’s ability to decide
unilaterally to control exports
to unstable regions such as
the Middle East.”
(Emphasis added.)
On 6 June 1990, Rep.
Gejdenson vigorously objected to
and voted against an amendment
offered by a distinguished member
of the Center for Security
Policy’s Board of Advisors, Rep.
Henry Hyde (R-IL). The
Hyde amendment to H.R. 4653 would
have prevented the decontrol of
such items as “U.S.
capacitators destined for
Iraq…naval nuclear propulsion
plants…and night-vision
equipment,” among other
military-related technologies.

Rep. Hyde specifically warned Mr.
Gejdenson that “I would
address [your] attention to Iraq,
which is developing or had once
tried to develop a nuclear
capability, and, without
breaching classified information,
I would watch Iraq today
very carefully.“
Prophetically, Hyde admonished:
“This bill does nothing to
protect our products, our
commodities, our munitions, our
sensitive technologies, from
being sent to the Middle East and
from coming back on our allies
and on our friends.”
Having done so little to inhibit
the transfer of sensitive
technologies to Iraq prior to its
invasion of Kuwait, it is perhaps
not surprising that Gejdenson was
most reluctant to use his
position as chairman of the House
Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on
International Economic Policy and
Trade — the subcommittee with
primary responsibility for
oversight on export controls —
to conduct a careful examination
of that sorry record. In fact,
Gejdenson failed to call a
single hearing to examine
the record on U.S. export
licenses granted to Iraq in the
pre-Kuwait invasion period until
some nine months after the fact.

Interestingly, in a public
hearing on 27 September 1990, his
own Democratic colleague, Representative
Doug Barnard (D-GA) indirectly
chided Rep. Gejdenson for
misleading the Congress on export
controls: “I am
sure I voted for the extension of
the Export Administration Act,
probably innocently though. The
fact is that maybe we were being
a little bit too liberal in what
we were doing in that
regard….[I]f I was President of
the United States, I think I
would take a new look at [the
legislation] as far as the veto
is concerned.”
Even after the Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait, Rep. Gejdenson
led the charge on 30 October 1991
to pass H.R. 3489, a bill
similarly designed to promote
exports at the expense of U.S.
national security.
Despite the mounting evidence
(such as the notorious Consarc
furnaces-to-Iraq case) that the
Commerce Department had given
only cursory scrutiny of export
licenses to Iraq, Gejdenson
opposed an initiative sponsored
by Reps. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) and
Barnard aimed at ensuring that
the Secretary of Defense retained
a meaningful role in the review
process.

According to a 2 July 1991 House
Government Operations Committee
report discussed during this
debate:

“Commerce’s poor
coordination and
institutional bias to
promote exports likely
combined in the case of
Iraq to allow the sale of
technologies that may
have helped the aggressor
nation’s missile and
nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons
development program.
Defense tried hard to
prevent these sales from
going through, but was
ignored or
overruled.”

Gejdenson’s blind-spot concerning
mis- or malfeasance at Commerce
in connection with export
licensing is most in evidence in
his continuing defense of former
Under Secretary Dennis Kloske as
a brave hero, a man the
Congressman maintains was
“fired…because he told the
truth.” In fact, Kloske has
acknowledged that he resigned at
a moment when he was aware that
his conduct in connection with
altering export license documents
subpoenaed by the Congress was
under investigation by the
Commerce Department’s Inspector
General. Kloske’s conduct is now
under criminal investigation by
the Justice Department.

Bottom Line

Clearly, Rep. Gejdenson cannot
be relied upon to safeguard national
interests in the export control arena.
His penchant for self-promotion and
distortion of the record cannot conceal
an as-yet-unreformed disregard for
security interests when they conflict
with those of unscrupulous exporters and
government bureaucrats aligned with them.
At the very least, the relationship
between his subcommittee and the
executive branch department it is
supposed to oversee has become
dangerously cozy.

The truth of the matter is that Saddam
Hussein’s extensive ballistic missile and
nuclear weapons program benefitted from
Rep. Gejdenson’s efforts in a number of
ways. Thanks in part to his
concerted and on-going campaign to gut
the Control List, thousands of dual-use
technologies were made available to Iraq.

The success of that campaign has,
moreover, largely neutered the utility of
foreign policy controls to prevent
dangerous dual-use technologies from
reaching people like Saddam Hussein.
Despite Gejdenson’s claim that foreign
policy controls can substitute for an
effective export control regime, they are
not — and have never been intended — to
protect U.S. national security. Instead,
they are meant to underscore U.S.
diplomacy. Claims of foreign
availability, contract sanctity and other
legislative caveats make foreign policy
controls an ineffective means to
safeguard sensitive technologies at best.

The Center for Security Policy
believes the lessons that should
be learned from the fact that Saddam
Hussein acquired many of the most
sensitive dual-use technologies legally
is still not fully appreciated by
Gejdenson and his colleagues.
The former’s past unwillingness to
provide any genuine oversight or scrutiny
of the Commerce Department’s approval of
U.S. exports to Iraq — and his
determination to gut the export control
regime — helped Saddam to get away with
the purchase of dual-use technologies for
such end-users as Iraq’s Atomic Energy
Agency and his Sa’ad 16 Defense
Establishment. The latters’ continued
inaction, however, ensures that none of
the checks-and-balances needed to prevent
a repeat of the Iraqi disaster are being
put into place.