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.