Walsh Dragging Out Iran Affair, Scowcroft Charges

Brent Scowcroft, who served on the Tower Commission that investigated the Iran- contra affair, said Thursday that independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh’s team is “dragging this out longer than they need to be.”

“The whole dispute is basically a dispute over policy rather than illegality,” Scowcroft said in a speech to a symposium sponsored by the World Affairs Council.

“The basic issues involved in this are not those of criminal culpability,” he said. “They are the major policy issues for the country as a whole--what’s behind it, how it was implemented and so on. I think that the independent counsel is a minor part of the whole thing and in a sense is delaying the country arriving at the whole policy disclosure, therefore dragging this out longer than they need to be.”

Walsh on Wednesday won his second conviction in the case. Public relations executive Richard R. Miller pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the government with an illegal scheme to raise money to arm the Nicaraguan rebels.

Conservative fund-raiser Carl R. (Spitz) Channell pleaded guilty to a similar conspiracy charge last week.