Dellums Appointment

Much ado has been made recently about U.S. House Speaker Thomas Foley’s appointment of me to the House Intelligence Committee.

In what is obviously part of an orchestrated campaign designed for expedient political purposes, Cal Thomas (Column Right, Feb. 14) joins other commentators in reiterating old, previously discredited allegations.

Two prongs form this attack. First, that I will reveal secrets vital to the nation. Second, that the presence on the committee of somebody with my views will itself disserve the nation.

For 20 years I have served in Congress on the committees that deal with the most sensitive security issues. These includes: two years on Foreign Affairs; service during the complete tenure of the House Select Committee (Pike) to Investigate the Intelligence Community, and, of course, the House Armed Services Committee and its super-sensitive subcommittee on research and development, which I have chaired for two years.

Republican colleagues such as William Dickinson of Alabama, David O’B. Martin of New York and Robert W. Davis of Michigan have repeatedly acknowledged my ability to work with members of all ideological and political orientations. Even my colleague Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) conceded in his Atlanta Journal opinion piece that: “First, you believe Bonior and Dellums are not security risks. I agree, they are both honorable men and have known and kept secrets for years.” This, despite the fact that he is among those leading the charge against my appointment.

I do not feel compelled to yet again respond in detail to the tawdry and inaccurate allegations leveled against me and my staff that appeared in The Times. They have been previously discredited in print and before the appropriate committees of the House.

The second prong of this attack is fundamentally contemptuous of our very form of government.

The right-wing’s insistence that only those who share its pessimistic, monolithic vision of the world deserve inclusion on the committee is a frightening testimonial to the extent to which they are willing to subordinate fact to ideological fiction in the pursuit of the nation’s foreign affairs.

Their quote out of context printed and reprinted in various forums of my statement that we should “dismantle every intelligence agency in this country piece by piece, brick by brick, nail by nail” fails to include my call in the same sentence that “if there was a need for us to rebuild such organizations that we rebuild them with civil liberties and civil rights and justice to people in mind.” I reached this conclusion based upon documentation available to the Pike Committee and now generally acknowledged that our intelligence agencies had conducted themselves in a fashion that exceeded their charters and which were inimical to our Constitution’s guarantees to its citizens.

I believed then, as I continue to believe, that intelligence acquisition enjoys a rightful place in our society, but that the agencies chartered with the responsibility to conduct this part of our nation’s business must be required to respect both the rule of law in this country and the rules of international law.

If the conclusion that such a viewpoint does not deserve inclusion in our deliberations, or is somehow a threat to the nation, were to become the policy of the nation, I shudder to think of how far we would have departed from the very principles upon which our nation was founded.

RONALD V. DELLUMS, Berkeley