Unpardonable Liberties : UNDUE PROCESS: A Story of How Political Differences Are Turned into Crimes, By Elliott Abram ; (Free Press: $22.95; 243 pp.)

Standing on the courthouse steps after being sentenced to 100 hours of public service for withholding information from Congress, Elliott Abrams read a brief public statement including a line that seemed to promise a book: “I believe this case does raise some serious and important public policy issues, and in due course I plan to address those.”

“Undue Process” is not the promised book--not, at any rate, the book readers might have expected from one of the brightest, brashest neo-conservative intellectuals who came to Washington with Ronald Reagan. That book would have been an extended examination of the Ethics in Government Act, the law by which the attorney general may appoint independent counsel to investigate and, if necessary, prosecute misconduct in the executive branch. This book is something quite different.

In the last 20 pages of his book, Abrams does offer his summary case against the law, but the rest of the book is an account of Abrams’ suffering during a two-month trial that began five years after the Iran-Contra scandal erupted and nearly three years after he had left office as assistant secretary of state for Latin America.

No one ghost-wrote this book, and Abrams is never less than utterly himself in his sense of personal grievance, his contempt for Congress, his bitter disappointment in President Ronald Reagan (who could have pardoned him but didn’t), his more carefully controlled disappointment in President George Bush (who has now pardoned him but had not done so at the time the book went to press) and--on every page and in nearly every paragraph--his foaming fury against Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh and his staff, most especially Walsh’s assistant Craig A. Gillen.

It is all quite convincing. You don’t have to like a guy (and Abrams, his best friends will tell you, has a knack for making enemies) to recognize when he has been hurt. And as a picture of how, in one case, the Walsh team has gone about its work, Abrams’ book is not likely soon to be topped. He tracks the agonizing steps toward a plea bargain with a professional’s attention to legal detail (Abrams has a Harvard law degree). I don’t doubt that in one detail or another of the exposition, Gillen might beg to differ, but I trust Abrams in outline and even in detail. He has told us accurately enough what happened, and the bile and venom that he never troubles to conceal are, after all, a part of the adversary process.

The troubles with the book are two.

First, at this late date, when even supporters of the Ethics in Government Act admit that the public is bored with Iran-Contra, Abrams has given us 200-plus pages of just the sort of close-up legal infighting that bores worst. Thanks to his utter lack of sympathy with his opponents, he is utterly unable to bring them to life as characters--worthy opponents, we might say--on his page. For perhaps the last 50 pages before the concluding, theoretical essay, “Undue Process” does take on some of the life of a courtroom drama; but the first 150 pages drag for their having, essentially, just one character, Abrams himself.

Second, precisely because the date is late and the Ethics in Government Act has expired, the lessons Abrams draws from his personal experience need to be set against lessons he might have drawn, but does not, from other independent counsel investigations as well as from Iran-Contra indictments that rest on firmer ground than his.

In his closing pages, Abrams argues from historical example that the executive branch has lied to Congress again and again and always with impunity. From James Polk to Lyndon Johnson, they all did it, and they all got away with it. Why? Because, Abrams argues, reasonable men know that the business of government, particularly a government with a separation of powers, cannot require total candor. Why was there no impunity for Abrams? Because, he further argues, the misbegotten Ethics in Government Act has permitted the government to forbid--selectively and for political motives--what is ordinarily allowed.

The statement Abrams read on the courthouse steps came in lieu of a withheld, longer statement of which he here provides, most interestingly, three distinct drafts. In the second, he blames Lawrence Walsh for criminalizing the withholding of information from Congress. In the third, he blames the Ethics in Government Act itself.

The second draft is more persuasive. There have been other independent counsel investigations, of Democrats as well as Republicans. Most of them have not led to indictments, and yet several--the Edwin Meese investigation, for example--have nonetheless served the Act’s initial purpose: They have reassured the country that the executive branch is not above the law. Furthermore, as Terry Eastland, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, recently pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, even those convicted after prosecution by the implacable Walsh have not all been pardoned by President Bush. In other words, even the President, the law’s most influential opponent, implicitly concedes that it has brought wrongdoers to justice.

The wrongdoers in question were principals in the Iran-Contra “enterprise,” as Oliver North called it, a private weapons company unwittingly capitalized by the United States, which provided its inventory and paid some of its personnel. That the government was to have been partially reimbursed by the “enterprise” does not change the fact that the government was duped into a gross violation of its own policy against trading arms for hostages and of its own law (the Boland Amendment) against providing U.S. tax money for Contra arms.

Elliott Abrams was not a part of the “enterprise.” His tragic flaw was, in a way, a State Department novice’s blithe assumption that he was really in charge of the area that he nominally headed. Abrams admits that he was appalled, after leaving office, to learn of Contra atrocities (crimes no Lawrence Walsh will ever prosecute) and to learn, worse, that the CIA had concealed them from him.

The fact that a man as bright as Abrams could be so humiliatingly misled only strengthens the case for the independent policing of the executive branch. One comes away from “Undue Process” persuaded that, yes, it would have mattered little if Elliott Abrams had been spared an indictment that has cost him so much and helped the country so little. And yet a mistake lies at the heart of this too scantily argued book: Abrams confuses the case for the law with the case against him. The latter may be weak. The former, partly on the evidence of his own book, remains overwhelmingly strong.