House OKs Special Panel to Probe Arms to Bosnia

After a rancorous partisan debate that spilled over from a committee hearing room to the House floor, Republican leaders pushed ahead Wednesday with their investigation into President Clinton’s secret decision to permit Iran to ship arms to Bosnia.

In a party-line vote of 224 to 187, the House approved spending $995,000 for an eight-member special committee to conduct a six-month investigation into Clinton’s Bosnia arms policy.

Democrats labeled the action a waste of money and an election-year gimmick to embarrass Clinton. They noted that the committee, which will have five Republican and three Democratic members, is scheduled to issue a final report a week before the presidential election in November.

Several Democrats argued that the House already has three existing committees conducting investigations of the policy and that the creation of a fourth with an expensive outside staff is simply designed to drag out the investigation and to pound away at Clinton’s foreign policy record during the campaign.

“They want a million dollars. They are going to have four staff members who will make over $100,000. And they have a budget line item in the bill paying for bottled water and new color television sets,” said Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.). “This is investigation No. 4. This is desperation politics.”

Republican leaders said that they are only following the example set by Democrats when they were in power in Congress. They noted that in 1992, the Democrats spent far more on their special “October Surprise” investigation, which delved into unproven allegations that the Ronald Reagan-George Bush campaign in 1980 plotted with Iranians to keep Americans held hostage until after Reagan was elected president.

The House set up a task force to investigate those allegations but reported after 10 months that there was no credible evidence to support the charges. Now, Republicans say, it is their turn to look into White House involvement with Iran.

“This policy was absolutely insane,” said Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach). “Giving Iran a foothold into Europe. . . . That’s what this policy is about.”

The congressional investigation will look into Clinton’s April 1994 decision to give a green light secretly to covert Iranian arms shipments to the Bosnian-Muslim government. At the time, the United States had pledged publicly to uphold a United Nations arms embargo against Bosnia and Clinton was opposed to congressional efforts to unilaterally lift the embargo so that the United States could supply the besieged Bosnians with arms.

Just before the floor vote Wednesday, the House International Relations Committee ended a sometimes comic and disorganized hearing by voting to issue subpoenas to Peter Galbraith, U.S. ambassador to Croatia, and Charles Redman, U.S. ambassador to Germany, to force them to testify publicly about their involvement in the policy.

The Republicans demanded the power to issue the subpoenas because committee Chairman Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.) learned from the newspapers that the two diplomats had testified in closed session before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week, even while the State Department was being slow in responding to Gilman’s request that they testify publicly before his panel.

Later in the day, the State Department and Gilman’s staff worked out an agreement to have the two testify soon without being subpoenaed, according to State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns.