Seven of these "nine years" came after Biden had deliberately ignored Thurmond's warning about the importance of the Security and Terrorism Subcommittee. By the time Ames was doing serious damage to U.S. national security -- in addition to causing the murder of the ten sources cited by Clinton, Ames betrayed at least 100 American intelligence operations -- Biden had long since shut down precisely the tool Thurmond intended to discover spies like Ames.
"In spite of a warning from his Republican predecessor, one of Senator Joseph Biden's first acts as the new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1987 was to abolish the Committee's Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism. Biden's action came just as one of the most famous spies in American history had begun leaking secrets to the Soviet Union. The spy -- Soviet CIA mole Aldrich Ames -- went undiscovered for nine years, almost the entire period of Biden's chairmanship of the Committee. Biden relinquished his post after Republicans re-captured the Senate in 1994. Ames was finally arrested that year.
"The Subcommittee had been established by the GOP's South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond within a month of the Republican takeover of the Senate in the 1980 Reagan landslide. The election brought 12 new Republicans to the upper chamber, handing control of the Senate to the GOP for the first time in 26 years.
"On December 14, 1980, the New York Times featured Thurmond in an article spotlighting his new role as the incoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Saying that Thurmond was "ready to take the offensive" after the GOP's decades in the minority, the very first major change the Times cited was Thurmond's decision to move on national security issues. "Just created," wrote concerned Timesman Tom Wicker, "is a subcommittee on 'Security and Terrorism' which has the obvious possibility of reincarnating the old Communist-hunting Internal Security subcommittee. Chairing it will be the ex-admiral, ex-POW and new Senator from Alabama Jeremiah Denton…"
"In a statement Thurmond brushed aside liberal concerns that the subcommittee would somehow bring Joe McCarthy back to life, warning "that if we don't know who the enemies of this country are then we're in real trouble." An aide to Denton, the ex-POW who had been held captive in North Vietnam along with John McCain, said that Denton "wants to get a better handle on the matter. He wants to talk to the FBI about what it sees as security dangers." As an added insult to liberals, Thurmond abolished a liberal favorite, or as Wicker described it, the "important Subcommittee on Anti-Trust and Monopoly." This jewel had been headed by Ohio's liberal Democrat Howard Metzenbaum and was scheduled to be run by a GOP liberal, Maryland's Charles Mathias. Thurmond, exercising his new power, simply abolished the subcommittee targeted at capitalists and replaced it with the new Security and Terrorism Subcommittee that would investigate Communists. This meant that the staff, research and investigative resources of the Senate Judiciary Committee could now be directed at various perceived threats to U.S. national security -- such as Soviet penetration of U.S. intelligence agencies." . . . More
No comments:
Post a Comment