Bill Gertz over at the Washington Free Beacon
reports
that House leaders seek a General Accounting Office (GAO) investigation
into the State Department’s failure to report Russian violations of the
1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Gertz writes:
“It is clear from my subcommittee’s
oversight that the administration did not fully disclose what it knew
about Russian arms control violations when it was trying to get the New
START treaty ratified,” said Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Ala.), chairman of
the House Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces. “Its
all-consuming drive to protect its Russia reset policy has gutted our
missile defenses, alienated allies, and only encouraged Vladimir Putin’s
lawlessness,” he said in a statement.
Alas, the willingness of the State
Department (often the Central Intelligence Agency as well) to turn a
blind eye to intelligence that undercuts high-profile diplomatic
engagements is more the rule than the exception. Researching
Dancing With the Devil,
it became clear that diplomats and analysts often seek to bury
information that might lead Congress to conclude that diplomacy is not
successful. When Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, both the CIA and
the State Department changed their interpretation of the “yellow rain”
incident to suggest that the battlefield presence of deadly toxins
dropped from airplanes had less to do with the Soviet planes that
dropped them than naturally occurring bee feces that just happened to
appear in the area at the same time. To conclude that the Soviet Union
had violated the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), diplomats and
analysts feared, might undercut efforts to conclude the second Strategic
Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT-2). Years later, however, as the Soviet
Union collapsed, Russian officials acknowledged that they had indeed
cheated on the BWC.
(Click link below to read more)
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