Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 9, 1990 TAG: 9005090396
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The page reflecting the meeting between North and Bush on Aug. 6, 1986, was not among the heavily censored excerpts from North's notebooks published by the Senate and House Iran-Ccntra committees during their 1987 investigation of the scandal.
The reference to Bush, then vice president, gives no hint of what he and North talked about. That page of the notebook appears no different from hundreds of other pages that were released long ago, and there was no explanation for why it may have been withheld.
Approximately 1,400 uncensored pages of North's notes were released Tuesday as the result of a lawsuit brought against the government last July by the National Security Archive, a non-profit research institute, and Public Citizen, a Ralph Nader-founded public interest group.
Mark A. Belnick, a top aide to the Senate investigating committee, said Tuesday night that the page including the reference to Bush may not have appeared in the version of the notebooks made available to the panels. North's lawyer, Brendan Sullivan, edited the notebooks before turning them over to the committees, removing material he deemed "not responsive" to the panels' subpoenas. Additional deletions were made on national security grounds, before public release of some of the notebook pages, by an interagency committee supervised by the Reagan White House.
Belnick said he and other former committee lawyers reviewed the Aug. 6, 1986, notes after they were released Tuesday and "no one recalls that document."
He added that the committee lawyers "can't state with certainty" that they never got the document, but "given something like the reference to the vice president, it would have caught someone's eye." The Iran-Contra committees' records are now stored in the National Archives.
The lawsuit that led to Tuesday's disclosures was filed under the Freedom of Information Act last year. The suit charged that the notebooks should be released to the public since they had been provided to the special prosecutor in the final stages of North's trial. U.S. District Court Judge Norma Holloway Johnson agreed after government lawyers failed to assert any national security or other reason for withholding them.
Johnson has given the Justice Department until May 17 to decide how much of the remaining 1,200 pages of the notebooks it is willing to release without deletions for national security reasons. The congressional committees released less than 900 pages of the 2,600 pages of North's 22 notebooks.
North's Aug. 6, 1986, meeting with Bush occurred on a day that began with a phone call from Amiram Nir, an Israeli official who was working with North on the secret arms-for-hostages deals with Iran.
North then attended an extraordinary White House meeting with members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. As North later testified at his trial, he lied to them about his role in raising funds for the Nicaraguan Contras.
Shortly thereafter, North took a phone call from Robert Dutton, a member of his secret team in El Salvador working to supply the Contra rebels with military aid at a time when Congress had prohibited such assistance by the U.S. government. Dutton, the notes show, complained to North about Felix Rodriguez, a former CIA agent who had joined the resupply team after going to El Salvador with Bush's blessings.
by CNB