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GOP Congress working to adjourn
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Mideast leaders join Clinton for summit
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A year's work hangs in the balance - from legislation on national issues such as education and contraceptives to the individual projects that many lawmakers crave - and the daily script has been predictable. Chief of staff Erskine Bowles spends hours in private talks with GOP leaders inside the Capitol, and the president roughs up Republicans in brief, once-a-day public appearances before the television cameras.
"I wish I had time to win the philosophical debate with our friends on the other side, who somehow see helping more teachers teach and providing more school buildings as an intrusion into local affairs. It is not," Clinton said this week at a campaign-style appearance at an overcrowded Maryland school a few miles from the White House.
Republicans counter that the Democrats are merely defenders of a large bureaucracy.
"The president has disagreed with us all year," says House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas. "He vetoed our education agenda to put the dollars in the hands of teachers and parents instead of the Washington bureaucracy."
The polls say that education remains an issue that works to the advantage of Democrats, despite gains Republicans have made in the past two years in an attempt to reposition themselves.
Whatever their momentary optimism, Democrats speaking privately concede there's plenty of time for Republicans to assert control over the election campaign. The GOP will have more money to spend on advertising, their voters remain highly motivated to go to the polls and the Republicans appear well-positioned to run strongly for a number of seats where Democrats are retiring.
Still, the polls indicate that Democrats have been able to energize their own core voters by underscoring their opposition to the GOP plans for a no-limits impeachment inquiry, and now they're pressing for election-year trophies on issues that appeal to key voting blocs, as well.
Republicans have known all year that Clinton would seek billions in extra social spending as the price for adjournment. The alternative to yielding was unthinkable - a rerun of the politically disastrous government shutdowns of three winters ago.
"The president has a lot of leverage and he's emboldened to use it," said Rep. Vic Fazio, D-Calif, the third-ranking Democrat in the House. "In terms of public opinion he's not as weak as Republicans hoped or believed." In addition, he said, "They're clearly nervous about a backlash from the Lewinsky matter."
Republicans discount such talk.
"Our (poll) numbers are looking better and better," said Rep. John Linder of Georgia, head of the GOP House campaign committee. "They (Democrats) need to get home and campaign. Every one of our incumbents is ahead. That's not true of theirs."
The polls are mixed. One survey reported that Democrats enjoy a healthy lead among likely voters. A second reported a substantial advantage for Republicans. A third found a statistical tie.
The surveys also show a split on impeachment proceedings. Likely voters approve of the Republican approach. The country as a whole does not, and the GOP is treading carefully.
A week ago, the Judiciary Committee chairperson, Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois insisted on an impeachment inquiry unlimited in time or scope.
In the days since, he's emphasized a desire to finish by the end of the year, and told reporters during the day he intends to "streamline" the 15 counts of impeachable offenses outlined by his chief counsel. "My sense is there's a burnout factor" among the public, he said.
The crush of the final few days of the session stands in sharp contrast to a leisurely pace of most of the year.
And this year's list of legislative casualties is long.
Republican infighting prevented agreement on an overall budget for the year as well as a large election-year tax cut, many of the regular spending bills and a measure to rewrite Depression-era laws governing financial service organizations.
GOP unity killed off a variety of initiatives that Clinton outlined in his State of the Union Address last winter, notably anti-smoking legislation, a bill to rein in HMOs and an increase in the minimum wage. A bipartisan push for campaign finance overhaul also fell to GOP objections.
The two accomplishments that GOP leaders cite most often - a highway bill and legislation to restrain the IRS - were holdovers from 1997.
The list of accomplishments expected to be featured in GOP campaign commercials include the balanced budget deal and tax cut, enacted in 1997, and the welfare overhaul measure passed in 1996.
In May, when Rudolph was placed on the FBI's 10 most wanted list, FBI Director Louis Freeh said that investigators had developed "a significant linkage" between the Birmingham bombing and the three earlier Atlanta attacks. Freeh said then that, while Rudolph was not an official suspect in the Atlanta bombings, he was "the only individual that we're seeking right now" for questioning in those cases.
Investigators since have uncovered substantial other evidence linking the crimes but it is not likely to be made public when the charges against Rudolph are announced, a development that could have come as early as yesterday, according to the sources who declined to be identified.
The Justice Department action is designed to spur public cooperation in the hunt for Rudolph and to discourage anyone from helping the fugitive, the sources said.
Rudolph dropped from public sight soon after the Jan. 29 attack on the New Woman All Women Health Center in Birmingham, the first fatal bombing of an abortion clinic in the country. An off-duty police officer working as a security guard was killed and a nurse was severely injured as she arrived for work.
In the July 27, 1996, Olympics bombing, one person died and more than 100 were injured.
The other Atlanta bombings now connected to the Olympics bombing were a January 1997 attack on an abortion clinic and a February 1997 blast at a gay and lesbian bar.
Rudolph, a 32-year-old carpenter from western North Carolina, has eluded law enforcement officials for about eight months. An experienced survivalist, he is believed to be hiding in the hills where North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia come together.
Technicians for the FBI and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms have concluded that small steel plates built into the knapsack bomb that exploded in Atlanta's Olympic Centennial Park match metal plates in two bombs planted at the abortion clinic in an Atlanta suburb last year, according to federal sources.
The plates were designed to force the blast in one direction, according to investigators. Agents determined that the plates were fashioned from steel at a Franklin, N.C., Machine Co. after a search there in February. The Associated Press reported Tuesday that a "special order" of about 50 pounds of smokeless powder linked to Rudolph has now been tied to the Centennial Olympic Park bombing. A Tennessee gun dealer recently identified Rudolph as the man who bought the special order from him four years ago.
An analysis of bomb scene rubble connected the Atlanta abortion clinic bomb and the explosive used at the Birmingham clinic. And the rare type of flooring nails found at those sites matched nails found in a storage shed that Rudolph had rented in North Carolina, according to federal sources.
Those nails, however, do not seem to match the nails found in the Olympic blast, according to the sources.
Federal sources declined to discuss why the charges naming Rudolph have been sealed. But agents have been conducting interviews to try to place Rudolph at the Atlanta bombing scenes and likely would want to protect potential witnesses until Rudolph is apprehended.
The discoveries sparked a hasty scramble by Congress to block the release of information that energy officials warned would advance the capabilities of emerging nuclear states such as Pakistan and India. The congressional solution, which critics contend will slow the release of Cold War documents to a crawl, is part of the 1999 defense authorization bill awaiting Clinton's signature.
White House officials were alerted to the problem this summer in a letter from Kenneth Baker, a senior official in the Energy Department's Office of Nonproliferation and National Security. The letter concerned the discovery of pages marked "Restricted Data" or "Formerly Restricted Data," in boxes of 25-year-old classified documents slated for release without review. The government applies those designations to material on the design, production, performance and use of nuclear weapons.
Clinton's executive order, which requires automatic declassification by the year 2000 of documents more than 25 years old, includes an exception for restricted data. But the order contains no provision to search every document in every box - a task involving billions of pages and as many as 67 different agencies - looking for the sensitive material.
"This problem poses a great national security risk" because it involves the potential release" the nation's most sensitive secrets," Baker wrote. "Some of the compromised information found in these file series involved design information of special value to proliferants seeking to weaponize their nuclear devices, such as India and Pakistan." Those two countries tested nuclear weapons earlier this year and are developing ways to deploy nuclear weapons on planes and missiles.
"We have no way of estimating how much information of great potential value to proliferants is now on the open shelves or scheduled to be placed there," Baker wrote.
Enormous amounts of material on how to build nuclear weapons are publicly available - enough that college undergraduates have written creditable papers on how to build the bomb. But there remain highly sensitive secrets about weapons design, particularly the control of explosive yield and techniques of miniaturizing a nuclear weapon for use as a missile warhead.
Republican Sens. Jon Kyl of Arizona, Bob Smith of New Hampshire and Richard Shelby of Alabama, alerted to the Energy Department's discoveries, complained to National Security Adviser Sandy Berger that "in a frenzied attempt to meet the (year 2000) deadline," agencies were releasing whole boxes of classified material without looking at the documents.
The president's executive order was intended to aid historians and reduce an enormous backlog of 25-year-old documents awaiting declassification by permitting release with little or no review of each individual document.
After an intense internal debate, the administration has now accepted the change that requires a page-by-page declassification review except when boxes of material are deemed "highly unlikely" to contain nuclear weapons information.
The Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit Washington-based group that has tracked the declassification issue, says the provision will cripple the government's declassification program.
"Nobody wants to see sensitive nuclear information disclosed," said the federation's Steve Aftergood. "But what Congress has done is to shut down the entire automatic declassification process, which has been incredibly productive until now."
National Archives chief John Carlin warned the White House that requiring a page-by-page review would mean that "vast amounts of declassified records that are not (restricted data) would be indefinitely withheld from release."
Robert Wampler, a member of a Pentagon advisory panel on declassification, said similar document searches by the Defense Department have also turned up restricted data mixed in among material to be released.
What is less clear, he said, is whether the occasional decades-old nuclear weapons document represents a threat great enough to tie up the entire declassification process.
JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat will join President Clinton today for a rare three-way peace summit, each buffeted by troubles at home and each very much wanting a deal, but for very different reasons.
All three leaders face restive oppositions that are watching their moves closely. And all three could undoubtedly use success in the talks - however success is defined - to build domestic political advantage.
The summit opens five years and one month after the historic Oslo, Norway, accords formally ended hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians and set in motion a laborious peace process aimed at protecting Israelis from terrorism and establishing limited Palestinian self-rule.
With the peace process stalemated for more than 18 months, however, and acrimony and mistrust deepening, the meeting at Maryland's Wye River Plantation is seen by many as a crucial last chance to prevent renewed full-scale violence.
The U.S.-drafted compromise before Netanyahu and Arafat requires the Israelis to withdraw from an additional 13 percent of occupied West Bank territory in exchange for concrete steps by the Palestinians to halt anti-Israeli terrorism.
This interim agreement would clear the way to so-called "final status" talks that would tackle the most difficult issues in Israeli-Palestinian relations.
"This is the moment when we'll find out if the two parties are ready to make the hard political decisions they've avoided for the past 18 months and get serious about coming to closure," a senior Clinton administration official said. "If we don't get this, or (the) underpinnings of a process, we are heading toward a train wreck."
Arafat has repeatedly threatened to unilaterally declare an independent Palestinian state next May if the final-status talks envisioned in Oslo are not completed by then. That, U.S. and Middle East experts warn, could trigger a chain of disastrous events, including armed conflict between Israeli troops seeking to retake territory and Palestinian police seeking to keep it.
Arafat needs an agreement at the Wye Plantation summit to give his people something to reaffirm their sagging confidence in his leadership - although the sort of deal that the Palestinian masses would applaud seems totally out of the question.
Failure in the talks may mean that the ailing Arafat, who dedicated his life to the cause of Palestinian nationalism, will not live to see the outcome of his life's work.
The stagnation of the peace process has cost Arafat and his mainstream Fatah party a large amount of support, sending many followers into the arms of the fast-growing militant Islamic Hamas movement. Palestinians are increasingly disillusioned by the failure of peace to bring them the land and prosperity they expected.
The Israelis are demanding that Arafat agree to a detailed program to dismantle Hamas' armed wing and other extremists held responsible for terrorist attacks that have claimed scores of Israeli lives in recent years. It is a risky move for Arafat, because such a crackdown would target precisely those already seen as heroes by many Palestinians. Arafat's negotiators note they earlier agreed to a broad security memorandum, but the Israelis want to bind the Palestinians to a step-by-step plan on which they would condition a phased release of land.
Netanyahu is also under pressure from Israeli extremists, settlers and his own right-wing supporters. The prime minister whiled away the days before the U.S. trip courting senior right-wing officials and religious leaders. Several on the right have threatened to oust Netanyahu if he signs away more land to the Palestinians, and they have begun floating the names of alternative candidates for prime minister to underscore the point.
They want guarantees that Jewish settlements in the West Bank will retain territorial contiguity; extradition of Palestinian murder suspects; and an amendment of the Palestinian Charter that calls for the destruction of Israel.
It remains unclear just how much irreversible damage the right can do to Netanyahu's government, and the prime minister last week apparently bought a measure of relief by naming hawk Ariel Sharon to the post of foreign minister. The appointment of Sharon, whom Netanyahu placed in charge of final-status negotiations, both appeases the right and brings one of Netanyahu's harshest critics safely into the fold, where he will not be able to attack government policies with the same ferocity.
Sharon's presence also may make it easier for Netanyahu to strike an interim deal, because he has sufficient credibility with the right to pull it off.
If Netanyahu can secure a deal that does not alienate the right, he could easily solidify his position going into the next Israeli election campaign.
The elections are scheduled for 2000, but they could be moved up if the prime minister's rightist coalition falls apart.
For Clinton, the summit affords a glittering opportunity to demonstrate to the public that he is not immobilized by the scandal over his sexual liaisons with former intern Monica S. Lewinsky. Conversely, failure could convince Congress and the public that the scandal has so sapped Clinton's effectiveness that resignation or impeachment may be the only remaining options.
Clinton enters the summit with a far weaker hand than then-President Carter held in 1978 when he brought Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Camp David and forged a landmark peace treaty. Such a breakthrough is not expected now, after almost two years of deadlock and with the differences between the Israelis and the Palestinians so great.
While the Israelis are demanding a guarantee that Arafat will not declare a Palestinian state next May, the Palestinians are demanding a freeze on new Jewish settlements, something Netanyahu has repeatedly refused to impose.
Communist Party leaders, basking in their new influence in the government, applauded Primakov's plan, as did regional governors. Primakov left unanswered the question of how the financially pressed Russian government can afford to cut revenues and increase spending.
Until now, Primakov has delivered only the vaguest pronouncements about how he intends to halt the country's plunge toward bankruptcy. Speaking yesterday before the upper house of parliament, he announced financial breaks and government aid to agricultural producers, energy and fuel companies, banks, importers and particularly hard-up regional governments. He also reiterated his pledge to pay back wages and pension arrears.
The speech was a sharp departure from the policies of his reform-minded predecessor, Sergei Kiriyenko, who insisted that parliament slash spending and boost taxes to save the country from economic collapse. President Boris Yeltsin replaced Kiriyenko with Primakov after the government devalued the ruble and defaulted on its domestic debt in mid-August.
Primakov said his plan will provide a boost to the economy and stimulate payment of debts between government and industry. But he gave no specifics on how he will pay for the program.
With the political turmoil in Moscow, the government has collected even less tax revenue than usual. The International Monetary Fund, uncertain of Primakov's commitment to economic reform, has backed off on a pledge to lend Russia more money.
"This has been Primakov's problem from the very beginning," said Lilia Shevtsova, senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow. "They are going to pay nearly everybody, everybody should be satisfied, but how? At the expense of whom?"
Many politicians cheered Primakov's speech despite its lack of specifics. "Primakov's government is the ultimate hope of the Russian Federation, high-flown as it might sound," said Yevgeny Nazdratenko, governor of the Primorskiy Territory in far eastern Russia. "This is Russia's hope to remain among the civilized countries."
Said Yegor Stroyev, chairperson of the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament: "The routes that were mapped out today . . . found complete understanding and support." Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov called Primakov's plan "pragmatic" and "constructive."
Without proposing solutions, Primakov outlined some of the most serious economic problems facing the country: businesses that hide profits, evade taxes, fail to pay workers and take over state enterprises only to strip them of their assets. He also said the country needs to restore confidence in the ruble and the banks, many of which are now bankrupt.
In preparation for winter, Primakov said, the government has spent $600 million on an emergency food reserve that will last two weeks and cover only one-third of the population. But he said, "We practically have enough fruits and vegetables and potatoes." The government is also slashing rail tariffs on food deliveries and allowing agricultural producers to delay payment on about $1.6 billion in government debt, he said.
He also pledged government support to certain "crucial" banks and payment of back wages to military personnel and pensioners.
Primakov did not mention Yeltsin in his speech, but later said Yeltsin was working in his Kremlin office and ignoring his doctor's orders to stay in bed. Yeltsin, 67, cut short a visit to Kazakhstan Tuesday and flew back to Moscow because of what the Kremlin said was bronchitis. That prompted a new round of calls for his resignation on the grounds that he is too ill to govern.
10-15-98
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