Wednesday, December 9, 1998___ Page 2
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Defense: No grounds for impeachment
WASHINGTON (AP) - Opening a
final, impassioned defense against
impeachment, President Clinton’s legal
team told the House Judiciary
Committee on Tuesday that Clinton’s
conduct was “misleading, even mad
dening” but did not warrant removing
him from office.
“Nothing in this case justifies this
Congress overturning a national elec
tion,” White House special counsel
Greg Craig told the committee. “There
are no grounds for impeachment”
He also questional the truthfulness
of Monica Lewinsky, the former White
House intern whose account of an affair
and cover-up put the Clinton presidency
in jeopardy. “We think in some areas she
provided erroneous testimony that is in
disagreement with the president’s testi
mony,” Craig said under questioning.
Craig said he did not believe Oval
Office secretary Betty Currie or
Clinton’s friend Vernon Jordan, who
also gave testimony that conflicted with
the president
Committee Republicans frequently
expressed dismay that Craig refused to
say Clinton had lied under oath and that
the White House didn’t summon any
witnesses with direct knowledge of the
case.
After months of relentless attacks
on Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr,
the White House took a gentle approach
toward the evidence he turned over to
the impeachment committee.Craig
promised a “powerful case” against
impeachment that includes testimony
from 14 witnesses over two days. The
committee will then vote on articles of
impeachment
Rep. Marty Meehan, D-Mass.,
lamented that a committee vote in favor
of impeachment was “a foregone con
clusion” regardless of the hearing testi
mony.
“The will of the American people is
about to be ignored in the hope that the
people won’t care enough to say any
thing,” he said, adding that die hearing
was important nonetheless to help sway
20 or 30 Republican members of die fuH
House who are undecided on impeach
u
The will of tlie American people is about
to be ignored in the hope that the people
won’t care enough to say anything,
Marty Meehan
Democratic representative
mentOne of the first witnesses, Yale
University Law Professor Bruce
Ackerman, offered the White House a
possible legal challenge to impeach
ment He argued that if the House voted
before year’s end to remove Clinton
from office, the new Congress could
not act on articles of impeachment
approved by the previous one.
The vote on impeachment “loses its
constitutional force with die death of the
House that passed it,” he testified. He
added that die new Congress that con
venes in January, in which the GOP
majority is slimmer; would have to vote
again on impeachment before a Senate
trial could begin.
That testimony conflicts with a
Congressional Research Service memo
stating that an impeachment proceeding
may be continued from one Congress to
the next
Away from the historic proceed
ings, the president kept his public focus
elsewhere. He kicked off a two-day con
ference on reforming Social Security
and then departed for a Tennessee
memorial for former Sen. Albert Gore
Sr., the vice president’s father, who died
Saturday.
FBI releases file on Sinatra
Singer volunteered to work undercover, was refused
WASHINGTON (AP) - Francis
Albert Sinatra - special agent for the
FBI?
It would have happened if OF Blue
Eyes had his way, according to a cache
: of confidential documents from
Sinatra’s FBI file, made public Tuesday.
Sinatra in 1950 volunteered to work
undercover for the feds - an offer they
could (and did) refuse.
That same year, according to a con
fidential federal informant, Sinatra
smuggled $1 million cash into Italy for
mobster Charles “Lucky” Luciano.
Such tales are the stuff of The Sinatra
Files, a mishmash of facts, allegations
and plain rumors.
The papers offered few nuggets of
new information. There were vague
allegations of mob ties and communist
sympathies, but litfae evidence of either.
There Is no mention of Judith Exner,
Sinatra’s acquaintance who allegedly
had simultaneous affairs with President
Kennedy and Chicago mobster Sam
. ffiancana. No tales of the Rat Pack ram
paging through Las Vegas. And only
passing mentions of mob bosses such as
Carlo Gambino, with no smoking guns.
Rather than flashes of die infamous
Sinatra temper, the documents include a
variety of threats against the singer -
everything from extortion to death
threats.A Sept. 7, 1950, confidential
memo showed Sinatra Offering his
assistance to the FBI. The Hoboken,
N.J., native told FBI officials that he felt
there was an opportunity to “do some
good for his country under the direction
of the FBI,” the memo said.
The singer, the memo continued,
was “willing to do anything even if it
affects his livelihood and costs him his
job.”
The FBI started its Sinatra file in
February 1944 after a gossip columnist
passed along a tip that the thin singer
had paid a doctor $40,000 to give him a
phony 4-F draft rating.
That charge was baseless, but the
file filled up ova* the years.
According to the FBI, Sinatra saw
the material after filing his own requests
in 1979 and 1980. The FBI came up
with 1,300 pages on Sinatra, and they
released all but 25 of the pages after
requests from news agencies.
i ban Francisco blackout affects 938,000
\ ■A ‘simple human error9
left thousands in the dark,
in the city and in suburbs.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A city
wide blackout cut off power to nearly a
million people Tuesday, halting trains,
planes and cable cars, closing shops
and offices and leaving pedestrians
scrambling. The mess was blamed on a
mistake by electrical workers.
Virtually the entire city and sever
al Suburbs to the south were blacked
out, and neighborhoods were only
gradually coming back on line this
afternoon.
The outage happened when a con
struction crew at a power substation in
suburban San Mateo County made a
mistake involving a temporary
ground, said Gordon Smith, Pacific
Gas & Electric president and chief
executive officer. Other links in the
grid shut down automatically to limit
the damage, he said.
“It appears at this time that simple
human error may have been to blame,”
Smith said. “Procedures appear not to
have been followed to the letter.”
Power went out just after 8 a.m.
Electricity was beginning to be
restored to the 375,000 affected cus
tomers by midmoming, but the work
was expected to last into the late after
noon, PG&E spokesman Corey
Warren said. That number of cus
tomers - homes and businesses -
equates to roughly 938,000 people.
Shauwana Horn, two months preg
nant, was stuck in an elevator with
another woman until an elevator com
pany worker rescued them. “We were
in there for an hour and a half. It was
dark,” she said. “I just want to go eat
now.”
The power went out just as the San
Francisco Examiner was starting its
first press run, with a front page that
was immediately out of date.
Scrambling to publish without power
or phones, the afternoon paper’s staff
managed to put out an expanded edi
tion two hours later using a combina
tion of 21st-century technology,
“chewing gum, glue and spit,”
Executive Editor Phil Bronstein said.
Questions? Comments?
Ask for the appropriate section editor at (402) 4792588
or e-mail dn@unl.edu.
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Iran activists
slain during
killing wave
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - After
Dariush Foruhar and his wife were
found stabbed to death under myste
rious circumstances, dissidents
began to more openly question a
string of slayings of critics of the
Iranian government
A friend found the couple’s
bloody bodies in their home last
month Foruhar had been stabbed 15
times in the heart. His wife,
Parvaneh, also was stabbed to death.
There was no sign of burglary,
and it seemed like a professional
killing. Both husband and wife had
been sprayed with some unknown
substance, knocking them out so
they couldn’t scream for help.
The slayings were chilling in
their familiarity: At least nine politi
cal activists, whose actions angered
Iran’s clerical rulers, have been
killed over the past decade. Many
were stabbed to death like the
Foruhars.
Dissidents and newspapers are
beginning to question the slayings,
emboldened by the promise of polit
ical freedoms offered by President
Mohammad Khatami, a moderate
cleric elected last year.
Others killed include a Tehran
University professor, a magazine
editor, a publisher, three Christian
priests and two Sunni Muslim
preachers who spoke out against
ban’s Shiite Muslim leaders.
In none of the earlier slayings are
the perpetrators known to have been
found or brought to justice.
Police said they have made sev
eral arrests in the slaying of the
Foruhars, after Khatami condemned
die killings and ordered an investiga
tion. But no findings have been
made public.
New York-based Human Rights
Watch expressed concern “that the
killing of the Foruhars is part of a
long-standing pattern of harassment
and persecution of government crit
ics in ban.”
Parvaneh Foruhar had told
Human Rights Watch that she and
her husband feared for then lives.
The political killings have not
been limited by ban’s borders. More
than 60 Iranian exiles have been
slain while abroad since 1979.
Court decision prohibits
car searches after ticketing
WASHINGTON (AP) - In a rare
win for privacy rights, the Supreme
Court ruled Tuesday that police cannot
search people and their cars after mere
ly ticketing them for routine traffic vio
lations.
Such a search is unreasonable and
unconstitutional, the court ruled unani
mously in an Iowa case.
The justices said police unlawfully
searched an Iowa man’s car after he was
stopped for speeding. The search turned
up marijuana and a pipe in Patrick
Knowles’ car.
The decision amounted to “a pretty
resounding no” to police, said
Knowles’ lawyer, Paul Rosenberg.
Allowing die search would have created
a “very big category of permissible
searches,” he said.
“Which of us has not at some point
gone over the speed limit or made an
illegal left turn?” added Brooklyn Law
Professor Susan Homan, who signed a
friend-of-the-court brief on Knowles’
behalf
The ruling disappointed the
National Association of Police
Organizations. Traffic stops are “one of
the least predictable and most danger
ous duties of a law enforcement offi
cer,” said Robert Scully, the group’s
executive director.
%
U.S. agrees to aid Netanyahu
during mounting tensions
JERUSALEM (AP) - The United
States agreed to key symbolic conces
sions Tuesday on President Clinton’s
visit to Israel and the Palestinian areas,
extending a helping hand to an Israeli
prime minister under political siege.
New clashes erupted in the West
Bank as domestic pressure mounted on
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to
abandon the Wye River land-for-securi
ty agreement with the Palestinians.
The violence and Israel’s political
turmoil came just five days before the
start of Clinton’s visit to Israel and the
Palestinian areas.
The trip had been intended to shore
up the latest Mideast peace agreement
In one of several bouquets to
Netanyahu, Clinton’s top envoy to the
region reversed earlier claims and said
the president had initiated the upcom
ing visit
Earlier, the U.S. claims that
Netanyahu had suggested the visit at
October’s Wye talks angered right
wingers in Netanyahu’s Cabinet and
helped lead to a vote Monday in parlia
ment for a no-confidence motion, to
take place in two weeks.
U.N. inspectors search
for banned weapons in Iraq
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - U.N.
inspection teams launched an intensive ^
search Tuesday for banned Iraqi"
weapons despite angry assertions from
Baghdad that the searches amount to
harassment
“We are undertaking a very inten
sive schedule,” said Caroline Cross, the
spokeswoman in Baghdad for the U.N.
Special Commission, which oversees
the inspections. “We have several teams
in town. We need to test Iraq’s pledge to
comply.”
Baghdad did not hide its anger as
the weapons inspectors speeded up
their probe. State-run newspapers quot
ed Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz,
currently on a visit to Moscow, as say
ing there was a limit to Iraq’s compli
ance.