Arguing About Means and Ends

And U.S. aid to Nicaragua's contra rebels

The sporadic clashes in the mountains and jungles of Nicaragua's thinly populated northern provinces so far scarcely deserve to be called a war. The forces involved are minor. On one side are perhaps 2,000 exiles, known as contras, who have slipped back into the country from bases in Honduras, where they were trained as guerrillas; on the other are a scattering of militia and border guards of Nicaragua's Marxist Sandinista government. Casualties in the past month total a few hundred, of whom many were peasants killed almost at random. But the political struggle touched off in Washington by this low-level fighting is escalating rapidly, especially in Congress. Said one Administration official last week: "The temperature on Capitol Hill is higher than at any time during the past several months." The issue that is causing all the heat: Does the Reagan Administration's no-longer-secret aid to the contras violate U.S. law?

The law in question is the Boland Amendment, a little-noticed rider tacked onto an omnibus Government-spending bill last December. Ironically, it was adopted at the urging of the Administration, as a substitute for a far more restrictive measure proposed by Democrat Thomas Harkin of Iowa. Harkin's rider would have banned U.S. support of any "military activities in or against Nicaragua"; the CIA argued that this would prevent necessary covert actions aimed at reducing the flow of arms supplied by the Nicaraguan government to Marxist-led guerrillas in El Salvador. So the House accepted, 411 to 0, a rider offered by Massachusetts Democrat Edward P. Boland, chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, that merely repeated language written into an earlier appropriations bill. It forbade aid to guerrilla groups "for the purpose of over throwing the government of Nicaragua or provoking a military exchange between Nicaragua and Honduras," presumably in the form of a Nicaraguan counterinvasion of Honduras to destroy the contras' bases.

The contras, however, loudly if extravagantly proclaim their objective to be precisely the overthrow of Nicaragua's increasingly repressive government. To that end, they have launched a much ballyhooed "invasion" — actually a series of hit-and-run raids by guerrillas operating inside Nicaragua. And a stream of reports by American newsmen who have visited contra bases in Honduras has left no doubt that the Administration is assisting them by supplying training, arms, and intelligence on troop movements in Nicaragua's northern provinces gathered by spy plane.

Consequently, growing numbers of Congressmen are questioning whether the Administration is violating at least the spirit of the Boland Amendment, which it had pledged to obey. Thirty-six House Democrats and one Republican, Jim Leach of Iowa, raised the issue in a letter to the White House in late March. Last week Democratic Senators Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, both members of the committee that oversees CIA operations, voiced their doubts on the Senate floor. Democrat Wyche Fowler of Georgia, just returned from a fact-finding visit to Nicaragua, declared, "No branch of our Government may pick and choose which statutes it will obey."