[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 49 (Wednesday, April 23, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Page S3482]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                Condition 31 on Rejecting CWC Inspectors

  A third condition on which the Senate will be asked to vote is 
condition 31, which would require the United States to reject all CWC 
inspectors from countries that supported terrorism or violated U.S. 
nonproliferation law.
  This is an unnecessary condition, one that has the potential to do 
great harm to the implementation of the CWC, and one that is a poor way 
to get at the perceived problem of untrustworthy CWC inspectors. It 
should be struck.
  The dangers that CWC inspectors will learn some trade secrets of U.S. 
firms in the course of onsite inspections are limited. Many CWC 
provisions limit what inspectors will learn. Facility agreements 
governing routine inspections and managed access in challenge 
inspections will specify what inspectors can see. U.S. firms are free 
to use such devices as shrouding, removal of papers, and limiting the 
number of inspectors who see a particular area or how long they are 
allowed to see it. No employees need answer questions that are 
irrelevant to the question of whether the CWC is being violated. An 
agreed condition, No. 16, adds teeth to the CWC provision permitting 
the director-general to waive the immunity of any employee who betrays 
confidential U.S. information.
  The CWC already provides the U.S. Government the right to bar 
inspectors on an individual-by-individual basis each year when the CWC 
organization proposes its list of inspectors, just as a defense 
attorney can peremptorily challenge a prospective juror in a trial.
  Condition 31 is unnecessarily rigid. This condition takes a meat ax 
approach to whom we would allow to come to the United States, which is 
almost certain to provoke reciprocity. In other words, adoption of this 
condition would most likely result in other nations blackballing all 
American inspectors in advance. This would defeat one of our principal 
objectives in our joining the treaty: to ensure American inspectors 
take the lead in finding violations, just as we have for UNSCOM in 
Iraq.
  It also fails to require rejection of inspectors from other countries 
who might be known spies or have a record of improper handling of 
confidential information.
  As Admiral Zumwalt recently testified, ``the ability for us to get 
more access is an important thing to me as a member of the President's 
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; the opportunity to inspect is 
going to give us additional information which can be cross-compared 
with what we get through the intelligence community. And it will, 
without a doubt, enhance our ability to know more about what is going 
on.''
  A better approach would have been to require the President to tell 
the intelligence committees of Congress the nationality of all 
inspectors the United States approved, as well as any derogatory 
information about them that U.S. agencies might have. This would enable 
those committees to weigh in with the executive branch if the U.S. 
National Authority were ignoring serious information or other agencies' 
concerns regarding an inspector.
  A substitute condition was prepared embodying this more flexible 
approach. CWC critics would not even consider this, and instead 
insisted that no substitutes be in order. We can avoid this Hobson's 
choice, however, between rigidity and doing nothing. All we have to do 
is vote to strike condition 31 and then enact more sensible language in 
the implementing legislation that will come to the floor next month. I 
urge you to do just that.