RIGHT OF CENTER: IF BASE CLOSINGS WRONG, WHY APPROVE?

Editor's note: this column was written prior to Friday's reassignment of FBI deputy director Larry Potts to the FBI trainin division.

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After staging a tantrum in protest, President Bill Clinton this week went ahead and approved a list that would close 79 military bases and realign 26 others.

The president denounced the list, saying the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission that compiled it hadn't taken into account the economic impact on regions of the country hit particularly hard by the base closings.

There was our president pounding his lectern while decrying the "devastating impact" of the base closings. The media, increasingly cynical when it comes to our boy president, reported the base-closings blow falls most heavily on California and Texas, huge electoral prizes in next year's presidential election.

Clinton plans to convert some of the jobs at the bases over to the private sector. In a finger-pointing, fist-pounding outburst he assured reporters his concerns were for the local economies affected by the base closings, and he called accusations that his concerns were more political in nature "an outrage."

Outrage or not, it seems likely the whole affair was intended to show voters in California and Texas that the president was in there fighting for them, even though he was compelled to accept the base-closure list. But if Clinton didn't want the bases closed -- if he truly is concerned about the plan's economic affect -- he shouldn't have approved the package.

The president isn't the only person in Washington and elsewhere -- and I count myself among them -- who resists massive military downsizing. But he is the only person who single-handedly could have done something about it. He could have rejected the list. If Clinton isn't willing to fight to keep the bases open, then he shouldn't feign indignation when someone suggests his rationale is affected more by politics than economics.

Clinton's sputtering fit amounted to another in an endless litany of self-aggrandizing attempts by the president to avow his relevance and good character.

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As two House subcommittees prepare to hold joint hearings on the FBI's role in the 1993 standoff with the Branch Davidian cult near Waco, Texas, new information surfaced this week regarding a similar FBI debacle in Idaho.

A senior FBI official was suspended after he allegedly tampered with records related to the approval of a "shoot on sight" directive to bureau snipers during a deadly 1992 standoff in Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

E. Michael Kahoe, now head of the FBI field office in Jacksonville, Fla., was chief of the violent crime and major offenders section of the bureau's criminal investigative division during the 1992 incident. He apparently has been placed on administrative leave pending a final action on the tampering with documents case.

Kahoe smells to me like a fall guy. His suspension resulted from a Justice Department internal investigation into allegations the bureau covered up responsibility for the "shoot on sight" order.

The Justice investigation was begun after the FBI's former Salt Lake City chief, Eugene Glenn, alleged that the bureau's investigation of the Idaho incident was designed to protect Larry Potts, who since has been promoted to be deputy to FBI Director Louis Freeh.

Glenn was the bureau's field commander during the 1992 standoff with white separatist Randy Weaver, in which Weaver's unarmed wife, Vicki, was shot and killed by an FBI sniper while she was holding their infant child. A deputy U.S. marshal and Weaver's 14-year-old son also were killed.

After the incident, Kahoe was censured and suspended by Freeh for his role in the shootout. Potts, who was the chief headquarters supervisor of the standoff, was given the lightest penalty, a letter of censure, before he was promoted in May by Attorney General Janet Reno to deputy FBI director at Freeh's recommendation.

For some reason, Justice is bent on not only keeping Potts out of hot water, but on promoting him. Two senior FBI officials who were on the scene at Ruby Ridge have said Potts signed off on the shoot-without-provocation orders, although Potts denies that he read the orders. Freeh's blindness in evaluating his agency's performance at Ruby Ridge is rivaled only by its ineptitude at Waco.

It's important that the House hearings on both incidents find what was lost in the earlier FBI and Treasury investigations -- the truth. Then when the American people find out who was responsible for the decisions that led to tragedies in Waco and Ruby Ridge, heads must roll -- starting with Larry Potts, Louis Freeh and Janet Reno.

~Jay Eastlick is the news editor of the Southeast Missourian.