Prosecutor questions North’s following-orders defence

Press, 13 April 1989, Page 8

Prosecutor questions North’s following-orders defence

NZPA-Reuter Washington A prosecutor says Oliver North wrote “a pack of lies” in answering Congressional queries about aid to Nicaraguan rebels. North then justified his deeds with the war criminal’s excuse he was only following orders. The chief Government prosecutor, John Keker, sparred with North on Tuesday in the second day of a hostile crossexamination, likening North’s defence for his actions on the Reagan Administration National Security Council (N.S.C.) to the defence of German officers on trial for Nazi war crimes. “Were you told about

the cases after World War Two where a number of German officers were prosecuted and they said, ’I committed all kinds of crimes, but I was ordered to do it’?” Mr Keker asked North. “My training at the Naval Academy included (the definition of) what was an unlawful order,” North replied angrily, adding that he had never been given an unlawful order. North, a career Marine, has admitted lying to Congress and shredding documents — two of the 12 criminal charges against him in the so-called IranContra trial — but has maintained that he had approval for his covert

actions from the highest officials in government, including former President, Ronald Reagan. But under close questioning, North said he never had specific approval from Reagan or his N.S.C. boss, Robert McFarlane, to lie to Congress in responding to official queries about his involvement in an operation to get military aid to the Contras despite a congressional ban. “Did it cross your mind that for self-preservation purposes, you might want to tell someone (at the N.S.C.) about what you were doing?” Mr Keker asked, referring to North’s false and misleading answers to. the Con-

gressional inquiries in late 1985. “It wasn’t a matter of self-preservation,” North said. “These people knew what I was doing; they sent me out there to do it.” Mr Keker later referred to North’s draft responses to Congressional questions as “a pack of lies.” North, who was dismissed from the N.S.C. on November 25, 1986, and later retired from the Marines as a lieutenantcolonel, is one of four people charged in the 1985-86 plan to sell arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages and funnel the proceeds to the Contras when Congress had outlawed aid.