THE WEEK

□ Forget Star Wars. Beef up the Cessna fleet.

□ The Joint Congressional Committee on Pro-American Activities went into its familiar high-dudgeon mode concerning Under Secretary of State Elliott Abrams’s putative deceptions regarding secret aid to the anti-Communist forces in Nicaragua. But its wrath slumbered when its own lawyer deliberately falsified Abrams’s December testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The quick-witted Abrams noted that the lawyer, Mark Belnick, had somehow read aloud a “no” from the transcript where Abrams had actually said “yes”—i.e., he had discussed fundraising with the NSC staff. Belnick nearly got away with it— and on national television. That’s what in other contexts is known as “lying to the American people.”

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William F. Buckley Jr.

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□ Forget Star Wars. Beef up the Cessna fleet.

□ The Joint Congressional Committee on Pro-American Activities went into its familiar high-dudgeon mode concerning Under Secretary of State Elliott Abrams’s putative deceptions regarding secret aid to the anti-Communist forces in Nicaragua. But its wrath slumbered when its own lawyer deliberately falsified Abrams’s December testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The quick-witted Abrams noted that the lawyer, Mark Belnick, had somehow read aloud a “no” from the transcript where Abrams had actually said “yes”—i.e., he had discussed fundraising with the NSC staff. Belnick nearly got away with it— and on national television. That’s what in other contexts is known as “lying to the American people.”