The timing of the DNC's announcement was appropriately ironic, in that this appointment tells us volumes about the roots of the nation's growing security crisis: the dramatic erosion of America's military credibility in an ill-conceived war, and the theft of its nuclear arsenal by an adversary the administration claims is a "strategic partner."

Carlottia Scott was for many years the chief aide to Rep. Ron Dellums, a Berkeley radical who, with the approval of the congressional Democratic leadership, was appointed first to the Armed Services Committee and then to the chair of its subcommittee on military installations, which oversees U.S. bases worldwide. The Democratic leadership apparently saw no problem in the fact that every year during the Cold War with the Soviet empire, Dellums introduced a "peace" budget, which would have required a 75 percent reduction in government spending on America's defenses.

Nor did they have any problem with Dellums' performance during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which occurred on Jimmy Carter's watch. As Soviet troops poured across the Afghan border and President Carter called for the resumption of the military draft, Dellums told a "Stop the Draft" rally in Berkeley that "Washington, D.C., is a very evil place," and the only "arc" of a crisis that he could see was "the one that runs between the basement of the West Wing of the White House and the war room of the Pentagon."

Among the government documents retrieved when the Marxist government in Grenada was overthrown were the love letters of Dellums' chief aide, Carlottia Scott, to its anti-American dictator, Maurice Bishop. Scott wrote: "Ron has become truly committed to Grenada ... He's really hooked on you and Grenada and doesn't want anything to happen to building the Revolution and making it strong ... The only other person that I know of that he expresses such admiration for is Fidel."

Bishop and Fidel were not the only communists in the Americas favored by Dellums and his aide. About the time these letters were retrieved, Dellums was opening his congressional office to a Cuban intelligence agent who proceeded to organize support committees in the United States for the communist guerrilla movement in El Salvador. Yet, when Dellums' retired, the Clinton administration's secretary of defense, William S. Cohen, bestowed on him the highest civilian honor the Pentagon can award "for service to his country."

After Dellums' retirement, Scott became the chief of staff to his successor, Berkeley leftist Barbara Lee. In the 1970s Lee was a confidential aide to Huey Newton, the "minister of defense" of the Black Panther Party, whose calling card was the "Red Book" of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong. Among the documents liberated from Grenada were minutes from a politburo meeting attended by Lee and the Marxist junta. The minutes state that "Barbara Lee is here presently and has brought with her a report on the international airport done by Ron Dellums. They have requested that we look at the document and suggest any changes we deem necessary. They will be willing to make the changes."

The airport in question was being built by the Cuban military and, according to U.S. intelligence sources, was designed to accommodate Soviet warplanes. The Reagan administration regarded the airport project as part of a larger Soviet plan to establish a military base in this hemisphere, and administration officials invoked its construction as a national security justification for the invasion that followed.

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