State’s Dick Stratford ventured over to the Hill yesterday to brief the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Staff on the US-India 123 Agreement and what went down in Vienna. I have a little readout for you.
Stratford basically confirmed the outlines of Glenn Kessler’s excellent story today in the Washington Post.
Stratford also provided staffers with a basic account of the negotiations: The key holdouts, as of Friday afternoon, were New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway, and the Netherlands. By Saturday morning, only Austria and New Zealand remained as holdouts, awaiting direction from their capitals.
What happened? Stratford told staffers, without qualification, that the United States made no side deals with any of the holdouts. SECSTATE Rice apparently made the same pledge to Representative Berman on Tuesday.
Several staffers think this is all very suspicious because — as Stratford admitted and as I have pointed out on the blog — the US didn’t make any substantive changes to the waiver that would have addressed these concerns.
But the Kiwis and others all fell into line, anyway.
One last note — the Administration and the supporters of the deal in Congress may try to waive the 30 day waiting period and wrap everything up in the next two weeks. I have some questions about whether that is feasible under the Atomic Energy Act, so I offer it as a possibility.