Top advocate of US-India nuke deal has yet to see text

Michael RostonPublished: Tuesday July 31, 2007
Staff for a top Democratic advocate of a US-India nuclear cooperation agreement admitted to RAW STORY on Tuesday morning that the Bush administration had not yet showed him the text of the deal it announced last Friday.
"The Congressman has not yet seen a copy of the text of the agreement," acknowledged Lynne Weil, spokesperson from Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA), who chairs the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
She added, "It is important to Rep. Lantos that the agreement will comport with the legal requirements of the Hyde Act."
Rep. Lantos was a co-sponsor of the United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Promotion Act, which was honorarily named after Rep. Henry Hyde, the Illinois Republican who chaired the House International Relations Committee until his retirement at the end of the previous Congress.
While some nonproliferation advocates argue that the US-India nuclear cooperation scheme will undermine the global regime against the spread of nuclear weapons, champions of the deal like Rep. Lantos have argued that the Hyde Act allows the removal of a key irritant from broader US-India strategic cooperation while expanding international safeguards around the South Asian giant's civilian nuclear energy program.
A colleague of Lantos, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) slammed the Bush administration for hiding the text of the agreement last week.