President Clinton's visit to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation last week was an exercise in irony and hypocrisy. The very day that the President was lavishing Native Americans with promises his Interior Secretary was testifying before a federal court concerning the $350,000 that the Democratic National Committee received from a tribal group to influence the awarding of a gambling license.

In addition, there is still the matter of $2.4 billion in missing funds that was to go to the reservations to improve the lives of Native Americans that is unaccounted for. One Interior Department attorney has testified that he was ordered to shred documents indicating the whereabouts of these funds.

These stories of malfeasance go unreported while Clinton makes his rounds feeling the pain in the poverty pockets. Where is the national media when the poor need them? Every concerned citizen should contact their U.S. senators and representatives and demand that the Clinton-Gore Administration find the billions in royalty funds owed to Native Americans for minerals extracted from reservation sites.

[On the other side of the world, meanwhile,] the fact that a U.S. delegation recently found no nuclear weapons in a new North Korean tunnel complex should not cause anyone to breathe easier.

What we should be asking is why a Third World power who supposedly can't feed the children in its orphanages spends millions for underground complexes and the second largest army in Asia. We should also remember that the North Koreans, for no reason, once attacked and killed unarmed U.S. soldiers in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. Further, we need to ask why the Clinton-Gore Administration continues to provide various forms of aid to these bandits.

William H. Fielder
Peachtree City

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