A majority of the House Foreign Affairs Committee has finally rebelled against stale and spurious arguments of the Defense and State Departments and voted to cut off aid to the military regimes of Greece and Pakistan. Rather than attempting feverishly to overturn the decision in the full House, the Nixon Administration should try to understand what this usually docile committee majority was telling it with these votes.

Chairman Thomas E. Morgan and colleagues of both parties were endeavoring first of all to reassert the proper role of this committee in the shaping of foreign policy. The Administration henceforth can ‘expect many more such challenges from both houses as Congress strives to restore a long‐absent balance between executive and legislative branches in foreign affairs.

Secondly, the majority was rejecting the notion that is always unwise for the United States to rock the diplomatic boat by suspending military or economic aid dictatorships that fail to make good their commitments to their own oppressed people. In voting to cut off nearly $132 million in aid to Pakistan, the committee was taking a stand previously advocated by the World Bank in light of the Yahya Khan regime's bloody repression in East Pakistan. Aid could be resumed under certain conditions but in any case the cutoff would not bar the use of $100 million approved earlier by the committee for refugee relief.

Action to halt aid to Greece resulted directly from testimony last week before a Foreign Affairs subcommittee headed by Representative Benjamin Rosenthal Queens. Here some members learned, evidently for the first time, that the 1967 coup had not been an action military leaders to head off Communism, as so frequently represented, but “an open mutiny within the armed forces and a rebellion by those mutineers against their King and the constitutional Government of Greece.”

The man who said this was Col. Oliver Marshall, now retired, American Defense and Army attache in Athens, 1963‐67. He sees “the greatest danger to future Greek-American and Greek‐NATO relationships” in the widely held belief that “the United States supported this military mutiny and continues to do so.” In other words, by sustaining the junta this country will jeopardize its own and NATO's security rather than protect it.

Colonel Marshall advocated an all‐out effort to convince Greeks that the United States does not back the junta and to persuade the junta to keep its promise restore democratic government. Contradicting the State-Pentagon line, he said this effort should take priority over “our immediate military needs on Greek soil.”

In the Greek case, the President can resume aid he reports to Congress that the overriding security requirements of the United States justify it. Even then, however, the military aid would be resumed at the current annual level of $80.3 million rather than the $118 million the Administration requested.

The Foreign Affairs Committee has projected the national interest on a broader canvas than that employed by the State and Defense Departments. It would be foolhardy for the Administration to ignore the meaning of its actions.