The Iran/Contra Scandal

[Mme. Defarge]

Question - what was the name and position of a prominent figure in the H.W. Bush administration who died quite suddenly (and conveniently?) right before he was to testify in a scandal-related trial?

[MerryHolidays]

1. William Casey, CIA Director?

[Mme. Defarge]

4. THANK YOU!

Been racking my brain for a week or so. It seemed so suspicious to me at the time and I’ve always wondered if he faked his own death. That said, I’ve never heard or read anything which suggested that.

[mopinko]

7. iirc, he conveniently has a stroke in his speech center.

died not long afterward. but i remember reading about other supposed cia-related witnesses who had strokes.

[John1956PA]

9. Shortly after Casey's death, Bob Woodward came out with the book "Veil."

In the last chapter, Woodward recounts speaking to Casey as Casey lay dying in a hospital bed. Woodward asked Casey why he went along with the "Arms-For-Hostages / Funds-To-Contras" transaction. Casey replied, "I believed."

[Mme. Defarge]

11. Ha!

Thanks for setting me straight on my long-held suspicion.

[uponit7771]

2. I remember my parents looking at this and thinking back then "why is it always republicans..." and

... now we're looking at the same thing nearly 40 years later.

I'm sick of republicans being allowed to do janky shit

[John1956PA]

3. I am thinking of a figure from Reagan's presidency.

CIA Director William Casey.

[rainy]

5. What was the name of the guy who actually had election

Fraud evidence that was killed suspiciously on the way to give evidence? It was when Karl Rove was involved.

[mikeysnot]

6. Michael Connell

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/republican-it-guru-dies-in-plane-crash/

[Mme. Defarge]

8. Oh my!

I had forgotten about that too. But what a story! As one says in French, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

[2naSalit]

12. C'est vrai!

[Kid Berwyn]

10. Did not get a chance to explain the Reagan-Bush treason.

Altercation: Toying With Treason

A short history of Republicans’ long history of selling out the U.S. to help them win the White House

BY ERIC ALTERMAN
The American Prospect, JULY 30, 2021

EXCERPT…

Another episode of possibly treasonous GOP skullduggery remains a little murky to this day—and may have been far more significant than anyone realized at the time. This was the so-called “October Surprise” that either did or didn’t occur during the election of 1980. At issue here was the Iranian government’s holding 56 American diplomats hostage, as Jimmy Carter—whom Reagan was endeavoring to unseat—worked to set them free. As Kai Bird recounts in his much-praised new biography of Jimmy Carter, The Outlier, William Casey, Reagan’s campaign chief and later his CIA director, “was a busy man in the summer of 1980.” Just after Reagan fought off a last-minute challenge from Gerald Ford to win his party’s presidential nomination, Casey took time from the campaign to travel to London, allegedly to give a paper at a conference on the history of the Second World War. (Casey had served in the OSS, the CIA’s WWII predecessor.) Casey flew on the Eastern Air Lines shuttle from Washington, D.C., to New York City on July 25, and his speech was scheduled for 9:30 a.m. on July 29. Casey was absent when the London conference opened on July 28. His whereabouts between these dates, as Bird shows us, are “unaccounted for by any travel records.”

Where was Casey on the 26th and 27th? According to a deposition given by Iranian businessman Jamshid Hashemi to the House Task Force on the October Surprise in 1992, Casey flew to Madrid to meet with a representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Mehdi Karrubi, a meeting orchestrated by Hashemi and his brother Cyrus. The two men had longtime connections to both the Khomeini regime and the CIA. Bird writes: “[T]wo meetings were held between Casey and the Ayatollah Karrubi in a lavish suite at Madrid’s Hotel Ritz. Jamshid later told Ted Koppel on ABC’s Nightline, ‘Casey said the Iranians should hold the hostages until after the election … and the new Reagan administration would feel favorably towards Iran, releasing military equipment and the frozen Iranian assets.’” This is, needless to say, exactly what happened.

Extremely conveniently for all the Reagan administration Iran-Contra criminals looking for a fall guy, CIA chief Casey died of a brain tumor in 1987, not long after that crazy scheme was first (partially) discovered. In 1992, as President George H.W. Bush faced a tough battle for re-election, Rep. Lee Hamilton and his House Task Force on the October Surprise sought to uncover what actually had happened in the fall of 1980. They didn’t get very far: After Casey died, his 1980 passport somehow disappeared. His calendar turned up, but guess what? The pages for July 26–27, 1980, had gone missing. Investigative reporter Robert Parry (who died of pancreatic cancer in early 2018) later found a State Department memo in the archives of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library mentioning “a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown.” Bird calls this “damning evidence that Bill Casey did indeed make that side trip from London to Madrid in late July 1980.” What’s more, Bird adds, “the Bush White House deputy counsel knew of this evidence—but it was never turned over” to Hamilton’s committee. Why not? It turns out that Bush’s White House counsel C. Boyden Gray had “convened a meeting to discuss how they should handle the new evidence. Gray said the October Surprise investigation was ‘of special interest to the President.’ It was essential, he told his staff, that there be ‘no Surprises to the White House.’” Why was that? The investigation, he insisted, was—wait for it—“partisan.”

Bush had gone on a pardoning spree upon becoming president in 1988 in order to continue the cover-up of the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration (in which Bush had been vice president) had secretly sold arms to Iran, using the proceeds to fund the Contras’ war against the Nicaraguan government. Among the pardoned were genocide-enabler Elliott Abrams and other officials still under investigation by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh. When revelations in former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger’s diaries appeared to implicate Bush himself, Weinberger received a pardon before a jury could decide on his guilt or innocence. This marked, as a furious Walsh later noted, “the first time a president ever pardoned someone in whose trial he might have been called as a witness.”

CONTINUES…

https://prospect.org/politics/altercation-toying-with-treason/

[moniss]

13. Back in 1972

the Nixon White House plotted the assassination of investigative journalist Jack Anderson. Anderson had uncovered lots of dirty Nixon deals. This plot was confessed to by two separate White House aides under oath. Senior aide Charles Colson ordered the hit and Liddy and Hunt held meetings with CIA "operatives" to lay out the plans. The plan was canceled by a twist of fate when the same plotters got busted when the Watergate break-in happened. This is just one of the reasons why it is important to not let people reduce the Watergate break-in to just what happened that day. There were all manner of illegal activities going on that got interrupted/ended when the attention to Watergate began.

I'm adding this long forgotten fact because it sheds light on how corrupt and criminal the GQP could be. We could actually go back at least to WW2 and Prescott Bush etc. But suffice it to say that it is a reasonable conclusion that if they will try to assassinate a US citizen who is digging dirt on them then certainly killing off/causing medical issues to someone who is going to testify is certainly not a bridge too far. The GQP has for many decades been a criminal organization masquerading as a political party and using political policies as their front.

[Mme. Defarge]

14. I do remember Jack Anderson

but not the assassination plot.