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Iran Contra At 25: Reagan And Bush "Criminal Liability" Evaluations (11-25-11 The National Security

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bobthedrummer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-29-11 07:15 PM
Original message
Iran Contra At 25: Reagan And Bush "Criminal Liability" Evaluations (11-25-11 The National Security
Archive/Electronic Briefing Book 365)

Presidential "Exposure" and roles detailed in Special Prosecutor Reports
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB365/index.htm

Yes, let's discuss this once more DUers.

RECALL WALKER/KLEEFISCH!!!
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bobthedrummer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-29-11 07:22 PM
Response to Original message
1. New "October Surprise" Series (5-9-11 Consortium News/Robert Parry)
Let's discuss this again DU. Below are some articles you may have missed over the years. Thank you Robert Parry!

New "October Surprise" Series
http://www.consortiumnews.com/the-new-october-surprise-series

RECALL WALKER/KLEEFISCH!!!
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H2O Man Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-29-11 08:04 PM
Response to Reply #1
8. Older folks here
will remember that the Senate Committee that investigated the series of crimes & scandals popularly known as "Watergate" would include in their final report a demand for the legislative & judicial branches of the federal government to cooperate in the creation of an actual full-time, unending department greater than a "special prosecutor." It would have been funded by the legislative branch; the appropriate House and Senate Committees could file concerns and complaints of a criminal nature (not civil, re: impeachment), as well as have access to certain reports by the department.

The USSC would have made the appointments, which would have been for terms longer than four years, to avoid any effort by a President or Congress to stack the deck to one party's advantage.

The department would not have been "under" the US Department of Justice. In theory, it was intended that it would serve as a watchdog for the public, rather than any party or branch of government. This concept had clear advantages, which explains why it never was established.

It would have been EXACTLY what was needed to prosecute the Iran-Contra "scandal's" numerous crimes. As it turned out, Robert Parry did more to inform the public about this series of attacks upon our Constitutional democracy that the combined efforts of the federal government.
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mod mom Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-29-11 07:23 PM
Response to Original message
2. Thanks Bob. Your informative posts are always appreciated.
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bobthedrummer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-29-11 07:29 PM
Response to Reply #2
3. Hi mod mom-all I do is read and post the work of others, but I apply it to everything!
RECALL WALKER/KLEEFISCH!!!
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mod mom Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-29-11 07:30 PM
Response to Reply #3
4. Passing the info on is an important role. One of the reasons I love DU
is you can find so much information at one site.
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bobthedrummer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-29-11 07:36 PM
Response to Reply #4
5. Yep, DU's Archives are priceless...
RECALL WALKER/KLEEFISCH!!!
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underpants Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-29-11 07:49 PM
Response to Original message
6. Read Jeffrey Toobin' s "Opening Arguments" for all the info you need on the fix
Laurence Silberman directed the investigation (later used as the basis for the absurd Whitewater investigation) and then he ruled that the investigation, following his rules, was enough to dismiss charges against Ollie North. Toobin clearly points out that North stole and lied.
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H2O Man Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-29-11 07:49 PM
Response to Original message
7. It was then,
and remains today, among the most damaging of criminal "scandals" in our nation's history. Obviously it was harmful in the short and long-term in Central America and the Middle East. It also did severe damage to all three branches of our federal government .... a damage that the shadow government was not concerned about from begiining to end.

Had they been able to keep the secret operations from being uncovered, they would have. Once found, they exploited the chance to trample on the Constitution.
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Solly Mack Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-30-11 03:52 AM
Response to Original message
9. k/r
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bobthedrummer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-30-11 03:06 PM
Response to Original message
10. Hmmm, Iran, Central American drug cartels, Saudis, October...it reminds me of some hidden histories
(related archived GD thread started 10-12-11)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x2104315

RECALL WALKER/KLEEFISCH!!!
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Scurrilous Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-30-11 10:30 PM
Response to Original message
11. Thanks.
:kick:
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bobthedrummer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Dec-01-11 03:48 PM
Response to Original message
12. The Lost Opportunity of Iran-Contra (Robert Parry, 12-1-11 Consortium News)
"If you want to solve the perplexing mystery of modern-day America-and understand what went so terribly wrong-an important place to look for clues would be the Iran-Contra scandal, which began a quarter century ago, on Nov. 25, 1986."

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/12/01/the-lost-opportunity-of-iran-contra

RECALL WALKER/KLEEFISCH!!!
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Dec-01-11 04:03 PM
Response to Original message
13. They just keep on haunting American history.
From the present moment and back to FDR's election, the same stain of evil continues to pervert and privatize the United States America.

For some reason, not everyone's gotten the word. Hmm. A letter to the editor explores the question: "Why would that be?"



HOW THE WASHINGTON POST CENSORS THE NEWS

EXCERPT...

Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its coverup of the arms/drug conspiracy evaporating, the ever-accommodating Post shifted gears and retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat to domestic tranquility, the "October Surprise" conspiracy (*7). But close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with the same title, "October Surprise" (*8). Honegger was a member of the Reagan/Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick, professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published their evidence of how the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United States hostages until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was to quash the possibility of a pre-election release (an October surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for President Carter.

Others published details of this alleged Reagan-Bush conspiracy. In October 1988, Playboy Magazine ran an expose "An Election Held Hostage"; FRONTLINE did another in April 1991 (*9). In June, 1991 a conference of distinguished journalists, joined by 8 of the former hostages, challenged the Congress to "make a full, impartial investigation" of the election/hostage allegations. The Post reported the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the conference itself which was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium (*10). On February 5, 1992 a gun-shy, uninspired House of Representatives begrudgingly authorized an "October Surprise" investigation by a task force of 13 congressmen headed by Lee Hamilton (D-IN). who had chaired the House of Representatives Iran-Contra Committee. Hamilton has named as chief team counsel Larry Barcella, a lawyer who represented BCCI when the Bank was indicted in 1988 (*11).

Like the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing the U.S. arms-for-drugs operation (*12). He had accepted Oliver North's lies, and as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he derailed House Resolution 485 which had asked President Reagan to answer questions about Contra support activities of government officials and others (*13). After CIA operative John Hull (from Hamilton's home state). was charged in Costa Rica with "international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation's security", Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling Hull's case "in a manner that will not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican relations" (*14). The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the Costa Rican response that declared Hull's case to be "in as good hands as our 100 year old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all citizens" (*15).

Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from conspiracy theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrongdoing involves government or corporate conspiracies:
    In its COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery, surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass U.S. citizens in the 60's (*16).

    The CIA's Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by "destroying crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and conspiring with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders" (*17).

    "Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G.Farben...of Germany. ...By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil, the United States was effectively prevented from developing or producing any substantial amount of synthetic rubber," said Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin (*18).

    U.S. Government agencies knowingly withheld information about dosages of radiation "almost certain to produce thyroid abnormalities or cancer" that contaminated people residing near the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington (*19).

    Various branches of Government deliberately drag their feet in getting around to cleaning up the Nation's dangerous nuclear weapons sites (*20). State and local governments back the nuclear industry's secret public relations strategy (*21).

    "The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and some twenty comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused the public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning the war against cancer. In fact, the cancer establishment has continually minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates which it has largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat, while discounting or ignoring the causal role of avoidable exposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and the workplace." (*22).

    The Bush Administration coverup of its pre-Gulf-War support of Iraq "is yet another example of the President's people conspiring to keep both Congress and the American people in the dark" (*23).
If you think about it, conspiracy is a fundamental aspect of doing business in this country.



It's getting obvious We the People need to wake up, investigate their crimes, jail the guilty, confiscate their ill-gotten gains, and restore law and order. Among the last to get the news will be America's kept press corpse.
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bobthedrummer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Dec-01-11 04:10 PM
Response to Reply #13
14. Yep. And they employ themselves to constantly "revise" reality.
RECALL WALKER/KLEEFISCH!!!
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Dec-01-11 04:39 PM
Response to Reply #14
15. And while they spin their neocon neolib neobull, they hope the truth gets forgotten...
...or misplaced in the minds of the masses.

From the only government official to prosecute anyone on charges related to the assassination of President Kennedy:



Jim Garrison, Playboy Interview

Playboy, October, 1967

EXCERPT...

"What worries me deeply, and I have seen it exemplified in (the assassination of President Kennedy), is that we in America are in great danger of slowly evolving into a proto-fascist state. It will be a different kind of fascist state from the one of the Germans evolved; theirs grew out of depression and promised bread and work, while ours, curiously enough, seems to be emerging from prosperity. But in the final analysis, it's based on power and on the inability to put human goals and human conscience above the dictates of the state. Its origins can be traced in the tremendous war machine we've built since 1945, the "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower vainly warned us about, which now dominates every aspect of our life. The power of the states and Congress has gradually been abandoned to the Executive Department, because of war conditions; and we've seen the creation of an arrogant, swollen bureaucratic complex totally unfettered by the checks and balances of the Constitution.

In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can't spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can't look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won't be there. We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line. We're not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. But this isn't the test. The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here, the process is more subtle, but the end results can be the same.

I've learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in. The imperatives of the population explosion, which almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life, combined with the awesome power of the CIA and the defense establishment, seem destined to seal the fate of the America I knew as a child and bring us into a new Orwellian world where the citizen exists for the state and where raw power justifies any and every immoral act. I've always had a kind of knee-jerk trust in my Government's basic integrity, whatever political blunders it may make. But I've come to realize that in Washington, deceiving and manipulating the public are viewed by some as the natural prerogatives of office. Huey Long once said, "Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism." I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."

CONTINUED...

http://www.jfklancer.com/Garrison4.html



Weird how little people care, considering the government's own files indicate a conspiracy in Dallas -- meaning perpetrators are still out there, running free.
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bobthedrummer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Dec-03-11 03:14 PM
Response to Original message
16. Anyone still failing to see the historic patterns of what led to our US fascism?
Kick.

RECALL WALKER/KLEEFISCH!!!
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