I got a little bit of a chance to listen to my girl Randi Rhodes this afternoon, and she was on a rant about how all of the thugs from Iran-Contra are back again, and how they’re in the Iraq Study Group and that they are nothing more than more of the same, and that the Gates nomination is another one of these crooks from the olden days come again to save some more Republicans ass when they’ve really messed up. You know, when they might have some awful things coming like real investigations from Congress, or criminal investigations heaven forbid if the Justice Department ever did its job.
After hearing her show I decided to do a little searching, and I found these two really wonderful diaries that were posted here but didn’t get a lot of attention:
We're a disgrace if we don't fight Gates by theyrereal and the other isGates Gate? -- Is Rummy's Replacement Even More Scandalous? by Paul Rosenberg.
Linked below are the articles that I found on the subject, and they’re interesting to say the least.
NeoCon Continuity at the Pentagon: Robert Gates Involved in Iran-Contra Scandal
Hamilton and Iran Contra
The Iraq Study Group: Official damage control and cover-up
Edwin Meese III: November 1986
Some of the more interesting quotes from the articles are:
Since March, Baker, backed by a team of experienced national-security hands, has been busily at work trying to devise a fresh set of policies... "Baker is primarily motivated by his desire to avoid a war at home--that things will fall apart not on the battlefield but at home. So he wants a ceasefire in American politics," a member of one of the commission's working groups told me. Specifically, he said, if the Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress in November, they would unleash a series of investigative hearings on Iraq, the war on terrorism, and civil liberties that could fatally weaken the administration and remove the last props of political support for the war, setting the stage for a potential Republican electoral disaster in 2008. "I guess there are people in the [Republican] party, on the Hill and in the White House, who see a political train wreck coming, and they've called in Baker to try to reroute the train.
.......former Congressman Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House select committee investigating the Iran-contra affair, was shown ample evidence against Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, but he did not probe their wrongdoing. Why did Hamilton choose not to investigate? In a late 1980s interview aired on PBS 'Frontline,' Hamilton said that he did not think it would have been 'good for the country' to put the public through another impeachment trial. In Lee Hamilton's view, it was better to keep the public in the dark than to bring to light another Watergate, with all the implied ramifications. When Hamilton was chairman of the House committee investigating Iran-contra, he took the word of senior Reagan administration officials when they claimed Bush and Reagan were 'out of the loop.
Mainstream media reporting and official statements from Washington have characterized the ISG as proof of a "shift towards diplomacy" in the Middle East. These same reports cite the sponsorship of the so-called US Institute for Peace as evidence that the ISG represents a "change of course". In fact, the ISG is another official damage control apparatus, spearheaded by notorious Western political and corporate elites, former military-intelligence officers, and "experts" from right wing and intelligence-connected Western think tanks---one of which is the US Institute for Peace itself.
Attorney General Edwin Meese III became directly involved in the Reagan Administration's secret plan to sell weapons to Iran in January 1986, when he was asked for a legal opinion to support the plan.1 When the secret arms sales became exposed in November 1986, raising questions of legality and prompting congressional and public scrutiny, Meese became the point man for the Reagan Administration's effort, in Meese's words, ``to limit the damage.
One thing I did catch from Randi’s show was that this book is worth checking out if we all want to get informed on just what happened during Iran-Contra:
Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up by Lawrence E. Walsh. After hearing part her show today it’s on my list of to-buys. If anyone else got to hear more of it than I did I'd love to play catch-up. Some of the articles linked are long, but they're worth the read. They say those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. We can't even seem to remember our recent history in this country with this gang of thieves who are allowed in the TV without being scorned by the public as people who have anything meaningful to say. I believe that's due to not being told the truth the first time around about what they did, and it being too early for the history books to pick up in a meaningful way.