The Nasty Blowback From America’s Wars: The Brutalizers and the Brutalized (Ray McGovern)

[Octafish]

14. Back in the Iran-Contra days...

Cover-up and Blowback

What Congress Left Out of the Iran-Contra Report

by Jonathan Marshall
Middle East Report published in MER151

The House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran and Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair. (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1987.)

Of the millions of Americans who watched some or all of the televised hearings on the Iran-Contra scandal during the summer of 1987, only a handful will slog through the 690 pages of fine print that make up the final report of the congressional investigating committees. That’s a shame, because the report succeeds in many areas where the hearings failed dismally.

Where the hearings wandered aimlessly and confused the public with their diffuse findings, the report has an admirably clear structure, narrative and conclusion. Clear lines of argument emerge in the majority and minority reports. No obnoxious Brendan Sullivan is on hand to disrupt the reader; no gap-toothed Oliver North stands at the reader’s side to make speeches or elicit false sympathy. The majority report, unlike so many committee members during the hearings, even refrains from calling the Nicaraguan rebels “freedom fighters.”

This massively documented tome paints a devastating picture of fraud, crime, cover-up, venality, duplicity and stupidity. Even those who have followed the scandal closely may be stunned by its detailed portrait of North trading not only arms and top-secret intelligence but the interests of entire nations (Kuwait, Iraq) in his quest to free a few American hostages; of Admiral John Poindexter and his crew lying not only to Congress but to nearly every senior member of the administration; of Attorney General Edwin Meese issuing off-the-cuff opinions to ratify blatant law-breaking by top officials; and of President Reagan shamelessly lying his way through press conferences in late 1986.

Voluminous as it is, however, the report withholds the full story. Some of the gaps stem from causes beyond the committees’ power: the death of CIA director William Casey, the hectic shredding of documents by Oliver North, the difficulty of retrieving the full contents of the NSC computer system, administration delays in turning over vital materials, and the impossibility of interviewing many foreign witnesses, especially Israelis.

Yet the report’s silence on several key issues was a matter of conscious choice, not ignorance, and says as much about congressional resistance to the truth as the report itself says of the administration’s willingness to lie. The neglected areas include what could be called “operational embarrassments,” the historical context of the Iran-Contra affair, the role of Israel, and the fundamental contradictions between covert operations and a democratic society.

SNIP...

Ultimately, however, the report’s greatest weakness is its failure to go beyond pleas for better executive branch compliance with the law in the future. It missed the chance to take a more profound look at the unbearable tension between covert operations and democratic government. The one thrives on secrecy, the other on openness; the former on manipulation and law-breaking, the latter on following rules. As the report’s own evidence suggests, in the course of targeting the Third World with propaganda, deception and intimidation operations, the administration turned the same tactics on its opponents at home. Intelligence professionals call this phenomenon “blowback.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.merip.org/mer/mer151/cover-blowback

For some reason cough CIA all that was forgotten and Poppy and crew lived to play another day.



Thank you for grokking, JEB.