More legal than Iran-Contra

U.S. President Joe Biden is able to skirt congressional opposition to Ukraine aid by donating weapons to Greece with the expectation that Greece will then donate its own surplus equipment to Kyiv, according to a Jan. 30 report published in Forbes.

A U.S. legal authority known as Excess Defense Articles (EDA) allows the president to deem certain weapons systems surplus and transfer them to partner nations at a cheap price or without cost.

[...]

Kathimerini reported that Greek political and military leadership have already agreed to transfer surplus equipment to Ukraine.

  Kyiv Independent

Was that option not available to Ronald Reagan? Or did he want the Contras to have the best, latest arms?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Republican dirty tricks were going on long before Nixon

What happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.

[...]

Mr. Carter’s camp has long suspected that Mr. Casey or someone else in Mr. Reagan’s orbit sought to secretly torpedo efforts to liberate the hostages before the election, and books have been written on what came to be called the October surprise. But congressional investigations debunked previous theories of what happened.

  NYT

So much for congressional investigations.

With Mr. Carter now 98 and in hospice care, Mr. Barnes said he felt compelled to come forward to correct the record.

The time to do that was when the shit was being done. Because it was the Reagan election that turned the US down a path to destruction.

Mr. Barnes is no shady foreign arms dealer with questionable credibility, like some of the characters who fueled previous iterations of the October surprise theory. He was once one of the most prominent figures in Texas, the youngest speaker of the Texas House of Representatives and later lieutenant governor. He was such an influential figure that he helped a young George W. Bush get into the Texas Air National Guard rather than be exposed to the draft and sent to Vietnam. Lyndon B. Johnson predicted that Mr. Barnes would become president someday.

He was almost crooked enough.

Mr. Barnes said he had no idea of the purpose of the Middle East trip when Mr. Connally invited him. They traveled to the region on a Gulfstream jet owned by Superior Oil. Only when they sat down with the first Arab leader did Mr. Barnes learn what Mr. Connally was up to, he said.

Mr. Connally said, “‘Look, Ronald Reagan’s going to be elected president and you need to get the word to Iran that they’re going to make a better deal with Reagan than they are Carter,’” Mr. Barnes recalled. “He said, ‘It would be very smart for you to pass the word to the Iranians to wait until after this general election is over.’ And boy, I tell you, I’m sitting there and I heard it and so now it dawns on me, I realize why we’re there.”

Mr. Barnes said that, except for Israel, Mr. Connally repeated the same message at every stop in the region to leaders such as President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt.

[...]

Confirming Mr. Barnes’s account is problematic after so much time. Mr. Connally, Mr. Casey and other central figures have long since died and Mr. Barnes has no diaries or memos to corroborate his account. But he has no obvious reason to make up the story and indeed expressed trepidation at going public because of the reaction of fellow Democrats.

Like all the scum who come forward too late.

Mr. Barnes said he did not reveal the real story at the time to avoid blowback from his own party. “I don’t want to look like Benedict Arnold to the Democratic Party by participating in this,” he recalled explaining to a friend. The headlines at the time, he imagined, would have been scandalous. “I did not want that to be on my obituary at all.”

Well, it will be there now.

Discussing the trip now, he indicated, was his way of making amends. “I just want history to reflect that Carter got a little bit of a bad deal about the hostages,” he said. “He didn’t have a fighting chance with those hostages still in the embassy in Iran.”

[...]

Mr. Barnes identified four living people he said he had confided in over the years: Mark K. Updegrove, president of the L.B.J. Foundation; Tom Johnson, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson (no relation) who later became publisher of the Los Angeles Times and president of CNN; Larry Temple, a former aide to Mr. Connally and Lyndon Johnson; and H.W. Brands, a University of Texas historian.

All four of them confirmed in recent days that Mr. Barnes shared the story with them years ago.

And none of them had the decency to come forward.

The term “October surprise” was originally used by the Reagan camp to describe its fears that Mr. Carter would manipulate the hostage crisis to effect a release just before the election.

To forestall such a scenario, Mr. Casey was alleged to have met with representatives of Iran in July and August 1980 in Madrid leading to a deal supposedly finalized in Paris in October in which a future Reagan administration would ship arms to Tehran through Israel in exchange for the hostages being held until after the election.

[...]

Mr. Barnes said he was certain the point of Mr. Connally’s trip was to get a message to the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the election. “I’ll go to my grave believing that it was the purpose of the trip,” he said. “It wasn’t freelancing because Casey was so interested in hearing as soon as we got back to the United States.” Mr. Casey, he added, wanted to know whether “they were going to hold the hostages.”

None of that establishes whether Mr. Reagan knew about the trip, nor could Mr. Barnes say that Mr. Casey directed Mr. Connally to take the journey. Likewise, he does not know if the message transmitted to multiple Middle Eastern leaders got to the Iranians, much less whether it influenced their decision making. But Iran did hold the hostages until after the election, which Mr. Reagan won, and did not release them until minutes after noon on Jan. 20, 1981, when Mr. Carter left office.

[...]

Gerald Rafshoon, who was [Carter's] White House communications director, said any interference may have changed history. “If we had gotten the hostages home, we’d have won, I really believe that,” he said. “It’s pretty damn outrageous.”

The lesson of Iran-Contra: Cover-ups can work

We'll work our way to Bill Barr.

“The bottom line in Iran-Contra is: Cover-ups can work,” James Brosnahan, a prosecutor in the independent counsel’s Iran-Contra investigation, told me in a phone interview. “And that’s what we should be worried about here.”

[...]

Iran-Contra involved a feast of malfeasance. The initial crime was the Reagan administration’s illegal provision of military aid to anti-communist Nicaraguan guerillas known as the Contras. Separately, top administration officials ordered the illegal sale of anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles to Iran, in a series of (failed) exchanges aimed at the release of American hostages held by Iran-linked terrorist groups in Lebanon. Administration figures, led by National Security Council staffer Oliver North, then illegally used the proceeds from these Iran transactions to purchase more weapons for the Nicaraguan Contras. Finally, officials illegally falsified a presidential directive ordering the Iranian arms sales, and—in a cover-up of the preceding crimes—Cabinet and other top administration officials illegally obstructed investigators, lying to Congress and prosecutors in the process.

[...]

In Iran-Contra, Reagan administration officials illegally conspired with multiple foreign regimes to alter U.S. foreign policy. In Iran-Contra, part of the scandal revolved around inappropriate—and often illegal—dealings with a hostile, expansionist foreign power, a destabilizing force in its near-abroad and a sponsor of terror. In Iran-Contra, powerful administration figures lied to federal investigators about their relations with foreign officials from this hostile country. Perhaps this rings a bell.

The parallels to Trump-Russia don’t end there. In Iran-Contra, the independent counsel investigating the scandal, Lawrence Walsh, was a deadly serious Brahmin lawyer with a sterling Republican pedigree; he nevertheless faced withering criticism from members of his own party, just as special counsel Robert Mueller has. [...] Republicans attacked Walsh’s team for its purported partisan bias, clamoring for the resignation of key investigators, and railed against the probe’s purported waste and corruption. They even demanded that an investigation be opened into Walsh’s (spurious) improprieties.

Walsh’s team was “a hotbed of Democratic activist lawyers,” thundered Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole, repeatedly, during the yearslong probe. In Walsh’s own account, Dole was a key figure in undermining public trust in the special counsel’s office and in thwarting its activities.

[...]

It was “the biggest witch hunt since Salem,” read placards at the 1992 Republican National Convention—echoing Trump’s own favorite term for the Mueller investigation.

[...]

Walsh, the Mueller of yesteryear, spent seven years fleshing out what was in essence a conspiracy to defraud the United States, only to see powerful political interests, whose fate sometimes depended on killing the investigation, bulldoze their way through a potential constitutional crisis.

Eleven people were convicted of Iran-Contra-related crimes, but all the principals walked away unscathed. The conviction of John Poindexter, a Reagan-era national security advisor, was overturned on appeal in 1991, as was that of Oliver North. [...] A former CIA officer involved with the scandal had his case dismissed when Bush’s attorney general refused, in a highly unusual maneuver, to declassify material deemed necessary for the defense by the trial judge.

  Foreign Policy

And here, we have found our way to William Barr, for he was Bush's AG.

There have been pitifully few consequences for individuals implicated in Iran-Contra. George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, and Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese are all venerated Republican elder statesmen.

[...]

Elliott Abrams, who pleaded guilty to lying to Congress as part of the Iran-Contra probe, worked in the George W. Bush administration and was very nearly Trump’s deputy secretary of state.

And instead is now his henchman in the attempted coup against Venezuela's elected president.

Poindexter got a job under George W. Bush with the Defense Department. In early 2017, McFarlane reportedly worked with Michael Flynn, then the national security advisor, on a shady proposal to finance nuclear power plants in the Middle East. Oliver North—who nearly rode his newfound Iran-Contra “celebrity” with the far-right into a Virginia Senate seat in 1994—is now the president of the National Rifle Association.

If the system fails during the Trump-Russia investigation, it certainly won’t be on Mueller’s shoulders alone, and Iran-Contra shows us why. The rot goes far deeper than Trump himself.

More details of Barr's involvement in the Iran-Contra coverup is provided in this Alternet article:

History shows that when a Republican president is in serious legal trouble, Bill Barr is the go-to guy.

[...]

Back in 1992, the last time Bill Barr was U.S. attorney general, iconic New York Times writer William Safire referred to him as “Coverup-General Barr” because of his role in burying evidence of then-President George H.W. Bush’s involvement in [the Iran-Contra affair].

[...]

Barr has struck again.

[...]

Barr—without showing us even a single complete sentence from the Mueller report—decided there are no crimes here. Just keep moving along.

Barr’s history of doing just this sort of thing to help Republican presidents in legal crises explains why Trump brought him back in to head the Justice Department.

[...]

Earlier in [George HW] Bush’s administration, Barr had succeeded in blocking the appointment of an investigator or independent counsel to look into Iraqgate, as Safire repeatedly documented in the Times. In December, Barr helped Bush block indictments from another independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, and eliminated any risk that Reagan or George H.W. Bush would be held to account for Iran-Contra.

[...]

Christmas day of 1992, the New York Times featured a screaming all-caps headline across the top of its front page: Attorney General Bill Barr had covered up evidence of crimes by Reagan and Bush in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Earlier that week of Christmas, 1992, George H.W. Bush was on his way out of office. Bill Clinton had won the White House the month before, and in a few weeks would be sworn in as president.

But Bush’s biggest concern wasn’t that he’d have to leave the White House to retire back to Connecticut, Maine, or Texas (where he had homes) but, rather, that he may end up embroiled even deeper in Iran-Contra and that his colleagues may face time in a federal prison after he left office.

Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh was closing in fast on him, and Bush’s private records, subpoenaed by the independent counsel’s office, were the key to it all.

[...]

Walsh had zeroed in on documents that were in the possession of Reagan’s former defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, who all the evidence showed was definitely in on the deal, and President Bush’s diary that could corroborate it. Elliott Abrams had already been convicted of withholding evidence from Congress, and he may have even more information, too, if it could be pried out of him before he went to prison. But Abrams was keeping mum, apparently anticipating a pardon.

Weinberger, trying to avoid jail himself, was preparing to testify that Bush knew about it and even participated, and Walsh had already, based on information he’d obtained from the investigation into Weinberger, demanded that Bush turn over his diary from the campaign. He was also again hot on the trail of Abrams.

So Bush called in his attorney general, Bill Barr, and asked his advice.

Barr, along with Bush, was already up to his eyeballs in cover-ups of shady behavior by the Reagan administration.

[...]

[I]n another scandal—having to do with Bush selling weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein—Barr was already covering up for Bush, Weinberger, and others from the Reagan administration.

[...]

“I went over and told the President I thought he should not only pardon Caspar Weinberger, but while he was at it, he should pardon about five others,” [Barr told an interviewer in 2001.]

Which is exactly what Bush did, on Christmas Eve when most Americans were with family instead of watching the news. The holiday notwithstanding, the result was explosive.

America knew that both Reagan and Bush were up to their necks in Iran-Contra, and Democrats had been talking about impeachment or worse. The independent counsel had already obtained one conviction, three guilty pleas, and two other individuals were lined up for prosecution. And Walsh was closing in fast on Bush himself.

[...]

Bush shut the investigation down by pardoning not only Weinberger, but also Abrams and the others involved in the crimes, destroying Walsh’s ability to prosecute anybody.

[...]

[Journalist William] Safire accused Barr of not only rigging the cover-up, but of being one of the criminals who could be prosecuted.

“Mr. Barr,” wrote Safire in August of 1992, “…could face prosecution if it turns out that high Bush officials knew about Saddam Hussein’s perversion of our Agriculture export guarantees to finance his war machine.”

He added, “They [Barr and colleagues] have a keen personal and political interest in seeing to it that the Department of Justice stays in safe, controllable Republican hands.”

[...]

Independent Counsel Walsh added that the diary and notes he wanted to enter into a public trial of Weinberger represented, “evidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public.”

The phrase “highest ranking” officials included Reagan and Bush.

[...]

Both Trump and senior Republican leadership are already calling for a repeat of ’93; what remains to be seen is if the press and Democratic leadership will go along like they did back then.

  Alternet

On the evening of George H.W. Bush’s 1992 Christmas Eve pardons, Walsh held a hastily convened press conference in his hometown of Oklahoma City. Bush’s action, Walsh said at time, “demonstrates that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office—deliberately abusing the public trust—without consequences.”

As Walsh recalled, “near the end [of the press conference] one reporter asked, ‘Is the message here if you work for the government, you’re above the law?’”

“That,” he replied, “depends on the president you work for.”

  Foreign Policy

And, unfortunately, Bob Mueller doesn't appear to be a Lawrence Walsh.

Barr did what he was hired to do.  Twice.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:



Not in this country.  And that's why they keep committing them.

Kill the messenger

RIP Gary Webb.

Dark Alliance was a series written by California-based reporter [Gary] Webb and published in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996. In it, he claimed the Contra rebels in Nicaragua were shipping cocaine into the US. which was then flooding Compton and South-Central Los Angeles in the mid-Eighties after being turned into crack – a relatively new and highly addictive substance sold in 'rocks' that could be smoked. Webb also said the CIA was aware that proceeds from the sales of those drugs were being funnelled back to help fund the Contras.

  UK Telegraph

For the youngsters: Oliver North

Since Oliver North has taken the head position at the NRA, it's useful to revisit why Oliver North is infamous. Check out this 2003 Wired article if you don't know, or have forgotten exactly what it was all about.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Back channel

Certainly, he's proven he knows how to sell guns.

And speaking of Iran...

verything having to do with the United States government, up to and including its word among nations, now functions on the basic principle that has animated the president*’s entire business career–“Yeah? So, sue me.” So he went on TV with his Serious World Leader face screwed on tightly, and he told the world that the good faith of the United States is now worth as much as a degree from his phony university.

  Charles P Pierce

I think the world has been seeing it coming.

You all know that he had no fcking clue what he was talking about, right? If he’s read the text of the agreement with Iran past the first comma, I am Xerxes of Persia. The whole speech was abject gibberish; it was framed as though Iran already has nuclear weapons, which they bought with the bags of cash that Barack Obama personally delivered to Tehran. He was handed some truthless lunacy from some crackpot like John Bolton, and he read it on television.

John Bolton, and don't forget Benjamin Nuthouse Netanyahu.

The Saudis took a break from slaughtering people in Yemen to praise the president*, which I’m sure warmed his orb for him. And, finally, if we haven’t mentioned it, the president* had no fcking clue what he was talking about.

[...]

At least he didn’t say he didn’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. Man, I hated 2002 the first time around.

But the deeply hopeless part of the speech came at the end, when the president* assured the Iranian people that, while we may have to blow some of them up, we’re really on their side.

[...]

When I make promises, I keep them.

That’s the funniest damn thing he’s ever said. All over New Jersey, subcontractors are doubled over with laughter.

No, I didn't watch, and no, I didn't read the speech. A person can take only so much.

RIP Gary Webb

August 31, 1955 - December 10, 2004

Webb's Dark Alliance Articles Online

Assault on Gary Webb in the Press

Kill the Messenger

What next?

If you'd had time to think about it, you would have figured it out.

The White House and CIA have been considering a package of secret proposals to allow former US intelligence officers to run privatized covert actions, intelligence gathering, and propaganda missions, according to three sources who’ve been briefed on or have direct knowledge of the proposals.

  Buzzfeed

Because the CIA isn't already unaccountable enough?  I very much doubt if it's the White House and "the CIA."  It may be the head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, who was appointed by Trump.

One of the proposals would involve hiring a private company, Amyntor Group, for millions of dollars to set up a large intelligence network and run counter terrorist propaganda efforts, according to the sources.

[...]

Amyntor declined to discuss the proposals, but a lawyer for the company said in a statement to BuzzFeed News that the type of contract being contemplated would be legal “with direction and control by the proper government authority.”

Also to be appointed by Trump.

Another proposal presented to US officials would allow individuals affiliated with the company to help capture wanted terrorists on behalf of the United States. In keeping with that proposal, people close to the company are tracking two specific suspects in a Middle Eastern country, the sources said, for possible “rendition” to the United States.

A source speaking on behalf of the company stressed that while Amyntor officials are aware of and involved in the rendition plan, the company itself would not be involved.

WTF?

The CIA declined to comment, but a US government official downplayed the proposals' significance. “The idea they are pitching is absurd on its face,” he said, “and it is not going anywhere.”

Don't bet your house on it, dude.

A spokesperson for the National Security Council said that Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump's national security adviser, and other officials were not aware of the proposals.

Fucking amazing.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo has publicly promised that the agency would become “much more vicious” and aggressive. He said in one speech that the administration “is prepared to engage in activities that are different from what America has been doing these past few years.”

Jesus christ.  How much more vicious can you get than what the CIA has been?  Perhaps we are about to find out.

Amyntor Group is a reclusive company headquartered in Whitefish, Montana, ...

Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Whitefish?

...a town of 6,500 residents that recently gained notoriety after a company based there won, then lost, a $300 million contract to rebuild Puerto Rico’s electrical grid. There is no known relationship between the two companies.

Bullshit. It's a town of 6,500 people, ffs. You know what the relationship is. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, hometown: Whitefish, Montana.

But wait! It gets better. (It always does with this pack of hyenas.)

Among the management of Amyntor is John Maguire, a former CIA case officer who reportedly led a US effort to provoke Saddam Hussein into war before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Amyntor appears to be an offshoot of a one-time DoD funded private operation called "The Eclipse Group" which was run by a former Iran-Contra figure, Duane Clarridge, who organized the Contras to overthrow the Sandanista government in Nicaragua and was indicted in that scandal, along with his associates Caspar Weinberger and Elliott Abrams, but all were pardoned by George Bush, Sr. before their trial could begin.  Clarridge died last year.

One source saw the plan presented in a PowerPoint. He says it appeared that the pitches coincided with a widely publicized effort by Erik Prince — the private security official, founder of Blackwater, and brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — to privatize the war in Afghanistan.

[...]

Asked about Amyntor’s proposal and the rendition plan, one former senior intelligence official said, “All the institutional structures exist to prevent things from going off the rails. Is this an attempt to circumvent oversight?”

You think?

We were already off the rails. We have gone so far off the rails we'll never find our way out.

And I thought the plan to move Tom Cotton to CIA and Pompeo to State was bad, which it was.

Speaking of Whitefish, Montana...I didn't realize it was a hotbed of white supremacists.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Draining the Swamp

It may seem small in the saga of President Trump’s first two weeks, but according to The Washington Post, there’s a good chance he’ll appoint an actual war criminal to be the second-ranking US diplomat.

  The Nation

This is misleading. There are plenty of actual war criminals in our government. What The Nation means is "convicted" war criminal. The article goes further to clarify that point. We're talking about Elliott Abrams, T-Rump's pick to be Deputy Secretary of State.

Abrams was forced to plead guilty to deliberately misleading Congress regarding his nefarious role in the Iran-contra scandal. (He was also disbarred in the District of Columbia.)

[...]

[S]ince Abrams’s 1991 conviction for his Iran-contra lies (and subsequent pardon by George H.W. Bush), the course of his failing-upward career has repeatedly revealed the moral rot at the heart of our political establishment.

[...]

As a member of George W. Bush’s National Security Council staff, Abrams encouraged, according to credible reports, a (briefly successful) military coup against the democratically elected government of Venezuela in 2002, poisoning the US relationship with that government once it returned to power. He also worked to subvert the results of the 2006 elections in the Palestinian territories, a move that ended up strengthening the most radical elements of Hamas and undermining—perhaps forever—the possibility of a democratic peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

[...]

As assistant secretary of state for human rights, Abrams sought to ensure that General Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala’s then-dictator, could carry out “acts of genocide”—those are the legally binding words of Guatemala’s United Nations.

[...]

 When The New York Times published an op-ed challenging the official State Department count of the mass murders under way—by a woman who had witnessed a death-squad-style assassination in broad daylight in Guatemala City without ever seeing it mentioned in the press—Abrams lied outright in a letter to the editor, even citing an imaginary story in a nonexistent newspaper.

Perfect pick for State. He and Tillerson can reclaim Exxon's power all around the Globe.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE: Damn! WaPo strikes out again!

RIP Gary Webb

August 31, 1955 - December 10, 2004

Webb's Dark Alliance Articles Online

Assault on Gary Webb in the Press

Kill the Messenger

Kill the Messenger

For those of you who won't be able to see the movie "Kill the Messenger" - and for those of you who will, but still want a thorough summary (or reminder) of what Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Gary Webb was writing about (Iran-Contra-CIA-cocaine-crack-connections) and eventually gave his life over, read James DiEugenio's article here at Consortium News. (http://consortiumnews.com/2014/10/16/kill-the-messenger-rare-truth-telling/)

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Kill the Messenger: a Review of the Reviews

[Some reviews,] including those in the New York Times and the Washington Post, continued the snarky tone that pervaded the sneering treatment of [journalist Gary] Webb that hounded him out of journalism in 1997 and ultimately drove him to suicide in 2004. For instance, the headline in the Post’s weekend section was “Sticking with Webb’s Story,” as in the phrase “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

The review by Michael O’Sullivan stated: “Inspired by the true story of Gary Webb — the San Jose Mercury News reporter known for a controversial series of articles suggesting a link between the CIA, the California crack epidemic and the Nicaraguan Contras — this slightly overheated drama begins and ends with innuendo. In between is a generous schmear of insinuation.”

You get the point. The allegations, which have now been so well-established that even the CIA admits to them, are “controversial” and amount to “innuendo” and “insinuation.” Similarly, the New York Times review by Manohla Dargis disparaged Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series as “much-contested,” which may be technically accurate but fails to recognize that the core allegations of Contra-cocaine trafficking and U.S. government complicity were true – something an earlier article by Times’ media writer David Carr at least had the decency to acknowledge.

In a different world, the major newspapers would have taken the opening created by “Kill the Messenger” to make amends for their egregious behavior in the 1980s – in discrediting the scandal when the criminality could have been stopped – and for their outrageous actions in the 1990s in destroying the life and career of Gary Webb. But it appears the big papers mostly plan to hunker down and pretend they did nothing wrong.

[...]

As for “Kill the Messenger,” I had the pleasure of watching it on Friday night with my old Associated Press colleague Brian Barger – and we both were impressed by how effectively the movie-makers explained a fairly complicated tale about drugs and politics. The personal story was told with integrity, aided immensely by Jeremy Renner’s convincing portrayal of Webb.

There were, of course, some Hollywood fictional flourishes for dramatic purposes. And it was a little weird hearing my cautionary advice to Webb – delivered when we talked before his “Dark Alliance” series was published in 1996 – being put into the mouth of a fictional Kerry staffer.

But those are minor points. What was truly remarkable about this movie was that it was made at all.

  Robert Parry: Consortium News

Kill the Messenger

If you ever wondered how the mainstream U.S. media changed from the hard-nosed Watergate press of the 1970s into the brown-nose MSM that swallowed the Iraq War lies, a key middle point was the Contra-cocaine scandal of the 1980s/1990s, the subject of a new movie.

[...]

The movie, “Kill the Messenger,” is forcing the mainstream U.S. media to confront one of its most shameful episodes, the suppression of a major national security scandal implicating Ronald Reagan’s CIA in aiding and abetting cocaine trafficking by the Nicaraguan Contra rebels in the 1980s and then the systematic destruction of journalist Gary Webb when he revived the scandal in the 1990s.

Hollywood’s treatment of this sordid affair will likely draw another defensive or dismissive response from some of the big news outlets that still don’t want to face up to their disgraceful behavior. The New York Times and other major newspapers mocked the Contra-cocaine scandal when Brian Barger and I first exposed it in 1985 for the Associated Press and then savaged Webb in 1996 when he traced some of the Contra-cocaine into the manufacture of crack which ravaged American cities.

So, when you’re watching this movie or responding to questions from friends about whether they should believe its storyline, you might want to know what is or is not fact.

  Consortium News

For folks in the Columbia, Missouri, area, “Kill the Messenger” will open at the wonderful RagTag Cinema on October 17.

Check out Contra-cocaine journalist Robert Parry’s corroborating article in Consortium News.

To this day, none of the journalists or media critics who participated in the destruction of Gary Webb has paid a price. None has faced the sort of humiliation that Webb had to endure. None had to experience that special pain of standing up for what is best in the profession of journalism — taking on a difficult story that seeks to hold powerful people accountable for serious crimes — and then being vilified by your own colleagues, the people that you expected to understand and appreciate what you had done.

On the contrary, many were rewarded with professional advancement and lucrative careers. For instance, for years, Howard Kurtz got to host the CNN program, “Reliable Sources,” which lectured journalists on professional standards. He was described in the program’s bio as “the nation’s premier media critic.” (His show has since moved to Fox News, renamed “MediaBuzz.”)

The rehabilitation of Webb’s reputation and the correction of this dark chapter of American history now rest on how the public responds to the presentation of Webb’s story in the film, “Kill the Messenger.”

Spread the word. At the least, perhaps Gary’s life and death will help wean Americans from the mainstream propaganda system and usher in a new period of truthtelling in journalism.

Wishful thinking?

Here's the original YWA post from December 13, 2004, quoting the Sacramento Bee on Gary Webb's death December 9:  http://ywatblog.blogspot.com/2004/12/whistleblower-dead.html

Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

Eighteen years after it was published, “Dark Alliance,” the San Jose Mercury News’s bombshell investigation into links between the cocaine trade, Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, and African American neighborhoods in California, remains one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism.

The 20,000-word series enraged black communities, prompted Congressional hearings, and became one of the first major national security stories in history to blow up online. It also sparked an aggressive backlash from the nation’s most powerful media outlets, which devoted considerable resources to discredit author Gary Webb’s reporting. Their efforts succeeded, costing Webb his career. On December 10, 2004, the journalist was found dead in his apartment, having ended his eight-year downfall with two .38-caliber bullets to the head.

  Ryan Devereaux: The Intercept

I would still like to know how often a suicide is committed by TWO bullets to the head. And to the back of the head, at that.

On September 18, the agency released a trove of documents spanning three decades of secret government operations. Culled from the agency’s in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, the materials include a previously unreleased six-page article titled “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story.”

[...]

“Dark Alliance” focused on the lives of three men involved in shipping cocaine to the U.S.: Ricky “Freeway” Ross, a legendary L.A. drug dealer; Oscar Danilo Blandón Reyes, considered by the U.S. government to be Nicaragua’s biggest cocaine dealer living in the United States; and Meneses Cantarero, a powerful Nicaraguan player who had allegedly recruited Blandón to sell drugs in support of the counter-revolution. The series examined the relationship between the men, their impact on the drug market in California and elsewhere, and the disproportionate sentencing of African Americans under crack cocaine laws.

And while its content was not all new, the series marked the beginning of something that was: an in-depth investigation published outside the traditional mainstream media outlets and successfully promoted on the internet.

[...]

But newspapers like the Times and the Post seemed to spend far more time trying to poke holes in the series than in following up on the underreported scandal at its heart, the involvement of U.S.-backed proxy forces in international drug trafficking. The Los Angeles Times was especially aggressive. Scooped in its own backyard, the California paper assigned no fewer than 17 reporters to pick apart Webb’s reporting. While employees denied an outright effort to attack the Mercury News, one of the 17 referred to it as the “get Gary Webb team.” Another said at the time, “We’re going to take away that guy’s Pulitzer.”

[...]

The CIA watched these developments closely, collaborating where it could with outlets who wanted to challenge Webb’s reporting. Media inquiries had started almost immediately following the publication of “Dark Alliance,” and [Nicholas Dujmovic, a CIA Directorate of Intelligence staffer at the time] in “Managing a Nightmare” cites the CIA’s success in discouraging “one major news affiliate” from covering the story. He also boasts that the agency effectively departed from its own longstanding policies in order to discredit the series.

And this, I want to see:

Obit: Lawrence Walsh

Lawrence E. Walsh, the special prosecutor who spent six years investigating misconduct by President Ronald Reagan administration officials in the Iran-Contra affair, has died. He was 102.

[...]

"While struggling to learn the truth and unravel a willful cover-up that extended all the way to the Oval Office, my staff and I had to fend off attacks from members of Congress and the president's Cabinet and to break through the barriers erected by the national security community," Walsh wrote.

Iran-Contra had its roots in two covert operations directed from the Reagan White House. In both, Congress was kept in the dark.

  ABC

Where they seem to be most at home.

Eleven people pleaded guilty or were convicted by juries in Iran-Contra. But the two biggest courtroom victories for Walsh's prosecutors — convictions of national security adviser John Poindexter and former Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North — were overturned on appeal.

Over Walsh's strenuous objections, Congress had granted North and Poindexter limited immunity from prosecution in exchange for both men's testimony in nationally televised hearings.

[...]

The biggest case of all, that of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, never came to trial because President George H.W. Bush pardoned the defendant and five other Iran-Contra figures on Christmas Eve of 2002, two weeks before Weinberger's trial was to start.

[...]

In the end, the Iran-Contra probe cost $47 million and resulted in just one person being sent to prison — a retired CIA officer who helped deliver weapons to the Contras.

In Mr. Walsh’s private life of later years, he litigated on behalf of AT&T and General Motors, but in his public career he made a name for himself on the moral/legal side of some important issues from racket busting in New York and New Jersey to drafting the Civil Rights Act of 1960, to attempting to bring to justice the political criminals of the Iran-Contra affair.

Related:

Bush I’s pardon of Iran-Contra criminals, and Walsh’s response

Firewall: Inside the Iran-Contra Cover-up by Lawrence Walsh

“For Walsh, a lifelong Republican who shared the foreign policy views of the Reagan administration, the Iran-contra experience was a life-changing one, as his investigation penetrated one wall of lies only to be confronted with another and another -- and not just lies from Oliver North and his cohorts but lies from nearly every senior administration official who spoke with investigators. […]Walsh's investigation broke through the White House cover-up in 1991-92. Almost by accident, as Walsh's staff was double-checking some long-standing document requests, the lawyers discovered hidden notes belonging to Weinberger and other senior officials. The notes made clear that there was widespread knowledge of the 1985 illegal shipments to Iran and that a major cover-up had been orchestrated by the Reagan and Bush administrations. […] The Iran-contra cover-up marked the restoration of a Cold War status quo in which crimes, both domestic and international, could be committed by the Executive while the Congress and the press looked the other way.”

  Consortium News

In which we got the now infamous Reagan defense: “I forgot.”

"What set Iran-contra apart from previous political scandals was the fact that a cover-up engineered in the White House of one president and completed by his successor prevented the rule of law from being applied to the perpetrators of criminal activity of constitutional dimension."

A precedent which appears to be becoming a pattern.

[T]he cover-up likely could not have worked if the other institutions of Washington -- Congress, the courts and the press -- had not helped.

Of course. ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Remember This (Again): It's Always Worse Than You've Been Told

These documents are the final testimony that "looking forward and not backwards" is no way to run a democracy.

  Charlie Pierce

In the case of Watergate – the foiled Republican break-in at the Democratic National Committee in June 1972 and Richard Nixon’s botched cover-up leading to his resignation in August 1974 – the evidence is now clear that Nixon created the Watergate burglars out of his panic that the Democrats might possess a file on his sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968.

[...]

Shortly after Nixon took office in 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover informed him of the existence of the file containing national security wiretaps documenting how Nixon’s emissaries had gone behind President Lyndon Johnson’s back to convince the South Vietnamese government to boycott the Paris Peace Talks, which were close to ending the Vietnam War in fall 1968.

The disruption of Johnson’s peace talks then enabled Nixon to hang on for a narrow victory over Democrat Hubert Humphrey.

  Alternet

How many people died so that Nixon could become president? And here's the kicker...Lyndon Johnson knew he did it and kept it a secret. He had the file.

And, remember the speculation and rumors that Reagan made a deal with the Ayatollah Khomeini to hold the American hostages until after the election so that Jimmy Carter would fail at getting them released? New evidence shows it's true.

Official Washington dismissed [the Reagan campaign's] “October Surprise” and other Iran-Contra-connected scandals, like Contra drug trafficking, as conspiracy theories.

As with Watergate and Nixon, Official Washington has refused to rethink its conclusions absolving President Ronald Reagan and his successor President George H.W. Bush of guilt in a range of crimes collected under the large umbrella of Iran-Contra.

[...]

The major newspapers have been equally unwilling to rethink the origins – and the significance – of the October Surprise/Iran-Contra scandal. It doesn’t matter how much new evidence accumulates. It remains much easier to continue the politically safe deification of “Gipper” Reagan and the fond remembrances of “Poppy” Bush.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.