Hamilton and Iran-Contra

"......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.' Independent counsel Lawrence Walsh and White House records later proved that Reagan and Bush had been very much in the loop. If Hamilton had looked into the matter instead of accepting the Reagan administration's word, the congressional investigation would have shown the public the truth. Hamilton later said he should not have believed the Reagan officials. However, today, George W. Bush is considering appointing Hamilton UN ambassador."
Uncovering the Florida cover-up: The good fight continues
A Past Look, 25  December, 2000

"One of the key congressional Republicans fighting this rear-guard action was Rep. Dick Cheney of Wyoming, who became the ranking House Republican on the Iran-contra investigation. Cheney already enjoyed a favorable reputation in Washington as a steady conservative hand. Cheney smartly exploited his relationship with Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., who was chairman of the Iran-contra panel. Hamilton cared deeply about his reputation for bipartisanship and the Republicans quickly exploited this fact. A senior committee source said one of Cheney’s top priorities was to block Democrats from deposing Vice President Bush about his Iran-contra knowledge. Cheney 'kept trying to intimidate Hamilton,' the source said. 'He kept saying if we go down that road, we won’t have bipartisanship.' So, Hamilton gave Bush a pass. The limited investigation also gave little attention to other sensitive areas, such as contra-drug trafficking and the public diplomacy operation. They were pared down or tossed out altogether. Despite surrendering to Cheney’s demands time and again, Hamilton failed, in the end, to get a single House Republican to sign the final report. Only three moderate Republicans on the Senate side – Warren Rudman, William Cohen and Paul Trible – agreed to sign the report, after extracting more concessions. Cheney and the other Republicans submitted a minority report that denied that any significant wrongdoing had occurred."
Covering Up Iran-Contra - Robert Parry
Consortium News, 5 November 2000
Robert Parry is an investigative reporter who broke many of the Iran-contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek

"[November 13, 1987] The designated congressional committees filed their joint report on the Iran-Contra affair. Wyoming Representative Richard Cheney, the senior Republican member of the House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran, helped steer the joint committees to an impotent result. George Bush was totally exonerated, and was hardly mentioned. George Bush, when President, rewarded Dick Cheney by appointing him U.S. Secretary of Defense, after the Senate refused to confirm John Tower."
Chapter -XVIII- Iran- Contra
'George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography'
by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin

Bush and the Iran-Contra arms and drugs scandal - click here
Bush, Harken, BCCI and the Contras - click here
Bush, Harken, BCCI and Bin Laden - click here

Drugs And The Bogus 'War Against Terrorism'

"Around the same time as the destruction of the Project X records, President Bush was completing the long-running cover-up of the Iran-contra scandal. On Christmas Eve 1992, he issued pardons to former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and five other Iran-contra defendants. The pardons effectively ended the Iran-contra investigation and spared leading Republicans, including Gen. Colin Powell, the embarrassment of having to testify at the Weinberger trial about their earlier deceptions. After leaving office, Bush himself refused to submit to an interview with Walsh that might have established what Bush and his aides actually did during the Iran-contra operation."
Covering Up Iran-Contra - Robert Parry
Consortium News, 5 November 2000
Robert Parry is an investigative reporter who broke many of the Iran-contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek

"In a remarkable new book, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up, [Judge Lawrence] Walsh [special prosecutor in charge of the complex investigation into President Reagan's foreign policy mis-adventures] details his six-year battle to break through the 'firewall' that White House officials built around President Reagan and Vice President Bush after the Iran-contra scandal exploded in November 1986. 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. According to Firewall, the cover-up conspiracy took formal shape at a meeting of Reagan and his top advisers in the Situation Room at the White House on Nov. 24, 1986. The meeting's principal point of concern was how to handle the troublesome fact that Reagan had approved illegal arms sales to Iran in fall 1985, before any covert-action finding had been signed. The act was a clear felony -- a violation of the Arms Export Control Act -- and possibly an impeachable offense... everyone at the meeting knew that Reagan had approved those shipments through Israel... Bush, who had been told of the shipment in advance by McFarlane, said nothing. Casey, who [had] requested that the president sign the retroactive finding to authorize the CIA-facilitated delivery, said nothing. [NSC adviser John] Poindexter, who had torn up the finding, said nothing. Meese asked whether anyone knew anything else that hadn't been revealed. No one spoke.... When Shultz returned to the State Department, he dictated a note to his aide, Charles Hill, who wrote down that Reagan's men were 'rearranging the record.'...The story might have stopped there but for the work of Walsh and his small team of lawyers. Yet Walsh's investigation was hampered from the start by congressional rashness and hostility from key elements of the media.... 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 Republican independent counsel also infuriated the GOP when he submitted a second indictment of Weinberger on the Friday before the 1992 elections. The indictment contained documents revealing that President Bush had been lying for years with his claim that he was 'out of the loop' on the Iran-contra decisions. The ensuing furor dominated the last several days of the campaign and sealed Bush's defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton. Walsh had discovered, too, that Bush had withheld his own notes about the Iran-contra affair, a discovery that elevated the president to a possible criminal subject of the investigation. But Bush had one more weapon in his arsenal. On Christmas Eve 1992, Bush destroyed the Iran-contra probe once and for all by pardoning Weinberger and five other convicted or indicted defendants. 'George Bush's misuse of the pardon power made the cover-up complete,' Walsh wrote. '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."
Firewall: Inside the Iran-Contra Cover-up - Robert Parry
Consortium News, 1997
Robert Parry is an investigative reporter who broke many of the Iran-contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek

"I don't know of anything in the Clinton Administration that resembles what happened in the Reagan Administration where North and Poindexter were blamed for running away and doing something on their own, when in fact, they had been tacitly authorized to do it either by the President himself, or by implication -- and when the secretary of defense had written notes exposing the cover up and nevertheless denied having them both to Congress and to the Independent Counsel.... I never granted immunity to [Oliver North and John Poindexter]. Congress did it. I begged them not to do it. I told them that if they did it, they would jeopardize the case."
Judge Walsh Interview
INVESTIGATING A PRESIDENT: A CHAT WITH LAWRENCE WALSH
Time Magazine, 28 February 2002

"Walsh's team had discovered that Weinberger's handwritten notes disproved Bush's claim that he had been 'out of the loop' and proved that Weinberger knew full well about $25 million in Saudi contributions to the contras.... According to Brosnahan, the trial would have shown that Weinberger knew as early as summer 1985 that President Ronald Reagan had personally authorized missile shipments to Iran in violation of the Arms Control Export Act, and that this potentially impeachable act was concealed by constructing a false record. 'The August [1985] meeting [of Reagan's National Security Council] discussed having Israel send the missiles to Iran and replenishing them out of U.S. stocks,' says Brosnahan. 'Weinberger is responsible for all missiles. The secretary of defense is the guy.'... Bush subsequently killed the Weinberger trial (scheduled to start last January) by pardoning him and five other Iran-contra figures.... This past spring, emboldened by anti-Walsh sentiment, former President Bush balked at an earlier understanding that he would submit to unrestricted Iran-contra questioning after the 1992 election. Having been pummeled in the media over the length and cost ($36 million-plus) of his investigation, Walsh shrank from the ugly battle that would have ensued if he'd tried to drag Bush before a grand jury. Walsh lost the public-relations battle, even as he finally exposed the lies that protected the Oval Office from the consequences of President Reagan's illegal acts. Though Walsh could finally prove initial crimes and the obstruction of justice, official Washington didn't want to hear about it. Iran-contra was too old, too complicated.... But in the context of helping to pry loose proof of White House wrongdoing, Walsh has accomplished a remarkable feat: he has salvaged an important part of American history, so that future generations might understand the strange events that occurred inside the U.S. government in the 1980s. It's clear that the full truth on Iran-contra will never be told. But considering White House dishonesty, congressional timidity, and the press corps' complacence, Lawrence Walsh did his best. He wrested from a determined White House cover-up a substantive if incomplete accounting of history. He has proven himself no loser."
The White House cover-up that no one wants you to understand - Robert Parry
Mother Jones, January 1993
Robert Parry is an investigative reporter who broke many of the Iran-contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek

How one of the two brains behind the Iran-Contra scandal [Poindexter] this week became one of America's most powerful men - Guardian, 18 February 2002

"The Iran-Contra scandal can be traced to the October Surprise during the 1980 Presidential election between incumbent Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan"
October Surprise and Iran-Contra - click here

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