Republicans backing Trump

"Ultimately, we’re looking at Nixon 2.0, with significantly more power to potentially overcome whatever investigatory hurdles appear in his path. " - Bob Cesca (Nixon didn’t have Twitter: The parallels are clear, but Trump might be more dangerous Salon 05/141/2017)

He's talking about Donald Trump, of course.

The firing of James Comey has understandably brought flashbacks to Nixon, Watergate and the Saturday Night Massacre.

Cesca raises a question about this difference between our current moment and the reaction to the Saturday Night Massacre:

Nixon also didn’t enjoy the unwavering support of the GOP Congress. It’s unclear why exactly the Republican caucus is so completely motivated to flack for Trump, but that loyalty comes despite the fact that the president is utterly toxic, and has been since day one. GOP lawmakers largely don’t seem to care. Early Wednesday, for example, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell didn’t hesitate before he declared that there would be no more Russia investigations, including special hearings to probe the firing of Comey. Few if any Republicans will dare to criticize the president’s actions on anything, much less his sloppy treatment of the Russia story.

Along those lines, imagine if the Russia attack had come in the form of a nuclear device that was detonated in a major U.S. city — a more destructive attack than a cyber-attack, sure, but still a direct assault on American sovereignty, our people and our democracy. Now imagine the president calling that attack a hoax, while the Republican Congress silently shrugged its shoulders. We’d have no choice but to wonder: What’s in it for Congress? Analogies aside, why the lack of outrage over a foreign attack on our political institutions? Why such loyalty to a chief executive whose approval numbers had dropped to 36 percent even before the Comey news? At what point does having Trump’s jagged autograph on their legislation fail to make up for the myriad political liabilities commensurate with being linked to such a loser?

A couple of reasons strike me. One is that conservatives have coalesced decades ago around the idea that the Watergate scandal and Nixon's 1974 resignation were basically completely "political," as in a partisan Democratic Party dirty deed. And that Nixon could have survived an impeachment by the House and a trial in the Senate. And this position regards Republicans like Howard Baker and that notorious liberal squish Barry Goldwater as RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) who stabbed Dear Leader Tricky Dicky in the back.

And it tells us something important about the American hard right that they have been willing to bestow such a retrospective martyrdom to Richard Nixon. Because the kind of conservatives that have effectively controlled the Republican Party since 1980 were deeply suspicious of Nixon as of 1972-3, even though of course they preferred him to Democrat George McGovern in 1972. Nixon had started a reconciliation with China, which acknowledge that Taiwan was part of China. (That was the long-standing arrangement that Trump blundered into disturbing during his transition period; see Charlie Campbell, Donald Trump Angers China With Historic Phone Call to Taiwan's President Time 12/05/2016) He had negotiated the SALT nuclear arms control treaty with the Soviet Union, the most important nuclear arms treaty until that time, which pleased most Democrats but upset the more conservative Republicans. He had instituted affirmative action as the lead federal approach to ending illegal racial discrimination. He set up the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). He declared himself a Keynesian and imposed wage-and-price controls on the economy.

But once they could see him as a martyr to the Mean Libruls, he looked more heroic to hardline conservatives.

And second factor is that Watergate and Nixon's resignation badly shook the Washington Beltway Village media crowd. Despite the iconic status of Watergate as one of the finest hours of the free press, the corporate press was reluctant to have another one. This is a major reason that the media was willing to basically give St. Reagan a pass on the Iran-Contra scandal.

And this in the context of a Republican Party that has been radicalizing itself more and more intensely over the last several decades.

St. Reagan and the Iran-Contra affair

The Iran-Contra scandal was the event that detracted the most from Ronald Reagan's image during his Presidency, though his hardcore admirers enthusiastically supported the controversial operations involved. This report from the National Security Archives has a good general summary and many links to more recently available documents, The Iran-Contra Affair 20 Years On 11/24/2006:

On November 25, 1986, the biggest political and constitutional scandal since Watergate exploded in Washington when President Ronald Reagan told a packed White House news conference that funds derived from covert arms deals with the Islamic Republic of Iran had been diverted to buy weapons for the U.S.-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

In the weeks leading up to this shocking admission, news reports had exposed the U.S. role in both the Iran deals and the secret support for the Contras, but Reagan's announcement, in which he named two subordinates -- National Security Advisor John M. Poindexter and NSC staffer Oliver L. North -- as the responsible parties, was the first to link the two operations.

The scandal was almost the undoing of the Teflon President. Of all the revelations that emerged, the most galling for the American public was the president's abandonment of the long-standing policy against dealing with terrorists, which Reagan repeatedly denied doing in spite of overwhelming evidence that made it appear he was simply lying to cover up the story.

Despite the damage to his image, the president arguably got off easy, escaping the ultimate political sanction of impeachment. From what is now known from documents and testimony -- but perhaps not widely appreciated -- while Reagan may not have known about the diversion or certain other details of the operations being carried out in his name, he directed that both support for the Contras (whom he ordered to be kept together "body and soul") and the arms-for-hostages deals go forward, and was at least privy to other actions that were no less significant. [my emphasis]

From St. Reagan's address to the nation in which he admits having "traded arms for hostages":



The Federation of American Scientists, a great resource for a lot of things like this, has a copy of The "Walsh Report", the final report from Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. It's formal title is Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters 08/04/1993.

Congress investigated the matter, as well. Their findings are an important part of the historical record on Iran-Contra. See Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran/Contra Affair by Lee H. Hamilton, Daniel K. Inouye. Excerpts are also provided by the American Presidency Project at UC-Santa Barbara.

Wyoming Congressman Dick Cheney's Iran-Contra defense would provide to be a significant step onto the road that took the United States into invading Iran and directly employing sadistic torture as a terror measure in foreign policy.

Tags: iran-contra, iran-contra affair, ronald reagan

Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" series from 1996

Gary Webb (1955-2004)

Reporter Gary Webb did a series for the San Jose Mercury-News in 1996 on the role of cocaine traffic in financing the Contra war in Nicaragua during the 1980s. As he opening of the initial article in the series put it:

For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found.

This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the "crack" capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America - and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.'s gangs to buy automatic weapons.

It is one of the most bizarre alliances in modern history: the union of a U.S.-backed army attempting to overthrow a revolutionary socialist government and the Uzi-toting "gangstas" of Compton and South-Central Los Angeles.

The series is available at the Dark Alliance Web page maintained by NarcoNews, a news service focusing on Latin America in general and the problems of the "war on drugs" in particular. Apparently, the site was down for some time but is now restored.

Webb's story was not well received among the Establishment press, not to mention parties with more urgent interests at stake. Robert Perry, who had written about the cocaine-contra connection earlier, tells the story that led to Webb's suicide in We All Failed Gary Webb ConsortiumNews.com 12/10/08. He writes of Webb's last years:

Though a number of factors contributed to Webb’s suicide, it was his inability to find meaningful work in his profession that pushed him into a deep depression. Eight years earlier, he had been forced out of his job at the San Jose Mercury News as a result of the ugly controversy that followed publication of his story about contra-cocaine trafficking.

That story prompted a fierce counterattack from major U.S. newspapers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times which had all downplayed or dismissed the contra-cocaine scandal when it first arose in the mid-1980s. Unwilling to admit their earlier error, the big papers simply trashed Gary Webb.

With Webb and his story under fierce attack, the executives at the San Jose Mercury News found betraying their reporter a better course for their own careers. Webb was reassigned to a humiliating job and resigned in disgrace.

Even when the CIA inspector general issued his 1998 report, which confirmed much of what Webb had alleged and more, the Establishment newspapers refused to significantly revisit the issue. That would have been far too embarrassing for them, and they faced no powerful interests demanding that they correct their earlier flawed reporting. [my emphasis]

Sen. John Kerry pressed for an investigation of the cocaine-contra story, as Perry reports in some detail in How John Kerry exposed the Contra-cocaine scandal Salon 10/25/04:

In December 1985, when Brian Barger and I wrote a groundbreaking story for the Associated Press about Nicaraguan Contra rebels smuggling cocaine into the United States, one U.S. senator put his political career on the line to follow up on our disturbing findings. His name was John Kerry.

Yet, over the past year, even as Kerry's heroism as a young Navy officer in Vietnam has become a point of controversy, this act of political courage by a freshman senator has gone virtually unmentioned, even though -- or perhaps because -- it marked Kerry's first challenge to the Bush family.

As the national press was sliding toward the cliff it went over with the Whitewater story, Kerry's investigation failed to catch the imagination of the corporate press, who were reluctant to challenge the noble image of St. Reagan:

The Reagan administration's tolerance and protection of this dark underbelly of the Contra war represented one of the most sordid scandals in the history of U.S. foreign policy. Yet when Kerry's bombshell findings were released in 1989, they were greeted by the mainstream press with disdain and disinterest. The New York Times, which had long denigrated the Contra-drug allegations, buried the story of Kerry's report on its inside pages, as did the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. For his tireless efforts, Kerry earned a reputation as a reckless investigator. Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom Watch dubbed Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff."

But almost a decade later, in 1998, Kerry's trailblazing investigation was vindicated by the CIA's own inspector general, who found that scores of Contra operatives were implicated in the cocaine trade and that U.S. agencies had looked the other way rather than reveal information that could have embarrassed the Reagan-Bush administration.

Even after the CIA's admissions, the national press corps never fully corrected its earlier dismissive treatment. That would have meant the New York Times and other leading publications admitting they had bungled their coverage of one of the worst scandals of the Reagan-Bush era. [my emphasis]

Official investigations in 1998 confirmed much of what Kerry had found and what Perry, Barger and Webb had reported:

While the major newspapers gloated when reporter Gary Webb was forced to resign from the Mercury News, the internal government investigations, which Webb's series had sparked, moved forward. The government's decade-long Contra cocaine cover-up began to crumble when CIA inspector general Frederick Hitz published the first of two volumes of his Contra cocaine investigation on Jan. 29, 1998, followed by a Justice Department report and Hitz's second volume in October 1998.

The CIA inspector general and Justice Department reports confirmed that the Reagan administration knew from almost the outset of the Contra war that cocaine traffickers permeated the CIA-backed army but the administration did next to nothing to expose or stop these criminals. The reports revealed example after example of leads not followed, witnesses disparaged and official law-enforcement investigations sabotaged. The evidence indicated that Contra-connected smugglers included the Medellin cartel, the Panamanian government of Manuel Noriega, the Honduran military, the Honduran-Mexican smuggling ring of Ramon Matta Ballesteros, and Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans.

Reviewing evidence that existed in the 1980s, CIA inspector general Hitz found that some Contra-connected drug traffickers worked directly for Reagan's National Security Council staff and the CIA. In 1987, Cuban-American Bay of Pigs veteran Moises Nunez told CIA investigators that "it was difficult to answer questions relating to his involvement in narcotics trafficking because of the specific tasks he had performed at the direction of the NSC."

CIA task force chief Fiers said the Nunez-NSC drug lead was not pursued then "because of the NSC connection and the possibility that this could be somehow connected to the Private Benefactor program [Oliver North's fundraising]. A decision was made not to pursue this matter."

Perhaps the most revealing press reaction that Perry describes in Salon was this one:

The Los Angeles Times actually used Kerry's report to dismiss the Mercury News series as old news because the Contra cocaine trafficking "has been well documented for years."

This is actually a standard technique of our dysfunctional press corps: ignore or downplay the story when it breaks, then dismiss later revelations as old news. Stories like George W. Bush's drunk driving and his dubious National Guard record were dismissed by conventional press wisdom in 2004 because they had been surfaced but not seriously explored in the national press in 2000. (Dan Rather's famous report on the latter was an exception, but that didn't work out too well for him.)

I should note here that one of the claims of the original series and of Webb's subsequent book based on it, Dark Alliance (1998), was, as quoted above, that the CIA's Contra financing activities "helped spark a crack explosion in urban America". Though that claim, at least as quoted there, was pretty modest, it was one of the aspects on which his critics hung the "conspiracy theory" epithet. And his analysis did lend itself easily to already-extant theories about how the spread of hard drugs among African-American urban communities was somehow a deliberate plan by the government/ruling class/white elite to control the black population. That notion long predated Gary Webb's series in 1996. Here was his version in the opening article:

While the [Nicaraguan Contra's] war is barely a memory today, black America is still dealing with its poisonous side effects. Urban neighborhoods are grappling with legions of homeless crack addicts. Thousands of young black men are serving long prison sentences for selling cocaine -- a drug that was virtually unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the CIA's army started bringing it into South-Central in the 1980s at bargain-basement prices.

And the L.A. gangs, which used their enormous cocaine profits to arm themselves and spread crack across the country, are still thriving, turning entire blocks of major cities into occasional war zones.

But however dramatic that speculation was, the real factual meat of the story was the CIA's collaboration with drug trafficers, which was largely substantiated by the subsequent official investigations.

This story not only involves an important piece of more-or-less contemporary history. It also is an important chapter in the collapse in quality in much of the American press, particularly the national political press corps.

And it's a reminder that guerrilla groups, of all persuasions, can degenerate partly or wholly into basically criminal operations with no meaningful practical political goals. When an insurrectionary process continues as long as the one in Colombia, for instance, the need to finance themselves through extra-legal channels - no government looks cheerfully on fundraising for groups waging armed warfare against it - can lead them to settle into patterns of behavior in which the financing method starts to take precedents over the political goals.

See also:

It's Time for Realism by Michael Massing The Nation 09/02/1999 (09/20/1999 edition)

Life of a Scandal by Peter Kornbluh The Nation 09/02/1999 (09/20/1999 edition)

Tags: gary webb, iran-contra, iran-contra affair

Will the Iran-Contra crowd ever go away?

John Poindexter, Bud McFarlane, Eliot Abrams, Michael Ledeen - all these names of key figures in the Iran-Contra affair keep popping up in connection with the Bush Administration's military adventures and intelligence programs.

Now here's another one. Manucher Ghorbanifar, one of the key scamsters that suckered Ollie North and his team of hot-shot amateur spy-diplomats back during the Reagan Administration, figures in yet another dispute between Rummy and the CIA (my emphasis):

The drama's central figure is Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer based in Paris who was involved in the Iran-Contra affair during the Reagan administration.

At that time, the CIA gave him two lie detector tests, which he failed. In 1984 and 1985 the CIA issued two "burn notices", warning all members of the US government not to go anywhere near him.

That did not stop two Pentagon officials from meeting Mr Ghorbanifar in December 2001 in Paris and January 2002 in Rome, lured by his promises to build bridges to influential Iranians who were interested in bringing down the Tehran theocracy.

The meetings took place in secrecy, intelligence sources say, and the CIA director, George Tenet, and the secretary of state, Colin Powell, only found about them when the Rome meeting was reported by the US ambassador to Italy.

Nevertheless, according to one source, the meetings continued until they were leaked to the press this summer and the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, ordered a halt.

But Mr Ghorbanifar maintained lines of communication with the neoconservative thinktank, the American Enterprise Institute, and in particular a friend from the Reagan days, Michael Ledeen, and through him passed on an extraordinary story.

The CIA wound up following up on one of Ghorbanifar's bogus tips and nothing came of it. They made a point of saying afterward that Ghorbanifar "a fabricator who has peddled false information for financial gain".

This can't be good. It just can't be good. We've been here before. Been there, done that. It didn't work out at all.

Tags: bud mcfarlane, eliot abrams, iran-contra affair, john poindexter, nanucher ghorbanifar, michael ledeen, oliver north