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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 7/1/10

Rethinking Iran-Contra

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The secret relationships, born of the 1980 hostage dealings, created the framework for the Reagan administration's approval of Israel's clandestine arms shipments to Iran beginning immediately after Reagan took office in 1981, just as the American hostages were finally released. Those initial Israeli arms sales gradually evolved into the Iran-Contra weapons transfers.

Thus, when the Iran-Contra scandal surfaced in fall 1986, the subsequent cover-up was not simply to protect Reagan from possible impeachment for violating the Arms Export Control Act and the congressional ban on military aid to the Nicaraguan contras, but from exposure of the even darker, earlier phase of the scandal, which would implicate Israel and the CIA.

In authorizing the first investigation of Iran-Contra, Reagan's Attorney General Edwin Meese set the chronological parameters as 1985 and 1986. Congressional inquiries also focused on that narrow time frame, despite indications that the scandal began earlier, such as the mystery of an Israeli-chartered arms flight that was shot down in July 1981 after straying into Soviet air space.

Only late in the Iran-Contra criminal investigation did Walsh and his investigative team begin suspecting that the only explanation for the futile arms-for-hostage dealings regarding Lebanon in 1985-86 when each freed hostage was replaced by a new captive was that the tripartite relationship of Iran-Israel-and-Reagan predated the Lebanese crisis, going back to 1980.

That was one reason why Walsh's investigators asked George H.W. Bush's national security adviser (and former CIA officer) Donald Gregg about his possible role in delaying the release of the hostages in 1980. His denial was judged deceptive by an FBI polygrapher.

"People on High'

Nicholas Veliotes, Reagan's assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, described his discovery of the earlier Iran connections after the Israeli plane went down in the Soviet Union in 1981.

"It was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment," Veliotes said in an interview with PBS Frontline.

In checking out the Israeli flight, Veliotes came to believe that the Reagan camp's dealings with Iran dated back to before the 1980 election.

"It seems to have started in earnest in the period probably prior to the election of 1980, as the Israelis had identified who would become the new players in the national security area in the Reagan administration," Veliotes said. "And I understand some contacts were made at that time."

Though some two dozen witnesses including senior Iranian officials and a wide range of other international players have expanded on Veliotes's discovery, the pressure became overpowering in the final years of George H.W. Bush's presidency not to accept the obvious conclusions. [For details of the evidence, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]

It was easier for all involved surely the Republicans but also the Democrats and much of the Washington press corps to discredit the corroborated 1980 allegations. Taking the lead was the neoconservative New Republic.

In fall 1991, as Congress was deliberating whether to conduct a full investigation of the October Surprise issue, Steven Emerson, a journalist with close ties to Likud, produced a cover story for The New Republic claiming to prove the allegations were a "myth."

Newsweek published a matching cover story also attacking the October Surprise allegations. The article, I was told, had been ordered up by executive editor Maynard Parker who was known inside Newsweek as a close ally of the CIA and an admirer of prominent neocon Elliott Abrams.

The two articles were influential in shaping Washington's conventional wisdom, but they were both based on a misreading of attendance documents at a London historical conference which William Casey had gone to in July 1980.

The two publications put Casey at the conference on one key date thus supposedly proving he could not have attended an alleged Madrid meeting with Iranian emissaries. However, after the two stories appeared, follow-up interviews with conference participants, including historian Robert Dallek, conclusively showed that Casey wasn't at the conference until later.

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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at
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