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3 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA A bombshell that nobody
heard By Tom Engelhardt
Let me see if I've got this straight.
Perhaps two years ago, an "informal" meeting of
"veterans" of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal -
holding positions in the Bush administration - was
convened by Deputy National Security Adviser
Elliott Abrams. Discussed were the "lessons
learned" from that labyrinthine, secret and
illegal arms-for-money-for-arms deal involving the
Israelis, the Iranians, the Saudis, and the
Contras of Nicaragua, among others - and meant to
evade the Boland Amendment, a congressionally
passed attempt to outlaw US
administration assistance to the anti-communist
Contras.
In terms of getting around
Congress, the Iran-Contra vets concluded, the
complex operation had been a success - and would
have worked far better if the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) and the military had been kept out of
the loop and the whole thing had been run out of
the vice president's office.
FROM OUR
ARCHIVE ATol reported on
Elliott Abrams' role in undermining Hamas
in: No-goodniks and the Palestinian
shootout, by
Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke
(Jan 9,
'07)
Subsequently,
some of those conspirators, once again with the
financial support and help of the Saudis (and
probably the Israelis and the British), began
running a similar operation, aimed at avoiding
congressional scrutiny or public accountability of
any sort, out of Vice President Dick Cheney's
office. They dipped into "black pools of money",
possibly stolen from the billions of Iraqi oil
dollars that have never been accounted for since
the US occupation began.
Some of these
funds, as well as Saudi ones, were evidently
funneled through the embattled, Sunni-dominated
Lebanese government of Prime Minister Fouad
Siniora to the sort of Sunni jihadist groups
("some sympathetic to al-Qaeda") whose members
might normally fear ending up in Guantanamo and to
a group, or groups, associated with the
fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.
All of
this was being done as part of a "sea change" in
the Bush administration's Middle East policies
aimed at rallying friendly Sunni regimes against
Shi'ite Iran, as well as Hezbollah, Hamas and the
Syrian government - and launching secret
operations to undermine, roll back or destroy all
of the above. Despite the fact that the
administration of President George W Bush is
officially at war with Sunni extremism in Iraq
(and in the more general "global war on terror"),
despite its support for the largely Shi'ite
government, allied to Iran, that it has brought to
power in Iraq, and despite its dislike for the
Sunni-Shiite civil war in that country, some of
its top officials may be covertly encouraging a
far greater Sunni-Shi'ite rift in the region.
Imagine. All this and much more was
revealed, often in remarkable detail, just over a
week ago in "The redirection", a Seymour Hersh
piece in The New Yorker. Other revelations
included news of US military border crossings into
Iran, new preparations that would allow Bush to
order a massive air attack on that land with only
24 hours' notice, and a brief window this spring
when the staggering power of four US
aircraft-carrier battle groups might be available
to Bush in the Persian Gulf.
Hersh, the
man who first broke the My Lai story in the
Vietnam era, has never been off his game since. In
recent years, from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal
on, he has consistently released explosive news
about the plans and acts of the Bush
administration.
Imagine, in addition, that
Hersh went on Democracy Now!, Fresh Air,
Hardball with Chris Matthews and CNN's Late
Edition with Wolf Blitzer and actually
elaborated on these claims and revelations, some
of which, on the face of it, seem like potentially
illegal and impeachable offenses, if they do
indeed reach up to the vice president or
president.
Now imagine the response:
front-page headlines; editorials nationwide
calling for answers, congressional hearings, or
even the appointment of a special prosecutor to
look into some of the claims; a raft of op-ed-page
pieces by the nation's leading columnists asking
questions, demanding answers, reminding us of the
history of Iran-Contra; bold reporters from
recently freed media standing up in White House
and Defense Department press briefings to demand
more information on Hersh's various charges; calls
in Congress for hearings and investigations into
why the people's representatives were left so
totally out of this loop.
Uh ...
All I can say is: if any of this happened,
I haven't been able to discover it. As far as I
can tell, no one in the mainstream even blinked on
the Iran-Contra angle or the possibility that a
vast, secret Middle Eastern operation is being
run, possibly illegally and based on stolen funds
and Saudi money, out of the US vice president's
office.
You can certainly find a few
pieces on, or reports about, "The redirection" -
all focused only on the possible buildup to a war
with Iran - and the odd wire-service mention of
it; but nothing major, nothing earth-shaking or
eye-popping; not, in fact, a single obvious
editorial or op-ed piece in the mainstream; no
journalistic questions publicly asked of the
administration; no congressional cries of horror;
no calls anywhere for investigations or hearings
on any of Hersh's revelations, not even an
expression of fear somewhere that we might be
seeing Iran-Contra, the sequel, in our own moment.
This, it seems to me, adds up to a
remarkable non-response to claims that, if true,
should gravely concern Congress, the media and the
nation.
Let's grant that Hersh's New
Yorker pieces generally arrive unsourced and
filled with anonymous officials ("a former senior
intelligence official", "a US government
consultant with close ties to Israel").
Nonetheless, Hersh has long mined his sources in
the intelligence community and the military to
striking effect. Undoubtedly, the lack of sourcing
makes it harder for other reporters to follow up,
though when it comes to such papers as the
Washington Post and the New York Times, you would
think that they might have Washington sources of
their own to query on Hersh's claims.
And,
of course, editorial pages, columnists, op-ed
editors, congressional representatives and
reporters at administration news briefings don't
need to do any footwork at all to raise these
subjects. (Consider, for instance, the White House
press briefing last April 10, where a reporter did
indeed ask a question based on an earlier Hersh
New Yorker piece.) As far as I can tell, there
haven't even been denunciations of Hersh's report
or suggestions anywhere that it is inaccurate or
off-base. Just the equivalent of a
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