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January 31, 2008

G.W. Bush Is a Criminal, Like His Dad

By Robert Parry

Watching Attorney General Michael Mukasey evade the obvious fact that
waterboarding is torture – and the reluctance of Democrats to press him – I was
reminded of how the first President Bush got away with an earlier batch of national
security crimes.
Indeed, one of the common questions I’ve been asked over the years is – if the
evidence really does show that the Reagan-Bush crowd was guilty of illegal dealings
with Iran, Iraq and the Nicaraguan contras – why didn’t the Democrats hold those
Republicans to account?
For people who have posed that question, I would suggest that they watch the
Senate Judiciary Committee’s Jan. 30 hearing with Mukasey. Everybody in the room
knew what the unspoken reality was, but nobody dared say it: George W. Bush
authorized torture, which is a crime under U.S. and international law.
However, if the Attorney General – the highest-ranking law-enforcement officer in the
United States – recognized the obvious, he would have to either commence legal
action against President Bush or send a referral to Congress for the initiation of
impeachment proceedings.
If such a referral were sent to Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would have
little choice but to permit the start of impeachment hearings in the House Judiciary
Committee. A wide range of Bush’s illegal actions would then begin spilling out,
provoking a political crisis in the United States.
Not only do Bush’s allies want to avoid that possibility but so do Democratic
congressional leaders. They fear an impeachment battle would boomerang, putting
them on the spot with both angry Republicans and a hostile Washington news media.
On Dec. 20, 2007, Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee,
told Amy Goodman on “Democracy Now” that impeachment hearings could end up
like Watergate in reverse, with today’s careerist press corps treating the notion of
accountability for Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney like some kind of nutty idea.
“There is a very stark reality that with the corporatization of the media, we could end
up with turning people, who should be documented in history as making many
profound errors and violating the Constitution, from villains into victims,” the
Michigan Democrat said.
So, Democratic senators weren’t all that upset when Mukasey mumbled through a
variety of obfuscations.
Orwell Reference
At one point, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, even made a George Orwell
reference in noting that Mukasey’s discussion about the criminality of waterboarding
had “melted into the abstract.”
Mukasey responded: “We could engage in a discussion. It would not be a concrete
and factual discussion because we would be talking about if this, if that, if the other.”
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When Whitehouse called Mukasey’s answer “totally not credible” because Bush
administration officials already have acknowledged that CIA interrogators did use
waterboarding against several terror suspects, Mukasey continued:
“All of that depends on whether certification was given and whether it was
permissibly relied on and it should not turn on one person’s current view of what the
(anti-torture) statute requires or doesn’t require.”
Whitehouse, a former federal prosecutor, rejected that explanation too, noting that
“there is no Nuremberg defense built into the criminal statute,” meaning that
authorization from President Bush or some other senior official would not make
torture legal.
However, Whitehouse, like other Democrats, finished his questioning with praise of
Mukasey for taking a variety of steps to shield the Justice Department from the Bush
administration’s political pressure.
Still, on the most sensitive issue to Bush – his assertion that he possesses unlimited
presidential powers that let him violate criminal laws and ignore constitutional
protections – Mukasey was as much in lock step with the administration as his
predecessor, Alberto Gonzales.
The only significant difference was that the more mature Mukasey, a former federal
judge, was less smug in his treatment of the senators than Gonzales had been. For
their part, the committee Democrats seemed eager to look to the future.
“So today we continue the restoration of the [Justice] Department,” said Judiciary
Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont.
But that “restoration” apparently will not include holding the President and Vice
President accountable for authorizing the commission of felonies – in permitting the
torture of terror suspects, in ordering warrantless wiretaps of Americans, in exposing
the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, etc.
Not Good at Confrontation
The Democrats adopted a similar see-no-evil posture from late 1992 through the
Clinton years when evidence surfaced about serious crimes committed by Ronald
Reagan, George H.W. Bush and some of their subordinates.
Like Marty McFly’s father in “Back to the Future,” the Democrats weren’t very good
at “confrontation.”
So, when evidence implicated George H.W. Bush on issues ranging from the Iran-
Contra cover-up and secret military support for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to
Nicaraguan contra drug trafficking and a politically motivated search of Bill Clinton’s
passport files, the Democrats averted their eyes and slinked away from a fight.
In December 1992 and January 1993, for instance, evidence poured in to a House
task force that was investigating the so-called October Surprise controversy, whether
the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign had gone behind President Jimmy Carter’s back and
contacted Iranian mullahs while Iran was holding 52 Americans hostage.
Carter’s failure to resolve that hostage crisis doomed his re-election and touched off
Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory. Plus, Iran’s release of the hostages as Reagan was
taking the oath of office gave Reagan an aura of heroism that has continued to this
day.
In a December 2007 campaign ad, Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani
cited Reagan’s supposed toughness with terrorists as the reason the Iranians
suddenly freed the hostages after a 444-day standoff.
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“They released the American hostages in one hour, and that should tell us a lot about
these Islamic terrorists that we’re facing” today, Giuliani said. “The one hour in which
they released them was the one hour in which Ronald Reagan was taking the oath of
office as President of the United States.
“The best way you deal with tyrants and terrorists, you stand up to them. You don’t
back down.” [NYT, Dec. 6, 2007]
But the House task force was learning a different reality in December 1992, as
witnesses came forth and documents surfaced indicating that Reagan campaign
operatives, including then vice presidential candidate George H.W. Bush, had
engaged in their own secret diplomacy in 1980, promising a swap of arms for the
hostages.
Among this new evidence:
--Former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr sent the task force a detailed letter
describing the Iranian infighting that had occurred around this Republican overture
and how Iran’s most radical elements favored a deal with the Reagan-Bush team.
--The biographer for French intelligence chief Alexandre deMarenches recounted how
deMarenches had confessed his role in arranging secret meetings in Paris, a
statement that was corroborated by several other French intelligence operatives.
--Former CIA officer Charles Cogan described a meeting in early 1981 at which Joseph
Reed, an aide to banker David Rockefeller, boasted to then CIA Director William
Casey about their success in thwarting President Carter’s hoped-for October Surprise
of a pre-election hostage release.
So Startling
The new evidence was so startling that the task force’s chief counsel Lawrence
Barcella approached chairman, Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, with a request that the
investigation be extended a few months so the new information could be evaluated.
Barcella told me during an interview in 2004 that Hamilton rejected the request for
an extension.
The task force then finished up work on a report that reached the opposite conclusion
from what the new evidence indicated. The task force report claimed there was no
credible evidence to support the long-standing allegations that the Reagan-Bush
campaign had interfered with the 1980 hostage crisis.
The task force maintained this conclusion by hiding away much of the new evidence.
(I discovered some of this evidence in 1994-95 when I gained access to boxes
containing the raw files of the task force.)
In January 1993, however, there was one more surprise for the October Surprise task
force. After its report was already at the printers, the Russian government responded
to an earlier request for information about what its intelligence files showed about
secret U.S. contacts with Iran.
On Jan. 11, 1993, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow forwarded to Hamilton a translated
version of the Russian report, which stated that Soviet intelligence was aware of
secret meetings between Republicans and Iranian officials that had occurred in
Madrid and Paris during the 1980 presidential campaign.
Among the Republican operatives menioned by the Russians were George H.W. Bush,
William Casey and Robert Gates, who was then a senior CIA official and who is now
U.S. Defense Secretary. The Russian report flatly contradicted the findings of the
House task force, which were to be released two days later, on Jan. 13, 1993.
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Despite this extraordinary example of Russian-U.S. cooperation – and the stunning

assertions of Republican guilt – Hamilton’s task force simply stuffed the Russian
report into one of the file boxes.
There was no mention of the Russian report or other contradictory evidence when the
task force report was issued, or when Hamilton wrote a New York Times op-ed
entitled “Case Closed,” which relegated the October Surprise suspicions to the loony
bin of conspiracy theories.
In 2004, I asked Barcella about the Russian report and why it hadn’t been released.
He explained that it was a classified document and that the task force decided not to
undertake the necessary steps to arrange for its declassification.
A more likely explanation was that the Democrats wanted to avoid a nasty fight with
Republicans over the Reagan-Bush legacy. In early 1993, the Democrats, especially
President Bill Clinton, saw a battle over history as a distraction from his domestic
priorities. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
Clinton adopted a tolerant attitude, too, toward George H.W. Bush’s unprecedented
decision on Christmas Eve 1992 to pardon six Iran-Contra defendants (another
scandal which implicated Bush and could be viewed as a sequel to the October
Surprise case).
Clinton was equally disinterested when new evidence emerged in 1996 about Bush’s
role in the Iraq-gate arming of Saddam Hussein, and in 1998 when the CIA’s
inspector general compiled damning evidence on how the Reagan-Bush
administration had protected drug traffickers linked to the Nicaraguan contras.
Instead of demanding the truth about these crimes and holding people accountable,
the Clinton administration found it easier to sweep these unpleasant matters under
the rug. One of Clinton’s rewards was a cozy relationship with the senior George
Bush.
Now, the congressional Democrats seem to taking a similarly permissive approach
toward the crimes of the junior George Bush.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated
Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of
George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be
ordered at neckdeepbook.com