GAVEL TO GROVEL

...A few months earlier, the Reagan-appointed Tower Commission reached virtually the same conclusion...

...to list the murders, tortures, and other atrocities committed by the contras...

...When Cambodia was ravaged by "secret" U.S...

...I did so because I was firmly convinced that to follow the path or the course that was laid down by the Reagan proposal would certainly and inevitably lead to a point where young men and women of the United States would have to be sent into the conflict...

...Similarly, the Iran-contra arms conspirators did not hesitate to share their intrigues with foreign governments and international grifters, while going to extreme lengths of concealment and deception to keep the public, the Congress, and even their own colleagues in the Executive branch uninformed...

...here were guys who could make the trains run on time...

...Owen found any information pertaining to the possibility of involvement in drugs, he told me and I would tell the appropriate Federal authorities...

...Congress's first and most basic error was to enact the National Security Act of 1947, the legislative foundation for the national security state that was fashioned to wage Cold War against the Soviet Union...

...In today's Congress, the doubts have been silenced, the problems overlooked...

...What was astonishing and distressing, however, was the popularity of their philosophy as articulated in the networks' gavel-to-gavel coverage...

...If everyone accepts the premise that the United States must behave in ways that cannot stand the light of day, it is hardly surprising that fundamental questions about such behavior will go unaddressed...

...They bent over backward to put their most "moderate" members on the panel, deliberately excluding those who had been most outspoken in their opposition to U.S...

...I did so not as a communist, I did so not as an agent of the K.G.B...

...I simply didn't want any outside interference...

...Can you shed any light for us on that question...

...Lie upon lie was fed to the American public on national television, and no member of the committees dared take the microphone to refute them...

...Our Executive branch, containing only two elected officials accountable to the people, has enormous unchecked power...

...One could have expected the Democrats to press the issue, but they did not...

...It was useful to have a bracing reminder that the American can-do attitude has its authoritarian overtones...

...Senators Edward Kennedy, John Kerry, and Christopher Dodd were not invited to participate in the hearings, nor were Representatives Henry B. Gonzalez or Ron Del-lums...

...Nothing of the sort occurred...

...Perhaps a few members of the committee were actually naive enough to believe what they were told...

...It had, in short, a chance to institute a safer and more just system...

...At most, the committees were suggesting that eight members of Congress be notified, and perhaps as few as four...

...No one pointed out that covert actions are seldom, if ever, carried out to protect the United States from imminent danger...

...At bottom, the investigating committees accepted what they should have been questioning: the necessity of U.S...

...And it holds in its hands the power to destroy the world on a moment's notice—all in the name of protecting national security at home and promoting democracy abroad...

...According to press accounts, this scheme involved nothing less than an attempt to nullify the Constitution, but Congress wouldn't let the American people hear the details...

...It was much safer simply to scold North, Poindexter, Abrams, and Meese for their lies and deceptions, or to worry about money stolen by middlemen or .spent on snow tires, or to dwell on the White House intrigue between Cabinet members and the National Security Council...

...And when Poindexter complained about the obstacles placed in his path by "outsiders"—he meant Congress—who couldn't sympathize...

...The surge of mass support for the NSC outlaws recalls a line from Shakespeare: "Now this ill-wresting world is grown so bad, mad slanderers by mad ears believed be...

...Its failure is the country's loss and the whole world's misfortune...

...Bigotry, too, is central to fascism, and its reappearance with the testimony of General Secord and Colonel North underscored how fundamentally reactionary their actions were...

...Not another question about it...

...meddling in Nicaragua's affairs...

...Everyone agreed that they were the good guys...

...If we wish to get into this, I'm certain arrangements can be made for an executive session...

...Had the National Security Act been accurately labeled, it would have been called An Act to Facilitate the Expansion of the American Empire and Diminish Democracy Within the United States...

...That seemed to be the credo of the Reagan Administration, and especially of its national-security apparatus...

...Members of Lee Hamilton's House Intelligence Committee talked privately with North and accepted his patently false assurances that he was not aiding the contras...

...My objective, all along, was to withhold from the Congress exactly what the NSC staff was doing in carrying out the President's policy," Poindexter said...

...Their martial attitudes are understandable, though they hardly rendered them fit to hold high civilian office...

...I think it is very important for the American people to understand that this is a dangerous world, that we live at risk," North said on his first day of testimony by way of justifying covert activity...

...Not a single member of the committees challenged the assumption that the United States should be engaged in that ugly business...

...No one seemed to harbor any doubts about the propriety of having four or eight out of 535 elected members of the House and Senate make decisions on whether the United States should foment war or not...

...Their unblushing patriotism of the my-country-right-or-wrong variety, their gung-ho anticommunism, swept America off its feet, even as they admitted repeated and enthusiastic participation in falsehood...

...Case closed...

...For the first time in more than a decade, Congress had an occasion to intervene in that ruinous process, restore the constitutional balance, and return the United States to a more democratic structure...

...The means were faulty, according to the committees, because the Reagan Administration did not follow the standard procedure for covert actions...

...Other members fawned on him in a repulsive orgy of obsequiousness...

...Senator Daniel Inouye, the Hawaii Democrat who chaired the Senate committee, was the only member to defend opposition to the contras, and he did so in terms that verged on the apologetic...

...Whenever those code words were uttered, it was safe to conclude that a justification for antidemocratic acts was to follow, one that invariably accepted the premise that the American people—and even a majority of their elected officials-are not to be informed of some of the most far-reaching actions undertaken by their Government...

...It must "share the blame" for the Iran-contra fiasco, though not in the sense intended by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, Admiral John Poindexter, and their faithful Republican chorus on the committees, all of whom would cheerfully abolish Congress if they had the choice...

...No lie was too blatant, no deception too crude to be mobilized in defense of our leader...

...It can declare martial law and trample our Constitution, as this Administration has planned...

...For months and months, information has accumulated implicating the contras and Reagan Administration officials in the illegal drug trade...

...Senator George Mitchell, Democrat of Maine, scored a debating point with Oliver North by showing how undemocratic the Marine officer's approach was...

...All that the investigators left on their agenda was "the means employed," as Representative Hamilton put it...

...Similarly, the entire subject of joint U.S.-Israel covert actions was deemed off limits...

...The chief investigator on the Senate staff was Thomas Polgar, who had been the CIA station chief in Vietnam when Saigon fell...

...It had the opportunity to step back from covert actions and rethink an interventionist foreign policy...

...What Mitchell failed to address was that the people still have no basis for checking the President...

...It did not submit a finding to the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees who, by statute, must be notified...

...Owen is the last person, perhaps right beside me, that would ever be engaged in those kinds of activities and when Mr...

...And when Senator Inouye didn't bow deeply enough to North, racist calls directed toward Inouye rang in the Committees' offices...

...North: "Absolutely false...

...People admired North not just for his military bearing, his chestful of medals, and the gap between his two front teeth, but because he was willing to get things done, no matter the cost, no matter the legality...

...Representative after Representative, Senator after Senator, Democrat after Republican parroted North on the need for covert action in a "complex" or "dangerous" world...

...Congress passed up an extraordinary opportunity to expose the darker side of the Reagan Administration...

...With the deck so stacked, the committees were in no position to deal out an aggressive inquiry...

...Congress should have strengthened the Boland Amendment and insisted that it be followed...

...Other mistakes have been more recent, chief among them not taking a decisive stand against U.S...

...It was common knowledge in Washington...

...This evolution belies the seventh-grade civics lessons about checks and balances that the Senators and Representatives were so prone to recite during the hearings...

...No one took issue when North, Poindex-ter, and other witnesses ceaselessly referred to the contras as "freedom fighters...

...More than a decade ago, the late Senator Frank Church of Idaho conducted searching hearings exposing the nature of covert actions, but memory fades quickly on Capitol Hill...

...When the controversial issues arose, the committees ducked...

...Nor was there more than fleeting mention of the fact that most covert operations are kept secret only from the American people...

...Congress was established as an equal branch of Government...

...We received some calls in the committee and our offices over the last seventy-two hours of ugly ethnic slurs against our chairman, and other kinds of calls that were extraordinarily insulting to the members of this committee," Senator Rudman announced angrily during North's testimony...

...If the only check on the President was whether the people approved of his actions, and if the people were kept in the dark about his actions, then the people would have no basis for checking the President, Mitchell noted...

...For a putative democracy, that's not good news...

...The laws are there to be broken, particularly if they interfere with anything the Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief wants done...

...Though there were ample hints of a prominent Israeli role in the arms transfers to Iran and in the furtive assistance rendered to the contras, the details of various operations were discussed in executive session—if they were discussed at all...

...Congress should have held immediate hearings on the matter and should have enacted clear, airtight legislation that would have prohibited any U.S...

...But more than that, it missed a historic opportunity to rein in the Presidency and restore a semblance of decency and democracy to American foreign policy...

...By their very nature, covert operations are a lie," North said, and he was absolutely right...

...It was their ideology...

...Congress failed, in part, because it was reluctant to recognize, examine, and correct its own mistakes that helped lay the groundwork for the scandal...

...Primitive chauvinism, the sway of ideology over fact, and the pursuit of an aggressive foreign policy are traditional elements of fascist doctrine...

...instead, it was diluted by Congress and flouted by the Administration...

...And the Republicans, led by Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, made the most of it...

...Congress returned to the issue this summer only because there was a whiff of truly unacceptable Administration behavior—the clandestine sale of arms to the regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini...

...Even Edward Boland, the Massachusetts Democrat who sponsored the effort to halt U.S...

...Cowed into submission by North's popularity, the Democrats ceded the issue of aid to the contras...

...It is, as you said, a dangerous world, and we must be able to conduct covert actions, as every member of this panel has said," Lee Hamilton, Democrat of Indiana, who headed the House Iran-Contra Committee, acknowledged in his closing remarks to North...

...The only member who addressed it head-on was Orrin Hatch, who asked, in his unctuous way, the following question of Oliver North: "O.K., what about drug smuggling...

...It was the National Security Act that established the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, and in doing so effectively transferred all control over foreign policy from the Congress to the Presidency...

...intervention...

...Democracy was slow and creaky...

...Perhaps that is why the most sinister elements of the scandal scarcely received an airing...

...Gavel to Grovel Why the hearings failed will be free to conduct a great variety of covert wars in the future, so long as a few "trustworthy" Congressional leaders are cut in on the deal...

...Fawn Hall cast it in the simplest, most revealing terms: "Sometimes you have to go above the written law...

...intervention in Central America...

...Behind our backs, it overthrows governments, assassinates foreign leaders, bombs foreign capitals, trains torturers, and conducts campaigns of economic or military sabotage...

...They are the sentiments of the soldier determined to follow orders, and North and Poindexter are, after all, military men...

...aid to this brutal band of counterrevolutionaries had ceased to be an issue...

...It also demonstrated that their ilk has a constituency in this country, and that the most virulent hostility to the democratic process always lurks just below the surface of American political life...

...A news program, over the weekend, suggested that Rob Owen, who testified earlier, was involved in drug smuggling...

...Ladies and gentlemen and Colonel North, I voted against aid to the contras...

...These, to put it gently, are not democratic sentiments...

...Two days later, a Senate subcommittee heard testimony that two CIA agents were involved in a contra guns-for-drugs operation, but no one on the Iran-contra panels seems to have taken notice...

...It was as if U.S...

...And when Jack Brooks, Democrat of Texas, the only member to take an appropriately contemptuous attitude toward the witnesses, tried to ask North about his involvement in a plan to declare martial law in the United States, he was cut off by North's attorney, Brendan Sullivan, and Senator Inouye upheld the objection: "May I most respectfully request that matter not be touched upon, at this stage...

...But it was not willing to take that chance...

...Thirty-five years after the heyday of McCarthy ism, its noxious effects still linger...

...But because the committees refused even to consider the legitimacy of covert action, they were in no position to recommend any sweeping changes in the way the United States conducts its foreign policy...

...What made the Congressional abdication even more worrisome was the indication that Congress merely reflected a widespread drift toward authoritarianism—a drift that might have been identified in more candid times as a prelude to fascism...

...covert actions is a record of bloody intrusions into the affairs of sovereign nations: Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, the Congo in 1960, Cuba in 1961, Indonesia in 1965, Vietnam in the 1960s, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua in the 1980s...

...Notifying a handful of Congressional leaders, and swearing them to secrecy, doesn't solve the problem...

...The Democrats bear the responsibility for allowing the hearings to turn into a contra pep rally...

...There've been a lot of allegations thrown around that the contra resupply operation was involved in cocaine trafficking...

...They are, instead, the black glove of U.S...

...agency or official from assisting the con-tras...

...military assistance to the contras, gave a bloodless and legalistic account of the amendment that bears his name, avoiding all moral and political considerations and sticking to the formal question of whether the statute was violated...

...After Arthur Liman, the Democratic Senate investigators' lawyer, grilled General Richard Secord about his profiteering in the Iran-arms deals, the committees were swamped with anti-Semitic mail...

...I didn't want to show Congress a single word about this whole thing," North said...

...And Hamilton was relatively tough on North...

...And there were several of such instances...

...That such conduct could win the plaudits of the American public, however briefly, should disquiet all those who cherish democracy...

...It has allowed its powers to atrophy, and its will has run dry...

...covert action around the globe...

...After the first Boland Amendment was passed—and more than two years before the Iran scandal broke—the press carried reports of Oliver North aiding the contras from his position on the National Security Council staff...

...Other seamy aspects of extreme rightist politics surfaced during the hearings...

...bombing in the Johnson and Nixon Administrations, the Cambodians certainly knew about the bombings, and so did the Vietnamese, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Thais, from whose air bases American B-52s were launched...

...And the committees brooked no mention of potential problems that might flow from a supranational intelligence agency made up of the CIA and Israel's Mossad...

...Another Senate investigator, Joel Lisker, had worked with none other than Oliver North in a March 1985 attempt to shuttle aid to the Nicaraguan contras...

...To make matters worse, the staffs of the committees were hopelessly biased in favor of the contras and covert action, as In These Times has reported...

...Every constitutional duty that it has abandoned, the Executive has usurped...

...All in all, some two-thirds of the members of the investigating committees were on record as supporting the contras...

...North and, to a lesser extent, Poindexter tapped the most reactionary sentiments in the American body politic...

...I haven't seen anything radically wrong with the system, but there was something wrong with the people," said Senator Warren Rudman, Republican of New Hampshire...

...The Democratic leadership allowed North and other witnesses to prattle on with their lurid propaganda about the contras...

...But it wasn't just the efficiency of the runaway NSC staff that people revered...

...If Congress had any gumption and any real commitment to constitutional democracy, it would hold hearings now on repealing the National Security Act...

...None of these countries threatened the United States...

...Virtually every witness, from General Richard Secord and Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North to Secretary of State George Shultz and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, stressed the indispensability of covert action...

...It is equal no longer...

...Absolutely false, Senator...

...They just wanted to join the cabal...

...That Inouye felt compelled to deny being a communist shows how far to the Right the hearings had lurched...

...Not a single Senator or Representative stood up to set the record straight: to demonstrate that the contra leadership is composed largely of members of the late dictator Anastasio Somoza's dreaded National Guard...

...Capitulation on the issue of the contras was perhaps the most disgraceful display the Iran-contra committees put on...

...Now, is there any truth to that...

...The rest eagerly accepted what they wanted to hear...

...Despite their platitudes, the Executive runs the show—either in the form of a President who calls the shots or, as in Ronald Reagan's case, in the form of a free-wheeling gang of meddlers and manipulators who manage to surround a feeble and feckless President...

...The unanimous endorsement of covert action points up one of the major failings of the hearings...

...A list of U.S...

...Only the American public was deliberately kept in the dark about its Government's nefarious acts...

...But no one on the committees dared even to question whether operations grounded in deceit are so antidemocratic at their core that they should be outlawed...