Comment
COMMENT The Guilty Parties 'The President, clearly hoping to put the Iran-contra issue to rest, derided what he termed "needless, mindless, needless speculation about my word of honor." 9 —The New...
...So Who's Perfect...
...The Soviet Union has about 11,000...
...Ginsburg wrote an eighteen-page dissent...
...He telephoned the Honduran president and convinced him to go along...
...But our system of law does depend on court decisions open to public scrutiny...
...Such equanimity grossly underestimates the organizing power of the Exxon spill...
...and thus the bulk of this opinion will be available only to a limited readership/ —Federal Appeals Court Judge Douglas H. Glnsburg Today, the United States has about 13,000 nuclear warheads deployed on long-range missiles and bombers...
...But this was too much to ask of a complacent Congress, which has settled comfortably into its role as junior partner to the Presidency...
...Early on in the scandal, when Reagan and his closest advisers—including the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Adviser, the Director of Central Intelligence, and the Attorney General—cooked up the scheme to get third-country financing for the contras, only James Baker (then White House chief of staff) demurred...
...Government itself, puts Bush smack in the middle of the loop...
...They lacked the will and the courage and the commitment to democracy to tackle a popular President...
...If "The Fernald nuclear weapons plant in Ohio released up to six times as much radioactive uranium dust into the atmosphere as the Government has disclosed, according to a private study...
...Don't blame Exxon, they seemed to say...
...If such a story gets out," Reagan said, according to notes released at North's trial, "we'll all be hanging by our thumbs in front of the White House until we find out who did it...
...This opinion is a dissent, so no real harm has been done—yet...
...And it lets Exxon off way too easily...
...arsenal has raised doubts about the reliability of thousands of missile warheads...
...Grass-roots boycotts have sprung up, and 10,000 credit cards have already been returned to Exxon headquarters...
...Breaking and entering at the headquarters of the opposing party is vastly different— in kind and in magnitude—from violating legislative restrictions on foreign policy...
...The Department of Energy, in contrast, estimated in its most recent report in March that 394,000 to 552,000 pounds of uranium were released...
...Bush was also at various White House meetings where illegal aid to the contras was discussed...
...These were, indeed, impeachable offenses...
...An impeachment trial might have exposed the threat covert action poses to our constitutional system...
...he was just a bad apple...
...he directed it: H At a June 25, 1984, meeting of the National Security Planning Group about third-country financing, Reagan ordered his deputies to keep the solicitations secret from Congress and the public...
...The Exxon oil spill, more than any other single incident, has galvanized wide sectors of the American public into taking action...
...The three houses are empty, and the neighbors left on the street want to know why...
...Congress was simply unprepared and unwilling to take on the national-security state that has grown, with Congressional approval, into a behemoth beyond democratic control...
...Reagan himself was cognizant (not sleeping, or chopping wood, or watching reruns of The Sound of Music) during the planning and cover-up of the scandal...
...I've Got a Secret Ignorance of the law, according to the lawyer's cliche, is no excuse, but it is fast becoming a legal necessity...
...It is the largest oil company in the country...
...last year, it made a profit of $5.3 billion...
...What's more, Exxon is hardly a small, victimized wildcatter...
...The Honduran president, Roberto Suazo, "believes we must continue to oppose communism," Reagan's own notes read...
...Oddly, the American people were ahead of the official environmental organizations on this one...
...Since 1945, the United States has conducted 932 nuclear test explosions and the Soviet Union has conducted 638/ —Center for Defense Information lion...
...Two families who lived across the road were plagued with long-term health threats, however: seven cases of serious neurological problems and one rare form of cancer...
...What became all the more clear during the trial was the extent of Reagan's and Bush's involvement in Iran-contra...
...The Government had secret evidence and asked a Federal appeals court to dismiss the case without hearing it...
...It seems he was expelled from the party in 1964 after COINTELPRO agents planted a fictitious report that led his comrades to think he was an informant...
...But that lets the committees off too easily...
...In 1979, the message hit home...
...it's the policy that's wrong...
...During the Reagan Administration, Ralph Nader seemed to be the only person left in America who realized that "the private sector" (as it is benignly called) was trampling workers' rights, corrupting our politics, and befouling our environment...
...Or any of the following items that may have escaped your notice as you wallowed in the day's good news: H "Faulty manufacture by a Baldwin Park company of a small electronic switch used in most of the air-launched tactical missiles in the U.S...
...The Government's own evidence at the trial described Shultz as the originator of a 1984 plan to get Congress to "wink at lethal support for the resistance" by providing extra aid to El Salvador...
...The Alar apple scare, the Eastern airlines strike, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill have restored giant corporations to their rightful place of distrust and dishonor...
...Xerox runs a manufacturing plant in Webster and discovered several years ago that a hazardous chemical had leaked into the ground water...
...Supreme Court—did...
...Xerox admits no liability or fault...
...But it also bought up several other properties lying within the contaminated area, including the home of one more family it agreed to relocate...
...Shultz also approved a meeting between North and Manuel Noriega of Panama in which Noriega was urged to carry out sabotage inside Nicaragua in exchange for "a promise from the U.S...
...And they all were in on one of the most blatantly illegal enterprises ever carried out by the U.S...
...Suddenly, he is alone no longer...
...And he acted personally to see that the deal was accomplished...
...He was Reagan's secret emissary to Roberto Suazo in March 1985...
...The New York Times, May 4. H "Military leaders had warned that the aging and inadequate computer systems inside the nerve center for the nation's nuclear attack warning network needed to be replaced...
...They point out, accurately enough, that the Reagan Administration just happened to neglect to turn over several of the most damaging documents, including those that implicated Bush in the Honduras deal...
...The jury had plenty of evidence on this score, for North was no renegade...
...Bush now lamely denies that he consummated a "quid pro quo," but he does not deny that a meeting took place...
...The other case involves an almost unheard-of form of secrecy...
...An appellate panel didn't buy this nonsense, but Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg—who, but for a youthful puff of marijuana smoke, would now be sitting on the U.S...
...They're worried, but no one will tell them anything...
...The invisible hand is oily and visible...
...This verdict, they intoned, proves that no one is above the law...
...Robert McFarlane, former National Security Adviser, testifed that Bush was present when he reported that North was "providing occasional advice and occasional assistance" to the contras...
...That's why it is sheer lunacy to seek "national security" in materials and weapons systems that can, at any moment and under random circumstances, plunge the world into a catastrophe of incalculable dimensions...
...Two recent cases come to mind...
...An oil spill off Alaska, for example...
...The national groups, largely centered in Washington, took a dispassionate (even Dukakis-esque) approach to the oil spill...
...And then he classified twelve pages of his opinion and refused to let anyone but Government lawyers see it...
...Suazo "will call his military commander to tell him to deliver the ammunition...
...An impeachment trial might have restored a measure of such control...
...The bad barrel still stands...
...Why, then, was there no move toward impeachment during the Iran-contra hearings...
...he was simply, if energetically, carrying out the policy directives and wishes of the President and Vice President...
...It did not want to disturb the balance any further...
...The plaintiffs lawyers weren't allowed to see the evidence—or even the affidavit filed by the FBI asking for secrecy...
...This undisputed court testimony makes a liar and a crook out of Ronald Reagan...
...The company, they said, is a "polluter without equal...
...Even in this age of ultrasophisticated high technology, something occasionally goes wrong...
...He had discussed this with the President of the United States, and it was agreed with the President that this was how it should be handled...
...U A witness testified at the trial that William Casey, Director of Central Intelligence, had met with Reagan about having North circumvent Congressional restrictions on aid to the contras...
...Exxon is the industry leader, and it exercises enormous control over the U.S...
...Fortunately, some environmental groups now see the light...
...The Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph, April 2. So who's perfect...
...One occurred in Webster, New York, a small community near Rochester, where the Xerox Corporation settled a lawsuit under terms that permanently seal all the records and prohibit everyone involved from ever discussing the case...
...Once was enough with Nixon...
...It was Exxon's fault, after all...
...Government...
...you could imagine a future case when the Government cites the opinion but the opponent doesn't know what's in it...
...There is another, larger contrast with Watergate that explains (but does not exonerate) the Congressional failure...
...Does Judge Ginsburg secretly yearn for a Star Chamber in which to hold court...
...The Los Angeles Times, March 18...
...Bombers were on the runway and civilian airspace throughout the country was being cleared for the military before commanders at the North American Aerospace Defense Command's Cheyenne Mountain Complex realized their computers were erroneously showing a Soviet attack...
...Exxon was just unfortunate...
...In early May, under Nader's leadership, six of them joined together to call for a national boycott of Exxon...
...The Senators and Representatives lacked much more than a few documents...
...As a conservative legal scholar told The Washington Post in this case, "If you have secret law that's known only to the judge or the Government...
...Baker warned that such an end-run around the Boland Amendment would constitute "an impeachable offense...
...They sued Xerox, which eventually relocated them and paid them $4.75 mil'Unfortunately, I am unable to fully explain my disagreement with the court •. . without discussing in some detail the contents of the classified affidavit...
...The slimy ooze on the coast of Alaska has indelibly altered American consciousness...
...One obvious lie was Reagan's statement to the Tower Commission in January 1987 that he "did not know that the NSC staff was engaged in helping the contras...
...economy...
...The company disclosed the leak but told the community not to worry—there was no long-term health threat...
...Some embarrassed Senators and Representatives now claim they didn't have all the facts...
...There was no Sam Ervin to defend the Constitution, just as there was no John Dean to come clean from a dirty Administration...
...As one of the lawyers put it, "I can't say anything about this case because there is a covenant of silence...
...George Bush also has some accounting to do...
...Reagan, Bush, Casey, Shultz, McFarlane, Admiral John Poindexter, Attorney General Edwin Meese—they all lied...
...Baker was right, but no impeachment followed...
...Ronald Reagan and George Bush are above the law...
...The jury (which obliged CBS by deliberating until the network's Guts and Glory abomination had aired) seemed to buy North's excuse that he was only following orders when he lied to Congress about the Iran-contra affair...
...And it could have happened to any of the oil companies...
...He not only knew what was going on, according to testimony at the trial...
...11 In early 1985, Reagan authorized a secret plan to increase aid to Honduras in exchange for Honduran military aid to the contras...
...Secrecy of this sort is certainly not unheard-of in out-of-court settlements, which this was, but this was no ordinary piece of private litigation...
...An impeachment trial might even have grappled with the false god of anticommunism...
...George Shultz, the lionized former Secretary of State, is not blameless in the Iran-contra affair, either...
...Visible Hand For the first time in a decade, a new anti-corporate politics is sweeping the land...
...Nobody...
...9 —The New York Times, May 5 The verdict on Oliver North had hardly been read when the platitudes began to issue forth: Ours is a system of laws, not men, we were told by the prosecutor, Senators, Representatives, and The New York Times...
...They wonder what kind of evidence those families produced that led Xerox to hush them up with $4.75 million, and they wonder whether they will be next to need medical treatment—and then lawyers...
...If In October 1985, Reagan approved of a plan to airdrop rifles and intelligence data to contra forces in Nicaragua...
...A more perfect target could not have been found...
...no amount of air-spraying can erase the corporate blunder...
...Wrong...
...There is ample evidence that they committed "high crimes and misdemeanors...
...Government to help clean up Noriega's image...
...Evidence at the trial, filed by the U.S...
...Throughout the unfolding of the Iran-contra affair, Reagan pretended to be a happy idiot, blissfully ignorant of the evil doings of his staff...
...It stems from a claim by the widow of a man, once a member of the Communist Party, who was defamed by the FBI...
...Covering up to protect merely personal power is vastly different from covering up to protect "national security" and to fight communism...
...600,000 to 3.1 million pounds of uranium dust have been released since the plant opened in 1951, to process uranium for nuclear weapons...
...The committees also received incomplete documents, some of which magically omitted Ronald Reagan's initials...
...Bush's aides, especially Donald Gregg, whom Bush has nominated to be ambassador to South Korea, also were heavily involved in the illegal contra resupply effort...
...The entire conduct of the hearings, from beginning to end, was designed to minimize the scandal, to isolate North and Poindexter as the culprits, to insulate Reagan and Bush, and to stop short of anything that approached the impeachment question...
Vol. 53 • June 1989 • No. 6
