The Ides of Texas are Upon You

Holy crap, Batman! I’ve been harping on these things for several years now, ofttimes with yawns or whispers that I was being paranoid or engaging in “conspiracy theories.”*

But, no  con to it, these are definitely piracy theories:

Shocking New Evidence Reveals Depths of ‘Treason’ and ‘Treachery’ of Watergate and Iran-Contra
New evidence continues to accumulate showing how Official Washington got key elements of two major presidential scandals of the Nixon and Reagan administrations wrong.
Consortium News / By Robert Parry
Alternet  March 10, 2013

A favorite saying of Official Washington is that “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” But that presupposes you accurately understand what the crime was. And, in the case of the two major U.S. government scandals of the last third of the Twentieth Century – Watergate and Iran-Contra – that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Indeed, newly disclosed documents have put old evidence into a sharply different light and suggest that history has substantially miswritten the two scandals by failing to understand that they actually were sequels to earlier scandals that were far worse. Watergate and Iran-Contra were, in part at least, extensions of the original crimes, which involved dirty dealings to secure the immense power of the presidency.

How deep was the perfidy? Let me count the ways:

Tricky Dick sets John McCain
 on his road to crankdom

There was (and this surprised me, and surprised me THAT it surprised me) Nixon’s secret deal with the North Vietnamese…

… the evidence is now clear that Nixon created the Watergate burglars out of his panic that the Democrats might possess a file on his sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968….

Nixon was searching high and low for the file that was kept on the deal, not knowing that wily Texan Lyndon Johnson had taken it with him when leaving the White House.  Johnson never did anything with the file, but Nixon did himself in looking for it.

Ah. And then there was Ronnie Ray-Gun:

Reagan’s campaign undermined President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 American hostages in Iran and then paid off the Iranians by allowing Israel to ship weapons to Iran for the Iran-Iraq War.

… Newly discovered documents at the Reagan presidential library reveal that Reagan’s neocons at the State Department – particularly Robert McFarlane and Paul Wolfowitz – initiated a policy review in 1981 to allow Israel to undertake secret military shipments to Iran. McFarlane and Wolfowitz also maneuvered to put McFarlane in charge of U.S. relations toward Iran and to establish a clandestine U.S. back-channel to the Israeli government outside the knowledge of even senior U.S. government officials….

Witnesses?

As recently as this past week, former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr reiterated his account of Republican overtures to Iran during the 1980 hostage crisis and how that secret initiative prevented release of the hostages.

In a Christian Science Monitor commentary about the movie “Argo,” Bani-Sadr wrote that “Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation … which prevented the attempts by myself and then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 U.S. presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”

And what about that cocaine that led to the crack epidemic?

Reagan adopted the “cowboy” persona  (and Western riding)
during his  first gubernatorial run in California in 1966.
Previously, he had always ridden English style.

When journalist Gary Webb revived the Contra-Cocaine scandal in the mid-to-late 1990s, he faced unrelenting hostility from Establishment reporters at the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. The attacks were so ugly that Webb’s editors at the San Jose Mercury News forced him out, setting in motion his professional destruction.

It didn’t even matter when an internal investigation by the CIA’s inspector general in 1998 confirmed that the Reagan and Bush-41 administrations had tolerated and protected drug trafficking by the Contras. The major newspapers largely ignored the findings and did nothing to help rehabilitate Webb’s career, eventually contributing to his suicide in 2004.

Ah, but …

Not the first poison that Reagan ever sold …

Instead of giving a careful review to the new evidence, the House Task Force ignored, disparaged or buried it. I later unearthed some of the evidence in unpublished Task Force files. However, in the meantime, Official Washington dismissed the “October Surprise” and other Iran-Contra-connected scandals, like Contra drug trafficking, as conspiracy theories. [For the latest information on the October Surprise case, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]

Because, as is usual in the Dead Tree Media:

The major newspapers have been equally unwilling to rethink the origins – and the significance – of the October Surprise/Iran-Contra scandal. It doesn’t matter how much new evidence accumulates. It remains much easier to continue the politically safe deification of “Gipper” Reagan and the fond remembrances of “Poppy” Bush.

Not only would rethinking Iran-Contra and Watergate stir up anger and abuse from Republican operatives and the Right, but the process would reflect badly on many journalists and historians who built careers, in part, by getting these important historical stories wrong.

And so, as in the story of the Ides of March, the Idiots of March have stolen the ideas that make us march, and we are left with only trampled mud.

This it the coin that Marcus Brutus had struck in 
honor of the assassination of Caesar by the Senate
the Phrygian “liberty” cap in the center denotes “freedom”
The assassination of Caesar was the end of that freedom
once and for all, but they didn’t know that …

Let me tell you, it’s getting very very bad out there.

And it’s not getting any better.

h/t Gary G.

Courage.

* Posts that

• I’ve mentioned “Iran Contra” in.
• I’ve talked about Gary Webb in.
• I’ve talked about Tricky Dick in.
• I’ve talked about Watergate in.

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