So Dems, in the midst of the Plame Leak/WMD Lies Scandal, can ask Roberts searching questions about the Bush I pardons of Weinberger and the whole gang, all guilty of lying to Congress and far worse crimes of running an illegal secret government.In fact, Weinberger and Shultz had argued strongly that the sales not be made--and then got blamed for them (sound familiar George Tenet?). In '92 Weinberger started proclaiming to the press that he was not about to go to jail--a message to Bush I to be ready to be impeached.

The only trouble with pardoning the Iran Contra Gang was that the Constitution says the Presidential Pardon is absolute EXCEPT FOR IMPEACHMENT. This meant it would be better for Bush to LOSE the '92 election and then pardon everyone. Then there is no impeachment process and the pardons hold--as long as Clinton doesn't prosecute Bush himself on the actual pardon as a quid pro quo to prevent impeachment!

So there were theoretically quite a number of conversations or memos about this unprecedented and corrupt use of the pardon to let Weinberger off the hook and keep those smoking gun notes out of the courtroom.

Roberts will plead coinfidentiality and the WH will NEVER release those docs--and they already making noise about how they will not release them.

You know what that likely means--or they would just turn them over, or at least let Senators look at them somewhere in confidence. Roberts must have advised Starr and Bush I on the Iran Contra Pardons and perhaps even the reprehensible Bush pardon of a 55-year term for a Pakistani heroin smuggler, far worse than Clinton's Rich pardon.

We don't know and likely will never know for sure, but it's more probable than not, given the immediate and stiff resistance from the WH.

A quick recap of the Iran-Contra Pardons follows:

From Lawrence Walsh, the Special Prosecutor of Iran Contra:

George Bush served as vice president through the Reagan presidency from 1981 to 1989. In January 1989, he succeeded Reagan as President. It was in his capacity as President that Bush committed what will likely become his most memorable act in connection with Iran/contra. On December 24, 1992, twelve days before former Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger was to go to trial, Bush pardoned him.1 In issuing pardons to Weinberger and five other Iran/contra defendants, President Bush charged that Independent Counsel's prosecutions represented the ``criminalization of policy differences.''

1 President Bush also pardoned former National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane, former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, former CIA Central American Task Force Chief Alan D. Fiers, Jr., former CIA Deputy Director for Operations Clair E. George, and former CIA Counter-Terrorism Chief Duane R. Clarridge. The Weinberger pardon marked the first time a President ever pardoned someone in whose trial he might have been called as a witness, because the President was knowledgeable of factual events underlying the case.

The criminal investigation of Bush was regrettably incomplete. Before Bush's election as President, the investigation was primarily concerned with the operational conspiracy and the careful evaluation of the cases against former National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter and Lt. Col. Oliver L. North of the National Security Council staff, prior to their indictment in March 1988. This included a review of any exculpatory material that might have shown authorization for their conduct. In the course of this investigation, Vice President Bush was deposed on January 11, 1988.

A year later Bush was President-elect, and OIC was engaged in the intensive preparation for the trial of North, which began on January 31, 1989. After the completion of the trials of North and Poindexter and the pleas of guilty of retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord and Albert Hakim, OIC broadened its investigation to those supporting and supervising Poindexter and North. This investigation developed a large amount of new material with which it intended to question President Bush. His interrogation was left to the end because, as President, he obviously could not be questioned repeatedly. It was Independent Counsel's expectation that he would be available after the completion of the 1992 Presidential election campaign.

In light of his access to information, Bush would have been an important witness. In an early interview with the FBI in December 1986 and in the OIC deposition in January 1988, Bush acknowledged that he was regularly informed of events connected with the Iran arms sales, including the 1985 Israeli missile shipments.2 These statements conflicted with his more extreme public assertions that he was ``out of the loop'' regarding the operational details of the Iran initiative and was generally unaware of the strong opposition to the arms sales by Secretary of Defense Weinberger and Secretary of State George P. Shultz. He denied knowledge of the diversion of proceeds from the arms sales to assist the contras.3 He also denied knowledge of the secret contra-resupply operation supervised by North.4

2 Bush, FBI 302, 12/12/86; Bush, OIC Deposition, 1/11/88. But Bush's recollection was very general and he did not recall specific details of meetings in which the Iran arms sales were discussed.

3 Bush, FBI 302, 12/12/86, p. 3; Bush, OIC Deposition, 1/11/88, p. 17. During his interview with the FBI, Bush said he would be willing to take a polygraph examination concerning his lack of prior knowledge of the diversion.

4 Bush, OIC Deposition, 1/11/88, p. 154.

In 1991 and 1992, Independent Counsel uncovered important evidence in the form of withheld documents and contemporaneous notes that raised significant questions about the earlier accounts provided by high Administration officials. The personal diary of Vice President Bush was disclosed to Independent Counsel only in December 1992, despite early and repeated requests for such documents. This late disclosure prompted a special investigation into why the diary had not been produced previously, and the substance of the diary.

Following the pardons, Bush refused to be interviewed unless the interview was limited to his non-production of his diary and personal notes. Because such a limited deposition would not serve a basic investigative purpose and because its occurrence would give the misleading impression of cooperation where there was none, Independent Counsel declined to accept these conditions. A Grand Jury subpoena was not issued because OIC did not believe there was an appropriate likelihood of a criminal prosecution. Bush's notes themselves proved not as significant as those of Weinberger and Shultz aides Charles Hill and Nicholas Platt, and the statute of limitations had passed on most of the relevant acts and statements of Bush.

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/chap_28.htm

From Slate:

Walsh's final report concluded that Reagan "knowingly participated or at least acquiesced in" the Iran-Contra cover-up, which involved, among other things, Oliver North shredding thousands of documents that may well have implicated Reagan more deeply. Any Flytrap cover-up pales in comparison. (The nearest equivalent involves the mysterious appearance--not disappearance--of documents, none of which has turned out to be vital, in a White House closet.) Yet Walsh didn't bring charges against Reagan, or even depose him to squeeze out information or set him up for a perjury rap.

The case against George Bush--by the standards being applied to Bill Clinton--is even stronger. Bush claimed in the 1992 campaign that he'd given sworn testimony hundreds of times conceding that he knew all about the arms-for-hostages deal. In fact, when the story broke in 1986, Bush repeatedly claimed to have been "out of the loop." He knew we were selling arms to Iran--itself flatly illegal and spectacularly in conflict with the administration's public pronouncements--but, he claimed, he had no idea the deal involved paying ransom for hostages.

Specifically, Bush claimed not to have attended a January 1986 meeting at which Secretary of State George Schultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger vehemently opposed trading for hostages. When White House logs indicated that Bush was at the meeting, he emended his story to say he hadn't caught the drift of Schultz's and Weinberger's objections. If only he'd known George and Cap were as bothered as he was, Bush said, he would have tried to stop the policy. This was his story until 1992, when Walsh released notes taken by Weinberger at the meeting, recording that "VP approves" of the policy Bush claimed to be both ignorant of and disturbed by.

As president in 1989-93, Bush did his best to thwart Walsh's investigation. He tightened up on the release of classified information. A diary he started keeping in 1986 somehow never materialized until after the 1992 election. And his last-minute pardon of Weinberger, Poindexter, and others, after he'd lost re-election, effectively thwarted Walsh's pursuit of Bush himself, among others. No "obstruction of justice" or "abuse of presidential power" in Flytrap comes close.

http://slate.msn.com/id/12441/

From Online Journal:

George H. W. Bush's many lies - Part One

By Carla Binion

January 14, 2000 | George W. Bush is the Republican party's confident front-runner and a "pet" of certain mainstream TV journalists. Chris Matthews of CNBC's "Hardball" said recently that Bush's father had a clean presidency, and commentator Cokie Roberts said on ABC's "Sunday Morning" that Bush comes from a nice family.

Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and other members of the Reagan Administration participated in a cover-up of Iran-Contra during the 1980s, and the cover-up continues to this day. In their glowing praise of the Bush family, Matthews and Roberts did not mention George Herbert Walker Bush's many lies to the American people regarding Iran-Contra.

During Iran-contra, Republicans undermined the Constitution in ways Democrats have never done. Many people say Democrats and Republicans are both owned by large corporations. They say there is little difference between the parties, and that neither represents the people. That is true to an extent, but, on the whole, it is only Republicans who have aggressively threatened the Constitution.

Americans often either wince or yawn at the mention of Iran-Contra, a scandal lost to memory for most of us. However, the story is important now because the son of one of the Iran-Contra participants is running for president. The elder Bush lied to the public when he claimed he was "out of the loop" on Iran-Contra.

People might find Iran-Contra interesting if it were more accurately named. An apt name for Iran-Contra would be the "Republicans-Undermine-the-Constitution" scandal. If the public fully understood that George W. Bush's father participated in a forceful assault on the Constitution, George-the-Younger would not likely be the GOP front-runner today.

One reason Iran-Contra is lost to the American memory is that television news commentators did not do a good job explaining it to the public. The problem is not that mainstream media censored the story. They did not. Print journalists ran detailed accounts, and the Iran-Contra hearings were televised. The problem is, many Americans get all their news from television. Many people believe a news story is important only if TV journalists discuss it on news talk shows day after day.

Television journalists did not repeatedly dissect Reagan's and Bush's behavior and explain the constitutional implications of Iran-Contra. Journalists did manage to set aside enough air time to saturate the public with detailed explanations of the Clinton scandal. If TV commentators had spent an equal amount of time sifting through and explaining Iran-Contra, most Americans would now fully understand why the scandal mattered and how it threatened our constitutional system. If journalists understood Iran-Contra, they would not say George W. Bush's father had a "clean presidency."

This week I replayed 1987 and 1990 broadcasts of "PBS Frontline" with Bill Moyers on the subject of Iran-Contra. I also re-read substantial portions of the "Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair" published by the New York Times (Times Books, 1988.) The Moyers broadcast and the Congressional Report are the sources for all the information which follows, except where I specify other sources.

Moyers says that Congress's report on the Iran-Contra affair shows "the common ingredients of the White House policies were secrecy, deception, and disdain for the law." Moyers is right. The Congressional Report does show the Reagan White House deceived the American people and expressed contempt for the Constitution and the law.

The Congressional Report says: "The President did know of the Iran arms sales, and he made a deliberate decision not to notify Congress. ... As a consequence of the President's decision not to notify Congress, the operation continued for over a year through failure after failure, and when Congress finally did learn, it was not through notification by the Administration, but from a story published in a Beirut weekly."

President Ronald Reagan repeatedly told the American people he would not negotiate with terrorists. That was a lie. A November 3, 1986 report in a Lebanese magazine broke the story that Reagan was bargaining with the Ayatollah Khomeni for release of American hostages. Moyers shows footage of Reagan looking straight into TV cameras denying it. Reagan lied to the public again during a news conference the following week, claiming there were no U. S. sales of arms to Iran.

Reagan also lied to the American people about the nature of the Contras and the purpose of their operations. Reagan and CIA director William Casey created the Contras. Reagan portrayed them as democratic "freedom fighters," but the Contras' ultimate goal was the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government, a government legally recognized by the United States.

The Contras were not interested in promoting democracy, as Reagan claimed. A March 1986 report by the human rights monitoring group America's Watch said: "The testimony we obtained frequently showed gratuitous brutality: the Contras not only murdered their victims; they also tortured and mutilated them. In some cases they also killed members of the families of their targets." (William D. Hartung, AND WEAPONS FOR ALL.)

Around 70 percent of the American people disapproved of Reagan's Central American policy, but he zealously (and secretly) pursued it anyway. When CIA agents under Reagan's CIA director Casey mined Nicaraguan harbors and blew up fuel tanks, Congress cut off Contra funds. Reagan then secretly and illegally turned to foreign governments for money to keep the Contras going. He lied about that to the American people, too.

The Reagan White House enlisted a group called the "Enterprise" to help get around the law. General Richard Secord defined the Enterprise during the Iran-Contra hearings. He said, "The Enterprise is the group of companies that Mr. Hakim formed to manage the Contra and the Iranian project. ... I exercise overall control." Secord admitted to the Congressional Committee that he sold arms to the Contras for a profit.

The Enterprise included, in Moyer's words, "a shadowy network of arms dealers, fraudulent companies, and secret bank accounts." Senator Daniel K. Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee, described the Enterprise as a "shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fund-raising mechanism and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself."

Enterprise leader Richard Secord purchased 1,000 missiles from the CIA for $3.7 million. He sold them to an Iranian middle man for $10 million. The Enterprise made millions of dollars of profits from sales to Iran, and most of the money did not reach the Contras. Around $8 million remained in a private Swiss bank account at the time of the Moyers broadcasts.

During the Iran-Contra hearings, Senator Paul Sarbanes asked Secord, "If the purpose of the Enterprise was to help the Contras, why did you charge [Contra leader] Calero a mark-up that included a profit?" Secord answered, "We were in business to make a living, Senator. We had to make a living. I didn't see anything wrong with it at the time."

Bill Moyers says, "While profits were being made, lives were being lost. ... In Nicaragua the Contras use weapons from the Enterprise against civilians. It is a terrorist war they are fighting. Old men, women, children are caught in the middle." Lt. Col. Oliver North learned the Contra leaders were not noble "freedom fighters." North's liaison with the Contras, Robert Owen, told North in a memo that the people surrounding Contra leader Adolfo Calero "are not first-rate people. They are liars, greed and power motivated. This war has become a business to many of them."

Moyers interviewed a disillusioned former Contra officer. The officer said of Contra leaders, "They bought shoddy goods and sold them at hiked up prices. They bought low-grade grains...and put them up for sale or billed them to themselves at the highest prices. They did the same with ammunitions. They did the same with rifles."

"All this," says Moyers, "the contempt for Congress, the defiance of law, the huge mark-ups and profits, the secret bank accounts, the shady characters, the shakedown of foreign governments, the complicity in death and destruction -- they did all this in the dark, because it would never stand the light of day. Secrecy is the freedom zealots dream of. No watchman to check the door. No accountant to check the books. No judge to check the law. The secret government has no Constitution. The rules it follows are the rules it makes up."

The Reagan Administration repeatedly lied to the American people throughout the Iran-Contra scandal. In fact, Reagan, Bush, and the other Iran-Contra participants managed to get away with their wrongdoing precisely because they lied, stalled, stonewalled, and participated in a cover-up -- not because they were innocent, as many of their supporters still believe.

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