I wasn't particularly conscious of it at the time, but ever since I was old enough to understand it has been the most mindboggling political scandal I can imagine, with the most mindboggling thing being that the US political establishment doesn't seem to agree. I can just about understand the desire to protect St. Ronnie, even if it's absurd, but the way that the other conspirators have been rehabilitated from the most brazenly illegal and immoral foreign policy adventure since we were given the term "banana republic" never ceases to enrage me.
It was sort of enraging, but also sort of felt like NBD. Or, only a big deal to people who cared about stuff like the rule of law and dead nuns in Nicaragua, both of which were dirty-hippie obsessions.
The thing was that the only seriously scary foreign policy stuff was Soviet-related, and Iran-Contra wasn't really; it was doing shitty stuff in other countries, which was regrettable and horrible but not anything that was going to affect an American's life.
The other thing was that the argument underlying the defense was incredibly fucked up, but also incredibly effective. They got away with it because it wasn't about personal corruption, it was about breaking the law to subvert Congress's authority over foreign policy for ideological reasons that got sold as patriotism. And you can't get mad at someone as mournfully noble looking as Ollie North just for being a patriot, can you?
(I was a teenager, so I may be failing to remember some personal corruption. but that wasn't the big story.)
Iran was still a really big boogie man, though, right? And among the many bad things in Iran-Contra was selling arms to Iran.
Sort-of on topic, the movie of Kill the Messenger is good. And notable, in that the journalist worked for a smallish city newspaper, which was still paying for serious investigative journalism in 1996.
which was regrettable and horrible but not anything that was going to affect an American's life.
Other than all the cocaine used to make crack dumped on American cities.
It was complex and had a lot of moving parts. I was fucking outraged. Arms for hostages. Arming terrorists in Central America.
Waiting for Stormcrow and CC to show up.
Ollie fucking North Robert fucking McFarlane and the fucking cake.
I was in high school at the time. I definitely recall that Oliver North was the big celebrity of the whole thing. I remember once seeing a poster that looked like the movie poster for Rambo, except instead of Sylvester Stallone with a big machine gun, it had Oliver North holding a gun-like paper shredder with shredded documents spraying out of it.
And North ended up with his own cable TV show.
Still fucking outraged.
It's part of the bad timeline of Republicans undermining our democracy and getting away with it. Beginning with Watergate and Ford's pardoning of Nixon, Iran-Contra, Iraq War. Torture. Everything since this election. Flaunting their impunity because they know they'll always get away with it.
9: IIRC a bunch of CIA people who were forced out formed some of the earlier private intelligence contractors.
Also, I think Iran-Contra was the general public's introduction to Adnan Khashoggi.
Which reminds me that Slate's "6 degrees of Adnan Khashoggi" columns from years ago were fun.
I recall Iran-Contra almost entirely through Doonesbury strips.
Did Bloom County do Ollie North as a puppydog?
Our paper wouldn't carry Bloom County. I think they would drop Doonesbury on weeks when he attacked Reagan too much.
Ollie North was found guilty of accepting a gift of a $13,800 home security system. Also destroying documents and abetting the obstruction of Congress.
The convictions were ultimately reversed because the trial court was found to have been influenced by North's immunized testimony. Or, to put it in wingnutese: He got acquitted on a technicality.
They were really mad when he did GHWB as an invisible voice.
Khashoggi donated a bunch of money to my undergrad institution, which named their gym after him. I believe it was renamed very quickly.
16: I thought HW was portrayed as a point of light.
And here is the poster I was remembering.
I wasn't paying attention in real time but during the Clinton impeachment hearings I got interested in the other recent presidential scandals and really dug into Watergate and Iran-Contra. The thing that struck me more than anything about the latter was the contrast between the overwhelming evidence of guilt and how little any of the major actors suffered for it. I mean, they well and truly got themselves caught red-handed and hardly anybody even suffered reputational damage not to mention jail. The culture of unaccountability that has kept Rumsfeld and Cheney out of the Hague was already in place back then.
It was a huge deal at the time, but the coverage was just as bad if not worse than today in terms of wide-eyed deference to the Republican position, irrespective of the facts and any common-sense reading of the statutes involved and the motives of the players. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the GOP came out of it with their reputation for Serious Foreign Policy actually burnished across the populace.
Right. It was all noble and patriotic, because it was about doing what it took to serve the administration's desired foreign policy. The fact that they were subverting the Constitutional designation of Congress as the branch with authority and breaking the law was handwaved away.
Our paper wouldn't carry Bloom County.
Out of bitterness towards Iowa?
I don't directly recall the tenor of the news coverage, even though we were a news-junkie household, but 2/3 sounds right.
Also, my father decided to videotape all of the broadcasts of the testimony that he could, which I recall interfering with my use of the VCR at the time.
I did get to vote against Oliver North when he ran for Senate from VA, so that was good.
21,22: Right. The idea that liberals/Democrats were pot smoking hippies and conservatives/Republicans were serious minded grown ups was very much dominant in popular and political culture in the 80s. The various players in Iran-Contra got credit for being hard eyed realists were weren't afraid to Do What Had To Be Done(Tm).
I suspect the decade's Vietnam obsession played into it as well, somehow.
Because the CIA running drugs and guns in SE Asia totally won that war.
I was in college then, I intermittently read US newspapers and weeklies, not much TV. Oliver North's personality and the shenanigans to get stuff in and out of his office and bank accounts were prominent in the news I remember. I remember a few descriptions of Ortega's perfidy. In Chicago, I'd read the somewhat anti-establishment Sun-Times and of course the then excellent Chicago Reader rather than the running dog of imperialism that was the Tribune. In St Louis, the local paper was pretty good then.
I don't have any memory of coverage of the war between Iran and Iraq, and actually I still do not know whether the missiles the US sold to Iran had much of an effect on that insanely murderous war. Basically Iran had the Shah's US-made weapons, though defections and crazy purges left them with few skilled people, and Iraq had a mix of Soviet and US weapons. No public discussion on the wisdom or concrete effects of pumping so many weapons into the world that I can remember.
"The gun is good, the penis is bad" counts as discussion.
Because the CIA running drugs and guns in SE Asia totally won that war.
Because the damn hippie liberals were holding them back. If the CIA had been allowed to really take off the gloves with the guns and drug running, they totally would have won the war.
I don't have any memory of coverage of the war between Iran and Iraq
Neither do I. It was curiously absent from the news, considering how many people were getting killed.
Iran-Contra might have extended back to the 1980 election: https://www.amazon.com/October-Surprise-Gary-Sick/dp/0812920872
Yeah, I remember being sort of shocked sometime long after the fact to realize how bloody the Iran-Iraq war had been. I'd had a vague, incorrect impression of it as a sort of state-of-war-but-not-much-actual-gunfire precisely because there wasn't much news coverage.
I found it shocking to meet Iranian students at University around 1989-1990 who were veterans. These were 18 year old kids. They must have been 12-16 when they fought during the war.
The claims cited in 30 depend pretty much exclusively on memory of a small number of Iranians who left power pretty early for exile, right? Is there evidence (flight logs of relevant Americans, say) to support any senior meeting then?
33: I'm useless, because I don't remember any of the details. But twenty years ago when I paid attention, where I came down was "Not quite unambiguously proven, but I'm convinced."
But I'd have to get completely back up to speed to back that up.
32: They called the enlistment forms passports to paradise. Horrible shitty war.
Which was probably using "paradise" in a different sense, but was on the radio during that same time.
This might belong in the other thread, but I should read something about Iran to get some handle on what's going on in the region. Like, I read stuff like this and I've no idea how much of it is disinformation from Saudi or whoever.
We had an Imam do the high school morning assembly* in about 1985-6 or so who praised the heroism of Iranian boys who volunteered to clear minefields by running over them. That and occasional listens to the BBC were about as much as I learned about the war until it was well over.
*we had a rotating set of religious leaders who would give a morning sermon and prayer once a week. The nutty Imam only appeared once - most of the time we got a more measured guy who talked about the obligation to give alms and shit like that.
34 is about where I stand on the October Surprise. Means, motive, and opportunity are all there, it's just a matter of did they actually pull the trigger or not.
The nutty Imam only appeared once
Can't imagine why.
Although I think that 11 is still correct as far as the general public is concerned, Khashoggi was already famous enough by 1983 that a character in the rather bad comedy about wacky arms dealers, , was based directly on him.
Not sure what happened in 42. The wacky arms dealers comedy in question is Deal of the Century, which predated Iran-Contra by 2 years.
We had a rabbi drive all the way out from Omaha to tell us about Judaism. His day was 3.5 hours in the car, have rude 13-year-old Catholics ask absurd questions about the Old Testament*, 3.5 hours in the car.
* Mine was how they found a guy to make gold hemorrhoids.
Mine was how they found a guy to make gold hemorrhoids.
What???????
It's in the Bible somewhere. These guys (Philistines?) stole the Ark and they all got death and hemorrhoids. So, they had to give the Ark back and give up statues of hemorrhoids and stuff.
Death and hemorrhoids? In that order?
On an individual level, I think it was death or hemorrhoids.
1 Samuel 6:17-19. Google is your friend. I'm quoting 12-1 on mistranslation, any takers?
There were golden hemorrhoids in the Temple of Solomon. Due to the story in 46. I remember this well thanks to a book I read a while back highlighting the weirdnesses in the bible. There are a lot. God is constantly comparing himself to crazy things.
stole the Ark and they all got death and hemorrhoids.
I like Spielberg's version better. Fewer hemorrhoids and more exploding heads.
Oliver North, who dominated the production and galvanized the audience to a degree reminiscent of the great screen heroes: Gary Cooper as Sergeant York, Henry Fonda as Tom Joad and King Kong as himself.
49: I see the newer translations say "tumor." I'm assuming the older ones are more correct and "tumor" is an attempt to suck the joy out of life.
Can you imagine if Reagan had been tweeting about Iran-Contra the whole time it was going on? That would have been totally bizarre. Looking back, it was really a much more adult scandal, and one with very meaningful geopolitical impact. I watched a bunch of the hearings, but didn't find them particularly compelling.
My dad bought and read the final report. There was a book or something with the results.
I don't mean that he bought something from the government publications office or anything. There was enough interest that a regular publisher put out a paperback edition that was available in Waldenbooks and such.
The point about Iran-Contra as I remember it was that notwithstanding the impact it had on Iran, Iraq and Nicaragua, the illegal bit was fairly commonplace white collar crime, and ipso facto as boring as hell. At least Watergate had burglars.
Mr Y is correct; having one's own private foreign policy independent of one's home country and its constitutional provisions is perfectly normal and lawful.
Iran-Contra was the flowering of IOKIYAR, no? Ford pardoned Nixon, but that was more roundly criticized and followed by a lot of new ethics legislation. Iran-Contra was where they did proof-of-concept that you could break the law (not yet blatantly, but still fairly obviously) and avoid consequences by keeping the atmosphere partisan and militaristic. And it was followed a few years later by the converse, "it's never OK if you're a Democrat", using investigations to prevent Clinton from acting as president.
Now, I want you to know that I would be more than willing-and if anybody else is watching oversees, and I am sure they are-I will
be glad to meet Abu Nidal on equal terms anywhere in the world. OK? There is an even deal for him.But I am not willing to have my wife and my four children meet Abu Nidal or his organization on his terms.
This is the part I remembered from North's testimony, but I couldn't remember the name of the Scary Terrorist Mastermind du Jour.
https://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/ollie.pdf
Then said they, What shall be the trespass offering which we shall return to him? They answered, Five golden emerods ...
I'm now going to think about this anytime I sing the Twelve Days of Christmas.
Reagan said the contras were the moral equalsupport of our Founding Fathers. I don't recall anyone replying, "So, they're slave owners?"
My phone may be the only thing in the universe stupider than me.
"So, they're genocidal thugs terrorizing people who disagree with them?"
I remember Iran-Contra as being largely business as usual for the late period Cold War. After hearing about bombing Cambodia and similar CIA projects it just didn't seem all that unusual except that it was so public so quickly.
So, a combination of LB's 2.1 mixed with Y's 58. I do remember a lot of coverage of the Iran-Iraq War which was of greater interest because I knew some Iranian (pro-Shah) exiles. It was also said to have been the biggest war in terms of manpower since WW1 (disclaimer: don't know if that was true). There was a lot of "can't they both lose?" rhetoric.
This Bill Moyers documentary is probably the best way to understand how it looked at the time. IIRC, it aired before the scandal had quite run its course.
Subjectively, I may say, it was astonishing.
I was around 20 at the time (forget which summer it was) but I distinctly remember we had the hearings up loud in the room where we were programming away at this startup I worked at, and were amazed to hear discussion of drug-runners allowed to land their planes at air bases, etc, etc, etc. It was very clear that the Rs broke the law and were slowly getting away with it. And when Poppy pardoned himself, we were spitting mad. Of course, we were Dems, so we just didn't matter.
Shoulda added: "pardoned himself". Obv. he didn't *literally* do that. But pardoning every single co-conspirator was the same thing.
What I remember best is Fawn Hall. As I recall, the press kinda overdid the coverage of her.
71: They were desperate for the story to have some sex appeal. Everybody was hoping she and Oliver North were having an affair.
It was a big deal at the time, and I guess I followed it. I also had a 6 month old when the first reveal took place, and other things to focus on. I didn't have a TV then, but spent a lot of time in Helena on a work project in the summer of 1987, and the hotel had cable. It was clearly good that Dems had retaken the Senate, but once you take removal off the table (and the bar is so high as to keep it off the table for nearly anything) there's not much to do about a policy dispute, even when it's illegal.
The popularity of North and Fawn Hall was discouraging.
My subsequent episode with the hostage whose release triggered the crisis has pretty strongly overtaken my memories.
I don't remember that story. Link it, if you've told it here, or retell it?
death and hemorrhoids
After tackling the Napoleonic Wars, Woody Allen decided to address a contemporary conflict.
58: Smuggling heavy weapons is not often considered a white-collar crime.
Is that a claymore you're smuggling?
And you can't get mad at someone as mournfully noble looking as Ollie North just for being a patriot, can you?
All I can remember of the Iran-Contra affair is that some American cousins from Connecticut* came to visit us during the hearings, and my dad asked of Ollie North: "Why the hell is this clown considered a hero?" The answer was along the lines of "because he's a patriot who loves America."
*No, not the classy, WASP-y part of Connecticut, but one of those downmarket, semi-rural areas where the men drive 4 by 4 trucks with gun racks. Said cousins were Reagan Democrats, of course.
United States vs. Winner is also good but mostly makes me sad that impeachment isn't at all likely.
Reality Show Winner vs. Regular Old Reality Winner
Like CC I was dealing with my firstborn during the time (and having moved across country to a new job at a new company) so I was not as tuned in as I should have been. It was clear that the press would generally treat Reagan as their beloved but now confused Grandpa who really could not be held accountable.
I found many of the side characters fascinating such as Richard Secord and Albert Hakim (Stanford Technology Trading Group International, a key part of "The Enterprise"), William Casey* and his untimely brain tumor (and Bob Woodward's likely BS deathbed "scoop"), and slimy liar, Elliott Abrams (who was blackballed from State by Trump because of the only worthy thing Abrams had ever done--writing a campaign piece that trashed Trump. A quote from Abrams in 1989 when he was profiting from timber operations in Central America from contacts he made down there: "I'm making lots of money. It's great."). And last but not least, the Mena Airport.
It certainly was a harbinger.
Pretend I provided links.
I remember the Woodward deathbed scoop. But, I'd forgotten it until now.
Casey, along with George HW Bush, Jesus James Angleton, E. Howard Hunt, and Allen Dulles are the folks from back in the day who I would love to get a brain dump of what they really knew, Back when the Deep State was really deep, man.
(I was reminded recently from some "how the Nixon impeachment thing went down" article of Nixon's "Bay of Pigs thing."
At his meeting with Helms, when Nixon's emissary brought up the Bay of Pigs, according to Haldeman, the CIA chief gripped the arms of his chair, leaned forward and shouted: "The Bay of Pigs has nothing to do with this! I have no concern about the Bay of Pigs." Haldeman said he was "absolutely shocked by Helms's violent reaction" when he delivered Nixon's message. Helms "yelled like a scalded cat," said Nixon aide John Ehrlichman when Haldeman mentioned the Watergate trail might lead to "the Bay of Pigs."So maybe Helms, too.)
Bays are nature's perfect body of water.
"Of" is nature's perfect preposition.
I have read too much Ron Rosenvaum for my own good.
Holy crap. 85.2 makes me realize that I don't know anything! It's clear I'm missing some key background and context to the story of how movement conservatives managed to seize control of the levers of power, mobilizing resentment against Big Gov while enriching themselves at the expense of a credulous public.
charley, we need the full cite.
i am disappointed that fawn hall didn't make an appearance until 70+ comments, but then we live in a fallen world. i remember her hair, which was epic. also remember from that time all the refugees from central America and sanctuaries in church basements ... does anyone else remember from the bay area back then the billboards/ads that would be cleverly defaced to deform the intended message? i later was friends/colleagues with some folks involved, i was too young, in many ways it was just a sad time. i never understood the Reagan thing, he never struck me as anything but cynically phony and then pretty soon completely barmy. the wife could wear some clothes, but if anything she was creepier.
I was a teenager at the time and I'd been paying attention for a while. What struck me was the contrast between the Carter administration and the Reagan administration. The press seemed to want to spin everything Carter did in a negative way. They seemed to do the opposite for Reagan. The worshipful way Ollie North was treated seemed disgusting, like they all wanted him to make love to them.
All I remember about Fawn Hall is that she supposedly smuggled documents out in her underwear. Much easier back then because women wore bigger underwear.
93 Fawn Hall truly had epic hair which I well remember. Didn't the NYT ship Hall and North?
She admitted smuggling them out in her clothes but not sure she ever claimed underwear. In fact: 'I was shocked to hear what Sen. Heflin said about me smuggling documents out in my bra,'' she said through a spokesman. ''It is untrue; it is outrageous that he would say that, and it is certainly sexist.''
I recall a friend of mine whose father was a Marine Corps officer telling me how puzzling it was for a North who was merely a Lieutenant Colonel to ever be in the position where he could get involved.
And Operation Just Cause We Can to remove Noriega (who died very recently) was widely viewed as a key part of GHWB's cleanup on aisle 3.
Thing I learned about Fawn Hall just now that I did not before.
1) Her mother was Robert McFarlane's* (Reagan's NSC succeeded by Pondexter--both were convicted but pardoned IIRC)) secretary.
2) She moved to LA and ended up marrying Danny Sugermen (one time Doors' manager and author of No One here Gets Out Alive.
I'm still trying to figure out if Reality Winner released something vital in a deliberate act of civil disobedience or messed up or what.
If the goal was to get it widely reported (without any hedging or 'alleged') that the Russians were hacking the voting machines and not just the Democrats' email, she sure succeeded.
And speaking of arms sales to Middle Eastern countries, turns out the $110B arms deal to Saudi was mostly theater reflecting ongoing wishlists from the Saudis mostly dating back to Obama's term. And it really highlights how misleading articles like this one in the Times were: "$110 Billion Weapons Sale to Saudis Has Jared Kushner's Personal Touch>."
The Times close in access journalism is adding a lot of noise to the system. See also their Bannon, Gorka, no now its Sessions on their way out/in disfavor articles. (Undoubtedly some real insight as well, but who can deconvolve?)
102 Those are interesting facts, thanks. Something to ruminate over as I huddle in the bomb shelter chasing rats for food. I think I might have once heard the Doors one but dismissed it as a hallucinogenic dream.
If you chase the rats too long, they burn off all their fat and even if you get enough calories from the rats, you can still get protein poisoning (aka rabbit starvation).
I think I might have once heard the Doors one but dismissed it as a hallucinogenic dream.
Oh, you mean that band that got all the kudos Love would have got if Arthur Lee had been white?
Val Kilmer, cultural appropriator.
109 Discovered Forever Changes in the mid-90s and it blew me right away. Still one of my all time favorites.
106: The Times is now functioning as sort of a funhouse mirror Soviet media from back in the day. It's not a good source of actual news, but it does provide a lens through which one can try to discern what various factions in power would like you to believe are the news.
And they just added yet another Politico guy in Ken Vogel. Tiger Beat on The Potomac comes to the Big Apple!
Christ. I just had a "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE EMAILS" conversation in real life. Went to have my haircut in the local Italian place; four young men messing around, all barbers. No other customer. The manager asks when the general election is, and I say Thursday. Then he asks who I am voting for, and I say I don't know. The conversation rambles. He doesn't rate Theresa May, gets all his news from Facebook and YouTube, and is a fan of Tommy Robinson, who "tells it straight, and explains what's really happening behind closed doors".
The conversation shifts to Trump. What do I make of him. He's a three-year-old, I say. General agreement. "But at least he knows what the problems are, even if he goes about them the wrong way. We need a tough guy, almost like Putin. Everyone could walk all over Obama."
I express dissent.
"WHy do you think he won the election?" I say because of Russian help and a huge propaganda machine; in any case Hillary won the popular vote. "But she was terrible!" What had she done? "SHe deleted thousands of files".
Democracy, eh. I wish I had said the election was on Friday.
109 Discovered Forever Changes in the mid-90s and it blew me right away. Still one of my all time favorites.
Late 90s for me, but same. Saw him perform it live as well.
Because the world is now trolling us: The man who sold Trump a used boat has died.
I'm also now getting spam for "heat inactivated fetal bovine serum".
116: Also see 11, 17 & 42 above, (Or maybe that was implied?)
Yes. I would have not noticed the name in the headline if it hadn't been mentioned above.
Same weak Noriega kicked it too. 80s redux.
Strong Noriega stomped it
Weak Noriega kicked it
Memento mori
80s redux.
Also, get this: Donald Trump is President.
If Reagan had really been media savvy who would have arranged to have attack ads against disfavored former aides aired during the hearings.
The message of the ad reflects a strategy by Trump and his advocates to erode Comey's credibility. "James Comey: just another DC insider only in it for himself," the ad concludes.
We have always been at war Oceania.