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dc_dux · 09-23-2006, 08:12 PM

Was Reagan arming Iran at the same time as buddying up to Saddam?

Quote:

The evidence is now persuasive that George H.W. Bush participated in negotiations with Iran’s radical regime in 1980, behind President Jimmy Carter’s back, with the goal of arranging for 52 American hostages to be released after Bush and Ronald Reagan were sworn in as Vice President and President, respectively.

In exchange, the Republicans agreed to let Iran obtain U.S.-manufactured military supplies through Israel. The Iranians kept their word, releasing the hostages immediately upon Reagan’s swearing-in on Jan. 20, 1981.

Over the next few years, the Republican-Israel-Iran weapons pipeline operated mostly in secret, only exploding into public view with the Iran-Contra scandal in late 1986. Even then, the Reagan-Bush team was able to limit congressional and other investigations, keeping the full history – and the 1980 chapter – hidden from the American people.

Upon taking office on Jan. 20, 2001, George W. Bush walled up the history even more by issuing an executive order blocking the scheduled declassification of records from the Reagan-Bush years. After 9/11, the younger George Bush added more bricks to the wall by giving Presidents, Vice Presidents and their heirs power over releasing documents.

But that history is vital today.

First, the American people should know the real history of U.S.-Iran relations before the Bush administration launches another preemptive war in the Middle East. Second, the degree to which Iranian officials are willing to negotiate with their U.S. counterparts – and fulfill their side of the bargain – bears on the feasibility of talks now.

Indeed, the only rationale for hiding the historical record is that it would embarrass the Bush Family and possibly complicate George W. Bush’s decision to attack Iran regardless of what the American people might want.

*snip*

The false history surrounding the Iranian hostage crisis also has led to the mistaken conclusion that it was only the specter of Ronald Reagan’s tough-guy image that made Iran buckle in January 1981 and that, therefore, the Iranians respect only force.

The hostage release on Reagan’s Inauguration Day bathed the new President in an aura of heroism as a leader so feared by America’s enemies that they scrambled to avoid angering him. It was viewed as a case study of how U.S. toughness could restore the proper international order.

That night, as fireworks lit the skies of Washington, the celebration was not only for a new President and for the freed hostages, but for a new era in which American power would no longer be mocked. That momentum continues to this day in George W. Bush’s “preemptive” wars and the imperial boasts about a “New American Century.”

However, the reality of that day 25 years ago now appears to have been quite different than was understood at the time. What’s now known about the Iranian hostage crisis suggests that the “coincidence” of the Reagan Inauguration and the Hostage Release was not a case of frightened Iranians cowering before a U.S. President who might just nuke Tehran.

The evidence indicates that it was a prearranged deal between the Republicans and the Iranians. The Republicans got the hostages and the political bounce; Iran’s Islamic fundamentalists got a secret supply of weapons and various other payoffs.

Though the full history remains a state secret, it now appears Republicans did contact Iran’s mullahs during the 1980 campaign; a hostage agreement was reached; and a clandestine flow of U.S. weapons soon followed.

In effect, while Americans thought they were witnessing one reality – the cinematic heroism of Ronald Reagan backing down Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – another truth existed beneath the surface, one so troubling that the Reagan-Bush political apparatus has made keeping the secret a top priority for a quarter century.

The American people must never be allowed to think that the Reagan-Bush era began with collusion between Republican operatives and Islamic terrorists, an act that many might view as treason.

A part of those secret dealings between Iran and the Republicans surfaced in the Iran-Contra Affair in 1986, when the public learned that the Reagan-Bush administration had sold arms to Iran for its help in freeing U.S. hostages then held in Lebanon.

After first denying these facts, the White House acknowledged the existence of the arms deals in 1985 and 1986 but managed to block investigators from looking back before 1984, when the official histories assert that the Iran initiative began.

During the 1987 congressional hearings on Iran-Contra, Republicans – behind the hardnosed leadership of Rep. Dick Cheney – fought to protect the White House, while Democrats, led by the accommodating Rep. Lee Hamilton, had no stomach for a constitutional crisis.

The result was a truncated investigation that laid much of the blame on supposedly rogue operatives, such as Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North.

Many American editors quickly grew bored with the complex Iran-Contra tale, but a few reporters kept searching for its origins. The trail kept receding in time, back to the Republican-Iranian relationship forged in the heat of the 1980 presidential campaign.

Besides the few journalists, some U.S. government officials reached the same conclusion. For instance, Nicholas Veliotes, Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, traced the “germs” of the Iran-Contra scandal to the 1980 campaign.

In a PBS interview, Veliotes said he first discovered the secret arms pipeline to Iran when an Israeli weapons flight was shot down over the Soviet Union on July 18, 1981, after straying off course on its third mission to deliver U.S. military supplies from Israel to Iran via Larnaca, Cyprus.

“We received a press report from Tass [the official Soviet news agency] that an Argentinian plane had crashed,” Veliotes said. “According to the documents … this was chartered by Israel and it was carrying American military equipment to Iran. …And it was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment.

“Now this was not a covert operation in the classic sense, for which probably you could get a legal justification for it. As it stood, I believe it was the initiative of a few people [who] gave the Israelis the go-ahead. The net result was a violation of American law.”

The reason that the Israeli flights violated U.S. law was that no formal notification had been given to Congress about the transshipment of U.S. military equipment as required by the Arms Export Control Act – a foreshadowing of George W. Bush’s decision two decades later to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

In checking out the Israeli flight, Veliotes came to believe that the Reagan-Bush camp’s dealings with Iran dated back to before the 1980 election.

*snip*

With the Republican defenses falling apart and with many documents from the Reagan-Bush years scheduled for release in 2001, the opportunity to finally learn the truth about the pivotal election of 1980 loomed.

But George W. Bush..... on his first day in office, his counsel Alberto Gonzales drafted an executive order for Bush that postponed release of the Reagan-Bush records.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Bush approved another secrecy order that put the records beyond the public’s reach indefinitely, passing down control of many documents to a President’s or a Vice President’s descendants.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2006/092006.html

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

In the early 80's Iraq was seen as a potential ally against Iran, and we supported one group of assholes against another. Once the level of assholishness was determined that cooperation ceased.

The cooperation ceased?

Surely, if you are old enough to remember Carter, you must remember the BNL/BCCI bank scandal...aka Iraqqate...that continued through the Bush Sr. years:

Quote:

The Reagan/Bush administration had spent a good portion of its first term in office secretly selling arms to Iran in an abortive attempt to get our hostages in Lebanon released and a more successful program to fund a rogue Contra supply network. The nation would not loam much about that until well into their second term.

Meanwhile war had broken out between Iran and Iraq and by 1984 Iran was licking Iraq. The administration had to figure out how to balance the fight so that neither side could actually win. But they could hardly go to Congress for funding to aid Iraq since then they might have to explain why Iran was so well equipped.

So the administration again chose the now familiar covert route. They had already gotten Congress to remove Iraq from the list of countries harboring terrorists, clearing the way for non-military trade. All Iraq needed now was funding.The administration decided to supply the funding via two federal loan-guarantee pre-grams administered by two executive branch departments, Agriculture and Commerce, and overseen by the State
Department.

The two loan programs - the Export/Import Bank (Exim) and Commodity Credit
Corporation - could funnel billions of dollars secretly to Iraq by simply authorizing that the bank loans made to Iraq carry a 100 percent U.S. payback guarantee. Of course, the law limited the loan proceeds to specific, non-military uses, such as buying grain from American farmers. But never mind. That little problem could be easily overcome if they used the right bank.

The bank they chose for this specialized operation was the Banco Nazionale del Lavaro (BNL), an Italian-owned bank that just happened to have a branch in Atlanta, Georgia. This was no ordinary bank. BNL also just happened to have former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on its board of advisers, and his consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, represented BNL. At the time the loan program began in 1985 the vice chairman of Kissinger Associates was Larry Eagleburger (now acting Secretary of State) and the KA’s president was Brent Scowcroft (now White House National Security Adviser.)

On the international scene BNL had even more interesting connections. Its wholly owned subsidiary in Zurich, Lavaro Bank, AG, was headed by Dr. Alfred Hartmann, a mysterious Swiss banker who was also a director of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). Hartmann also was president of the Swiss Chemical Manufacturer’s Society. Sto-ries in the Swiss press quote Hartmann in 1986 complaining that sales of Swiss chemical producers was way down and that new markets had to be developed.

In 1989 the U.S. Federal Reserve would report that tens of millions of dollars were funneled from BCCI through Lavaro Bank to BNL/Atlanta and then to Iraq at the very time Saddam Hussein was building his chemical warfare capabilities.

With the CCC/Exim loan program in place at BNL/Atlanta, the administration
approved $1 billion a year for five years in CCC and Exim bank loans to Iraq – $5 billion in all. At least $2.6 billion of the money was directly spent on military equipment, particularly on Iraq’s chemicl, nuclear, and ballistic missile programs. What American pain and rice Iraq did buy with the money was more often than not shipped to third countries and bartered for additional military equipment.

http://deepblade.net/journal/Iraqgate_primer.pdf