Brattleboro Reformer : When good men do nothing

When good men do nothing

Thursday, July 12

Twenty years ago, when the details of what became known as the Iran-Contra affair were revealed, there was a hesitancy among many in Congress to go after the Reagan administration officials involved in the scandal.

For those who may have forgotten, here's a brief summary of what happened: In the mid-1980s, against the wishes of Congress and the American people, our government -- with the apparent knowledge and consent of President Reagan and most of the top echelon of his administration -- secretly and illegally sold weapons to Iran and used the proceeds to fund a private army to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

After a Lebanese newspaper blew the whistle on the scheme in November 1986, the Reagan administration scrambled to cover its collective butt.

In the ensuing investigation, the special prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh discovered, in his words, "a coverup engineered in the White House of one president and completed by his successor (that) prevented the rule of law from being applied to the perpetrators of criminal activity of constitutional dimension."

When he left Washington in January 1994 -- after the publication of his massive three-volume final report of his investigation into Iran-Contra -- Walsh was a figure tepidly supported by his would-be allies, despised and undermined by the conservatives in Congress and mocked and scorned by the Washington media establishment. Few wanted to acknowledge what Walsh had done, which was to lay bare the duplicity of the Reagan administration's foreign policy and tell the truth about the criminal acts being committed in the name of national security.

The irony of Walsh's tale is that the more he learned about the scope of Iran-Contra, the more his power to prosecute the key figures in the scandal lessened. Walsh's two main convictions -- of Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North and former national security advisor John Poindexter -- were overturned by the courts. The other people involved either entered guilty pleas or were convicted and received light sentences.

Five of them -- former national security advisor Robert McFarlane, former State Department official Elliott Abrams, former CIA officials Clair George and Alan Fiers and former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger (who was indicted but never tried) -- all received pardons by President George H.W. Bush in December 1992.

The bigger fish got away. Attorney General Edwin Meese (who engineered the coverup), CIA Director William Casey (who died and took his knowledge of the affair to the grave), Secretary of State George Shultz and President Reagan's Chief of Staff Donald Regan all escaped prosecution. And President Reagan -- who despite the lack of concrete evidence, probably knew what was going on -- was too popular to face impeachment.

Walsh's seven-year quest for justice in this case was outlined in his book, "Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up," which attempted to rescue the story of Iran-Contra from the national memory hole.

Perhaps the turning point in the story came in the summer of 1987. Over Walsh's objections, Congress granted North and Poindexter immunity to testify before Walsh had a chance to build a criminal case against the two on the most obvious charges. This immunity helped to get the convictions later obtained by Walsh overturned, because it was ruled by the courts that North's and Poindexter's testimony might have been indirectly used against them.

Walsh soon saw the bind he was in. He was dependent on the executive branch to declassify documents needed for his investigation.

Congress had the power to foil his investigation with their grants of immunity to the key people. And the courts were vulnerable to political pressure. He realized "the nature of the awesome, three-sided conflict" that he and his team were in the middle of and saw how they would "be crushed when the political forces of government, the national-security community, and the courts collided."

Which is exactly what happened. Walsh compared himself to Santiago in Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea," who struggled to catch the marlin, only to see most of it devoured by sharks before he can get the prize fish back to shore. "As the independent counsel, I sometimes felt like the old man; more often, I felt like the marlin," Walsh noted ruefully.

Twenty years later, we're paying the price for allowing the Iran-Contra plotters to escape justice. The precedent for a lawless executive branch conducting its own foreign policy against the wishes of Congress and the American people was set in Iran-Contra. Some of the key players in Iran-Contra, such as Abrams and Poindexter, have jobs in the current Bush administration.

The precedent for the "get out of jail free" card that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby received was set when the Iran-Contra pardons were handed out as the first President Bush was leaving office. The arguments that claim the impeachment process is cumbersome and counterproductive (the Clinton impeachment notwithstanding) originated in Iran-Contra.

The Washington press corps that so aggressively investigated Watergate sat on its hands through Iran-Contra, afraid it might turn out another president that, unlike Richard Nixon, retained his popularity even after the sordid details of the scandal emerged. They too, paid the price, which can be seen in how the current Bush administration has treated the press.

Because Congress failed to do its job, the "criminal activity of constitutional dimension" that occurred in Iran-Contra went unpunished. The similar activities that are going on in the White House today will also likely go unpunished, because, just like in 1987, no one in Congress has the guts to call for impeachment.

This is how, as Edmund Burke observed more than two centuries ago, evil triumphs -- when good men do nothing.