4

The Limits of Scandal

It is important to understand what does, and what does not, constitute the “scandal” that erupted in late 1986. The major scandal in the eyes of elite opinion is that the Reagan administration was caught dealing with Iran, a terrorist state, in violation of its noble commitment to protect civilization from “the evil scourge of terrorism” (Ronald Reagan), a plague spread by “depraved opponents of civilization itself” in “a return to barbarism in the modern age” (George Shultz). At the dissident extreme, George McGovern describes the “humiliating fiasco” that is the real scandal of 1986: “An administration that came to power announcing that henceforth counterterrorism would become the keystone of American foreign policy was discovered to have been secretly selling arms to the most terrorist government in the world,” namely Iran1—undoubtedly a terrorist government, but one that cannot aspire to the achievements of the U.S. and its client states in this regard, a truism that cannot be perceived. A lesser scandal was that congressional directives were evaded and a “secret government” established that evaded congressional scrutiny and perhaps, if one can believe the testimony of witnesses of very limited credibility, even the scrutiny of cabinet members and the president. But the bounds of scandal are narrowly delimited.

Within these bounds, there was scandal enough. The contempt for democratic processes revealed day after day served as a vivid testimonial to the true nature of the form of “conservatism” that calls for executive power immune from any requirement of accountability to the public or its elected representatives. Oliver North’s performance was a particularly chilling illustration of the fanatic commitment of latter-day “conservatism” to state power and violence, and its fear and hatred of democracy, already exhibited with sufficient clarity—for those who chose to see—in Reaganite policies. Even the New York Times and Wall St. Journal were able to scent the whiff of fascism in his incredible testimony.2 And one can appreciate the disgust inspired by the seedy gang that was organized by the state executive to evade public scrutiny, or—as observed abroad—by such matters as North’s payment of $1.5 million to arms dealer Monzer Alkassar, banned from Britain as an “undesirable alien” and under investigation by the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency.3 Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to scrutinize closely the limits of scandal.

Adopting the narrowest perspective as a start, the congressional inquiry took considerable care not to learn too much that would be unpleasant. The trails of its inquiry constantly led back to the CIA, and the operations partially exposed were not unfamiliar to those who have paid attention to the clandestine operations undertaken by the state executive through this medium over many years, with their terrible human cost. According to contra leaders, CIA Central America task force chief Alan Fiers was the man “most involved in the day to day management of the contras,” Dennis Volman reports, citing congressional and administration analysts who confirm “CIA management” of the program during the period when the Boland amendment explicitly blocked such operations. Fiers was the man who “directed field operations, the man who was plunged into the midst of wheeling and dealing among the various contra factions, the man who not only carries out but also made policy,” enjoying particularly close relations with the leader of the FDN (the main contra military force), the right-wing businessman Adolfo Calero, “who had a longstanding relationship with the CIA which dated back to Nicaragua even before the Sandinistas took power.” Contra sources indicate that Fiers wanted to keep Arturo Cruz—the official democrat for a U.S. audience—“on board” in order to obtain congressional support, and tried to influence him through his “most trusted US advisers,” contra lobbyists Bruce Cameron and Robert Leiken. But his goal was to protect Calero and the “‘Somocista’ and oligarchic clique” that ran the FDN and to work with “the US and Nicaraguan ultra right” to block contra reform, according to contra and U.S. sources. U.S. sources “close to the situation” note that Fiers’s CIA experience in Saudi Arabia for many years (probably as CIA station chief) was also valuable as Saudi Arabia became one of the main backers of the contras through the clandestine network, and “knowledgeable sources, both among the contras and in the US,” believe that Fiers and the CIA generally “had more influence in organizing and running the overall contra operation” than North, whom Fiers “manipulated” into doing what he wanted. Former CIA operative Ralph McGehee commented that “the committees are back-pedaling as fast as they can away from looking seriously at the CIA” even though “at every juncture they turn up new evidence which says ‘CIA’.” He notes that the complex web of covert operations not only have the CIA stamp, but also would require the kind of coordination that only the agency could provide, and agrees with Volman’s report.4 Fiers and other top CIA officials testified in secret after the public hearings ended, in a perfunctory manner, according to committee staffers, but sufficiently so as to convince Senator William Cohen, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that CIA “counterterrorism chief” Duane Clarridge was “instrumental in the Iran-contra enterprises”5—that is, in fomenting terrorism.

It is, furthermore, highly unlikely that the CIA or its supervisors in the executive branch would have given free rein to an incompetent blowhard of the Oliver North variety, a conclusion that seems inescapable after his testimony. Virtually every operation in which North claims to have been engaged turns out to have been calamitous, including those of which he was most proud.6 His incapacity to tell the truth approaches the pathological. His teary tale about the threats from Abu Nidal that led him to accept a gift from General Secord appears to be fraudulent; there is no evidence of a meaningful threat, and the Pentagon reports that North made no request for protection during the period in question.7 As for his story about leaks from Congress which impelled him to lie to them, Newsweek revealed that North himself was the source of the major leak he identified (with regard to the Achille Lauro), while the others, in connection with the attack on Libya, turned out to derive from the executive branch, as Senator Inouye documented in response. In an ode to North published by U.S. News & World Report during the wave of Olliemania, Marine Corps historian General Victor Krulak is quoted as dismissing his much-heralded exploits in Vietnam as “romanticized,” a “Sunday-supplement tale” that “never happened.”8 Surely all of this must have been apparent to CIA director Casey, apparently a canny operative, whom North claims was his mentor and adviser.

But the committee carefully steered away from the obvious CIA connections. That they would do so was evident from the start, when they selected as senior investigator none other than Thomas Polgar, an active member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers that lobbies Congress on behalf of the CIA, whose many years in the agency include service in Indochina, where he worked closely with such CIA figures as Theodore Shackley, who was involved in arms sales to Iran. This rather striking case of conflict of interest was of no concern to the media, which also managed to overlook Polgar’s tribute to Eugene Hasenfus and the CIA in the Miami Herald.9 The committee also steered clear of the ample evidence of CIA-contra drug connections, some of it revealed during the course of their inquiry.10 There was also no attempt to unravel the longstanding connections of the figures involved in the Iran-contra operations with convicted arms smuggler and ex-CIA agent Edwin Wilson, who was “intimately involved in the creation of the contra network” and the Iran affair and was close to General Richard Secord and his associate former CIA official Thomas Clines, but was not even interviewed by committee investigators or the special prosecutor’s office in the course of the hearings. Nor did the committee pursue other clandestine operations of those who testified or their contacts who did not, ever since Cuba and Vietnam days, for the light that these operations would inevitably shed on the matters at hand.11

Also avoided was the Israeli connection, though it plainly loomed large. Commenting on the failure of the congressional inquiry to pursue Israel’s role, Senator John Tower, chairman of Reagan’s Iran-contra review board, observed that “If you think Congress is going to pick up that hot potato, you’re going to be waiting a long time.”12 And in fact the ample evidence on the matter “passed with little show of interest by the committee” or Senator Inouye, who received extensive funding by PACs linked to the Israeli lobby, columnists Evans and Novak observe. Visiting Israel after the scandals erupted, Senator Inouye, described by Prime Minister Shamir as “one of Israel’s greatest friends in the U.S.,” denounced the media for turning the Iran-contra affair “into a scandal of monumental scale and as a result [harming] the credibility and integrity of my nation.” Though the Israeli connection was already obvious, he expressed his view that nothing revealed should cause U.S.-Israeli relations to be “weakened or damaged”13—or, for that matter, to be explored in any depth.

In short, the investigating committees sought to narrow the investigation, evading crucial but unwelcome areas, and keeping to questions of procedure or “management style” of limited significance. Primary among them was what was constantly posed as the central issue, namely, whether President Reagan knew, or remembered, what the cabal was doing, or had authorized the operations. On this matter, Reagan’s denials are doubted by a majority of the population and many commentators, but they appear to me credible. Largely a creation of the Public Relations industry, Reagan may well have been kept uninformed of matters that he did not have to address at press conferences. The matter is of little consequence in the real world, though significant in the world of imagery and illusion in which ideologists must labor to maintain the pretense that the public determines policy guidelines by voting for the chief executive.

But this narrow perspective on the limits of scandal is extremely misleading, since it leaves out topics of far greater significance, topics that are not on the agenda of legitimate concerns established by the state and adopted by the media, but that provide much insight into the culture of terrorism. Putting accepted conventions aside, let us turn to some of these.

What the U.S. has done in “the fledgling democracies” of Central America during the 1980s is not a scandal, and it has always been unthinkable that it would be the topic of any inquiry, either by Congress or the media. Rather, these achievements are considered a demonstration of our traditional benevolence and our use of power solely “in the service of certain values” such as freedom and democracy that we hold “to be not only good but self-evidently good.”14

In the case of Nicaragua, the blatant illegality of the U.S. attack is not a scandal, not a factor inhibiting U.S. international terrorism. In June 1986, the International Court of Justice determined that U.S. actions constitute “an unlawful use of force” and violations of treaties. It ruled that “These violations cannot be justified either by collective self-defence [the U.S. claim] . . . nor by any right of the United States to take counter-measures involving the use of force in the event of intervention by Nicaragua in El Salvador, since no such right exists under the applicable international law.” The Court found no credible evidence of Nicaraguan support for guerrillas in El Salvador since early 1981, noting further that Nicaragua could not be charged with a higher responsibility to halt arms flow than El Salvador, Honduras and the United States, which claimed to be unable to do so despite the “extensive resources deployed by the United States.” The Court also observed that El Salvador had not charged “armed attack” until August 1984, four months after Nicaragua had brought its claim to the Court.15

The World Court decision was simply ignored. The U.S. Senate expressed its commitment to international law by voting in favor of Reagan’s $100 million military aid package two weeks after the Court had called upon the U.S. to terminate its unlawful use of force, eliciting no relevant comment. The Democrat-controlled House had signified its concerns for world order by voting the same way on the eve of the expected Court decision. The Court was dismissed as a “hostile forum” with a traditional “anti-Western bias”16—this same “hostile forum” had ruled in favor of the U.S. against Iran in 1980, but that was deemed irrelevant. Contra lobbyist Robert Leiken “blamed the court, which he said suffers from the ‘increasing perception’ of having close ties to the Soviet Union”17; the Soviet judge had withdrawn from the case, and the general conception is laughable, but natural within the curious current amalgam of Maoism and contemporary neoliberalism-neoconservatism. Even rational commentary held that the U.S. should disregard the Court’s decision, because, as international law specialist Thomas Franck put it, the United States must maintain “the freedom to protect freedom”—as in Nicaragua. The United States then vetoed a UN Security Council Resolution (11-1, 3 abstentions) calling on all states to observe international law, and along with two client states (El Salvador and Israel), voted against a General Assembly resolution (passed 94-3) calling for compliance with the World Court ruling.18 The General Assembly vote received no mention in the Newspaper of Record; its UN correspondent, the same day, preferred to report on overly high salaries at the UN. The Security Council vote merited a brief note, though not, for example, the 124-1 vote in the General Assembly the day before, the U.S. alone in opposition as usual, calling for a South Atlantic “zone of peace.”19

The World Court decision, and the disdainful rejection of it, is not part of the scandal. It arouses no call for a congressional inquiry, and has been dispatched quickly to the memory hole, along with the condemnation of U.S. measures in the GATT Council that monitors international trade and other similar irrelevancies. None of this impugns the reputation of George Shultz, with his ringing declarations that “I can assure you that in this Administration our actions will be governed by the rule of law.”20 And rightly, on the principle that the law is what the U.S. government says it is, a natural principle in a terrorist culture.

From these events, we perceive with great clarity the self-image of American elites: the United States is a lawless and violent state and must remain so, independently of such nonsense as international law, the World Court, the United Nations, or other international institutions. World opinion will inhibit the terrorist commanders in Washington only if it becomes articulate and sufficiently disruptive so as to impose costs that they are unwilling to face, just as domestic public opinion is of no account until it reaches a level of dissidence that threatens the interests of the powerful at home. Meanwhile starry-eyed ideologues pay their tributes in awed and reverential tones to our unique commitment to the rule of law: “There is no other country so involved in talking about fundamental law, its limits and flexibility.”21 Arguably true, so long as we recognize that the operative word is “talking.”

U.S. international terrorism is “scandalous” only if it infringes upon the prerogatives of the powerful or carries a potential cost to elite interests. Congress does represent various power blocs; therefore, violation of explicit congressional directives is scandalous, at least after it can no longer be easily suppressed, in contrast to the framework of customary international law and “solemn treaty obligations,” which are an irrelevance. Similarly, during the Watergate farce, largely a damage control operation by Congress and the media,22 there was much outrage over the break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters, but not over the far more serious crimes of the Nixon and earlier administrations, exposed at exactly the same time, including the use of the national political police to undermine the Socialist Workers Party by repeated burglaries and other illegal acts from the early 1960s—not to speak of other FBI operations designed to foment violence in the ghettoes, undermine the civil rights movement and other forms of popular action, etc. The Democratic Party represents domestic power, the Socialist Workers Party—a legal political party—does not; hence the predictable difference in response to the major scandal concerning the SWP and the minor thuggery involving the Democrats. Nixon’s “enemies list” was a scandal, but not the FBI involvement in the assassination of Fred Hampton by the Chicago police, exposed at the same time; it is scandalous to call powerful people bad names in private, but not to assassinate a Black Panther organizer. The Cambodia bombings were not part of the Watergate indictment. The issue arose in the congressional inquiry, but the crime alleged was the failure to notify Congress, not the bombing of Cambodia with tens of thousands of peasants killed. The exposures during the Watergate period constitute a “crucial experiment,” conveniently arranged for us by history. The lesson taught by the Watergate affair is stark and simple: people with power will defend themselves, not surprisingly. Domestic repression and murderous aggression are legitimate, but not violation of the prerogatives of domestic power. Much the same is true in the present case. We learn a good deal about ourselves from the fact that these two incidents of submissiveness to power are regarded as a brilliant demonstration of the courage and integrity of the media and the fundamental soundness of our institutions and their exceptional performance under stress.

It is understandable, then, that the successful use of terrorism is not considered a scandal. On the contrary, it is welcomed and applauded, including large-scale state terrorism in the Middle East-Mediterranean region sponsored or carried out directly by the United States,23 the successful terrorist operations in El Salvador and Guatemala, far greater in scale, and the increasing misery and repression in Honduras as the U.S. involvement deepens there. The attack against Nicaragua, given renewed authorization by Congress just as the World Court decision was announced, is regarded as perhaps a mistake, but it is not a scandal that shakes the foundations of the Republic. All of this makes perfect sense, when one understands the principles of the culture of terrorism.