Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism

The Shredding of Democracy

excerpted from the book

The Secret Government

by Bill Moyers

Seven Locks Press, 1988

p87

Ronald Reagan ran in 1980 with a strong and clear message the world was a hostile place and closing in on America. Russian troops were in Afghanistan, Sandinistas were in Nicaragua, and Americans were being held hostage in Iran. President Reagan wanted to reinvigorate the CIA. To run it, he chose a tough director, his campaign manager, William Casey.

They were ideological soulmates, true Cold Warriors on the offensive. In seven years Reagan approved over 50 major covert operations, more than any president since John F. Kennedy. Reagan and Casey set the agenda, but it was Oliver North's job to carry it out. In North, they had their 007.

North's primary mission was to keep the contra war going despite the congressional ban on aid. For two years he master minded a privately funded airlift to Honduras. According to some reports, criminal elements seized opportunities presented by the secret airlift to smuggle drugs back into the United States with profits being used to buy more weapons for the contras

SENATOR JOHN KERRY:

Were there contras who relied on the profits of narcotics in order to buy arms and to survive? Yes. I'm convinced of that. Once you open up a clandestine network which has the ability to deliver weapons or other goods from this country, leaving airfields secretly under the sanction of a "covert operation," with public officials, DEA, Customs, law enforcement, whatever, pulled back because of the covert sanctioning, you've opened the pipeline for nefarious types who are often involved in these kinds of activities to become the people who bring things back in.

North had been told the airlift was using questionable characters. Robert Owen, his contact man with the contras, wrote from the field that some of the leaders were running drugs. In February 1986, Owen advised North that a resupply plane had been used for shipping drugs. In Owen's words, "Part of the crew had criminal records."

SEN. DANIEL K. INOUYE, D.-Hawaii (Iran-contra hearings, 1987):

The second sentence says, "Nice group the boys choose." Who are the boys?

MR. OWEN: CIA.

So what happens? I asked Senator Kerry: "In effect, does the president of the United States say, 'This is the national security, you must step back and let these people do their job,' and therefore a lot of smugglers, drug traffickers, others, go through the back door?"

SENATOR KERRY:

I don't think the president of the United States said specifically, "Look the other way to these things." I don't think the president of the United States knew these things were going on. But the president of the United States did encourage to such a degree the continuation of aid to the contras, and it was so clear, through Casey and Poindexter, etc., that this was going to please the president if it happened. It's clear that there were those who turned their heads and looked the other way because they knew that this major goal was out there and it was part of it, and if there happened to be these minor aberrations, as people referred to them, that was the price you were paying in the effort to accomplish the larger goal. Which larger goal, obviously, was against the law and against the wishes of the Congress and against the American people.

How does it happen that to be anticommunist we become undemocratic, as if we have to subvert our society in order to save it? Because the powers claimed by presidents in national security have become the controlling wheel of government, driving everything else. Secrecy then makes it possible for the president to pose as the sole competent judge of what will best protect our security. Secrecy permits the White House to control what others know. How many times have we heard a president say, "If you only knew what I know, you would understand why I'm doing what I'm doing." But it's a self-defeating situation. As Lord Acton said, "Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice." So in the bunker of the White House, the men who serve the president put loyalty above analysis. Judgment yields to obedience. Just salute and follow orders.

COLONEL NORTH (Iran-contra hearings, I987):

This lieutenant colonel is not going to challenge a decision of the commander in chief, for whom I still work, and I am proud to work for that commander in chief. And if the commander in chief tells this lieutenant colonel to go stand in the corner and sit on his head, I will do so.

That notion troubled Inouye, a combat hero of World War II. He reminded North of the military code, of a soldier's duty.

SENATOR INOUYE (Iran-contra hearings, 1987):

The uniform code makes it abundantly clear that it must be the lawful orders of a superior officer. In fact it says, "Members of the military have an obligation to disobey unlawful orders." This principle was considered so important that we - we, the government of the United States, proposed that it be internationally applied in the Nuremberg trials. And so in the Nuremberg trials we said that the fact that the defendant -

BRENDAN SULLIVAN, counsel to Colonel North:

Mr. Chairman, may I please register an objection?

SENATOR INOUYE:

May I continue my statement?

MR SULLIVAN:

I find this offensive. I find you're engaging in a personal attack on Colonel North, and you're far removed from the issues of this case.

North's lawyer deflected Inouye, but some of North's fellow officers watching on television took issue with the colonel.

GEORGE GORMAN, former captain, U.S. Marine Corps:

I'm two years senior to Oliver North out of the Naval Academy, and the only thing he's got on me is a Silver Star and six more years in the Corps. And when Oliver North started to say the things he started to say, I literally wanted to throw things at my TV set. I seriously considered mailing my Naval Academy ring back to the Naval Academy and denying ever having gone there. I was so embarrassed and humiliated that a professional military officer would stoop to the dishonor and disgrace and warmongering that Oliver North and Poindexter and McFarlane and the rest of the crew did. Selling arms to the Iranians after they blew up the Beirut barracks, after they blew up the Beirut embassy, is the most immoral thing- that's like selling Zyklon-B to the Germans after you've found out the Holocaust is under way.

ROBERT COLCLASURE former captain, U.S. Marine Corps:

One of my drill instructors in the Marine Corps - there were a of protests in Washington, D.C., and somebody said, well, those commie lovers, or whatever - and the drill instructor told us something as we were about to graduate. He said, "What you're fighting for might be wrong or right, nobody really knows. But,"(he said) "there's a Constitution that allows those people to be out on the streets protesting." (He said) "That's what's worth fighting for. That's what the Constitution is." He said, "That's what you took an oath to, and when you put those bars on as a second lieutenant, you better remember that." I don't think Oliver North had that drill instructor.

It was career military men who managed the Iran-contra debacle under Reagan and Casey; North, Poindexter, McFarlane, Secord, and Singlaub were trained to fight wars, not run foreign policy. In war, the aim is absolute and simple: destroy the enemy, no matter what. They had little understanding of politics in Iran, in Nicaragua, and, most important, in Washington. Yet our foreign policy has increasingly become a military policy. Reagan has doubled the number of military men on the staff of the National Security Council. What was created in 1947 as a civilian advisory group to the president has become a command post for covert operations run by the military. Far removed from public view and congressional oversight, they are accountable only to the one man they serve. The framers of the Constitution feared this permanent state of war, with the commander in chief served by an elite private corps that put the claims of the sovereign above the Constitution.

CONTINUED...

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