Cheney’s Assassination Squads and Iran-Contra and Findings
By: emptywheel Monday March 23, 2009 12:29 pm
..............
Cheney's Lessons Learned Meeting ....................
And at the meeting, here were some of the conclusions: that
the Iran-Contra thing, despite the disasters, proved you could do it, you could run operations without Congressional money and get away with it.The reason they got exposed, and this is what was said in the White House, there were too many people that knew too much--too many people in the military knew in '85 and '86, and too many people in the CIA knew, and Oliver North who you might remember what a great witness he was, was the wrong person to be running that. So what you do is you tell nobody. One of things Cheney wrote in his dissent to the Iran-Contra committee, Cheney said,
"my god, Reagan was telling too many people too much, don't tell Congress anything. You don't tell the CIA much, you don't tell the military much, and YOU, Mr. Vice President, you're the Ollie North for this. We're going to run operations off the books and you're going to honcho them." And this is what they did. And this is what is still left to be reported, this kind of stuff, this kind of extraordinarily contemptuous attitude towards the Constitution.
..............
I've been talking about how Cheney had clearly integrated lessons learned from all his previous scandals and I'm glad that Hersh has now confirmed that.
But consider what this means in regards to the disclosure that the covert ops going on in Iran and the rest of the Middle East. The "lessons learned" meeting concluded that:
* It is desirable to run covert ops off the books by finding funding from non-congressional sources
* To succeed such ops must avoid any revelations to Congress and most revelations to the CIA and Defense
* Such ops should be run out of the VP's office directly
(And I'll remind you that we learned the Saudis were using the bribes they received from BAE to fund covert ops.)
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2008/05/23/the-bae-bribes-funded-covert-ops/
There's a lot more these three pieces, taken in conjunction, suggest. But for the moment, they show how well Cheney gamed the restrictions put into place after Iran-Contra.
more at:
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/03/23/cheneys-assassination-squads-and-iran-contra-and-findings/
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