1 Boring Old Man

 

Cheney’s Assassination Squads and Iran-Contra and Findings
By: emptywheel
March 23, 2009

Sy Hersh’s recent discussion at University of Minnesota included a number of tidbits, two of which are pertinent to this post. Hersh explained that the Joint Special Operations Command was doing operations that directly reported to Cheney, up to and including assassination. And Hersh revealed that Cheney had convened a meeting not long after 9/11 where he and other alumni of Iran-Contra brainstormed how to avoid the legal problems they had with Iran-Contra. A recent Congressional Research Service article on covert ops and presidential findings helps to show how these two revelations relate to each other…

Cheney’s Lessons Learned Meeting

Of course, given his intimate role in the history of presidential findings, Cheney would know that.  Cheney would know all the details about the requirements on presidential findings (indeed, much of what he wrote in the minority dissent on Iran-Contra objected to that kind of Congressional oversight over covert ops.

Which is why Hersh’s description of Cheney’s meeting to discussion "lessons learned" from Iran-Contra is so fascinating [this is about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way through the MP3–and the following is my imperfect transcription].

They set about and talking about how to sabotage oversight. And what is the model for sabotaging oversight? The model turned out to be the Bill Casey model. The Congress’ hold, in the Constitution, over the executive is about money. Everything that’s being spent must be approved by the Congress–even the most secret operation, there are secret committees in Congress that review it. And so the answer was, "let’s run operations off the books. Let’s find money elsewhere and the hell with Congress." And it was talked about as "this is the way to finally put those creeps in place." The contempt for Congress in the Bush-Cheney White House was extraordinary, just extraordinary. And it came out of Iran-Contra. 
[Mondale explains Iran-Contra]
The critical thing about Iran-Contra is that they were specifically barred from using money, and they went around. They were selling arms–the Israelis were involved in this–they were selling arms for a profit, taking the profit and the thought was to invest it.
[snip]
Elliott Abrams was also involved, he became a key player in the Bush-Cheney White House.

So what makes Bush-Cheney so interesting is that at some point, they had a meeting after 9/11 of the people who were in, in the White House, who worked in Iran-Contra–that would be Abrams and Cheney, and there were others involved who were also in the White House and they had a meeting of lessons learned, I’m telling you literally took place. They had a meeting with a small group of people who worked for Reagan and for George Bush when he was Vice President, his father, George Herbert Walker Bush, anyway.

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.  [my emphasis]

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

Isn’t this just special? The Iran-Contra Affair was the front page topic of the late 1980’s. The US had sold Arms to Iran and used the proceeds to finance the Contras in Nicaragua [forbidden by Congress]. The Israelis were involved. The Tower Commission hearings were the dramatic hit of the decade starring Ollie North and his side-kick Fawn Hall. Unnoticed by most of us, there was a dissenting opinion in the Tower Commission report written by [you guessed it] Congressman Dick Cheney. It was an open statement of his opinion that Congress was eroding Presidential power, opinions channelled by John Yoo and David Addington a decade later. Now we learn that Cheney had a think-about-it meeting with the old Iran-Contra team to see how to do the same end-around with Congress, but avoid the pitfalls of the clumsy Reagan Administration.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the point of the Tower Commission was not that Ollie North’s little Iran-Contra operation wasn’t well executed. The point was that it was a wrong thing to do! Secretly defying Congress by finding creative loopholes isn’t a Presidential prerogative in most of Americans’ understanding of our government – exception: Dick Cheney [former college drop-out, former Presidential Chief of Staff, former Congressman, former Secretary of Defense, former Vice President]. For him, all of the outrage about Iran-Contra suggested that it was a poorly run operation that would be better run by someone competent at being secretive, like himself. We don’t yet know what his assassination squadron did, but we’re beginning to know it existed, modeled on the Iran-Contra blueprint, run out of the OVP in the White House. In this post, emptywheel is following Sy Hersh’s recent exposé that Cheney had a meeting of the old Iran-Contra veterans to review why they got caught, and to avoid those pitfalls.