No Ties No Secret Policies - Arms Deals " Wars Contragate
1987Nat Weinstein 1987-01Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 1 →
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On Dec. 14, a small Massachusetts newspaper, The Lowell Sun charged Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, then an official of the National Security Council, with funneling some of the profits from the Iran arms sale to "right-wing pressure groups."
About $5 million of the profits is said to have been given to these groups for their campaign to defeat "anti-contra" Democratic Party candidates in the 1986 elections.
The Lowell Sun allegations, along with other even more hair-raising charges of Reagan administration misconduct, suggest the depths of criminal action that still lie hidden in the can of worms just barely opened by the Iran-contra scandal.
Congress has been hoping to carry out a respectful wrist-slapping of the Reagan administration's pointmen for their " patrio -tic" excesses. Members of Congress are concerned because the government was caught lying—not because of the criminal policy itself.
Not one leading spokesperson of the capitalist class has challenged the "nobility" of the administration's motives. The investigators only want Lt. Col. North and his cohorts to tell enough of the story to put the whole matter to rest.
But the charge made by the Lowell Sun, true or not, points to why Reagan's appointees haven't owned up: They fear that once someone in the inner circle starts talking, as did John Dean in the Watergate affair, it will not be possible to easily stop the unraveling of interlinked conspiracies.
In any case, governmental credibility, already at its lowest ebb in history, threatens to sink even lower.
The evidence uncovered so far points to the hypocritically fake system of capitalist "democracy," whereby Congress can decide (continued on page S)
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coverup under way