SPOTLIGHTING HITORY ~ Ronald Wilson Reagan ~ Feb. 6, 1911 ~ June 5, 2004

     Hey. This is one hell of a well-investigated story.

     We thought of spotlighting Ronald Wilson Reagan. He was the 40th President of the United States, serving from 1981 to 1989. Prior to that, he was the 33rd Governor of California from 1967 to 1975 and a radio, films and television actor.

     This story was assigned to me early on by Professor Malatesta during this latest wave of conservatism that is pitting one conservative ideology against another. It has now escalated across the United States as the political conservative rhetoric is more interested at comparing themselves with former President Ronald Reagan. Strangely, since his passing, some Americans have also come to the brink of deifying him for having fulfilled his many conservative causes.

     We at the Embroiled News Central Office instead, thought that now is the proper moment to remind our readers about a few historical facts, that the current Republican candidates are neglecting to mention. Foremost is when mentioning Ronald Reagan they seem to sidestep that it's been 26-years since he addressed the nation about Iran. This is what he said:

>>> Good evening. I know you've been reading, seeing, and hearing a lot of stories the past several days attributed to Danish sailors, unnamed observers at Italian ports and Spanish harbors, and especially unnamed government officials of my administration. Well, now you're going to hear the facts from a White House source, and you know my name.
      -- Ronald Reagan addressing the nation on November 13, 1986.

     Ronald Reagan had gone on national television to confront a building firestorm over the initial revelations about the Iran Contra Affair. At the time, this seemed like a devastating scandal - an appalling betrayal of American Democracy.

     And it was.

     However, after the comparison with the Bush II Administration’s peccadilloes, it just seems now like another day at the office.

More from the Gipper:

>>> During the course of our secret discussions, I authorized the transfer of small amounts of defensive weapons and spare parts for defensive systems to Iran These modest deliveries, taken together, could easily fit into a single cargo plane We did not -- repeats -- did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.
      -- President Reagan claimed that the arms for hostages swap wasn’t really a swap because we didn’t give them too much stuff, and besides, the stuff we did give them hardly counted as weapons.

Reagan concluded:

>>> All these reports are quite exciting, but as far as we're concerned, not one of them is true.
-- I love the part when he mentions, "as far as we're concerned. . . "
     In case you were wondering what types of weapons were on the shipment docket to Iran, here are those that made the list:

August 20, 1985. – 96 TOW anti-tank missiles
September 14, 1985.  – 408 more TOWs
November 24, 1985.  – 18 Hawk anti-aircraft missiles
February 17, 1986.  – 500 TOWs
February 27, 1986.  – 500 TOWs
May 24, 1986.  – 508 TOWs, 240 Hawk spare parts
August 4, 1986.  – More Hawk spares
October 28, 1986.  – 500 TOWs

     Neocon buddy Saddam Hussein was, of course, not pleased that the United States was now supplying arms to the Iranians - with whom Iraq was at war. Yet the President Reagan Administration also simultaneously supplied hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons to Iraq. Perhaps partly to help making it up to him, the United States later also launched operation Earnest Will to flag Kuwaiti oil tankers as US ships, so that the US Navy could escort them through an Iranian blockade -- in exchange for a Kuwaiti commitment to lend some of the $ billions from keeping their oil exports afloat to Iraq to keep financing their side of the war.

     If this is confusing and familiar at the same time, you’re not alone – and it must have been one hell of big-ass cargo plane to do all the weapon transport by it self!

     A few years later, Hussein had a thought. Rather than repay those $ billions in loans to the Kuwaitis, it would be a lot easier to just annex the country, and presumed he had been given the green flag from the US: "We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts." This, of course, led to George Bush the I, Top-Gun moment in the desert.
      Anyhow, back to Reagan's November 13 heart-to-heart with our fellow Americans. In the weeks that followed, Attorney General Ed Meese was on the case and launched an internal investigation. John Poindexter and Oliver North would soon get their shredders rolling 24-7 as an attempt to destroy as much evidence as possible about their illegal operations. (Johnny Poindexter would later reemerge in the context of "Total Information Awareness.")
      The Meese's boys just weren't quick enough however, to feed the shredders. Go figure, how some political devotes fowl-up their own moment in history. Nonetheless, by November 25, Meese would admit that profits from the weapon sales were being sent to right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
      Bummer!  Meese probably didn’t know that aiding the Contras was an explicit violation of Congressional mandate / US law.
      That set off Congressional inquiries by the Tower Commission and a kind of political circus and gripping television went in full swing.  Yet in conclusions after the exchanges among the “Big Heads” in Washington was over, there was absolutely no accountability for the bums we elected to safeguard and run our nation.
     Of course, the covert Reagan Administration contacts with Iran were not exactly new. And William Casey and the CIA boys, were busy little beavers throughout the 1980s, outsmarting themselves repeatedly, while essentially creating Al Qaeda along the way.
      But when one stops to reflect on the last Bush White House officials laughing at the law and Congressional oversight, and the ways that the Obama Administration continues to blithely operate above the law today – with top-secret “findings” to justify our actions, top secret courts, endless drone attacks (presumably to justified those top-secret findings), and enormous “black” budgets – we should recognize that the most important forerunner that made it all possible, was the Iran Contra operation. The astonishing fact that still remains unfulfilled is that none of the major engineers of hijacking US foreign policies - and effectively shredding the U.S. Constitution - have ever been held accountable.

     Today, the turmoil still continues in the same regions of the middle east and in all likelihood our presence there will be felt for years to come.  The casual observer during these past years has remained unaware how the instability in the region began, while political historians are in agreement that the Iran-Contra Affair was the cause and effect.

Sam McGuffin - Embroiled News