About
Community
Bad Ideas
Drugs
Ego
Erotica
Fringe
Society
Politics
Anarchism
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Corporatarchy - Rule by the Corporations
Economic Documents
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Foreign Military & Intelligence Agencies
Green Planet
International Banking / Money Laundering
Libertarianism
National Security Agency (NSA)
Police State
Political Documents
Political Spew
Right to Keep and Bear Arms
Terrorists and Freedom Fighters
The Nixon Project
The World Beyond the U.S.A.
U.S. Military
Technology
register | bbs | search | rss | faq | about
meet up | add to del.icio.us | digg it

Hawk Missile Sales to Iran

HUMAN EVENTS 7/4/92

The more one delves into Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh's prosecution of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger the more furious one becomes. The chief charge in the Weinberger indictment is that he, as Walsh's office puts it, "lied to Congress about his knowledge of a shipment of U.S. Hawk missiles to Iran by Israel in November 1985 in return for the release of American hostages held in Lebanon."

Because he supposedly lied, the shipments themselves must have been illegal, right? That is certainly the line being conveyed by much of the major media, including the wire services, Ted Koppel and the nightly news. Indeed, why else would he deceive U.S. law makers? Why would Walsh be willing to move heaven and earth to go after Weinberger unless Weinberger had deliberately covered up federal malfeasance?

Well, those are all good questions. Yet as it turns out, there was no good reason for Walsh to go after Weinberger, because the shipments were never illegal to begin with. M. Stanton Evans made a forceful case against their illegality in our cover story last week, of course. But now his view has been corroborated by a particularly authoritative source: Walsh's own shop.

We put this question to the chief spokesman for the office, Mary Belcher, on June 24:

Q: "Has the Office of Independent Counsel ever charge anyone with violating the law for implementing Hawk missile shipments to Iran?

A: "No, no, we have not."

And a little later on in the interview.

Q: "Does the independent counsel believe shipments to Iran were illegal?"

A: "We've never made a statement in court to that effect, that the shipments to Iran were illegal. We've never charged that as a crime."

Amazing. Just as Evans pointed out, Weinberger "is being accused of illegal conduct and/or testimony concerning a policy that was itself quite legal, so far as the public record discloses." In fact, so far as the independent counsel admits.

To paraphrase Paul Craig Roberts, only the special counsel's office would be so demented as to invest five and a half years to prosecute a loyal public servant for allegedly "covering up" an incident not even deemed to be unlawful. How can anyone be guilty of concealing a crime when no crime has been committed?

There is also a notion, in hearing and reading reports on the Weinberger indictment, that he denied to the congressional committees probing Iran-Contra that he knew anything about the efforts to ship weapons to Iran when, of course, he was perfectly aware of such efforts.

But this isn't the case at all. Weinberger squarely addressed the various attempts to furnish the weapons, and detailed his vigorous opposition. For instance, the House Iran-Contra panel's deputy chief counsel for the majority, Neil Eggleston, asked Weinberger if he had received in the fall of 1985 "an intelligence report that related to negotiations between American officials and Iranians."

Yes, he did, said Weinberger, and he secured, with the help of his aide, Gen. Colin Powell, even more disturbing information about such negotiations.

Asked if he recalled his "specific objections" at a December 7, 1985, meeting at the White House to proposed arms shipments to Iran, Weinberger responded: "Oh, yes. I ran through a whole group and raised every point that occurred to me, including the fact that we were at the same time asking other countries not to make sales of weapons to Iran, that there was no one of any reliability, or indeed, any sense with whom we could deal in Iran..." By the end of the meeting, he said, he thought his arguments had prevailed with the President with the President, and that "this baby had been strangled in its cradle..."

In another meeting on January 7, however, Weinberger said the President, after Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese had concluded the arms transfer could be done legally, "now had decided" he wanted to go ahead with the Iranian initiative. And in mid-January, Adm. John Poindexter informed Weinberger the President wished to go ahead with the deal.

Weinberger, in short, was not avoiding telling the committee members about the sale of weapons to Iran. He discussed the issue quite freely, saying who he believed favored the idea and who didn't, when the President opposed it, and when he was for it.

What he did deny, however, was that he knew a specific shipment of U.S. Hawk missiles had actually gone to Iran in November 1985. He claimed he found out about it later. That's what he supposedly "lied" about, although non one has yet provided a convincing reason why he would choose to lie about an action he adamantly opposed and which even the independent counsel has never charged as being illegal.

Weinberger, moreover, was hardly firm about his recollection of when or what he knew about the Hawk missile shipment, since he was testifying nearly two years after the event. Asked by House deputy chief counsel for the majority, Neil Eggleston, for instance, if the "November Hawk shipment" was discussed at the December meeting at the White House, Weinberger said: "No, I don't believe so..."

Eggleston: "You think if it had been discussed, you would remember it?"

Weinberger: "I think so, yes. I am not entirely sure. My memory is not as good as it once was, but I don't have any memory [of that] at this point."

Indeed, Senators Daniel K. Inouye (D.-Hawaii) and Warren Rudman (R.-N.H.), the chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the Senate Iran-Contra panel, wrote to Weinberger's lawyer, Robert Bennett, on April 29 of this year that while Weinberger testified he did not have "contemporaneous knowledge of the 1985 arms shipment to Iran through Israel," he also "indicated that his recollection of dates was not as good as it once was and that he had difficulty sorting out what he knew at any particular time form what he had learned later...

"What was important to us, however, was not the date on which the Secretary knew or could have inferred from other information that arms shipments might have taken place, on which the testimony and evidence was murky, but the adamant position that the Secretary consistently took with the President in opposing sales to Iran on which the testimony was incontrovertible...

"Finally, we shall end on a personal note. Our relationship with Secretary Weinberger is professional and not personal. Based upon our dealings with him over the years, we know Secretary Weinberger to be a man of the highest integrity and honor. It is inconceivable to us that he would intentionally mislead or lie to Congress."

What the independent counsel is finally left with is whether Weinberger, as is charged, "concealed from Congress" in his 1987 testimony his personal diary notes on the Iran-Contra affair or made "false statements" to the Office of Independent Counsel about his note-taking practices. Even if he did, there appears to be nothing in his notes that reflects badly on Weinberger or was inconsistent with his congressional testimony or sheds some startling new light on Iran-Contra.

Walsh's shop says that during 1985 and 1986 Weinberger "took more than 1,700 pages of daily notes and hundreds of additional pages of notes from White House meetings," but just a small fraction of those, it turns out, were relevant to Iran-Contra dealings in 1985. And the New York Times reports that some of "these scraps of paper" were "so hard to read that Mr. Weinberger's former aides had to be enlisted to help decipher them..."

Weinberger's defenders also say the notes were ambiguous, and that Weinberger himself informed the Office of Independent Counsel that he had shipped them off to the Library of Congress.

The former defense secretary, furthermore, passed with flying colors a lie detector test on May 5 of this year-given to him by a polygraph examiner of some reputation, Paul Minor- which he responded "no" when asked, among other things, if he had intended to "deliberately mislead any governmental entity, including the Office of Independent Counsel, about your diary notes."

In Weinberger's corner also sits Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell. From July 1983 to March 1986, Powell served as Weinberger's senior military assistant. In his April 21, 1992 affidavit Powell stressed:

"During the period I worked with Secretary Weinberger at the Department of Defense, I observed on his desk a small pad of white paper, approximately 5" x 7". He would jot down on this pad in abbreviated form various calls and events during the day. I viewed it as his personal diary which reflected a record of his life.

"Knowing Secretary Weinberger as I did and knowing the routine way he would jot down notes on these pads, it is entirely possible that it would not have occurred to him to associate or link these private notes on the 5" x 7" pads with a governmental request for 'notes' in the context of the Iran-Contra matter. I do not believe that he would have viewed these as official documents. While I had open access to his office and papers, I never read the notes of the 5" x 7" pads because I considered them a private diary."

In the last several weeks, Powell added, he had been asked by Weinberger's attorneys and the independent counsel to review the defense secretary's diaries. And while he had not reviewed them all, said Powell, "the notes I have seen show a person committed to trying to stop the Administration from transferring arms to Iran but who was frustrated in his efforts...

"Some of the notes I reviewed covered the fall of 1985. These notes do not suggest to me that Secretary Weinberger knew, at the time that they were prepared, that Israel had sent missiles to Iran. I do not believe that I knew in the fall of 1985 that Israel had sent missiles to Iran.

"While I believe we may have heard about such discussions or proposals or suggestions involving such activities, to the best of my recollection we did not know that any such activities had actually been carried out until long after.

"I also wish to emphasize that while the Iran-Contra matter has been given a great deal of attention, it was only a 'blip' on the screen in the Secretary's office during 1985. In the fall of 1985, neither of us spent a great deal of time on this issue."

Colin Powell swears, in effect, that Weinberger has told the truth. Will Walsh now have the courage to indict chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

 
To the best of our knowledge, the text on this page may be freely reproduced and distributed.
If you have any questions about this, please check out our Copyright Policy.

 

totse.com certificate signatures
 
 
About | Advertise | Bad Ideas | Community | Contact Us | Copyright Policy | Drugs | Ego | Erotica
FAQ | Fringe | Link to totse.com | Search | Society | Submissions | Technology
Hot Topics
arturo gatti retires
You vs. Laila Ali in a boxing match
USA beats Brazil 2-1!!!
any othe fencers on totse?
Germany Vs. England
Mundene fight
Chris Benoit Dead
Kimbo Slice vs. Sgt. Ray Mercer June 23rd
 
Sponsored Links
 
Ads presented by the
AdBrite Ad Network

 

 

TSHIRT HELL T-SHIRTS