American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [68]
Given who was in charge, we shouldn’t be too surprised at the task force’s conclusions. In 1993, the House report found “no credible evidence supporting any attempt by the Reagan presidential campaign—or persons associated with the campaign—to delay the release of the American hostages in Iran.” Lee Hamilton noted that the vast majority of sources for the allegation were “wholesale fabricators or were impeached by documentary evidence.”27 Washington Post columnist David Broder lauded Hamilton as the “conscience of Congress” for repudiating the accusations.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee also conducted a small-scale investigation. They’d imposed travel restrictions on checking out leads in Europe, denied subpoena power, and claimed a shortage of funds. The Secret Service wouldn’t allow any questioning of agents who might have gone with Bush to Paris. The Senate’s report, issued on November 19, 1992, said the “vast weight of all available evidence” was that Bush never made that trip to cut a deal with Iran.
William Casey was dead by now, and his family decided not to supply any of his records. Donald Gregg, a member of Bush’s NSC staff after working more than 30 years for the CIA, failed a lie-detector test on the matter, but the Senate committee would only say “that Gregg’s response was lacking in candor.”28 The House found “credible” French intelligence sources about the Paris meetings, but still concluded somehow that it was all “baseless.”29
As for that report by the Russians, which ended up in Hamilton’s hands two days before he was to announce the Task Force’s conclusions, he instead took at face value a cable from an American Embassy official in Moscow that the report might be “based largely on material that has previously appeared in the Western media.” (Not the Times or the Post, I’ll bet!) The Russians continued to insist that the intel was their own and reliable; they considered the report “a bomb” and “couldn’t believe it was ignored .”30
There’s one journalistic hero in all this, and it’s Robert Parry. He just kept plugging away and, in 1984 after he uncovered Oliver North’s role in the Iran-Contra story for Newsweek, he was awarded the George Polk Award for National Reporting. Pretty soon, though, he was persona non grata with the establishment media, so he started Consortium News as an online magazine dedicated to investigative reporting. He’s also written several books, and he’s still out there pitching for truth.
Most other journalists stayed the course with Lee Hamilton. Newsweek did a piece headlined: “The October Surprise Charge: Treason; Myth.” The New Republic called it “The Conspiracy That Wasn’t.” The author of that piece was Steven Emerson, who is today considered one of our top authorities on Islamic extremists, their financing and operations. Since 9/11, he’s given many briefings to Congress on Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other networks. To say the least, he’s a well-connected journalist.31
I can’t let this chapter go without talking a little about Bill Clinton’s reaction to it all, after he defeated Bush to become president in 1992. Twice emissaries from Iran told members of his cabinet about those Republican contacts with Islamic radicals close to Khomeini. But Clinton turned away, or at least his team did, not wanting to open themselves to charges of playing