A couple of decades back I called Democratic Representative Lee Hamilton a coverup artist. He was always on key committees where he'd discourage investigations into all things national security.
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius has become the latest voice of influence to sing the praises of former Rep. Lee Hamilton, who is almost universally hailed in U.S. power circles as a modern-day Wise Man, a Democratic centrist who shuns partisanship and puts love of country over politics.
But the sad truth is that Lee Hamilton has done great damage to the U.S. political process by elevating bipartisanship above a commitment to the truth. One reason why many Americans buy into baseless conspiracy theories today is that Hamilton failed to expose real conspiracies when he was in Congress.
For instance, it was surely "bipartisan" in August 1986 when Hamilton joined other members of the House Intelligence Committee, including Rep. Dick Cheney, in concluding that stories about White House aide Oliver North running money and guns to the Nicaraguan contras were false.
Hamilton, then the committee’s chairman, accepted denials from North and his boss, National Security Adviser John Poindexter, and agreed to kill a proposed congressional investigation into what was then known as “the North network.”
Since I and my Associated Press colleague Brian Barger had been writing the stories about North’s secret operation (based then on about two dozen sources), I got a call from one of Hamilton’s aides and was told that Hamilton and the panel had the choice of “believing you and your 24 sources or these honorable men. And it wasn’t a close call.”
It was, however, an erroneous call. And it was not without consequences, both in the larger scheme of things and on the personal side.
At the AP that summer, Barger had been assigned to the overnight desk as a way to transition him onto the AP regular staff (he originally had been hired into a temporary position to work with me on the North project). However, in August, Barger was informed that his time on the overnight would be extended indefinitely, a development that prompted Barger to quit.
If Hamilton had done his duty – by insisting on a real investigation to get at the truth about North's network instead of caving in to Cheney and the other Republicans – our situation at AP would have been quite different. With a congressional investigation validating our reporting, I probably could have sprung Barger from his overnight assignment and kept our team together.
Instead, Hamilton’s out-of-hand rejection of an investigation amounted to a repudiation of our work – our critics quickly noted that even the Democrats deemed our reporting not worthy of pursuit – and AP management was left with an impression that we had taken the news agency out onto a dangerous limb.
In the bigger picture, Hamilton was demonstrating what would become his M.O., putting bipartisanship and collegiality ahead of truth and accountability.
For the next few months, the AP investigation of North, which also had lifted the curtain on the Reagan administration’s tolerance of contra drug trafficking, remained in limbo.
However, on Oct. 5, 1986, one of the last planned flights by North’s little contra-supply air force was shot down over Nicaragua. One American onboard, Eugene Hasenfus, survived and began talking.
Between Hasenfus’s account and documents that were recovered from the plane, it became clear that not only were our earlier articles about the North network true but that the secret contra supply operation was bigger and more sophisticated than we had understood.
Nevertheless, President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George H.W. Bush and other officials continued to deny a U.S. government connection to the downed plane. Apparently, the White House remained confident that it could fend off the growing evidence. After all, it had successfully co-opted Hamilton and the intelligence committee in August.
But the scandal continued to grow. In early November 1986, a Beirut newspaper disclosed Reagan’s secret arms-for-hostages deals with Iran.
Reagan and his subordinates issued another round of hearty denials, but their bluster was finally not enough. By late November, the two disclosures – the contra supplies and the Iranian arms deliveries – became linked when evidence emerged that North had crossed the two operations by diverting profits from the Iran arms sales to fund the contra war.
The Iran-Contra scandal was born. Yet, despite Hamilton’s earlier failure to detect the secret North network, the House Democratic leadership still turned to him to lead the investigation. Hamilton was made co-chairman of the joint congressional Iran-Contra probe, with Cheney assuming the role as the administration’s chief defender.
As the Iran-Contra investigation picked up speed in early 1987, I was offered a job at Newsweek, and – given all the strife that had surrounded our investigation at AP – I decided it was the right time to leave.
My first stories at Newsweek revealed that the Iran-Contra scandal reached much higher than had been known and that the White House had begun a frantic cover-up aimed at shielding Reagan from possible impeachment.
Amid this new investigative momentum, there also was an opportunity to examine possibly the darkest part of the Iran-Contra underbelly, the Reagan administration’s concealment of contra-connected cocaine traffickers – out of fear that Americans would recoil if they knew this ugly reality about Reagan’s “freedom-fighters.”
However, it soon became clear that Hamilton envisioned his role not as a determined pursuer of the truth but as a conciliator seeking a bipartisan solution that would bring the nasty scandal to a politically acceptable conclusion without damaging the capital’s fragile political comity.
In 1987, Hamilton undertook a series of decisions that altered the course of American history, at least as it is available to the public. Over the resistance of other Democrats on the Iran-Contra panel, Hamilton struck a generous deal with Cheney and the Republicans to grant North immunity in exchange for his testimony, without requiring pre-hearing questioning.
Hamilton also didn’t push very hard against the White House insistence that the scandal was just the work of a few overzealous underlings. Though Reagan was chastised for enabling violations of law, he mostly got a pass, as did Vice President Bush despite strong evidence that Bush’s office was overseeing the entire operation.
As the committee’s final report was being written, some Democratic investigators pressed for inclusion of their discovery of a covert domestic propaganda campaign that the White House had organized to intimidate journalists – and even members of Congress – who brought to light unflattering information about the contras.
The investigators prepared a draft chapter dedicated to this remarkable discovery, but three “moderate” Republican senators – William Cohen, Warren Rudman and Paul Trible – balked at signing the majority report if it included this explosive new information.
Eager for some GOP support – since Cheney and the other Republicans were preparing a minority report denying any Iran-Contra wrongdoing – Hamilton agreed to delete the chapter although allowing a few of its findings to be sprinkled into the executive summary.
Hamilton got his three Republican signatures, but the “compromise” meant almost no American would understand how the public had been manipulated by pro-contra propaganda.
As for the contra drug trafficking scandal, the Hamilton-led investigation chose to take testimony only behind closed doors and to exclude the topic from the final report. That “compromise” served to solidify Washington’s misguided conventional wisdom that the contra-cocaine issue was a “conspiracy theory.”
In 1996, nearly a decade later, investigative reporter Gary Webb revived the contra-drug scandal with a series for the San Jose Mercury News, describing how contra cocaine helped fuel the nation’s crack epidemic. But his reporting was widely ridiculed by the major U.S. news media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, which reflected Hamilton's earlier brushing aside of the contra-cocaine problem.
It would take until 2000 for the House Intelligence Committee – long after Hamilton had left the panel – to grudgingly acknowledge that the earlier stories about Reagan’s CIA protecting contra drug traffickers were true.
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