Dr. Hamilton and Mr. Hyde
By Jerry Meldon
March 27, 2008
Editor’s Note: Whenever the Republicans have a touchy
national-security scandal to put to rest, their favorite Democratic
investigator is Lee Hamilton. Over the years, Hamilton has developed a
reputation as a very reasonable fellow who knows how far he can go without
ruffling too many important feathers.
Hamilton’s carefully honed skill for balancing truth
against political comity has elevated him to the status of a Washington Wise
Man. In this guest essay, however, Jerry Meldon suggests that attendees at a
Tufts conference on the Middle East might want to ask Hamilton about his past
compromises with history.
(Plus, at the end of the essay, you may want to read an
addendum from reporter Robert Parry on two questions that might be posed to
Hamilton about decisions he made in wrapping up the so-called “October
Surprise” case):
When former Rep. Lee Hamilton gives the keynote address –
entitled “Iraq: Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond” – at a Tufts University symposium
on March 27, he may be thankful if he doesn’t have to discuss “yesterday.”
He probably would prefer not to revisit fateful decisions
he made while chairing investigations into Republican dirty work, especially
those that let George H.W. Bush off the hook and cleared George W. Bush's path
to the White House.
As veteran journalist Robert Parry has persuasively
argued at Consortiumnews.com, the Bush family name squeaked through the 80’s
and early 90’s essentially mud-free, only because:
--On Christmas Eve 1992, lame-duck President George H.W.
Bush pardoned six of his earlier co-conspirators in the Iran-Contra affair (the
Reagan-Bush White House’s diversion of profits from illegal arms sales to Iran
to bankroll Nicaragua’s contra terrorists in defiance of a congressional ban).
Until he was pardoned that day, former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger
might have bought clemency by testifying against co-conspirator Bush.
-- After Bush left office on Jan. 20, 1993, President
Bill Clinton (along with other senior Democrats, including Hamilton) cut short
a congressional inquiry into Bush’s secret billion-dollar loans to Saddam
Hussein and did nothing to help Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh penetrate the
Iran-Contra cover-up.
--Hamilton also soft-pedaled two key congressional
inquiries. The first investigated the Iran-Contra scandal in 1987 and the
second examined allegations that the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign team had struck
a treasonous deal with the hostage-holding Iranian government while Jimmy
Carter was still president.
Conventional wisdom has attributed the
target-friendliness of those latter investigations to Mr. Hamilton's celebrated
spirit of bipartisanship.
After all, what else could have persuaded Hamilton to
narrow the scope of the Iran-Contra investigation in order to placate Dick
Cheney and the rest of the committee's Republicans, if not his desire to appear
bipartisan?
And how else to explain Hamilton’s ill-advised decision
to join with the panel’s Republicans (in defiance of all but one other
Democrat) and immunize the testimony of a man on whom it had the goods, Marine
Lt. Col. Oliver North (whose operations in the Old Executive Office Building
had been exposed by reporter Parry in 1985-86)?
Thus emboldened, the cocky Col. North proceeded to cover
up for then-Vice President Bush, and North was spared a felony record because
his later criminal conviction was reversed because of his immunized testimony,
which Hamilton had helped arrange.
Hamilton’s Iran-Contra performance was troubling. But he
went several steps further when he chaired the October Surprise Task Force and
handed the Reagan-Bush administration a deck full of get-out-of-jail-free
cards.
In the lead-up to the 1980 election, Republicans feared
that Jimmy Carter would pull off an "October Surprise" and talk the
Iranians into releasing 52 American hostages. Carter's failure to do so led to
Reagan’s landslide victory.
However, over the next several years, a parade of
individuals alleged that Carter failed only because the Republicans had
secretly agreed to arm Iran in exchange for a delay in the hostages’ release.
Heated Republican denials notwithstanding, the fact
remained that the Iranians chose to end the hostages’ 444-day ordeal within
hours of Reagan’s inauguration. To put the nasty rumors to rest more than a
decade later, the House Foreign Affairs Committee formed a task force under the
leadership of Henry Hyde, R-Illinois, and … Lee Hamilton.
The task force was charged with examining allegations
that in the summer and fall of 1980 Republican heavyweights, notably the vice
presidential candidate, former CIA director George H.W. Bush, and the campaign
director, future CIA director William J. Casey, had secretly flown to Europe to
strike the fateful deal.
The key issue was the veracity of Bush’s and Casey’s
alibis.
In the heat of his 1992 re-election campaign, an angry
President Bush accused the task force of waging a “witch hunt.” Obligingly,
Hamilton and Hyde disclosed that partially redacted Secret Service records
backed Bush's alibi, thus clearing him of suspicion.
However, Spencer Oliver, chief counsel to the House
Foreign Affairs Committee, objected, asking why key sections of those records
were blacked out; why one crucial entry asserted a trip to a Maryland country
club that Bush never took; and why the identity of a person who supposedly met
with Bush was withheld from the task force.
Oliver charged that the Bush administration was
stonewalling:
“They have sought
to block, limit, restrict and discredit the investigation in every possible way
… President Bush’s recent outbursts [about] his whereabouts in mid-October of
1980 are disingenuous at best since the administration has refused to make
available the documents and the witnesses that could finally and conclusively
clear Mr. Bush.”
Journalist Parry
adds: “The Bush administration flatly refused to give any more information to
the House task force unless it agreed never to interview [Mr. Bush's] alibi
witness and never to release [that person’s] name. Amazingly, the task force
accepted the administration’s terms.”
Hamilton’s treatment of Mr. Bush was outrageously
deferential. But it was pit-bull-like compared to how he handled the attempts
to provide the late Mr. Casey with an alibi.
The Republicans first insisted that Casey could not have
flown to meet with the Iranians when it was alleged that he did, because on
that particular weekend he had attended a historical conference in London.
But that alibi had to be ditched when historian and
conference attendee Robert Dallek reported that Casey had missed a
strategically timed morning session.
No problem.
A new alibi was introduced that instead placed Casey at
California’s Bohemian Grove retreat. As it turned out, Casey had indeed stayed
at the Bohemian Grove, only not on the decisive weekend.
Unfazed, Hamilton’s task force acted as if Casey's alibi
remained solid and issued a report that exonerated both Casey and Bush.
Not long afterward, task force co-chair Henry Hyde
acknowledged that Casey’s 1980 passport had vanished along with key pages in
his personal calendar.
Unperturbed, Lee Hamilton penned a New York Times Op-Ed
in which he cited Casey’s so-called alibi in insisting that the House task
force’s report “should put the controversy to rest once and for all.”
Only later did journalist Robert Parry rummage through
the task force’s records to discover a photograph of the 16 men who had been at
the Bohemian Grove on that notorious weekend in the summer of 1980 in the
company, it was claimed, of William Casey.
Casey was not in the photo, a fact that the task force
had conveniently neglected to report. [For more details on the October Surprise
mystery, see Parry’s 2004 book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush
Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]
So, on March 27 – as Mr. Hamilton participates in the
Fares Center’s symposium, “The United States and the Middle East: What Comes
Next After Iraq?” – the Tufts community will have the opportunity to ask Mr.
Hamilton exactly why he has repeatedly kept Americans in the dark about
critical episodes of their nation’s history in dealing with the Middle East.
Jerry Meldon is an associate professor of chemical
engineering at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. He can be contacted
at jerry.meldon@tufts.edu
Addendum from reporter Robert Parry:
If someone does get to ask Hamilton a question or two on
the October Surprise case, there are two new points worth pressing him on:
One, task force chief counsel Larry Barcella told me in
an interview that so much incriminating evidence was pouring in to the task
force at the end of 1992 that he recommended to Hamilton that the investigation
be extended a few months so the new material could be evaluated.
Hamilton refused and instead ordered the report to be
issued exonerating the Bush-Casey crowd. Barcella said Hamilton cited the
complexity of getting the task force re-authorized heading into a new Congress.
But shouldn't evidence of such a serious political crime
and of such an important historical event take precedence over clerical matters
like getting an extension approved?
Two, on Jan. 11, 1993, just two days before the House
task force issued its debunking report, Hamilton received a classified report
from the Russian Duma's national security committee revealing what Moscow's
intelligence files showed about the U.S. October Surprise controversy.
The Russian report confirmed that Casey, Bush and CIA
officer Robert Gates had attended meetings in Europe with senior Iranian
officials regarding the Iran hostage crisis in 1980.
However, the House task force did nothing with this
remarkable report, besides stick it in a box with other papers from the
investigation.
Two days later, on Jan. 13, 1993, Hamilton presided over
a press conference dismissing the October Surprise allegations, but he made no
reference then or at any time since to the Russian report, which I later
recovered from the files.
Barcella told me that the task force didn't want to be
bothered with trying to get it declassified. So they stuck it in the box. (He
envisioned it ending up in a giant government warehouse, like in “Raiders of
the Lost Ark.”)
But why didn't Hamilton (who took over as chairman of the
House Foreign Affairs Committee in 1993) arrange for the Russian report to be
declassified and shared with the American people?
I know these may not be exactly topical questions, but
they do relate to U.S. dealings with the Middle East, especially given Iran's
current role in Iraq. Many of the same Iranians from the October Surprise case
(such as Karrubi and Rafsanjani) are still active.
Thanks. Robert Parry
