After 9/11 ... executive assassination ring ...Gov within Gov
Howie
assassination ring'"
What fascinates me, over halfway down, is the 'government within the
government' remark regarding Cheney & Elliot Abrams who were reunited
in the George W. Bush White House and decided that the key lesson from
Iran-Contra was that too many people in the administration knew about
it.
see:
The Iran Contra scandal.
(Hersh said the Reagan administration came to office with a clear
goal of finding a way to finance covert actions, such as the funding
of the Nicaraguan Contras, without appropriations so that Congress
wouldn't know about them. Mondale noted that Reagan had signed a law
barring further aid to the Contras, then participated in a scheme to
keep the aid flowing. Hersh said that two key veterans of Iran-Contra,
Dick Cheney and national security official Elliot Abrams, were
reunited in the George W. Bush White House and decided that the key
lesson from Iran-Contra was that too many people in the administration
knew about it.)
And the Bush-Cheney years.
(Said Hersh: “The contempt for Congress in the Bush-Cheney White
House was extaordinary.” Said Mondale of his successor, Cheney, and
his inner circle: “they ran a government within the government.” Hersh
added: “Eight or nine neoconservatives took over our country.” Mondale
said that the precedents of abuse of vice presidential power by Cheney
would remain "like a loaded pistol that you leave on the dining room
table.")
Jacobs pressed both men on the question of whether the frequent abuses
of power show that the Constitution fails, because these things keep
happening, or whether it works, because these things keep coming to
light.
Mondale stuck with the happy answer. “The system has come through
again and again,” he said. Presidents always think they will get away
with it, but eventually reporters like Hersh bring things to light,
the public “starts smelling this stuff,” the courts and the Congress
get involved. Presidents “always, in the long run, find out that the
system is stronger than they are.”
Hersh seemed more troubled by the repetitions of the pattern. The
“beautiful thing about our system” is that eventually we get new
leaders, he said. “The evil twosome, Cheney and Bush, left,” Hersh
said. But he also said “it’s really amazing to me that we manage to
get such bad leadership, so consistently.”
And he added that both the press and the public let down their guard
in the aftermath of 9/11.
“The major newspapers joined the [Bush] team,” Hersh said. Top editors
passed the message to investigative reporters not to “pick holes” in
what Bush was doing. Violations of the Bill of Rights happened in the
plain sight of the public. It was not only tolerated, but Bush was re-
elected.
And even Mondale admitted that one of his greatest successes, laws
reforming the FBI and CIA in the aftermath of the Church Committee,
were supposed to fix the problem so that “we would never have these
problems again in the lifetime of anyone alive at the time, but of
course we did.”