February 19,  2001

Democrats' Bipartisan Folly
By Robert Parry

In marked contrast to the continuing Republican investigations of President
Clinton, the Democrats eight years ago cooperated with Republicans in
shutting down substantive inquiries that implicated President George H.W.
Bush in a variety of geopolitical scandals.

At that time, the Democrats apparently felt that pursuing those inquiries
into Bush’s role in secret contacts with Iran – both in 1980 and during the
Iran-contra affair – and getting to the bottom of alleged CIA military
support for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the mid-1980s would distract from the
domestic policy goals at the start of the Clinton presidency.

That judgment, however, has come back to haunt the Democrats. Clearing
George H.W. Bush in 1993 ironically set the stage both for the Republican
scandal-mongering against Clinton and for the restoration of the Bush family
dynasty in 2000.

Certainly, the Democratic gestures of bipartisanship were not reciprocated
by the Republicans. They opted for a pattern of aggressive politics that
challenged the Clinton administration from its first days and has continued
through the 2000 Election and into the new round of investigations of
ex-President Clinton.

The Democrats have found themselves constantly on the defensive, sputtering
about the unfairness of it all.

Historic Openings

It might seem like ancient history now, but eight years ago, as the White
House was changing hands from Bush to Clinton, there were promising
opportunities for getting at the truth about the Reagan-Bush era.

Lawrence Walsh’s Iran-contra investigation was still alive, although Bush
had dealt it a severe blow in December 1992 by pardoning six Iran-contra
defendants. That move blocked the Iran-contra cover-up trial of former
Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and the possible incrimination of
President Bush himself.

Despite that setback, Walsh’s investigation had made some new breakthroughs.
Walsh had exposed details of the long-running Iran-contra cover-up. He also
had learned that Bush had withheld his personal diaries from investigators.

Walsh was pressing Bush to sit down for an interview with the special
prosecutor’s office to reconcile Bush’s earlier insistence of little
Iran-contra knowledge with later disclosures revealing Bush’s deeper role.
Walsh had agreed to postpone that questioning during the 1992 campaign, with
the understanding that Bush would submit to the interview afterwards. But
Bush was balking.

Also in December 1992, new witnesses had come forward with evidence that the
Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 indeed had made secret contacts with Iran’s
radical Islamic government while it was holding 52 American hostages. That
hostage crisis in 1980 had eroded President Jimmy Carter’s reelection
support and guaranteed Reagan’s victory.

Now, there was new evidence that the Republicans had been playing games
behind Carter’s back to deny him the October Surprise of a hostage release
before the election.

Privately, some of Walsh’s investigators had come to believe, too, that the
Republican contacts with Iran in 1980 had been the precursor to the later
Iran-contra arms sales in 1985-86. One investigator told me that otherwise
the fruitless Reagan-Bush arms payoffs to Iran in the mid-1980s made little
sense.

New pieces of the 1980 puzzle had surfaced in a congressional October
Surprise inquiry that was still underway in late 1992. A detailed letter
arrived from former Iranian president Abolhassan Bani-Sadr describing the
internal battles within Iran’s government in 1980 about how to respond to
the secret Republican initiative.

In another development, a biographer of French intelligence chief Alexandre
deMarenches testified about deMarenches’s private account of secret meetings
between top Republicans and Iranians in Paris in the fall of 1980.

Perhaps, most remarkably, the Russian Supreme Soviet sent a confidential
report to the U.S. Congress recounting what Soviet intelligence had learned
while tracking the secret Republican-Iranian negotiations in 1980. The
Russians reported, too, that leading Republicans had met with Iranians in
Paris in 1980.

As Bill Clinton was about to take office, there were other lingering
questions about secret Republican dealings with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during
the 1980s. The CIA allegedly had assisted in arranging third-country
supplies of sophisticated armaments to Saddam Hussein in his border war with
Iran.

President Bush had angrily denounced such charges after they were raised
following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. But a number of witnesses were
alleging that the CIA had helped arrange the supplies, including cluster
bombs to Iraq through Chile.

In 1992-93, the Democrats were in a strong position to get to the bottom of
all these historic questions that had so entangled U.S. foreign policy in
the 1980s. The Democrats controlled both houses of Congress as well as the
White House. Walsh was furious with Bush’s Iran-contra pardons and was
considering impaneling a new grand jury to force Bush’s testimony.  [See
Walsh's book, Firewall, for more details.]

Getting answers to these questions also made policy sense, if for no other
reason than it was important for the new administration to know where
diplomatic mine fields might be hidden in this delicate geopolitical
landscape.

Shutting Down

But the Democrats -- led by then-House Speaker Tom Foley and Rep. Lee
Hamilton -- chose a very different course. Apparently believing that
battling for answers would distract from the domestic policy agenda, such as
passage of a universal health care plan, the Democrats chose to shut down
all the investigations.

In December 1992, Foley  signaled Bush that he would have no problem with
the Iran-contra pardons. After the pardons were issued, a few Democrats
groused but no hearings were held and no formal explanation was demanded,
even though this may have been the first time a president had used his
pardon powers to protect himself from possible incrimination.

After the Inauguration, the Clinton administration offered no help to Walsh
in arranging declassification of documents that would have aided his
investigation. When Bush refused to submit to an interview with Walsh’s
prosecutors, the Democrats made not a peep about this final move to obstruct
the Iran-contra investigation.

Faced with a lack of political support, Walsh decided not to call Bush
before a grand jury and shut down his office.

On the 1980 Iran issue, a congressional task force chose to obscure or cover
up the new evidence of Republican guilt. Bani-Sadr’s letter was
misrepresented in the task force’s report as mere speculation. Bani-Sadr's
detailed account of the interplay inside the Iranian government was simply
ignored.

Only those who bothered to dig through the task force report’s appendix
could find out what the Iranian president had actually said. Not a single
story about Bani-Sadr’s letter appeared in major newspapers.

In an odd twist, the task force accepted the testimony about deMarenches’s
account of Republicans meeting Iranians in Paris as “credible,” but then
incongruously dismissed it as irrelevant, since it conflicted with
Republican denials.

The extraordinary Russian report describing what Soviet intelligence files
had shown about the Republican-Iran initiative was simply hidden. There was
no serious follow-up with the Russians to determine how solid their
intelligence was and how they had obtained the information.

The Russian report itself was not mentioned in the final task force report,
nor was its existence disclosed at a news conference unveiling the
bipartisan congressional findings that cleared the Republicans of all
wrongdoing in January 1993.

The Russian report was stuck in a storage room on Capitol Hill where I found
it in 1994. A story about its contents appeared at this Web site in 1995,
but its existence has never been reported by anyone else.

[For a more detailed summary of Bani-Sadr's letter, the deMarenches account
and the Russian report, see a story about the report's author, former
Russian Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin. For more on the congressional task
force, see Robert Parry's book, Trick or Treason, or the October Surprise
X-Files series at this Web site.]

Unexplored avenues of the 1980 investigation – such as alleged Republican
use of the Palestine Liberation Organization to contact Iran – were never
followed. [In 1996, however, PLO leader Yasir Arafat personally told former
President Carter that the Republicans had approached the PLO as potential
emissaries to Iran in 1980, a fact that appeared in Diplomatic History, fall
1996, and in our writings, but again no where else.]

As for the secret Republican-Iraqi ties, those too were buried by the new
Clinton administration. In 1995, when a Reagan national security appointee,
Howard Teicher, submitted a sworn affidavit describing the CIA’s secret
operation to supply Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with cluster bombs through Chile –
just as earlier witnesses had alleged – Justice Department lawyers attacked
Teicher’s credibility. They forced him to back away from his affidavit,
which had been submitted in connection with a criminal case in Florida.

Payback

Beyond obscuring these important chapters of recent history and thus adding
to the confusion of the American people, the Democrats discovered that their
deferential strategy gained them nothing from the Republicans. If anything,
the Democratic behavior was taken as a sign of weakness.

After the Democrats folded the Reagan-Bush investigations, the Republicans
simply swept their easy winnings off the table and raised the stakes.

In early 1993, Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., informed President Clinton that the
Republicans would oppose every part of his economic plan – a threat they
backed up with unanimous GOP blocs against Clinton’s budget proposals, which
survived solely with Democratic votes. Republicans also helped turn Clinton’
s ambitious health-care plan into a fiasco.

Beyond that, the Republicans used the bipartisan findings of Reagan-Bush
innocence to attack and isolate news organizations and investigators who had
pressed for full disclosure. PBS Frontline, which had recruited me to
examine the 1980 Iran hostage case, came under fire for taking seriously a
“baseless conspiracy theory.” The once-courageous documentary program began
trimming its sails and tacking more toward pro-Republican positions to help
protect PBS’s government funding.

Middle East expert Gary Sick, who had judged the 1980 allegations credible,
was denounced and effectively blacklisted from returning to a position in
government. Rep. Henry Gonzalez, D-Texas, who had championed the Iraqi arms
investigation, was left high and dry, looking like an eccentric old man.

By undercutting Walsh, the Democrats gave the Republicans more ammunition
when they chose to use the special-prosecutor apparatus in partisan warfare
against Clinton. Though Walsh was himself a conservative Republican, he was
transformed in the fuzzy minds of the Washington pundit class into a
partisan Democrat who thus justified the appointment of partisan Republicans
to run the investigations of Clinton and his aides.

The consequences inside the mainstream media also were damaging. Reporters
who had taken the Reagan-Bush side in these controversies of the 1980s were
rewarded when those investigations were deemed to be baseless. These
pro-Reagan-Bush reporters got promoted while reporters who had pushed for
thorough investigations were marginalized as “liberals” or “conspiracy
theorists.”

By the time, the Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994 and stepped
up their investigations of the Clinton administration, the national press
corps had few voices left willing to stand in the path of a
conservative-driven stampede.

Increasingly through the 1990s, the national media could be viewed as having
two primary parts. One was a relentless conservative media – from Rupert
Murdoch’s Fox News to Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times, from the talk
radio world of Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy to the racks full of
hard-right magazines, such as the American Spectator and the Weekly
Standard, from the Christian right TV to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial
page, from conservative newspaper columnists to TV pundits.

The other part of the media was the mainstream press that was owned by
bottom-line-oriented corporations and staffed by journalists who understood
that their careers were best promoted by avoiding the tag “liberal.” These
journalists had learned the lessons of the 1980s and recognized that there
was no danger in tilting their reporting to the right. There also were real
benefits in reporters proving that they were not liberal, by being
especially hard on Democrats.

There was also a tiny “leftist” media – The Nation, Mother Jones, In These
Times, etc. Many of these leftist publications and their commentators
despised Clinton because of his New Democrat policies and thus ended up on
the same side as the conservatives in attacking his administration, though
for different reasons.

Clinton Scandals

This media imbalance ensured that every Clinton administration mistake, no
matter how petty, would be seized on as a major “scandal” with congressional
hearings, media breast-beating and appointments of special prosecutors –
while conversely there would be no interest in reexamining any of the
Reagan-Bush scandals from the 1980s.

Clinton’s sloppy Whitewater real estate investment, therefore, became the
subject of nearly eight years of investigations, with side trips into such
trivial matters as the Travel Office firings and the mistaken delivery of
FBI files to the White House – none of which led to any charges related to
the actions of Bill or Hillary Clinton.

Conservatives and some leftist journalists also promoted bogus allegations
suggesting that White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster had been murdered,
though investigation after investigation found his death to be an obvious
suicide. The right-wing attack machine added to the clouds of suspicion by
distributing lists of so-called “mysterious deaths” pinned on Clinton.

Stepping back and viewing this process in its totality, the “Clinton
scandals” had the look of a CIA-style “black propaganda” operation. Just as
false or exaggerated charges were planted against U.S. adversaries in
Guatemala in the 1950s or in Chile in the 1970s or in Nicaraguan in the
1980s, now those tactics were turned against an American president.

The right-wing attack machine’s most notable success was in funding Paula
Jones as she lodged dubious – and shifting – claims against Clinton for
allegedly exposing himself to her as a come-on. Although lacking legal
merit – the case eventually was rejected by a Republican judge in Arkansas –
the Paula Jones case enabled conservative lawyers to corner Clinton with
questions about his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

At that point, Clinton lied, trying to keep the relationship secret. His
deception – compounded by his finger-waving denial on national television –
handed the Republicans their ultimate victory in discrediting this
Democratic president.

Though Clinton survived impeachment, his reputation was permanently sullied.
The public’s displeasure with Clinton’s personal behavior also damaged Vice
President Gore’s campaign to succeed his boss.

Saving George W.

Ironically, the Democratic strategy of taking dives on the scandals of the
1980s came back to whack the party another way.

Having protected the reputation of President George H.W. Bush in 1993, the
Democrats found themselves faced with the strong candidacy of Bush’s son,
Texas Gov. George W. Bush, whose principal qualification – arguably his only
qualification – was the honorable reputation of his father.

In veiled references to the so-called “Clinton squalor,” Gov. Bush promised
to restore “honor and dignity” to the White House. Because of the decisions
made eight years earlier, the Democrats had no effective response to this
Bush campaign pledge. They simply hoped that the American people would not
punish Gore for Clinton’s personal misdeeds.

By the late 1990s, however, the national news media recognized only one
currency for framing scandals: they had to be Clinton-Gore stories, even if
the evidence pointed in a very different direction. So when the Chinese
espionage scandal broke in spring 1999, the media framed it as another
Clinton-Gore scandal, although the facts were that the key U.S. nuclear
secrets had been lost in the mid-1980s.

Similarly, as Campaign 2000 began, the media transformed Gore – a staid,
serious public servant – into a pathological liar who lived in a world of
his own delusions. Often, this disqualifying image was based on false or
highly distorted reading of the facts. Gore, for instance, was frequently
quoted as having claimed to have “invented” the Internet, when he never made
that claim.

In another situation, major newspapers wrote that Gore had claimed credit
for discovering the Love Canal toxic waste problem. Gore supposedly had
said, “I was the one that started it all.” Actually, Gore had been referring
to a similar toxic waste case in Toone, Tenn., and had said, “That was the
one that started it all.”

Only grudging corrections were made by the news media, often in the context
of making new accusations about other supposed exaggerations. The
journalists responsible for this inept reporting appeared to suffer no
adverse consequences. They were still covering the campaign as it ended.

Some Republicans have cited their success in tagging Gore as a liar – and
thus linking Gore to Clinton’s deception about Lewinsky – as crucial in
making the 2000 election competitive.

Recount Battle

The media imbalance proved critical on Election Night and the days that
followed. A key turning point in the election occurred when The Associated
Press and other news organization involved in exit polling determined that
Al Gore was the choice of Florida voters. The loss of Florida seemed to doom
George W. Bush’s hopes.

In an unusual Election Night scene, however, Bush summoned a news crew to
the room where he was watching the returns with family members. Bush
challenged the exit poll results in Florida and the news media quickly
backpedaled on its “mistake” in calling Florida for Gore.

By early morning, Fox News, working with a Bush cousin, flipped the call and
gave Florida to Bush, with enough electoral votes to put Bush over the top
for the presidency. Other news outlets followed. Though the networks also
retreated from that call, voters turning on the television sets on Nov. 8
had the impression that Bush had won the presidency and that it was time for
Gore to concede.

In the five weeks that followed, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his subordinates
worked to certify Florida’s electoral votes for his brother while Republican
operatives did all they could to stop a thorough recount that appeared
likely to give Gore a Florida victory.

On Nov. 22, Republican hooligans charged the offices of the Miami-Dade
canvassing board where a recount was starting. With the Republicans pounding
on the doors, the canvassing board reversed itself and stopped the recount.
The media treated the reversal as a victory for Bush, with little outrage
over the strong-arm tactics.

The next night, these Republican activists – many recruited from GOP
congressional staffs in Washington – celebrated at a Ft. Lauderdale hotel
and received a thankful telephone call from Bush and Cheney, according to
the Wall Street Journal. With few exceptions, the media showed little
interest in this strange scene of a would-be president and vice-president
thanking rioters.

Meanwhile, Gore reined in his supporters and concentrated on the courts. On
Dec. 8, Gore seemed to be rewarded for this confidence when the Florida
Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount of ballots that had been rejected
by machine tabulations. The recount began on Dec. 9, with canvassing boards
discovering scores of clearly marked ballots that had been rejected.

The Bush team, however, was determined to halt the count. Its first attempt
with the conservative federal appeals court in Atlanta was rebuffed, but
Bush’s lawyers had better luck with five conservatives on the U.S. Supreme
Court. In an unprecedented act in American history, the five justices
stopped the counting of votes in a U.S. presidential election.

Three days later, on Dec. 12, the same five justices prevented a resumption
of the counting and handed the presidency to Bush. Despite the brazen power
play, most major media again handled the story primarily as a Bush victory
and a Gore defeat.

More than anything, the media seemed to crave normalcy, and that was
interpreted as a restoration of Bush rule. Gore’s half-million-vote-plus
victory in the national popular vote was treated as an irrelevance.

More Hearings

The eight years of Clinton-bashing weren’t over either. As Clinton left the
White House, he, too, seemed to have learned little about the rules of
engagement in this new age of “information warfare.”

His decision to pardon fugitive commodities trader Mark Rich raised some
legitimate questions about Clinton’s penchant for “feeling the pain” of his
wealthy contributors. But Clinton did have more defensible reasons for
pardoning Rich, including appeals from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and
a former Mossad director who had worked with Rich on Middle East peace
initiatives.

Nevertheless, the Republicans saw another opportunity to drive up Clinton’s
negatives. They twinned the Rich pardon flap with exaggerated claims about
Democrats vandalizing the White House before they left. The strong
impression to the public was that George W. Bush indeed had arrived to
restore “honor and dignity” to the White House.

Clinton complained in one interview that he had been “blind-sided.” Other
Democrats fumed about the Bush success in hyping the vandalism allegations.
[See The Washington Post, Feb. 18, 2001] But the tactics should not have
come as any surprise.

As they had for almost a decade, the Democrats let the Republicans determine
which situations deserved investigations and which ones didn’t. While
Republicans conducted new hearings on Clinton’s pardons – a contrast to the
lack of hearings on George H.W. Bush’s Iran-contra pardons in 1992 – the
Democrats made no move to force an investigation of the GOP power plays
around the Florida recount.

The only congressional hearing on the Florida case was called by
Republicans – and that was for the Orwellian purpose of having news
executives explain why their “erroneous” projections had shown Al Gore to be
the voters’ choice in Florida.

Though the Democrats have the right to demand hearings in the evenly split
Senate, they appeared to have no stomach for confrontational hearings about
the Florida showdown, clearly one of the most important political events in
recent U.S. history.

Thanks to this Democratic timidity, no Republican has been called on the
carpet for dispatching hooligans to south Florida. No conservative Supreme
Court justice has been compelled to justify the unprecedented interference
in the electoral process that meant negating more than 50 million votes cast
by American citizens for Al Gore.

None of Jeb Bush’s aides has been hauled before Congress to explain how
thousands of African-American voters apparently were purged from voting
lists based on an inaccurate computer program for eliminating supposed
felons. [See BBC story on What Really Happened in Florida?, Feb. 16, 2001.]

Having retreated so far and so often, today’s Democrats seem incapable of
fighting back. It is a pattern of behavior that – as much as anything – has
made the Republicans the dominant political force in Washington and left
American democracy in an endangered state.

Robert Parry is an investigative reporter who broke many of the Iran-contra
stories in the 1980s for The Associated Press and Newsweek.

What Can Be Done?

How can the current political situation that is endangering American
democracy be corrected? One thing is certain. It will not be easy.

Since we started Consortiumnews.com in 1995, our focus has been on what to
do about the deterioration of the national news media. Our original goal was
twofold: to seek out financial resources for supporting honest journalism –
hence the notion of a consortium – and  to produce and disseminate as much
serious investigative reporting as we could.

In the past five years, we have succeeded in generating hundreds of original
investigative articles about important topics that otherwise were receiving
little or no press attention. However, we did not succeed in locating
significant sources of funding for this work.

That failure forced us to curtail our efforts about a year ago, though we
have continued the work on a part-time basis, supported by small individual
donations.

It remains our belief that convincing people with resources to support
tough, honest, non-ideological journalism is a necessary first step in
revitalizing American democracy.

We also believe that there must be a new news media that consciously
counterpoises itself to the existing media: the conservative press, the
mainstream press, and even the tiny leftist press. This new media must be
information-based, not opinion-based. It must work to give the American
people the serious information they need to act as informed citizens.

To be successful, the scope of this new media must be ambitious. There are
various forms this media could take – from magazines and Web sites to a
cable network – but it must be well-financed. There is a need for a kind of
Marshall Plan for honest journalism.

>From such a media could come a more engaged public. Some of that we have
seen in the enthusiastic reception our Web site has received from many
Americans dissatisfied with the wretched news media they now have. A
well-informed grassroots movement, in turn, could embolden politicians to
stand up for the truth, knowing that they will not be left alone and vulnerable.

We understand that media will not solve all the problems of this endangered
democracy, but we are convinced that it is a necessary first step.

One of the lessons that we have learned from this recent era is that
cowardice comes in small pieces, concessions that might seem insignificant
at the time but that cumulatively have a devastating consequence. We
believe, too, that courage also comes slowly at first, when individuals
begin to stand up for what’s right -- and that courage, too, can gain a
powerful momentum.