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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (339463)	1/7/2003 2:04:52 PM
From: Baldur Fjvlnisson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Do they keep Reagan garbage in inventory? Why didn't they start another gestapo with this guy? ---------------------------- An unwelcome parting gift from Lott Friday, January 03, 2003 By WAYNE MADSEN northjersey.com OUTGOING SENATE Republican leader Trent Lott had one more nasty surprise for the American people before he announced he was quitting his leadership post. He nominated former Navy Secretary John Lehman as a member of the "independent" Sept. 11 investigation commission, passing over former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H., a respected former head of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a co-chair, along with former Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colo., of a federal blue-ribbon Commission on National Security that recommended drastic changes in the U.S. intelligence infrastructure before the attacks in 2001. Lehman was Navy secretary from 1981 to 1987 and presided over Ronald Reagan's buildup to a 600-ship Navy. But Lehman also presided over one of the worst cover-ups in the Navy's entire 227-year history. Long before the Roman Catholic Church pedophile scandal, the U.S. Navy experienced one of its own. It involved at least one U.S. Naval Academy graduate, P-3 Orion naval pilots with access to nuclear weapons (the P-3 Orion is an anti-submarine warfare aircraft), personnel with top-secret clearances, and officers in leadership positions of trust akin to those of clergymen. The Navy's pedophilia scandal broke in the quiet and serene Oregon coastal town of Coos Bay on Sept. 11, 1982, when the commanding officer of the U.S. Naval Facility, a classified submarine tracking station, was arrested by local police for involvement in child pornography and lascivious acts with minors, including sodomy. The arrest followed a 2-month-long investigation involving the FBI and the Naval Investigative Service. At a general courts-martial held later that year, the commanding officer, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and P-3 Orion pilot having both Critical Nuclear Weapons Design Information and top-secret communications security clearances was found guilty of 16 counts of sodomy and lewd conduct. Immediately after the Coos Bay arrest, Lehman's Navy Department bureaucracy went into cover-up mode. Reporters from the local NBC television affiliate in Coos Bay were barred from both the naval base and the dependents' housing area. A team of Navy counselors, chaplains, and child psychiatrists from Bethesda Naval Hospital, who were alerted to fly to Oregon to treat and offer assistance to the young victims and their families, was abruptly ordered to stand down. And before long, the Navy acted as if the incident never even occurred. The potential for damage to the Navy's reputation was evident as reports surfaced of other Navy pedophile rings at Moffett Field Naval Air Station near San Jose, Calif., and U.S. naval bases in the Philippines and at San Diego. Some senior naval officers, allegedly including one flag rank officer, were quietly and quickly retired. According to one NIS investigator, the Coos Bay arrest opened up a Pandora's box of pedophile cases in the Navy and, according to a number of federal law enforcement officials in Portland, Seattle, and Washington, the cover-up of the incidents "went right to the top" - and the top at the time was John Lehman. The Navy also pressured the state of Oregon and Coos County not to investigate independently the Coos Bay incident any further, saying that its investigation never turned up any evidence that civilian children in Oregon were victimized. Throughout the next few years, Navy public affairs officers were ordered to stonewall reporters. In many respects, John Lehman was no different than Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law in covering up an incident later described by a senior naval officer as among the top 10 most damaging incidents in the history of the U.S. Navy. However, unlike John Lehman, Cardinal Law had the decency to acknowledge the scandal and ultimately resign his office over the church's pedophilia scandal. Rewarding an arch-cover up artist like John Lehman with a seat on the Sept. 11 investigation commission is a disservice to the families of the victims of the terrorist attacks who are seeking answers to why it happened and closure to their horrific tragedies. Wayne Madsen was the operations officer at Naval Facility Coos Head, Ore., from 1980 to 1982 and assisted the FBI and NIS in the investigation as a temporary special agent. His columns frequently appear in Intelligence Online (www.intelligenceonline.com) and Counter Punch (www.counterpunch.com).