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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (2612)	2/14/2004 11:57:33 PM
From: zonkie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

Since you mentioned the Iran Contra affair ---- This article is long and most have probably already read it so I won't post all of it here. Well worth reading if you haven't seen it though. ____________________ With probes, making his mark By John Aloysius Farrell, Globe Correspondent, 6/20/2003 ASHINGTON -- On a summer day in 1986, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gathered behind closed doors off the chamber floor to hear the sales pitch of a brash freshman, Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts. Fifteen years earlier, Kerry had appeared before the same committee to denounce the Vietnam War, challenging the senators to answer the question: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Now, at age 42, Kerry was a senator himself, the US was embroiled in another anti-communist crusade in a distant land, and Kerry was determined to prevent a repeat of Vietnam. He had spent the spring conducting an unauthorized investigation into reports that the Reagan administration was illegally providing aid to the rebel Nicaraguan Contra armies, which were attempting to overthrow the left-wing government of that Central American nation. At this closed session, he planned to urge the committee to launch an official probe. On this and related issues, Kerry's relentless drive "came largely from Vietnam veteran syndrome," said former aide and investigator Jack Blum, describing the disillusionment that returning soldiers often felt as a result of that divisive war. "You come home and discover that people who are running the war are just interested in covering their ass; meanwhile, real people are dying real deaths. ... This was a very searing business." To Kerry's critics -- and they were especially fierce toward a Massachusetts liberal at the height of Reagan's popularity -- the action seemed like another case of Kerry grandstanding. Several committee members were wary of Kerry's reputation for self-promotion; one griped aloud that the senator's staff was already leaking to the press. The Republican senators who controlled the committee owed their majority status to Reagan's popularity. Privately, they were feeling increasing pressure from a shadowy figure at the White House, a Marine lieutenant colonel named Oliver North, who was orchestrating support for the contras. But behind the scenes, Kerry had forged an unlikely alliance with Senator Jesse Helms, the hidebound conservative from North Carolina. As the senior Republican on the committee, Helms was the key to Kerry's hopes. And the key to Helms was the drug war. In the course of their investigation, Kerry and his staff had found evidence that some contras had ties to drug smuggling. If there was one class of villain that Helms deplored as much as the communists, it was drug traffickers. On matters of political philosophy, Kerry and Helms were polar opposites. Yet each was something of a maverick, contemptuous of the capital's courtiers and willing to rock the clubby Senate. "I spent time with Jesse," Kerry recalls. "I talked to him. Talked his language. Jesse didn't believe the same things I did in many cases, but he was a gentleman. He was a man of his word." As Kerry finished his presentation, the senior members turned to Helms, taking his temperature on the issue. "Jesse? What do you think about this?" asked Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the panel, according to a transcript of the then-secret session. "I know you are a contra supporter." "I will tell you what I do not support, and John Kerry and I have talked about this: anybody sending drugs into this country," Helms told his colleagues. "I do not care whose side they are on." Helms was on board. The committee reached a consensus: It would investigate the contras and the contra-drug connection. ________________ continued at --> boston.com