Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by freemason9 » Wed Sep 26, 2012 10:16 pm
by compared2what? » Wed Sep 26, 2012 10:41 pm
by Iamwhomiam » Wed Sep 26, 2012 11:07 pm
by Lottie McLotsaluck » Thu Sep 27, 2012 6:05 pm
Iamwhomiam wrote:I had quite a chuckle listening to Willard talk about the 345K American jobs lost during O's reign, condemning him for its occurrence.
I wonder how many of those Bain was responsible for. Anyone have those figures?
by Allegro » Thu Sep 27, 2012 9:48 pm
by justdrew » Fri Sep 28, 2012 6:05 am
by seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 28, 2012 9:28 am
Netanyahu, Romney to Speak Friday
12:00 AM, SEP 28, 2012 • BY DANIEL HALPER
THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has scheduled a phone call for late morning Friday with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Admissions on Nixon’s ‘Treason’
June 14, 2012
Special Report: Definitive proof of a historical mystery is often elusive, even with archival documents and memoirs. Skeptics can always say some witness or some evidence isn’t perfect. But the case that Richard Nixon sabotaged the Vietnam peace talks in 1968 to win that pivotal election is clear, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Republicans have long bristled at allegations that Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign helped sink Vietnam peace talks to win the election, but Nixon’s Asian counterparts – both in Saigon and Washington – have been much more open about the collaboration, what President Lyndon Johnson privately called “treason.”
In perhaps the most complete account from the South Vietnamese side – The Palace Fileby Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold L. Schecter – Hung recounts detailed interviews with his former boss, South Vietnam’s President Nguyen van Thieu, and with Nixon’s chief emissary to Thieu, China Lobby leader Anna Chennault.
President Lyndon Johnson meeting with South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu on July 19,1968.
Both Thieu and Chennault described messages from Nixon’s campaign urging the South Vietnamese to boycott Johnson’s peace talks in the crucial days before the Nov. 5, 1968, election, according to The Palace File, published in 1986. Chennault made similar admissions in her own memoir, The Education of Anna, in 1980.
Upset by LBJ’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war with North Vietnam, Thieu followed the Republican advice and – just days before the election – balked at the Paris peace talks, thus denying Democrat Hubert Humphrey a last-minute boost that might have cost Nixon his narrow victory. Nixon then continued the war for four more years.
Another key figure in the 1968 dramga was South Vietnam’s Ambassador to the United States Bui Diem, who addressed the sabotage allegations in his own memoir, In the Jaws of History, published in 1987.
Bui Diem acknowledged many of the facts about his meetings with Republicans and his infamous cable to Saigon conveying the desire of “many Republican friends” that Thieu “stand firm” against Johnson’s pressure. But Bui Diem insisted there was nothing wrong in these contacts and communications.
Despite his claims of innocence, Bui Diem’s admissions lend factual support to the case against Nixon. For instance, Bui Diem recounted a private meeting with Nixon at the Hotel Pierre in New York City on July 12, 1968. It was attended by Nixon’s campaign manager John Mitchell and Chennault.
At the end of the meeting, “Nixon thanked me for my visit and added that his staff would be in touch with me through John Mitchell and Anna Chennault,” Bui Diem wrote.
According to Chennault’s account of the same meeting, Nixon also told Bui Diem that as President he would make Vietnam his top priority and “see that Vietnam gets better treatment from me than under the Democrats.” [See The Palace File.]
Deeper Distrust
After the meeting with Nixon, Bui Diem said he grew more alienated from President Johnson and the Democrats as they pressed for peace talks to end the war. By then, more than 30,000 American troops had died and the conflict was ripping the United States apart.
“As the Democrats steered with all due haste away from the Indochinese involvement they had engineered, I was increasingly attracted to the Republican side,” Bui Diem wrote. “As far as courting Republicans went, there were few places in Washington like Anna Chennault’s penthouse apartment at the Watergate. …
“By October [1968] I was back in touch with Anna, who was now co-chairman of Nixon’s fundraising committee, and Senator John Tower, chairman of the Republican Key Issues Committee. I also got together with George [H.W.] Bush and other Republicans from whom I was trying to elicit support for a strong Vietnam policy.”
Bui Diem’s reference to Bush may seem odd, since Bush at the time was only a freshman congressman from Texas. However, Bush, the son of former Sen. Prescott Bush and the scion of a well-connected Wall Street family, was already emerging as an important behind-the-scenes player in Washington.
Despite his back-bench status in Congress and his relative youth – then 44 – Bush made Nixon’s short list for vice president before Nixon picked Spiro Agnew. Nixon then recruited Bush to be a leading surrogate for the 1968 campaign.
(In subsequent years, Bush would remain a Nixon favorite, getting financial support from a Nixon slush fund to run for the U.S. Senate in 1970 and, after losing, getting appointments as United Nations ambassador and as Republican National Committee chairman in 1973, when he spearheaded efforts to contain the Watergate scandal.)
But Bui Diem’s linking Bush to the Republican/Saigon collaboration in fall 1968 is provocative. Bush was later implicated in a similar scheme in 1980 when he was Ronald Reagan’s running mate and allegedly took part in secret Republican efforts to sabotage President Jimmy Carter’s talks with Iran to free 52 American hostages. [See Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege or Consortiumnews.com’s “New October Surprise Series.”]
In fall 1968, Bui Diem said he was surprised that discovery of his covert contacts with Republicans angered the Johnson administration. In his memoir, he also claimed to be perplexed to receive an inquiry from the Christian Science Monitor, just before the election, about those contacts and his possible interference with peace talks.
Bui Biem said he rebuffed the Monitor’s questions, but then went back to examine his recent cables to Saigon. He noted that there were a couple of messages that might have understandably raised suspicions about his role in Republican efforts to disrupt Johnson’s peace initiative.
“I found a cable from October 23 … in which I had said, ‘Many Republican friends have contacted me and encouraged us to stand firm. They were alarmed by press reports to the effect that you [President Thieu] had already softened your position.’
“In another cable, from October 27, I wrote, ‘I am regularly in touch with the Nixon entourage,’ by which I meant Anna Chennault, John Mitchell, and Senator [John] Tower,” a Texas Republican and another Nixon favorite.
Bui Diem said those were the only two relevant cables, adding: “They certainly did not mean that I had arranged a deal with the Republicans. But putting the two together and looking at them in the context of the charged pre-election atmosphere, I saw that they constituted circumstantial evidence for anybody ready to assume the worst.”
He also conceded that Chennault “had other avenues to Thieu, primarily through his brother, Nguyen Van Kieu, a South Vietnamese ambassador to Taiwan.”
Thieu’s Version
President Thieu’s fullest account of the peace-talk gambit was recounted by his former aide, Nguyen Tien Hung, in The Palace File. Hung (with Jerrold Schecter) wrote, Thieu “believed that Richard Nixon owed him a political debt as a result of his refusal to support President Lyndon Johnson’s peace initiative just before the U.S. 1968 election.
“Although he never said so publicly, Thieu was certain that his refusal to take part in the peace talks with the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong when President Johnson halted the bombing of North Vietnam on October 31, 1968, just five days before the election, played a decisive role in Nixon’s victory.”
Hung said that after he became a special assistant to Thieu in 1973, they discussed these events over many hours. Thieu described his arrangement with the Republicans as one of mutual benefit, since he believed “a Humphrey victory would mean a coalition government in six months” but “with Nixon at least there was a chance.”
Hung/Schecter reported that “Anna Chennault visited Saigon frequently in 1968 to advise Thieu on Nixon’s candidacy and his views on Vietnam. She told him [Thieu] then that Nixon would be a stronger supporter of Vietnam than Humphrey.”
Thieu also bypassed his Washington embassy for some of his messages to Chennault, Hung/Schecter wrote. “He relied heavily on his brother Nguyen Van Kieu” and that “Mrs. Chennault often sent messages to Thieu through aides to his brother.”
Based on interviews with Chennault, Hung/Schecter reported that she claimed that John Mitchell called her “almost every day” urging her to stop Thieu from going to the Paris peace talks and warning her that she should use pay phones to avoid wiretaps.
Hung/Schecter wrote: “Mitchell’s message to her was always the same: ‘Don’t let him go.’ A few days before the election, Mitchell telephoned her with a message for President Thieu, ‘Anna, I’m speaking on behalf of Mr. Nixon. It’s very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position and I hope you have made that clear to them.’”
Chennault said, “Thieu was under heavy pressure from the Democrats. My job was to hold him back and prevent him from changing his mind.”
Nixon’s Trump Card
Nixon’s intelligence operation also benefited from inside information from Henry Kissinger, a foreign policy aide to banker David Rockefeller and an informal adviser to the Vietnam negotiations. But Kissinger wasn’t Nixon’s only source of news. Johnson himself apprised Nixon and the other leading candidates of the peace-talk progress.
But Nixon’s trump card may have been knowing that Johnson’s efforts to achieve a breakthrough before the Nov. 5 election could be countered by President Thieu’s intransigence, privately encouraged by the Republicans.
As Hung/Schecter wrote: “Throughout October 1968 Thieu tried to delay the Johnson bombing halt decision and an announcement of Paris Talks as long as possible to buy time for Nixon. … He knew that Johnson would proceed on his own, so he did not openly object to Johnson’s proposal but only to the specifics of its terms.”
For his part, Johnson became increasingly aware of the double game being played by Thieu and Nixon as the days counted down to the election. Johnson was hearing sketchy reports from U.S. intelligence that Thieu was dragging his feet in anticipation of a Nixon victory.
“Top Secret” reports from the National Security Agency informed President Johnson that Thieu was closely monitoring the political developments in the United States with an eye toward helping Nixon win the Nov. 5 election.
For instance, an Oct. 23, 1968, report – presumably based on NSA’s electronic eavesdropping – quotes Thieu as saying that the Johnson administration might halt the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam as part of a peace maneuver that would help Humphrey’s campaign but that South Vietnam might not go along. Thieu also appreciated the other side of the coin, that Johnson’s failure would help Nixon.
“The situation which would occur as the result of a bombing halt, without the agreement of the [South] Vietnamese government … would be to the advantage of candidate Nixon,” the NSA report on Thieu’s thinking read. “Accordingly, he [Thieu] said that the possibility of President Johnson enforcing a bombing halt without [South] Vietnam’s agreement appears to be weak.” [Click here and here.]
By Oct. 28, 1968, according to another NSA report, Thieu said “it appears that Mr. Nixon will be elected as the next president” and that any settlement with the Viet Cong should be put off until “the new president” was in place.
Wall Street Tip
The next day, Oct. 29, national security adviser Walt Rostow received the first clear indication that Nixon might actually be coordinating with Thieu to sabotage the peace talks. Rostow’s brother, Eugene, who was Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, wrote a memo about a tip from a source in New York who had spoken with “a member of the banking community” who was “very close to Nixon.”
The source said Wall Street bankers – at a working lunch to assess likely market trends and to decide where to invest – had been given inside information about the prospects for Vietnam peace and were told that Nixon was obstructing that outcome.
“The conversation was in the context of a professional discussion about the future of the financial markets in the near term,” Eugene Rostow wrote. “The speaker said he thought the prospects for a bombing halt or a cease-fire were dim, because Nixon was playing the problem … to block. …
“They would incite Saigon to be difficult, and Hanoi to wait. Part of his strategy was an expectation that an offensive would break out soon, that we would have to spend a great deal more (and incur more casualties) – a fact which would adversely affect the stock market and the bond market. NVN [North Vietnamese] offensive action was a definite element in their thinking about the future.”
In other words, Nixon’s friends on Wall Street were placing their financial bets based on the inside dope that Johnson’s peace initiative was doomed to fail. (In another document, Walt Rostow identified his brother’s source as Alexander Sachs, who was then on the board of Lehman Brothers.)
A separate memo from Eugene Rostow said the speaker had added that Nixon “was trying to frustrate the President, by inciting Saigon to step up its demands, and by letting Hanoi know that when he [Nixon] took office ‘he could accept anything and blame it on his predecessor.’” So, according to the source, Nixon was trying to convince both the South and North Vietnamese that they would get a better deal if they stalled Johnson.
In a later memo to the file, Walt Rostow recounted that he learned this news shortly before attending a morning meeting at which President Johnson was informed by U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Ellsworth Bunker about “Thieu’s sudden intransigence.” Walt Rostow said “the diplomatic information previously received plus the information from New York took on new and serious significance.”
That same day, Johnson ordered FBI wiretaps of Americans in touch with the South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington and quickly learned that Anna Chennault was holding curious meetings with South Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem.
Working the Phones
Johnson began working the phones contacting some of his old Senate colleagues, including Republican Senate Leader Everett Dirksen, to urge that they intercede with Nixon to stop his campaign’s peace-talk sabotage.
“He better keep Mrs. Chennault and all this crowd tied up for a few days,” Johnson told Dirksen on Oct. 31, 1968, according to a tape recording of the call released in 2008. That night, Johnson announced a bombing halt intended to ensure North Vietnamese participation in the talks.
However, on Nov. 2, 1968, Johnson learned that his protests had not shut down the Nixon operation. The FBI intercepted the most incriminating evidence yet of Nixon’s interference when Anna Chennault contacted Ambassador Bui Diem to convey “a message from her boss (not further identified),” according to an FBI cable.
According to the intercept, Chennault said “her boss wanted her to give [the message] personally to the ambassador. She said the message was that the ambassador is to ‘hold on, we are going to win’ and that her boss also said, ‘hold on, he understands all of it.’ She repeated that this is the only message … ‘he said please tell your boss to hold on.’ She advised that her boss had just called from New Mexico.”
In quickly relaying the message to Johnson at his ranch in Texas, Rostow noted that the reference to New Mexico “may indicate [Republican vice presidential nominee Spiro] Agnew is acting,” since he had taken a campaign swing through the state.
That same day, Thieu recanted on his tentative agreement to meet with the Viet Cong in Paris, pushing the incipient peace talks toward failure. That night, at 9:18, an angry Johnson from his ranch in Texas telephoned Dirksen again, to provide more details about Nixon’s activities and to urge Dirksen to intervene more forcefully.
“The agent [Chennault] says she’s just talked to the boss in New Mexico and that he said that you must hold out, just hold on until after the election,” Johnson said. “We know what Thieu is saying to them out there. We’re pretty well informed at both ends.”
Johnson then renewed his thinly veiled threat to go public. “I don’t want to get this in the campaign,” Johnson said, adding: “They oughtn’t be doing this. This is treason.”
Dirksen responded, “I know.”
Johnson continued: “I think it would shock America if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter of this importance. I don’t want to do that [go public]. They ought to know that we know what they’re doing. I know who they’re talking to. I know what they’re saying.”
The President also stressed the stakes involved, noting that the movement toward negotiations in Paris had contributed to a lull in the violence. “We’ve had 24 hours of relative peace,” Johnson said. “If Nixon keeps the South Vietnamese away from the [peace] conference, well, that’s going to be his responsibility. Up to this point, that’s why they’re not there. I had them signed onboard until this happened.”
Dirksen: “I better get in touch with him, I think.”
“They’re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war,” Johnson said. “It’s a damn bad mistake. And I don’t want to say so. … You just tell them that their people are messing around in this thing, and if they don’t want it on the front pages, they better quit it.”
A Worried Nixon
After hearing from Dirksen, Nixon grew concerned that Johnson might just go public with his evidence of the conspiracy. At 1:54 p.m. on Nov. 3, trying to head off that possibility, Nixon spoke directly to Johnson, according to an audiotape released in 2008 by the LBJ Library.
“I feel very, very strongly about this,” Nixon said. “Any rumblings around about somebody trying to sabotage the Saigon government’s attitude, there’s absolutely no credibility as far as I’m concerned.”
However, armed with the FBI reports and other intelligence, Johnson responded, “I’m very happy to hear that, Dick, because that is taking place. Here’s the history of it. I didn’t want to call you but I wanted you to know what happened.”
Johnson recounted some of the chronology leading up to Oct. 28 when it appeared that South Vietnam was onboard for the peace talks. He added: “Then the traffic goes out that Nixon will do better by you. Now that goes to Thieu. I didn’t say with your knowledge. I hope it wasn’t.”
“Huh, no,” Nixon responded. “My God, I would never do anything to encourage … Saigon not to come to the table. … Good God, we want them over to Paris, we got to get them to Paris or you can’t have a peace.”
Nixon also insisted that he would do whatever President Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk wanted, including going to Paris himself if that would help. “I’m not trying to interfere with your conduct of it; I’ll only do what you and Rusk want me to do,” Nixon said, recognizing how tantalizingly close Johnson was to a peace deal.
“We’ve got to get this goddamn war off the plate,” Nixon continued. “The war apparently now is about where it could be brought to an end. The quicker the better. To hell with the political credit, believe me.”
Johnson, however, sounded less than convinced by Nixon’s denials. “You just see that your people don’t tell the South Vietnamese that they’re going to get a better deal out of the United States government than a conference,” the President said.
Still professing his innocence, Nixon told Johnson, “The main thing that we want to have is a good, strong personal understanding. After all, I trust you on this and I’ve told everybody that.”
“You just see that your people that are talking to these folks make clear your position,” Johnson said.
According to some reports, Nixon was gleeful after the conversation ended, believing he had tamped down Johnson’s suspicions. However, privately, Johnson didn’t believe Nixon’s protestations of innocence.
A Last Chance
On Nov. 4, the White House received another report from the FBI that Anna Chennault had visited the South Vietnamese embassy. Johnson also got word that the Christian Science Monitor was onto the story of Nixon undermining the peace talks.
Saville Davis of the Monitor’s Washington bureau approached Ambassador Bui Diem and the White House about a story filed by the Monitor’s Saigon correspondent, Beverly Deepe, regarding contacts between Thieu’s government and the Nixon campaign.
Deepe’s draft article began: “Purported political encouragement from the Richard Nixon camp was a significant factor in the last-minute decision of President Thieu’s refusal to send a delegation to the Paris peace talks – at least until the American Presidential election is over.”
The Monitor’s inquiry gave President Johnson one more chance to bring to light the Nixon campaign’s gambit before Election Day, albeit only on the day before and possibly not until the morning of the election when the Monitor could publish the story.
So, Johnson consulted with Rostow, Rusk and Defense Secretary Clark Clifford in a Nov. 4 conference call. The advisers were unanimous that Johnson shouldn’t go public, citing the risk that the scandal would reflect badly on the U.S. government.
“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected,” Clifford said. “It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.”
Johnson concurred with the judgment, and an administration spokesman told Davis, “Obviously I’m not going to get into this kind of thing in any way, shape or form,” according to another “eyes only” cable that Rostow sent Johnson. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Almost Scoop on Nixon’s ‘Treason.’”]
The Consequences
The next day, Nixon narrowly prevailed over Humphrey by about 500,000 votes or less than one percent of the ballots cast.
On the day after the election, Rostow relayed to Johnson another FBI intercept which had recorded South Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem saying, prior to the American balloting, that he was “keeping his fingers crossed” in hopes of a Nixon victory.
On Nov. 7, Rostow passed along another report to Johnson about the thinking of South Vietnam’s leaders. The report quoted Major Bui Cong Minh, assistant armed forces attaché at the South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, saying about the peace talks: “Major Minh expressed the opinion that the move by Saigon was to help presidential candidate Nixon, and that had Saigon gone to the conference table, presidential candidate Humphrey would probably have won.”
Johnson continued to hope that Nixon, having won the election, would join in pressing for Saigon’s participation in the peace talks and a breakthrough before Johnson left office on Jan. 20, 1969. But the breakthrough was not to be.
When Nixon met Thieu on Midway Island on June 8, 1969, in their first face-to-face sit-down since the election, Nixon unveiled his plan for a gradual “Vietnamization” of the war, while Thieu sought more U.S. guarantees, according to The Palace File.
Hung/Schecter recounted Thieu explaining Nixon’s assurances in a later meeting with Taiwan’s leader Chiang Kai-shek.
“He promised me eight years of strong support,” Thieu told Chiang. “Four years of military support during his first term in office and four years of economic support during his second term. … By the time most of the Americans have withdrawn, so will the North Vietnamese; by then Saigon should be strong enough to carry on its own defense with only material support from the United States.”
Nixon’s plan proved unsuccessful. Yet, having allegedly made his secret commitment to the South Vietnamese regime, Nixon kept searching for violent new ways to get Thieu a better deal than Johnson would have offered. Seeking what he called “peace with honor,” Nixon invaded Cambodia and stepped up the bombing of North Vietnam.
Before U.S. participation in the war was finally brought to a close in 1973 — on terms similar to what had been available to President Johnson in 1968 — a million more Vietnamese were estimated to have died. Those four years also cost the lives of an additional 20,763 U.S. soldiers, with 111,230 wounded.
The failure of Johnson and the Democrats to call Nixon out on his possible “treason” also left Nixon with a sense of invulnerability, a gambler’s confidence after succeeding at a high-stakes bluff.
When it came to his reelection campaign, Nixon pushed more chips onto the table. Feeling that he had snookered the savvy Johnson, why not hoodwink the entire democratic process by rigging the selection of his Democratic opponent?
Nixon’s worries about Johnson’s file on the peace-talk gambit led him into a frantic search for its location. He didn’t realize that Johnson had ordered Rostow to take the file out of the White House when Johnson departed on Jan. 20, 1969.
On June 17, 1971, upon hearing that the file might be in a safe at the Brookings Institution, Nixon ordered a break-in by operatives under former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt. The order apparently marked the start of Nixon’s “plumbers’ operation” that led to the failed Watergate break-in at the Democratic National Committee one year later. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Dark Continuum of Watergate."]
Though Nixon’s Watergate bet turned bad – forcing Nixon to resign in disgrace on Aug. 9, 1974 – his legacy of ruthless politics lived on, in part, because he and his cohorts were never held accountable for their interference in the Vietnam peace talks. In fact, there was never even an official investigation of the case.
Many of the same Republican characters circled back to a parallel situation in 1980 when President Carter was struggling to negotiate the release of 52 American hostages held in Iran.
The tale of the 1980 October Surprise case involved George H.W. Bush (who also had served as CIA director under Nixon’s successor, President Gerald Ford); Kissinger (who shows up on the fringes); and even Nixon himself (who continued to offer advice to Republicans from his post-resignation exile). [See Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege or Consortiumnews.com’s “New October Surprise Series.”]
Over the ensuing years, a pattern emerged. Republicans played an anything-goes game of hardball, while Democrats sought to avoid ugly confrontations. Even at the rare moments when the Republicans appeared to get caught, they became masters at raising doubts about witnesses and noting that the evidence wasn’t perfect.
Key October Surprise Evidence Hidden
By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
May 6, 2010
A Russian government report, which corroborated allegations that Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign interfered with President Jimmy Carter’s Iran-hostage negotiations in 1980, was apparently kept from the Democratic chairman of a congressional task force that investigated the charges a dozen years later.
Lee Hamilton, then a congressman from Indiana in charge of the task force, told me in a recent interview, “I don’t recall seeing it,” although he was the one who had requested Moscow’s cooperation in the first place and the extraordinary Russian report was addressed to him.
The Russian report, which was dropped off at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow on Jan. 11, 1993, contradicted the task force’s findings – which were released two days later – of “no credible evidence” showing that Republicans contacted Iranian intermediaries behind President Carter’s back regarding 52 American hostages held by Iran’s Islamic revolutionary government, the so-called October Surprise case.
I was surprised by Hamilton’s unfamiliarity with the Russian report, so I e-mailed him a PDF copy. I then contacted the task force’s former chief counsel, attorney Lawrence Barcella, who acknowledged in an e-mail that he doesn’t “recall whether I showed [Hamilton] the Russian report or not.”
In other words, the Russian report – possibly representing Moscow’s first post-Cold War collaboration with the United States on an intelligence mystery – was not only kept from the American public but apparently from the chairman of the task force responsible for the investigation.
The revelation further suggests that the congressional investigation was shoddy and incomplete, thus reopening the question of whether Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980 was, in part, set in motion by a dirty trick that extended the 444-day captivity of the hostages who were freed immediately after Reagan was sworn into office on Jan. 20, 1981.
The coincidence between Reagan’s inauguration and the hostage release was curious to some but served mostly to establish in the minds of Americans that Reagan was a tough leader who instilled fear in U.S. adversaries. However, if the timing actually resulted from a clandestine arms-for-hostage deal, it would mean that Reagan’s presidency began with an act of deception, as well as an act of treachery.
The Russian report also implicates other prominent Republicans in the Iranian contacts, including the late William Casey (who was Reagan’s campaign director in 1980), George H.W. Bush (who was Reagan’s vice presidential running mate), and Robert Gates (who in 1980 had been a CIA officer on the National Security Council before becoming executive assistant to Carter’s CIA Director Stansfield Turner).
Casey, who served as Reagan’s first CIA director, died in 1987 before the 1980 allegations came under scrutiny. Bush, who was President during the task force’s 1992 inquiry, angrily denied the accusations at two news conferences but was never questioned under oath. Gates, who was CIA director in 1992 and is now President Barack Obama's Defense Secretary, also has brushed off the suspicions.
Competing Offers
As described by the Russians, the 1980 hostage negotiations boiled down to a competition between the Carter administration and the Reagan campaign offering the Iranians different deals if the hostages were either released before the election to help Carter or held until after the election to benefit Reagan.
The Iranians “discussed a possible step-by-step normalization of Iranian-American relations [and] the provision of support for President Carter in the election campaign via the release of American hostages,” according to the U.S. Embassy’s classified translation of the Russian report.
Meanwhile, the Republicans were making their own overtures, the Russian report said. “William Casey, in 1980, met three times with representatives of the Iranian leadership,” the report said. “The meetings took place in Madrid and Paris.”
At the Paris meeting in October 1980, “R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA Director George Bush also took part,” the Russian report said. “In Madrid and Paris, the representatives of Ronald Reagan and the Iranian leadership discussed the question of possibly delaying the release of 52 hostages from the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran.”
Both the Reagan-Bush Republicans and the Carter Democrats “started from the proposition that Imam Khomeini, having announced a policy of ‘neither the West nor the East,’ and cursing the ‘American devil,’ imperialism and Zionism, was forced to acquire American weapons, spares and military supplies by any and all possible means,” the Russian report said.
According to the Russians, the Republicans won the bidding war. “After the victory of R. Reagan in the election, in early 1981, a secret agreement was reached in London in accord with which Iran released the American hostages, and the U.S. continued to supply arms, spares and military supplies for the Iranian army,” the Russian report continued.
The deliveries were carried out by Israel, often through private arms dealers, the Russian report said. [For text of the Russian report, click here. To view the U.S. embassy cable that contains the Russian report, click here.]
The Russian report came in response to an Oct. 21, 1992, query from Hamilton, who asked the Russian government what its files might show about the October Surprise case. The report came back from Sergey V. Stepashin, chairman of the Supreme Soviet’s Committee on Defense and Security Issues, a job roughly equivalent to chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
In what might have been an unprecedented act of cooperation between the two longtime enemies, Stepashin provided a summary of what Russian intelligence files showed about the October Surprise charges and other secret U.S. dealings with Iran.
In the 1980s, after all, the Soviet KGB was not without its own sources on a topic as important to Moscow as developments in neighboring Iran. The KGB had penetrated or maintained close relations with many of the intelligence services linked to the October Surprise allegations, including those of France, Spain, Germany, Iran and Israel.
History had shown, too, that the KGB had spies inside the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. So, Soviet intelligence certainly was in a position to know a great deal about what had or had not happened in 1980.
The Supreme Soviet’s response was delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow by Nikolay Kuznetsov, secretary of the subcommittee on state security. Kuznetsov apologized for the “lengthy preparation of the response.” It was quickly translated by the U.S. embassy and forwarded to Hamilton.
Lost Report
However, if the recollections of Hamilton and Barcella are correct, the report may never have reached Hamilton, instead being intercepted by Barcella who had previously acknowledged to me that he decided to simply file the report away in boxes containing the task force documents.
After I discovered the Russian report in one of those boxes in late 1994, I failed to get a response to questions I placed with Hamilton’s congressional staff. Back then, Hamilton was a powerful figure in Congress, transitioning from being chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to being the panel’s ranking Democrat.
Years later, in 2004, while working on the book Secrecy & Privilege, I managed to get Barcella on the phone to ask him why the task force hadn’t at least released the Russian report along with the final task force report which had reached a contradictory conclusion.
Barcella explained that the Russian report had arrived late and its classification, as “confidential,” meant that it couldn’t simply be made public. Instead he said he filed it away, assuming it would disappear into some vast government warehouse, “like in the movie ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark.’”
In that interview, Barcella also acknowledged that new evidence implicating the Republicans in the October Surprise intrigue arrived in December near the end of the investigation, leading him to ask Hamilton to extend the investigation for a few more months so the new material could be evaluated, but that Hamilton refused.
However, the task force report – released on Jan. 13, 1993 – reflected none of that uncertainty, as it attacked various witnesses who claimed knowledge of the secret Republican-Iranian contacts. The task force claimed to have established solid alibis for the whereabouts of Bill Casey and other key Republicans on dates of alleged meetings with Iranians.
In my view, many of the task force’s alibis and other key findings were misleading or downright false. [For details, see Secrecy & Privilege.]
However, in 1993, Washington’s conventional wisdom was that the October Surprise story was a bogus conspiracy theory, despite the fact that many of the same Reagan figures had been caught lying about the secret Iran-Contra guns-for-hostages negotiations in 1985-86.
Back on the Radar
The October Surprise case popped back onto my radar in late February 2010 while I was traveling in Los Angeles. I received an e-mail from one of the former task force members, ex-Rep. Mervyn Dymally, D-California. Since we were both in Los Angeles, I suggested meeting for breakfast, which we did.
Dymally said he was pulling together some of his papers and was surprised to learn that Hamilton and task force vice chairman, Republican Henry Hyde, had forwarded the task force report to House Speaker Thomas Foley with a letter indicating that there had been a unanimous vote approving the debunking findings on Dec. 10, 1992.
Dymally said he never voted to approve the findings and indeed tried to submit a dissent to the final report, only to face resistance from Hamilton and Barcella. Dymally added that Hamilton called him in January 1993, demanding that the dissent be withdrawn.
“If it were the case [that there had been a unanimous vote on Dec. 10, 1992], why call me in January and talk to me about the dissent,” Dymally said. “I didn’t know of any meeting on the tenth.”
Dymally’s dissent letter had protested some of the absurd alibis that Barcella and the task force were using to establish Casey’s whereabouts on key dates. For instance, the task force claimed that because someone had written down Casey’s home phone number on one day that proved Casey was at home, and that because a plane flew from San Francisco directly to London on another date, Casey must have been onboard.
According to sources who saw Dymally’s dissent, it argued that “just because phones ring and planes fly doesn’t mean that someone is there to answer the phone or is on the plane.” But Barcella reportedly was furious over the prospect of a dissent and enlisted Hamilton to pressure Dymally into withdrawing it.
In an interview with me back in 1993, Dymally, who had just retired from Congress, said the day his dissent was submitted, he received a call from Hamilton warning him that if the dissent was not withdrawn, “I will have to come down hard on you.”
The next day, Hamilton, who was taking over the House Foreign Affairs Committee, fired the staff of the Africa subcommittee that Dymally had headed. The firings were billed as routine, and Hamilton told me back then that “the two things came along at the same time, but they were not connected in my mind.”
Hamilton said his warning to Dymally had referred to a toughly worded response that Hamilton would have fired off to Dymally if the dissent had stood. Hoping to salvage the jobs of some of his staff, Dymally agreed to withdraw the dissent.
However, Dymally told me at our Los Angeles breakfast that he never approved the report and was certainly not onboard for a unanimous vote on Dec. 10, 1992, which came more than a month after Congress had adjourned in that election year.
Russian Mystery
I also asked Dymally if he had known of the Russian report or the other late-arriving evidence that had supposedly led Barcella to recommend an extension of the task force investigation. Dymally said he knew of neither.
Because of Dymally’s dispute about the unanimous vote, I began contacting other ex-task force members to plumb their recollections. I tracked down two former congressmen who had served on the task force, Edward Feighan and Sam Gejdenson. Neither had a clear recollection of the vote, but were stumped when asked about the Russian report and Barcella’s proposed extension.
One Democratic congressional staffer who had served on the investigation told me that interest in the October Surprise inquiry faded quickly after the November 1992 election when Democrat Bill Clinton defeated President George H.W. Bush in his bid for a second term. The focus of Official Washington turned to staffing the new administration, he said.
The Washington Establishment also had a great fondness for the departing President, so there was a feeling that pursuing old scandals that might implicate him in wrongdoing would be excessive. Incoming President Clinton also wanted to focus the Democrats on gaining as much bipartisan goodwill for his agenda as possible.
When I first spoke with Hamilton recently, he said his memory also was foggy regarding the events of the early 1990s, including the circumstances surrounding the supposedly unanimous vote by task force members. But he said he would not have claimed a unanimous vote if there had not been one.
Regarding Barcella's claim that he had urged an extension of the investigation and that Hamilton had turned him down, Hamilton suddenly bristled.
“That would have been an extraordinary development,” Hamilton said, indicating that he would have remembered that. “We would not have closed an investigation if there was pending evidence.”
When I asked Hamilton about the Russian report, he responded, “none of that is ringing a bell with me.” I then e-mailed him a PDF file of the Russian report.
Barcella’s Response
I also contacted Barcella, who is now a lawyer in private practice at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP. He responded via e-mail, beginning with some personal insults:
“It's sad that after so many years, you're still obsessing over this. It's equally sad that you have insisted on one-sided interpretations and twisted characterizations of things. Nonetheless, at the risk of feeding your quixotic obsession, here's my best recollection, recognizing it is at best partial after nearly 2 decades.
“The information from Russia came in literally at the last minute. It's [sic] source was unclear and needed verification. The information was hardly self-authenticating and lacked detail. Russia was in chaos in this immediate post-Soviet Union period and information and disinformation was spewing out like and uncapped oil well.
“The Task Force report was either printed or at the printers. The Task Force authorization was expiring or expired. It was only authorized for that Congress and that congress had expired. I spoke briefly w/ Lee [Hamilton] and don't recall whether I showed him the Russian report or not.
“He felt ham-strung, as there was a new Congress, a new(and Democratic)President, a new Administration and new priorities and nothing could be done w/o a whole new re-authorization process. The original authorization had been very acrimonious and had taken weeks and weeks.
“He wasn't sure there was any stomach for fighting for re-authorization, particularly given the thoroughness of the investigation and confidence in the results. There's no doubt in my mind that if It were up to Lee, he would have given me the green light.
“The realist in him knew that the House leadership wasn't going to break their pick on a re-authorization fight.”
Hamilton, however, told me that he had no recollection of any such re-authorization request from Barcella. After receiving the PDF file of the Russian report, Hamilton also reiterated that he had no recollection of having ever seen it before, nor did his staff aide on the task force, Michael Van Dusen.
Barcella’s contention in his e-mail about “the thoroughness of the investigation and confidence in the results” is also open to question.
On Dec. 8, 1992, recognizing the report’s shaky conclusions, Barcella ordered his deputies “to put some language in, as a trap door” in case later disclosures disproved parts of the report or if complaints arose about selective omission of evidence. [For the “trap door” memo, click here.]
After the trap-door memo, more late-arriving evidence implicated the Reagan campaign, but that material was either shoved aside or misrepresented in the final report.
For instance, a detailed letter from former Iranian president Abolhassan Bani-Sadr – dated Dec. 17, 1992, and describing his first-hand account of internal battles with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini over whether to conspire with the Republicans – was dismissed as “hearsay” that lacked probative value.
The next day, Dec. 18, 1992, David Andelman, the biographer of French intelligence chief Alexandre deMarenches, gave sworn testimony about what deMarenches had confided to him about the Republican-Iranian contacts.
Andelman, an ex-New York Times and CBS News correspondent, said that while he was working on deMarenches’s autobiography, the arch-conservative spymaster admitted arranging meetings between Republicans and Iranians about the hostage issue in the summer and fall of 1980, with one meeting held in Paris in October.
Andelman said deMarenches ordered that the secret meetings be kept out of his memoirs because the story could otherwise damage the reputations of his friends, William Casey and George H.W. Bush. Andelman’s testimony corroborated longstanding claims from a variety of international intelligence operatives about a Paris meeting involving Casey and Bush.
But the task force report brushed this testimony aside, too, paradoxically terming it “credible” but then claiming it was “insufficiently probative.” The report argued that Andelman could not “rule out the possibility that deMarenches had told him he was aware of and involved in the Casey meetings because he, deMarenches, could not risk telling his biographer he had no knowledge of these allegations.”
More Corroboration
Yet, besides corroborative testimony from intelligence operatives, such as Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe and several members of French intelligence, Barcella also was aware of a contemporaneous account of the alleged Bush-to-Paris trip by Chicago Tribune reporter John Maclean.
Maclean, the son of author Norman Maclean who wrote A River Runs Through It, had said a well-placed Republican source told him in mid-October 1980 about Bush’s secret trip to Paris to meet with Iranians on the hostage issue.
That evening, Maclean passed on the information to David Henderson, a State Department Foreign Service officer who later recalled the date as Oct. 18, 1980. At the time, Maclean didn’t write about the Bush-to-Paris leak because, he told me, a Reagan-Bush campaign spokesman subsequently denied it and Maclean didn’t have additional corroboration at that time.
The Maclean-Henderson recollection only bubbled to the surface in the early 1990s when the October Surprise investigation began. Henderson mentioned the meeting in a 1991 letter to a U.S. senator that was forwarded to me while I was working for PBS Frontline. In the letter, Henderson recalled the conversation about Bush’s trip to Paris but not the name of the reporter.
A Frontline producer searched some newspaper archives to find a story about Henderson as a way to identify Maclean as the journalist who had interviewed Henderson. Though not eager to become part of the October Surprise story in 1991, Maclean confirmed that he had received the Republican leak on or about Oct. 18, 1980, precisely the time frame when Bush was alleged to have made a quick trip to Paris.
Despite the mounting evidence that the Republicans indeed had made secret contacts with Iranians in 1980, the task force kept refusing to rethink its conclusions. Instead, to debunk the October Surprise suspicions, the task force relied on supposed alibis for Casey and Bush, but the investigators knew how shaky the alibis were.
The alibis included the one about Reagan’s foreign policy adviser Richard Allen writing down Casey’s home phone number, which was interpreted as solid evidence that Casey must have been at home, even though Allen had no recollection of calling Casey and no record of any call. Other alibis were equally false or flimsy. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Crazy October Surprise Debunking.”]
Barcella’s Game
Now, with Barcella’s claim that he urged Hamilton to extend the investigation so the late-arriving evidence could be thoroughly vetted, the former chief counsel seems to be playing a double game, acknowledging that he was concerned about the fragility of the report’s conclusions while still insisting that the debunking was airtight.
The fact that Barcella and Hamilton now differ on the question of whether Barcella requested an extension – and their apparent agreement that Barcella never showed the Russian report to Hamilton – suggests that Barcella may have decided to sink the October Surprise suspicions for his own reasons.
That also might explain Barcella’s touchiness over the case being brought back up again.
Barcella always seemed to be an odd choice for chief counsel, although he volunteered for the October Surprise job in 1991 and at the time had a reputation as a tough prosecutor because of his work in the 1980s capturing “rogue” CIA operative Edwin Wilson, who was subsequently convicted of selling explosives and other military items to Libya.
However, Barcella had apparent conflicts of interest, including a friendship with neoconservative operative Michael Ledeen, who had been a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal and was linked as well to the October Surprise case.
For instance, an early draft of the task force report had identified Ledeen and another prominent neocon Richard Perle as participating in meetings of the Reagan campaign’s “October Surprise Group,” though “they were not considered ‘members.’”
The campaign’s “October Surprise Group” was assigned the task of preparing for “any last-minute foreign policy or defense-related event, including the release of the hostages, that might favorably impact President Carter in the November election,” the draft report said.
The draft also mentioned a Sept. 16, 1980, meeting on something called the “Persian Gulf Project” involving senior campaign officials, including William Casey and Richard Allen. According to the draft and Allen’s notes, Ledeen also participated in that meeting.
However, both references to Ledeen were removed from the task force’s final report, apparently after Ledeen spoke with his friend Barcella. [To read portions of the draft report, click here.]
“Yes, I believe I spoke to Larry Barcella about the October Surprise investigation,” Ledeen told me in an e-mail exchange last year. “And I undoubtedly told him what I have always said, namely that, to the best of my knowledge, the October Surprise theory is nonsense.”
The Barcella-Ledeen relationship dates back several decades when Barcella sold a house to Ledeen and the two aspiring Washington professionals shared a housekeeper. According to Peter Maas’s book Manhunt about Barcella’s work as a prosecutor on the Wilson case, Ledeen approached Barcella regarding the investigation in 1982.
Ledeen, then a State Department consultant on terrorism, was concerned that two of his associates, former CIA officer Ted Shackley and Pentagon official Erich von Marbod, had come under suspicion in the Wilson case.
“I told Larry that I can’t imagine that Shackley [or von Marbod] would be involved in what you are investigating,” Ledeen told me in an interview years later. “I wasn’t trying to influence what he [Barcella] was doing. This is a community in which people help friends understand things.”
Barcella also saw nothing wrong with the out-of-channel approach.
“He wasn’t telling me to back off,” Barcella told me. “He just wanted to add his two-cents worth.” Barcella said the approach was appropriate because Ledeen “wasn’t asking me to do something or not do something.” However, Shackley and von Marbod were dropped from the Wilson investigation.
Ledeen’s associate, Shackley, also had a connection to the October Surprise case in 1980, having worked with then-vice presidential candidate George H.W. Bush on the Iran hostage issue. [For more on Shackley’s role in the October Surprise case, see Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege. To reach a document on Shackley’s October Surprise work with Bush, click here.]
The Collapsing Case on Wilson
Barcella’s golden reputation from the Wilson conviction also has been tarnished in recent years. In 2003, an irate federal judge threw out Wilson’s Libya conviction after learning that the U.S. government had lied in a key affidavit which denied that Wilson was in contact with the CIA regarding his work with the Libyans.
The government’s false affidavit, which disputed Wilson’s defense claim that he had been cooperating with the CIA, was read twice to the jury before it returned the guilty verdict in 1983. Jury foreman Wally Sisk has said that without the government’s affidavit, the jury would not have convicted Wilson.
“That would have taken away the whole case of the prosecution,” Sisk said.
The discovery of this prosecutorial abuse – after Wilson had been imprisoned for two decades – led U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes to vacate Wilson’s conviction for selling military items to Libya.
“There were, in fact, over 80 contacts, including actions parallel to those in the charges,” Hughes wrote in his decision. “The government discussed among dozens of its officials and lawyers whether to correct the testimony. No correction was made,” until Wilson managed to pry loose an internal memo describing the false affidavit and revealing the debate among government officials about whether to correct it.
In an interview with ABC’s “Nightline,” Wilson called Barcella and another prosecutor “evil” for their role in the deception. “Once they got me convicted, then they had to cover this thing up constantly,” Wilson said. “They wanted to make sure that I would never get out of prison.”
Barcella, who was the supervising prosecutor in the Wilson case, has said he doesn’t recall seeing the affidavit before it was introduced and has denied any impropriety afterwards, when other government officials challenged the affidavit’s accuracy.
While the Wilson reversal dimmed Barcella’s standing, Hamilton’s reputation remains glittering, at least as far as Official Washington is concerned.
After retiring from Congress in 1999, he became president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Considered a Washington Wise Man by many, he has served on blue-ribbon panels in recent years, including the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Study Group.
Now, the question is whether Hamilton will insist that his task force’s certainty regarding its October Surprise debunking be reconsidered in light of the new evidence – or whether he’ll assume that it’s smarter to keep quiet and trust that Washington’s misguided conventional wisdom will continue to hold.
by seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 28, 2012 10:55 am
Romney's Non-Military Record Faces New Scrutiny
Steve Peoples, The Associated Press
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
In this 1966 photo taken by a photographer at the San Francisco Examiner newspaper, 19-year-old Mitt Romney, far right, then a student at Stanford University, participates in a counter-protest on campus. (Photo: AP)
SAN DIEGO (AP) — On a stage crowded with war heroes, Mitt Romney recently praised the sacrifice "of the great men and women of every generation who serve in our armed services."
It is a sacrifice the Republican presidential candidate did not make.
Though an early supporter of the Vietnam War, Romney avoided military service at the height of the fighting after high school by seeking and receiving four draft deferments, according to Selective Service records. They included college deferments and a 31-month stretch as a "minister of religion" in France, a classification for Mormon missionaries that the church at the time feared was being overused. The country was cutting troop levels by the time he became eligible for the draft, and his lottery number was not called.
President Barack Obama, Romney's opponent in this year's campaign, did not serve in the military either. The Democrat, 50, was a child during the Vietnam conflict and did not enlist when he was older.
But because Romney, now 65, was of draft age during Vietnam, his military background — or, rather, his lack of one — is facing new scrutiny as he courts veterans and makes his case to the nation to be commander in chief. He's also intensified his criticism lately of Obama's plans to scale back the nation's military commitments abroad, suggesting that Romney would pursue an aggressive foreign policy as president that could involve U.S. troops.
A look at Romney's relationship with Vietnam offers a window into a 1960s world that allowed him to avoid combat as fighting peaked. His story also demonstrates his commitment to the Mormon Church, which he rarely discusses publicly but which helped shape his life.
Romney's recollection of his Vietnam-era decisions has evolved in the decades since, particularly as his presidential ambitions became clear.
He said in 2007 — his first White House bid under way — that he had "longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam." But his actions, Selective Service records and previous statements show little interest in joining a conflict that ultimately claimed more than 58,000 American lives.
Still, he repeatedly cites his commitment to public service and the nation's military while campaigning for president.
"Greatness in a people, I believe, is measured by the extent to which they will give themselves to something bigger than themselves," Romney said in San Diego last week to a Memorial Day crowd of thousands, flush with military veterans of all ages.
He did not address his own Vietnam history that day. And his campaign has refused to comment publicly on the subject over the past week.
Political rivals, military veterans among them, suggest that Romney's own decision not to serve in the military is in conflict with his pro-military rhetoric.
"He didn't have the courage to go. He didn't feel it was important enough to him to serve his country at a time of war," said Jon Soltz, who served two Army tours in Iraq and is the chairman of the left-leaning veterans group VoteVets.org.
Critics note that the candidate is among three generations of Romneys — including his father, former Michigan Gov. George Romney, and five sons — who were of military age during armed conflicts but did not serve.
As a presidential candidate in 2007, Romney told The Boston Globe he was frustrated, as a Mormon missionary, not to be fighting alongside his countrymen.
"I was supportive of my country," Romney said. "I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there, and in some ways it was frustrating not to feel like I was there as part of the troops that were fighting in Vietnam."
Indeed, Romney strongly supported the war at first. As a freshman at Stanford University, he protested anti-war activists. In one photo, he's shown in a small crowd of students, smiling broadly, wearing a sport jacket and holding up a sign that says, "Speak Out, Don't Sit In."
But the frustration he recalled in 2007 does not match a sentiment he shared as a Massachusetts Senate candidate in 1994, when he told The Boston Herald, "I was not planning on signing up for the military."
"It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam, but nor did I take any actions to remove myself from the pool of young men who were eligible for the draft," Romney told the newspaper.
But that's exactly what Romney did, according Selective Service records. He received his first deferment for "activity in study" in October 1965 while at Stanford.
As Soltz notes, the younger Romney was under no obligation to seek a college-related deferment.
"Vietnam was a war that the poor and the people who couldn't afford to go to college had to go to," Soltz said.
After his first year at Stanford, Romney qualified for 4-D deferment status as "a minister of religion or divinity student." It was a status he would hold from July 1966 until February 1969, a period he largely spent in France working as a Mormon missionary.
He was granted the deferment even as some young Mormon men elsewhere were denied that same status, which became increasingly controversial in the late 1960s. The Mormon church, a strong supporter of American involvement in Vietnam, ultimately limited the number of church missionaries allowed to defer their military service using the religious exemption.
But as fighting in Vietnam raged, Romney spent two and a half years trying to win Mormon converts in France. About that same time, Romney's father would famously speak out against Vietnam, declaring that he had been "brainwashed" by military officials into supporting the conflict.
Young Romney's comments indicated his support had waned, too.
"If it wasn't a political blunder to move into Vietnam, I don't know what is," a 23-year-old Romney would tell The Boston Globe in 1970 during the fifth year of his deferment.
His 31-month religious deferment expired in early 1969. And Romney received an academic studies deferment for much of the next two years. He became available for military service at the end of 1970 when his deferments ran out and he could have been drafted. But by that time, America was beginning to slice its troop levels, and Romney's relatively high lottery number — 300 out of 365 — was not called.
Romney's past may not be enough to hurt his popularity in this year's election among veterans, who typically lean Republican.
A Gallup survey released last week found that veterans prefer Romney over Obama by 58 percent to 34 percent. That voting bloc, consisting mostly of older men, makes up 13 percent of the adult population. Obama won the presidency four years ago while losing veterans by 10 points to Sen. John McCain, a former Navy pilot.
Still, some veterans say Romney's reluctance to serve irks them.
"I volunteered for the draft. Romney could have, too. Simple as that," said Wade Lieseke, of Nevada, who served as a helicopter gunner in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970.
by seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 28, 2012 1:53 pm
Mitt Romney's Real Agenda
If you want to understand Romney's game plan, just look at what Republicans have been doing in Congress
By TIM DICKINSON
September 28, 2012 10:30 AM ET
It was tempting to dismiss Mitt Romney's hard-right turn during the GOP primaries as calculated pandering. In the general election – as one of his top advisers famously suggested – Romney would simply shake the old Etch A Sketch and recast himself as the centrist who governed Massachusetts. But with the selection of vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan, the shape-shifting Romney has locked into focus – cementing himself as the frontman for the far-right partisans responsible for Washington's gridlock.
There is no longer any ambiguity about the path that Romney would pursue as president, because it's the same trajectory charted by Ryan, the architect of the House GOP's reactionary agenda since the party's takeover in 2010. "Picking Ryan as vice president outlines the future of the next four or eight years of a Romney administration," GOP power broker Grover Norquist exulted in August. "Ryan has outlined a plan that has support in the Republican House and Senate. You have a real sense of where Romney's going." In fact, Norquist told party activists back in February, the true direction of the GOP is being mapped out by congressional hardliners. All the Republicans need to realize their vision, he said, is a president "with enough working digits to handle a pen."
The GOP legislation awaiting Romney's signature isn't simply a return to the era of George W. Bush. From abortion rights and gun laws to tax giveaways and energy policy, it's far worse. Measures that have already sailed through the Republican House would roll back clean-air protections, gut both Medicare and Medicaid, lavish trillions in tax cuts on billionaires while raising taxes on the poor, and slash everything from college aid to veteran benefits. In fact, the tenets of Ryan Republicanism are so extreme that they even offend the pioneers of trickle-down economics. "Ryan takes out the ax and goes after programs for the poor – which is the last thing you ought to cut," says David Stockman, who served as Ronald Reagan's budget director. "It's ideology run amok."
Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital
And Romney has now adopted every letter of the Ryan agenda. Take it from Ed Gillespie, senior adviser to the campaign: "If the Ryan budget had come to his desk as president," Gillespie said of Romney, "he would have signed it, of course."
A look at the bills that Republicans have passed since they took control of the House in 2010 offers a clear blueprint of the agenda that a Romney administration would be primed to establish:
FEWER JOBS
Republicans in Congress have repeatedly put ideology before creating jobs. For more than a year, they've refused to put President Obama's jobs bill up for a vote, even though projections show it would create nearly 2 million jobs without adding a penny to the deficit. The reason? The $447 billion bill would be entirely paid for through a surtax on millionaires.
In addition, the Republicans' signature initiative last year – the debt-ceiling standoff – was a jobs-killer, applying the brakes to the economic recovery. From February through April 2011, the economy had been adding 200,000 jobs a month. But during the uncertainty created by the congressional impasse, job creation was cut in half for every month the standoff continued. And according to the Economic Policy Institute, the immediate spending cuts required by the debt-ceiling compromise are likely to shrink the economy by $43 billion this year, killing nearly 323,000 jobs.
What Ryan markets as his "Path to Prosperity" would make things even worse: The draconian cuts in his latest budget, according to the EPI, would put an additional drag on the economy, destroying another 4.1 million jobs by 2014.
GOD, GUNS AND GAYS
The retrograde social agenda laid out in recent GOP legislation represents a full-scale assault on fundamental American rights. Last year, the House passed a bill that would broadly prohibit women from purchasing insurance plans that cover abortion. The so-called Protect Life Act would also allow hospitals to refuse a dying woman an abortion that would save her life. Ryan himself co-sponsored legislation that would have made it impossible for impoverished victims of rape and incest to receive abortions unless their assault met a narrow definition of "forcible rape." Under the bill's language, for instance, federal abortion coverage would be denied to a 12-year-old girl impregnated by a 40-year-old man, unless she could prove she fought back.
When they weren't trying to force women to birth babies for rapists, the GOP House was voting to make it easier for would-be criminals to carry concealed firearms. In the first major gun legislation passed after their colleague Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head, the House sided with her attempted murderer, passing an NRA-backed measure that would have undercut state limits on concealed-carry permits. Under the legislation, authorities in a state that prohibits drunk people from carrying a hidden weapon, for instance, would be barred from arresting an armed inebriate if he had a permit from another state without such a restriction. The bill, said Dennis Henigan of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, would "make it easier for the Jared Loughners of the world to pack heat on our streets and in our communities."
The GOP's love of guns is rivaled only by its contempt for gay Americans – even those who take up arms in defense of their country. Unable to block the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," Republicans in the House approved riders in the Defense appropriations bill to undermine the rights of gays in the armed forces. An amendment introduced by Rep. Todd Akin – Ryan's co-sponsor on "forcible rape" – sought to prohibit military facilities from being used to hold gay weddings, and to bar military chaplains from presiding over such ceremonies. Another House rider banned the military from offering medical, pension and death benefits to the spouses of gay soldiers.
DRILL AND POLLUTE
In thrall to dirty-energy interests, House Republicans have held more than 300 votes to hamstring the EPA, roll back environmental protections and open up sensitive public land to drilling – offering polluters a virtual license to kill. "This is, without doubt, the most anti-environmental Congress in history," said Rep. Henry Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the House Energy Committee.
Under the Republicans, the House has voted to ban the EPA from placing limits on climate-warming pollution, to reverse new fuel standards projected to slash dependence on foreign oil and save Americans $1.7 trillion at the pump, and to end standards signed into law by President Bush that would phase out wasteful, high-wattage incandescent light bulbs. Even more reckless, the House voted to block limits on deadly mercury emissions – a move that federal scientists calculate would result in 20,000 premature deaths – and drop safeguards on cement manufacturing that would kill another 12,500 Americans and lead to thousands of avoidable heart attacks.
The Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney
In February, over the objections of the State Department, the House voted to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport toxic tar sands from Canada across the Midwest's largest and most vulnerable supply of drinking water. In that same vote, the House returned to the great dream of the Bush era, voting to permit the oil industry to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In an even more sweeping move, the House passed a bill to block all new major regulations until the nation's unemployment rate falls to six percent – a measure that would choke off not only new environmental safeguards, but also the new limits on Wall Street recklessness required under Dodd-Frank.
BASH IMMIGRANTS
In June, the house approved a raft of amendments blocking Obama's executive directives on immigration reform. The legislation would prevent the administration from prioritizing the deportation of violent criminals over law-abiding immigrants, and put Homeland Security back in the business of deporting the undocumented spouses of American citizens. The House even found a way to merge its dirty-energy agenda with its anti-immigrant stance, passing a "border bill" that bars enforcement of 16 key environmental laws – including the Endangered Species Act – on federal land within 100 miles of the Mexican border. The bill is a sop to the Minuteman crowd, who don't want to contend with environmental rules as they erect electrified fences to keep out immigrants. But the measure is so broadly written that it also applies to the Canadian border, opening up places like Glacier National Park in Montana to bulldozers. Rep. Denny Rehberg, a Republican from Montana, calls the bill "absolutely necessary" to secure his state from "drug dealers, human traffickers and terrorists."
In perhaps its most absurd gesture, the House GOP managed to weave together its hatred of immigrants and abortions, passing a rider that bans the government from providing abortions to immigrants in detention. The move is a brave solution in search of an actual problem: Federal agencies have never paid for such a procedure.
ENRICH BILLIONAIRES
House Republicans have voted three times to extend all of the Bush-era tax cuts – a move that would blow a $3.8 trillion hole in the budget over the next decade. In fact, the Ryan budget – twice approved by the House – goes even further, doling out another $2.5 trillion to the wealthiest Americans by reducing the tax rate on top earners from 35 to just 25 percent, lowering the corporate rate to 25 percent, and ending the alternative minimum tax, a safeguard against tax cheats.
Romney, in fact, wants to give away even more to the rich than Republicans in the House by permanently eliminating the estate tax – a proposal that alarmsr veterans of the first Bush administration. "Given the vast amounts of wealth that have accumulated at the very, very, very top, it's an odd time to be eliminating this most progressive element of the tax system," says Michael Graetz, a former deputy assistant Treasury secretary under Bush. Over a decade, Romney's gift to the nation's most fortunate families would allow their heirs to pocket at least $1 trillion (including up to $50 million for Mitt's own heirs).
How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich
Those without family fortunes, meanwhile, would see their taxes soar. Independent tax groups have concluded that the only way to replace the tax revenue lost by the proposed Ryan and Romney tax cuts would be to end tax breaks – like the one for home-mortgage interest – that directly benefit the middle class. And the poor would get the shaft: The Ryan budget slashes the Child Tax Credit, meaning that a single mother of two earning the minimum wage would watch her annual tax bill rise by more than $1,500.
SLASH GOVERNMENT
Under the Ryan blueprint approved by the House and voted for by 40 GOP senators, government spending on everything that's not Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – NASA, highways, education, you name it – would be cut in half by 2022 and nearly in half again by 2050, until it stands at just 3.5 percent of the economy. As the Congressional Budget Service notes, such spending levels would be unprecedented in modern times: Since World War II, the government's discretionary spending has never fallen below eight percent of GDP.
If signed into law by President Romney, the Ryan budget would slash spending on college tuition grants by 42 percent next year and kick 1 million students out of the program. It would also gut funding for public schools, food and drug safety, basic science research, law enforcement and low-income housing. The cuts to food stamps alone would total $134 billion over the next decade. Ripping Ryan for trying to cloak his budget in Catholic doctrine, priests and faculty from Georgetown University wrote, "Your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ." There is one place, however, where Republicans want to increase spending: Under the most recent Ryan budget, the Pentagon would receive an extra $29 billion a year, reversing Obama's modest efforts to slow the growth of defense spending. Where would the extra cash come from? In May, the House approved a Ryan bill to replace automatic cuts to the Pentagon under the debt-ceiling agreement with $261 billion in cuts to the federal safety net. The measure would deny food stamps to 1.8 million Americans, leave 280,000 kids without school lunches and cut off health care to 300,000 poor children.
DESTROY HEALTH CARE
Republicans in the House have voted more than 30 times to repeal Obamacare – a move that would deplete the Medicare trust fund eight years early, kick 6.6 million young adults off their parents' health insurance, cost seniors $700 more on average for prescription drugs, and make it legal once again for insurance companies to charge women more than men and to rescind policies when people get sick. At the same time, repealing Obamacare would provide a massive giveback to the rich, handing over nearly $400 billion in tax revenues to those who earn above $250,000 a year.
To further boost the profits of insurance companies, the House passed a Ryan plan to voucherize Medicare, subjecting seniors to the whims of the private market. In the first year alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost to seniors would more than double, to $12,500 – and taxpayers would not save a dime, as private insurers pocketed the money. By 2050, as inflation took its toll, buying a policy as good as present-day Medicare would cost an 85-year-old more than $50,000. The Ryan plan would also eviscerate Medicaid by turning federal contributions to the program into lump-sum "block grants" that states can administer as they see fit. The trouble is that the grants, like Medicare vouchers, won't keep pace with soaring health care costs. In the first decade alone, the plan would bilk states out of $810 billion and deny health care to 30 million poor children, disabled Americans and seniors.
The last time a Republican presidential candidate touted an agenda to cut spending, lower taxes, boost defense and balance the budget was Ronald Reagan in 1980. Like Romney and Ryan, Reagan didn't have an actual plan for his spending cuts – they were an accounting fantasy, openly joked about as the "magic asterisk." In the end, as promised, Reagan's tax cuts went through, and the Pentagon's budget soared. But the spending cuts never materialized – so Reagan wound up tripling the debt.
If it didn't work for Reagan, says his former budget director, it would be foolish to assume Romney and Ryan can do better. "The Republican record on spending control is so abysmally bad," Stockman says, "that at this point they don't have a leg to stand on." Indeed, the last GOP administration turned $5 trillion in projected surplus into $5 trillion of new debt.
No one doubts Ryan's determination to slash the social safety net: Of the $5.3 trillion in cuts he has proposed, nearly two-thirds come from programs for the poor. But when it comes time to eviscerate the rest of the federal budget, Stockman says – funding for things like drug enforcement and public schools – Congress will "never cut those programs that deeply." In short, the rich will get their tax cuts. The poor will be left destitute. But America will be driven even deeper into debt.
That, at heart, is the twisted beauty of the plan being championed by Ryan and Romney: The higher Republicans manage to drive up the debt, the more ammunition they have in their fight to slash federal spending for the needy. And the more time they waste trumpeting their "fiscal discipline," the more the nation's infrastructure will continue to crumble around them. Squandering two full workweeks of the congressional calendar on votes to repeal Obamacare has cost taxpayers $48 million. That's nearly the same amount of money now needed to repair cracks in the Capitol itself – spending the House GOP has refused to authorize, out of anti-governmental spite. "If the House wants the dome to fall in," said Senate Appropriations chair Ben Nelson, "I hope it falls on their side." If the Republicans experience a crushing blow as a result of their hard-right agenda, of course, it won't be caused by the laws of physics – it will be delivered by the voters on Election Day.
by Lottie McLotsaluck » Fri Sep 28, 2012 6:14 pm
by Nordic » Sat Sep 29, 2012 3:32 am
by JackRiddler » Sat Sep 29, 2012 12:22 pm
Nordic wrote:Romney's toast. As was the plan all along.
by justdrew » Sat Sep 29, 2012 5:07 pm
Peachtree Pam wrote:
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