RONALD REAGAN Illegally Traded Arms With Iran In Exchange For The Release Of American Hostages!
In 1985, while Iran and Iraq were at war, Iran made a secret request to buy weapons from the United States. McFarlane sought Reagan's approval, in spite of the embargo against selling arms to Iran. McFarlane explained that the sale of arms would not only improve U.S. relations with Iran, but might in turn lead to improved relations with Lebanon, increasing U.S. influence in the troubled Middle East. Reagan was driven by a different obsession. He had become frustrated at his inability to secure the release of the seven American hostages being held by Iranian terrorists in Lebanon. As president, Reagan felt that "he had the duty to bring those Americans home," and he convinced himself that he was not negotiating with terrorists. While shipping arms to Iran violated the embargo, dealing with terrorists violated Reagan's campaign promise never to do so. ...
The arms-for-hostages proposal divided the administration. Longtime policy adversaries Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz opposed the deal, but Reagan, McFarlane and CIA director William Casey supported it. With the backing of the president, the plan progressed. By the time the sales were discovered, more than 1,500 missiles had been shipped to Iran. Three hostages had been released, only to be replaced with three more, in what Secretary of State George Shultz called "a hostage bazaar."
read more: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/reagan-iran/
Maybe If President Obama Had Sold ILLEGAL Arms To Iran, Republicans Would Call Him A Hero
April 5, 2015
By Allen Clifton
As most people have probably heard by now, the U.S., several of our allies and the Iranian government agreed upon a historic deal pertaining to Iran’s nuclear program. It’s a deal many experts are hailing as groundbreaking and some have even suggested that, if successful, could prevent a third world war down the line.
Now, clearly, any sort of talk like that is extremely premature as it’s very possible this deal could eventually fail. But it’s like I’ve said before, I would rather try to give diplomacy a chance to succeed rather than send thousands of Americans off to die in a war that could have been avoided. Well, about a year and a half ago I wrote an article with a headline very similar to this when all of these talks were still basically in their infancy stage. At the time, I mocked Republicans for being outraged that President Obama might dare try to use diplomacy to deal with Iran (some even suggesting he’s betraying his country) when almost every member of the GOP hails Ronald Reagan as a “conservative legend and American icon” – yet he illegally sold arms to Iran. Sure, Oliver North is the one who ultimately gets tagged with the “blame,” but you have to be an absolute moron to honestly believe that arms were being illegally sold to the Iranian government and the Reagan administration knew nothing about it.
But could you imagine the right-wing freak-out if, instead of simply agreeing to the framework of a deal on Iran’s nuclear program with several of our allies, the Obama administration was caught selling weapons illegally to the Iranian government?
read more: http://www.forwardprogressives.com/maybe-president-obama-illegal-arms-iran-republicans-call-hero/
= new reply since forum marked as read
I beg you
Great OP, napkinz. After Iran-Contra, Reagan should have lived out the rest of his natural days making license plates at San Quentin. I wonder who pardoned him?
[font size="1"]In Detroit, at the 1980 GOP nominating convention.[/font size]
After the election, and the assassination attempt, the relationship really developed:
George Bush Takes Charge
The Uses of "Counter-Terrorism"
By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58
A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.
During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.
Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.
The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.
SNIP...
Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.
CONTINUED...
More details from the good professor:
EXCERPT...
NSDD 159. MANAGEMENT OF U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS, (TOP SECRET/VEIL‑SENSITIVE), JAN. 18,1985
The Reagan administration's commitment to significantly expand covert operations had been clear since before the 1980 election. How such operations were actually to be managed from day to day, however, was considerably less certain. The management problem became particularly knotty owing to legal requirements to notify congressional intelligence oversight committees of covert operations, on the one hand, and the tacitly accepted presidential mandate to deceive those same committees concerning sensitive operations such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, on the other.
The solution attempted in NSDD 159 was to establish a small coordinating committee headed by Vice President George Bush through which all information concerning US covert operations was to be funneled. The order also established a category of top secret information known as Veil, to be used exclusively for managing records pertaining to covert operations.
[font color="red"]The system was designed to keep circulation of written records to an absolute minimum while at the same time ensuring that the vice president retained the ability to coordinate US covert operations with the administration's overt diplomacy and propaganda.
Only eight copies of NSDD 159 were created. The existence of the vice president's committee was itself highly classified.[/font color] The directive became public as a result of the criminal prosecutions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved in the Iran‑Contra affair, hence the designation "Exhibit A" running up the left side of the document.
CONTINUED...
CovertAction Quarterly no 58 Fall 1996 pp31-40.
This all used to be online, easily found via the GOOGLE. It's gone now, for some strange reason.
the "'foreign policy president'" 
And his idiot son becomes president, takes us to war based on lies, a war that kills thousands of our own troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and destabilizes the entire region.
Now the other idiot son is applying for the job.
And he wasn't impeached!
