The Death Toll of Watergate

from Consortium News:

The Death Toll of Watergate
November 17, 2012

Exclusive: Major gaps in the history of Watergate and Iran-Contra have let Republicans minimize those scandals by comparing them to the fabricated “scandal” over the Benghazi attacks. A fuller understanding of Watergate would reveal its links to Richard Nixon’s prolonging the Vietnam War, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Republicans are fond of comparing their scandal-mongering – like the current hype over the terrorist assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya – with genuine scandals, like Watergate, which sank Richard Nixon’s second term, and Iran-Contra, which marred Ronald Reagan’s last two years in office.

The GOP’s false equivalence represents both an effort to puff up their latest accusations against Democrats and an attempt to minimize the misconduct of those two Republican presidents. For instance, one favorite GOP comment about Benghazi is: “No one died at Watergate. Four brave Americans died in Benghazi.”

This apples-and-oranges sophistry misses the point that Watergate and Iran-Contra were complex conspiracies that required intensive investigations to unravel their secrets (many of which remain hidden or in dispute to this day) while the Benghazi affair boils down to an easily resolved question as to why the U.S. intelligence community withheld some of the details in the immediate aftermath of the attack last Sept. 11.

The answers seem to be that the Benghazi consulate had evolved into a CIA base for secret operations and that U.S. intelligence didn’t want to tip off the attack’s perpetrators regarding how much the agency knew about their identities. So, the word “extremists” replaced specific groups and the CIA affiliation of two slain Americans was withheld. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2012/11/17/the-death-toll-of-watergate/

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3 replies	Author	Time	Post
The Death Toll of Watergate (Original post)	marmar	Nov 2012	OP
du rec. nt	xchrom	Nov 2012	#1
Q.E.D.	ROBROX	Nov 2012	#2
Following an internal link -- the roots of Watergate go back to 1968: sabotaging Vietnam peace talk	hedda_foil	Nov 2012	#3

Response to marmar (Original post)

Sun Nov 18, 2012, 09:48 AM

xchrom (90,522 posts)

1. du rec. nt

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Response to marmar (Original post)

Sun Nov 18, 2012, 10:58 AM

ROBROX (392 posts)

2. Q.E.D.

That which is shown is proven.

I remember listing as each fact of Watergate was told to the public. There were many then as today that can not hear the truth since it would wreck their idea of the present. I know that we have the ability to understand the facts and make a sound decision. I do not think there are many people who vote GOP who can make a sound decision based on facts since these people are biased or just plain STUPID.

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Response to marmar (Original post)

Sun Nov 18, 2012, 11:26 AM

hedda_foil (7,335 posts)

3. Following an internal link -- the roots of Watergate go back to 1968: sabotaging Vietnam peace talk

Consortium News is a national treasure. For those of us who lived through the horrors of 1968, the election of Nixon and the bizarreness of Watergate, here is a contemporary, high-level account.

LBJ’s ‘X’ File on Nixon’s ‘Treason’
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/03/03/lbjs-x-file-on-nixons-treason/

...snip

On May 14, 1973, Walt W. Rostow, who had been national security adviser during some of the darkest days of the Vietnam War, typed a three-page “memorandum for the record” summarizing a secret file that his former boss, President Lyndon Johnson, had amassed on what may have been Richard Nixon’s dirtiest trick, the sabotaging of Vietnam peace talks to win the 1968 election.

...snip

Those secret activities surfaced with the arrest of the Watergate burglars in June 1972, but they had begun much earlier. In his memo for the record, Rostow expressed regret that he and other top Johnson aides had chosen –for what they had deemed “the good of the country” –to keep quiet about Nixon’s Vietnam peace-talk sabotage, which Johnson had privately labeled “treason.”

“I am inclined to believe the Republican operation in 1968 relates in two ways to the Watergate affair of 1972,” Rostow wrote. He noted, first, that Nixon’s operatives may have judged that their “enterprise with the South Vietnamese” –in frustrating Johnson’s last-ditch peace initiative –had secured Nixon his narrow margin of victory over Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968.

“Second, they got away with it,” Rostow wrote. “Despite considerable press commentary after the election, the matter was never investigated fully. Thus, as the same men faced the election in 1972, there was nothing in their previous experience with an operation of doubtful propriety (or, even, legality) to warn them off, and there were memories of how close an election could get and the possible utility of pressing to the limit –and beyond.”

...snip

Much more: http://consortiumnews.com/2012/03/03/lbjs-x-file-on-nixons-treason/

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