Dark Shadows: Iran-Contra, Secret Wars & Covert Operations, Part 1

How the National Security State Created a State of Global Insecurity

INTRODUCTION:

Dear Reader: As journalism chases the perceived diminishing attention span by making everything shorter and shorter, we’re going to head in the opposite direction on occasion – go really deep and thorough on something historical and still of interest. Here’s one such case: a remarkable look at Iran-Contra, a still somewhat-mysterious big scandal of 30 years ago that tells us much about the Deep State, the Military-Industrial complex and America’s will to empire that provides context to so much happening today.

This is the first of a three-part series exploring Iran-Contra and its implications. Part I describes the Reagan Administration’s secret wars and illegal arms deals exposed in the scandal. Part II explains how the constitutional and legal crisis unfolded but backfired politically in the Bush and Clinton years. Part III will survey the era of global insecurity we have entered in the second Bush and Obama Administrations and the role key members of the incoming Trump team played in creating it by immunizing themselves from the consequences of past criminality.

The author, Doug Vaughan, spent years as an investigative journalist covering the Central/South American horrors of the 1970s and 80s. In this series, he draws a throughline from that troubling time to the present cast of characters taking their places in a new administration. It provides background to Donald Trump’s decision to ignore many veterans of the George W. Bush administration while reaching back to those who served Bush’s father and Ronald Reagan, and the pernicious influence of Dick Cheney.

–Russ Baker, Editor in Chief

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“Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.” — Claudius¹

Thirty years ago the United States government was embroiled in a scandal whose repercussions are felt today in a perverse variation on the idea that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We have been repeating Iran-Contra operations in various forms and guises ever since, only now they’re not a scandalous aberration but standard operating procedure of the Deep State.

Illegal wars are now legal. Covert operations are continuous. Only revealing them is illegal.

Thirty years later, every day is Day of the Dead and each night is New Year’s Eve when we make resolutions to do better next time. Where to begin the body count? The scandal itself began dramatically enough, at least in the theater of television if not the cauldron of secret war where it had been simmering, waiting to explode, for years.

The Fat Lady, the Arrow & a Rabbit’s Foot

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Let’s return, then, to the unmasking of aged players, the unraveling of ancient plots:

On the night of October 5, 1986, a young conscript in the People’s Sandinista Army named Jose’ Fernando Canales Aleman was on patrol near San Carlos on the Rio San Juan in the hills of southern Nicaragua. Hearing the now-familiar low roar of a big propeller-driven airplane, Canales aimed his shoulder-fired rocket-launcher at the big belly of a lumbering Fairchild C-123K Provider as it swung down to 2,500 feet overhead in the moonlit clouds.

Bwooshh! The Soviet-made Strela (“arrow” in Russian) surface-to-air missile roared off with its characteristic tailing flare, then Boom! exploded near the fuselage of the aircraft. Much to the boy-soldier’s delight and surprise — “shock and awe” were terms reserved for later displays of superior firepower — the big bird burst into flame. Down it came like a wounded duck, crashing into the jungle.

http://whowhatwhy.org/2017/01/11/dark-shadows-iran-contra-secret-wars-covert-operations-part-1/