Saturday, November 26, 2011

IRAN CONTRA AT 25:

REAGAN AND BUSH 'CRIMINAL LIABILITY' EVALUATIONS

Ronald Reagan with Caspar Weinberger, George Shultz, Ed Meese, and Don Regan discussing the President's remarks on the Iran-Contra affair, Oval Office. 11/25/86. Source credit: Courtesy Ronald Reagan Library

* Presidential 'Exposure' and roles detailed in Special Prosecutor Reports

* Reagan Briefed In Advance on Each Group of Missiles Sold to Iran

* Bush Chaired Secret Committee that Recommended Mining Harbors of Nicaragua

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 365

Washington D.C., November 25, 2011 – President Ronald Reagan was briefed in advance about every weapons shipment in the Iran arms-for-hostages deals in 1985-86, and Vice President George H. W. Bush chaired a committee that recommended the mining of the harbors of Nicaragua in 1983, according to previously secret Independent Counsel assessments of "criminal liability" on the part of the two former leaders posted today by the National Security Archive.

Twenty-Five years after the advent of the "Iran-Contra affair," the two comprehensive "Memoranda on Criminal Liability of Former President Reagan and of President Bush" provide a roadmap of historical, though not legal, culpability of the nation's two top elected officials during the scandal from the perspective of a senior attorney in the Office of Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh. The documents were obtained pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the National Security Archive for the files compiled during Walsh's six-year investigation from 1987-1993.

The posting comes on the anniversary of the November 25, 1986, press conference during which Ronald Reagan and his attorney general, Edwin Meese, informed the American public that they had discovered a "diversion" of funds from the sale of arms to Iran to fund the contra war, thus tying together the two strands of the scandal which until that point had been separate in the public eye. The focus on the diversion, as Oliver North, the NSC staffer who supervised the two operations wrote in his memoirs, was itself a diversion. "This particular detail was so dramatic, so sexy, that it might actually-well divert public attention from other, even more important aspects of the story," North wrote, "such as what the President and his top advisors had known about and approved." read more>>>

Documents and President Reagan's 1990 Testimony - Video's (39 parts):

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