Saturday, November 26, 2011

The Reagan Legacy Just Keeps Giving - IRAN CONTRA AT 25:

The years of the Reagan Administration, and the cabal that surrounded him, left the oh so many changes in this country and society. Many of those that surrounded him and that administration, in and out of government then, were around, again in and out of government, during the previous administration of jr bush including daddy bush especially.

Yesterday the country celebrated an offshoot of the economic legacy, black friday, the herding of shoppers, with as reported many violent acts ensued as in previous years, to buy buy buy, thing is we don't produce much of what they bought anymore, another legacy.

The National Security Archive at George Washington University reminds us of another very important legacy that still shapes what our government does as seen during the very destructive years of bush jr. and many of the same characters of past ideologies once more in the government control game, never really leaving, and bringing along younger converts.

The National Security Archive is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals. On March 17, 2000, Long Island University named the National Security Archive as winner of a Special George Polk Award for 1999 for "piercing self-serving veils of government secrecy" and "serving as an essential journalistic resource. "
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):

We've been living, along with the far reaching into the western world economies, the oft forecast collapse of the economic policy changes that started back then. And we've been also living, though rarely mentioned, the very destructive foreign and domestic policy legacy that arguably stated then as well. Will we ever get a full picture of what went on not only in the previous administration but their congresses as well, for the past decade couldn't have happened the way it did without those congresses help or lack of.

I'll close this off with another blast from the past and out of another administration, that aired last night on the PBS News Hour:

AIR DATE: Nov. 25, 2011 New Nixon Tapes Reveal Details of Meeting With Anti-War Activists
SUMMARY Recently released audio recordings detail President Richard Nixon's surreal meeting with anti-Vietnam War protesters at the Lincoln Memorial one night more than four decades ago. Ray Suarez reports. Transcript

As I watched and listened, the nixon rewriting of his history only a few days after this took place, my mind visited all that was really happening in relation to his administration and the government agencies of at the time. Like the FBI file building on individuals, especially us veterans of Vietnam and the huge anti-war movement within the military and once discharged from, of the anti war movement by the agencies and using agent and civilian infiltrators to gather the needed intelligence to discredit as well as build needed meme's around their policies and so much more.

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