Disinformation
excerpted from the book
Unreliable Sources
a guide to detecting bias
in news media
by Martin A. Lee & Norman
Solomon
A Lyle Stuart Book, Carol
Publishing Group, 1990
p126
Editors don't make any bones about "the
presidential factor." "We've got to cover what the President
says and does," is the common refrain. But what happens when
the President and his aides routinely lie as they try to sell
their policies to the American public? Then the presidential factor
is a recipe for distortion.
"Lying to the press goes back to
the beginning of the republic," says David Wise, a former
New York Herald Tribune editor who has authored a number of books
on the American espionage establishment. But institutional Iying
took on a new dimension at the outset of the Cold War, as clandestine
operations began to multiply like rabbits. The proliferation of
covert actions required a plenitude of cover stories-and cover
stories, lest we forget, are lies. "It used to be that policies
were framed to fit events," Wise remarked in a 1987 interview
about Reagan-era disinformation. "Now events are shaped and
manipulated to fit policies."
Over the years, reporters have had to
contend with a steady barrage of deceptions, half-truths and blatant
falsehoods emanating from the White House. This deliberate perversion
of the truth calls into question the fundamental character of
a democratic society, which is supposed to be based on the consent
of the governed. An ill-informed public can't hold officials accountable
for their policies.
"Every government is run by liars,
and nothing they say should be believed," said I.F. Stone.
But the Reagan era was unprecedented in that it marked the first
time government officials came right out and said that a president's
numerous misstatements of fact and his inability to grasp detail
didn't really matter. "We've been dealing with...an administration
that freely states-and stated early-that literal truth was not
a concern," said Bill Kovach when he was Washington news
editor of the New York Times.
U.S. officials openly flaunted their disregard
for the facts during the 1980s. "You can say anything you
want in a debate and 80 million people hear it," George Bush's
press secretary stated shortly after the vice presidential debate
with Geraldine Ferraro in October 1984. "If reporters then
document that a candidate spoke untruthfully, so what? Maybe 200
people read it."
p127
Austrian scholar Karl Kraus' dictum: "How is the world ruled
and led into war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe those
lies when they see them in print."
p128
Following the lead of U.S. officials, mass media depicted the
Soviet Union as the prime mover of a worldwide terrorist network
that included Libyan leader Moammar Qadaffi as a key operative.
The demonizing of Qadaffi began in earnest shortly after Reagan
took office. First came the lurid tales (based on "unnamed
intelligence sources") of Libyan hit squads stalking President
Reagan. Later came the Berlin disco bombing, which killed two
people, including an American serviceman, and injured 200 in April
1986. Citing "irrefutable evidence" that Qadaffi was
behind the bombing, Reagan ordered an air attack against Libya
a week later. It was, as Noam Chomsky observed, the first air
raid in history geared to preempt coverage on 7:00 p.m. prime-time
news in the U.S.
As it turned out, the so-called "irrefutable
evidence" was hardly airtight. Manfred Ganshow, chief of
the Berlin Staatsschutz and head of the 100-person team which
investigated the disco bombing, told Stars and Stripes, a publication
servicing the U.S. armed forces, three weeks after the incident:
"[I have] no more evidence that Libya was connected to the
bombing than I had two days after the act. Which is none."
This, however, did not dissuade the American media, whose rush
to judgment was as dramatic as Reagan's rise in the popularity
polls following the Libya raid. A New York Times editorial claimed
that proof was "laid out clearly to the public... Even the
most scrupulous citizens can only approve and applaud the American
attacks on Libya."
Months later, West German authorities
concluded that if any country was behind the Berlin disco bombing,
it was Syria, not Libya. But that hardly seemed to matter as U.S.
news media continued to blame the incident on Qadaffi. Soon another
round of stories appeared, warning of new plots by Libya. Replete
with 42 references to unnamed U.S. officials, a Wall Street Journal
article by John Walcott and Gerald F. Seib disclosed that Qadaffi
was planning more terrorism. This time the unnamed source turned
out to be National Security Adviser John Poindexter, who was promoting
what Newsweek later called a "disinformation program"
aimed at destabilizing the Libyan government. The propaganda operation
was outlined in a three-page memo, dated August 14, 1986, from
Poindexter to President Reagan.
When details of the disinformation plot
were leaked to the U.S. press, Secretary of State George Schultz
justified the deception by quoting Winston Churchill: "In
time of war, the truth is so precious it must be attended by
a bodyguard of lies." The Reagan administration, Shultz said,
was "pretty darn close" to being at war with Libya.
Reporters and editors cried foul, expressing righteous indignation
about being misled by the U.S. government-as if they had suddenly
discovered something new!
Indeed, journalists should have known
that the Reagan administration was Iying about Libya. Five years
prior to the Poindexter revelations, Newsweek reported on a CIA-run
"disinformation program designed to embarrass Qadaffi,"
along with covert operations to overthrow and perhaps assassinate
him.
U.S. actions-rhetorical and military-against
Libya, and "counter-terrorist" rhetoric in general,
were geared largely toward converting public anxiety over anti-Western
political violence into support for an aggressive American foreign
policy and increased intervention in the Third World. Exaggerating
the threat of external demons in order to whip up nationalist
hysteria at home was nothing new in American history. By focusing
on Libya, the Reagan administration picked a fight it knew it
could win. Seen in this context, the bombing of Libya was as much
salutary medicine for Vietnam syndrome jitters as it was a plot
to kill Qadaffi.
Cloaked in fiction
Even when lies by the government are exposed,
U.S. reporters dutifully return to the same poisoned well, seeking
information from official sources that have been publicly discredited.
Former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams appeared frequently
as a guest on Nightline and other TV news shows, despite his admission
that he intentionally misled Congress regarding U.S. policy in
Central America. Abrams' confession aroused little skepticism
among journalists as to whether he could be trusted as a news
source. Never once did Ted Koppel, who fancies himself a tough
interviewer, ask Abrams: "Why, given your record of deceit,
should we believe anything you say about Nicaragua?"
A cub reporter would surely grow skeptical
about a courtroom defendant who continually changed alibis. Yet
as soon as Reagan took office, veteran journalists pandered to
his Nicaragua obsession, hardly blinking at the everchanging explanations
for why it was necessary to support the contras. First it was
merely to "interdict" weapons allegedly flowing from
Nicaragua to Salvadoran leftists. Next it was to force the Sandinistas
to enact "democratic reforms," when all along the real
motive should have been obvious-to overthrow the Nicaraguan government
and destroy the popular revolution that swept the Sandinistas
into power in 1979.
If journalists weren't so busy fixating
on a White House chimera, they might have noticed that the weapons
were actually moving in the opposite direction-from CIA-run air
bases in El Salvador to the Nicaraguan contras. The Iran-contra
scandal exposed Reagan's inner circle as a coterie of chronic
dissemblers and schemers, revealing "a wholesale policy of
secrecy shrouded in lies, of passion cloaked in fiction and deception,"
as Bill Moyers put it in an exceptional PBS report, "The
Secret Government-The Constitution in Crisis."
Lt. Col. Oliver North, Elliott Abrams
and other U.S. officials lied repeatedly as they sought to give
credence to the absurd notion that Nicaragua, an impoverished
country of three million, with no navy or air force to speak of,
posed a serious threat to the security of the United States. The
anti-Sandinista propaganda offensive included oft-repeated allegations
of Nicaraguan complicity with Khomeini's Iran-an ironic charge
given that North and the CIA were secretly supplying weapons to
Iran at the time. Such deliberate falsifications were part of
a protracted disinformation campaign designed to manufacture a
"Nicaraguan threat."
p143
The much-ballyhooed conclusion that journalists are of a predominantly
leftish bent failed to square with data compiled by researchers
without a strongly conservative agenda. A Brookings Institution
study, for instance, found that 58 percent of Washington journalists
identified themselves as either "conservative" or "middle
of the road."
A 1985 Los Angeles Times survey, comparing
3,000 journalists to 3,000 members of the general public, found
that journalists were more conservative when asked if the government
should act to reduce the gap between rich and poor. Fifty-five
percent of the general public supported such measures, compared
to only 50 percent of the "news staff" and 37 percent
of the editors.
But all the heated number-crunching may
be much ado about little. The private opinions of media workers
are much less important than the end products. Mark Hertsgaard
has astutely pinpointed "the deeper flaw in the liberal-press
thesis"-"it completely ignored those whom journalists
worked for. Reporters could be as liberal as they wished and it
would not change what news they were allowed to report or how
they could report it. America's major news organizations were
owned and controlled by some of the largest and richest corporations
in the United States. These firms were in turn owned and managed
by individuals whose politics were, in general, anything but liberal.
Why would they employ journalists who consistently covered the
news in ways they did not like?"
If there's a political tilt to news coverage,
it derives principally from mass media owners and managers, not
beat reporters. "Admittedly," said sociologist Herbert
Gans, "some journalists have strong personal beliefs and
also the position or power to express them in news stories, but
they are most often editors; and editors, like producers in television,
have been shown to be more conservative than their news staffs."
To the extent that personal opinions influence news content, Gans
added, "they are most often the beliefs of the President
of the United States and other high federal, state and local officials,
since they dominate the news."
However baseless, accusations by conservatives
that the media lean left have made many journalists compensate
by tilting in the other direction. In this sense, the liberal
media canard has been effective as a pre-emptive club, brandished
to encourage self-censorship on the part of reporters who "bend
over backwards not to seem at all critical of Republicans,"
commented Mark Crispin Miller. "Eager to evince his 'objectivity,'
the edgy liberal reporter ends up just as useful to the right
as any ultra-rightist hack."
And there are plenty of those, dominating
America's highest-profile forums for political commentary on television
and newspaper editorial pages. "In terms of the syndicated
columnists, if there is an ideological bias, it's more and more
to the right," President Reagan's media point man David Gergen
declared in a 1981 interview. As the decade wore on, the imbalance
grew more extreme.
The syndicated likes of George Will, Patrick
Buchanan, Robert Novak, William F. Buckley and John McLaughlin
achieved monotonous visibility on national TV, thanks to producers
casting nets wide for right-wing pundits. As a tedious ritual
they were paired with bland centrists, so that supposed "debates"
often amounted to center-right discussions-on PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer
NewsHour, Gergen with the Washington Post's charmingly mild Mark
Shields; on ABC's This Week With David Brinkley, Will with the
network's stylized but politically tepid Sam Donaldson; on CNN's
Crossfire, Buchanan or Novak with somnolent ex-CIA-exec Tom Braden.
(In late 1989, Braden yielded his seat "on the left"
to Michael Kinsley of the New Republic magazine, but this didn't
make the show any less unbalanced. "Buchanan is much further
to the right than I am to the left," Kinsley acknowledged.
As Howard Rosenberg wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "Crossfire
should at least get the labeling right: Pat Buchanan from the
far right and Michael Kinsley from slightly left of center.")
In early 1989, columnist Jack Newfield
counted eight popular political opinion talk shows on national
television. "These shows all have certifiably right-wing
hosts and moderators," wrote Newfield. "This is not
balance. This is ideological imbalance that approaches a conservative
monopoly... Buchanan, who calls AIDS a punishment from God for
sin, and campaigns against the prosecution of Nazi war criminals
hiding in America, is about as far right as you can get."
A fixture on CNN, and often made welcome
on the biggest TV networks, Buchanan has flaunted his admiration
for prominent fascists past and present, like the Spanish dictator
Francisco Franco (who came to power allied with Hitler) and Chile's
bloody ruler Augusto Pinochet. "A soldier-patriot like Franco,
General Pinochet saved his country from an elected Marxist who
was steering Chile into Castroism," Buchanan effused in a
September 1989 column, going on to defend the apartheid regime
in South Africa: "The Boer Republic is the only viable economy
in Africa. Why are Americans collaborating in a U.N. conspiracy
with sanctions?"
Sharing much of the remaining op-ed space
are others from the hard right, including former U.N. ambassador
Jeane Kirkpatrick; William Safire (like Buchanan, an ex-speechwriter
for the Nixon-Agnew team); erstwhile segregationist James J. Kilpatrick;
Charles Krauthammer; former NBC News correspondent and Moral Majority
vice president Cal Thomas; neo-conservative prophet Norman Podhoretz,
and Ray Price (yet another Nixon speechwriter). Aside from a handful
of left-leaning liberals, most of the other op-ed mainstays are
establishment-tied middle-roaders such as Flora Lewis, David Broder,
Jeff Greenfield, Georgie Anne Geyer, and Meg Greenfield.
p145
By 1987, religious broadcasting had become a $2 billion a year
industry, with more than 200 full-time Christian TV stations and
1,000 full-time Christian radio stations. This means that evangelical
Christians control about 14 percent of the television stations
operating in the U.S. and 10 percent of the radio stations, which
bombard the American public with a conservative theo-political
message. TV ministries continue to thrive, despite the widely
publicized preacher sex and money scandals of the late 1980s.
Some journalists may reject the mythology
about liberal prejudice, but when addressing what is going on
they're prone to denial. Instead of identifying the thumbs on
news-media scales, the preference is to call the whole contraption
neutral. "Everybody talks about media biases to the right
or the left," syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman pooh-poohed
in 1989. "The real media bias is against complexity, which
is usually terminated with the words: 'I'm sorry, we're out of
time." Of course, electronic news media are surface-skimming
operations. Views that seriously challenge the status quo, however,
have few occasions to be interrupted, since they're so rarely
heard at all.
p147
Shadowboxing in Washington
When Reagan became President in 1981,
there was a high degree of consensus within America's corporate
and political elites about domestic and foreign policy. Abdicating
the role of a real opposition party, Democratic leaders in Congress
were more eager to put on a show than put up a fight.
Sometimes the media used the passivity
of the Democrats to justify their own. Either way, as Walter Karp
put it, "the private story behind every major non-story during
the Reagan administration was the Democrats' tacit alliance with
Reagan."
It was a convenient arrangement for each
of the three principals. The Reagan administration got credit
for superb political smarts, and-after its nadir, the unraveling
of the Iran-contra scandal-admirable resiliency. ("Howard
Baker restored order to the White House," etc.) The Democrats
scored points for slugging it out with the Reaganites. And the
media reported the shadowboxing as a brawl instead of a contest
that kept being thrown before it ever got bloody.
"For eight years the Democratic opposition
had shielded from the public a feckless, lawless President with
an appalling appetite for private power," Karp wrote. "That
was the story of the Reagan years, and Washington journalists
evidently knew it. Yet they never turned the collusive politics
of the Democratic party into news. Slavishly in thrall to the
powerful, incapable of enlightening the ruled without the consent
of the rulers, the working press, the 'star' reporters, the pundits,
the sages, the columnists passed on to us, instead, the Democrats'
mendacious drivel about the President's 'Teflon shield.' For eight
years, we saw the effects of a bipartisan political class in action,
but the press did not show us that political class acting, exercising
its collective power, making things happen, contriving the appearances
that were reported as news."
One of the chronically contrived appearances
was President Reagan's great popularity-phenomenal only in that
it was a distortion. In April 1989, the New York Times reminded
readers that Reagan was "one of the most popular Presidents
in American history." Authoritative, but false-as University
of Massachusetts political science professor Thomas Ferguson promptly
documented for the umpteenth time. "It is tiresome,"
he wrote in the Nation magazine, "always to be pointing out
that this ever-popular and seemingly indestructible refrain monumentally
distorts the truth. But it does." The past half-century of
polling data from Gallup Report showed Reagan's average public
approval rating while in office (52 percent) to be lower than
Presidents Johnson (54 percent), Kennedy (70 percent), Eisenhower
(66 percent), and Roosevelt (68 percent). What's more, Reagan
barely bested his three immediate predecessors-Carter (47 percent),
Ford (46 percent) and Nixon (48 percent). Of the last nine Presidents,
Reagan's approval ranking was a mediocre fifth.
But the Reagan popularity myth was extremely
useful for all concerned. It enhanced the administration's power.
It alibied the congressional Democrats' ineffectual pseudo-opposition.
And it left the media-unencumbered by much authentic political
conflict-free to talk about the success of the mirage on stage
instead of the motives and methods of those orchestrating from
the wings. "It was a win-win situation," recalled Jeff
Cohen of FAIR.
"First, Reagan wins by manipulating
the media and the public, then he wins by getting laudatory stories
out of the media about how brilliantly he manipulates the media
and the public."
In fact there was plenty of vigorous opposition
to the Reagan administration, but little of it came via Capitol
Hill. It was strongest at the grassroots, in a diversity of American
communities, wild and woolly areas that national political reporters
had little patience-or coverage-for, especially when propounded
views didn't fit within the "two sides" put forward
by news operations based in Washington and New York. Reagan wasn't
very popular among the millions of hungry and homeless, the unemployed,
racial minorities, the bankrupt farmers, the struggling single
mothers or the union members forced to accept cuts in wages and
benefits.
But he was popular among journalists.
Sam Donaldson, nurturing his hold-on-there image as one tough
inquisitor around the White House, found the commander-in-chief
simply charming. "I'm gonna admit something," Donaldson
said during Reagan's first term. "He's a hard President to
cover for most reporters, because he is such an amiable, warm,
human being." The business and financial community-especially
media owners and military contractors-were even more enthused
about Mr. Nice Guy in the White House, whose policies catered
to the interests of corporate America.
Of course, Reaganomics had a distinct
downside, as Mark Hertsgaard noted in his book On Bended Knee-"it
deprived the many while subsidizing the few." But most of
the press didn't guffaw when Reagan insisted that social spending
could be slashed without hurting the poor, or that taxes could
be cut and the military budget jacked up without incurring a huge
deficit. When Congress approved Reagan's tax package in 1981,
major news media skirted an obvious point: it constituted one
of the most phenomenal giveaways to big corporations and wealthy
individuals in American history.
Teflon journalism
Much of the Reagan program was directly
at odds with popular sentiment. But the President's aides figured
they could overcome this problem if the press adopted the Reagan
agenda as its own. The goal was not simply to neutralize the press
but to turn it into a government asset. Toward this end, a team
of public relations experts utilized a deft combination of news
management techniques. They played emotionally on patriotic themes
("America is Back"), repeating the same message in a
variety of forms as often as possible. The way issues were presented
took precedence over substance, as the White House served up pre-masticated
news bites and photo opportunities. Mass media bit the bait, while
the President himself remained largely off limits to reporters.
Thus on television, we caught glimpses of Reagan visiting a senior
citizen center or doing a cameo at the International Games for
the Disabled, but journalists never got close enough to ask him
why he cut programs for the elderly and the handicapped.
Jeff Gralnick, executive producer of ABC
World News Tonight, commented on the media's willingness to play
by Reagan's rules. "It's my job to take the news as they
choose to give it to us," he told Hertsgaard. "The evening
news telecast is not supposed to be the watchdog on the government.
It never was, never will be. We are a national front page, five
days a week."
When journalists tried to do some serious
reporting about Reagan, they often got flak from management. CBS
News executives pressured White House correspondent Lesley Stahl
to tone down what they viewed as overly negative stories, especially
about the economy. As Stahl recounted, "No one said to me,
'We're being more positive, we're out to be less shrill,' if you
will. When occasionally a piece would have a sharply critical
close, I found it coming back changed, with editorial suggestions
that took the hard edge off the piece." For the most part,
critical stories that saw the light of day were scattered, one-shot
affairs and, therefore, basically innocuous, as far as the White
House was concerned.
On the whole, Reagan's people were quite
pleased by the media coverage the President received. "I
think a lot of the Teflon came because the press was holding back,"
said David Gergen, White House communications director during
Reagan's first term. "I don't think they wanted to go after
him that toughly." Reagan aide Michael Deaver felt the same
way. In his memoirs, Deaver wrote that prior to the Iran-contra
scandal, "Ronald Reagan enjoyed the most generous treatment
by the press of any President in the postwar era. He knew it,
and liked the distinction."
Soft treatment of the President was most
evident at his rare news conferences, when Reagan stumbled along
without the help of a teleprompter. After a while, reporters stopped
trying to correct his legendary gaffes and inane statements. Journalists
avoided asking difficult questions, lest they appear partisan.
Following a press conference in June 1986, a White House aide
remarked that the media treated Reagan "almost reverentially."
Indeed, those reporters who marveled at the Teflon President were
often the same ones who coated and protected him.
Mass media fawning over Reagan reached
a height during Fourth of July festivities in 1986. A Time magazine
cover story titled "Yankee Doodle Magic"-featuring a
beaming Reagan haloed by fireworks-called him "one of the
strongest leaders of the 20th century...who has restored the authority
of the presidency." "People tend to trust him,"
Time asserted, "even if they utterly disagree with his principles."
Two months later, in a cover story praising his hands-off managerial
style, Fortune magazine hailed Reagan as a model executive-"One
extraordinarily important if little-noted element of the Reagan
legacy is already established: He has proved once again that the
presidency is manageable." Shortly thereafter came the Iran-contra
scandal, and the media bubble burst.
p153
As Mark Hertsgaard has written, "The essentials of the contra
story and to some extent the Iran arms sales were known to individual
members of the press nearly 18 months before they became headline
news in November 1986. Parts of the stories were even reported
in major media outlets... But the stories were not deemed worthy
of vigorous pursuit, were not picked up throughout the rest of
the news media, were not accorded a sufficiently high profile
to attract the attention of the American public. And so they floated
past largely unnoticed, fortifying Reagan administration officials
in the conviction that they could conduct whatever illegal or
unpopular operations they wished without fear of detection."
p153
Ten signs of an official scandal
The Iran-contra revelations shared ten
common characteristics of an official scandal:
1) The scandal comes to light much later
than it could have to prevent serious harm.
2) The focus is on scapegoats and fall
guys, as though remedial action amounts to handing the public
a few heads on a platter.
3) Damage control keeps the media barking
but at bay. The press is so busy chewing on scraps near the outer
perimeter that it stays away from the chicken house.
4) Sources on the inside supply tidbits
of information to steer reporters in certain directions-and away
from others. With the media dashing through the woods, these sources
keep pointing: "The scandal went that-a-way!"
5) After denials by government officials
come well-publicized admissions of "mismanagement,"
"mistakes," even "improprieties." The media
take, and report, these half-hearted confessions at face value.
6) The spotlight is on outraged officials-senators,
congressmen, special prosecutors, federal judges-asking tough
questions. (But not too tough.) As time passes, politicians and/or
the judicial system take the lead in guiding media coverage.
7) Despite all the hand-wringing, the
press avoids basic questions that challenge institutional power
and not just a few powerful individuals.
8) Even when the proverbial "highest
levels" are implicated, a journalistic fog sets in, obscuring
trails that could lead to more substantial revelations, or far-reaching
solutions.
9) Protracted news coverage makes a big
show out of airing certain facts, over and over, but in the end
the most powerful and culpable oxen remain ungored.
10) Inevitably, media pundits emphasize
that despite all the past problems, the system is cleansing itself.
"The system works."
p154
Olliemania, Olliemedia
Unable to muster the resolve for a full-fledged
investigative assault, the press began to do the White House damage-control
shuffle. The plan for containing the scandal was set in motion
at the very moment Meese disclosed the diversion of Iranian "assets"
to the contras and fingered North and Poindexter as the higher-ups
responsible. Mass media picked up the cue and focused on the diversion
while ignoring other crucial issues, such as U.S. government complicity
in contra drug smuggling. The overriding question became, "What
did the President know, and when?" It all seemed to boil
down to this: If Reagan knew about the diversion, he was guilty;
otherwise he was innocent. And since North and his colleagues
had already shred key documents, the damage-controllers knew the
paper trail would stop short of Nice Guy in the White House.
During the congressional Iran-contra hearings
in the summer of 1987, PBS analyst Elizabeth Drew commented on
how ironic it was that people were "searching for a smoking
gun in a room filled with smoke." The televised hearings
coincided with the 200th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution-yet
neither Congress nor the press showed much fiber when it came
to confronting those who had made a mockery of constitutional
government by setting up an "off the shelf" apparatus
to conduct secret missions.
A Miami Herald article by Alfonso Chardy
disclosed that Oliver North had "helped draw up a controversial
plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis,
such as...widespread internal dissent or national opposition to
a U.S. military invasion abroad." Published on the eve of
North's congressional testimony, Chardy's article should have
put a snag in the can-do colonel's attempt to pass himself off
as a beleaguered patriot. But the papers of record and the TV
networks shamelessly ignored the story. (The media silence was
deafening when Congressman Jack Brooks tried to raise the issue
during the hearings, only to be reprimanded by the chairman, Senator
Daniel Inouye.)
Coverage of North's testimony was marked
by the same superficiality that characterized White House reporting
throughout the Reagan presidency. TV commentators described his
chin line, his haircut, the way his voice choked up at just the
right moments. Ted Koppel said North held "an entire nation
enthralled." John Chancellor called it "a terrific performance"
that "played in Peoria." Dan Rather praised it as "Washington
theater at its best." Typically the emphasis was not on what
North said but on how he said it.
TV analysts neglected to point out the
most glaring contradictions. While North claimed to be an anti-terrorist,
he sold missiles to the Iranian government, which backed the Islamic
fanatics who pulled off the 1983 terrorist attack that killed
241 Marines in Beirut. North bragged of his role in apprehending
the Achille Lauro hijackers, but his contra supply network utilized
the services of Manzar Al-Kassar, a Syrian drug and gun runner
who also supplied weapons to the group that hijacked the Achille
Lauro. Many other such contradictions went unreported, in part
because so many of the guest "experts" who provided
commentary during the hearings were drawn from the ranks of hardline
conservatives and intelligence operatives-people like Patrick
Buchanan, John McLaughlin, former CIA agent Ray Cline and retired
general John Singlaub, who was himself deeply implicated in the
scandal.
In devising covert operations, spymasters
create cover stories in advance to contain the damage should their
schemes be exposed. North's congressional interlocutors chuckled
when he revealed that his mentor, CIA director William Casey,
had told him that he might not be a big enough fall guy; North's
immediate superior, National Security Adviser John Poindexter,
would probably also have to take the rap if it came down to that.
Poindexter was a well-known dissembler on Capitol Hill, having
planted disinformation in the U.S. media about Libya. Yet when
it came his turn to testify about Iran-contra, he was pegged by
reporters as the one person who could prove or disprove that Reagan
was privy to the diversion scam. Poindexter said no. He also maintained
it was his job to provide the President with "plausible deniability."
In effect, Poindexter told Congress and
the media that they had been taken for a ride on a national security
roller-coaster, and now the ride was over. Since there was no
way to refute Poindexter's testimony, he would end up being the
principal fall guy, just as CIA director Casey had planned. The
Democrats in Congress, still refusing to act like an authentic
opposition party, had little inclination to pursue the matter
further. And the Washington press corps, peering through a cover
story that had been rendered transparent, caught a vivid glimpse
of its own weakness, and moved on. A new political season was
about to begin.
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