For myself, I am enjoying some well-earned Tom Waits time (buy Orphans: Brawlers, Ballers, and Bastards if you haven't yet; he's in top form as always), the sun is shining, my St. Bernard is sleeping at the top of the stairs as my kids play. I had all sorts of plans for a boring post no one would read or comment on (it's still coming), and then . . .
. . . I ran across this story at Alternet.org, commenting on the MSM cricket-chirping in response to a Seymour Hersch article about what is essentially a money-laundering and financing racket run out of the VP's office, some of said money going to groups with ties to Al Qaeda. The opening of the Alternet piece needs to be read to be believed:
Let me see if I've got this straight.
Perhaps two years ago, an "informal" meeting of "veterans" of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal -- holding positions in the Bush administration -- was convened by Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams. Discussed were the "lessons learned" from that labyrinthine, secret, and illegal arms-for-money-for-arms deal involving the Israelis, the Iranians, the Saudis, and the Contras of Nicaragua, among others -- and meant to evade the Boland Amendment, a congressionally passed attempt to outlaw Reagan administration assistance to the anti-communist Contras.
In terms of getting around Congress, the Iran-Contra vets concluded, the complex operation had been a success -- and would have worked far better if the CIA and the military had been kept out of the loop and the whole thing had been run out of the Vice President's office.
Subsequently, some of those conspirators, once again with the financial support and help of the Saudis (and probably the Israelis and the Brits), began running a similar operation, aimed at avoiding congressional scrutiny or public accountability of any sort, out of Vice President Cheney's office. They dipped into "black pools of money," possibly stolen from the billions of Iraqi oil dollars that have never been accounted for since the American occupation began.
Some of these funds, as well as Saudi ones, were evidently funneled through the embattled, Sunni-dominated Lebanese government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to the sort of Sunni jihadi groups ("some sympathetic to al-Qaeda") whose members might normally fear ending up in Guantanamo and to a group, or groups, associated with the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.
Just a few comments. First, this is Sy Hersch, whose first Pulitzer was for breaking the My Lai story. In the early 1980's he wrote "the Kissinger anti-memoir", The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. His reporting in The New Yorker in recent years has been spot on, from debunking the whole Niger story to his initial report on the Office of Special Plans and its end-run around the CIA to the plans for war on Iran. There is little he has gotten wrong; he is a hard-working journalist of the old-school.
Second, the fact that Eliot Abrams had his career revived by Bush should have had everyone up in arms, because this is a man who has nothing but contempt for the rule of law, for the separation of powers, for Congress, and a Junior G-man love of comic book-style intrigue. Only an amateur would have loved the Iran-Contra business, as convoluted and silly (not to mention illegal) as it was. His felonious fingers should be no where near a lever of power, not even the transmission lever of a car, because he is not to be trusted under any circumstances. He should have run out of chances with the American people in 1987.
Third, every time in the past three weeks a story comes out on some nefarious, illegal, and dunder-headed action by the Bush Administration, the entire story-cycle goes something like this:
-Tony Snow laughs it off, and the WH press corps laugh with him
-More detailed information becomes available, and the question become more heated; Snow does his "No Comment" dance, and the MSM make fun of conspiracy-mongers on the Internet
-Even more detailed information comes to light, and everyone starts to say, "Hey, there might be something there."
-Congress holds a hearing to reveal the fact that everyone's worst fears are in fact the case; Bush acts indignant, and rumors swirl about this or that fall-guy taking the heat
In other words, I believe this story because every single time an accusation of wrong-doing is made against the Bush Administration, it has proven to be not only correct, but in fact much worse than was initially suspected. Of course, as a kind of background to all this, one wonders why anyone, journalist or not, listens to anything these people say, because, as Digby originally said, and I have repeated, these people lie as easily as they breathe; one just knows that if they say "black", reality is white. Worse, I honestly believe they are incapable of telling the truth; this is like the first truly sociopathic institution in American history (much worse than Nixon, because the press hated Nixon; I think the press genuinely like Bush, something that is beyond my capability to imagine).
I think this is one of those stories that will simmer on the back burner until some vital piece of information is corroborated by a member of the mainstream press, and then - BOOM! - Eliot Abrams takes another fall, this time for Dick Cheney, rather than Ronald Reagan. Of course, with so much on their plate, one wonders if Congress will consider this worth looking into; but, and this needs to be said, the criminality of this Administration knows no bounds.
