Cheney and Rumsfeld Pressured the CIA To Mislead Congress In the 70's Too

[Mr. Ected]

The first time Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld pressured the CIA to mislead Congress was in 1975 and 1976, when Cheney was chief of staff to President Gerald Ford and Rumsfeld was Ford’s secretary of defense.

Cheney, having held a series of positions alongside Rumsfeld -- starting under him in the Nixon administration -- also became campaign manager for Ford’s reelection campaign. George H. W. Bush was head of the CIA, appointed by Jerry Ford when Ford switched Rumsfeld from White House chief of staff to secretary of defense.

The mission of the three men was to protect the Ford presidency and some elements in the CIA from the Church Committee. According to researcher Lamar Waldron, they succeeded.

Waldron is co-author, with Thomas Hartmann, of Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination, an exhaustively documented 800 pages compiling more than three decades of research into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. In two recent interviews of more than an hour each, Waldron discussed how much some things haven’t changed since before Watergate.

Reacting to public outrage over a series of abuses -- including domestic surveillance -- exposed during Watergate, the Nixon impeachment and the winding down of the Vietnam War, in 1975 Congress authorized a special senate committee chaired by Democrat Frank Church of Idaho to look into abuses of the intelligence agencies, primarily the CIA and FBI. The Church Committee was convened, getting off to a slow start and under steady CIA-friendly media fire from the beginning; Ford appointed George H. W. Bush as head of the CIA and Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense in October 1975.

As Waldron points out, we now know from thousands of documents declassified since the 1970s that a massive amount of vital information was withheld by Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush from the Senate’s Church Committee. The White House and top echelon of the CIA withheld from the committee information about the CIA’s manipulation of the news media; domestic spying; and material about Cuba, including JFK’s plan to topple Fidel Castro on December 1, 1963, the Mafia’s infiltration of the anti-Castro plan, and the CIA’s unauthorized continuation of agency plotting to use the Mafia to assassinate Castro. Waldron and Hartmann document in Legacy of Secrecy that then-CIA official Richard Helms withheld the unauthorized extension of the mob-linked anti-Castro plots from JFK himself, and from President Lyndon Johnson and from the Warren Commission afterward -- and even from JFK’s own CIA Director.

--Margie Burns
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4736.shtml

[KansDem]

1. Cheney ran interference for Reagan and his dealings with terrorists...

"......former Congressman Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House select committee investigating the Iran-contra affair, was shown ample evidence against Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, but he did not probe their wrongdoing. Why did Hamilton choose not to investigate? In a late 1980s interview aired on PBS 'Frontline,' Hamilton said that he did not think it would have been 'good for the country' to put the public through another impeachment trial. In Lee Hamilton's view, it was better to keep the public in the dark than to bring to light another Watergate, with all the implied ramifications. When Hamilton was chairman of the House committee investigating Iran-contra, he took the word of senior Reagan administration officials when they claimed Bush and Reagan were 'out of the loop.' Independent counsel Lawrence Walsh and White House records later proved that Reagan and Bush had been very much in the loop. If Hamilton had looked into the matter instead of accepting the Reagan administration's word, the congressional investigation would have shown the public the truth. Hamilton later said he should not have believed the Reagan officials. However, today, George W. Bush is considering appointing Hamilton UN ambassador."
Uncovering the Florida cover-up: The good fight continues
A Past Look, 25 December, 2000

"One of the key congressional Republicans fighting this rear-guard action was Rep. Dick Cheney of Wyoming, who became the ranking House Republican on the Iran-contra investigation. Cheney already enjoyed a favorable reputation in Washington as a steady conservative hand. Cheney smartly exploited his relationship with Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., who was chairman of the Iran-contra panel. Hamilton cared deeply about his reputation for bipartisanship and the Republicans quickly exploited this fact. A senior committee source said one of Cheney’s top priorities was to block Democrats from deposing Vice President Bush about his Iran-contra knowledge. Cheney 'kept trying to intimidate Hamilton,' the source said. 'He kept saying if we go down that road, we won’t have bipartisanship.' So, Hamilton gave Bush a pass. The limited investigation also gave little attention to other sensitive areas, such as contra-drug trafficking and the public diplomacy operation. They were pared down or tossed out altogether. Despite surrendering to Cheney’s demands time and again, Hamilton failed, in the end, to get a single House Republican to sign the final report. Only three moderate Republicans on the Senate side – Warren Rudman, William Cohen and Paul Trible – agreed to sign the report, after extracting more concessions. Cheney and the other Republicans submitted a minority report that denied that any significant wrongdoing had occurred."

Hamilton and Iran-Contra

It appears daily that we've been "governed" by a cabal of thugs and cutthroats to whom "public service" means ravish the public trust to acquire exalted services...

[FiveGoodMen]

2. Those who cannot remember history...

[Mr. Ected]

3. Had We Only Prosecuted Nixon's Criminal Cabal in the 1970's

We may have avoided the re-introduction of their virulent strain in our generation.

[FiveGoodMen]

5. Yup.

'Just looking forward' is never the right thing to do.

[Psychic Consortium]

4. They have been running a rogue government for a long time. NT

[GreenTea]

6. Very interesting read....This all makes things very clear concerning the neocons (fascist)

Pappy Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al.

[bobthedrummer]

7. "The Pike Committee" (a highly related archived thread I started March 11, 2008)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2990965

[global1]

8. So If This Was Done Back In The 70's And Again Over The Last 8 Years......

Did the CIA go along with them against its better judgement? Was the CIA intimidated by the likes of Cheney and Rumsfeld? What did the CIA learn from that experience back in the 70's? Why did the CIA let them do it again during the last 8 years? What was the CIA afraid of? If the CIA has felt used - why don't they come out now and say that - given that Cheney and Rumsfeld are in no position now to do anything to them? I just don't get it. Sorry. I need answers as to why the CIA lets this happen to them.