In These Times
They took their fury out on Teicher.....
Sat Jan 3 03:00:11 2004
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They took their fury out on Teicher, insisting that his affidavit was unreliable and threatening him with dire consequences for coming forward. Yet, while deeming Teicher’s affidavit false, the Clinton administration also declared the document a state secret, classifying it and putting it under court seal. A few copies, however, had been distributed outside the court and the text was soon posted on the Internet.

After officially suppressing the Teicher affidavit, the Justice Department prosecutors persuaded the judge presiding in the Teledyne-Johnson case to rule testimony about the Reagan-Bush policies to be irrelevant. Unable to mount its planned defense, Teledyne agreed to plead guilty and accept a $13 million fine. Johnson, the salesman who had earned a modest salary in the mid-$30,000 range, was convicted of illegal arms trafficking and given a prison term.

Before a U.S. invasion of Iraq begins, former President Clinton might be asked whether he was approached by George H.W. Bush or a Bush emissary with an request to drop investigations into Reagan-Bush policies in the Middle East.

Teicher, who has since 1995 refused to discuss his affidavit, could be given a congressional forum to testify about his knowledge. So could other surviving U.S. officials named in Teicher’s affidavit, including Gates and Rumsfeld. Foreign leaders mentioned in the affidavit also could be approached, including former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Mubarak and Aziz.


Junior Bush’s Hidden Records

George W. Bush also has some questions he should answer before missiles start crashing into Baghdad. When he took office in 2001, one of his first acts as president was to block the legally required release of documents from the Reagan-Bush administration.

Then, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a stunned nation rallied around him, Bush issued an even more sweeping secrecy order. He granted former presidents and vice presidents or their surviving family members the right to stop release of historical records, including those related to “military, diplomatic or national security secrets.” Bush’s order stripped the Archivist of the United States of the power to overrule claims of privilege from former presidents and their representatives. [For details on Bush’s secrecy policies, see the New York Times, Jan. 3, 2003]

By a twist of history, Bush’s order eventually could give him control of both his and his father’s records covering 12 years of the Reagan-Bush era and however long Bush’s own presidential term lasts, potentially a 20-year swath of documentary evidence.

As the junior Bush now takes the nation to war in the name of freedom and democracy, he might at least be challenged to reverse that secrecy and release all relevant documents on the history of the Reagan-Bush policies in the Middle East. That way, the American people can decide for themselves whether Saddam Hussein is an aggressive leader whose behavior is so depraved that a preemptive war is the only reasonable course of action.

Or they might conclude that Saddam, like many other dictators through history, operates within a framework of self-preservation, which means he could be controlled by a combination of tough arms inspections and the threat of military retaliation.

Without the full history—as embarrassing as that record might be to the last five U.S. presidents—the American people cannot judge whether the nation’s security will be enhanced or endangered by Bush’s decision to put the United States on its own aggressive course of action.

In These Times - 16 Dec 2003


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