Word: iran-contra
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Baker's remarks signaled a surprising new White House strategy in coping with what has emerged as a central question posed by Congress's hearings about the Iran-contra affair: Did Ronald Reagan violate U.S. law? Reagan and his aides have begun freely admitting that he was deeply involved in encouraging private support for the contras during the period when the Boland amendment barred "direct or indirect" U.S. aid. But they argued that the amendment simply did not apply to the President -- and if it had, it would have been unconstitutional...
This new "Yes, but it wasn't illegal" tack is part of a broader White House attempt to shift the focus of the Iran-contra drama. As long as Reagan and other top officials were pleading ignorance, each new disclosure about their ties to Oliver North's secret contra-supply network qualified as a front-page headline. Now the Administration is stipulating that it did indeed support the contra cause but that this was well within the bounds of the shifting congressional restrictions that existed between 1983 and 1986. Thus the very real moral and political questions about a secret...
...North was working for the National Security Council and obviously my assumption was that any instruction he gave me came from...his superiors," Tambs said in responding to a question at the Iran-Contra hearings about why he followed orders from the Marine lieutenant colonel...
Some of this is standard political gamesmanship, and the debt problem stems from actions -- and inactions -- by Congress as well as the White House. But the Iran-contra affair exposes a far more disturbing undertone to the Reagan Administration: the belief that some laws are little more than inconvenient pieces of paper. It is now clear that the Reagan team consciously set out to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the Boland amendment, which banned U.S. military aid to the contras. This same wink-and-nod approach to legality has often been apparent in the Administration's languid...
...Iran-contra scandal spreads in ever wider circles, a disturbing image of Ronald Reagan is taking shape. Most accounts of Iranscam, notably the damning Tower commission report, depict the President as a woolly-minded, out- of-touch leader who permitted a band of overzealous aides to conduct secret and possibly illegal operations right under his nose. The White House has done little to dispute that characterization, and for good reason: an inattentive Reagan who knew little of the weapons sales to Iran and nothing about the illicit funneling of arms to the Nicaraguan rebels seemed better than a President...