The Shadow Government

(SALEM, OR) – You don’t have to believe in conspiracies to understand the threat to freedom of a small but powerful group of people in and outside of government subverting the Constitution, effectively executing a coup d’état. Not in the United States, this is a free country, you must be paranoid, we’re the good guys, you say.

It is not hyperbole to say that thousands of Americans have fought and died for the right to remain free. Just walk through Arlington Cemetery or for that matter any cemetery on Veterans Day and notice the American flags placed beside graves. Life was too often short for those who served and died to preserve our freedom to ignore the threats of a ‘shadow government.’

Senator Daniel Inouye referred to the covert and illegal activities of a shadow government involved in the Iran-Contra Affair of the 1980s. The sale of arms to Iran and the transfer of weapons to the Contras were activities not approved by Congress and in violation of Federal laws.

A few of the key players of Iran-Contra Affair include William Casey, Lt.Col. Oliver North, Admiral John Poindexter, Robert McFarlane, Elliott Abrams, Duane Clarridge, Alan Fiers, Clair George, and Caspar Weinberger.

If this were a play, top billing would go to Lt. Oliver North, who with his Marine Corps dress greens and boyish charms, claimed the attention of millions of Americans in 1987 during the Iran-Contra hearings.

Vice President George H. Bush claimed that he was “out of the loop,” but his diaries not released to investigators until after the 1988 Presidential election revealed that he was aware of many if not all of the details.

Even though it was a violation of law to sell arms to the Iranians, few Americans at the time objected to the excessive mark-up of sales of TOWs and Hawk missiles to Iran. After the taking of hostages from the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, very few Americans held fond memories of this strategic Middle Eastern country and the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini.

The diversion of funds from the sales of weapons to support the Contra War in Nicaragua and the prospect of the U.S. entanglement in a war in Central America were illegal and, even if it were not, had no chance of approval by Congress and the American public.

The Reagan administration painted the picture of Contras as “freedom fighters,” good guys riding into town with their white hats taking on the gang of Communists that had forcefully taking over Nicaragua and were a threat to the hemisphere.

After the Boland Amendments prohibited the use of appropriated funds to support the Contras, this pitch was an effective tool used by Lt.Col. North in briefings to right wing millionaires willing to write checks to fund the ‘cause.’

Had they known about the sale of illegal drugs to fund the Contras and the use of CIA proprietary airlines to transport the weapons from the U.S. to Central America and the drugs into the U.S., the source of funds from private donors would have dried up quickly.

Those in the administration who knowingly turned the other eye to the illegal drugs would have faced serious jail terms and not just ‘slaps on the wrists’ handed out by the judicial system.

The revelation that U.S. military bases and personnel were used to support the Contras’ supply of weapons and drugs is not widely known and disputed by those who served in the Reagan administration.Using FOIA, the National Security Archive obtained copies of Lt.Col. North’s diaries that show knowledge of drug trafficking. “In a July 12, 1985 entry, North noted a call from retired Air Force general Richard Secord in which the two discussed a Honduran arms warehouse from which the contras planned to purchase weapons. (The contras did eventually buy the arms, using money the Reagan administration secretly raised from Saudi Arabia.) According to the notebook, Secord told North that “14 M to finance [the arms in the warehouse] came from drugs.” [1] This was not just an isolated incident. 

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