Posted on 02/14/2002 2:17:15 PM PST by rdavis84
The fly in the butter milk is that the executive branch raised and spent money in direct contravention of the Constitution.
And yes, Reagan was briefed and he okayed every bit of it.
Walt
Except that, well, he wasn't, was he? And neither was Armitage. Poindexter's conviction was overturned on the grounds that the prosecutors had violated his 5'th Amendment rights. I don't know about you, but I find the thought that the 5'th Amendment still has some meaning to be somewhat comforting, regardless of whether we think Poindexter was actually guilty or not.
The Constitution, and the protections it affords, are, after all, how we insure that the innocent are not completely railroaded by the government. If that means that one guilty man walks so that 100 innocent men are freed, so be it.
As for the rest of your list, I don't really see its relevance. It strikes me as nothing more an attempt at guilt-by-association for Poindexter and Armitage. Neither the Constitution nor the laws of this country consider that to be adequate grounds for demonstrating wrongdoing by someone....
Several years after Kiki's last tape-recorded cries were shoved well under a government rug, a maverick group of DEA agents decided to take the law into their own hands. Working without the knowledge or approval of most of the top DEA bosses, whom they mistrusted, the agents arranged to have Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain, a Mexican citizen alleged to have participated in Kiki's murder, abducted at gun point in Guadalajara Mexico and brought to Los Angeles to stand trial.
On June 16, 1992, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Machain Decision that the actions of those agents was "legal." The ruling said in no uncertain terms that U.S. law enforcement authorities could literally and figuratively kidnap violators of American drug law in whatever country they found them and drag them physically and against their will to the U.S. to stand trial. Immediately thereafter the Ayatollahs declared that they too could rove the world and kidnap violators of Islamic law and drag them back to Iran to stand trial. Kidnapping, therefore, has now become an accepted tool of law enforcement throughout the world.
Resorting to all sorts of wild extremes to bring drug traffickers to justice is nothing new for the U.S. government. At various times during my career as a DEA agent I was assigned to some pretty unorthodox operations—nothing quite as radical as invading Panama and killing a thousand innocents to capture long-time CIA asset Manny Noriega—but I was once, (long before the Machain Decision), assigned to a group of undercover agents on a kidnapping mission. Posing as a soccer team, we landed in Argentina in a chartered jet during the wee hours of the morning, where the Argentine Federal Police had three international drug dealers—two of whom had never in their lives set foot in the United States—waiting for us trussed up in straight-jackets with horse feed-bags over their heads, each beaten to a pulpy, toothless mess. In those years we used to call it a "controlled expulsion." I think I like the honesty of kidnapping a little better.
By now you're probably saying, "Get real Levine you live in a nation whose politicians ripped their own people off for half a trillion dollars in a savings and loan scam, a nation whose Attorney General ordered the FBI to attack a house full of innocent babies, and this is the decade of Ruby Ridge, Waco and Whitewater-gate; your own people sent Kiki Camarena to Mexico to be murdered and then gave aid and comfort to those who murdered him—how can you expect justice?"
If you aren't saying these things you should be. And you'd be right. Under the current two-party, rip-off system of American politics with their complete control of main stream media, I expect Ollie North to have a bright future in politics, while hundreds of thousands of Americans like John rot in jail. Ollie North, after all, is the perfect candidate. But there is one faint glimmer of hope remaining, and it isn't in America.
You know ... Ollie the Entertainer was quite the hit at CPAC. He's a huge hero to folks like my reservist cousin and the youth at the rally.
But, all of his laughlines (and a bit of wistfulness) re: his trip to Afghanistan and his schtich regarding "Ralph" the not yet Federalized/Profressionalized security checkpoint crank at the airport could be summed up as:
and
Huge cheers, of course, and folks waiting in line for a booksigning as if he were a rock star.
Oooh, sorry.
I'm sure they're both squeaky clean despite the morass of corruption in which they were immersed and for which they had a certain authority.
Thanks for the correction on Poindexter, though. I guess I assumed too much (or too little, I'm not sure) where the chutzpah of the GOP was concerned.
A great many French patriots died in the Vendee resisting the raping hordes of the Republic. Many Russian patriots were put to death by the bolsheviks. Likewise, American patriotism was itself born out of resistance to the unjust laws of the Parliament and the King.
In the waning years of the Cold War, the Democrats and their allies among the Western Left had become so thoroughly Marxized as to represent a serious danger to the forces of Liberty. By providing arms and support to the Contras, we probably prevented the Soviets from gaining a key beachhead in Central America from which to project the revolution Westward. I consider the men who were responsible for stopping them to be patriots of the first order.
Gack ...
Ignorance may be invincible where the "patriotism" is concerned but please don't go ascribing "virtue" to these men. You'll set me off.
I'll be sure to cite the same logic for you the next time someone posts one of those lovely Jew-bashing/n*****-hating articles/posts around here - drawn straight from the pages of Stormfront, no doubt. If it's here, and you're here, why, you must be an irredeemable neo-Nazi skinhead racist, right?
That seems to be the favorite tactic of the Left these days, doesn't it?
If we're going to pretend to believe that this virtuous straight-shooters were busting their tails for The People and the sorts of Adults who knew how to run things, keep order and follow a chain of command ... chances are good I'm not going to accept some lame THEORY that they had clean hands and clear consciences because they were too INEPT to see what was going on around them or within their ranks.
I fail to see how the operation of a government agency or department where paid professionals are entrusted to exercise both their expertise and vigilance as they serve The People can compare in the realm of "collective" Accountability to some internet forum of anonymous posters.
Frankly, I am far more contemptuous of the Democrats in congress at that time, who were--as usual--willing to sell out their country in order to strike the romantic pose of the principled resistance to American Imperialism. It was a different era. Back then, we really were slugging it out with a fellow superpower who had both the means and will to destroy us completely. The Democrats behavior was, in the context of the era, inexcusable.
Now....in the interim, we seemed to have reached a, how to put it, accomodation with our erstwhile enemies. I find the conduct of our current official foreign policy far more offensive than the "illegal, clandestine" policies pursued by the Iran-Contra gang.
If he were so obviously guilty, surely the prosecutors ought to have been able to convict him without breaking the rules, right? And if they weren't able to, perhaps his guilt is not so obvious after all. He has, at the end of the day, committed no crime in the eyes of the law.
My analogy is simply intended to illustrate the fact that ascribing guilt by association is not a proper means for indicting and convicting someone. It can't be - do you really know that everyone around you in your personal and professional life is perfectly "squeaky clean"? I'd hate to see you dragged away because the mail-boy at your office was once convicted of dealing pot, so therefore you must be a drug-dealer also.
And whether you like it or not, those posts are used in the wider world to paint FR as a gang of racist crackpots. Let us not sink to that level, please...
If I've learned anything from the "War on Drugs", DC scandals, Clinton's impeachment or the Bush Administration's defenses of traitors and rehiring of the tainted, it's that the same rules DO NOT apply to citizens and the Elite.
They are the elite, after all. In fact, I figured that's why all their companies had "Dyn" in the name. The dynatoi being the natural superior to the demos dinks like us who float them, excuse them, elect them and defend them depending on how much we do -- or are forced -- to believe in them.
It's an analogy - if it troubles you, consider the other analogy about the pot-smoking mailroom boy instead.
If I've learned anything from the "War on Drugs", DC scandals, Clinton's impeachment or the Bush Administration's defenses of traitors and rehiring of the tainted, it's that the same rules DO NOT apply to citizens and the Elite.
Whether that's true or not, nothing you've posted so far about Poindexter suggests to me that he has somehow escaped a fate that surely would have been in store for lesser mortals such as you and I. Whether your conclusion about how the rules apply to "them" versus "us" is actually true or not is irrelevant - Poindexter does not, IMO, support such a conclusion. If you have other cases or examples you wish to point to instead, I'll be more than happy to consider them, of course.
We've taken that tack to a whole new level with our "War on Terrorism" as prosecuted by the same crowd.
What that says for our sensibilies as Americans, I don't know. I figure as long as we're cool with having no privacy whatsoever and having "professionalized" Federal Police with IQ's of peach pits inspecting our shoes, patting us down and rifling through our personal belongings as a matter of course, we're probably likely to take whatever abuse they're willing to dish out.
Including the rank insult to our intelligence that is putting folks like Poindexter back in power along with other "personal" compadres of the DYNasty whose attitude may well be very akin to that of Ridge:
Ridge said the administration might do some reorganizing of the federal government that would require new laws.
"We may make some recommendations about the integration or consolidation of some of these departments that will certainly need congressional approval," Ridge said.
The ex-Marine and former Pennsylvania governor predicted, however, that he would not seek legal authority for his own office because the president's personal support is enough for Ridge to do his job coordinating homeland security operations.
"I've got all the authority I need," Ridge said. "I've gotten $38 billion in (budget) authority in four months," Ridge said, referring to funds in Bush's budget proposal. "That is not so bad."
Ridge: Gov't Might Need Reorganizing
Naturally, I'm offering this at the risk of another accusation of "guilt by association" response.
So by all means, let us make things worse by allowing association with unsavory types to become an offense in and of itself. What better way to insure that everyone becomes a criminal eventually?
That's my entire point - don't you see what you're doing when you make that same old tired argument about Poindexter being a criminal because some around him were criminals? What you're doing is giving them the very rope that will someday be used to hang you.
Including the rank insult to our intelligence that is putting folks like Poindexter back in power along with other "personal" compadres of the DYNasty whose attitude may well be very akin to that of Ridge:
I like that qualification - "may very well be akin to..."
Well, are they or aren't they "akin to" Ridge's supposed attitudes? And if you don't really know, aren't Ridge's attitudes really irrelevant to discussions about Poindexter?
They have all the rights, I have no rights. It's not just a matter of whether some of my friends are unsavory, their strangulation of the citizenry with regulatory legislation leaves us all in the dark as to where we've crossed a line UNTIL WE CROSS that line.
So you can drop that.
As for looking to Ridge's statements (as well as Poindexter's past swim ... those of which actually convicted given the benefit of Bush's personal pardon protections), I think it's a valid example of the mindset and "smarts" on which this administration is relying to "re-organize" and introduce wholly new federal powers to prosecute its latest War on a Noun.
That wasn't some off-the-cuff remark. It was part of his presentation to the National Press Corps. It stinks.
We had no problems for eight years taking note of the homogenous mindset of what we liked to call the "Clintonistas". I realize I'm perhaps a stick in the mud, here, and need to "Move On" but I fail to see why it's out of bounds to take notice of the same general Mindset where the Bush Administration is concerned.
Particularly where the reliance on the "personal" support of the President -- as evidenced in his cut of the treasury's "take" from taxpayers -- like Bush was some kind of Don or something.
Contary to the state of play back during Iran-Contra, I see no indication whatsoever the Dems are at all willing to confront or contradict this administration. It's "war-time", you know, regardless of whether this war on which so many new and extra-constitutional powers of the federal goverment are predicated is itself "constitutional."
It's not like they're going to come out and admit that one reason they consistentely let the Dems get away with murder (quite literally, mind you), is that they've got even bigger fish to fry and are bringing back on board the same Brigade who stood the heat in the kitchen the last 30 years ... particularly during the worst of GOP scandals.
I don't see why I can't judge a man by what he says -- or won't say. I fail to see why these men, hand-picked by our President and his advisors -- aren't some direct indication of the bent of the administration.
But it's out there now. If you ever find yourself in a situation like Poindexter's, you can point to this publicly done thing and claim the same rights for yourself. And if they persist in denying it to you when they have granted it to Poindexter, call me - I'll be the first to bring out the torches and the dogs on your behalf. But until then, you're simply assuming that there's a separate set of rules for him versus you.
As for looking to Ridge's statements (as well as Poindexter's past swim ... those of which actually convicted given the benefit of Bush's personal pardon protections), I think it's a valid example of the mindset and "smarts" on which this administration is relying to "re-organize" and introduce wholly new federal powers to prosecute its latest War on a Noun.
You may very well be right. That may very well be the universal mindset among past and present administration officials. But you haven't really adequately demonstrated it here, and certainly not in the particular case of John Poindexter.
It's not like they're going to come out and admit that one reason they consistentely let the Dems get away with murder (quite literally, mind you), is that they've got even bigger fish to fry and are bringing back on board the same Brigade who stood the heat in the kitchen the last 30 years ... particularly during the worst of GOP scandals.
But don't you see the inherent logical flaw of this argument? If they admit it, they're guilty. If they don't admit it...they're guilty. You have created a case that can never really be falsified. And, of course, one that can never really be proven, either. It's just a set of assertions about facts, without really bothering to demonstrate that a connection between all those facts actually exists.
This is all just me providing a necessary counterpoint, really. It pains me to see an argument made when such obvious counterpoints remain unmade - call it a character flaw. I think your case is much weaker than you think. This is my opinion, of course - others will have to decide for themselves.
I don't see why I can't judge a man by what he says...
Of course you can. But up to this point, for John Poindexter, you haven't. You've been judging him by what Tom Ridge says, and by what Casper Weinberger and a whole load of other people said and did. What is that, I ask, other than an attempt to poison the well of discourse?
...or won't say.
You can't be serious. Again, if they deny it, they're guilty anyway. If they say nothing, they're guilty. If they admit it, they're guilty.
Well, in that case, I don't believe I've ever seen John Poindexter or Richard Armitage make a public statement on the propriety of kicking puppies. Obviously we can infer from their silence that they are very much in favor of it.
I fail to see why these men, hand-picked by our President and his advisors -- aren't some direct indication of the bent of the administration.
You can certainly make that claim. I merely suggest that your claim would be infinitely stronger if you could adequately demonstrate that such a bent actually exists, rather than begging the question and simply assuming that it exists...
So, your answer to my question is " There was a Cold War on and we shouldn't have resisted as strongly as we did, because Congress didn't like it."
FYI "Don't jump threads - If you get involved in an argument in one thread, it's considered poor manners to restart the previous argument in the middle of an unrelated thread."
Please pardon my poor manners. After trashing the Constitution, FR rules don't seem so important.
Exactly. She never has admitted that there was a war on. Maybe she thinks the wrong side won. We only won because we cheated.
They did what was right even though shady.
This is the difference between Poindexter and Clinton, the former lied for a good cause, Clinton lied to cover his own a$$.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.