Charles Pierce: Connecting the Dots (Seriously) Between Iran-Contra and Peyton Manning

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/34389-focus-connecting-the-dots-seriously-between-iran-contra-and-peyton-manning

We few, we happy few, we Iran-Contra obsessives, we can have fun linking that mother of all scandals to practically everything that's gone sideways in this country since the 1980 presidential election. (That, of course, if you connect the Reagan campaign's jacking around with the release of the American hostages in Iran to the eventual missile shipments, which you can do through master crook Bill Casey.) The key is to see Iran-Contra as the central pivot to a decade of really bad foreign policy initiatives that really didn't peter out until the following decade. One of those was the shady process by which this country helped arm Saddam Hussein through some shenanigans involving an Atlanta bank called the Banco Nazionale del Lavoro. (The BNL scandal, in the argot of the obsessives.) Now, watch as I play Six Degrees Of Manucher Ghorbanifar and put Iran-Contra together with the recent kerfuffle involving Peyton Manning and human-growth hormones.

OK, it all starts with an oddball Indianapolis millionaire named Beurt SerVass. His company, SerVass Equipment, got a contract in 1989 to build a $40 million smelting plant in Iraq that would be financed by BNL. Congressional investigators discovered that Iraq planned to use the plant to make ammunition. (The plant was never built because Hussein invaded Kuwait.) At the trial of a BNL official accused of using the bank as an off-the-books money pit for Iraqi arms purchases, SerVass testified that he had no idea that the smelting plant might be used for anything except civilian purposes.