Here are some very interesting and relevant observations from Gary Sick, who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan. The political crimes of the 1980’s may seem quaint compared to what we have become accustomed to, but Sick has articulated the principles involved and the political and social dynamics as well as anyone.
October Surprise, America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan
Random House, NY, 1991
Pages 226 - 228
We are accustomed to the petty scandals of Washington politics: A candidate for high office is a lush or a compulsive womanizer; an official lies to cover up an embarrassing policy failure. These are misdeeds on a human scale, and those miscreants who are unfortunate enough or careless enough to get caught are pilloried and punished by the press and their peers in periodic cleansings. We regard such rituals with a certain satisfaction, evidence of our democracy at work.
There is another category of offenses, described by the French poet Andre Chenier as “les crimes puissants qui font trembler les lois,” crimes so great that they make the laws themselves tremble. We know what to do with someone caught misappropriating funds, but when confronted with evidence of a systematic attempt to undermine the political system itself, we recoil in a general failure of imagination and nerve.
We understand the motives of a thief, even if we despise them. But few of us have ever been exposed to the seductions of power on a grand scale and we are unlikely to have given serious thought to the rewards of political supremacy, much less to how it might be achieved. We know that groups and individuals covet immense power for personal or ideological reasons, but we suppose that those ambitions usually will be pursued within the confines of the laws and values of our society and democratic political system. If not, we assume we will recognize the transgressions early enough to protect ourselves.
Those who operate politically beyond the law, if they are deft and determined, benefit from our often false sense of confidence. There is a natural presumption, even among the politically sophisticated, that ”no one would do such a thing.” Most observers are predisposed toward disbelief, and therefore may be willing to disregard evidence and to construct alternative explanations for events that seem too distasteful to believe. This all-too-human propensity provides a margin of safety for what would otherwise be regarded as immensely risky undertakings.
Illegitimate political covert actions are attempts to alter the disposition of power. Since all of politics involves organized contention over the disposition of power, winners can be expected to maintain that they were only playing the game, while those who complain about their opponents’ methods are likely to be dismissed as sore losers. Even if suspicions arise, the charges are potentially so grave that most individuals will be reluctant to give public credence to allegations in the absence of irrefutable evidence. The need to produce a ”smoking gun” has become a precondition for responsible reporting of political grand larceny. The participants on political covert actions understand this and take pains to cover their tracks, so the chance of turning up incontrovertible Documentation of wrongdoing – such as the White House tapes in the Watergate scandal – is slim.
This leads to a journalistic dilemma. In the absence of indisputable evidence, the mainstream media – themselves large commercial institutions with close ties to the political and economic establishment – are hesitant to declare themselves on matters of great political gravity. The so-called alternative media are less reluctant, but they are too easily dismissed as irresponsible. By the time the mainstream media are willing to lend their names and reputations to a story of political covert action, the principal elements of the story have almost always been reported long before in the alternative media, where they were studiously ignored.
When the Iran-Contra scandal exploded in 1986, both Congress and the media pulled up short. Neither had the stomach for the kind of national trauma that would have resulted from articles of impeachment being delivered against a popular President in who was his last two years in office. So, when it could not be proven conclusively that the President saw the “smoking gun” in the case – a copy of a memo to Reagan reporting in matter-of-fact terms that proceeds of Iranian arms sales were being diverted to the Nicaraguan contras – the nation seemed to utter a collective sigh of relief. (The original memo, bearing the signatures of those who had seen it, had been deliberately destroyed.) The laws trembled at the prospect of a political trial that could shatter the compact of trust between rulers and ruled, a compact that was the foundation upon which the laws themselves rested. The lesson seemed to be that accountability declines as the magnitude of the offense and the power of those charged increase.
The ultimate dilemma, which Chenier captured so perfectly in his comment on the revolutionary politics of eighteenth-century France, is the effect of very high stakes. A run-0f-the-mill political scandal can safely be exposed without affecting anyone other than the culprits and their immediate circle. A covert political coup, however, like the one engineered by Casey in 1980, challenges the legitimacy of the political order; it deliberately exploits weaknesses in the political immune system and risks infecting the entire organism of state and society…
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