Ronald Reagan: Efraín Ríos Montt is “totally dedicated to democracy”

[Octafish]

7. Mr. Brooks passed away last year...A GREAT MAN...

From the lefties who remember him:

Congressman Jack Brooks, Rex ’84 and the Iran-Contra affair

By Patrick Martin
6 December 2012

Former congressman Jack Brooks, a liberal Democrat who represented an east Texas district centered on the city of Beaumont for 42 years, died Tuesday at the age of 89.

Obituaries by the New York Times and the Associated Press detailed his long political career, including his role as one of a handful of pro-civil-rights southerners in the Democratic Party, but passed over in silence the most critical episode in his four decades in Washington.

Brooks was one of the House members of the joint House-Senate committee established to investigate the Iran-Contra affair, a major political crisis of the Reagan administration. It erupted in November 1986, when Reagan was compelled to acknowledge that a group of White House aides had been conducting secret arms sales to Iran and using the proceeds of the arms sales to buy weapons to supply the right-wing Contra guerrillas fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

SNIP...

At one point during North’s testimony, Congressman Brooks, a member of the joint committee, sought to raise the issue of the officer’s work at the National Security Council on a project that pre-dated Iran-Contra. This had been described in an article in the Miami Herald, the only newspaper to report it, as Operation Rex ’84, a plan to suspend the US Constitution, declare martial law, establish a “parallel government” of US military and intelligence operatives, and round up potential opponents of a US war with Nicaragua. The plan was to be activated in the event that the Reagan administration decided to invade the Central American country.

In the jargon of the military-intelligence apparatus, this plan to establish a military dictatorship in America and jail hundreds of thousands of people because of their political views was known as an exercise in ensuring “continuity of government.”

CONTINUED...

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/12/06/brks-d06.html

PS: Way back when, an independent investigator named Danny Casolaro found a thread that linked Poppy Bush and the Watergate crew to the October Surprise to the Iran-Contra Affair to the INSLAW/PROMIS software scam. Casolaro went to meet a source and ended up dead in a West Virginia motel room, a "suicide" followed by quick embalming. Of course, investigators found his papers and brief case missing, but that's life. Around that time, Brooks and a few good Congressmen were investigating the INSLAW/PROMIS story. I called Mr. Brooks' office and got the quick skinny on what they had found, re the software. Amazing stuff that all Americans should know, but, for some reason, never seems to make it on-air or in-print.

PPS: You are most welcome, byeya! I'm getting ready to retire and very much appreciate that you and younger DUers understand how important history is for our current situation and bringing forward a better day.