I doubt that will happen, he criticizes Newsweek and the media has too much invested in keeping his reality off the air. The comparisons to the yappers they have on now would make them look like the Bozos they are.
The "media" doesn't want anyone telling folks things like Lee Hamilton is a milquetoast front man.
http://192.220.64.45/collections/conspiracies/parryspeech.htm">A talk by Robert Parry given in Santa Monica on March 28, 1993
So this was what was happening by the Summer of '86, when Barger and I finally did a story - we had 24 sources by this point - it was getting silly, you know? You know, it wasn't like two sources, or three sources, we were up to 24, and some of them named, and we did this story in June of '86 where we laid a lot of it out - we didn't have all of it, I'll grant - we didn't know about Secord's flights, but we had Rob Owen, and we had Jack Singlaub, and we had how the intermediaries were moving the weapons and so forth. So we get to this point, and we put this story out, and finally Congress - which had been very afraid of touching this - the democrats were extremely timid - finally Lee Hamilton, who was then Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee takes our little story with the rest of the Intelligence Committee over to the White House and they sit down with Ollie North and they say, "Colonel North - we have this story that says you're doing these things which are kind of illegal, uh, what about it?" He said, "It's not true," they said "Thank you," and they went back to Capitol Hill. And I get a call from one of Hamilton's aides, and he told me, he said - I'll never forget this, because it was probably my worst moment in the whole Iran Contra Scandal - I get this call from a Democratic aide who tells me that Lee Hamilton has looked into my story, and he had a choice between believing these honorable men at the White House or my sources and it wasn't a close call. ....
And even when Oliver North finally told the truth, which was that he was ordered to do all this stuff, and that there was a cover-up going on - you see, he even told them there was a fall guy planned - it was the first cover-up that had been announced probably in front of 100 million Americans and still it was believed by Congress! So Lee Hamilton again, the same guy who had accepted North's word and other guys' back in August of '86, he decides, as Chairman of the Iran-Contra Committee, that we all should sort of say that it was just these 'men of zeal' - there'd been a coup d'etat in the White House, we'd find out - there'd been a junta of a Lt. Col and maybe an Admiral here and there you know who were running this policy and that somehow the CIA had missed it, the White House had missed it, NSA had missed it - it wasn't like the Russians were doing this, it was like, being done, like, under their nose! But, you know, okay - it's not very believable - a lot of Americans didn't believe it, to tell you the truth - but in Washington we believed it. We all believed it. Not all of us, but we pretty much had to believe it. And at Newsweek and elsewhere we were told in the press this was not a story anymore, this was not to be pursued, I guess because this wouldn't be good for the country to pursue it. ....
Anyway, so after the second show, there was this Congressional investigation, which the Republicans fought, which George Bush personally strategized to stop, and it was stopped in the Senate with a filibuster, but the House approved an investigation - the Senate did a little one in one of the subcommittees, and it just has to be that Lee Hamilton was of course assigned to head the investigation. It wouldn't have been fair otherwise - see, Lee Hamilton was a very honorable man, in many ways, I think, except he doesn't believe anyone else can lie, I guess. He was chairman of the Middle East subcommittee when the Iran stuff was happening - the Iran arms stuff and he missed it. He was then chairman of the intelligence committee when North was going full board - missed that. He was then rewarded by being made head of the Iran-Contra investigation and he kind of missed that. And so, because of his sterling record they made him head of the House Task Force on the October Surprise! And of course then the House Task Force found that it was just fantasy, and they put out their report - and I must say I've read a lot of reports and I think it's the worst one I've ever read - but it was well-received in Washington but I'm going to tell you one little - I mean when people talk about fantasy in Washington - there is this section in this report, and this I think is emblematic of it, where the House wants to put Casey somewhere, and they decide that on August 2nd, 1980, Bill Casey was on Long Island. And you look for why they think that - this becomes important to the story and I'll make it brief. When you look back at this, what they have is that, on August 2nd, Richard Allen - who was then a foreign policy advisor to candidate Reagan, wrote Casey's Long Island phone number on the bottom of a sheet of paper. It was Bill Casey, 516, you know, whatever, and there's no notation of a call or conversation, and Allen when he testified he said I think I called the number, he said, but I don't recall talking to Casey or even if the call was answered. And there's no phone bill showing a call. So what normally people would say, even my four year probably would say, is that doesn't prove anything. That proves, like, zero! If someone calls my number in 703 in Arlington hey, I'm not there! And it doesn't matter that they call my number, or write it down. Yet this becomes conclusive proof to the task force that Bill Casey was on Long Island.
more from DN Robert Parry: .......And it goes back, really, to what Lee Hamilton was doing in the 1980s. I do have to disagree a bit with Mel in that I never found Hamilton to be a junkyard dog in his investigations. When we did our first stories about Oliver North in '85 and '86 at the Associated Press, they finally -- those stories finally went to Lee Hamilton at the Intelligence Committee. He arranged a meeting with Oliver North, which involved Dick Cheney, who was on the Intelligence Committee at the time, and Henry Hyde and some other members, and they essentially asked Ollie if these stories were true, and he said they weren't. And that was pretty much the end of the investigation at that point. And it was only because a plane was shot down, one of Ollie's planes was shot down, in October of 1986 that the Nicaraguan side of the story started spilling out.
AMY GOODMAN: That was the downing of Eugene Hasenfus's plane?
ROBERT PARRY: Correct. Eugene Hasenfus survived the crash and began talking about what was actually going on. And that sort of put Hamilton back on the spot. When the Iran-Contra scandal sort of broke open in November of '86, he was made head of the investigation. But again, he led it in a way that was not designed to find the truth. It was designed to sort of reach a political solution, which was not to have impeachment of Ronald Reagan, not to have it go too far, not to damage the CIA. It wasn't to find the facts, as much as it was to sort of reach a consensus that enough people could agree on.
And we've seen that repeatedly with Hamilton. We saw it in the October Surprise investigation, which he headed in 1992, which, when at the end of that investigation so much evidence was pouring in, in late 1992, about this 1980 matter that the chief counsel, Larry Barcella, went to Hamilton and said, "We need another three months, another few months to review all this new incriminating evidence about the Republicans." And Hamilton said "No," that "we're not going to continue this. We're wrapping it up."
AMY GOODMAN: And just to be clear, you're talking about 1980, this allegation that somehow the Reagan forces, before Ronald Reagan became president, worked to stop the hostages from being released under Carter, what would have been the October Surprise, and have them released on Inauguration Day, when President Reagan was being sworn in, that allegation, and this possibility, though many have discounted it, of a meeting that was held in Paris in October, where US officials, perhaps like Vice President George H.W. Bush, met with Iranian officials.
ROBERT PARRY: Right. And there's actually a great deal of evidence that has built up to support that. But again, the idea was, of that investigation, was to avoid having the kind of political crisis, the crisis of confidence, that might occur if the American people began to see their government as it was actually functioning, not as some people in Washington would like them to see it, which is as a more fair, a more decent operation. So, Hamilton has always been the guy who sort of steps in and sort of smoothes things over, tries not to have too many rough edges, and moves on. So that's been his record and, of course, now he's working on the Iraq Study Group. But he's never been the fellow who actually goes to find the truth and lets the facts stand where they may. He has never been that guy.
Parry is too honest for TV. Hell, for that matter you won't see many top blogs ever link to him including TPM and TP.
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