[CTRL] Bush's Disgraceful Payback

[William Shannon]

http://www.bergen.com/editorials/abr220010703.htm Bush's dubious choice Elliott Abrams is a ghost of scandals past Tuesday, July 3, 2001 GEORGE W. BUSH took the office of president promising to "restore honor and integrity" to government. Last week, he appointed Elliott Abrams, a convicted criminal and oath-breaker, to an important White House post. How to account for this strange disconnect between rhetoric and reality? The answer, as is often the case with this president, lies in family history. As assistant secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, Mr. Abrams worked closely with Oliver North, the man who directed the squalid Iran-Contra operation that entangled the Reagan-Bush administration with gunrunners, drug traffickers, money-launderers, and others engaged in illegal activities designed to circumvent a law banning military aid to rebel armies in Nicaragua. Mr. Abrams was a key figure in the administration's attempt to cover up the scandal. In 1991, facing a barrage of felony charges for lying under oath, he struck a plea bargain with prosecutors and confessed to two counts of deceiving Congress in sworn testimony. But his conviction was quashed by President George H. W. Bush, who issued last-minute pardons to Mr. Abrams and several other Iran-Contra figures just before he left office. The pardons effectively killed the Iran-Contra investigation, leaving many questions still unanswered -- not least the extent of the former president's own involvement in the affair. Now his son has named Mr. Abrams to a senior position on the White House National Security Council, overseeing "democracy and human rights" worldwide. Mr. Abrams spent his previous government service as an apologist for some of Latin America's most brutal authoritarian regimes. He was considered one of the fiercest partisans of the Reagan-Bush era, blasting his political opponents as "vipers" with "blood on their hands." Even many Republican leaders were dubious about him. Sen. Dave Durenberger, R-Minn., once declared: "I wouldn't trust Elliott any farther than I could throw Ollie North." There is no doubt that the White House could have found an equally qualified, equally conservative, but far less divisive figure to fill such an important position. But the president chose not to. This provocative appointment -- which, conveniently enough, doesn't require Senate approval -- speaks volumes about the hardball politics that lie behind the administration's soothing rhetoric. Mr. Bush likes to project the image of a political innocent, a plain-talking Texas "outsider" arriving to clean up the Washington swamp. But in fact he is a savvy Beltway insider. He served in his father's White House as a tenacious "enforcer" of partisan loyalty and knows well the murky ins-and-outs of the scandal that tainted the last two Republican administrations. Mr. Abrams' new job makes sense only in this context. It's a reward to a partisan loyalist who fell on his sword for the Reagan-Bush cause. His appointment as an advocate for international human rights is a disgrace.