Rising to the top, like scum tends to do....
From BoRev:
http://www.borev.net/2007/05/finding_northand_the_rest_of_t.html
It's the Iran-Contra Anniversary, everyone! Can you believe it's been twenty years since those revelations of mass murder and paper shredding shamed and titillated America? Bernardo Ruiz does such a nice job with his "where are they now" piece in the Salt Lake Tribune <http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_5813271> today that all we have to do is cut and paste. The shame continues! Enjoy! "During his tenure as U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the early 1980s, John Negroponte was put in charge of "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinista government in Nicaragua," The New York Times reported. A 1997 CIA inspector general's report concluded that Negroponte covered up reports on human rights abuses committed by the U.S.-backed Honduran military that was linked to "death-squad activities." He was appointed ambassador to Iraq in 2004. Today, he is the U.S. State Department's deputy secretary of state." "Under Reagan, Otto Reich headed the Office of Public Diplomacy. "The purpose of his office was none other than to get the American people to side with war over peace, using propaganda methods determined to be 'improper,"' wrote Nobel Peace Prize winner and Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez. A U.S. government investigation concluded that Reich's office engaged in "prohibited acts of domestic propaganda," according to The New York Times. Despite this history, Reich was appointed assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere in January 2002". That's three short months before the Venezuelan coup! "During Iran-Contra, Elliott Abrams pleaded guilty on two counts of unlawfully withholding information, but was later pardoned by the outgoing President George H.W. Bush. At the start of this president's second term, Abrams was promoted to the role of deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy - a role that is responsible for advancing democracy abroad." "Donald Rumsfeld's replacement, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, served as deputy CIA director while the illegal Iran-Contra operations were taking place. "I was trying to learn the ropes while all this was going on," Gates wrote in his memoirs. But Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a private group that has collected hundreds of thousands of pages of documents on the scandal, calls Gates "the ultimate hear-no-evil, see-no-evil high official during Iran-Contra." And oh yeah! Ollie North is on Fox News! Yay!
