"He has experience so we can trust him!"
-Fox News viewers
To be fair, he's annoyed at them having missiles, he had no problem selling them as long as he could profit.
no hypocrisy then
He wants Iran to not have missiles because then Iran will buy his missiles
Giving this traitor a television platform instead of a prison cell, was one giant step in making Republicans feel untouchable, no matter how poorly they behaved. Even treason is excused, and rewarded.
Lmao no fucking way, really?
there's more to the story, like using the US military to traffic cocaine
Well, it didn't really happen like that, but yeah, the Iran-Contra Scandal contributed heavily to the onset of the crack cocaine epidemic. The fact that they couldn't use the US military in this operation is why cocaine became involved.
They needed to smuggle illegally purchased weapons to Central America, so they hired drug smugglers to smuggle guns in the other direction. What does a drug smuggler do after he's dropped off his weapons, and finds himself in Central America with an empty plane, a fistful of dirty money, and CIA cover?
That's right, he fills it full of cocaine, flies it back to America, and quintuplets his money. And they did it over and over and over, until there was so much coke on the streets of America, that it went from being the drug of the wealthy and celebrities, and became the drug of the ghetto.
And how do we know this? Because smuggler Eugene Hasenfus was captured, and he spilled the entire story.
The only question was: Was the CIA aware of the drug smuggling? Some think that they used it to raise even more money for their cause, but I've never seen any real evidence of that, other than speculation. OTOH, I find it hard to believe that they didn't know their pilots were smuggling cocaine back to America. If they didn't know, they should have, they're the CIA. Besides, it's not exactly a big leap to realize they would do this. They didn't hire commercial cargo pilots to do some side gigs, they hired drug smugglers specifically because they were smugglers. They aren't going to fly an empty plane home. Of course, they're going to smuggle Coke (or weed), back in their planes. Duh.
lol wow, so that’s where Tom Clancy got that plot point for Without Remorse
And dumping it in marginalized neighborhoods and starting the '90s Crack epidemic.
It's a wild tale. I once told the entire thing to a friend, who listened through the whole story, then said "Did that really happen?"
Related to nothing but Ollie, I rode an elevator with him and some police in the US courthouse in DC during his trial
What does "opportunistic shitheel with a side of bacon" smell like?
That I don't remembers, but he was shorter and smaller than I expected
I was just a bike messenger at the time
well, you can't argue that he hasn't learnt his lesson.
You really think he wouldn't sell them missiles again if he thought he would get away with it?
George HW Bush pardoned him on the advice of William Barr, giving Barr the start of a career helping presidents avoid responsibility for their illegal activities.
Hear me out, theoretically this is actually cool?
Like, theoretically, take away the Fox propaganda and shameless lack of disclosure. Picture this guy presenting himself as a CI, like a convicted hacker, former cartel, defector or something. He has real experience with Iran, missiles, the whole Contra affair. He knows what they’d do with them, how they get them, what the buyers are like because he shamelessly sold them.
That’d be a cool perspective.
It’s of course not reality, but still.
Theoretically sure. But the regime he sold it to go toppled like three times over. So it's not the same people anymore and the context he could provide is out of date and ... checks notes still based on his treasonous actions.
No. The current constitution is what they got after the revolution in 1979. Khomeini was supreme leader until 1989. Khamenei somehow got himself appointed to successor just in time. The successor he replaced was against mass executions and stuff. Funny how it goes.
I'm sure as hell not defending him, but your point is valid and why him being against them having missiles isn't necessarily a contradiction. "Them" isn't the same them that he sold to. Again, not defending him and I haven't listen to anything he's said recently to know his stance (nor do I really care to), but just keeping my own logic in check.
For similar reason I enjoyed the Sam Bent episode on Darknet Diaries.
Don't get me wrong. The Iran - Contra affair was a terrible circumvention of U.S. law and North deserved to go to prison and Reagan should have been impeached.
However, this post is a mischaracterization of that event.
This was part of an overall plan to get American hostages released.
That being said, we sold arms to Iran, who was fighting Iraq (a U.S. ally at the time), and one of the intermediaries we used was fucking Israel.
Yup, Israel helped us sell arms to Iran. So Iran can turn around and use them against an ally.
North was then made a fall guy.
I was younger when this happened but I recall, at the time, it was characterized as we just sold them parts for their airplanes and defensive arms.
Man, we just can't stop fucking our face with our own foot.
This was part of an overall plan to get American hostages released.
It was part of an overall plan to commit treason in order to sabotage Carter by preventing the hostages from being released before the election so that Reagan would win.
You're mixing up your Reagan-era Iran scandals.
First, there was the Iran Hostage Crisis, where Iranians stormed the US embassy and took a bunch of hostages in 1979. While I have no doubt there was Republican fuckery going on, Carter really didn't do himself any favors with his handling of that. The hostages were finally released, after more than a year, the day Reagan was inaugurated
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis
Iran-Contra was a scandal where the Reagan administration sold arms to Iran (who was fighting Iraq, then an American ally), circumventing Congress. They then gave the money to the Contras, a group of rebels in Nicaragua, again circumventing Congress:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Contra_affair
You are correct that part of the goal was to release hostages, but those hostages were taken by the Lebanese well after Reagan's first election.
North wasn't the "Fall Guy." That makes him sound like a scapegoat, which he wasn't, he was the guy managing the entire operation.
Also, it wasn't part of an operation to get the Iranian hostages released. They had been released back in 1980, as soon as Reagan had been inaugurated. The Iran-Contra Conspiracy happened later, but the wound from that humiliating episode was still stinging in the American psyche. The fact that North was selling weapons to our bitterest enemy at the time is only one of the things that made this such an egregious violation.
Iran-Contra was about providing weapons, training, and support to the conservative soldiers fighting the establishment of a Russian-supported regime in Central America.
Do they put anyone on screen for ratings?
Heard about him in Killer Mike's Reagan song. Great song
Oliver North, a retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel, played a key role in the Iran-Contra affair, a major political scandal during the Reagan administration. He was involved in the sale of weapons to Iran, with the profits being diverted to support the Contras in Nicaragua, despite a congressional ban on funding the Contras.
Land of the free.
I'm hardly surprised - just seems like a US thing. I mean, who else would leave it up to Trump of all people to decide whether the Epstein files should be made public?
Just another bucket of slime sloshing whichever way gets him a seat at the table.
