Do you think Oliver North felt a responsibility as a politician of democracy to shred those papers to prevent the public and

Congress from stopping progress with assisting the rebels in Nicaragua? I dont think Oliver North was concerned with democracy at all. He felt a responsibility to implement President Reagans chosen policies regardless of the law, and he felt a responsibility to arm the Nicaraguan contras. In order to do these things he had to keep the policy secret because it was illegal; if anyone in Congress had found out about it they might have had to stop it. North and other supporters of the Contras often called them the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance, but North and others like him supported the Contras not because the Contras were truly fighting for democracy. Some of the Contras probably favored democracy and others were authoritarians, having previously supported or even worked for the pre-1979 dictatorship in Nicaragua. What united the Contras, and what motivated their supporters in the United States (like Reagan and North), was not democracy but a determination to support rightist forces over leftist forces in Latin America. North definitely felt he had a moral and political right to violate U.S. law in order to arm the Contras and implement Reagans policies. Do you think the Iran-Contra Affair was a constitutional crisis? It could have been and perhaps it should have been. However, the leaders of the Democratic party in the U.S. Congress decided not to make it a full-blown constitutional crisis, in the sense that they chose not to press the issue of President Reagans violation of U.S. law and of the constitutional balance of powers between the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. They could have suggested impeaching Reagan for his actions, but for a variety of reasons they chose not to. Therefore the constitutional crisis, if it existed, was a limited one.

Do you think the papers that Oliver North shredded blocked the publics *right* to know about government affairs? Yes. Members of the public have the right to request public documents. Under the Freedom of Information Act, government agencies then decide whether or not national security considerations should block the release of these documents, or parts of them. It is not for a government employee like North to simply destroy documents so that this process can never play itself out in accord with the law. The documents were not Norths property; they were the property of his employer, the U.S. government and, in a certain way, those of the people of the United States. North had no right to destroy them, and he had a responsibility as a government employee to see that public documents in his care were preserved properly. I should add that Norths motives in destroying numerous documents were self-interested. He was destroying documents with the capacity to prove he and others had committed crimes. Do you believe the government did the right thing by selling weapons to Iran to be passed to the Contras, or do you think it would be better if America would have been better off not getting involved at all?

No, the U.S. government did not do the right thing in selling weapons to Iran. It was both illegal and foolish and it clearly did no good. I am not completely sure I know what you mean by not getting involved at all. Do you mean not getting involved in Israels initial proposal to sell weapons to Iran? Yes. Or perhaps you mean that the U.S. should not have had contacts with the Iranian government. If the latter, then I would say selling arms to Iran was not the only way to have contacts with Iran, so the alternative to selling those arms is not staying totally uninvolved in that part of the world. But maybe I misunderstand you. Was keeping Iran-Contra Affair a secret from the public a good thing? It was not a good thing. This was a dumb policy, and therefore keeping it a secret simply allowed the Reagan administration to do something that was not in the interests of the United States. North defended the secrecy by arguing that covert operations must be secret in order to be effective. You wouldnt want your countrys enemies to know all about the covert measures you are taking against them! But this was beside the point. Everyone agreed that covert operations are legal under United States law and that the government may keep such operations secret from the public. The legal issue (see below) was that even legal covert operations cannot, under U.S. law, be kept totally secret from the Congress. President Reagan, and his subordinates following his directives, broke the law by refusing to obey U.S. laws stating that a small number of senators and representatives in the Congress must be notified, in advance, of covert operations that the president plans to implement. Pres. Ronald Reagan broke laws, including the violation of the Freedom of Information Act of 1966, and wasnt charged with any crimes. Was the system flawed? Do you think this happened because of an imbalance of power? I am not familiar with Reagans violation of the FOIA. It is clear to me that he violated the National Security Act of 1947, as amended many times afterward, and also the Arms Export Control Act. The National Security Act and its later amendments required any U.S. president to issue a legal document, called a presidential finding, that describes a covert action he or she plans to pursue, and to inform a select few members of the Congress (in the 1980s these included the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees) of this proposed covert action before it is implemented. There was no finding at all before the first arms shipment to Iran. A later finding stated that no one in Congress should be informed of the operation! This was an explicit violation of the law. The Arms Export Control Act prohibits countries who buy arms from the U.S. government from selling or giving those arms to certain other countries without the permission of the United States (and for some other countries, like Iran, that permission would not have been granted or so everyone thought!). Most of the arms sales to Iran involved in Iran-Contra took the form of Israel selling U.S.-made arms to Iran and the Reagan administration then restocking Israeli supplies. President Reagan, of course, never officially gave Israel permission to sell arms to Iran. If he had done so, that would have destroyed the secrecy around the arms sales to Iran. Reagan also violated the Boland Amendment that was attached to a Defense appropriations bill by the Congress. This amendment prohibited any form of U.S. government support to forces working to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. The Contra part of Iran-Contra was all about circumventing the Boland Amendment, partly by having the National Security Council which is simply part of the White

House staff and is directly answerable to the president secretly take over the CIAs previous work in support of the Contras. Before and after any of these specific violations of law, the presidents oath of office states that the president will take care to ensure that the laws of the United States are faithfully upheld, and the entire Iran-Contra scandal concerned Reagans blithe disregard for that presidential responsibility. I do not think the failure to charge Reagan with any crimes or to pursue his impeachment was due to a flaw in the political system or to an imbalance of power. Democratic leaders simply chose, as I noted above, not to take that path. That was their choice to make. No one forced them to make it. How did Iran benefit from this affair? Iran got about 2,000 anti-tank weapons that it felt it needed in its ground war against Iraq (19801988). Did your view of Pres. Ronald Reagan change after the Iran-Contra Affair? In 1984 I voted for President Reagans reelection. I was eighteen years old and it was my first vote. I would not have voted for him, if I had had it to do over again, after what I learned about the Iran-Contra affair. But by this time were talking about late 1986 when the first revelations came to light, and summer 1987 when the televised hearings of the congressional investigating committee were held I already had changed my mind about Reagan politically. This was because of his support for South Africas apartheid government and his hostility toward Nelson Mandela, as well as other things, including Reagans failure to respond seriously to the HIV/AIDS crisis. But I would say that before the Iran-Contra revelations, I had not fully understood the depth of Reagans disregard for the law when the law inconvenienced him. What kinds of violations of human rights did the Contras commit that were highly publicized during the time of the event? During the 1980s, human rights violations by the Contras, including attacks on civilians, were widely reported in the United States and elsewhere. They were not secrets. However, the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which the Contras were trying to destabilize, was not popular in Washington, DC, so some people in the United States were willing to overlook the ugly stories about the Contras, including a lot of reporting about their involvement with international cocaine trafficking.

Any additional comments are appreciated as well. In terms of rights and responsibilities, President Reagan and Oliver North went far beyond their legal rights. They believed that what they viewed as their moral and political responsibilities

gave them the right to disregard their legal responsibility to uphold and obey United States law. But they were wrong about this. There are those who pursue a path of civil disobedience, violating the laws of man or merely those of some locality in the name of a higher moral or constitutional law, like Martin Luther King, Jr. But Reagan was not like King. He was not a protester and champion of the downtrodden, banging on the doors of power to demand justice. He occupied the seat of power. He was not practicing civil disobedience. He was just a powerful man who didnt want to obey the law. Because Reagan wanted to pursue an illegal policy, he had to keep it secret from the Congress and therefore had to violate additional laws.