Heard about him in Killer Mike’s Reagan song. Great song
Do they put anyone on screen for ratings?
Well Fox News has been, since inception, the propaganda arm of the GOP. So not only will they do anything to get and keep eyeballs, they have a deficit of ethics and ethical contributors. So if they need to spray paint a shit log and call it a gold nugget then that’s what they’re gonna keep on doing.
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.
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.
Some background, as memes inevitably lack details:
During the Reagan administration an Islamist military group called Hezbollah took some Americans hostage in Lebanon. Oliver North was one of a group of Reagan staffers who came up with a plan to sell arms to Iran in exchange for help persuading Hezbollah to free these hostages. North’s contribution to the scheme was to use money from the arms sale to fund the Contras - an unrelated US-backed group of rebels in Nicaragua (freedom-fighters or terrorists, depending on your POV). It was all negotiated in secret because the President didn’t have the authority to conduct such deals.
When the plot leaked out there was a congressional investigation, in which many documents disappeared, and North was the fall guy. I remember him testifying at length on television, sitting stonefaced and ramrod straight in uniform, a caricature of the perfect soldier loyal to his chain of command. There were diagrams of the office showing the locations of desks, phones, the shredder, etc… An office underling named Fawn Hall was also interviewed extensively on TV because she had shredded/hidden documents and was also extremely hot.
North ended up doing prison time for his part in the whole thing. Hall pursued a brief modeling career, dated Rob Lowe, married the fomer manager of The Doors, and according to Wikipedia was last known to be working in a Hollywood bookstore.
Lmao no fucking way, really?
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?”
there’s more to the story, like using the US military to traffic cocaine
And dumping it in marginalized neighborhoods and starting the '90s Crack epidemic.
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.
forgot to mention that Congress made a specific law against funding the CONTRA. And Reagan went around it by illegally smuggling weapons and drugs for them.
lol wow, so that’s where Tom Clancy got that plot point for Without Remorse
Republicans don’t go to jail for committing crimes.
we think it started with trump, but Reagan did so much illegal BS.
He should have spent the rest of his life in jail for trafficking cocaine
He spent the rest of his lif living with Nancy Reagan so I think he kinda got his due
When Nancy Reagan was a struggling actress in Hollywood, she had a reputation for giving the best blowjobs in town. True story.
Just another bucket of slime sloshing whichever way gets him a seat at the table.
Those who do US crimes get airtime; those who expose them get canceled.
Those white and rich who do US crimes get airtime
You don’t have to be rich or white, you only have to be useful in furthering US state propaganda. Condi Rice is still gets plenty of airtime.
You don’t have to be rich
Proceeds to name multi-millionaire.
I was naming a non-white person. Also, people who carry water for US imperialism tend to be well compensated. You don’t have to be rich to do it, but you will likely get rich by doing it.
Context makes it look like you’re trying to name someone that isn’t “rich or white.”
RIce wasn’t born with a silver spoon. She’s rich now from her lifetime of work in the interests of US empire.
Does she? I havent heard that name in what feels like a decade
Maybe because you don’t watch mainstream media anymore. I don’t.
https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=EgIIBQ%253D%253D&search_query=condi+riceYou are correct i do not watch any mainstraim media or news. Everything has to come to me filtered through friends, family, or lemmy.
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.
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.
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.
This reminds me how there’s a world of difference between learning history and living it. In my mind’s eye, I can still see Walter Cronkite saying every evening that it’s the XXXth day of the Iran hostage crisis. And still I remember Ollie North’s trial. There’s no way I’d mix them up.
Land of the free.
He wants Iran to not have missiles because then Iran will buy his missiles
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?
What do we think the payscale is for an occasional drop-in talking head interview? How much is ollie getting for spouting his ghoulish nonsense?
