Lying about John Kerry: From BCCI to the 2004 election

After a Democratic candidate fails, his supporters invariably form a circular firing squad – with the candidate himself in the center. Thus, John Kerry now finds himself under fire from certain self-proclaimed progressives.

Granted, I myself had serious problems with the campaign, which should have focused on Bush’s honesty. After-action critiques are indeed justified.

Lying about John Kerry is not.

Alas, certain alleged "leftists" now feel free to spin Rovian fantasies about the Democratic candidate. For a brazen example, see this text -- credited to one "Worthy Repost" -- which I found on the Portland Independent Media Center:

Everyone knows that Kerry's father was high up in the CIA, just like Bush's father, right?

Everyone knows that Kerry covered up for Bush in the Iran/Contra Commission (and covered up for the Bush family in the BCCI investigation), right? The Iran/Contras commission was the "Kerry Commission." BCCI was (partially) investigated by Kerry as well.

Who is this "Worthy Repost"? Either a misinformed young lefty or (more likely) a Republican operative. Only a dirty trickster would try to spread this sort of clever disinformation, which trades upon fading memories of bygone scandals.

First: I’ve seen no evidence to justify the remark about Kerry’s father.

As for the outrageous allegation that Kerry “covered up” Iran-contra and BCCI – well, this claim stands history on its head.

For the facts of the matter, visit this page and scroll down (and down) until you find the recorded interviews with Robert Parry and Lucy Komisar. Parry, formerly with AP and Newsweek, did pioneering work on the Iran-contra story. Komisar is a respected journalist who has extensively investigated BCCI, the powerful Pakistani bank devoted to money laundering and other unsavory practices.

Here’s a sample of what Bob Parry has to say about John Kerry’s work on the contra-cocaine connection:

In late ’85, we did the first story at AP. In ’86 Kerry picked up on it; he assigned members of his staff to do the investigating. He was stonewalled by the Reagan-Bush administration. We now know that he was lied to about information that was within the US government that would have supported his investigation...

So he was pretty much out there on his own trying to do this. After he did a very courageous report in ’89 describing for the first time how the US government had tolerated drug trafficking into the United States during the contra war, the stories were buried about his report. They were put way inside newspapers. Newsweek called him a "randy conspiracy buff..."

Journalist Gary Webb revived the allegations, which provoked an investigation by the CIA’s Inspector General in 1998. The first section of the I.G.’s report was boilerplate stuff, and received widespread media attention. The less-publicized second half of the report, released later, contained the real juice. Parry:

The overall point was correct -- that the contras were deeply involved in drug trafficking, that it involved not just a few people but dozens and dozens of operatives, and that the Reagan administration had hidden the facts and protected the drug traffickers because they didn’t want to embarrass what they considered a very important national security program...

And what about John Kerry’s work on the related BCCI scandal? Lucy Komisar summarizes the story well:

The CIA knew all along that BCCI was a criminal bank involved with drug trafficking, but didn’t want to stop it because it was also the CIA bank that was used for all kinds of black ops. Well, Kerry found out about this through his investigations into the Iran/contra scandal, and he wanted to look further into this, and he was stopped all along the way.

He was a junior senator, and only the head of a subcommittee dealing with narcotics. He thought this ought to go into the banking committee. The banking committee was run by Don Reigle, and he would not allow this to move along. So Kerry was finally able to get, at one point, one day of hearings, and he had to pay for the staff and investigations himself. They wouldn’t pay for it.

The investigations, though, turned up a lot of information. And Kerry’s chief investigator Jack Blum found clearly that the US officially would not do anything -- the Justice Department would not do anything, the CIA stonewalled the Kerry investigators. So he took the information to New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, and he is the one who did an investigation that led to a grand jury indictment. And a month later the U.S. justice department was forced to hand down an indictment.

If it hadn’t been for Kerry and his investigators and Morgenthau, nothing would have happened to the bank.

That is the truth of the matter.

Even in that period, clever disinformationists like our friend "Worthy Report" skulked around the fringes of the progressive community. They twisted the facts as they came out, force-fitting black hats onto the heads of the good guys. Kerry, Blum, and anyone else trying to uncover the truth became the target of poisonous, paranoid rumors.

Younger progressives, who may not have clear recollections of what occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, are the obvious targets for the latest disinformation barrage. Listen closely and you’ll hear sly voices mutter ominous vagaries about "Skull and Bones," as if shared membership in a silly college fraternity somehow makes Bush and Kerry partners in some grand scheme.

Don’t be fooled.

John Kerry’s investigations of BCCI and contra drug smuggling were nothing short of heroic. His work earned him the enmity of the vengeance-prone Bush family, whose interests were directly affected. According to Lucy Komisar:

The other thing that is interesting is that there was a George W. Bush connection. One of the big stockholders in BCCI...was Khalid Bin Mahfouz. And he was partners with a Saudi named [Ghaith] Pharaon, and they were involved with a guy named [James] Bath. And they financed Bush’s first oil company, named Arbusto. And then when the company which bought Arbusto, Harken, got into trouble, BCCI was also involved in some ways with bailing it out.

The record is clear. Bush did business with BCCI. John Kerry tried his damnedest to shut BCCI down.

There is one other thing you should know about Bush’s money-man, Khalid Bin Mahfouz: According to Komisar and others, he also headed up a "charity" which channeled funds to Al Qaeda. (However, former DCI James Woolsey apparently was in error when he identified Bin Mahfouz as Osama Bin Laden's brother-in-law.)