Monday, November 19, 2012

The Death Toll of Watergate

By Robert Parry, Consortium News
18 November 12

epublicans are fond of comparing their scandal-mongering - like the current hype over the terrorist assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya - with genuine scandals, like Watergate, which sank Richard Nixon's second term, and Iran-Contra, which marred Ronald Reagan's last two years in office. The GOP's false equivalence represents both an effort to puff up their latest accusations against Democrats and an attempt to minimize the misconduct of those two Republican presidents. For instance, one favorite GOP comment about Benghazi is: "No one died at Watergate. Four brave Americans died in Benghazi."

This apples-and-oranges sophistry misses the point that Watergate and Iran-Contra were complex conspiracies that required intensive investigations to unravel their secrets (many of which remain hidden or in dispute to this day) while the Benghazi affair boils down to an easily resolved question as to why the U.S. intelligence community withheld some of the details in the immediate aftermath of the attack last Sept. 11.

The answers seem to be that the Benghazi consulate had evolved into a CIA base for secret operations and that U.S. intelligence didn't want to tip off the attack's perpetrators regarding how much the agency knew about their identities. So, the word "extremists" replaced specific groups and the CIA affiliation of two slain Americans was withheld.

By contrast, the history of Watergate is still substantially misunderstood even by supposed experts.
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