US Training of Death Squads in Iraq? - War Is A Crime .org

assisted it. The evidence didn't support this assertion. For one, North had given Steele a specialcoding device that allowed encrypted communications to be sent securely over telephone lines.Why did Steele need this device if he had nothing to do with the operation? And for a time Steelepassed this device to Felix Rodriguez, one of North's key operatives in El Salvador. Furthermore,Congressional investigators discovered evidence indicating that aviation fuel given to ElSalvador under a US military aid program that Steele supervised was illegally sold to the Northnetwork. (The Reagan administration refused to respond to congressional inquiries about this oildeal.) And according to the accounts of others, Steele had made sure that the North network'splanes, used to ferry weapons to the contras, could come and go from Illopongo.When questioned by the Iran-contra independent counsel, Steele maintained that he had limitedhis actions to providing humanitarian assistance to the contras--an act that would not haveviolated the prohibition passed by Congress on supplying the contras with weapons. But, asindependent counsel Lawrence Walsh later pointed out in his book, Firewall, a lie-detectorexamination indicated Steel "was not being truthful." Steele's name had also turned up in theprivate notebooks in which North kept track of his various Iran-contra operations. As Walshwrote, "Confronted with the results of the lie-detector test and North's notebook, Steele admittednot only his participation in the [clandestine] arms deliveries [to the contras] but also his earlydiscussions of these activities with Donald Gregg [the national security adviser to Vice PresidentGeorge Bush] and the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, Edwin G. Corr."Walsh's description suggested that Steele tried to lie his way past investigators as part of a largercover-up. At the time of the scandal, a significant question was how much Donald Gregg knewabout the operation in El Salvador, for Gregg's connection to the secret, law-skirting contrasupportnetwork implicated Vice President Bush, who was running for president and claiming hehad been out of the loop on the Iran-contra affair. (George H.W. Bush's own diaries--which hewithheld for several years and did not release until after he had lost his 1992 bid for reelection aspresident--prove that despite his claim of ignorance he knew about the Iran-contra affair before itbecame public.) Steele had played the good soldier--that is, he did not tell the truth and kept hismouth shut as long as he could.Steele escaped indictment and his flunking of the polygraph exam was not revealed until Walsh'sbook came out in 1997. But he did have to pay for his participation in the North's contra scheme.In 1988, the Pentagon sent to the Senate a list of 50 Army colonels who were up for promotion tobrigadier general. An a list of proposed promotions to full colonel submitted at the same timeincluded Lt. Colonel Robert Earl, a North deputy who assisted the contra supply effort andparticipated in the destruction of records after the Iran-contra scandal exploded. Usually suchpromotions fly though the Senate with no debate. But aides working for Senator Tom Harkin, aDemocrat from Iowa, noticed Steele's and Earl's names on these lists, and Harkin blocked thesetwo promotions. "There is no way any of these people is going to get a promotion" without acongressional inquiry, Harkin told The Washington Post. The Army claimed that it had foundthat Steele had committed nothing wrong. Obviously, it had not looked hard enough, for, asWalsh later determined, Steele had not told the truth.But misleading congressional and independent investigators didn't fully derail Steele's career. Heis once more advising a military unit with a questionable human rights record. Let's hope that if80