For those of us who were already crazy fringe types when Reagan was in the midst of hiring terrorists and genocidal generals to slaughter civilians in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Angola, and Mozambique (for example), the most shocking thing at the time of the Iran-Contra hearings was not (yet) that their results would largely be ignored and pardoned, but how limited in scope the political establishment designed the inquiry to be.

You have to remember -- Iran-Contra was mostly about heading off the investigations & prosecutions that the establishment didn't want.

And that bipartisan willingness to protect Reaganite crimes in favor of the foreign policy establishment's lawlessness included protecting the public from knowing the results of an investigation into the very CIA-style domestic propaganda campaign which would be used against the U.S. public and major news media to sell the Iraq war.

Here's former AP & Newsweek investigative journalist Robert Parry, and original 'Iran-Contra' muckraker, who ought to be among the pantheon of lifetime achievers in being committed to actual journalistic principles:

From "Iran-Contra's 'Lost Chapter'"

By Robert Parry

A Special Report | Consortiumnews

June 30, 2008

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/062908.html

As historians ponder George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, they may wonder how Republicans perfected a propaganda system that could fool tens of millions of Americans, intimidate Democrats, and transform the vaunted Washington press corps from watchdogs to lapdogs.

To understand this extraordinary development, historians might want to look back at the 1980s and examine the Iran-Contra scandal’s “lost chapter,” a narrative describing how Ronald Reagan’s administration brought CIA tactics to bear domestically to reshape the way Americans perceived the world.

That chapter – which we are publishing here for the first time – was “lost” because Republicans on the congressional Iran-Contra investigation waged a rear-guard fight that traded elimination of the chapter’s key findings for the votes of three moderate GOP senators, giving the final report a patina of bipartisanship.

Under that compromise, a few segments of the draft chapter were inserted in the final report’s Executive Summary and in another section on White House private fundraising, but the chapter’s conclusions and its detailed account of how the “perception management” operation worked ended up on the editing room floor.

The American people thus were spared the chapter’s troubling finding: that the Reagan administration had built a domestic covert propaganda apparatus managed by a CIA propaganda and disinformation specialist working out of the National Security Council.

“One of the CIA’s most senior covert action operators was sent to the NSC in 1983 by CIA Director [William] Casey where he participated in the creation of an inter-agency public diplomacy mechanism that included the use of seasoned intelligence specialists,” the chapter’s conclusion stated.

“This public/private network set out to accomplish what a covert CIA operation in a foreign country might attempt – to sway the media, the Congress, and American public opinion in the direction of the Reagan administration’s policies.”

However, with the chapter’s key findings deleted, the right-wing domestic propaganda operation not only survived the Iran-Contra fallout but thrived.

Yes, that's correct: even in the midst of the right wing screaming about how the Iran-Contra hearings were merely 'criminalizing foreign policy', the actual bipartisan establishment was working furiously to make sure that the sort of lawbreaking and domestic propagandizing that was core to the Reaganite's death squad foreign policies went undisturbed and undisclosed.

And so the same people and same institutional forms (and occasionally the same institutions) were used to enact the domestic propaganda campaign which resulted in the Iraq invasion & occupation.

Please read the entire Parry article to refresh yourselves on the domestic propaganda skullduggery which the Iran-Contra committee worked to investigate and then ignore, in order to see who it was that sold you the Iraq war. (Hey, there's Otto Reich! Hey, there's Oliver North! Wow, the names, the offices, they are all so familiar!)

But Parry draws the obvious conclusions for you:

...the manipulative techniques that were refined in the 1980s – especially the skill of exaggerating foreign threats – have proved durable, bringing large segments of the American population into line behind the Iraq War in 2002-03.

Only now – with more than 4,100 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead – are many of these Americans realizing that were manipulated by clever propaganda, that their perceptions had been managed.

For instance, the New York Times recently pried loose some 8,000 pages of Pentagon documents revealing how the Bush administration had manipulated the public debate on the Iraq War by planting friendly retired military officers on TV news shows.

Retired Green Beret Robert S. Bevelacqua, a former analyst on Murdoch’s Fox News, said the Pentagon treated the retired military officers as puppets: “It was them saying, ‘we need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you.’” [NYT, April 20, 2008, or see Consortiumnews.com’s “US News Media’s Latest Disgrace.”]

Bush’s former White House press secretary Scott McClellan described similar use of propaganda tactics to justify the Iraq War in his book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

From his insider vantage point, McClellan cited the White House’s “carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval” – and he called the Washington press corps “complicit enablers.”

None of this would have been so surprising – indeed Americans might have been forewarned and forearmed – if Lee Hamilton and other Democrats on the Iran-Contra committees had held firm and published the scandal’s “lost chapter” two decades ago.