Letters to the Editor

• sysprog on the Logan Act, A Few Reflections, and Republican Violations Tending Toward Treason

  [Read the article: The American media's fringe ideological view of Pelosi's trip]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Now that we've had our edification on origins, with a tip of the old top hat to Herr sysprog, a few points can be somewhat clearly made.

  First off, this came out of a very turbulent time. This era ultimately culminated in the Alien and Sedition Acts, our first close encounter with authoritarian government, and the resulting repudiation of the Federalist Party that passed said acts.

  The Logan Act was very much a product of that time, and thus it is no accident that it hasn't been used since. Such laws are not necessary where good sense and custom can prevail, and besides, they are both too vague (arguably out of necessity in the original drafting, and the lack of subsequent case law to clarify) and too strict (one could, with mal intent, torpedo a quite useful effort to defuse minor tensions, that arguably wouldn't even rise to the level of cabinet-level attention, for example).

  Second, we find that the issue of historical context is a messy one. The real point of the Logan Act, as it has functioned in our history, has been to create conditions that we take for granted--a relatively focused foreign policy apparatus, compared to the diffuse intrigues that characterized the European courts at the time of our nation's founding. It was, in a sense, a warning shot, and wasn't felt to be needed again.

  Third, however, it should be noted that considerable meddling amount to clear violations of the Logan Act have most certainly taken place, and significantly shaped American history. I refer to the Republican presidential campaigns' intereference with (A) the Vietnam peace negotiations in 1968 and (B) the Iranian hostage negotiations in 1980. Entirely unlike the current FauxScandel, these were (a) secret actions (b) undertaken by private individuals (c) working to the detriment of America's interests and (d) to surreptiously influence the outcome of presidential elections.

  Here's what Robert Parry, presenting a gloss from Seymour Hersh, has to say about the first event:

  The first major recounting of Nixon's sabotage of Johnson's Paris peace talks - by offering South Vietnam's President Nguyen van Thieu a better deal from Republicans than was available from the Democrats - came 15 years after the actual events, in Seymour Hersh's 1983 political biography of Henry Kissinger, The Price of Power. According to Hersh's book, Kissinger learned of Johnson's peace plans and warned Nixon's campaign. "It is certain" Hersh wrote "that the Nixon campaign alerted by Kissinger to the impending success of [Vietnam] peace talks, was able to get a series of messages to the Thieu government making it clear that a Nixon Presidency would have different views on the peace negotiations.

  Nixon's chief emissary was Anna Chennault, an anti-communist Chinese leader who was working with the Nixon campaign. Hersh quoted one former official in President Lyndon Johnson's Cabinet as stating that the U.S. intelligence "agencies had caught on that Chennault was the go-between between Nixon and his people, and President Thieu in Saigon . ... The idea was to bring things to a stop in Paris and prevent any show of progress."

  In her memoirs, The Education of Anna, Chennault acknowledged that she was the courier. She quoted Nixon campaign manager John Mitchell as calling her a few days before the 1968 election and telling her: "I'm speaking on behalf of Mr. Nixon. It's very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position and I hope you have made that clear to them."

  On November 2, four days before the U.S. election, Thieu withdrew from his tentative agreement to sit down with the Viet Cong at the Paris peace talks, killing Johnson's last hope for a settlement of the war. A late Humphrey surge fell short and Nixon won a narrow election victory.

  In The Price of Power, Hersh quoted Chennault as saying that after the election, in 1969, Mitchell and Nixon urged her to keep quiet about her mission, which could have implicated them in an act close to treason. As the Vietnam War dragged on for another four years, tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers died, as did hundreds of thousands of Indochinese. When the allegations of the secret deal surfaced, survivors of the Nixon administration denied them, depicting Chennault as a freelance operative working on her own initiative.

  http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Bush_Gang/First_Restoration_S&P.html

  Now that's what a genuine Logan Act violation looks like--and, as Parry intimates--quite possibly an act of treason as well.

  The second event was the deal between the Reagan/Bush campaign and the Iranians known as the "October Surprise," which has never been adequately investigated, but appears even more serious in its implications. Parry discusses it in the same document quoted from above. Laying out the case takes considerable time, and pieces keep being added to the puzzle. But perhaps the strongest single piece of evidence for the October Surprise being real is the fact that arms shipments to Iran--via Israel--began in 1981, before both the capturing of hostages in Lebanon, and the cut-off of funding to the Contras, the two supposed triggering events that gave rise to Iranian arms sale side of the the Iran-Contra Affair.

  Fourth, with all the above in hand, it is now quite clear that tossing out Logan Act accusations against Pelosi consitutes yet another example of rightwing projection--wildly attacking an innocent liberal Democrat for the very sins that they themselves have committed.

  Now, I'm not saying that most folks making the accusations are aware of these past transgressions. Indeed, they would probably strenuously argue against admitting even the possibility that either could have happened. But it is precisely this sort of willful denial among the mass base that makes such machinations so attractive to the GOP elites. This is how the rightwing movement as a whole functions to falsely blame liberals and Democrats for the very sorts of things that conservartives and Republicans actually do.

  Permalink Friday, April 6, 2007 05:11 PM