So it is a yes, because that's what I said yes for. The ilegality, that is.
. . . You are really smart! The definition of illegal is something that breaks the law!
(law = legal)
Now you're just being incredibly daft or being a smartass. Of course, covert operations are illegal. You can't steal secrets, tap phones and induce traitors to work with you within the law. Duh. Accordingly, to crow like you've scored points of some kind because you have correctly identified covert operations as being illegal is ridiculous. Other countries have laws against espionage and the like. Under US law, the entire intelligence community is allowed to break the laws of other countries. Espionage would be impossible if this was not the case, something I'm not sure you appreciate or understand.
What matters, then, with Iran-Contra is that CIA, NSC and the people in the Reagan administration broke
American law. They did this by not following standard oversight procedures, flaunting the Boland Ammendment at trading arms with a country that had an embargo against it. Furthermore, they obstructed justice and destroyed evidence after an investigation into the matter began. This is all illegal, but doing something covert isn't necessarily.
Except there was a book about it and eventually a dead journalist...
Wow. Compelling. A guy wrote a book. He died. Apparently, the notion of causation has never occured to you.
The CIA-drug link has been alleged time and again, and little has ever come of it. If you want to read the OIG's repport, it's here, but basically in all came down to journalists making similar leaps of causation that you have and people condemning people for their associations. This was all rather exciting stuff at the time, but it's died down since then, because there is little credible evidence to support it.
http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/9712/exsump3.htm#XII.
By now we estalished the FACT, that you don't know the meaning of illegal. Now we can argue about the illegality of those wars, let's just say they are bigger sins than wiretapping the opposite party...
You've established nothing but your ignorance.
I've simply challenged your claim about the Iraq war and the actions in Central Europe being "illegal," a word you like to toss around as if you know its meaning. Support your claim, because from where I'm sitting there is nothing illegal about either conflict, both of which were voted on by the Congress and authorized through numerous funding votes.
Was it openly declared or secret? It might not have been illegal, but I can still make the case that more people died as a result of it, unlike you know wiretapping...
It was a secret. Secrets are not, by their nature, illegal. Do you understand that?
And yes, people died in Afghanistan, but people were dying before Carter signed the finding. Try reading something about what the Russians did when they invaded. The Afghans wanted arms from the US, and the simple fact is, giving arms to them probably saved lives, in that it allowed a group of people who were going to fight anyway to meet their would-be conquerors on more equal ground.
You still failed to convince us why Nixon was so bad compared to his successors....
I actually have a quantum of sympathy for the man.
My argument simply is that there is a moral difference in breaking the law, as Nixon did, for petty personal reasons and breaking the law for impersonal policy reasons. That is all.
It was very much political as well. The whole Bush and Clinton families were apart of it. I'll tell you that 100% fact. No surprise that those two wound up in charge of this country soon after.
- N
Clinton was a no-name governor from a backward state at the time, so I'm waiting eagerly to see how you link him to covert policies being run out of the White House in the mid-1980s. . .
And sure, Iran-Contra was "political" so far as it was ideological, but surely you see the difference between enacting covert policies to release hostages and deliberating tampering with the electoral system and trying to screw your enemies?
