Yup, they did it....

Well I'm glad to see no bias here.

 

Barbarian on carpro's "evidence isn't needed, he's guilty because I said so" claims:
Nice try, though. Treason would be something like selling weapons to the Iranians, or negotiating with them to keep our hostages until after Carter was out of office.

I'm of the opinion that unless you can show that he did, you're just engaging in false witness.

Trust me, doing those things is treason, by definition. Aid and comfort to our enemies is treason.

 

Barbarian observes:
Second, you seem to have forgotten to show that he actually did what the section prohibits. Notice that it does not say that Americans cannot meet with officials of other governments. It merely says in effect that they can't meddle in our government's policy.

 

Nor any more than any of the dozen or so Republicans who have done the same thing recently. But of course, you won't catch Drudge or any other rumormongering right wingers talking about them.

I wouldn't worry about this, we're going to be hearing a lot of this kind of garbage over the next few years. Some folks can only tolerate majority rule as long as they're the majority, and now that the voters have overwhelmingly repudiated the Bush administration and the Republican party, largely due to their failed Middle Eastern foreign policy and their allowing corporate business to rip-off the public, this self-justification garbage, translated into "the other guys are just as bad", will be polluting cyberspace and the media for quite some time.

 

As we should have since the Republicans' policies in the Congress and the Bush administration had become so much like that of liberal Democrats over the past few years.

We libertarians/conservatives had to politically slap the GOP leadership in order to wake them up to what they had done.

 

:laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

So that's how you explain it.

 

I would favor an investigation to determine culpability, not just rhetoric.

 

Clearly, the unhappiness of the GOP base with the performance of the GOP Congressional majorities added to the extent of the GOP defeat last month. I am not saying that the GOP would not have lost anyway(we are in year 6 of a GOP president) but it was worse than it had to be if the Republicans had stayed with limited government principles during the past six years.

 

Originally Posted by The Galatian
Two errors there. First, the US code is not the Constitution. Second, you seem to have forgotten to show that he actually did what the section prohibits. Notice that it does not say that Americans cannot meet with officials of other governments. It merely says in effect that they can't meddle in our government's policy.

Nice try, though. Treason would be something like selling weapons to the Iranians, or negotiating with them to keep our hostages until after Carter was out of office.

Problem is, if we had an investigation every time a congressman met a representative of another nation, there would be no time in Washington for anything but investigations. That's why there's normally some evidence of wrongdoing required in order to start an investigation. Mere political spite isn't sufficient, or shouldn't be.

 

That is why I am surprised that you are dredging up the unproven idea(downright false in my opinion) that Ronald Reagan kept the hostages from being released until he was inaugurated.

 

I don't know. It seems, shall we say, odd that the hostages were released the same day Reagan was inaugurated. Also, there is the fact that shortly after this event, the U.S. started selling arms to Iran. This seems too coincidental for me.

 

Why bother?

He was only there to talk about the weather.

 

I don't know, like, maybe after the November election, that, just perhaps, the Iranians decided to add insult to injury to Jimmy Carter just to make sure that his place as the worst president in U.S history was secured.

That sounds pretty plausible to me.

 

Actually, I didn't accuse Reagan of that. Some of the hostages did. But I didn't say Reagan (or any person for that matter) did it. In fact, several investigations (including one Congressional investigation) have concluded that there is insufficient evidence to show that Reagan was involved with any of the contacts republicans had with the Iranians during that time. Nor is there any evidence that the contacts were meddling with US interests. (that's a hint, carpro)

As seems to have happened later in Iran-contra, it does appear that Reagan's people often felt justified in taking risky or even illegal actions without clearing it with Reagan. And so circumstantial evidence is certainly there.

It's also entirely possible that the Iranians concluded that they would much rather have Reagan as an adversary than Carter, and timed the release themselves to help Reagan. If so, their wisdom is manifest, since they later got the weapons they wanted, without doing anything at all for the United States.

My point was that treason isn't merely talking to foreigners; it has to be giving aid and comfort to our enemies.

 

Okay. I understand. That's why I didn't understand your mentioning of the Iranian situation since neither Ronald Reagan nor anyone in his administration gave aid and comfort to our enemies.

 

Ollie North and whoever helped him. I can remember the embarassment of the investigation, and John Tower having to ask Reagan if he had ordered the delivery of sophisticated weapons to our enemies. Reagan said he couldn't remember, and Tower left it at that. Wisely, I think.

After the report was released, Jay Leno remarked, "I thought you always remembered your first arms shipment to the Ayatollah."

 

I have no problem with what Ollie and whoever helped him did. The Democratic Congress had, in essence, declared unconditional surrender to the Communists in Central America and extraordinary means were needed to overcome this idiocy on the part of the Democrats.

 

Even giving aid and comfort to the Iranians? Sorry. That's going too far. If any of us can go practice foreign policy on our own, then we don't have a nation anymore. The law defines how our policies will be determined, and it is criminal and disloyal to undermine those policies.

BTW, not long afterwards, the Sandinista regime was peacefully voted out of office by the Nicaraguans themselves. Turns out the democrats hit on a winning strategy.