Kerry for president

I didn't know much about John Kerry when he first won the Democratic nomination for president. I just thought he'd have to be awfully bad in order to be worse than four more years of Bush.

Back in August I blogged a Washington Monthly story that described how Kerry stared down resistance by powerful opponents, including senior members of his own party, when he insisted on investigating the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). In the end he was vindicated when BCCI was revealed to be "a vast criminal enterprise" and, not incidentally, a funder of terrorism.

Via Susan at Surburban Guerrilla, there's another interesting story on Kerry's time in the Senate at Salon. (Unfortunately it's premium content - you'll have to sit through an ad to get a Day Pass.)

In late 1985, a couple of years before the BCCI investigation began, Kerry got wind of allegations that the Contras, who were being supported by the Reagan/Bush administration in their resistance against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, were heavily involved in cocaine smuggling and that American agencies might be complicit in it. Kerry tried to enlist both congress and the press in an investigation but received little support and eventually a lot of resistance and even condemnation.

The Reagan administration did everything it could to thwart Kerry's investigation, including attempting to discredit witnesses, stonewalling the Senate when it requested evidence and assigning the CIA to monitor Kerry's probe. But it couldn't stop Kerry and his investigators from discovering the explosive truth: that the Contra war was permeated with drug traffickers who gave the Contras money, weapons and equipment in exchange for help in smuggling cocaine into the United States. Even more damningly, Kerry found that U.S. government agencies knew about the Contra-drug connection, but turned a blind eye to the evidence in order to avoid undermining a top Reagan-Bush foreign policy initiative.

The Reagan administration's tolerance and protection of this dark underbelly of the Contra war represented one of the most sordid scandals in the history of U.S. foreign policy. Yet when Kerry's bombshell findings were released in 1989, they were greeted by the mainstream press with disdain and disinterest. The New York Times, which had long denigrated the Contra-drug allegations, buried the story of Kerry's report on its inside pages, as did the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. For his tireless efforts, Kerry earned a reputation as a reckless investigator. Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom Watch dubbed Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff."

On the report Kerry issued:

Its stunning conclusion: "On the basis of the evidence, it is clear that individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers. In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter."

The report discovered that drug traffickers gave the Contras "cash, weapons, planes, pilots, air supply services and other materials." Moreover, the U.S. State Department had paid some drug traffickers as part of a program to fly non-lethal assistance to the Contras. Some payments occurred "after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies."

Although Kerry's findings represented the first time a congressional report explicitly accused federal agencies of willful collaboration with drug traffickers, the major news organizations chose to bury the startling findings. Instead of front-page treatment, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times all wrote brief accounts and stuck them deep inside their papers. The New York Times article, only 850 words long, landed on Page 8. The Post placed its story on A20. The Los Angeles Times found space on Page 11.

I guess that's why this part of the story was new to me. While the arms for hostages part of Iran-Contra is well known, the drug smuggling side just didn't get the attention. But Kerry was eventually vindicated in this too.

The government's decade-long Contra cocaine cover-up began to crumble when CIA inspector general Frederick Hitz published the first of two volumes of his Contra cocaine investigation on Jan. 29, 1998, followed by a Justice Department report and Hitz's second volume in October 1998.

The CIA inspector general and Justice Department reports confirmed that the Reagan administration knew from almost the outset of the Contra war that cocaine traffickers permeated the CIA-backed army but the administration did next to nothing to expose or stop these criminals. The reports revealed example after example of leads not followed, witnesses disparaged and official law-enforcement investigations sabotaged. The evidence indicated that Contra-connected smugglers included the Medellin cartel, the Panamanian government of Manuel Noriega, the Honduran military, the Honduran-Mexican smuggling ring of Ramon Matta Ballesteros, and Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans.

The Salon article is fairly long and there's a lot more detail than I've provided here. The point is that in this, as in the BCCI investigation and even his earlier opposition to the Vietnam war, Kerry seems to have a pattern of persevering even when a course of action doesn't necessarily look like the politically smart thing to do. And if there's one thing the U.S., not to mention the rest of us, could use it's a leader who doesn't look at every decision in terms of its political ramifications alone.

I've seen a number of supporters of Bush insist that as poor as he may be on domestic policy, he has the vision required to lead America in the War on Terror™. I don't see it. I see someone who doesn't understand the real problems he faces because he chooses not to. And I see someone who's proven repeatedly that not only does he pursue the wrong policies, he does it badly. On a day like today, when the big news story involves 380 tons of highly powerful explosives that went missing in Iraq a year and a half ago, even though the White House knew exactly where it was going in, Bush looks like someone who couldn't find his butt with both hands.

In Kerry I see someone who may a serial exaggerator in his political rhetoric but on his worst day doesn't come close to being the dissembler that Bush is. And in Kerry, increasingly, I see someone who has a nose for the truth and the courage to go where it leads him when he thinks it's important.

That doesn't mean I'm going to agree with everything he does. There's a pretty big gap between American foreign policy as it is, and as I think it should be. The gap was there before Bush took office and I would expect it to remain, at least in part, through a Kerry presidency. But the more I find out about Kerry's time in the Senate, the better I like it.

Update:
If you want to read the original article without sitting through the ad at Salon, it's been "liberated" at truthout.