It Would Be Absurd to Keep It a Secret : Supreme Court must not suppress Iran-Contra report

The broad outline of the Iran-Contra scandal has long been clear. President Ronald Reagan, eager to secure the release of American hostages being held by terrorists in Lebanon, sought by secretly violating the U.S. embargo on arms sales to Iran to bribe that country into helping. Then, without Reagan’s knowledge, his national security adviser, John M. Poindexter, and Poindexter’s aide, Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, diverted some of the profit from the arms sale to guerrillas seeking the overthrow of the government of Nicaragua, secretly violating a congressional ban on such aid.

When the scandal broke in 1986, Lawrence E. Walsh was appointed as independent counsel to prosecute and investigate the case. The law under which the appointment was made--a law now expired but likely to be revived--dates back to the Watergate era and was intended to guarantee that the executive branch of government would not be above the law or beyond public scrutiny.

Both goals were formally recognized under the law. The independent counsel (or “special prosecutor”) was to be named by the judiciary rather than the executive and was not just to prosecute criminal wrongdoing, if any, but also to issue a final, air-clearing report. The final report, an exercise required of no conventional prosecutor, was to cover those who were not indicted as well as those who were, because the abuse of power is wrong even when it is legal.

The prosecution phase of Iran-Contra is now complete. Walsh’s 14 indictments led to 11 guilty pleas or convictions. Two convictions were overturned; five cases ended in pardons by President George Bush. The investigation phase of Iran-Contra seemed about to end on Dec. 3, 1993, when a three-judge federal appeals court in Washington announced that it was about to release the report, minus some classified material. On that day, however, unnamed parties brought motions, which the three judges troublingly agreed to keep secret, requesting that the judges reverse themselves and suppress the report either in whole or in part. Last Friday, the same panel, having reviewed its earlier decision, confirmed it but gave the unnamed parties 10 days to appeal to the Supreme Court, presumably with a second set of secret motions.

The unnamed parties, sources have told the Associated Press, are Reagan, North, (now a Senate candidate in Virginia) and former Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III. If the Supreme Court agrees to review the decision of the appeals court, we can only hope that it will at the very least require those requesting its intervention to identify themselves in court and make their arguments for the record. But our deeper hope is that Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, whose role will be crucial, will recognize the immense harm that would be done to the credibility of government if a $35-million, tax-funded investigation should become an “eyes only” report for those who were themselves the objects of the investigation.

The Bush pardons placed a serious question mark at the end of the Iran-Contra prosecution phase. A suppression of the Walsh report at the behest of Reagan, Meese and North would place a disastrous question mark at the end of the Iran-Contra investigation as a whole.