Iran-Contra: In the End, Truth Counts : Though the guilty may go unpunished, the Walsh report is important to the nation

Two weeks ago Oliver L. North, Edwin Meese III and Ronald Reagan failed in secret, eleventh-hour legal motions to block publication of the Iran-Contra report of independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh. Interestingly, attorneys for Meese and Reagan had announced shortly before the release that they were abandoning any further attempt to block it. Brendan Sullivan, North’s attorney, who said nothing, did not appeal to the Supreme Court, his one remaining option. After the release, Meese and Reagan denounced the report. North and his attorney had little to say.

North has become a multimillionaire because of Iran-Contra, parlaying his telegenic defiance of Congress into a career whose most recent phase is a planned run for the Senate. Anticlimactic as the report may be, it may yet prevent a man it calls “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of serious criminal offenses” from joining the body for which he expressed such contempt. We certainly hope so.

The report of the independent counsel, in short, is by no means unimportant. In fact, Walsh might have done the country and his own reputation a service by dispensing with prosecution and issuing this report several years ago. Invoking “national security,” Richard L. Thornburgh, attorney general under George Bush and a forgotten but crucial figure in the Iran-Contra investigation, had withheld documents Walsh thought necessary for his prosecutions. Key testimony had been immunized by Congress. Under the circumstances, Walsh could have claimed with considerable impact that the cover-up had succeeded and serious prosecution had been foiled, and that he could at that point perform only the remaining portion of his mandate: an honest report on what he thought had happened, whether or not--given the withheld documents and immunized testimony--his version could stand up in court.

Iran-Contra has perhaps been a better teacher of how to do it and get away with it than of how to stop it. But one among its lessons may be that the truth counts even when the guilty walk.