
          Pursuing the Shadow Government
          By Guthey, EricEric Guthey
          Vol. 10, No. 5, 1988, pp. 5, 8-9
          
          Last May, Southern_Changes reported on the work of
the Christic Institute, a Washington-based public interest law firm
that has a strong history of legal activism throughout the South.
          The Christic Institute had filed a civil suit in a Miami Federal
court against twenty-nine alleged members of the "Secret Team"
Christic believes to be behind the Iran Contra Affair, behind a
massive guns-for-drugs campaign to fund the U.S.-backed Contras, and
behind a whole litany of covert acts of right-wing terrorism
stretching back over twenty-five years. The defendants included
retired Major General Richard Secord, retired General John Singlaub,
Oliver North's aide Robert Owen, businessman Albert Hakim, former CIA
operatives Theodore Shackley and Thomas Clines, and Thomas Posey, a
self-styled mercenary and head of the Alabama-based Civilian Materiel
Assistance, a Contra-support group (Posey is currently under
indictment in Miami on separate charges of violating the Neutrality
Act).
          The lawsuit held out the possibility of forcing key figures of the
Iran/Contra affair to answer tough questions that had not even been
asked by the mainstream press, by the Tower Commission, by the
Congressional Iran/Contra Committees, or by Special Prosecutor
Lawrence Walsh.
          But on June 23, just four days before the trial was to begin, Chief
U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King threw the case out of court,
maintaining that it wee based on hearsay and inadmissable evidence.
          The Christic Institute had filed its $24 million suit under the
Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization statute (RICO). Under
the statute, the Christic Institute would have to prove that each of
the defendants committed at least two acts contributing to a criminal
conspiracy that also resulted in the injury of the Christic
Institute's client, journalist Tony Avirgan, during the 1984
assassination attempt against former Contra leader Eden Pastora
(another alleged operation of the Secret Team). In 0a ruling, Judge
King said that the "causation link" between the injury to Avirgan and
the various criminal acts cited by the Christic Institute was
missing.
          Charging that Judge King's ruling was "arbitrary" and full of
"gross legal errors," the Christic Institute immediately appealed the
decision, and will bring its case before the Eleventh Circuit Court of
Appeals in Atlanta sometime later this year.
          In a funding appeal mailed to supporters shortly after the
decision, the Christic Institute suggested that political motives were
behind the abrupt dismissal of their case. "Apparently, Judge King
looked at this evidence and realized that his Miami 

courtroom was
going to become center stage for a riveting political drama--right in
the middle of the '88 election campaign. So he stopped the trial,"
the mailing said.
          But Judge King is not the only one to question the Christic
Institute's "Secret Team" theory. In an article written before King's
decision but published just afterwards, David Corn of The
Nation called the theory a "political device" intended to
rally opposition to the national security apparatus as well as an
"ambitious historical thesis that purports to explain much of
U.S. foreign policy since 1959." ("Is There Really a 'Secret Team'?",
The Nation, July 2/9, 1988) According to Corn, the
Christic Institute uses the Secret Team hypothesis to portray the
secret war against Castro, the CIA assassination program in Vietnam,
the covert war in Central America, and a whole slew of other covert
operations as ventures of the Secret Team and therefore private,
non-governmental acts. Said Com, "This lets the CIA, the Pentagon,
the State Department and various administrations off the hook."
          Corn also noted that the Christic Institute emphasizes the "dark
conspiracy" overtones of the Secret Team hypothesis because it is
"easy to package and offers a highly visible target for the
institute's crusade." (For example, the Christic Institute's
mailing that came out immediately after King dismissed the case
stated, "We must continue to expose the Secret Team
for who they are--private operatives of a "shadow government"
that wages secret ware, assassinates innocent people and smuggles
drugs to finance illegal foreign policy operations." [Christie
Institute's emphasis]) Corn claimed, however, that the Secret Team
hypothesis is merely a legal necessity which glosses over the
historical reality of government covert activity in order to win a
case in court. Corn therefore charged that the Christic Institute,
"in pursuit of its educational and political mission, is offering
this version of history to the public at $15 a copy" and is
therefore placing a historically "problematic document" in the hands
of its constituency.
          Responding to Corn's criticisms last month, Christic attorney
Andrew Love said that the Christic Institute has always recognized a
certain amount of tension between its litigation and public
information efforts. "But, legally, we have to work within the
constraints of the RICO statute," he said.
          Love said that for this very reason the public version of the
Christic Institute's legal declaration, which is entitled Inside the
Shadow Government, includes an introduction which explains why RICO
requires the Christic Institute to concentrate on the activity of the
Secret Team. "We wish that David Corn had read that introduction
more carefully," 

Love said.
          Love also reiterated that the legal focus of the case is not
intended to deflect criticism away from the U.S. government, but
rasher to expose connections between the Secret Team's private
operations and the government. "I don't think we've ever said that
the Secret Team is removed from the government," he said. "But
we're not going to come out and say that everything they did was
sanctioned by the government--because that could be interpreted as a
defense for them."
          "We can't take on the government--we would be thrown out of
court right away," Love explained further. "So we've taken on
the next beat thing. The whole idea of going to trial is to expose
what's going on--and we assume that this process will expose
connections with the government along the way."
          The Christic Institute's investigation has indeed uncovered
considerable evidence that a "shadow government" has been waging war
in the name of the American people and without their knowledge or
consent. But Christic's focus on the Secret Team should not be taken
to suggest that the shadow consists solely of a radical fringe of
rogue operative I perpetuating such countersubversion outside of the government and outside
of the law. Studied carefully and in the context of Reagan
Administration policy, the evidence provided by the Christic Institute
suggests that covert acts of a terrorist nature have become a legal
commonplace within our system of government--and this conclusion can
be supported by the findings of other investigations.
          For example, investigative journalists Frank Snepp and Jonathan
King recently reported in the New_York Times that federal authorities
knew of Tom Posey's violations of the Neutrality Act for over three
years, but did not move against him because his illegal activity served
Administration purposes. King and Snepp maintain that the Justice
Department felt compelled to take action against Posey and his
associate, Jack Terrell, "only after Mr. Terrell soured on
Administration policy and began criticizing it openly--and only after
Congress began investigating." ("Iran-Contra Folly," New
York Times, July 31,1988) Meanwhile, Snepp and King point out,
government officials who encouraged Posey and Terrell or conducted
similar operations of their own go unpunished, and the investigations
of those former Administration officials who have been indicted (i.e.,
Oliver North and John Poindexter) are being deliberately hampered by
federal intelligence agencies unwilling to release relevant
documents.
          Two recent books also reveal the extent to which the
U.S. government is willing to mislead the public and subvert the legal
system where Administration policy is concerned. In A Candid
Inside Story of the Iran-Contra Hearings, Maine Senators
George Mitchell and William Cohen (a Democrat and a Republican,
respectively) assert that the Congressional Iran-Contra Committees on
which they both eat failed to ask important questions or to follow up
significant leads uncovered in the course of their hearings. And Jane
Mayer's and Doyle McManua's new book, Landslide: The Unmaking
of the President, 1984-1988, made the headline, this month
because it revealed that Administration officials actually discussed
relieving President Reagan of his duties on the grounds of
incompetence. But the not-so-surprising news about Reagan's ineptitude
is just the prologue to Landslide, which actually
focuses more broadly on the Iran-Contra affair. Among other things,
the authors conclude that George Bush had "laid before him in clear,
unsparing terms" the Iran arms-for-hostages swap as early as July
1986, and that he did absolutely nothing about it. Bush has vigorously
denied any knowledge of the initiative.
          In such a state of affairs, when the agencies of government cannot
be depended on to uphold the Constitution and when candidates for
president are willing to lie repeatedly, any efforts to shed light on
the shadow government--including the indirect efforts of the Christic
Institute--deserve recognition and support.
          
            Eric Guthey is a student in the Graduate Institute of
Liberal Arts at Emory University.
          
        
