AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now! Congress wants to know how hundreds of FBI files on prominent Republicans wound up in the Clinton White House. Attorney General Janet Reno has ordered the FBI to conduct a thorough investigation of the FBI flap, after Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr decided he lacks jurisdiction. At least 408 background summaries were sent to the White House without apparent justification in late 1993 and '94. Many of those were files of prominent Republicans. Today, the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee will hold the first congressional hearing on the Clinton administration's obtainment of the FBI background files. The hearing comes one day after the Senate Special Whitewater Committee released its final reports.

We’re now joined by Robert Parry. He is director of The Nation Institute’s investigative unit, a longtime reporter at AP and Newsweek for more than 20 years, well known for his work into the Iran-Contra scandal. And today, among other things, we’re going to take a look at how presidents, past and present, have dealt with the FBI.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Bob.

ROBERT PARRY: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, what is your take on the FBI file, what has become a scandal?

ROBERT PARRY: Well, the information that’s in terms of the current situation has to still be sorted out. The White House is claiming that this was an innocent mistake, that they had obtained these documents as part of some background checks, and they were just using an outdated list. There have been some questions raised about that. At this point, it’s still unclear as to who’s telling the truth.

I think, though, it’s very interesting in terms of looking at past scandals with the FBI, when you even go back to the Reagan-Bush period, where you had the FBI being used in a very aggressive way against groups like CISPES. CISPES was a group that opposed U.S. involvement in El Salvador. And instead of treating those citizens as citizens and respecting their positions, the FBI was used to, essentially, harass them. The FBI started investigations of them because of their political leanings. The FBI was sent to talk to their employers, in many cases, generally causing them a great deal of grief for their political positions. And that was treated fairly lightly as a scandal in Washington. There was very little uproar over it. The Democrats did not make the kind of issue over the CISPES case as the Republicans are now making over the current FBI file case.

AMY GOODMAN: And why do you think they didn’t? Do you think it indicates a little difference between the parties?

ROBERT PARRY: Well, the Democrats have tended to always want to sort of smooth these things over. The Republicans are much more combative, aggressive in doing their political fighting. We’ve seen that now over the years. We saw in the case of Iran-Contra, where the Democrats did not want to engage at all on that. If you go back to '85, when I was starting to work on that for the Associated Press and we wrote the first stories about Ollie North and his activities, the Democrats shied away. And even in the summer of ’86, when we had done a long piece describing how North was running this operation in Nicaragua, the Democrats approached him through the Intelligence Committee and asked him, basically, was it true. And he told Lee Hamilton and other members of the Intelligence Committee it wasn't, and they dropped it. And they only found out later, when one of the planes that North was using was shot down in Nicaragua, that, in fact, he was lying. But the Democrats always shied away from that kind of serious battle. Maybe it was partly that they were afraid they’d be called soft on communists. Maybe they were afraid they were going to be stirring up so much trouble that it wasn’t worth it. But it was mostly, I think, a combination of lack of courage and somewhat lack of integrity on the part of the Democrats.

AMY GOODMAN: Wasn’t it Tom Foley at the time who said, “We don’t want to shake confidence in the presidency”? That’s why they weren’t going to pursue Iran-Contra.

ROBERT PARRY: Right. And then, in '87, when the scandal was beginning to be looked at by Congress, there were meetings that the Democrats held where they told the investigators, “This will not go to the president. This will not implicate Ronald Reagan.” And some of the investigators were quite shocked. And I've talked to them, and I’ve talked to Jim Wright, who was House — who became House Speaker, and they acknowledged that, yes, this was the position that was taken. And the thinking was that they did not want to have another Watergate-type scandal, a major constitutional crisis. So, in effect, they falsified the history. And the facts were that the scandal did go to Ronald Reagan and also to Vice President Bush, but that part of the history was kept hidden for years longer, until, ultimately, independent counsel Lawrence Walsh exposed it. But at that point, no one really cared, either. You know, again, the Democrats backed away from pursuing the obstructions of justice that occurred in ’87 and the fact that they were lied to repeatedly, not just by Ollie North, but by virtually every senior member of the Reagan administration, from Caspar Weinberger through George Shultz, people that were accepted by the Congress, by the Democrats, as telling the truth.

AMY GOODMAN: To Elliott Abrams, who was, what, assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, who has just, in the last two weeks, been named head of the Center for Ethics and Public Policy.

ROBERT PARRY: Right. Well, if you remember, Elliott Abrams, even though he was known to have misled Congress, was allowed to continue in his position as assistant secretary of state until the end of the Reagan administration. The Democrats were a little bit — a little bit tougher with Elliott than they were with Shultz and Weinberger and others, who probably lied more egregiously in many ways.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you not only have now the Republicans really biting into this and really taking hold — they’re now holding hearings, beginning today, into the FBI files — but you have Republicans who themselves are known for their ethics violations. For example, the person leading the Whitewater investigation is none other than New York Republican Senator Alfonse D’Amato, who had a tremendous ethics investigation into his own activities over the years, and, in fact, may — and it’s just come out — have a similar situation to Hillary Clinton, in that he was able to flip a thousand-dollar investment and turn it into $37,000.

ROBERT PARRY: Well, one must say, I think, that what the Clintons did in Arkansas deserves serious criticism. It is not admirable to use your public office even in small ways, even in sort of Arkansas-level ways, to enrich yourself. And I think, certainly, Mrs. Clinton should have been much more circumspect when she was taking advice on her commodities trades from someone who had various dealings with the state government.

That said, I think all these things have to be put into perspective if you’re going to be a fair, honest journalist. And if you want to hold the Clintons for those standards, you have to hold others. When Ronald Reagan and George Bush were coming into power, we did not give the same kind of scrutiny to their prior business dealings, and there were some questions that were worth asking, as we have with the Clintons. We did not look into, say, George Bush’s Zapata Oil deals. We did not look into how Ronald Reagan had amassed a good deal of money around his ranch. Those were were known problems when — in the early '80s. But the feeling was, in newsrooms around Washington — and I was in them — that it wasn't quite fair. The guy’s in office. He won the election. We’re not going to look at that. We’ll look at what he’s doing in office. Those were the takes that the media put on it, and the Democrats did not push it, either. So, what we’ve seen with the Clintons in terms of Whitewater is a remarkable break from that sort of tradition of dealing with presidents, after they’ve been elected, pretty much on what they’ve done in office, not on what they did before.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Bob Parry, veteran journalist, investigated Iran-Contra, as well as many other issues through his career, and is now heading up The Nation Institute’s investigative unit in New York. He’s based here in Washington. Isn’t there something ironic about it being the Republicans who are calling to task, for example, the FBI? I mean, as you’re talking about the FBI, that is much better known over the years for going into progressive organizations, for monitoring the Black Panthers, for breaking the Black Panthers, and here you have the Republicans going after the FBI and the president’s use of the FBI.

ROBERT PARRY: Well, if you go back historically and look at what happened to the efforts against the Black Panthers, the Fred Hampton killing and others that occurred during that period, it’s quite stunning. That, of course, goes back to the '60s and the early ’70s. So, yes, it is unusual that this does appear to be a far less egregious violation of people's privacy rights than the kinds of things we saw in the past that the FBI did. And assuming that the White House is telling the truth, there may not have been any significant violation of people’s privacy. Just because their files were turned over doesn’t mean they were gone through, doesn’t mean that they were exploited.

And you also have the case, even as recently as '92, when the Bush administration ordered the examination of Clinton's passport files in an effort to dig up dirt on him. That was a situation where Clinton was leading in the polls going into the fall of '92, the Bush people were scrambling around for what they called the silver bullet. The silver bullet would take Clinton out and discredit him. And they thought they might have it in his passport files, because of his time in Europe when he was a student. There was a rumor that he had renounced his citizenship. The State Department, in coordination with the White House, goes into his files over at Suitland, Maryland, in the archives, and paws through them. They find no renunciation of citizenship. All they find is a staple hole on the corner of his passport application. But that is then taken by the State Department and made — and they create that as a basis for an FBI investigation of Clinton, the idea being that someone had gone into his file to remove this apocryphal letter renouncing his citizenship. So, that becomes a referral, which is sent to the FBI. It is promptly leaked to Newsweek, which puts it out in its Periscope column. Then, then-candidate Bush can turn to this and say, “See, we have these problems with Bill Clinton's questions about his integrity and patriotism.” And that becomes a very, very important weapon that the Republicans plan to use through October of 1992.

What happens then is interesting, though. There were some Democrats on the Hill who still knew how to play a little tougher than the ones we see now. And they sent investigators over to Suitland, too, and they found out that all the Republicans had was a staple hole on the corner of a passport application, which was probably for a photograph or a check or something. And so they blew the whistle on it. And it blew up in the faces of James Baker and George Bush and others who were involved, and that became known as the Passportgate case. But again, what happens in '93 when that's put under investigation, the panel that picks special prosecutors picks a Republican, Joe diGenova. The Republicans — he hires a bunch of Republican investigators. They examine this. And even though there are clear and, in many cases, egregious violations of Clinton’s rights in an effort to taint an American presidential election, they come out with reports saying nothing happened. And so, again, the Democrats never really fight that. They never really protest it. It’s a pattern we’ve seen now throughout, where the Democrats will not stand up and insist that the Republicans are held to any kind of standards, where the Republicans, quite the opposite, hold the Democrats to very tough standards.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, in a recent Nation magazine editorial, it says that not only did the Bush administration go rifling through the passport files of Clinton and Perot, but were charged with trawling for information on Clinton from the Czech secret police, a charge that went unproven only because agents in Prague refused to cooperate with U.S. prosecutors.

ROBERT PARRY: Well, that was also looked at by diGenova’s investigation, and their conclusions are remarkable. What they found was that there were phone calls — I forget the number of, but roughly seven phone calls — from the Bush reelection headquarters to the U.S. Embassy in Prague. Now, you wonder: Why on Earth is a U.S. campaign calling Prague? There aren’t many votes there, at least for an American president.

AMY GOODMAN: Maybe they confused “Czech” with “check,” and they thought they could get some checks there.

ROBERT PARRY: Maybe do some fundraising, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s right.

ROBERT PARRY: But they — so, that goes on. And the evidence is actually quite clear that the Bush campaign was trying to get information out of Czechoslovakia. But again, because the Republicans were investigating themselves, they concluded that, despite the evidence, nothing happened. And the Democrats never protested.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, I like the beginning of this Nation magazine editorial. It says President Clinton gave a deeper answer than he realized when he described the latest FBI file flap, in which a White House aide procured dossiers on as many as 340 people, including many prominent Republicans, as a ”SNAFU.” Though Clinton meant simply a dumb bungle, someone of Bob Dole’s generation would remember SNAFU as a pungent World War II acronym for a phrase beginning “situation normal.”

ROBERT PARRY: Right, I think that that is sort of a good point that The Nation makes there, that the — that this, in many ways, is how Washington has functioned for a long time, that the FBI has been used in many ways far more egregious than what appears to have happened here, yet in most cases, when it’s a case — when it’s a situation where some liberal group, like CISPES, is being hounded, or whether a radical Black group, like the Black Panthers — 

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, with CISPES, I mean, they were breaking into churches to get their files.

ROBERT PARRY: And there were incredible remarks being made by the FBI agents involved. We now have seen their internal memos. And they were clearly targeting people, individuals who were just speaking out. That’s what they considered to be some kind of violation.

And not to go into this too much more, but there was also a very important case that occurs in 1986, where one of the early Contra whistleblowers, a man named Jack Terrell, who had been a mercenary working with the Contras — Jack Terrell had come forward and told his stories about Oliver North’s operations, and they turned out to be quite accurate. And he told them to some people in the media. I had interviewed him. He told it to some Democrats on the Hill, John Kerry, for instance. And then he was targeted by Oliver North through a group called the Terrorist Incident Working Group, or the TWIG, which was a very high-powered organization based at the NSC, but involved other agencies, including the FBI. And they developed a — what they called a counterterrorism plan to neutralize Jack Terrell. And in the documents, which were signed and approved by Ronald Reagan himself, the idea was: How can we make this guy look like he’s a discredited person? And they essentially manufactured an investigation claiming that he was trying to kill the president. Apparently, Jack Terrell had said that his information could get the president, so they used “get the president” as the pretext to start this investigation. And they brought in the FBI. They subjected Terrell to interrogation. And he was intimidated and effectively silenced. Plus, they put out word around Washington that this guy is under investigation. You know, you can’t — so reporters stopped dealing with him. It was a very effective way to sort of shut down what became known as Iran-Contra later on. This is before it broke. But that was the kind of game that was being played all the time in Washington.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what does it mean for now? I mean, do you think that the investigation now into the FBI files, the White House’s getting of these files, could actually lead to a crackdown on the FBI monitoring people around this country, or not?

ROBERT PARRY: I doubt it. I think it will be a little political football that will be kicked around for a bit. You know, the Democrats will say they’re sorry. The Republicans will suggest some grand, dark conspiracy. We’ve seen that played out now for the last three years through the Whitewater-type investigations. I think, on the other hand, the areas where the FBI truly has been violative of people’s rights, we’ll see very little exploration of that.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to stay with Bob Parry after our break to talk about some other issues that he has been following up on in his new newsletter, and then we’re going to be talking about the church burnings and what the FBI is doing or not doing. You’re listening to Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: And this is Democracy Now!, Pacifica Radio’s daily grassroots election show. I’m Amy Goodman, and we continue to be joined by Bob Parry, a longtime investigative journalist with AP, with Newsweek, and now he is the director of The Nation Institute’s investigative unit, and he also puts out a newsletter called The Consortium for Independent Journalism. Why? You didn’t think this kind of information could get out in Newsweek and AP?

ROBERT PARRY: Well, I’ve reached a conclusion that the Washington news media, in general, is not doing these kinds of tough stories anymore. They’re doing rather silly, more personal stories. And I think we really have misreported especially the events of the Reagan-Bush period. So many stories that were extremely important were giving you the short shrift or ignore it altogether. So, I’ve been bringing together a good deal of evidence and information, hard documentary material, and trying to put it together in a way that can be used by people. And one thing I did was I started last November this new publication called The Consortium, which exists on the web as an internet zine and also is distributed by — 

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean by “internet zine”?

ROBERT PARRY: Well, that’s a word they use for magazine on the internet. But it also exists as a paper newsletter, so people can subscribe if they wish to get it on paper. On the internet, it’s available for free, at least the new issue is always for free. And we have usually three or four stories.

AMY GOODMAN: OK, what’s your website address?

ROBERT PARRY: Oh my goodness. It’s — it’s http — 

AMY GOODMAN: The usual, www, yeah.

ROBERT PARRY: — colon, slash-slash, www-dot-delve — D-E-L-V-E — dot-com — C-O-M — slash-consort — C-O-N-S-O-R-T — dot-html.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about some of the issues that you’ve taken up. For example, I see your piece, “Behind Colin Powell’s Legend: A Warning.”

ROBERT PARRY: Right, the current issue is starting a series on who Colin Powell really is. There was a good deal of press adulation around General Powell last year when he was releasing his memoirs and considering a run for the presidency. Obviously, that interest has declined a bit, but it’s backed up again because of Bob Dole’s interest in General Powell as a possible vice-presidential running mate. So, I’m looking at, along with Norman Solomon, who’s co-authoring these pieces, the real history of Colin Powell, what he did in Vietnam, what he did when he was back in Washington, what he did during the Iran-Contra scandal.

AMY GOODMAN: And very quickly, what did he do?

ROBERT PARRY: Well, there was a much greater involvement in some fairly sinister aspects of Iran-Contra, certainly. He was much more involved in arranging and delivering those weapons than people know.

AMY GOODMAN: To Iran.

ROBERT PARRY: To Iran, yes. And he was able to, essentially, sneak away from that through fairly deceptive testimony. So we’re going to be looking at that, plus his period in Vietnam, when he had a minor role in the My Lai massacre as part of the follow-up. He was involved in the cover-up of the My Lai massacre. So, these are stories that people should know about Colin Powell. I mean, we’re going to deal with them very straightforwardly with documentary evidence, but they’re not quite the adulatory information that some people believe.

AMY GOODMAN: What was his position at the time when he was helping to sell the weapons to Iran?

ROBERT PARRY: He was the military assistant to Caspar Weinberger, who was then secretary of defense. He was effectively the person who handled all the sensitive matters for the secretary. So, when Ollie North was trying to set this up, Colin Powell was the man who circumvented Pentagon rules and regulations to arrange what amounted to possibly illegal shipments of missiles to Iran. And it could not have been done, actually, without Colin Powell’s intervention, because the Pentagon had very strict rules about how these things can be handled, and if the truth were known even inside the Pentagon, the Pentagon’s lawyers would have stopped it, because Iran was on the embargo list at that time.

AMY GOODMAN: And how did he cover up the My Lai massacre? What position was he in then?

ROBERT PARRY: Well, he was a major in the Americal Division. And the first complaints that arrived from some rank-and-file soldiers about what had happened, not just at My Lai, but in general, by the Americal Division against the Vietnamese civilians, went to Colin Powell. General Creighton Abrams referred the investigation to Major Powell. And Major Powell did a very cursory investigation and came out with a letter, which is now public through the archives, where he said that he looked into it, there was nothing there, and that, in fact, all this is disproven because of the warm relations that exist between the Americal Division and the Vietnamese civilians.

AMY GOODMAN: And the Americal Division was?

ROBERT PARRY: The Americal Division was the division that carried out the My Lai massacre.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Bob Parry, investigative journalist. You have an editorial on the same issue of The Consortium called “Dole, Clinton and Whitewater.” What is your conclusion?

ROBERT PARRY: Well, I think Clinton is in danger through this scandal. I talked to many Democrats who say, “Oh, no, he has this 20-point lead.” And I try to remind them in this that Michael Dukakis had a 17-point lead coming out of the convention in 1988, and then the Republicans went negative, which the Republicans do like nobody does. And Dukakis did not handle it well. He thought he could ignore it or just try to be positive, and that didn’t work. And very quickly, Bush wiped out the 17-point lead, and obviously won, almost going away. I think the Democrats are suffering from some of the same attitudes in this campaign. They’re overconfident. They don’t realize how these kinds of scandals can really erode a president or any candidate’s credibility.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, not to mention that Hillary Clinton could well be indicted. I mean, Kenneth Starr is very determined.

ROBERT PARRY: Right. Kenneth Starr is a conservative political operative. He worked at very high levels of the Reagan-Bush period. He is not just some nice lawyer. He knows what he’s there for, and he knows that his future depends — in terms of his hopes to get on the Supreme Court, certainly, depends on whether he brings this home and gets the Republicans into the White House again.

AMY GOODMAN: We were hoping that the first lady and the first lady — or, the woman who would like to be first lady, were going to have that debate at the University of Toledo at Ohio. They were offering them a forum, but they’ve turned it down. But it might have given us a chance to get to know Elizabeth Dole a little more. You were head of the investigative unit at The Nation that put out a very interesting piece, “Blood on the Campaign Trail: Elizabeth Dole, Presidential Politics, the Red Cross, and the Christian Right.” Can you summarize quickly your findings?

ROBERT PARRY: Well, we found that in contrast to the press clippings that are pretty glowing about Elizabeth Dole’s time at the Red Cross, where she was president — she’s now on leave — we found that this — that she had let politics interfere quite often in what the Red Cross does, which is very important, in that it’s involved in protecting the American blood supply, especially from the AIDS virus. It’s involved in teaching young people how to avoid getting AIDS. And it’s also now under pressure from the FDA to clean up its act. Now, in all those areas, there are serious conflicts of interest that we found. Mrs. Dole had an AIDS manual rewritten to sort of play down condom use and play up abstinence, because that’s what the Christian right was pushing for at the time. Obviously, her battle that her husband and she are engaged in with the FDA presents serious conflicts of interest, since the FDA has a consent decree, which is holding the Red Cross to very serious timetables to clean up the blood supply, while, in fact — while senator, now-presidential candidate Dole is pushing for legislation that will clip the wings of the FDA. So, what we found was not at all this glowing picture of Mrs. Dole’s handling of the Red Cross in its — in the important legacy that that institution holds.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, last Friday was Flag Day. You and Linda Heller, the author, main investigative reporter on this report, “Blood on the Campaign Trail,” talks about an interesting ad that Liddy Dole pulled.

ROBERT PARRY: Well, we open up with this anecdote about there was an ad showing the flag, American flag, waving, and then it goes, as the voiceover talks about the — when the blood supply goes, there are problems. And the red of the flag is removed from the picture. This was an ad that the Red Cross was going to be running, and then it was yanked. And according to the sources inside the Red Cross, the reason was that Bob Dole was about to introduce legislation about flag desecration. Now, this is a sort of a small area where these political — two political careers sort of cross over. But we also show that it’s actually far more significant, that this pattern of using political operatives inside the Red Cross, people brought in from Republican administrations, has had an effect on the Red Cross which is not in support of the public health.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting that Elizabeth Dole says that if her husband does become president, she will return to the helm of the American Red Cross. And that ad with the flag that was pulled said, “When the blood runs out, so does life.” And our time has run out. Bob Parry, I want to thank you very much for joining us. How can people get your newsletter that comes out biweekly, The Consortium for Independent Journalism?

ROBERT PARRY: Well, if they want to get a free copy, they can call our 800 number, which is 1-800-738-1812.

AMY GOODMAN: One more time?

ROBERT PARRY: 1-800-738-1812. And we’d be happy to send them a free copy and any — and how they can subscribe if they wish.

AMY GOODMAN: Bob Parry is head of The Nation Institute’s investigative unit, and he is now publishing The Consortium for Independent Journalism, a newsletter. Thanks so much for being on Democracy Now!

ROBERT PARRY: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Next up, we’re going to take a look at church burnings and what the FBI is and isn’t doing, as President Clinton prepares for his summit this afternoon with Southern governors.