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For most of us who watched the televised Joint Hearings Before the Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition and the House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran (better known as the Iran-Contra hearings, held by Congress to determine whether the Reagan administration had secretly and illegally sold arms to Iran in order to secure the release of American hostages, then used the profits from those sales to fund the contra rebels in Nicaragua) in 1987, the enduring image we came away with was a memory of an unapologetic and resolute Lt. Col. Oliver North delivering testimony in a Marine uniform. North, who was a central figure in the plan to secretly ship arms to Iran despite a U.S. trade and arms embargo, and who as a National Security Council aide directed efforts to raise private and foreign funds for the contras despite a Congressional prohibition on U.S. government agencies' providing military aid to the Nicaraguan rebels, testified before Congress under a grant of limited immunity in July 1987. Although North had been granted limited immunity for his testimony, he was later convicted of criminal charges related to Iran-Contra activities (a conviction that was eventually overturned on the grounds that witnesses had been influenced by his immunized testimony). One of the charges against North was that he had received a $16,000 home security system paid for out of the proceeds of the Iran-Contra affair and had forged documents to cover his receipt of an illegal gratuity. North admitted that he knew the security system was a gift but maintained he never inquired about who had paid for it or how it was financed, and he was insistent that he needed the security system because the government had failed to provide adequate protection against international terrorists for him and his family. The terrorist North mentioned in his testimony was not Osama bin Laden, however. To the extent that bin Laden was known to the western world in 1987, it was not as a terrorist but as one of the U.S.-backed freedom fighters participating in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden's hatred of the U.S. and conversion to terrorist status is not believed to have come about until the Gulf War of 1990-91, when he was outspokenly critical of Saudi Arabian dependence upon the U.S. military and denounced U.S. support of a corrupt, materialist, and irreligious Saudi monarchy. (The Saudi Arabian government stripped bin Laden of his citizenship in 1994 for his funding of militant fundamentalist Islamic groups.) Oliver North did not testify about or mention the name Osama bin Laden during the Iran-Contra hearings. He claimed that threats against his life had been made by terrorist Abu Nidal, telling a congressional committee: To emphasize his point, North showed the committee a blow-up of a newspaper article detailing the atrocities of Abu Nidal and recalled that an 11-year-old girl named Natasha Simpson, the daughter of an Associated Press news editor, had been gunned down (along with four other Americans) during an attack by an Abu Nidal group on the El Al terminal at the Rome airport in December 1985. North also later claimed that an attempt on his life had been made five months before his congressional testimony at the instigation of Libyan leader Mohmmar Qadaffi: So no, Oliver North didn't warn us back in 1987 about Osama bin Laden's potential threat to the security of the world or suggest that bin Laden be hunted down by an assassin team, nor was he given the brush-off by a clueless senator who disagreed with this approach. Eventually, Col. North drafted his own response to this piece of misinformation: Variations: One variant of this item concluded with the statement The senator disagreed with this approach and that was all that was shown of the clip. If anyone is interested, the Senator turned out to be none other than ... Al Gore. Senator Al Gore of Tennessee was not a member of the United States Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition and therefore did not take part in the questioning of any witnesses before the Committee. Additional information:
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