From Iran-contra to Iraq | David Corn: "Elliott Abrams--who pleaded guilty to misleading Congress regarding the Reagan administration's secret support of the contra rebels fighting the Sandinista government of Nicaragua--was hired as a staff member of George W. Bush's National Security Council and placed in charge of democracy promotion. Retired Admiral John Poindexter--who was Reagan's national security adviser, who supervised Oliver North during the Iran-contra days, and who was convicted of several Iran-contra crimes before the convictions were overturned on a legal technicality--was retained by the Pentagon to search for terrorists using computerized Big Brother technology. John Negroponte--who as ambassador to Honduras in the early 1980s was the on-the-ground overseer of pro-contra operations there--was recruited by Bush to be UN ambassador, then ambassador to Iraq, and, most recently, the first director of national intelligence. Otto Reich--who mounted an arguably illegal pro-contra propaganda effort when he was a Reagan official--was appointed by Bush to be in charge of Latin American policy at the State Department. Now comes the news that another Iran-contra alum--a fellow who failed a polygraph test during the Iran-contra investigation--is playing a critical role in Bush's war in terrorism.

James Steele was recently featured in a New York Times Magazine story as a top adviser to Iraq's 'most fearsome counterinsurgency force,' an outfit called the Special Police Commandos that numbers about 5000 troops. The article, by Peter Maass, noted that Steele 'honed his tactics leading a Special Forces mission in El Salvador during that country's brutal civil war in the 1980s.' And, as Maass reminded his readers, that civil war resulted in the deaths of 70,000 people, mostly civilians, and '[m]ost of the killing and torturing was done by the army and right-wing death squads affiliated with it."

(Via The Nation Weblogs.)