Ollie oops: he says he's exonerated. The record says he's a crook.

• Author: Kornbluh, Peter
• Position: Oliver North of the Iran-Contra scandal; includes related article on people involved in the scandal

He says be's exonerated. The record says be's a crook.

At least until the appearance of "Oliver NorthThe Movie" or "Oliver North-The Senate Campaign," it will be hard to top the absurdity of North standing on the marble steps of Washington, D.C.'s federal courthouse last September after the dismissal of all charges against him, proclaiming himself "totally exonerated." Exonerated? "It's as though Ernesto Miranda had claimed that the Supreme Court gave him a character reference when it threw out his famous confession for crimes because the police had not read him his rights," declared The New York Times. Indeed, because of the type of legal loophole that conservatives deride for springing common criminals, North has gotten off for crimes that he proudly admitted to carrying out. Ironically enough, the same balance of powers that he so heedlessly tampered with saved his neck in the end.

But when the charges against North were dropped, the forces of revisionism immediately went to work. The Washington Times celebrated the event as proof that the Iran-contra scandal was the result of a congressional fishing expedition to find something, anything, that could cut into then-President Reagan's popularity." The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal used the opportunity to bash Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh and to cast the prosecution of other Iran-contra actors as "a Kafkaesque ritual" comparable "to what used to happen to people in the Soviet Union." George Bush intoned that "the system of justice is working." In case you too are beginning to buy all this, it's worth recalling the ugly details once more-just for the record.

North was convicted in May 1989 of three federal crimes. In July he was fined $150,000 and sentenced to 1,200 hours of community service. But a year later, two Reagan appointees to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit out-voted a Carter-appointed justice to rule that, because North had testified under immunity before Congress in 1987, Judge Gerhard Gesell had to conduct a witness-by-witness, line-by-line review of the testimony to determine if any of the 67 witnesses had been influenced by North's immunized statements. When Robert McFarlane, North's immediate superior and the senior official responsible for the Iran-contra initiatives, told Judge Gesell on September 14 that North's congressional testimony had had "a very powerful impact," Walsh reluctantly threw in the towel, dropping all charges. (That move made it all but certain that Admiral John Poindexter's 1990 convictions on five counts will be similarly overturned.) So by giving limited immunity for his testimony in 1987, Congress in effect let North off the hook for the crimes he testified about.

But North's own words allow history to judge him, even if the legal system won't. Out of 12 counts, the jury found North guilty on three: Count 6, "aiding and abetting" the administration's effort to deceive Congress by writing false chronologies about the arms-for-hostages initiative in Iran; Count 9, altering and destroying documents by shredding; and Count 10, accepting an illegal gratuity in the form of a $13,800 security fence paid for by Richard Secord with monies raised from the arms sales.

On each of these charges, North-the man designated as the principal "fall guy" in the Iran-contra scandal, the one who volunteered to "take the spears in my chest"-had been grilled during the 1987 hearings by the lawyers and members of the select committees conducting the Iran-contra investigation; in each case he had openly admitted doing all these things, albeit with various justifications. Later, during his trial, North called himself a mere "pawn" and pointed his finger at higher-ups in the Reagan administration-in fact, members of the jury later told the press that they acquitted him on nine charges not because he was innocent but because they believed he was authorized. As Denise Anderson, foreman of the...