If anything, he's been criticized more after his death than he ever was before. When he left office, he was considered one of the greatest of all time, founders and Abe Lincoln aside. Were you alive then? The revisionist history is happening NOW when Obama wants to blame everyone except himself.
Could not have said it any better.
And if even he wasn't alive then, it's very easy to see that the country basically mandated a 12 year term for him (Bush I's election was a clear mandate on Reagan).
We should stop looking for culprits and denigrating one of the truly great adminstrations of our time. Yes, he made mistakes. It's tough to be the President and not. But, I'm sorry - this liberal backlash against the 80's is sickening. I'd like any of you to remember 1979 and how terrible we all felt at the end of the worst President's admistration (though the current one is trying - and that's the rub - if you ignore history, you are doomed to repeat it).
I was alive then, and even as a snot nosed teenager I knew he wasn't a good president. Reagan was criticized much more through the 90's than he is now. Now, Reagan is this magical figure that brought down communism and saved our economy. I knew Reagan was full of it in the 80's, and this was cemented in 1987 when I visited the actual "evil empire".
Bush got elected because of Willie Horton and Dukakis riding in a tank. But, I suppose we are looking at the past through our own lenses. I grew up in a liberal family, with mostly liberal friends, in a mostly liberal community and school system, so critiquing conservatives was common. It's not a recent liberal backlash against the 80's. It's been happening all along amongst liberals. What you see now is more glowing reviews of Reagan from middle-of-the-road media.
I grew up in a liberal family, with mostly liberal friends, in a mostly liberal community and school system, so critiquing conservatives was common. It's not a recent liberal backlash against the 80's. It's been happening all along amongst liberals.
I'm really sorry to hear that. You never had a chance did you?
I grew up in a liberal family, with mostly liberal friends, in a mostly liberal community and school system, so critiquing conservatives was common. It's not a recent liberal backlash against the 80's. It's been happening all along amongst liberals.
I'm really sorry to hear that. You never had a chance did you?
I grew up in a moderate family, in an open minded community and school system.
I'm guessing he grew up in Minnesota.
Sorry. The world doesn't work the way you tell it to.
so we supplied aid to...afganistan? in doing so, did reagan help support al-queda?
...
Put it this way...
In 1985, the United States (President Reagan) called the Mujahadin (which split into autonomous cells, forming a command network... one of which was later called, 'The Base' (al Qaeda, in Arabic) by it's leader, Usam bin Laden) 'Freedom Fighters'. The Mujahadin were funded through the Pakistani secret police (ISI) with money send from the U.S. to Pakistan. The agreement being, a war by proxy, using the Mujahadin as the main combatants.
If you think about it... how were 'goat farmers' able to hit Soviet helicopter gunships from safe distances?
Answer: Stinger surface to air missiles.
Pakistan set up the Afghani government after the Soviet withdrawal. Guess who they morphed into? Give yourself a Gold Star if you answered, 'The Taliban'. We were kind of thinking that the fundamentalist Muslims would create problem for the Russians (like the problems they have in Chechnya) and give their Persian neighbors, Iran, a hard time.
It might have worked out... if we'd kept out of bed with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, U.A.E. and Qatar's domestic policy making... working out deals of weapons for oil and favorable business opportunities for American companies in the region. Those monarchies can be oppressive... if you are not in line with the King.
...
Moral: The Enemy of My Enemy is Not My Friend if he Hates My Ass.
Allen Fieldhouse, home of the 2008 NCAA men's Basketball Champions! Go Jayhawks!
Hail, Hail!!!
I grew up in a liberal family, with mostly liberal friends, in a mostly liberal community and school system, so critiquing conservatives was common. It's not a recent liberal backlash against the 80's. It's been happening all along amongst liberals.
I'm really sorry to hear that. You never had a chance did you?
I grew up in a moderate family, in an open minded community and school system.
I'm guessing he grew up in Minnesota.
Yuk yuk you two. Sorry you guys think liberal and open-minded can't co-exist.
Not Minnesota, but the birthplace of commies: Indiana!
He said "tear down this wall" He single handidly brought down the Soviet Union.
It doesn't matter that a muppet could've been president and it would've happened anyway.
...
Yeah. The Soviet Union failed because it was not a Union... it was an Empire. How many so-called states of the Soviet Union were there by their choosing... as opposed to there beacuse of the Kremlim's will?
It's the same way the British Empire declined... and the French... and the Roman. Part of the Empire by force, not choosing.
Allen Fieldhouse, home of the 2008 NCAA men's Basketball Champions! Go Jayhawks!
Hail, Hail!!!
reagan was special because he was the last old man to hold the presidency, and i think he will be the last old man to hold the presidency. i think obama, bush, and clinton won in part because of their relatively young age, and the younger parts of the electorate were able to connect with them because they were close to the same age as an 18 year old's parents. i think someone running for president should convey an image of youthful vigor and healthy/active lifestyle. a decrepit old man projects none of that.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
I think it is because he gave American’s a new sense of optimism and hope after Watergate and the dismal administrations of Ford and Carter. He brought the prestige of the presidency back into the spotlight that developed over his two terms into almost mythical and intrinsic appeal across both political spectrums
As the mass media engaged in an orgy of adulation for Ronald Reagan in June of 2004, many thinking persons were remembering and mourning the deaths of the hundreds of thousands of victims of Ronald Reagan's policies and pondering the lasting damage that the man did not only to the United States but to the world.
During Reagan's reign the United States experienced the beginning of the end of what could have been a great nation. Under Reagan, elements within the government engaged in massive criminal activity that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the entrenchment of a vicious and evil criminal organization that is now firmly in power of not only the United States but much of the world.
Reagan's crimes are many and started well before he was President when he and Bush committed treason and paid the Iranian's to not release the hostages in order to prevent the re-election of Jimmy Carter in 1980, not mention his reign of stupidity as Governor of California. The hostages were released as promised as Reagan was sworn into office. Reagan then secretly sold chemical & biological weapons to Iraq and told CIA buddy Saddam Hussein to step up bombing of Iran while still selling weapons to Iran in a war that claimed an estimated one million victims. The criminal activities in the Mid East stretched around the world to Central America in the spectacle that came to be known as Iran-Contra.
In Afghanistan, Reagan was busy funding Ossama bin Laden and a terrorist army to displace the Russians. Once the mighty 'Muhjadeen' had completed their task they were partially abandoned and became the Taliban and Al Queda. With no real replacement intended for the Russian backed government, the radical muslims quickly took power. Only later did the army without a war become the enemy so desperately needed by the US defense industry.
In Central America, Reagan-Bush ran a massive criminal operation that imported hundreds of tons of cocaine into the US and shipped arms illegally to the terrorist Contras that Reagan affectionately called "Freedom Fighters". Coca paste was brought in from South America by plane to an airstrip near Puntarenas, Costa Rica owned by Reagan/Bush supporter Julio Calleja and processed on the ranch of CIA operative John Hull. From there the high-grade coke was shipped by plane to the Mina, Arkansas Airport under the protection of Bill Clinton and to various Air Force bases..
Under direct US control, Reagan's 'Freedom Fighters' raped, tortured and murdered tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Nicaragua in an effort to bring down Nicaragua's first democratically elected government. The US had previously ruled Nicaragua through the brutal Somoza family dicatorship, once the dictatorship was overthrown by a popular revolution the US was quick to start an criminal campaign of terror against the government and civilians. The campaign of terror claimed 50,000 lives and crippled the entire nation.
Nicaragua took its case to the World Court. The court found that the U.S. actions constituted "an unlawful use of force .... [that] cannot be justified either by collective self-defence ... nor by any right of the United States to take counter-measures involving the use of force." The court ordered the United States to pay reparations, estimated at between $12 billion and $17 billion, to Nicaragua. Two weeks after the verdict was issued, the U.S. Congress voted to give the Contras $100 million to continue their war of terror against the people of Nicaragua. The US has never recognized the World Court's ruling nor paid any of the compensation owed to Nicaragua.
"The ripple effects of that criminal murderous intervention in my country will go on for 50 years or more." Fr. D'Escoto, Priest and former Nicaraguan Foreign Minister
Reagan's blood-fest wasn't limited to Nicaragua, his puppet military dictators abducted, tortured, murdered and mutilated over 200,000 civilians in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras in the name of 'democracy' and fighting communism. Nor was the slaughter done only through the US controlled dictators. In operations that are still highly classified, US AC-130 gunships, crewed by US personnel, flew at night over mountainous areas with potential rebels and killed anything that gave off body-heat. The AC-130 is a highly sophisticated computerized killing machine that "incorporate side-firing weapons integrated with sophisticated sensor, navigation and fire control systems to provide surgical firepower or area saturation during extended loiter periods, at night and in adverse weather. The sensor suite consists of a television sensor, infrared sensor and radar." - US Air Force
In 1999 the United Nations determined that the wholesale slaughter of Guatemalans, constituted "genocide." It was a genocide ordered and managed by the White House under Reagan.
For their part in Iran-Contra fourteen high level government officials were charged, yet few of them were convicted and received any real penalty. Bush pardoned six of the criminal conspirators. Some of those involved in the Iran-Contra crimes are now back in power under the current Bush administration.
Despite some environmental concessions to voters while Governor of California, Reagan's real views on the environment became clear during his Presidential campaign when he claimed that trees caused more air pollution than cars. During his criminal reign of terror he systematically dismantled environmental protection laws and rolled back decades of hard-won progress to protect the Earth and the health of its inhabitants.
To help ensure the rape of the land he appointed lunatic James Watt as Secretary of the Interior who claimed "We don’t have to protect the environment, the Second Coming [of Christ] is at hand." It wasn't until Watt was trying to defend his decision to give away more than 1 billion tons of coal from federal lands in Wyoming that he was finally acknowledged for what he was. His defense for the coal giveway was that he was immune to criticism because members of his coal-advisory panel included "a black ... a woman, two Jews, and a cripple." This comment got finally him fired in 1983.
His appointee for the EPA was the environment molester Anne Gorsuch who tried her best to gut the hard-won Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Gorsuch's Superfund Director, Rita Lavelle, was jailed for lying to Congress under oath about the corruption in her division. Gorsuch was fired in 1983 when documents exposed by Congress revealed the corruption and crimes committed by the EPA under her direction.
...America's worst financial disaster since the Great Depression occured under Reagan with the collapse of the Savings & Loan system. Nearly $500 billion was looted from thousands of Savings & Loans by a criminal ring that included the Mafia, CIA and the Bush family. Neil Bush was involved in the collapse of Silverado Savings & Loan but never served any jail time. By the time the Federal government and elite is done milking the scam further, US taxpayers will have paid well over a trillion dollars.
The full extent of Reagan's crimes may never be known because George W. Bush issued an executive order which countermands the 1978 Presidential Records Act and prevents the release of 68,000 pages of Reagan era documents. Given that Reagan lacked the intelligence to carry out most of the more elaborate crimes, the records are likely to shed light on the true role of the Bush crime family.
Let us remember Reagan as he really was...
o Liar
o Thief
o Mass murderer
o War criminal
o Traitor
o Destroyer of freedom
o Destroyer of the environment
While Reagan may have not been entirely aware of what he was doing and how his decisions would impact the world, he was also much more sinister than the media has portrayed him. We can only hope that he gets to meet some of his many victims after joining the other thugs in hell.
Ronald Reagan's election in November 1980 set off celebrations in the well-to-do communities of Central America. After four years of Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the region's anticommunist hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House who understood their problems. The oligarchs and the generals had good reason for the optimism. For years, Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes that engaged in bloody counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist enemies.
In the late 1970s, when Carter's human rights coordinator, Pat Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its "dirty war" -- tens of thousands of "disappearances," tortures and murders -- then-political commentator Reagan joshed that she should "walk a mile in the moccasins" of the Argentine generals before criticizing them. Despite his aw shucks style, Reagan found virtually every anticommunist action justified, no matter how brutal. From his eight years in the White House, there is no historical indication that he was troubled by the bloodbath and even genocide that occurred in Central America during his presidency, while he was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.
The death toll was staggering -- an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political "disappearances" in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala. The one consistent element in these slaughters was the overarching Cold War rationalization, emanating in large part from Ronald Reagan's White House.
Yet, as the world community moves to punish war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, no substantive discussion has occurred in the United States about facing up to this horrendous record of the 1980s. Rather than a debate about Reagan as a potential war criminal, the ailing ex-president is honored as a conservative icon with his name attached to Washington National Airport and with an active legislative push to have his face carved into Mount Rushmore. When the national news media does briefly acknowledge the barbarities of the 1980s in Central America, it is in the context of one-day stories about the little countries bravely facing up to their violent pasts. At times, the CIA is fingered abstractly as a bad supporting actor in the violent dramas. But never does the national press lay blame on individual American officials.
The grisly reality of Central America was most recently revisited on Feb. 25 when a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the staggering human rights crimes that occurred during a 34-year civil war. The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body, estimated that the conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s. Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the panel blamed the army for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.
The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages. "The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages...are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala's history," the commission concluded. The army "completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their livestock and crops," the report said. In the north, the report termed the slaughter a "genocide." [WP, Feb. 26, 1999]
Besides carrying out murder and "disappearances," the army routinely engaged in torture and rape. "The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice" by the military and paramilitary forces, the report found. The report added that the "government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some [of these] state operations." The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed "acts of genocide" against the Mayans.
"Believing that the ends justified everything, the military and the state security forces blindly pursued the anticommunist struggle, without respect for any legal principles or the most elemental ethical and religious values, and in this way, completely lost any semblance of human morals," said the commission chairman, Christian Tomuschat, a German jurist.
"Within the framework of the counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, in certain regions of the country agents of the Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against groups of the Mayan people," he added. [NYT, Feb. 26, 1999]
The report did not single out culpable individuals either in Guatemala or the United States. But the American official most directly responsible for renewing U.S. military aid to Guatemala and encouraging its government during the 1980s was President Reagan.
Reagan vs. Human Rights
After his election, Reagan pushed aggressively to overturn an arms embargo imposed on Guatemala by President Carter because of the military's wretched human rights record. Reagan saw bolstering the Guatemalan army as part of a regional response to growing leftist insurgencies. Reagan pitched the conflicts as Moscow's machinations for surrounding and conquering the United States.
The president's chief concern about the recurring reports of human rights atrocities was to attack and discredit the information. Sometimes personally and sometimes through surrogates, Reagan denigrated the human rights investigators and journalists who disclosed the slaughters. Typical of these attacks was an analysis prepared by Reagan's appointees at the U.S. embassy in Guatemala. The paper was among those recently released by the Clinton administration to assist the Guatemalan truth commission's investigation. Dated Oct. 22, 1982, the analysis concluded "that a concerted disinformation campaign is being waged in the U.S. against the Guatemalan government by groups supporting the communist insurgency in Guatemala."
The report claimed that "conscientious human rights and church organizations," including Amnesty International, had been duped by the communists and "may not fully appreciate that they are being utilized."
"The campaign's object is simple: to deny the Guatemalan army the weapons and equipment needed from the U.S. to defeat the guerrillas," the analysis declared. "If those promoting such disinformation can convince the Congress, through the usual opinion-makers -- the media, church and human rights groups -- that the present GOG [government of Guatemala] is guilty of gross human rights violations they know that the Congress will refuse Guatemala the military assistance it needs.
"Those backing the communist insurgency are betting on an application, or rather misapplication, of human rights policy so as to damage the GOG and assist themselves."
Reagan personally picked up this theme of a falsely accused Guatemalan military. During a swing through Latin America, Reagan discounted the mounting reports of hundreds of Maya villages being eradicated. On Dec. 4, 1982, after meeting with Guatemala's dictator, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, Reagan hailed the general as "totally dedicated to democracy." Reagan declared that Rios Montt's government had been "getting a bum rap."
But the newly declassified U.S. government records reveal that Reagan's praise -- and the embassy analysis -- flew in the face of corroborated accounts from U.S. intelligence. Based on its own internal documents, the Reagan administration knew that the Guatemalan military indeed was engaged in a scorched-earth campaign against the Mayans.According to these "secret" cables, the CIA was confirming Guatemalan government massacres in 1981-82 even as Reagan was moving to loosen the military aid ban.
In April 1981, a secret CIA cable described a massacre at Cocob, near Nebaj in the Ixil Indian territory. On April 17, 1981, government troops attacked the area believed to support leftist guerrillas, the cable said. According to a CIA source, "the social population appeared to fully support the guerrillas" and "the soldiers were forced to fire at anything that moved." The CIA cable added that "the Guatemalan authorities admitted that 'many civilians' were killed in Cocob, many of whom undoubtedly were non-combatants."
Despite the CIA account and other similar reports, Reagan permitted Guatemala's army to buy $3.2 million in military trucks and jeeps in June 1981. To permit the sale, Reagan removed the vehicles from a list of military equipment that was covered by the human rights embargo.
Apparently confident of Reagan's sympathies, the Guatemalan government continued its political repression without apology. According to a State Department cable on Oct. 5, 1981, Guatemalan leaders met with Reagan's roving ambassador, retired Gen. Vernon Walters, and left no doubt about their plans. Guatemala's military leader, Gen. Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia, "made clear that his government will continue as before -- that the repression will continue. He reiterated his belief that the repression is working and that the guerrilla threat will be successfully routed."
Human rights groups saw the same picture. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission released a report on Oct. 15, 1981, blaming the Guatemalan government for "thousands of illegal executions." [WP, Oct. 16, 1981] But the Reagan administration was set on whitewashing the ugly scene. A State Department "white paper," released in December 1981, blamed the violence on leftist "extremist groups" and their "terrorist methods" prompted and supported by Cuba's Fidel Castro.
Yet, even as these rationalizations were presented to the American people, U.S. agencies continued to pick up clear evidence of government-sponsored massacres. One CIA report in February 1982 described an army sweep through the so-called Ixil Triangle in central El Quiche province. "The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor [known as the EGP] and eliminate all sources of resistance," the report stated. "Since the operation began, several villages have been burned to the ground, and a large number of guerrillas and collaborators have been killed."
The CIA report explained the army's modus operandi: "When an army patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village, it is assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed." When the army encountered an empty village, it was "assumed to have been supporting the EGP, and it is destroyed. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of refugees in the hills with no homes to return to. ..."
"The army high command is highly pleased with the initial results of the sweep operation, and believes that it will be successful in destroying the major EGP support area and will be able to drive the EGP out of the Ixil Triangle. ... The well documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is pro-EGP has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike."
In March 1982, Gen. Rios Montt seized power. An avowed fundamentalist Christian, he immediately impressed Washington. Reagan hailed Rios Montt as "a man of great personal integrity." By July 1982, however, Rios Montt had begun a new scorched-earth campaign called his "rifles and beans" policy. The slogan meant that pacified Indians would get "beans," while all others could expect to be the target of army "rifles". In October, he secretly gave carte blanche to the feared "Archivos" intelligence unit to expand "death squad" operations. Based at the Presidential Palace, the "Archivos" masterminded many of Guatemala's most notorious assassinations.
The U.S. embassy was soon hearing more accounts of the army conducting Indian massacres. On Oct, 21, 1982, one cable described how three embassy officers tried to check out some of these reports but ran into bad weather and canceled the inspection. Still, this cable put the best possible spin on the situation. Though unable to check out the massacre reports, the embassy officials did "reach the conclusion that the army is completely up front about allowing us to check alleged massacre sites and to speak with whomever we wish." The next day, the embassy fired off its analysis that the Guatemalan government was the victim of a communist-inspired "disinformation campaign," a claim embraced by Reagan with his "bum rap" comment in December.
On Jan. 7, 1983, Reagan lifted the ban on military aid to Guatemala and authorized the sale of $6 million in military hardware. Approval covered spare parts for UH-1H helicopters and A-37 aircraft used in counterinsurgency operations. Radios, batteries and battery charges were also in package. State Department spokesman John Hughes said political violence in the cities had "declined dramatically" and that rural conditions had improved too.
In February 1983, however, a secret CIA cable noted a rise in "suspect right-wing violence" with kidnappings of students and teachers. Bodies of victims were appearing in ditches and gullies. CIA sources traced these political murders to Rios Montt's order to the "Archivos" in October to "apprehend, hold, interrogate and dispose of suspected guerrillas as they saw fit."
Despite these grisly facts on the ground, the annual State Department human rights survey praised the supposedly improved human rights situation in Guatemala. "The overall conduct of the armed forces had improved by late in the year" 1982, the report stated.
A different picture -- far closer to the secret information held by the U.S. government -- was coming from independent human rights investigators. On March 17, 1983, Americas Watch representatives condemned the Guatemalan army for human rights atrocities against the Indian population. New York attorney Stephen L. Kass said these findings included proof that the government carried out "virtually indiscriminate murder of men, women and children of any farm regarded by the army as possibly supportive of guerrilla insurgents."
Rural women suspected of guerrilla sympathies were raped before execution, Kass said. Children were "thrown into burning homes. They are thrown in the air and speared with bayonets. We heard many, many stories of children being picked up by the ankles and swung against poles so their heads are destroyed." [AP, March 17, 1983]
Publicly, however, senior Reagan officials continued to put on a happy face. On June 12, 1983, special envoy Richard B. Stone praised "positive changes" in Rios Montt's government. But Rios Montt's vengeful Christian fundamentalism was hurtling out of control, even by Guatemalan standards. In August 1983, Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores seized power in another coup.Despite the power shift, Guatemalan security forces continued to act with impunity.
When three Guatemalans working for the U.S. Agency for International Development were slain in November 1983, U.S. Ambassador Frederic Chapin suspected that "Archivos" hit squads were sending a message to the United States to back off even the mild pressure for human rights improvements. In late November, in a brief show of displeasure, the administration postponed the sale of $2 million in helicopter spare parts. The next month, however, Reagan sent the spare parts.
In 1984, Reagan succeeded, too, in pressuring Congress to approve $300,000 in military training for the Guatemalan army. By mid-1984, Chapin, who had grown bitter about the army's stubborn brutality, was gone, replaced by a far-right political appointee named Alberto Piedra, who was all for increased military assistance to Guatemala. In January 1985, Americas Watch issued a report observing that Reagan's State Department "is apparently more concerned with improving Guatemala's image than in improving its human rights."
According to the newly declassified U.S. records, the Guatemalan reality included torture out of the Middle Ages. A Defense Intelligence Agency cable reported that the Guatemalan military used an air base in Retalhuleu during the mid-1980s as a center for coordinating the counterinsurgency campaign in southwest Guatemala. At the base, pits were filled with water to hold captured suspects. "Reportedly there were cages over the pits and the water level was such that the individuals held within them were forced to hold on to the bars in order to keep their heads above water and avoid drowning," the DIA report stated. Later, the pits were filled with concrete to eliminate the evidence.
The Guatemalan military used the Pacific Ocean as another dumping spot for political victims, according to the DIA report. Bodies of insurgents tortured to death and of live prisoners marked for "disappearance" were loaded on planes that flew out over the ocean where the soldiers would shove the victims into the water.
The history of the Retalhuleu death camp was uncovered by accident in the early 1990s, the DIA reported on April 11, 1994. A Guatemalan officer wanted to let soldiers cultivate their own vegetables on a corner of the base. But the officer was taken aside and told to drop the request "because the locations he had wanted to cultivate were burial sites that had been used by the D-2 [military intelligence] during the mid-eighties."
History Falsified
Guatemala, of course, was not the only Central American country where Reagan and his administration supported brutal counterinsurgency operations -- and then sought to cover up the bloody facts.
Reagan's falsification of the historical record was a hallmark of the conflicts in El Salvaodor and Nicaragua as well. In one case, Reagan personally lashed out at an individual human rights investigator named Reed Brody, a New York lawyer who had collected affidavits from more than 100 witnesses to atrocities carried out by the U.S.-supported contras in Nicaragua. Angered by the revelations about his pet "freedom-fighters," Reagan denounced Brody in a speech on April 15, 1985. The president called Brody "one of dictator [Daniel] Ortega's supporters, a sympathizer who has openly embraced Sandinismo."
Privately, Reagan had a far more accurate understanding of the true nature of the contras. At one point in the contra war, Reagan turned to CIA official Duane Clarridge and demanded that the contras be used to destroy some Soviet-supplied helicopters that had arrived in Nicaragua. In his memoirs, Clarridge recalled that "President Reagan pulled me aside and asked, 'Dewey, can't you get those vandals of yours to do this job.'" [See Clarridge's A Spy for All Seasons.]
To conceal the truth about the war crimes of Central America, Reagan also authorized a systematic program of distorting information and intimidating American journalists. Called "public diplomacy," the project was run by a CIA propaganda veteran, Walter Raymond Jr., who was assigned to the National Security Council staff. The explicit goal of the operation was to manage U.S. "perceptions" of the wars in Central America. The project's key operatives developed propaganda "themes," selected "hot buttons" to excite the American people, cultivated pliable journalists who would cooperate and bullied reporters who wouldn't go along.
The best-known attacks were directed against New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner for disclosing Salvadoran army massacres of civilians, including the slaughter of more than 800 men, women and children in El Mozote in December 1981. But Bonner was not alone. Reagan's operatives pressured scores of reporters and their editors in an ultimately successful campaign to minimize information about these human rights crimes reaching the American people. [For details, see Robert Parry's Lost History.] The tamed reporters, in turn, gave the administration a far freer hand to pursue its anticommunist operations throughout Central America.
Despite the tens of thousands of civilian deaths and now-corroborated accounts of massacres and genocide, not a single senior military officer in Central America was held accountable for the bloodshed. The U.S. officials who sponsored and encouraged these war crimes not only escaped any legal judgment, but remained highly respected figures in Washington. Reagan has been honored as few recent presidents have. The journalists who played along by playing down the atrocities -- the likes of Fred Barnes and Charles Krauthammer -- saw their careers skyrocket, while those who told the truth suffered severe consequences. Given that history, it was not surprising that the Guatemalan truth report was treated as a one-day story.
The major American newspapers did cover the findings. The New York Times made it the lead story. The Washington Post played it inside on page A19. Both cited the troubling role of the CIA and other U.S. government agencies in the Guatemalan tragedy. But no U.S. official was held accountable by name. On March 1, 1999, a strange Washington Post editorial addressed the findings, but did not confront them. One of its principal points seemed to be that President Carter's military aid cut-off to Guatemala was to blame. The editorial argued that the arms embargo removed "what minimal restraint even a feeble American presence supplied." The editorial made no reference to the 1980s and added only a mild criticism of "the CIA [because it] still bars the public from the full documentation." Then, with no apparent sense of irony, the editorial ended by stating: "We need our own truth commission."
During a visit to Central America, on March 10, President Clinton apologized for the past U.S. support of right-wing regimes in Guatemala.> "For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake," Clinton said. [WP, March 11, 1999] But the sketchy apology appears to be all the Central Americans can expect from El Norte.
Back in Washington, Ronald Reagan remains a respected icon, not a disgraced war criminal. His name is still honored, attached to National Airport and a new federal building. A current GOP congressional initiative would chisel his face into Mount Rushmore. Meanwhile, in the Balkans and in Africa, the United States is sponsoring international tribunals to arrest and to try human rights violators -- and their political patrons -- for war crimes.
reagan was special because he was the last old man to hold the presidency, and i think he will be the last old man to hold the presidency. i think obama, bush, and clinton won in part because of their relatively young age, and the younger parts of the electorate were able to connect with them because they were close to the same age as an 18 year old's parents. i think someone running for president should convey an image of youthful vigor and healthy/active lifestyle. a decrepit old man projects none of that.
MTV absolutely right. I think we will see it swing the other way at some point. Everything goes in cycles. But your analysis is spot on except your last part about it should.
Teedie, JFK, we've gone through this before, just not to this extent. MTV
Sorry. The world doesn't work the way you tell it to.
reagan was special because he was the last old man to hold the presidency, and i think he will be the last old man to hold the presidency. i think obama, bush, and clinton won in part because of their relatively young age, and the younger parts of the electorate were able to connect with them because they were close to the same age as an 18 year old's parents. i think someone running for president should convey an image of youthful vigor and healthy/active lifestyle. a decrepit old man projects none of that.
MTV absolutely right. I think we will see it swing the other way at some point. Everything goes in cycles. But your analysis is spot on except your last part about it should.
Teedie, JFK, we've gone through this before, just not to this extent. MTV
:?: :?: :?:
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
reagan was special because he was the last old man to hold the presidency, and i think he will be the last old man to hold the presidency. i think obama, bush, and clinton won in part because of their relatively young age, and the younger parts of the electorate were able to connect with them because they were close to the same age as an 18 year old's parents. i think someone running for president should convey an image of youthful vigor and healthy/active lifestyle. a decrepit old man projects none of that.
MTV absolutely right. I think we will see it swing the other way at some point. Everything goes in cycles. But your analysis is spot on except your last part about it should.
Teedie, JFK, we've gone through this before, just not to this extent. MTV
:?: :?: :?:
Not sure what your ? Is about. We have had more younger Presidents in a row than in the past. That will cycle through. Is there something else you didn't understand? Or are you amazaed we areed?
Sorry. The world doesn't work the way you tell it to.
Not sure what your ? Is about. We have had more younger Presidents in a row than in the past. That will cycle through. Is there something else you didn't understand? Or are you amazaed we areed?
what is teedie? and why did you say mtv twice? mtv helped clinton i know, but i have not watched mtv since they stopped actually caring about music so i don't know how effective mtv was for either of w's terms and obama's win.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
Not sure what your ? Is about. We have had more younger Presidents in a row than in the past. That will cycle through. Is there something else you didn't understand? Or are you amazaed we areed?
what is teedie? and why did you say mtv twice? mtv helped clinton i know, but i have not watched mtv since they stopped actually caring about music so i don't know how effective mtv was for either of w's terms and obama's win.
Teddy Roosevelt sorry thought that's common knowledge MTV twice just for emphasis of point.
Sorry. The world doesn't work the way you tell it to.
We should stop looking for culprits and denigrating one of the truly great adminstrations of our time. Yes, he made mistakes. It's tough to be the President and not. But, I'm sorry - this liberal backlash against the 80's is sickening.
I think it's sickening how anyone can describe as 'great' an administration that directly supported and defended death squads in Latin America, who Reagan knew were massacring hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
In 1999 the United Nations determined that the wholesale slaughter of Guatemalans, directly supported by Reagan and the C.I.A, constituted "genocide.
We should stop looking for culprits and denigrating one of the truly great adminstrations of our time. Yes, he made mistakes. It's tough to be the President and not. But, I'm sorry - this liberal backlash against the 80's is sickening.
I think it's sickening how anyone can describe as 'great' an administration that directly supported and defended death squads in Latin America, who Reagan knew were massacring hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
In 1999 the United Nations determined that the wholesale slaughter of Guatemalans, directly supported by Reagan and the C.I.A, constituted "genocide.
yes the reagan administration is only remembered as great by people who were too young to know the difference back then.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
I personally believe in responsibility being on the individual as well.
With my income and no debt I could have got a fat loan that put me in a tight spot (like many co-workers did) but I am not foolish enough to do that. I take responsibility for my actions - can only blame the govt so much - some of the blame needs to go on the people who took out these loans.
Just because you can do something doesnt make it a good idea.
We seem to have lost touch with that as a country.
And to link this to another thread - those are the people in the park. They should be embarassed rather than being emboldened.
I'm not embarrassed. I think you should be embarrassed for being such a smug prick.
P.S. I came on the forum today to find a few pics of PJ20 and I thought I would take a look at the train. Bad idea. Same old bull shit form a handful of assholes. Now I know why BrianLux said he is leaving; now you know why I am leaving.
I will likely get banned or reprimanded for my "smug prick" comment. So be it. This could be my last post for all I care; I haven't been posting much as of late anyway because the environment is rather hostile and silly.
Conservatives love to love what he was supposed to be, but he wasnt a Great President. That being said, if you look at the polls from the time, Reagan was much more popular than his policies. Not a whole lot different from Obama today.
He's almost as shitty a president as Bush was and Obama is.
i'd guess that Obama is better than the two of them put together, yes/no?
Except that he's basically a more popular, more well-spoken Bush.
Pretty sure Obama's been at the helm of the ship that's run our national debt up to record highs. Dunno how anybody can support that guy. Or Bush. Or Reagan. Or any of these nitwit conservative douches running against our fearless leader next year.
This country is fucked. I know leaning left is the cool, en vogue thing to do around the PJ boards, but, I don't trust the left any more or less than I do the right. They're all buddies behind the scenes; they're all rich puppets of their interest groups and corporate hot shots, etc.
Conservatives love to love what he was supposed to be, but he wasnt a Great President. That being said, if you look at the polls from the time, Reagan was much more popular than his policies. Not a whole lot different from Obama today.
Dude, Obama would OWN Ronnie the Drug Kingpin & Supreme Pimp of the 1980's one-on-one on the court. Dude's way more qualified and he's doing a much better job, because, I mean, remember, he promised us change!
Except that he's basically a more popular, more well-spoken Bush.
Pretty sure Obama's been at the helm of the ship that's run our national debt up to record highs. Dunno how anybody can support that guy. Or Bush. Or Reagan. Or any of these nitwit conservative douches running against our fearless leader next year.
This country is fucked. I know leaning left is the cool, en vogue thing to do around the PJ boards, but, I don't trust the left any more or less than I do the right. They're all buddies behind the scenes; they're all rich puppets of their interest groups and corporate hot shots, etc.
did Obama ruin this country? no he did not. it was well fucked when he inherited this pile of trash. trusting any of the powers that be today is what foolish people do. so good for you, JA, for knowing you will and are getting screwed over, as well as all the rest of us are too.
reagan was the first president that i noticed was the president and what it meant. i believe i was in 2nd grade when ron was shot. this being the first time i knew we all had a leader or something.
the president.
i also knew i was a boy with a thingy and i was attracted to girls, and they attracted to me. little mr. grew and grew. it was a great experience. and there were boobies on my teacher :shock:
moral of the story, ronald sucked.
he reminds me of big arnold out in california. a nitwit who landed the job due to being voted in by a shit ton of goofy bastards whose eyes been glued to the god damn television far to long.
Except that he's basically a more popular, more well-spoken Bush.
Pretty sure Obama's been at the helm of the ship that's run our national debt up to record highs. Dunno how anybody can support that guy. Or Bush. Or Reagan. Or any of these nitwit conservative douches running against our fearless leader next year.
This country is fucked. I know leaning left is the cool, en vogue thing to do around the PJ boards, but, I don't trust the left any more or less than I do the right. They're all buddies behind the scenes; they're all rich puppets of their interest groups and corporate hot shots, etc.
did Obama ruin this country? no he did not. it was well fucked when he inherited this pile of trash. trusting any of the powers that be today is what foolish people do. so good for you, JA, for knowing you will and are getting screwed over, as well as all the rest of us are too.
Yeah, he inherited a piece of trash, and did nothing to fix it. Clinton's initiatives did wonders with the economy after Reagan and Daddy Bush completely fucked it up. Then, after doing so well, Clinton buckled like a bitch at the end and set the precedence in motion that would eventually destroy the housing market under the "compassionate conservative" cowboy.
They're all to blame. Obama had the senate and house all painted blue for a little while, and did jack poop to improve our standard of living. He's just as fucking inept as the rest of 'em, my brother.
Comments
I was alive then, and even as a snot nosed teenager I knew he wasn't a good president. Reagan was criticized much more through the 90's than he is now. Now, Reagan is this magical figure that brought down communism and saved our economy. I knew Reagan was full of it in the 80's, and this was cemented in 1987 when I visited the actual "evil empire".
Bush got elected because of Willie Horton and Dukakis riding in a tank. But, I suppose we are looking at the past through our own lenses. I grew up in a liberal family, with mostly liberal friends, in a mostly liberal community and school system, so critiquing conservatives was common. It's not a recent liberal backlash against the 80's. It's been happening all along amongst liberals. What you see now is more glowing reviews of Reagan from middle-of-the-road media.
I'm really sorry to hear that. You never had a chance did you?
I grew up in a moderate family, in an open minded community and school system.
I'm guessing he grew up in Minnesota.
Put it this way...
In 1985, the United States (President Reagan) called the Mujahadin (which split into autonomous cells, forming a command network... one of which was later called, 'The Base' (al Qaeda, in Arabic) by it's leader, Usam bin Laden) 'Freedom Fighters'. The Mujahadin were funded through the Pakistani secret police (ISI) with money send from the U.S. to Pakistan. The agreement being, a war by proxy, using the Mujahadin as the main combatants.
If you think about it... how were 'goat farmers' able to hit Soviet helicopter gunships from safe distances?
Answer: Stinger surface to air missiles.
Pakistan set up the Afghani government after the Soviet withdrawal. Guess who they morphed into? Give yourself a Gold Star if you answered, 'The Taliban'. We were kind of thinking that the fundamentalist Muslims would create problem for the Russians (like the problems they have in Chechnya) and give their Persian neighbors, Iran, a hard time.
It might have worked out... if we'd kept out of bed with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, U.A.E. and Qatar's domestic policy making... working out deals of weapons for oil and favorable business opportunities for American companies in the region. Those monarchies can be oppressive... if you are not in line with the King.
...
Moral: The Enemy of My Enemy is Not My Friend if he Hates My Ass.
Hail, Hail!!!
Yuk yuk you two. Sorry you guys think liberal and open-minded can't co-exist.
Not Minnesota, but the birthplace of commies: Indiana!
It doesn't matter that a muppet could've been president and it would've happened anyway.
Yeah. The Soviet Union failed because it was not a Union... it was an Empire. How many so-called states of the Soviet Union were there by their choosing... as opposed to there beacuse of the Kremlim's will?
It's the same way the British Empire declined... and the French... and the Roman. Part of the Empire by force, not choosing.
Hail, Hail!!!
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Yeah, sure:
http://www.highstrangeness.tv/articles/reagan.php
Ronald Reagan Guilty of Treason & War Crimes
As the mass media engaged in an orgy of adulation for Ronald Reagan in June of 2004, many thinking persons were remembering and mourning the deaths of the hundreds of thousands of victims of Ronald Reagan's policies and pondering the lasting damage that the man did not only to the United States but to the world.
During Reagan's reign the United States experienced the beginning of the end of what could have been a great nation. Under Reagan, elements within the government engaged in massive criminal activity that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the entrenchment of a vicious and evil criminal organization that is now firmly in power of not only the United States but much of the world.
Reagan's crimes are many and started well before he was President when he and Bush committed treason and paid the Iranian's to not release the hostages in order to prevent the re-election of Jimmy Carter in 1980, not mention his reign of stupidity as Governor of California. The hostages were released as promised as Reagan was sworn into office. Reagan then secretly sold chemical & biological weapons to Iraq and told CIA buddy Saddam Hussein to step up bombing of Iran while still selling weapons to Iran in a war that claimed an estimated one million victims. The criminal activities in the Mid East stretched around the world to Central America in the spectacle that came to be known as Iran-Contra.
In Afghanistan, Reagan was busy funding Ossama bin Laden and a terrorist army to displace the Russians. Once the mighty 'Muhjadeen' had completed their task they were partially abandoned and became the Taliban and Al Queda. With no real replacement intended for the Russian backed government, the radical muslims quickly took power. Only later did the army without a war become the enemy so desperately needed by the US defense industry.
In Central America, Reagan-Bush ran a massive criminal operation that imported hundreds of tons of cocaine into the US and shipped arms illegally to the terrorist Contras that Reagan affectionately called "Freedom Fighters". Coca paste was brought in from South America by plane to an airstrip near Puntarenas, Costa Rica owned by Reagan/Bush supporter Julio Calleja and processed on the ranch of CIA operative John Hull. From there the high-grade coke was shipped by plane to the Mina, Arkansas Airport under the protection of Bill Clinton and to various Air Force bases..
Under direct US control, Reagan's 'Freedom Fighters' raped, tortured and murdered tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Nicaragua in an effort to bring down Nicaragua's first democratically elected government. The US had previously ruled Nicaragua through the brutal Somoza family dicatorship, once the dictatorship was overthrown by a popular revolution the US was quick to start an criminal campaign of terror against the government and civilians. The campaign of terror claimed 50,000 lives and crippled the entire nation.
Nicaragua took its case to the World Court. The court found that the U.S. actions constituted "an unlawful use of force .... [that] cannot be justified either by collective self-defence ... nor by any right of the United States to take counter-measures involving the use of force." The court ordered the United States to pay reparations, estimated at between $12 billion and $17 billion, to Nicaragua. Two weeks after the verdict was issued, the U.S. Congress voted to give the Contras $100 million to continue their war of terror against the people of Nicaragua. The US has never recognized the World Court's ruling nor paid any of the compensation owed to Nicaragua.
"The ripple effects of that criminal murderous intervention in my country will go on for 50 years or more." Fr. D'Escoto, Priest and former Nicaraguan Foreign Minister
Reagan's blood-fest wasn't limited to Nicaragua, his puppet military dictators abducted, tortured, murdered and mutilated over 200,000 civilians in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras in the name of 'democracy' and fighting communism. Nor was the slaughter done only through the US controlled dictators. In operations that are still highly classified, US AC-130 gunships, crewed by US personnel, flew at night over mountainous areas with potential rebels and killed anything that gave off body-heat. The AC-130 is a highly sophisticated computerized killing machine that "incorporate side-firing weapons integrated with sophisticated sensor, navigation and fire control systems to provide surgical firepower or area saturation during extended loiter periods, at night and in adverse weather. The sensor suite consists of a television sensor, infrared sensor and radar." - US Air Force
In 1999 the United Nations determined that the wholesale slaughter of Guatemalans, constituted "genocide." It was a genocide ordered and managed by the White House under Reagan.
For their part in Iran-Contra fourteen high level government officials were charged, yet few of them were convicted and received any real penalty. Bush pardoned six of the criminal conspirators. Some of those involved in the Iran-Contra crimes are now back in power under the current Bush administration.
Despite some environmental concessions to voters while Governor of California, Reagan's real views on the environment became clear during his Presidential campaign when he claimed that trees caused more air pollution than cars. During his criminal reign of terror he systematically dismantled environmental protection laws and rolled back decades of hard-won progress to protect the Earth and the health of its inhabitants.
To help ensure the rape of the land he appointed lunatic James Watt as Secretary of the Interior who claimed "We don’t have to protect the environment, the Second Coming [of Christ] is at hand." It wasn't until Watt was trying to defend his decision to give away more than 1 billion tons of coal from federal lands in Wyoming that he was finally acknowledged for what he was. His defense for the coal giveway was that he was immune to criticism because members of his coal-advisory panel included "a black ... a woman, two Jews, and a cripple." This comment got finally him fired in 1983.
His appointee for the EPA was the environment molester Anne Gorsuch who tried her best to gut the hard-won Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Gorsuch's Superfund Director, Rita Lavelle, was jailed for lying to Congress under oath about the corruption in her division. Gorsuch was fired in 1983 when documents exposed by Congress revealed the corruption and crimes committed by the EPA under her direction.
...America's worst financial disaster since the Great Depression occured under Reagan with the collapse of the Savings & Loan system. Nearly $500 billion was looted from thousands of Savings & Loans by a criminal ring that included the Mafia, CIA and the Bush family. Neil Bush was involved in the collapse of Silverado Savings & Loan but never served any jail time. By the time the Federal government and elite is done milking the scam further, US taxpayers will have paid well over a trillion dollars.
The full extent of Reagan's crimes may never be known because George W. Bush issued an executive order which countermands the 1978 Presidential Records Act and prevents the release of 68,000 pages of Reagan era documents. Given that Reagan lacked the intelligence to carry out most of the more elaborate crimes, the records are likely to shed light on the true role of the Bush crime family.
Let us remember Reagan as he really was...
o Liar
o Thief
o Mass murderer
o War criminal
o Traitor
o Destroyer of freedom
o Destroyer of the environment
While Reagan may have not been entirely aware of what he was doing and how his decisions would impact the world, he was also much more sinister than the media has portrayed him. We can only hope that he gets to meet some of his many victims after joining the other thugs in hell.
Or we could catch a dose of reality instead:
Reagan and Guatemala's Death Files
By Robert Parry
http://www.consortiumnews.com/052699a1.html
Ronald Reagan's election in November 1980 set off celebrations in the well-to-do communities of Central America. After four years of Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the region's anticommunist hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House who understood their problems. The oligarchs and the generals had good reason for the optimism. For years, Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes that engaged in bloody counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist enemies.
In the late 1970s, when Carter's human rights coordinator, Pat Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its "dirty war" -- tens of thousands of "disappearances," tortures and murders -- then-political commentator Reagan joshed that she should "walk a mile in the moccasins" of the Argentine generals before criticizing them. Despite his aw shucks style, Reagan found virtually every anticommunist action justified, no matter how brutal. From his eight years in the White House, there is no historical indication that he was troubled by the bloodbath and even genocide that occurred in Central America during his presidency, while he was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.
The death toll was staggering -- an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political "disappearances" in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala. The one consistent element in these slaughters was the overarching Cold War rationalization, emanating in large part from Ronald Reagan's White House.
Yet, as the world community moves to punish war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, no substantive discussion has occurred in the United States about facing up to this horrendous record of the 1980s. Rather than a debate about Reagan as a potential war criminal, the ailing ex-president is honored as a conservative icon with his name attached to Washington National Airport and with an active legislative push to have his face carved into Mount Rushmore. When the national news media does briefly acknowledge the barbarities of the 1980s in Central America, it is in the context of one-day stories about the little countries bravely facing up to their violent pasts. At times, the CIA is fingered abstractly as a bad supporting actor in the violent dramas. But never does the national press lay blame on individual American officials.
The grisly reality of Central America was most recently revisited on Feb. 25 when a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the staggering human rights crimes that occurred during a 34-year civil war. The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body, estimated that the conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s. Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the panel blamed the army for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.
The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages. "The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages...are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala's history," the commission concluded. The army "completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their livestock and crops," the report said. In the north, the report termed the slaughter a "genocide." [WP, Feb. 26, 1999]
Besides carrying out murder and "disappearances," the army routinely engaged in torture and rape. "The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice" by the military and paramilitary forces, the report found. The report added that the "government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some [of these] state operations." The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed "acts of genocide" against the Mayans.
"Believing that the ends justified everything, the military and the state security forces blindly pursued the anticommunist struggle, without respect for any legal principles or the most elemental ethical and religious values, and in this way, completely lost any semblance of human morals," said the commission chairman, Christian Tomuschat, a German jurist.
"Within the framework of the counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, in certain regions of the country agents of the Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against groups of the Mayan people," he added. [NYT, Feb. 26, 1999]
The report did not single out culpable individuals either in Guatemala or the United States. But the American official most directly responsible for renewing U.S. military aid to Guatemala and encouraging its government during the 1980s was President Reagan.
Reagan vs. Human Rights
After his election, Reagan pushed aggressively to overturn an arms embargo imposed on Guatemala by President Carter because of the military's wretched human rights record. Reagan saw bolstering the Guatemalan army as part of a regional response to growing leftist insurgencies. Reagan pitched the conflicts as Moscow's machinations for surrounding and conquering the United States.
The president's chief concern about the recurring reports of human rights atrocities was to attack and discredit the information. Sometimes personally and sometimes through surrogates, Reagan denigrated the human rights investigators and journalists who disclosed the slaughters. Typical of these attacks was an analysis prepared by Reagan's appointees at the U.S. embassy in Guatemala. The paper was among those recently released by the Clinton administration to assist the Guatemalan truth commission's investigation. Dated Oct. 22, 1982, the analysis concluded "that a concerted disinformation campaign is being waged in the U.S. against the Guatemalan government by groups supporting the communist insurgency in Guatemala."
The report claimed that "conscientious human rights and church organizations," including Amnesty International, had been duped by the communists and "may not fully appreciate that they are being utilized."
"The campaign's object is simple: to deny the Guatemalan army the weapons and equipment needed from the U.S. to defeat the guerrillas," the analysis declared. "If those promoting such disinformation can convince the Congress, through the usual opinion-makers -- the media, church and human rights groups -- that the present GOG [government of Guatemala] is guilty of gross human rights violations they know that the Congress will refuse Guatemala the military assistance it needs.
"Those backing the communist insurgency are betting on an application, or rather misapplication, of human rights policy so as to damage the GOG and assist themselves."
Reagan personally picked up this theme of a falsely accused Guatemalan military. During a swing through Latin America, Reagan discounted the mounting reports of hundreds of Maya villages being eradicated. On Dec. 4, 1982, after meeting with Guatemala's dictator, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, Reagan hailed the general as "totally dedicated to democracy." Reagan declared that Rios Montt's government had been "getting a bum rap."
But the newly declassified U.S. government records reveal that Reagan's praise -- and the embassy analysis -- flew in the face of corroborated accounts from U.S. intelligence. Based on its own internal documents, the Reagan administration knew that the Guatemalan military indeed was engaged in a scorched-earth campaign against the Mayans.According to these "secret" cables, the CIA was confirming Guatemalan government massacres in 1981-82 even as Reagan was moving to loosen the military aid ban.
In April 1981, a secret CIA cable described a massacre at Cocob, near Nebaj in the Ixil Indian territory. On April 17, 1981, government troops attacked the area believed to support leftist guerrillas, the cable said. According to a CIA source, "the social population appeared to fully support the guerrillas" and "the soldiers were forced to fire at anything that moved." The CIA cable added that "the Guatemalan authorities admitted that 'many civilians' were killed in Cocob, many of whom undoubtedly were non-combatants."
Despite the CIA account and other similar reports, Reagan permitted Guatemala's army to buy $3.2 million in military trucks and jeeps in June 1981. To permit the sale, Reagan removed the vehicles from a list of military equipment that was covered by the human rights embargo.
Apparently confident of Reagan's sympathies, the Guatemalan government continued its political repression without apology. According to a State Department cable on Oct. 5, 1981, Guatemalan leaders met with Reagan's roving ambassador, retired Gen. Vernon Walters, and left no doubt about their plans. Guatemala's military leader, Gen. Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia, "made clear that his government will continue as before -- that the repression will continue. He reiterated his belief that the repression is working and that the guerrilla threat will be successfully routed."
Human rights groups saw the same picture. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission released a report on Oct. 15, 1981, blaming the Guatemalan government for "thousands of illegal executions." [WP, Oct. 16, 1981] But the Reagan administration was set on whitewashing the ugly scene. A State Department "white paper," released in December 1981, blamed the violence on leftist "extremist groups" and their "terrorist methods" prompted and supported by Cuba's Fidel Castro.
Yet, even as these rationalizations were presented to the American people, U.S. agencies continued to pick up clear evidence of government-sponsored massacres. One CIA report in February 1982 described an army sweep through the so-called Ixil Triangle in central El Quiche province. "The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor [known as the EGP] and eliminate all sources of resistance," the report stated. "Since the operation began, several villages have been burned to the ground, and a large number of guerrillas and collaborators have been killed."
The CIA report explained the army's modus operandi: "When an army patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village, it is assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed." When the army encountered an empty village, it was "assumed to have been supporting the EGP, and it is destroyed. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of refugees in the hills with no homes to return to. ..."
"The army high command is highly pleased with the initial results of the sweep operation, and believes that it will be successful in destroying the major EGP support area and will be able to drive the EGP out of the Ixil Triangle. ... The well documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is pro-EGP has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike."
In March 1982, Gen. Rios Montt seized power. An avowed fundamentalist Christian, he immediately impressed Washington. Reagan hailed Rios Montt as "a man of great personal integrity." By July 1982, however, Rios Montt had begun a new scorched-earth campaign called his "rifles and beans" policy. The slogan meant that pacified Indians would get "beans," while all others could expect to be the target of army "rifles". In October, he secretly gave carte blanche to the feared "Archivos" intelligence unit to expand "death squad" operations. Based at the Presidential Palace, the "Archivos" masterminded many of Guatemala's most notorious assassinations.
The U.S. embassy was soon hearing more accounts of the army conducting Indian massacres. On Oct, 21, 1982, one cable described how three embassy officers tried to check out some of these reports but ran into bad weather and canceled the inspection. Still, this cable put the best possible spin on the situation. Though unable to check out the massacre reports, the embassy officials did "reach the conclusion that the army is completely up front about allowing us to check alleged massacre sites and to speak with whomever we wish." The next day, the embassy fired off its analysis that the Guatemalan government was the victim of a communist-inspired "disinformation campaign," a claim embraced by Reagan with his "bum rap" comment in December.
On Jan. 7, 1983, Reagan lifted the ban on military aid to Guatemala and authorized the sale of $6 million in military hardware. Approval covered spare parts for UH-1H helicopters and A-37 aircraft used in counterinsurgency operations. Radios, batteries and battery charges were also in package. State Department spokesman John Hughes said political violence in the cities had "declined dramatically" and that rural conditions had improved too.
In February 1983, however, a secret CIA cable noted a rise in "suspect right-wing violence" with kidnappings of students and teachers. Bodies of victims were appearing in ditches and gullies. CIA sources traced these political murders to Rios Montt's order to the "Archivos" in October to "apprehend, hold, interrogate and dispose of suspected guerrillas as they saw fit."
Despite these grisly facts on the ground, the annual State Department human rights survey praised the supposedly improved human rights situation in Guatemala. "The overall conduct of the armed forces had improved by late in the year" 1982, the report stated.
A different picture -- far closer to the secret information held by the U.S. government -- was coming from independent human rights investigators. On March 17, 1983, Americas Watch representatives condemned the Guatemalan army for human rights atrocities against the Indian population. New York attorney Stephen L. Kass said these findings included proof that the government carried out "virtually indiscriminate murder of men, women and children of any farm regarded by the army as possibly supportive of guerrilla insurgents."
Rural women suspected of guerrilla sympathies were raped before execution, Kass said. Children were "thrown into burning homes. They are thrown in the air and speared with bayonets. We heard many, many stories of children being picked up by the ankles and swung against poles so their heads are destroyed." [AP, March 17, 1983]
Publicly, however, senior Reagan officials continued to put on a happy face. On June 12, 1983, special envoy Richard B. Stone praised "positive changes" in Rios Montt's government. But Rios Montt's vengeful Christian fundamentalism was hurtling out of control, even by Guatemalan standards. In August 1983, Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores seized power in another coup.Despite the power shift, Guatemalan security forces continued to act with impunity.
When three Guatemalans working for the U.S. Agency for International Development were slain in November 1983, U.S. Ambassador Frederic Chapin suspected that "Archivos" hit squads were sending a message to the United States to back off even the mild pressure for human rights improvements. In late November, in a brief show of displeasure, the administration postponed the sale of $2 million in helicopter spare parts. The next month, however, Reagan sent the spare parts.
In 1984, Reagan succeeded, too, in pressuring Congress to approve $300,000 in military training for the Guatemalan army. By mid-1984, Chapin, who had grown bitter about the army's stubborn brutality, was gone, replaced by a far-right political appointee named Alberto Piedra, who was all for increased military assistance to Guatemala. In January 1985, Americas Watch issued a report observing that Reagan's State Department "is apparently more concerned with improving Guatemala's image than in improving its human rights."
According to the newly declassified U.S. records, the Guatemalan reality included torture out of the Middle Ages. A Defense Intelligence Agency cable reported that the Guatemalan military used an air base in Retalhuleu during the mid-1980s as a center for coordinating the counterinsurgency campaign in southwest Guatemala. At the base, pits were filled with water to hold captured suspects. "Reportedly there were cages over the pits and the water level was such that the individuals held within them were forced to hold on to the bars in order to keep their heads above water and avoid drowning," the DIA report stated. Later, the pits were filled with concrete to eliminate the evidence.
The Guatemalan military used the Pacific Ocean as another dumping spot for political victims, according to the DIA report. Bodies of insurgents tortured to death and of live prisoners marked for "disappearance" were loaded on planes that flew out over the ocean where the soldiers would shove the victims into the water.
The history of the Retalhuleu death camp was uncovered by accident in the early 1990s, the DIA reported on April 11, 1994. A Guatemalan officer wanted to let soldiers cultivate their own vegetables on a corner of the base. But the officer was taken aside and told to drop the request "because the locations he had wanted to cultivate were burial sites that had been used by the D-2 [military intelligence] during the mid-eighties."
History Falsified
Guatemala, of course, was not the only Central American country where Reagan and his administration supported brutal counterinsurgency operations -- and then sought to cover up the bloody facts.
Reagan's falsification of the historical record was a hallmark of the conflicts in El Salvaodor and Nicaragua as well. In one case, Reagan personally lashed out at an individual human rights investigator named Reed Brody, a New York lawyer who had collected affidavits from more than 100 witnesses to atrocities carried out by the U.S.-supported contras in Nicaragua. Angered by the revelations about his pet "freedom-fighters," Reagan denounced Brody in a speech on April 15, 1985. The president called Brody "one of dictator [Daniel] Ortega's supporters, a sympathizer who has openly embraced Sandinismo."
Privately, Reagan had a far more accurate understanding of the true nature of the contras. At one point in the contra war, Reagan turned to CIA official Duane Clarridge and demanded that the contras be used to destroy some Soviet-supplied helicopters that had arrived in Nicaragua. In his memoirs, Clarridge recalled that "President Reagan pulled me aside and asked, 'Dewey, can't you get those vandals of yours to do this job.'" [See Clarridge's A Spy for All Seasons.]
To conceal the truth about the war crimes of Central America, Reagan also authorized a systematic program of distorting information and intimidating American journalists. Called "public diplomacy," the project was run by a CIA propaganda veteran, Walter Raymond Jr., who was assigned to the National Security Council staff. The explicit goal of the operation was to manage U.S. "perceptions" of the wars in Central America. The project's key operatives developed propaganda "themes," selected "hot buttons" to excite the American people, cultivated pliable journalists who would cooperate and bullied reporters who wouldn't go along.
The best-known attacks were directed against New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner for disclosing Salvadoran army massacres of civilians, including the slaughter of more than 800 men, women and children in El Mozote in December 1981. But Bonner was not alone. Reagan's operatives pressured scores of reporters and their editors in an ultimately successful campaign to minimize information about these human rights crimes reaching the American people. [For details, see Robert Parry's Lost History.] The tamed reporters, in turn, gave the administration a far freer hand to pursue its anticommunist operations throughout Central America.
Despite the tens of thousands of civilian deaths and now-corroborated accounts of massacres and genocide, not a single senior military officer in Central America was held accountable for the bloodshed. The U.S. officials who sponsored and encouraged these war crimes not only escaped any legal judgment, but remained highly respected figures in Washington. Reagan has been honored as few recent presidents have. The journalists who played along by playing down the atrocities -- the likes of Fred Barnes and Charles Krauthammer -- saw their careers skyrocket, while those who told the truth suffered severe consequences. Given that history, it was not surprising that the Guatemalan truth report was treated as a one-day story.
The major American newspapers did cover the findings. The New York Times made it the lead story. The Washington Post played it inside on page A19. Both cited the troubling role of the CIA and other U.S. government agencies in the Guatemalan tragedy. But no U.S. official was held accountable by name. On March 1, 1999, a strange Washington Post editorial addressed the findings, but did not confront them. One of its principal points seemed to be that President Carter's military aid cut-off to Guatemala was to blame. The editorial argued that the arms embargo removed "what minimal restraint even a feeble American presence supplied." The editorial made no reference to the 1980s and added only a mild criticism of "the CIA [because it] still bars the public from the full documentation." Then, with no apparent sense of irony, the editorial ended by stating: "We need our own truth commission."
During a visit to Central America, on March 10, President Clinton apologized for the past U.S. support of right-wing regimes in Guatemala.> "For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake," Clinton said. [WP, March 11, 1999] But the sketchy apology appears to be all the Central Americans can expect from El Norte.
Back in Washington, Ronald Reagan remains a respected icon, not a disgraced war criminal. His name is still honored, attached to National Airport and a new federal building. A current GOP congressional initiative would chisel his face into Mount Rushmore. Meanwhile, in the Balkans and in Africa, the United States is sponsoring international tribunals to arrest and to try human rights violators -- and their political patrons -- for war crimes.
The new chosen line of defense of war criminals the World over.
Teedie, JFK, we've gone through this before, just not to this extent. MTV
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Not sure what your ? Is about. We have had more younger Presidents in a row than in the past. That will cycle through. Is there something else you didn't understand? Or are you amazaed we areed?
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Teddy Roosevelt sorry thought that's common knowledge MTV twice just for emphasis of point.
I think it's sickening how anyone can describe as 'great' an administration that directly supported and defended death squads in Latin America, who Reagan knew were massacring hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
In 1999 the United Nations determined that the wholesale slaughter of Guatemalans, directly supported by Reagan and the C.I.A, constituted "genocide.
Surely if they had done they would have all been let off with a little slap on the wrist?
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
I'm not embarrassed. I think you should be embarrassed for being such a smug prick.
P.S. I came on the forum today to find a few pics of PJ20 and I thought I would take a look at the train. Bad idea. Same old bull shit form a handful of assholes. Now I know why BrianLux said he is leaving; now you know why I am leaving.
I will likely get banned or reprimanded for my "smug prick" comment. So be it. This could be my last post for all I care; I haven't been posting much as of late anyway because the environment is rather hostile and silly.
Peace and love..........
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
Except that he's basically a more popular, more well-spoken Bush.
Pretty sure Obama's been at the helm of the ship that's run our national debt up to record highs. Dunno how anybody can support that guy. Or Bush. Or Reagan. Or any of these nitwit conservative douches running against our fearless leader next year.
This country is fucked. I know leaning left is the cool, en vogue thing to do around the PJ boards, but, I don't trust the left any more or less than I do the right. They're all buddies behind the scenes; they're all rich puppets of their interest groups and corporate hot shots, etc.
Dude, Obama would OWN Ronnie the Drug Kingpin & Supreme Pimp of the 1980's one-on-one on the court. Dude's way more qualified and he's doing a much better job, because, I mean, remember, he promised us change!
did Obama ruin this country? no he did not. it was well fucked when he inherited this pile of trash. trusting any of the powers that be today is what foolish people do. so good for you, JA, for knowing you will and are getting screwed over, as well as all the rest of us are too.
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
the president.
i also knew i was a boy with a thingy and i was attracted to girls, and they attracted to me. little mr. grew and grew. it was a great experience. and there were boobies on my teacher :shock:
moral of the story, ronald sucked.
he reminds me of big arnold out in california. a nitwit who landed the job due to being voted in by a shit ton of goofy bastards whose eyes been glued to the god damn television far to long.
something like that...
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
Yeah, he inherited a piece of trash, and did nothing to fix it. Clinton's initiatives did wonders with the economy after Reagan and Daddy Bush completely fucked it up. Then, after doing so well, Clinton buckled like a bitch at the end and set the precedence in motion that would eventually destroy the housing market under the "compassionate conservative" cowboy.
They're all to blame. Obama had the senate and house all painted blue for a little while, and did jack poop to improve our standard of living. He's just as fucking inept as the rest of 'em, my brother.
my father adored him so I did too ... first President for me
and last President for both of us