Efraín Ríos Montt: Guatemala human rights groups welcome genocide trial
'...Prosecutors said the dictator, who seized power in a coup, unleashed a campaign of slaughter, terror and rape against Maya highland villages which were suspected of backing leftwing guerrillas.
Human rights groups have long accused him of being among the cruellest despots during Latin America's cold war era of US-backed counter-insurgency operations. The Reagan administration armed and supported Ríos Montt, calling him a bulwark against communism.'
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zeroe ... Montt.html
According to Amnesty International, in just four months there were more than 2,000 fully documented extrajudicial killings by the Guatemalan army: 'People of all ages were not only shot, they were burned alive, hacked to death, disembowelled, drowned, beheaded. Small children were smashed against rocks or bayoneted to death.' The Catholic bishops said: 'Never in our national history has it come to such extremes.' US President Ronald Reagan, visiting Guatemala on a swing through Latin America, hailed Rios Montt as 'totally dedicated to democracy'.
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.
"By the end of his term, 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, had been indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal violations. In terms of number of officials involved, the record of his administration was the worst ever." P. 184 'Sleep-Walking Through History: America in the Reagan Years', by Haynes Johnson, (1991, Doubleday).
James Watt, Reagan's Secretary of the Interior was indicted on 41 felony counts for using connections at the Department of Housing and Urban Development to help his private clients seek federal funds for housing projects in Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Watt conceded that he had received $500,000 from clients who were granted very favorable housing contracts after he had intervened on their behalf. In testifying before a House committee Watt said: "That's what they offered and it sounded like a lot of money to me, and we settled on it." Watt was eventually sentenced to five years in prison and 500 hours of community service.
Although not convicted, Edwin Meese III, resigned as Reagan's Attorney General after having been the subject of investigations by the United States Office of the Independent Counsel on two occasions (Wedtech and Iran-Contra), during the 3 short years he was in office. E. Bob Wallach, close friend and law classmate of Attorney General Edwin Meese, was sentenced to six years in prison and fined $250,000 in connection with the Wedtech influence-peddling scandal. Lyn Nofziger – Convicted on charges of illegal lobbying of White House in Wedtech scandal. Michael Deaver received three years' probation and was fined one hundred thousand dollars after being convicted for lying to a congressional subcommittee and a federal grand jury about his lobbying activities after leaving the White House. The Iran-Contra scandal. In June, 1984, at a National Security Council meeting, CIA Director Casey urged President Reagan to seek third-party aid for the Nicaraguan contras. Secretary of State Schultz warned that it would be an "impeachable offense" if the U.S. government acted as conduit for such secret funding. But that didn't stop them. That same day, Oliver North was seeking third-party aid for the contras. But Reagan, the "teflon President" avoided serious charges or impeachment. Casper Weinberger was Secretary of Defense during Iran-Contra. In June 1992 he was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of concealing from congressional investigators and prosecutors thousands of pages of his handwritten notes. The personal memoirs taken during high level meetings, detailed events in 1985 and 1986 involving the Iran-Contra affair. Weinberger claimed he was being unfairly prosecuted because he would not provide information incriminating Ronald Reagan. Weinberger was scheduled to go on trial January 5, 1993, where the contents of his notes would have come to light and may have implicated other, unindicted conspirators. While Weinberger was never directly linked to the covert operations phase of the Iran-Contra affair, he is believed to have been involved in the cover-up of the ensuing scandal. According to Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, Weinberger's notes contain evidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to congress and the American public. Some of the notes are believed to have evidence against then Vice-President George Bush who pardoned Weinberger to keep him from going to trial. Raymond Donovan, Secretary of Labor indicted for defrauding the New York City Transit Authority of $7.4. million.
{ Republicans will point out that Donovan was acquitted. And that really matters in Donovan's case, because he was a Republican. But it didn't matter for Clinton or any of his cabinet, most all of whom were acquitted, because they were Democrats!} Elliott Abrams was appointed by President Reagan in 1985 to head the State Department's Latin American Bureau. He was closely linked with ex-White House aide Lt. Col. Oliver North's covert movement to aid the Contras. Working for North, Abrams coordinated inter-agency support for the contras and helped solicit illegal funding from foreign powers as well as domestic contributors. Abrams agreed to cooperate with Iran-Contra investigators and pled guilty to two charges reduced to misdemeanors. He was sentenced in 1991 to two years probation and 100 hours of community service but was pardoned by President George Bush. Robert C. McFarlane was appointed Ronald Reagan's National Security Advisor in October 1983 and become well-known as a champion of the MX missile program in his role as White House liaison to congress. In 1984, Mc Farlane initiated the review of U.S. policy towards Iran that led directly to the arms for hostages deal. He also supervised early National Security Council efforts to support the Contras. Shortly after the Iran-Contra scandal was revealed in early 1987, McFarlane took an overdose of the tranquilizer Valium in an attempt to end his life. In his own words: "What really drove me to despair was a sense of having failed the country." McFarlane pled guilty to four misdemeanors and was sentenced to two years probation and 200 hours of community service. He was also fined $20,000. He received a blanket pardon from President George Bush. Oliver North – Convicted of falsifying and destroying documents, accepting an illegal gratuity, and aiding and abetting the obstruction of Congress. Conviction overturned on appeal due to legal technicalities. John Poindexter, Reagan's national security advisor, – guilty of five criminal counts involving conspiracy to mislead Congress, obstructing congressional inquiries, lying to lawmakers, used "high national security" to mask deceit and wrong-doing. Richard Secord pleaded guilty to a felony charge of lying to Congress over Iran-Contra. Alan D. Fiers was the Chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's Central American Task Force. Fiers pled guilty in 1991 to two counts of withholding information from congress about Oliver North's activities and the diversion of Iran arms sale money to aid the Contras. He was sentenced to one year of probation and 100 hours of community service. Fiers agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for having his felonies reduced to misdemeanors and his testimony gave a boost to the long standing criminal investigation of Lawrence Walsh, Special Prosecutor. Fiers testified that he and three CIA colleagues knew by mid-1986 that profits from the TOW and HAWK missile sales to Iran were being diverted to the Contras months before it became public knowledge. Alan Fiers received a blanket pardon for his crimes from President Bush. Clair George was Chief of the CIA's Division of Covert Operations under President Reagan. In August 1992 a hung jury led U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth to declare a mistrial in the case of Clair George who was accused of concealing from Congress his knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair. George had been named by Alan Fiers when Fiers turned state's evidence for Lawrence Walsh's investigation. In a second trial on charges of perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice, George was convicted of lying to two congressional committees in 1986. George faced a maximum five year federal prison sentence and a $20,000 fine for each of the two convictions. Jurors cleared George of five other charges including two counts of lying to a federal grand jury. Those charges would have carried a mandatory 10 months in prison upon conviction. Clair George received a blanket pardon for his crimes from President George Bush. Duane R. (Dewey) Clarridge was head of the CIA's Western European Division under President Reagan. He was indicted on November 29, 1991 for lying to congress and to the Tower Commission that investigated Iran- Contra. Clarridge was charged with five counts of perjury and two counts of making false statements for covering up his knowledge of a November 25, 1985 shipment of HAWK missiles to Iran. Clarridge was also suspected of diverting to the Contras weapons that were originally intended for the Afghan mujahaddeen guerrillas. Clarridge received a blanket pardon for his crimes on Christmas Eve 1992 from President George Bush.
Environmental Protection Agency's favoritism toward polluter. Assistant administrator unduly influenced by chemical industry lobbyists. Another administrator resigned after pressuring employees to tone down a critical report on a chemical company accused of illegal pollution in Michigan. The deputy chief of federal activities was accused of compiling an interagency "hit" or "enemies" list, like those kept in the Nixon Watergate period, singling out career employees to be hired, fired or promoted according to political beliefs. Anne Gorscuh Burford resigned amid accusations she politically manipulated the Superfund money. Rita Lavelle was fired after accusing a senior EPA official of "systematically alienating the business community." She was later indicted, tried and convicted of lying to Congress and served three months of a six-month prison sentence. After an extensive investigation, in August 1984, a House of Representatives subcommittee concluded that top-level EPA appointees by Reagan for three years "violated their public trust by disregarding the public health and the environment, manipulating the Superfund program for political purposes, engaging in unethical conduct and participating in other abuses.".
Neglected nuclear safety. A critical situation involving nuclear safety had been allowed to develop during the Reagan era. Immense sums, estimated at 200 billion or more, would be required in the 1990s to replace and make safe America's neglected, aging, deteriorating, and dangerous nuclear facilities.
Savings & Loan Bail-out. Hundreds of billions of dollars were needed to bail out savings and loan institutions that either had failed during the deregulation frenzy of the eighties or were in danger of bankruptcy.
Reckless airline deregulation. Deregulation of airline industry took too broad a sweep, endangering public safety.
Additionally: Richard Allen, National Security adviser resigned amid controversy over an honorarium he received for arranging an interview with Nancy Reagan. Richard Beggs, chief administrator at NASA was indicted for defrauding the government while an executive at General Dynamics. Guy Flake, Deputy Secretary of Commerce, resigned after allegations of a conflict of interest in contract negotiations. Louis Glutfrida, Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency resigned amid allegations of misuses of government property. Edwin Gray, Chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank was charged with illegally repaying himself and his wife $26,000 in travel costs. Max Hugel, CIA chief of covert operations who resigned after allegations of fraudulent financial dealings. Carlos Campbell, Assistant Secretary of Commerce resigned over charges of awarding federal grants to his personal friends' firms. John Fedders, chief of enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission resigned over charges of beating his wife. Arthur Hayes, Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration resigned over illegal travel reimbursements. J. Lynn Helms, chief of the Federal Aviation Administration resigned over a grand jury investigation of illegal business activities. Marjory Mecklenburg, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Resources resigned over irregularities on her travel vouchers. Robert Nimmo, head of the Veterans Administration resigned when a report criticized him for improper use of government funds. J. William Petro, U.S. Attorney fired and fined for tipping off an acquaintance about a forthcoming Grand Jury investigation. Thomas C. Reed, White House counselor and National Security Council adviser resigned and paid a $427,000 fine for stock market insider trading. Emanuel Savas, Assistant Secretary of HUD resigned over assigning staff members to work on government time on a book that guilty to expense account fraud and accepting kickbacks on government contracts. Charles Wick, Director of the U.S. Information Agency investigated for taping conversations with public officials without their approval.
As of March 27, 2007, it was only an indictment, but Bloomberg News was reporting that David Stockman, President Reagan's budget director, was indicted on charges of defrauding investors and banks of $1.6 billion while chairman of Collins & Aikman Corp., an auto parts maker that collapsed days after he quit.
Cutting taxes for the Rich, and increasing taxes on the Middle Class -
Ronald Reagan is loved by conservatives and was loved by big business throughout his presidency and there's a reason for it. When Reagan came into office in January of 1981, the top tax rate was 70%, but when he left office in 1989 the top tax rate was down to only 28%. As Reagan gave the breaks to all his rich friends, there was a lack of revenue coming into the federal government. In order to bring money back into the government, Reagan was forced to raise taxes eleven times throughout his time in office. One example was when he signed into law the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982. Reagan raised taxes seven of the eight years he was in office and the tax increases were felt hardest by the lower and middle class.
Tripling the National Debt -
As Reagan cut taxes for the wealthy, the government was left with less money to spend. When Reagan came into office the national debt was $900 billion, by the time he left the national debt had tripled to $2.8 trillion.
Yep, that sure is hope and change we can believe in. :fp:
Dealing skillfully with Congress, Reagan obtained legislation to stimulate economic growth, curb inflation, increase employment, and strengthen national defense. He embarked upon a course of cutting taxes and Government expenditures, refusing to deviate from it when the strengthening of defense forces led to a large deficit.
A renewal of national self-confidence by 1984 helped Reagan and Bush win a second term with an unprecedented number of electoral votes. Their victory turned away Democratic challengers Walter F. Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro.
In 1986 Reagan obtained an overhaul of the income tax code, which eliminated many deductions and exempted millions of people with low incomes. At the end of his administration, the Nation was enjoying its longest recorded period of peacetime prosperity without recession or depression.
In foreign policy, Reagan sought to achieve "peace through strength." During his two terms he increased defense spending 35 percent, but sought to improve relations with the Soviet Union. In dramatic meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, he negotiated a treaty that would eliminate intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Reagan declared war against international terrorism, sending American bombers against Libya after evidence came out that Libya was involved in an attack on American soldiers in a West Berlin nightclub.
By ordering naval escorts in the Persian Gulf, he maintained the free flow of oil during the Iran-Iraq war. In keeping with the Reagan Doctrine, he gave support to anti-Communist insurgencies in Central America, Asia, and Africa.
Overall, the Reagan years saw a restoration of prosperity, and the goal of peace through strength seemed to be within grasp.
When the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced the nation's latest national employment figures Friday, the Obama administration stressed that people should not "read too much" into the data.
Mitt Romney's campaign pounced, and flagged the fact that the White House has repeated that same line nearly every month since November 2009.
See below for the roundup of articles from WhiteHouse.gov that Romney's campaign posted on its site. In many of the posts, the authors for the administration do acknowledge that they repeat themselves:
June 2012: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is informative to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/07/ ... ation-june)
May 2012: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is helpful to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/06/ ... uation-may)
April 2012: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is helpful to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/05/ ... tion-april)
March 2012: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, and it is helpful to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/04/ ... tion-march)
February 2012: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report; nevertheless, the trend in job market indicators over recent months is an encouraging sign." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/03/ ... n-february)
January 2012: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report; nevertheless, the trend in job market indicators over recent months is an encouraging sign." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/02/ ... on-january)
December 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/01/ ... n-december)
November 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/ ... n-november)
October 2011: "The monthly employment and unemployment numbers are volatile and employment estimates are subject to substantial revision. There is no better example than August's jobs figure, which was initially reported at zero and in the latest revision increased to 104,000. This illustrates why the Administration always stresses it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/11/ ... on-october)
September 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/10/ ... -september)
August 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/09/ ... ion-august)
July 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/08/ ... ation-july)
June 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/07/ ... ation-june)
May 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/06/ ... uation-may)
April 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/05/ ... tion-april)
March 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/04/ ... tion-march)
February 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/03/ ... n-february)
January 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/02/ ... on-january)
December 2010: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/01/ ... n-december)
November 2010: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/12/ ... n-november)
October 2010: "Given the volatility in monthly employment and unemployment data, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/11/ ... on-october)
September 2010: "Given the volatility in the monthly employment and unemployment data, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/10/ ... -september)
July 2010: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative. It is essential that we continue our efforts to move in the right direction and replace job losses with robust job gains." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/08/ ... ation-july)
August 2010: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/09/ ... ion-august)
June 2010: "As always, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/07/ ... ation-june)
May 2010: "As always, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/06/ ... uation-may)
April 2010: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/05/ ... tion-april)
March 2010: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/04/ ... tion-march)
January 2010: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/02/ ... on-january)
November 2009: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2009/12/ ... n-november)
Reagan grew up on welfare and then turned his back on the less fortunate. Reagan was the president of a union and then turned his back on unions. Reagan had the chance to do something about aids before it became an epidemic. He did nothing.
The current hero to the GOP is a guy who raised taxes in 7 of his 8 years in office. Go figure.
This show, another show, a show here and a show there.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..... :!:
Like I mentioned earlier, his embrace of the budding environmental movement is very important to me....I'm sure scads of the current GOP members still curse his signature on legislation such as the ESA. :twisted:
All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a thousand enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.
Reagan grew up on welfare and then turned his back on the less fortunate. Reagan was the president of a union and then turned his back on unions. Reagan had the chance to do something about aids before it became an epidemic. He did nothing.
The current hero to the GOP is a guy who raised taxes in 7 of his 8 years in office. Go figure.
There are times to raise taxes and times to lower taxes. I read somewhere they other day that in the 80's, 85% of Americans paid income tax. Today only 51% pay income tax. Something is wrong with this picture. Also Americans on disabilty as gone from around 3 million in 91 to 9 million today. Without tax revenue increasing, there is no way we can sustain the system.
Reagan grew up on welfare and then turned his back on the less fortunate. Reagan was the president of a union and then turned his back on unions. Reagan had the chance to do something about aids before it became an epidemic. He did nothing.
The current hero to the GOP is a guy who raised taxes in 7 of his 8 years in office. Go figure.
There are times to raise taxes and times to lower taxes. I read somewhere they other day that in the 80's, 85% of Americans paid income tax. Today only 51% pay income tax. Something is wrong with this picture. Also Americans on disabilty as gone from around 3 million in 91 to 9 million today. Without tax revenue increasing, there is no way we can sustain the system.
I'm for raising taxes. It's the only way to pay for shit.
This show, another show, a show here and a show there.
Reagan grew up on welfare and then turned his back on the less fortunate. Reagan was the president of a union and then turned his back on unions. Reagan had the chance to do something about aids before it became an epidemic. He did nothing.
The current hero to the GOP is a guy who raised taxes in 7 of his 8 years in office. Go figure.
There are times to raise taxes and times to lower taxes. I read somewhere they other day that in the 80's, 85% of Americans paid income tax. Today only 51% pay income tax. Something is wrong with this picture. Also Americans on disabilty as gone from around 3 million in 91 to 9 million today. Without tax revenue increasing, there is no way we can sustain the system.
I'm for raising taxes. It's the only way to pay for shit.
The current hero to the GOP is a guy who raised taxes in 7 of his 8 years in office. Go figure.[/quote]
There are times to raise taxes and times to lower taxes. I read somewhere they other day that in the 80's, 85% of Americans paid income tax. Today only 51% pay income tax. Something is wrong with this picture. Also Americans on disabilty as gone from around 3 million in 91 to 9 million today. Without tax revenue increasing, there is no way we can sustain the system.[/quote]
I'm for raising taxes. It's the only way to pay for shit.[/quote]
I'm for stopping spending on so much shit.[/quote]
I agree with both of you. We need to raise taxes a bit but there is also alot of useless spending.
I agree and would add that we need to move some of the spending around. For example: less on military/endless-useless war-- more on education, and addressing climate change.
"Pretty cookies, heart squares all around, yeah!" -Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
Reagan grew up on welfare and then turned his back on the less fortunate. Reagan was the president of a union and then turned his back on unions. Reagan had the chance to do something about aids before it became an epidemic. He did nothing.
The current hero to the GOP is a guy who raised taxes in 7 of his 8 years in office. Go figure.
There are times to raise taxes and times to lower taxes. I read somewhere they other day that in the 80's, 85% of Americans paid income tax. Today only 51% pay income tax. Something is wrong with this picture. Also Americans on disabilty as gone from around 3 million in 91 to 9 million today. Without tax revenue increasing, there is no way we can sustain the system.
I'm for raising taxes. It's the only way to pay for shit.
Yep, let's debate Reagan's stance on taxes, and let that determine whether or not he was a President worthy of admiration, or otherwise.
Never mind the fact that he carried out genocide in Latin America, that saw hundreds of thousands murdered by U.S-backed death squads, who wiped out thousands of villages, raping women - including Nuns - and killing children.
As it happens, Hitler and the Nazis did a great job with the German economy during their time in power. Following the logic of many posters here, maybe it's time to re-evaluate their legacy too? :?
There are times to raise taxes and times to lower taxes. I read somewhere they other day that in the 80's, 85% of Americans paid income tax. Today only 51% pay income tax. Something is wrong with this picture. Also Americans on disabilty as gone from around 3 million in 91 to 9 million today. Without tax revenue increasing, there is no way we can sustain the system.[/quote]
I'm for raising taxes. It's the only way to pay for shit.[/quote]
Yep, let's debate Reagan's stance on taxes, and let that determine whether or not he was a President worthy of admiration, or otherwise.
We can also debate what lead to U.S. intervention in Latin America. The Sandinista's backed by the Soviets and Cuba was spreading. I am not going to be naive either and say that the government's that were in place before were any better. But the goal of those countries backed by the Soviets in 70's and 80's were put in place to not only diminish the U.S. but the long term goal was to possibly to do away with the U.S. as it was our goal to do away with the Soviets.
We can also debate what lead to U.S. intervention in Latin America. The Sandinista's backed by the Soviets and Cuba was spreading. I am not going to be naive either and say that the government's that were in place before were any better. But the goal of those countries backed by the Soviets in 70's and 80's were put in place to not only diminish the U.S. but the long term goal was to possibly to do away with the U.S. as it was our goal to do away with the Soviets.
They were opposed to the U.S using the region as their own backyard sweatshop.
Are you honestly suggesting that the survival of the U.S was under threat from these popular resistance movements?
Do you have any evidence that the goal of the popular Nationalist governments in Latin America was to 'do away with the U.S'? Or is that just a convenient invention you use to excuse the genocide carried out in the region?
'...The case of Cuba is [...] instructive. Arthur Schlesinger, reporting the conclusions of a Latin American study group to President Kennedy in early 1961, described the Cuban threat as "the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into one's own hands;" a serious problem, he elaborated, when "[t]he distribution of land and other forms of national wealth [in Latin America] greatly favors the propertied classes ... [and] ... The poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living." "Meanwhile, the Soviet Union hovers in the wings, flourishing large development loans and presenting itself as the model for achieving modernization in a single generation." In public Schlesinger now describes the problem faced by Kennedy as Castro's "troublemaking in the hemisphere" and "the Soviet connection."
From the origins of the Cold War eighty years ago, such "troublemaking" and the "Soviet connection" were perceived in a similar light by Washington and London. High level U.S. planning documents identify the primary threat to their global plans as "nationalistic regimes" that are responsive to popular pressures for "immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses." These tendencies conflicted with the demand for "a political and economic climate conducive to private investment," with adequate repatriation of profits and "protection of our raw materials."
At a hemispheric conference in February 1945, the U.S. called for "An Economic Charter of the Americas" that would eliminate economic nationalism "in all its forms." Officials recognized that it would be necessary to overcome the "philosophy of the New Nationalism [that] embraces policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses." Latin Americans, the State Department warned, "are convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country's resources should be the people of that country." Given power relations, the U.S. position prevailed -- the first beneficiaries were to be U.S. investors and domestic elites. Latin America was to fulfill its service function without "excessive industrial development" that would encroach on U.S. interests.
We can also debate what lead to U.S. intervention in Latin America. The Sandinista's backed by the Soviets and Cuba was spreading. I am not going to be naive either and say that the government's that were in place before were any better. But the goal of those countries backed by the Soviets in 70's and 80's were put in place to not only diminish the U.S. but the long term goal was to possibly to do away with the U.S. as it was our goal to do away with the Soviets.
They were opposed to the U.S using the region as their own backyard sweatshop.
Are you honestly suggesting that the survival of the U.S was under threat from these popular resistance movements?
Do you have any evidence that the goal of the popular Nationalist governments in Latin America was to 'do away with the U.S'? Or is that just a convenient invention you use to excuse the genocide carried out in the region?
And let's not forget what our foreign policy goals have been since after the Civil War. We have done everything in our power to become a global power. We were too late to imperialize Africa so we claimed we needed to "protect" Latin America - that it was our sphere. This just eventually led to our involvement in other areas of the world and we kept shifting our foreign policy to allow us to continue to do that. TR continued the policy in Latin America, WIlson did it to make the world safe for democracy (justification for WWI), FDR did it, then every president who fought the cold war did it as well. Our war on terrorism is the same today as Cold War policy; only now we are fighting an enemy we helped create because of our foreign policy during the Cold War. Global political and economic power has been our goal for a very long time!
Are we getting something out of this all-encompassing trip?
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned...
Don't forget that the US partnered with Stalin during WW2. That means FDR and the US was responsible for tens of millions of deaths in Soviet controlled territory.
Don't forget that the US partnered with Stalin during WW2. That means FDR and the US was responsible for tens of millions of deaths in Soviet controlled territory.
:fp:
Why doesn't the US ever get blamed for Canada?
First of all, what 'millions of deaths' between 1941 and 1945 in Soviet controlled territory are you talking about?
Secondly, what do you mean by 'blamed for Canada'?
Don't forget that the US partnered with Stalin during WW2. That means FDR and the US was responsible for tens of millions of deaths in Soviet controlled territory.
:fp:
Why doesn't the US ever get blamed for Canada?
First of all, what 'millions of deaths' between 1941 and 1945 in Soviet controlled territory are you talking about?
Secondly, what do you mean by 'blamed for Canada'?
I assumed (correct me if I'm wrong Jason P) that he was referencing the Gulag labor camp system. Although tens of millions passed through, roughly 1 million died while there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
Are we getting something out of this all-encompassing trip?
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned...
Comments
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
Thanks dudesters.
By the way, Reagan was a scumbag.
What was done in Latin America under his direct orders should never be forgotten, or forgiven.
Worst. Barack Hussein
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/ja ... cide-trial
Efraín Ríos Montt: Guatemala human rights groups welcome genocide trial
'...Prosecutors said the dictator, who seized power in a coup, unleashed a campaign of slaughter, terror and rape against Maya highland villages which were suspected of backing leftwing guerrillas.
Human rights groups have long accused him of being among the cruellest despots during Latin America's cold war era of US-backed counter-insurgency operations. The Reagan administration armed and supported Ríos Montt, calling him a bulwark against communism.'
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zeroe ... Montt.html
According to Amnesty International, in just four months there were more than 2,000 fully documented extrajudicial killings by the Guatemalan army: 'People of all ages were not only shot, they were burned alive, hacked to death, disembowelled, drowned, beheaded. Small children were smashed against rocks or bayoneted to death.' The Catholic bishops said: 'Never in our national history has it come to such extremes.'
US President Ronald Reagan, visiting Guatemala on a swing through Latin America, hailed Rios Montt as 'totally dedicated to democracy'.
Sure, engineering, supporting, and attempting to cover-up, genocide, represents real hope and change.
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 Reagan Administration was so corrupt it even has it's own Wiki page dedicated to all the scandals:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_adm ... n_scandals
They don't make documentaries like this anymore:
The Secret Government PBS 1987 Bill Moyers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiRBxDEGDqw
"By the end of his term, 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, had been indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal violations. In terms of number of officials involved, the record of his administration was the worst ever."
P. 184 'Sleep-Walking Through History: America in the Reagan Years', by Haynes Johnson, (1991, Doubleday).
James Watt, Reagan's Secretary of the Interior was indicted on 41 felony counts for using connections at the Department of Housing and Urban Development to help his private clients seek federal funds for housing projects in Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Watt conceded that he had received $500,000 from clients who were granted very favorable housing contracts after he had intervened on their behalf. In testifying before a House committee Watt said: "That's what they offered and it sounded like a lot of money to me, and we settled on it." Watt was eventually sentenced to five years in prison and 500 hours of community service.
Although not convicted, Edwin Meese III, resigned as Reagan's Attorney General after having been the subject of investigations by the United States Office of the Independent Counsel on two occasions (Wedtech and Iran-Contra), during the 3 short years he was in office.
E. Bob Wallach, close friend and law classmate of Attorney General Edwin Meese, was sentenced to six years in prison and fined $250,000 in connection with the Wedtech influence-peddling scandal.
Lyn Nofziger – Convicted on charges of illegal lobbying of White House in Wedtech scandal.
Michael Deaver received three years' probation and was fined one hundred thousand dollars after being convicted for lying to a congressional subcommittee and a federal grand jury about his lobbying activities after leaving the White House.
The Iran-Contra scandal. In June, 1984, at a National Security Council meeting, CIA Director Casey urged President Reagan to seek third-party aid for the Nicaraguan contras. Secretary of State Schultz warned that it would be an "impeachable offense" if the U.S. government acted as conduit for such secret funding. But that didn't stop them. That same day, Oliver North was seeking third-party aid for the contras. But Reagan, the "teflon President" avoided serious charges or impeachment.
Casper Weinberger was Secretary of Defense during Iran-Contra. In June 1992 he was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of concealing from congressional investigators and prosecutors thousands of pages of his handwritten notes. The personal memoirs taken during high level meetings, detailed events in 1985 and 1986 involving the Iran-Contra affair. Weinberger claimed he was being unfairly prosecuted because he would not provide information incriminating Ronald Reagan. Weinberger was scheduled to go on trial January 5, 1993, where the contents of his notes would have come to light and may have implicated other, unindicted conspirators. While Weinberger was never directly linked to the covert operations phase of the Iran-Contra affair, he is believed to have been involved in the cover-up of the ensuing scandal. According to Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, Weinberger's notes contain evidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to congress and the American public. Some of the notes are believed to have evidence against then Vice-President George Bush who pardoned Weinberger to keep him from going to trial.
Raymond Donovan, Secretary of Labor indicted for defrauding the New York City Transit Authority of $7.4. million.
{ Republicans will point out that Donovan was acquitted. And that really matters in Donovan's case, because he was a Republican. But it didn't matter for Clinton or any of his cabinet, most all of whom were acquitted, because they were Democrats!}
Elliott Abrams was appointed by President Reagan in 1985 to head the State Department's Latin American Bureau. He was closely linked with ex-White House aide Lt. Col. Oliver North's covert movement to aid the Contras. Working for North, Abrams coordinated inter-agency support for the contras and helped solicit illegal funding from foreign powers as well as domestic contributors. Abrams agreed to cooperate with Iran-Contra investigators and pled guilty to two charges reduced to misdemeanors. He was sentenced in 1991 to two years probation and 100 hours of community service but was pardoned by President George Bush.
Robert C. McFarlane was appointed Ronald Reagan's National Security Advisor in October 1983 and become well-known as a champion of the MX missile program in his role as White House liaison to congress. In 1984, Mc Farlane initiated the review of U.S. policy towards Iran that led directly to the arms for hostages deal. He also supervised early National Security Council efforts to support the Contras. Shortly after the Iran-Contra scandal was revealed in early 1987, McFarlane took an overdose of the tranquilizer Valium in an attempt to end his life. In his own words: "What really drove me to despair was a sense of having failed the country." McFarlane pled guilty to four misdemeanors and was sentenced to two years probation and 200 hours of community service. He was also fined $20,000. He received a blanket pardon from President George Bush.
Oliver North – Convicted of falsifying and destroying documents, accepting an illegal gratuity, and aiding and abetting the obstruction of Congress. Conviction overturned on appeal due to legal technicalities.
John Poindexter, Reagan's national security advisor, – guilty of five criminal counts involving conspiracy to mislead Congress, obstructing congressional inquiries, lying to lawmakers, used "high national security" to mask deceit and wrong-doing.
Richard Secord pleaded guilty to a felony charge of lying to Congress over Iran-Contra.
Alan D. Fiers was the Chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's Central American Task Force. Fiers pled guilty in 1991 to two counts of withholding information from congress about Oliver North's activities and the diversion of Iran arms sale money to aid the Contras. He was sentenced to one year of probation and 100 hours of community service. Fiers agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for having his felonies reduced to misdemeanors and his testimony gave a boost to the long standing criminal investigation of Lawrence Walsh, Special Prosecutor. Fiers testified that he and three CIA colleagues knew by mid-1986 that profits from the TOW and HAWK missile sales to Iran were being diverted to the Contras months before it became public knowledge. Alan Fiers received a blanket pardon for his crimes from President Bush.
Clair George was Chief of the CIA's Division of Covert Operations under President Reagan. In August 1992 a hung jury led U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth to declare a mistrial in the case of Clair George who was accused of concealing from Congress his knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair. George had been named by Alan Fiers when Fiers turned state's evidence for Lawrence Walsh's investigation. In a second trial on charges of perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice, George was convicted of lying to two congressional committees in 1986. George faced a maximum five year federal prison sentence and a $20,000 fine for each of the two convictions. Jurors cleared George of five other charges including two counts of lying to a federal grand jury. Those charges would have carried a mandatory 10 months in prison upon conviction. Clair George received a blanket pardon for his crimes from President George Bush.
Duane R. (Dewey) Clarridge was head of the CIA's Western European Division under President Reagan. He was indicted on November 29, 1991 for lying to congress and to the Tower Commission that investigated Iran- Contra. Clarridge was charged with five counts of perjury and two counts of making false statements for covering up his knowledge of a November 25, 1985 shipment of HAWK missiles to Iran. Clarridge was also suspected of diverting to the Contras weapons that were originally intended for the Afghan mujahaddeen guerrillas. Clarridge received a blanket pardon for his crimes on Christmas Eve 1992 from President George Bush.
Environmental Protection Agency's favoritism toward polluter. Assistant administrator unduly influenced by chemical industry lobbyists. Another administrator resigned after pressuring employees to tone down a critical report on a chemical company accused of illegal pollution in Michigan. The deputy chief of federal activities was accused of compiling an interagency "hit" or "enemies" list, like those kept in the Nixon Watergate period, singling out career employees to be hired, fired or promoted according to political beliefs.
Anne Gorscuh Burford resigned amid accusations she politically manipulated the Superfund money.
Rita Lavelle was fired after accusing a senior EPA official of "systematically alienating the business community." She was later indicted, tried and convicted of lying to Congress and served three months of a six-month prison sentence. After an extensive investigation, in August 1984, a House of Representatives subcommittee concluded that top-level EPA appointees by Reagan for three years "violated their public trust by disregarding the public health and the environment, manipulating the Superfund program for political purposes, engaging in unethical conduct and participating in other abuses.".
Neglected nuclear safety. A critical situation involving nuclear safety had been allowed to develop during the Reagan era. Immense sums, estimated at 200 billion or more, would be required in the 1990s to replace and make safe America's neglected, aging, deteriorating, and dangerous nuclear facilities.
Savings & Loan Bail-out. Hundreds of billions of dollars were needed to bail out savings and loan institutions that either had failed during the deregulation frenzy of the eighties or were in danger of bankruptcy.
Reckless airline deregulation. Deregulation of airline industry took too broad a sweep, endangering public safety.
Additionally:
Richard Allen, National Security adviser resigned amid controversy over an honorarium he received for arranging an interview with Nancy Reagan.
Richard Beggs, chief administrator at NASA was indicted for defrauding the government while an executive at General Dynamics.
Guy Flake, Deputy Secretary of Commerce, resigned after allegations of a conflict of interest in contract negotiations.
Louis Glutfrida, Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency resigned amid allegations of misuses of government property.
Edwin Gray, Chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank was charged with illegally repaying himself and his wife $26,000 in travel costs.
Max Hugel, CIA chief of covert operations who resigned after allegations of fraudulent financial dealings.
Carlos Campbell, Assistant Secretary of Commerce resigned over charges of awarding federal grants to his personal friends' firms.
John Fedders, chief of enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission resigned over charges of beating his wife.
Arthur Hayes, Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration resigned over illegal travel reimbursements.
J. Lynn Helms, chief of the Federal Aviation Administration resigned over a grand jury investigation of illegal business activities.
Marjory Mecklenburg, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Resources resigned over irregularities on her travel vouchers.
Robert Nimmo, head of the Veterans Administration resigned when a report criticized him for improper use of government funds.
J. William Petro, U.S. Attorney fired and fined for tipping off an acquaintance about a forthcoming Grand Jury investigation.
Thomas C. Reed, White House counselor and National Security Council adviser resigned and paid a $427,000 fine for stock market insider trading.
Emanuel Savas, Assistant Secretary of HUD resigned over assigning staff members to work on government time on a book that guilty to expense account fraud and accepting kickbacks on government contracts.
Charles Wick, Director of the U.S. Information Agency investigated for taping conversations with public officials without their approval.
As of March 27, 2007, it was only an indictment, but Bloomberg News was reporting that David Stockman, President Reagan's budget director, was indicted on charges of defrauding investors and banks of $1.6 billion while chairman of Collins & Aikman Corp., an auto parts maker that collapsed days after he quit.
Cutting taxes for the Rich, and increasing taxes on the Middle Class -
Ronald Reagan is loved by conservatives and was loved by big business throughout his presidency and there's a reason for it. When Reagan came into office in January of 1981, the top tax rate was 70%, but when he left office in 1989 the top tax rate was down to only 28%. As Reagan gave the breaks to all his rich friends, there was a lack of revenue coming into the federal government. In order to bring money back into the government, Reagan was forced to raise taxes eleven times throughout his time in office. One example was when he signed into law the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982. Reagan raised taxes seven of the eight years he was in office and the tax increases were felt hardest by the lower and middle class.
Tripling the National Debt -
As Reagan cut taxes for the wealthy, the government was left with less money to spend. When Reagan came into office the national debt was $900 billion, by the time he left the national debt had tripled to $2.8 trillion.
Yep, that sure is hope and change we can believe in. :fp:
Dealing skillfully with Congress, Reagan obtained legislation to stimulate economic growth, curb inflation, increase employment, and strengthen national defense. He embarked upon a course of cutting taxes and Government expenditures, refusing to deviate from it when the strengthening of defense forces led to a large deficit.
A renewal of national self-confidence by 1984 helped Reagan and Bush win a second term with an unprecedented number of electoral votes. Their victory turned away Democratic challengers Walter F. Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro.
In 1986 Reagan obtained an overhaul of the income tax code, which eliminated many deductions and exempted millions of people with low incomes. At the end of his administration, the Nation was enjoying its longest recorded period of peacetime prosperity without recession or depression.
In foreign policy, Reagan sought to achieve "peace through strength." During his two terms he increased defense spending 35 percent, but sought to improve relations with the Soviet Union. In dramatic meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, he negotiated a treaty that would eliminate intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Reagan declared war against international terrorism, sending American bombers against Libya after evidence came out that Libya was involved in an attack on American soldiers in a West Berlin nightclub.
By ordering naval escorts in the Persian Gulf, he maintained the free flow of oil during the Iran-Iraq war. In keeping with the Reagan Doctrine, he gave support to anti-Communist insurgencies in Central America, Asia, and Africa.
Overall, the Reagan years saw a restoration of prosperity, and the goal of peace through strength seemed to be within grasp.
True leadership! Woot for Reagan.
When the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced the nation's latest national employment figures Friday, the Obama administration stressed that people should not "read too much" into the data.
Mitt Romney's campaign pounced, and flagged the fact that the White House has repeated that same line nearly every month since November 2009.
See below for the roundup of articles from WhiteHouse.gov that Romney's campaign posted on its site. In many of the posts, the authors for the administration do acknowledge that they repeat themselves:
June 2012: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is informative to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/07/ ... ation-june)
May 2012: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is helpful to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/06/ ... uation-may)
April 2012: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is helpful to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/05/ ... tion-april)
March 2012: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, and it is helpful to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/04/ ... tion-march)
February 2012: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report; nevertheless, the trend in job market indicators over recent months is an encouraging sign." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/03/ ... n-february)
January 2012: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report; nevertheless, the trend in job market indicators over recent months is an encouraging sign." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/02/ ... on-january)
December 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/01/ ... n-december)
November 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/ ... n-november)
October 2011: "The monthly employment and unemployment numbers are volatile and employment estimates are subject to substantial revision. There is no better example than August's jobs figure, which was initially reported at zero and in the latest revision increased to 104,000. This illustrates why the Administration always stresses it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/11/ ... on-october)
September 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/10/ ... -september)
August 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/09/ ... ion-august)
July 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/08/ ... ation-july)
June 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/07/ ... ation-june)
May 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/06/ ... uation-may)
April 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/05/ ... tion-april)
March 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/04/ ... tion-march)
February 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/03/ ... n-february)
January 2011: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/02/ ... on-january)
December 2010: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/01/ ... n-december)
November 2010: "Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/12/ ... n-november)
October 2010: "Given the volatility in monthly employment and unemployment data, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/11/ ... on-october)
September 2010: "Given the volatility in the monthly employment and unemployment data, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/10/ ... -september)
July 2010: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative. It is essential that we continue our efforts to move in the right direction and replace job losses with robust job gains." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/08/ ... ation-july)
August 2010: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/09/ ... ion-august)
June 2010: "As always, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/07/ ... ation-june)
May 2010: "As always, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/06/ ... uation-may)
April 2010: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/05/ ... tion-april)
March 2010: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/04/ ... tion-march)
January 2010: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/02/ ... on-january)
November 2009: "Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative." (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2009/12/ ... n-november)
Obama....talky talky talky
Handouts for all!
The current hero to the GOP is a guy who raised taxes in 7 of his 8 years in office. Go figure.
Like I mentioned earlier, his embrace of the budding environmental movement is very important to me....I'm sure scads of the current GOP members still curse his signature on legislation such as the ESA. :twisted:
worst: Obama, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter,
A man that stands for nothing....will fall for anything!
All people need to do more on every level!
There are times to raise taxes and times to lower taxes. I read somewhere they other day that in the 80's, 85% of Americans paid income tax. Today only 51% pay income tax. Something is wrong with this picture. Also Americans on disabilty as gone from around 3 million in 91 to 9 million today. Without tax revenue increasing, there is no way we can sustain the system.
I'm for raising taxes. It's the only way to pay for shit.
I'm for stopping spending on so much shit.
There are times to raise taxes and times to lower taxes. I read somewhere they other day that in the 80's, 85% of Americans paid income tax. Today only 51% pay income tax. Something is wrong with this picture. Also Americans on disabilty as gone from around 3 million in 91 to 9 million today. Without tax revenue increasing, there is no way we can sustain the system.[/quote]
I'm for raising taxes. It's the only way to pay for shit.[/quote]
I'm for stopping spending on so much shit.[/quote]
I'm for stopping spending on so much shit.[/quote]
I agree with both of you. We need to raise taxes a bit but there is also alot of useless spending.
I agree and would add that we need to move some of the spending around. For example: less on military/endless-useless war-- more on education, and addressing climate change.
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
Yep, let's debate Reagan's stance on taxes, and let that determine whether or not he was a President worthy of admiration, or otherwise.
Never mind the fact that he carried out genocide in Latin America, that saw hundreds of thousands murdered by U.S-backed death squads, who wiped out thousands of villages, raping women - including Nuns - and killing children.
As it happens, Hitler and the Nazis did a great job with the German economy during their time in power. Following the logic of many posters here, maybe it's time to re-evaluate their legacy too? :?
I'm for raising taxes. It's the only way to pay for shit.[/quote]
Yep, let's debate Reagan's stance on taxes, and let that determine whether or not he was a President worthy of admiration, or otherwise.
We can also debate what lead to U.S. intervention in Latin America. The Sandinista's backed by the Soviets and Cuba was spreading. I am not going to be naive either and say that the government's that were in place before were any better. But the goal of those countries backed by the Soviets in 70's and 80's were put in place to not only diminish the U.S. but the long term goal was to possibly to do away with the U.S. as it was our goal to do away with the Soviets.
They were opposed to the U.S using the region as their own backyard sweatshop.
Are you honestly suggesting that the survival of the U.S was under threat from these popular resistance movements?
Do you have any evidence that the goal of the popular Nationalist governments in Latin America was to 'do away with the U.S'? Or is that just a convenient invention you use to excuse the genocide carried out in the region?
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Choms ... _Cuba.html
A Century Later: Cuba , the Caribbean, and Latin America
by Noam Chomsky
'...The case of Cuba is [...] instructive. Arthur Schlesinger, reporting the conclusions of a Latin American study group to President Kennedy in early 1961, described the Cuban threat as "the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into one's own hands;" a serious problem, he elaborated, when "[t]he distribution of land and other forms of national wealth [in Latin America] greatly favors the propertied classes ... [and] ... The poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living." "Meanwhile, the Soviet Union hovers in the wings, flourishing large development loans and presenting itself as the model for achieving modernization in a single generation." In public Schlesinger now describes the problem faced by Kennedy as Castro's "troublemaking in the hemisphere" and "the Soviet connection."
From the origins of the Cold War eighty years ago, such "troublemaking" and the "Soviet connection" were perceived in a similar light by Washington and London. High level U.S. planning documents identify the primary threat to their global plans as "nationalistic regimes" that are responsive to popular pressures for "immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses." These tendencies conflicted with the demand for "a political and economic climate conducive to private investment," with adequate repatriation of profits and "protection of our raw materials."
At a hemispheric conference in February 1945, the U.S. called for "An Economic Charter of the Americas" that would eliminate economic nationalism "in all its forms." Officials recognized that it would be necessary to overcome the "philosophy of the New Nationalism [that] embraces policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses." Latin Americans, the State Department warned, "are convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country's resources should be the people of that country." Given power relations, the U.S. position prevailed -- the first beneficiaries were to be U.S. investors and domestic elites. Latin America was to fulfill its service function without "excessive industrial development" that would encroach on U.S. interests.
And let's not forget what our foreign policy goals have been since after the Civil War. We have done everything in our power to become a global power. We were too late to imperialize Africa so we claimed we needed to "protect" Latin America - that it was our sphere. This just eventually led to our involvement in other areas of the world and we kept shifting our foreign policy to allow us to continue to do that. TR continued the policy in Latin America, WIlson did it to make the world safe for democracy (justification for WWI), FDR did it, then every president who fought the cold war did it as well. Our war on terrorism is the same today as Cold War policy; only now we are fighting an enemy we helped create because of our foreign policy during the Cold War. Global political and economic power has been our goal for a very long time!
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned...
I AM MINE
:fp:
Why doesn't the US ever get blamed for Canada?
First of all, what 'millions of deaths' between 1941 and 1945 in Soviet controlled territory are you talking about?
Secondly, what do you mean by 'blamed for Canada'?
I assumed (correct me if I'm wrong Jason P) that he was referencing the Gulag labor camp system. Although tens of millions passed through, roughly 1 million died while there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned...
I AM MINE