- Usually, I am very reluctant to criticize the dead. However,
since the corporate media seems so fervent in their desire to glorify Ronald
Reagan and will undoubtedly spend weeks, if not months, in this effort,
I think an alternative perspective is only fair.
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- Anyone who thinks that former President Ronald Reagan
deserves to be put on a dime or have his face chiseled into Mt. Rushmore
needs to read a book called Lost History by Robert Parry. Robert Parry
was an AP and subsequent Newsweek reporter who caught a considerable amount
of flak from his editors and Reagan officials like Oliver North and Elliott
Abrams for his efforts to tell the truth about Reagan's policies in Central
America.
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- Robert Parry was far from the only reporter to suffer
this fate. Raymond Bonner of the New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto
of the Washington Post received enormous criticism for their coverage of
the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador in 1982. They were accused of lying
or at least greatly exaggerating the extent of the atrocities at El Mozote,
where over 900 men, women and children were slaughtered by the US-trained
Atlacatl battalion. Many years later, when US goals in defeating the insurgency
in El Salvador had been accomplished, forensic scientists dug up the bones
at El Mozote, noticing the skeletons of men, women and children and the
bullet holes in the skulls and machete marks on the bones. Raymond Bonner
and Alma Guillermoprieto had been right all along. Only this new information
was buried on the back pages of newspapers and ignored by the television
networks, so few people would notice.
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- A similar thing happened when Reagan first took office
in 1981. Four American churchwomen had been raped and murdered by the military
in El Salvador. Reagan's ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick excused
the murders by saying that the nuns had been political activists involved
in leftist causes and insinuating that this justified their fate. Reagan's
first Secretary of State Alexander Haig went even further, suggesting that
the nuns had been carrying guns and may have run a roadblock, leading to
an exchange of gunfire. Nuns packing heat-certainly not a very likely scenario.
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- Reagan knew on coming into office that his administration
was going to wage an unrelenting war against leftists all over the planet.
After all, he considered them to be part of the "Evil Empire."
I guess those people who want to redistribute land to poor, starving peasants
so they can grow food or want unions so people don't need to work 16 hours
a day, 7 days a week for wages that wouldn't keep a bird alive are by definition
evil devils that require elimination. The Reagan administration wanted
to limit public knowledge of the more unsavory aspects of this war against
leftists. They even had a euphemism for it - perception management. When
the North Koreans did it, it was called brainwashing. Of course, when done
by the United States, it is known as perception management. Just like napalming
Vietnamese villages was called "pacification" and now the terminology
for civilian casualties from US bombing is "collateral damage."
The Nazis called their mass slaughter of the Polish intelligentsia "Extraordinary
Pacification Action" or shooting people on the spot as being "summarily
sentenced." It seems that fascists love euphemisms to disguise their
atrocities.
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- Reagan created something called Project Truth run by
a CIA agent named Walter Raymond. The purpose of Project Truth was to influence
the large foundations, think tanks, political publications and human rights
organizations to move in a rightward direction. The success of this particular
operation can be seen in the fact that the New Republic magazine went from
a liberal to a conservative publication. Ronald Reagan also created the
Office of Public Diplomacy headed by Cuban exile Otto Reich. Otto Reich
traveled all over the United States and browbeat editors and journalists
of major newspapers if they made any remarks critical of US operations
in Central America. Robert Parry maintains that this constant intimidation
of journalists, criticism of dissenting viewpoints and massive government
propaganda made the Watergate press corps of the 1970s into the Monica
Lewinsky press corps of the 1990s.
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- President Reagan started funding the Contra army to overthrow
the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and greatly increased military aid to the
repressive, fascist governments in El Salvador and Guatemala. American
military advisors were sent to El Salvador and the death squads were organized
in Guatemala by the CIA with the help of the Argentine butchers who were
responsible for disappearing over 30,000 leftists in Argentina. These same
mass murderers and torture experts from Argentina were also used to train
the Contras and advise the Honduran military. Robert Parry was one of the
first journalists to discover the torture manual produced for the Contras
by the CIA. Also, he interviewed two American mercenaries fighting for
the Contras, Jack Terrell and Steven Carr, who revealed all sorts of corruption
and disgusting activities by the Contras, including drug smuggling. This
was before the Iran-Contra scandal, the Kerry Committee findings and the
Gary Webb investigation for the San Jose Mercury News also implicated the
Contras in cocaine smuggling. A smoking gun indicating that the Reagan
administration anticipated that the Contras and the CIA would be involved
in cocaine trafficking is the fact that Reagan's Attorney General William
French Smith issued an exemption to the CIA in 1982 from reporting drug
smuggling to any other government agency such as the DEA. Another example
of the priorities of the Reagan administration is the Frogman case in 1983.
Frogmen operating for the Contras were caught in San Francisco bringing
ashore 430 lbs of cocaine. Then, a call to the authorities in San Francisco
came in from a Contra leader in Costa Rica demanding money seized in the
raid to be returned. The CIA put pressure on the Justice Department and
$36,800 dollars were given back to the Contras.
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- Jack Terrell was a witness to several mass killings of
civilians by the Contras, and he described a particularly savage practice
by the Contras of slitting throats and then pulling the tongue out through
the resulting hole. It was called the "Colombian necktie." Remember
these Contras are the same people Ronald Reagan was calling "freedom
fighters" and "the equivalent of our founding fathers."
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- The situation was just as grim in Guatemala. Rios Montt
came to power and conducted a scorched earth policy against the Mayans
in the central highlands. Several hundred Mayan villages were destroyed.
Many Mayans were tortured and killed for being guerrilla suspects. Ronald
Reagan traveled to Guatemala and praised Rios Montt's repression and said
Rios Montt was getting a "bum rap" from the human rights organizations.
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- President Ronald Reagan invaded the tiny island of Grenada,
bombed Libya and increased military aid to UNITA and Renamo, the proxy
mercenary armies fighting against the leftist governments in Angola and
Mozambique. These wars in Angola and Mozambique were particularly brutal
with the death toll being over a million in both countries. Renamo had
a particularly savage practice of severing the arms and legs of people
with machetes, so there are a considerable number of amputees now in Mozambique.
The same sad case of amputees exists also in Angola, but mostly for a different
reason-land mines.
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- President Ronald Reagan vastly increased military supplies
to the CIA-trained moujahedeen in Afghanistan. The socialist government
there had instituted land reform, given women equal rights and started
many schools and medical clinics. The CIA found the most superstitious,
reactionary and religious tribesmen to first fight the socialist government
there and then the Soviet Union, when they invaded. Of course, the CIA
told these religious fanatics that the communists were atheists and that
a holy war was necessary to defeat them. One of the worst of these fanatics
was a man named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and he received the most US aid. He
and his followers were famous for throwing acid in the faces of women who
wouldn't wear the veil. Now, the US is mired in a military occupation of
Afghanistan, fighting the same people they trained and armed, including
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Even more lives are being lost.
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- As I have elucidated in this extensive history, the Reagan
administration was complicit in cocaine smuggling and the resultant epidemic
of crack babies and drive-by shootings in the poor, minority areas of large
American cities. Also, the Reagan administration instigated and financed
mass murder, torture, disappearances and horrendous repression against
leftists around the world and then lied to the American people about it
and conducted a cover-up of its activities. I don't believe an airport
or freeway should have been named for Ronald Reagan. I despise the idea
of a Reagan dime or seeing him on Mt. Rushmore. Instead, the money should
be spent building a monument to the millions of his victims or in compensating
the survivors of the atrocities. In addition, Robert Parry's book Lost
History should be required reading in high schools and colleges so that
we can change the economic and political system which allows such ignorant
and evil Presidents to come to power.
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- http://www.theblackflag.org/iconoclast
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