We Have Met The Enemy, And He Is Republican Administrations!

The New York Times is reporting that Sunni militants have emerged as the main obstacle to peace in Baghdad:

In January, when President Bush announced his plans to reinforce American troops in Baghdad, Shiite militias were seen as the main worry. Some analysts predicted that bloody clashes with Shiite militants in the Sadr City district in northeastern Baghdad were all but inevitable.

Instead, during the early weeks of the operation, deadly bombings by Sunni Arab militants have emerged as a greater danger. In particular, the threat posed by the Sunni group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia was underscored when American troops seized a laptop computer from a senior operative in the group who was killed in late December.

Information from captured materials indicates that the group’s leadership sees “the sectarian war for Baghdad as the necessary main focus of its operations,” according to an intelligence report that was described by American officials.

Okay.

Let's think about this.

Bush went to war with Saddam, whose Baathist Sunni minority oppressed the Shia Iraqi majority.

BBC:

Shia Muslims were oppressed by Iraq's Baathist regime for more than 30 years and excluded from the highest ranks of power.

Except that created worries that the Iraqi Shia majority will create an alliance with neighboring Shia Iran.

The Financial Times, almost a year ago:

Arab rulers are increasingly frustrated by a changing political order in the Middle East, where the Shia are for the first time in power in Iraq and Shia militia are now engaged in the sectarian conflict with the Sunni minority.

But their fears have been compounded by the muscle-flexing of Shia Iran, a traditional rival now determined to pursue a nuclear programme and consolidate its alliance with Syria, the Shia in Lebanon and some radical Palestinian factions, forming a radical anti-western axis in the face of the more moderate pro-western and Sunni-dominated Arab states.

And that fear was exacerbated by the disastrously bungled execution of Saddam.

Time:

Saddam's execution became another flash point. Even Sunnis who had little sympathy for Saddam were incensed that the government chose to hang him at the hour of morning prayers on one of the most sacred Muslim holidays (Iraqi Sunnis celebrated the holiday one day before the Shi'ites). The choice seemed to confirm suspicions that Shi'ite political dominance would be a constant humiliation. "It was their way of telling us, 'We're in charge now, and you are so weak that even your holy days have no meaning anymore,'" says media analyst Kadhim al-Mukhdadi. "That morning I gave up hoping that things would get better."

And Bush is so worried about Iran that he might go to war with them.

Newsweek:

The Iranians have reason to feel paranoid. In recent weeks senior American officers have condemned Tehran for providing training and deadly explosives to insurgents. In a predawn raid on Dec. 21, U.S. troops barged into the compound of the most powerful political party in the country, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and grabbed two men they claimed were officers in Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Three weeks later U.S. troops stormed an Iranian diplomatic office in Irbil, arresting five more Iranians. The Americans have hinted that as part of an escalating tit-for-tat, Iranians may have had a hand in a spectacular raid in Karbala on Jan. 20, in which four American soldiers were kidnapped and later found shot, execution style, in the head. U.S. forces promised to defend themselves.

Some view the spiraling attacks as a strand in a worrisome pattern. At least one former White House official contends that some Bush advisers secretly want an excuse to attack Iran. "They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something [America] would be forced to retaliate for," says Hillary Mann, the administration's former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs. U.S. officials insist they have no intention of provoking or otherwise starting a war with Iran, and they were also quick to deny any link to Sharafi's kidnapping. But the fact remains that the longstanding war of words between Washington and Tehran is edging toward something more dangerous. A second Navy carrier is steaming toward the Persian Gulf. Iran shot off a few missiles in those same tense waters last week, in a highly publicized test. With Americans and Iranians jousting on the chaotic battleground of Iraq, the chances of a small incident's spiraling into a crisis are higher than they've been in years.

And he's even been funding Sunni allies of al Qaeda, because they're also opposed to potential Shia hegemony.

Think Progress:

New Yorker columnist Sy Hersh says the “single most explosive” element of his latest article involves an effort by the Bush administration to stem the growth of Shiite influence in the Middle East (specifically the Iranian government and Hezbollah in Lebanon) by funding violent Sunni groups.

Hersh says the U.S. has been “pumping money, a great deal of money, without congressional authority, without any congressional oversight” for covert operations in the Middle East where it wants to “stop the Shiite spread or the Shiite influence.” Hersh says these funds have ended up in the hands of “three Sunni jihadist groups” who are “connected to al Qaeda” but “want to take on Hezbollah.”

And since at least last summer, there have been reports that the Sunni al Qaeda allies known as the the Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan.

Washington Post:

Since early May, a resurgent Taliban militia has launched attack after attack in which more than 300 insurgents, soldiers and civilians have died.

In fact, NATO is preparing to fight an imminently expected Taliban offensive.

AFP:

NATO has pledged a robust response to an expected offensive early this year from Taliban-led insurgents in Afghanistan, as the United States offered to boost aid and possibly provide extra troops.

And, of course, during the Cold War, Reagan helped create the Taliban, in the first place, because their predecessors were fighting the Soviet Union.

From the Dkosopoedia:

The Reagan administration and the Saudi governmen gasve weapons, training and vast sums to the Islamists who hated the attempt by the Soviet client Afghan regime because it had attempted to end debt slavery through land reform, end child marriage and educate women. The Taliban and al-Qaeda grew out of the seeds planted by the Reagan administraion in the 1980s.

Of course, back then, Reagan was also allied with Saddam, because Saddam was fighting Iran. Reagan sent some guy named Donald Rumsfeld to meet with Saddam, and finesse that support's little hitch over Saddam's use of chemical weapons.

The National Security Archive, at George Washington University:

Soon thereafter, Donald Rumsfeld (who had served in various positions in the Nixon and Ford administrations, including as President Ford's defense secretary, and at this time headed the multinational pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle & Co.) was dispatched to the Middle East as a presidential envoy. His December 1983 tour of regional capitals included Baghdad, where he was to establish "direct contact between an envoy of President Reagan and President Saddam Hussein," while emphasizing "his close relationship" with the president. Rumsfeld met with Saddam, and the two discussed regional issues of mutual interest, shared enmity toward Iran and Syria, and the U.S.'s efforts to find alternative routes to transport Iraq's oil; its facilities in the Persian Gulf had been shut down by Iran, and Iran's ally, Syria, had cut off a pipeline that transported Iraqi oil through its territory. Rumsfeld made no reference to chemical weapons, according to detailed notes on the meeting.

Rumsfeld also met with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, and the two agreed, "the U.S. and Iraq shared many common interests." Rumsfeld affirmed the Reagan administration's "willingness to do more" regarding the Iran-Iraq war, but "made clear that our efforts to assist were inhibited by certain things that made it difficult for us, citing the use of chemical weapons, possible escalation in the Gulf, and human rights." He then moved on to other U.S. concerns. Later, Rumsfeld was assured by the U.S. interests section that Iraq's leadership had been "extremely pleased" with the visit, and that "Tariq Aziz had gone out of his way to praise Rumsfeld as a person."

Of course, as
James Ridgeway writes in the Village Voice:

When Ronald Reagan dispatched Donald Rumsfeld as his special envoy to meet Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 1984, the Republican administration was anxious to stop any westward expansion of the Ayatollah Khomeini and his force of Shia madmen, who had taken power in Tehran.

To that end, the U.S. sent war supplies and offered intelligence to Saddam to keep the Iranians from beating Iraq in the war then raging between the two countries.

Need I go on?

Do they do anything but fuel the fire, first on one side, then the other?

Is there any greater threat to American national security than a Rebublican American administration? Posted

by Turkana at 3:19 AM Comments | Trackback

Reagan-Bush Drug Legacy in CentAm

consortiumnews.com

By Robert Parry
March 6, 2007

Two grisly mass executions in Guatemala – one involving three Salvadoran legislators and the second the four policemen who confessed to killing them – suggest that the Reagan era’s ideological tolerance of right-wing drug traffickers remains a corrupting legacy in the region.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush saw Central America as a Cold War battleground and thus downplayed evidence that right-wing paramilitary operatives in El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Nicaraguan contra movement were deeply implicated in cocaine trafficking.

That political protection enabled cash-rich South American cocaine cartels to penetrate Central American security forces and turn the region into a way station for smuggling cocaine north to the United States. Over the past two decades, that criminality has hardened into business as usual for many police officials and military officers.

That ugly reality broke into the headlines on Feb. 19 when three Salvadoran congressmen were waylaid while driving along a road in Guatemala. The politicians included Eduardo Jose D’Aubuisson, the son of the late Roberto D’Aubuisson, who led El Salvador’s feared “death squads” in the 1980s and established the powerful right-wing Arena Party.

Guatemalan prosecutors said one of the abductors was Luis Arturo Herrera, who was head of the Guatemalan National Police’s organized crime unit. Herrera and three other policemen took the captives to a remote area, searched their vehicle, beat the victims and later executed them, the prosecutors said.

The four policemen were quickly identified because their unmarked police car had a tracking beacon that placed them at the scene. The officers confessed, claiming they believed that the three Salvadorans were drug dealers, a suspicion shared by many Central American journalists and other experts.

The policemen were confined at a Guatemalan maximum security prison, but on Feb. 25, a group of masked gunmen in military clothing entered the prison, passed through seven locked doors and executed the four policemen, according to inmates and prison visitors.

The slayings had the look of one drug-connected group eliminating another and then a third band of killers silencing the detained policemen for fear they might finger higher-ups in a cocaine-and-corruption scandal. For their part, Guatemalan authorities claimed the four policemen died in a prison riot.

Without doubt, however, drug corruption is deeply rooted in Central America. At least two-thirds of the cocaine reaching U.S. cities now passes through Guatemala en route from Colombia and Bolivia, according to American officials, and several former Guatemalan military officers have been accused of trafficking. [NYT, March 5, 2007]

El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica also have been favorite transshipment points for smuggling cocaine, often hidden among legitimate cargo, for delivery to drug-distribution points in Florida, California and Texas.

Dark Days

Last month’s killings in Guatemala also recalled the dark days of the 1980s when “death squads” were widely tolerated, excused and sometimes aided by the Reagan-Bush administration as part of bloody counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist rebels.

At the start of that decade, Roberto D’Aubuisson, a cashiered major in the Salvadoran military, organized right-wing “death squad” operations, first from a safe haven in Guatemala and then more openly inside El Salvador. In both countries, the “death squads” became laws onto themselves, murdering thousands of political opponents.

The Reagan-Bush administration’s relationship with D’Aubuisson was complicated. Initially, the administration downplayed his role in the “death squad” slaughters. In 1982, when I attended a party at the home of the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, D’Aubuisson arrived with great fanfare and was treated as a guest of honor.

Later, however, as evidence of D’Aubuisson’s brutality and criminality grew undeniable, the Reagan-Bush administration distanced itself from the right-wing firebrand. (D’Aubuisson died of throat cancer in 1992.)

During the 1980s, many of the region’s security forces also became notorious for assisting shipments of cocaine to the United States.

Yet, whenever press or government investigations began digging into these corrupt relationships, the Reagan-Bush administration and right-wing media outlets, such as Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times, played aggressive defense to keep the American public from learning too much.

But the evidence is now clear – in part because of CIA and Justice Department investigations in the late 1990s – that drug profits helped augment the region’s right-wing paramilitary operations, most notably the Nicaraguan contras who were organized by the CIA to battle Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government from bases in Honduras and Costa Rica. The contras got cooperation from the region’s right-wing military and intelligence services, which controlled airports and port facilities.

Some contras, including key leaders, exploited that situation to facilitate drug shipments to the United States, while benefiting from political protection since President Ronald Reagan had hailed the contras as the “moral equals of the Founding Fathers.”

Given their place in Reagan’s pantheon, the contras could count on powerful U.S. politicians and national security officials looking the other way.

In a 1998 report, CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz found that a chief reason for the CIA’s protective handling of contra-drug evidence was Langley's "one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government ... [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the contra program."

According to Hitz's report, one CIA field officer explained, "The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war" in Nicaragua.

Hitz’s report concluded that scores of contras and contra units were implicated in the cocaine trade and that the CIA, on occasion, intervened to block criminal and congressional investigations. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Lost History.]
Blocking the DEA

A separate report by Justice Department inspector general Michael Bromwich discovered other examples of how the Reagan-Bush administration shut down or discouraged contra-drug investigations that threatened to implicate U.S. allies in Central America.

For instance, on March 20, 1986, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Costa Rica office was told by a source that contra pilot Carlos Amador was planning a cocaine flight from Costa Rica through El Salvador to Miami. The source said Amador possibly was picking up the cocaine in Hangar No. 4 at Ilopango Airport in El Salvador.

The DEA cable requested that the DEA's Guatemala office, which covered El Salvador, should "ask Salvadoran police to investigate Amador, and any person(s) and/or companies associated with Hangar No. 4."

The problem for the CIA, however, was that it controlled Hangar No. 4 – and had allocated space there to White House aide Oliver North's contra resupply operation, which then was circumventing a congressional ban on military aid to the contras.

Reacting to the DEA cable, the CIA station in Costa Rica sent another cable to the CIA station in El Salvador on April 23, 1986, asking about Amador and the drug-trafficking allegations. Two days later, the CIA's station in El Salvador urged that the DEA halt any inquiries about Hangar No. 4.

The CIA cable stated that Amador had stopped flying for the contras in early 1985, though he continued working for the FDN, the chief contra army, in Honduras. According to the cable, the CIA shared the suspicions about Amador's drug trafficking, but asserted that Amador only transported military supplies to Hangar No. 4.

"Based on that information, [El Salvador] Station would appreciate [Costa Rica] Station advising [DEA] not to make any inquiries to anyone re: hangar no. 4 at Ilopango since only legitimate [CIA] supported operations were conducted from this facility. FYI," the cable continued. "Station air operations moved from hangar no. 4 into hangar no. 5 which Station still occupies."

The CIA's request apparently did disrupt the DEA investigation for several months. But on June 10, 1986, the CIA's El Salvador station cabled the CIA’s Costa Rica station with news that a U.S. embassy officer in San Salvador had requested more information about Amador.

"The embassy officer said that if Amador is connected to [the CIA], [the DEA] will leave him alone, but if not they [the DEA] intend to go after him," the cable read. A week later, CIA headquarters denied any "association" with Amador. But the DEA's pursuit of drug-trafficking in El Salvador would not prove easy.

Celerino Castillo was the DEA officer responsible for El Salvador. On June 23, 1986, Castillo reported debriefing an informant known as "STG6," who knew Amador and other alleged traffickers.

STG6 said Amador used Salvadoran military credentials to land at Ilopango without the normal Customs search. STG6 added that Amador smuggled arms to the contras and cocaine from El Salvador to Miami. By fall 1986, Castillo also learned that the CIA had "obtained a U.S. visa" for Amador -- despite the earlier claim that the CIA had no "association" with him.

Keeping the Lid On

While the DEA slowly pieced together the contra-drug puzzle, the Reagan-Bush administration kept the lid on the new evidence in Washington.

In December 1985, my Associated Press colleague Brian Barger and I had written the first news story describing the contra-cocaine connection. But the article was greeted in Official Washington mostly with silence or disdain.

The Reagan-Bush administration wanted to focus most of the "war on drugs" attention on ideological enemies, such as the Nicaraguan Sandinistas even though there was scant evidence that Sandinistas played any significant role in cocaine shipments to the United States.

Only one U.S. senator, John Kerry, was willing to put his political career on the line to follow up on the AP report regarding drug trafficking by Reagan’s beloved contras.

But Kerry soon found his investigation under criticism not only from Moon’s Washington Times but from mainstream news outlets, such as the New York Times which treated the contra-drug allegations as a bogus tale.

Meanwhile, back in Central America, DEA agent Castillo began looking into the mysterious activities of a former U.S. military official, named Walter Grasheim, who operated out of San Salvador. Informant STG6 had identified Grasheim as "head of smuggling operations" at Ilopango.

"Grasheim owns and operates Hangar #4," alleged the informant who worked at the airport. "Said hangar is utilized by international cocaine and arms traffickers. Hangar #4 is also utilized by the Contra Movement in El Salvador."

On Oct. 27, 1986, Castillo opened a file on Grasheim, as part of a larger drug-trafficking investigation at hangars four and five. Castillo's investigative report identified 13 other "documented narcotics traffickers" who used the hangars.

On Oct. 30, Castillo briefed U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Edwin Corr, who knew Grasheim when he worked with the embassy's Military Group. Officially, Corr "welcomed any investigation on Grasheim but ... asked ... that the investigation be conducted in a very discreet manner," Castillo reported.

Unknown to Castillo, however, Corr went behind the agent's back. The ambassador sent a "back-channel" cable to the State Department asking DEA headquarters to review Castillo's investigation. DEA headquarters responded by judging the evidence inadequate and closing down the Grasheim file only days after the inquiry had started.

Suddenly, Castillo was under the embassy's watchful eye. In an interview with Bromwich's investigators, Corr said Castillo resisted the orders to drop the case and continued "to snoop around the airport and make allegations." Corr warned Castillo that unless he had more evidence, he should stop this "witch hunt."

Bad News

The fall of 1986 brought more bad news for the contra operations. The Iran-Contra scandal broke wide open, after one of North's supply planes was shot down inside Nicaragua and a Beirut magazine disclosed secret U.S. arms sales to Iran, a project which generated profits that North diverted into contra accounts.

However, the major Iran-Contra investigations still steered clear of any comprehensive examination of contra-drug trafficking.

According to an internal CIA memo, the agency's Central American Task Force chief Alan Fiers told congressional intelligence committees that the CIA would brief the DEA on what the CIA knew about contra-drug trafficking. But that meeting apparently never happened.

Bromwich's report in 1998 stated that "neither the DEA nor the CIA [Office of the Inspector General] could locate any record of any such discussions.” Sen. Kerry's investigation confronted similar stonewalls.

In 1989, the DEA got wind of more alleged contra-cocaine shipments. In an interview with Bromwich's investigators, DEA supervisor Thomas deTriquet recalled that a reliable informant had passed on information about drug dealers using contra pilots to transport cocaine through Hangar No. 5, the one controlled by the CIA.

When Castillo and deTriquet went to Ilopango to investigate, a CIA officer turned them away, the report said. The DEA agents then went to the U.S. embassy where the CIA chief of station assured them that there was no drug activity at Hangar No. 5.

Robert Stia, DEA country attache in Guatemala, complained to headquarters that "DEA cannot develop the most important information, that relating to those allegations and intelligence in regards to Ilopango Air Force Base."

Stia also reported that in March 1989 a confidential source relayed information from a Salvadoran Air Force officer that the Salvadoran government and the CIA were running large shipments of cocaine through air bases at La Union and San Miguel in El Salvador. The goal again was to raise money for the contras, the source claimed.

Stia noted, too, that the U.S. Embassy objected to Castillo's involvement because of his reputation for always "digging up things." Stia said the deputy ambassador had put "stringent controls" on handling Castillo's "country clearance" for entering El Salvador. Castillo was soon pushed out of the DEA.

Summing up this recurring contra-drug defensiveness, Bromwich grasped the obvious: "We have no doubt that the CIA and the U.S. Embassy were not anxious for the DEA to pursue its investigation at the airport. The DEA's [first] investigation of drug trafficking activities at Ilopango was closed in 1986, perhaps with the intervention of the U.S. Embassy.

"Moreover, as reflected in the CIA's cables in the Amador case, the CIA requested that the DEA not investigate its operations at Ilopango, and the CIA vouched that they were legitimate CIA-supported operations. It is also clear that there was intelligence, although not hard evidence, that some contra resupply pilots were trafficking in drugs."

Kerry Report

Though Kerry’s investigation in the late 1980s was hampered by a lack of cooperation from the Reagan-Bush administration and by hostility from most of the U.S. news media, he still managed to expose the broad outlines of the contra-cocaine network.

On April 13, 1989, Kerry’s report concluded: "On the basis of the evidence, it is clear that individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers. In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter."

The report added that drug traffickers gave the contras "cash, weapons, planes, pilots, air supply services and other materials." Moreover, the U.S. State Department paid some drug traffickers as part of a program to fly non-lethal assistance to the contras. Some payments occurred "after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies."

Although Kerry's findings represented the first time a congressional report explicitly accused federal agencies of willful collaboration with drug traffickers, the major news organizations chose to bury the startling findings.

Instead of front-page treatment, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times all wrote brief accounts and stuck them deep inside their papers. The New York Times article, only 850 words long, landed on Page 8. The Post placed its story on A20. The Los Angeles Times found space on Page 11.

For his hard work, Kerry was ridiculed as a “randy conspiracy buff” by Newsweek. One of the best-read political reference books, the Almanac of American Politics, gave this account of Kerry's investigation in its 1992 edition: "In search of right-wing villains and complicit Americans, [Kerry] tried to link Nicaraguan contras to the drug trade, without turning up much credible evidence."

Given the hostility to the contra-cocaine investigation in Washington, there was little follow-up on Kerry’s 1989 findings. Amid the neglect, officially sanctioned drug trafficking in Central America grew into a regional cancer.

When the contra-cocaine issue resurfaced in 1996 with a three-part series by reporter Gary Webb in the San Jose Mercury-News, Reagan-Bush defenders joined with the major U.S. newspapers – the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times – to destroy Webb.

Though Webb’s series sparked the official investigations at the CIA and the Justice Department, Webb was hounded out of his job at the Mercury-News – and received no vindication when the inspectors general’s reports corroborated many of his allegations and went even further.

Indeed, in 1998, when those critical findings were released, the major U.S. news media focused on elements of the government press releases that disparaged Webb rather than on the stunning admissions in the reports.

Shunned by the journalism profession and unable to find a decent-paying job, Webb committed suicide on Dec. 9, 2004. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Gary Webb’s Death: American Tragedy.”]

Meanwhile, Central American cocaine-trafficking, which took root in the region’s security services in the 1980s, has continued to spread, compounded by economic stagnation and widespread government corruption.

The strange case of the two February massacres in Guatemala offers another chance to finally force the dark history of the Reagan-Bush cocaine complicity into the open. But prospects for such a correction of the record are not great.

[For more on Sen. Kerry’s work on this issue, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Kerry’s Contra-Cocaine Chapter.”]

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. To comment to us by e-mail, click here.

Reagan & the Salvadoran Baby Skulls

consortiumnews.com

By Robert Parry
January 30, 2007

Ronald Reagan’s many admirers may find this idea offensive, but – given a new report by the Washington Post – it might be fitting to have a display at Reagan National Airport to show how Salvadoran baby skulls were used as candle holders and good luck charms. Perhaps the presentation could contain skeletal remains of Guatemalans and Nicaraguans, too.

It might be modeled after skeletons on display in Cambodia from the slaughters by the Khmer Rouge. After all, it was President Reagan – more than any other person – who justified and facilitated the barbarity that raged through Central America in the 1980s, claiming the lives of tens of thousands of peasants, clergy and students, men, women and children.

Reagan portrayed the bloody conflicts as a necessary front in the Cold War, but the Central American violence was always more about entrenched ruling elites determined to retain their privileges against impoverished peasants, including descendants of the region’s Maya Indians, seeking social, political and economic reforms.

One of the most notorious acts of brutality occurred in December 1981 in and around the Salvadoran town of El Mozote. The government’s Atlacatl Battalion – freshly trained and newly armed thanks to Reagan’s hard-line policies – systematically slaughtered hundreds of men, women and children.

When the atrocity was revealed by reporters at the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Reagan administration showed off its new strategy of “perception management,” denying the facts and challenging the integrity of the journalists.

Because of that P.R. offensive, the reality about the El Mozote massacre remained in doubt for almost a decade until the war ended and a United Nations forensic team dug up hundreds of skeletons, including many little ones of children.

Now the Washington Post has added a new grisly detail. Several months after the massacre, the Salvadoran army returned to the scene and collected the skulls of some El Mozote children as novelty items, the Post reported.

“They worked well as candle holders,” recalled one of the soldiers, Jose Wilfredo Salgado, “and better as good luck charms.”

Now, a quarter century later, describing his role piling the tiny skulls into sacks as souvenirs, Salgado acknowledged that he had “lost his love of humanity.”

The Post reported that “witnessing the aftermath of what his colleagues did in El Mozote and reflecting on those skulls changed his mind about how the war was being fought.” Salgada said his mentor, Col. Domingo Monterrosa, who later died in a helicopter crash, had ordered an act of “genocide” in El Mozote.

“If Monterossa had lived,” the Post reported, “Salgada said, he should have been prosecuted for ‘war crimes like a Hitler.’” [Washington Post, Jan. 29, 2007]

Enablers to Murder

But what about the American officials who were the enablers and the protectors of Central America’s mass murderers?

While Monterrosa may have ordered massacres in El Mozote and other towns in El Salvador, President Reagan and other senior U.S. officials collaborated in and covered up those crimes, along with acts of genocide in Guatemala and terrorism in Nicaragua.

Yet, the U.S. officials who supplied the guns, helicopters, advanced technology and political cover have never been called to account. Some, like former State Department official Elliott Abrams, have moved on to oversee the bloody chaos in Iraq.

After leaving office, Reagan was showered with honors, including having dozens of government sites named for him, including National Airport in Washington.

Criticism also should fall on President Bill Clinton, who came into office after the end of the Cold War but rejected suggestions that he authorize an American truth commission to investigate U.S. complicity in the era’s crimes and separate fact from fiction, as was done in Argentina, South Africa and other countries.

Only late in his eight-year presidency did Clinton agree to declassify documents for use by a Guatemalan truth commission examining three decades of political violence that had torn that Central American country apart and claimed some 200,000 lives.

But the worst of the Guatemalan violence – like the bloodletting in El Salvador, Nicaragua and to a lesser extent Honduras – came after the election of Reagan in November 1980. That outcome touched off celebrations in the walled-off, well-to-do neighborhoods across Central America.

After four years of Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the region's rich and powerful were thrilled to have someone in the White House who understood their problems and would let them do the needed dirty work.

Once in office, Reagan and his administration swung into action, deflecting condemnation of Salvadoran security forces for the rape/murders of four American churchwomen as well as playing down the staggering number of political slayings that left decaying and mutilated corpses on street corners and in trash dumps.

Reagan also put the Central Intelligence Agency to work arming and training an army of Nicaraguan exiles to launch raids into northern Nicaragua and destabilize that country’s leftist Sandinista government. The contra army soon gained a reputation for rape, torture, murder, drug trafficking and terrorism. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

The Guatemalan Genocide

Reagan also chipped away at an arms embargo imposed on Guatemala by Carter who was offended by its ghastly human rights record. A fundamental part of Reagan’s strategy was to silence criticism of the atrocities whether the accusations were coming from the news media, human rights groups or the U.S. intelligence community.

In April 1981, for instance, a secret CIA cable described a Guatemalan army massacre of peasants at Cocob, near Nebaj in the Ixil Indian territory. On April 17, 1981, government troops attacked the area, which was 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."

While keeping the CIA account secret, Reagan permitted Guatemala's army to buy $3.2 million in military trucks and jeeps in June 1981. 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 dictator, Gen. Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia, "made clear that his government will continue as before – that the repression will continue," the cable said.

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." [Washington Post, Oct. 16, 1981]

But the Reagan administration sought to confuse the American public. A State Department "white paper" in December 1981 blamed the violence on leftist "extremist groups" and their "terrorist methods," inspired and supported by Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

Yet, even as these rationalizations were sold to the American people, U.S. intelligence agencies in Guatemala continued to learn about government-sponsored massacres. One CIA report in February 1982 described an army sweep through the so-called Ixil Triangle in central El Quiche province, an area where descendants of the ancient Maya lived.

"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. … 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."

Rios Montt Coup

In March 1982, the violence continued to ratchet up when Gen. Efrain Rios Montt seized power in a coup d’etat. An avowed fundamentalist Christian, he was hailed by Reagan as "a man of great personal integrity."

By July 1982, Rios Montt had begun a new scorched-earth campaign. In October, he also gave secret carte blanche to the feared “Archivos” intelligence unit to expand “death squad” operations.

The U.S. embassy was soon hearing more accounts of the army conducting Indian massacres. But the political officers knew that such grim news was not welcome back in Washington and to report it would only damage their careers.

So, the embassy cables increasingly began to spin the evidence in ways that would best serve Reagan's hard-line foreign policy. On Oct. 22, 1982, the embassy sought to explain away the mounting evidence of genocide by arguing that the Rios Montt government was the victim of a communist-inspired "disinformation campaign."

Reagan picked up on that theme. During a swing through Latin America, he discounted the growing evidence that hundreds of Mayan villages were being eradicated.

On Dec. 4, 1982, after meeting with Rios Montt, Reagan hailed the general as "totally dedicated to democracy" and declared that the Rios Montt government was "getting a bum rap."

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.

In February 1983, 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 1982 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 sugarcoated the facts for the American public and 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 government reports – 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]

Happy Face

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, in reality, 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 the killings.
Guatemala, of course, was not the only Central American country where Reagan and his administration supported brutal military operations and then sought to cover up the bloody facts.

Reagan's falsification of the historical record became a hallmark of the conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua as well as Guatemala.

In one case, Reagan personally lashed out at a 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 contra "freedom-fighters," Reagan denounced Brody in a speech on April 15, 1985, calling him "one of dictator [Daniel] Ortega's supporters, a sympathizer who has openly embraced Sandinismo."

Privately, Reagan had a far more accurate understanding of the contras. At one point, 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 memoir, A Spy for All Seasons, Clarridge recalled that "President Reagan pulled me aside and asked, 'Dewey, can't you get those vandals of yours to do this job.'" Clarridge also acknowledged that "the people then in power in El Salvador were an unsavory collection of rightist cutthroats with an abominable record on human rights.”

Killing Children

Despite the bloodletting across Central America in the 1980s, the massacre at El Mozote in northeastern El Salvador in December 1981 still stood out as notable not only for the ferocity of the killings but for the brazenness of the Reagan administration’s cover-up.

The slaughter occurred as the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion swept through northeastern El Salvador, a region considered sympathetic to leftist guerrillas. Around the town of El Mozote, the troops rounded up about 800 unarmed peasants of all ages.

The Atlacatl soldiers started by shooting and beheading the men, followed by the slaughter of the women, some of whom were first dragged off to be raped. The soldiers then turned to the children, many of whom had watched their parents butchered. The children were bludgeoned to death or burned alive.

When news of the El Mozote massacre leaked out in stories published by the New York Times and the Washington Post in March 1982, the Reagan administration sought to discredit the information and the journalists.

Times correspondent Raymond Bonner became a favorite target of right-wing attack groups and eventually his Times editors succumbed to the pressure, recalling him to New York and giving him an unappealing job. Bonner resigned to the delight of Reagan’s right-wing activists who claimed vindication.

Not until 1991, when a United Nations forensic team excavated the site and found hundreds of skeletons, including many tiny ones, was the reality of the El Mozote massacre confirmed. (Bonner was subsequently rehired by the Times.)

The election of Bill Clinton – as the first President to take office after the end of the Cold War – offered a unique opportunity to expose the real history of the era and hold American war criminals to account. But Clinton and his advisers saw such investigations as a distraction and chose instead to focus on economic and social legislation.

After 1994, with the Republican congressional landslide, the opportunity was lost. Instead, the Republicans transformed Reagan into an icon, naming scores of buildings and other facilities after him, including National Airport.

An honest accounting of what really happened under Reagan's presidency became a political taboo in the United States. Even when Clinton finally released incriminating U.S. documents to a Guatemalan truth commission, the evidence never got the attention that it deserved.

On Feb. 25, 1999, Guatemala’s Historical Clarification Commission issued a report on the human rights crimes that Reagan and his administration had aided, abetted and concealed. The independent human rights body estimated that some 200,000 Guatemalans had died, with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s.

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 northern highlands, the report termed the slaughter a "genocide."

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.

U.S. Assistance

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 Guatemalan military units that committed "acts of genocide" against the Mayas.

"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,” Tomuschat said.

During a visit to Central America, on March 10, 1999, 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.

But the story of the Reagan-supported genocide of the Mayan Indians was quickly forgotten, as Republicans and the Washington press corps wrapped Reagan's legacy in a fuzzy blanket of heroic mythology.

The atrocities inflicted on the Mayas – and the peasants of El Salvador and Nicaragua – were rarely associated with the popular Reagan. Neither, of course, will anyone in polite Washington society link Reagan to the revelation that the skulls of children butchered at El Mozote became candle holders and good luck charms.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. To comment to us by e-mail, click here.

I Support Jimmy Carter

Dec 14, 2006
By Devilstower
devilstower@gmail.com

Not so long ago, that would not have been a very controversial statement, at least not within the confines of a Democratic blog. But with the publication of President Carter's book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, the former president has become anathema to some people who would normally be seen as on the same "liberal team."

However, the new book hasn't diminished my respect for Mr. Carter. It's only served to reinforce the idea that the former president possesses a great quantity of that property often found wanting in Washington D.C. and elsewhere -- courage.

This is very likely a foolish posting to write.

Whenever there is a posting that touches on Israel or Palestine, passionate supporters of either side fly in to man the ramparts and push back any assault from positions that are at least as entrenched as those surrounding abortion. Tossing yourself into the center of that kind of fight generally results in a lot of bruises (which thankfully in the case of posts here, are limited to bruises of the ego) and not a lot of progress. Should you feel so inclined, don't let me stop you (not that I could).

An example of the kind of nonsense that often clogs this debate can be found in the reasons that former Carter Center fellow, Kenneth Stein, gave for leaving.

In his book, Carter writes that the [UN] resolution says, "Israel must withdraw from occupied territories" it acquired by force during the Six-Day War in 1967 between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria.

But the word "must" never appears in the actual U.N. resolution text.

Stein argued that each word in the resolution was carefully chosen and by inserting the word "must," Carter changed the implications of this key resolution.

For those who would like to join Mr. Stein in dancing on the head of that pin, the actual wording of resolution 242 calls for "Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict." Does it say "must?" No, but neither does it say "maybe." What other interpretation can be drawn by removing the word "must?" That the UN heartily desired that Israel might remove itself, but that Israel could do so or not as it saw fit? I think "must" is much closer to the intent.

I'll leave that fight to President Carter.

Instead, I'd like to back up a bit... about twenty-eight years, and launch a defense of President Carter himself. It has become a precept, even among liberals that, while Mr. Carter may be of admirable character and might have taken on laudable work after leaving the White House he was really "not a very good president." This is a position so cemented into the press that it seems a necessary addition to any story about Mr. Carter. It's so solidified, that it's certain to appear in any Daily Kos discussion in which the president's name appears.

I have a somewhat different view. Jimmy Carter took office at a time when faith in the government was at a spectacular low. Vietnam and Watergate had thrown a staggering combination at the United States, leaving a country united only in the sense of distrust for everything in Washington. Not only that, but he faced an economy that was in the throws of massive change, and an energy crisis that exacerbated every problem. Even the moon landings, which had served as one pure point of admiration and distraction through the increasingly gloomy years, were in the past.

Jimmy Carter took control of a nation more nearly broken than at any time since the Great Depression.

It's true enough that he faced no Great War or invasion, but in a sense that only made President Carter's task harder. There was no "9/11" around which to rally the nation, only a series of crises, from minor to major, that eroded feelings of well-being. It was the bumpy end to the post World War II "American Century," the messy transition from an industrial to post-industrial economy, the heavy shadow of corruption from both Watergate and other branches of the government, a collapse of faith in the military, and just a lot of people out of work, out of gas, and angry. Carter caught it all -- a perfecta of calamities.

On top of this, President Carter faced a Democratic congress that was so sure they deserved to be there but he did not, that they determined to push around the newcomer, stalling or fighting against his initiatives. They successfully frustrated the president, tsk-tsk'd over his naiveté to all the talking heads, and did their best to make him look foolish -- and in the process blocked the best chance at real economic reform and national health care since the end of the Truman administration.

What was Carter's real sin as a president? He told the truth. Seeing the growing problems of the American economy, he told us that we would have to tighten our belts and reduce government debt. Seeing the clear signs of where the energy crisis would take us both at home and internationally, he started a crash program to reduce our need for oil. Seeing what was going on in the Middle East, he worked tirelessly to -- if not mend all wounds -- at least establish dialog. Seeing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the hostage crisis in Iran, he told us that we could not solve these problems through a military invasion, but must learn to work to apply pressure through diplomatic means.

Where Carter failed was only in his belief that the public could discern fact from fiction and act like adults. 1980 presented as stark a choice as the public has faced in its history. One candidate told the voters they would have to reduce their spending, learn to live with less energy consumption, and learn to deal with a world that wasn't an American play toy. The other candidate told them they could spend their way out of debt, that the energy crisis was a fake, and that enough guns would solve any issue.

The result of spurning Carter was a massive increase in national debt, a military build up of forces of a type entirely inappropriate to the world situation, and a deadly increase in our dependence on imported oil -- which itself may be the biggest single determinant in everything that has happened since.

As a reward for being right about the debt, right about oil, and right about the need for changing our approach to international affairs, Carter gets tarred as a "good man but poor president" by Democrats, and faces the charge of anti-Americanism from the right. In the meantime, Ronald Reagan -- who built the debt to staggering proportions, reintroduced every form of corruption to the White House, and assured that oil would dominate our interests for the foreseeable future, is lauded as a national hero.

The truth is, I don't worry about how any of the current controversy is affecting President Carter. For having the guts to face again and again the discrepancy between our words and deeds, Carter has been called everything from a fool to a traitor. But as a cadet at the US Naval Academy, Jimmy Carter set a goal as near to impossible for any man to achieve as hiking to the moon. He would do his best. Always do his best in every situation. When he measures himself against a yardstick like that, what does it matter what the right or the media have to say? Jimmy Carter will get by, whether he is loved by the pundits or not.

But I do worry about us as Democrats. I worry what it means that we should constantly allow a man who has given his life over to the ideals of honesty, decency, and hard work to be constantly derided. The Republicans took on the elevation of Ronald Reagan as a kind of public works project, laboring decades to erase the real man and build the myth that's worshiped today in the public square. Why are we so reticent in pushing forward a man who is everything Reagan claimed to be. And intelligent. And thoughtful. And who, yes, turned his post-presidential career into a continuation of his own good work rather than taking it as an opportunity to line his pocket with lucrative speaking engagements.

Jimmy Carter is my personal hero. There's no man I would rather meet. No one's opinion I would rather seek. No person whose approval I would rather earn. And there's no US president who has done more for the resolution of issues around the world through the means of peaceful negotiation and fair elections -- both things now sadly in short supply both at home and abroad.

To see Democrats not only dismissing Mr. Carter as a "failed president" and climbing aboard the bandwagon to batter the man for once again asking us to step up to a difficult truth isn't just disappointing, it's shameful.