Notes

Preface to the 2015 Edition

1. David Ignatius in the Washington Post. For details, see Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (New York: Holt, 2007), chap. 6.

2. See, for example, the careful work of Larry Bartels, Martin Gilens, and Benjamin Page, over many years.

3. Walter Dean Burnham and Thomas Ferguson, “Americans Are Sick to Death of Both Parties, “Americans Are Sick to Death of Both Parties: Why Our Politics Is in Worse Shape Than We Thought,” http://www.alternet.org/americans-are-sick-death-both-parties-why-our-politics-worse-shape-we-thought.

4. James E. Mahon Jr., Mobile Capital and Latin American Development (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). Timothy A. Canova, “Banking and Financial Reform at the Crossroads of the Neoliberal Contagion,” American University International Law Review 14.6 (1999), 1571–1645. Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

5. See Chomsky, Failed States, for discussion and sources.

6. The judgment was overturned on technical grounds by the Constitutional Court, and is scheduled to resume in January 2015. The Court decision was condemned by Amnesty International as a “devastating blow for the victims of the serious human rights violations committed during the conflict.” The US Embassy, obliquely recognizing the facts that are well known to scholarship and human rights activists, stated that “If judges are subject to threats and intimidation, justice will suffer.” Romina Ruiz-Goiriena, “A Year After Genocide Trial, Has Justice Been Done?” CNN, May 7, 2014. Available at: http://www.cnn.com /2014/05/03/world/americas/guatemala-genocide-trial-anniversary/. “Guatemala Rios Montt Genocide Trial to Resume in 2015,” BBC News, November 6, 2013. Available at: http://www.bbc.com/news /world-latin-america-24833642.

7. WIN/Gallup International poll. “Happy New Year? The World’s Getting Slowly More Cheerful,” BBC News, December 30, 2013. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-25496299. The results were ignored in the US press.

Notes to the Preface

1. Turning the Tide (South End, 1985), henceforth TTT. The “postscript” has appeared in the Canadian and Italian editions (Black Rose (Montreal), 1987; Eleuthera (Milan), 1987). See also my On Power and Ideology (South End, 1987; henceforth, PI), a series of lectures delivered in Managua in 1986, dealing with similar themes.

2. For sources and more general discussion, see my Towards a New Cold War (Pantheon, 1982), chapter 1, drawing particularly on Jesse Lemisch, On Active Service in War and Peace: Politics and Ideology in the American Historical Profession (New Hogtown Press (Toronto), 1975), an important study, unread for the usual reasons: wrong message. Lemisch was one of the many young scholars eliminated from the universities during the little-known but extensive academic repression of the left during the 1960s, on the grounds that his “political concerns interfered with his scholarship”—meaning, he failed to adopt the proper “political concerns.” Many illusions have been fostered about what happened in the universities in those years of conflict, when the rigid ideological barriers were breached to a limited extent, but at a serious cost to many of the young people who achieved this important result. Huntington, in International Security, Summer, 1981.

3. A related and very significant question, which I do not attempt to address, is the shaping of the popular culture for the general public in television, cinema, mass circulation journals, educational practice, and so on.

4. Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite (Vintage, 1975), 3.

Notes to the Introduction

1. Needless to say, these are not the conventional terms used to describe what happened during those years. But they are the accurate terms. For discussion, see several essays in my Towards a New Cold War, and sources cited there. On the conventional interpretation as the war progressed and since, particularly in the media, see Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon, 1988), chapters 5, 6.

Notes to Chapter One

1. Wayne Smith, “Lies about Nicaragua,” Foreign Policy, Summer 1987; Smith was chief of the U.S. interests Section in Havana prior to his resignation from the State Department in 1982 in protest over Reagan’s foreign policy, after 24 years in the Foreign Service, where he was considered the Department’s leading expert on Cuba. See chapter 3 on the World Court decision and the reaction to it, and chapter 7 for more on the diplomatic record.

2. James LeMoyne, Linda Greenhouse, Week in Review, New York Times, June 29, 1986.

3. Peter Jennings, ABC News, May 20, 1987; his emphasis.

4. Martha Honey and Tony Avirgan, San José, Costa Rica, In These Times, Sept. 2, Nation, Sept. 12, 1987; COHA’s Washington Report on the Hemisphere, Sept. 30, 1987. The six-month aid suspension ended in September 1987, though only after President Arias acceded to such U.S. demands as strengthening private banks at the expense of the state banking system; Nation, Sept. 19, 1987.

5. “Waking up from the dream of the ‘victorious’ contras,” Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 24, 1987.

6. Rohwer, deputy foreign editor of the London Economist, New York Times Book Review, Sept. 20, 1987; I rephrase his rhetorical question. Rohwer is much in favor of the use of violence to “keep Marxists out of power” in the U.S. crusade for “democracy, human rights and economic growth” in Latin America, to which it has been dedicated for a century with such impressive results, just as Britain was in Africa and India in its day in the sun.

7. New Republic, September 8, 1986.

8. Spectator, Aug. 15, 1987; Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 5 (Houghton Mifflin, 1951), 382.

9. See TTT, PI.

10. NYT, Aug. 6, 1987.

11. Alfonso Chardy, Miami Herald, July 5, 1987.

12. I put aside here two reasonable questions that cannot be raised in the U.S. cultural climate: whether it would be legitimate for Nicaragua to obtain aircraft to defend itself from U.S. terrorism and aggression; and whether it would be proper to provide arms to people driven to the hills by U.S.-organized state terror to help them defend themselves, as in El Salvador; see TTT, 126f., 137. Comparable questions are permitted, and readily answered, with regard to U.S. support for its allies, or for victims of state terror and aggression by official enemies, the guerrillas in Afghanistan, for example.

13. A unique exception, to my knowledge, was Alexander Cockburn, Wall St. Journal, Aug. 13, 1987. See also the forthright criticism by Randolph Ryan, “Hollow talk of peace,” Boston Globe, Aug. 8, 1987, noting that Nicaragua “cannot reasonably be expected to demobilize until the attack ends”—in fact, until the threat of attack ends, as we would agree in the case of any ally subject to threat of superpower violence, or even lesser threat.

14. Susan Kaufman Purcell, NYT, Aug. 12, 1987.

15. Wayne Smith, “How to Deal with Managua,” NYT, Sept. 24, 1987.

16. See chapter 7 for further comment.

17. Consider, for example, Dennis Wrong’s allegation (New Republic, Sept. 7, 1987) that the Nation features some “pro-Soviet writers,” “notably Alexander Cockburn,” who qualifies for the epithet because he is critical of the pieties of apologists for U.S. violence and sometimes refutes the propaganda devised to mobilize public support for U.S. repression and atrocities, thus challenging the important right to lie in service to the state. By the same logic, a Soviet dissident critical of the violence and repression of all sides who refutes lies about the United States in Soviet propaganda would be condemned by Party Liners as a “pro-American writer.” Wrong adds that “‘Zionism’, of course, is a negative epithet in today’s Nation,” a journal that would be regarded as dovish Zionist by Israeli standards, but exhibits insufficient loyalty to Israel by the standards of this author or the journal in which he writes. It is unnecessary to comment on the irony of these paired accusations, the latter reflecting the familiar Stalinist caste of mind.

Notes to Chapter Two

1. Allan Goodman and Seth Tillman, NYT, March 24, 1985.

2. True believers in Reaganomics are dissatisfied, though budget deficits “have at least restrained Congress from launching big new domestic spending programs”—meaning, programs directed to the needs of the poor, rather than the wealthy, for whom state spending has vastly increased through the military system. They complain that “there has been some deregulation—but less than in the Carter administration. International trade is more regulated than it was 10 years ago” (William Niskanen, formerly of the Council of Economic Advisers under Reagan). Treasury Secretary James Baker commented that “President Reagan has granted more import relief to U.S. industry than any of his predecessors in more than half a century.” Lindley Clark, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 24, 1987. In short, not a limited state, but a more powerful one, which serves the wealthy and privileged.

3. Erwin Chemerinsky, professor of constitutional law at the University of Southern California, speaking for a group of lawyers opposing the nomination of Judge Robert Bork, reflecting the views of civil libertarians rather generally; Bernard Weinraub, NYT, Aug. 29, 1987. A principle that emerges with still greater clarity is that where there’s business versus anyone, business wins. On Bork’s muddled thinking and “fake” scholarship, see Ronald Dworkin, New York Review, Aug. 13, 1987; Arthur Schlesinger, WSJ, Sept. 24, 1987. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of his hearings was his bland dismissal of his academic work, as not to be taken seriously, an interesting attitude towards the profession, and towards integrity.

4. Doyle McManus, MH, Los Angeles Times news service, July 9, 1987. These CIA operations were revealed in the Iran-contra hearings by the committee counsel, from Oliver North’s notes of a discussion with Gen. Paul Gorman, then commander of the U.S. Southern Command. See also Frank Smyth, Village Voice, Aug. 11, 1987, with evidence from War College documents and military sources on participation by U.S. Special Forces, including combat operations.

5. Cited by Peter Kornbluh in Thomas Walker, ed., Reagan vs. the Sandinistas (Westview, 1987), from testimony before the House Subcommittee on Western Hemispheric Affairs, April 16, 1985.

6. Editorial, Washington Post, weekly edition, March 31, 1986.

7. See Preface, and TTT, chapter 2.

8. Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War, 51; this went to press a few months after the Reagan inauguration, when the policy outlines were already entirely clear.

9. See TTT, 54; Bradford Burns, At War in Nicaragua (Harper & Row, 1987), 34; Theodore Schwab and Harold Sims, in Thomas Walker, ed., Nicaragua: The First Five Years (Praeger, 1985); Walker, Nicaragua (Westview, 1986), 67. See TTT, chapter 2.2, for future discussion.

10. Neil Lewis, Sept. 13, 1987 (we return to the context of these particular warnings in chapter 7); James LeMoyne, NYT, Aug. 10, 1987; and innumerable other examples. These have been, in fact, the standard and virtually invariant terms of news reporting and commentary as the U.S. attack intensified.

11. Testifying in the Iran-contra hearings. See also Bernard Trainor, “U.S. Fears Soviet Use of New Nicaraguan Airfield,” NYT, July 26, 1987, replaying the Grenadan farce. For details on the media version of the “Soviet helicopters” versus “boots and bandages” struggle, and media coverage of Nicaragua generally, see Jack Spence, in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas.

12. Estimates for Guatemala and Nicaragua are by Piero Gleijeses and John Booth, respectively, Current History, Dec. 1986.

13. See Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead, Demonstration Elections (South End, 1984), and for foreign reactions, TTT, 117f. See Herman and Brodhead for a detailed comparison with “a Soviet-sponsored demonstration election” in Poland, which did not deter Robert Leiken, attempting to evade their critique of his distortion of their concept of “demonstration elections” in the course of his pro-contra crusade, from accusing them of designing the concept “as a way of focusing attention on Western imperialism while diverting it from Soviet imperialism,” a standard reflex when deceit is exposed. New York Review of Books, Dec. 5, 1985.

14. We return to the matter, chapter 13.

15. For details, see TTT, chapter 5; Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn (Hill & Wang, 1986).

16. An apparent shift towards contra support after Oliver North’s testimony at the Iran-contra hearings proved temporary; see NYT, August 7, 1987. Note that as in the case of the Vietnam war, at certain stages, much of the popular opposition may well be of the “win or get out” variety. For people to gain a rational understanding of what their government is doing is very difficult, given the character of the ideological system.

17. David Lamb, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 26, 1987, reporting an LA Times poll; David Broder, WP weekly, July 27, 1987, reporting a WP-ABC poll.

18. On the Canadian role, see my “Towards Global War,” Studies on Political Economy (Ottawa), Summer 1985; Victor Levant, Quiet Complicity (Between the Lines, Toronto, 1986).

19. Alfred Grosser, The Western Alliance (Continuum, 1980), 8, 178.

20. Bruce Cumings, “The origins and development of the Northeast Asia political economy,” International Organization, Winter 1984. On some of the Korean exploits, see Chomsky and Edward Herman, Political Economy of Human Rights (South End, 1979), I, 5.1.4,

21. See Ferguson and Rogers, Right Turn.

22. M. J. Crozier, S. P. Huntington and J. Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy (New York U. press, 1975).

23. See Alex Carey, “Managing Public Opinion: the Corporate Offensive,” ms., New South Wales, 1986. On the measures taken to deal with the problems in Japan and Europe, see my paper “The ‘Right Turn’ in American Politics and the Decline of the Grand Area,” ms., May 1987, delivered at the conference on Switzerland, the United States and the Third World, Fribourg, May 1987, from which some of these remarks are taken.

Notes to Chapter Three

1. See TTT and PI, and sources cited there, for extensive discussion.

2. For extensive detail on these operations, and other exploits of Reagan’s international terrorist network, see Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (South End, 1987).

3. Sam Dillon and Guy Gugliotta, MH, Nov. 2, 1986.

4. See TTT, 4.4; Scott Anderson and John Lee Anderson, Inside the League (Dodd, Mead, 1986). U.S. involvement in the League, now run by ex-general John Singlaub, received limited notice after the capture of U.S. mercenary Eugene Hasenfus when his supply plane was shot down in Nicaragua in October 1986. The press repeated as fact government claims that the League had been purged of Nazis and the most extreme terrorist fanatics (Robert Reinhold, NYT, Oct. 14, 1986). It did not, however, report that at the annual conference of the League in Europe a few weeks earlier, the same Nazis were present and were given “respectful applause” when they addressed the conference (Chris Horrie, New Statesman (London), Oct. 31, 1986); the continued presence of Latin American assassins after their alleged expulsion is noted by the Andersons. Horrie reports the praise of General Singlaub for the South-African backed RENAMO forces terrorizing Mozambique, who were also prominent at the conference. On the Reagan administration’s contributions to terrorism in Mozambique, see Kevin Danaher, “Action Alert,” Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy, Summer, 1986. On the general background, see Joseph Hanlon, Beggar Your Neighbors (Catholic Institute for International Relations, Indiana U. Press, 1986).

5. Nayan Chanda, FEER, July 9, 1987.

6. Morton Kondracke, New Republic, Dec. 29, 1986; Robert Conquest dismisses Oxfam reports of atrocities as “silly,” in the style of his Stalinist models, who are the subject of his historical work; Daily Telegraph (London), April 19, 1986.

7. Stephen Engelberg, NYT, Aug. 20, Aug. 21, 1987. Israel’s abysmal civil and human rights record is quite inadequately covered in the media, and does not affect its image as a stellar democracy; see my Fateful Triangle (South End, 1983), chapter 4, for discussion, largely drawn from the Israeli press. The regular reports of such organizations as the Israeli League for Civil and Human Rights or the Palestine Human Rights Committee are also not a possible media source. Nevertheless, the reference to states “not dependent on American aid” is a little surprising, the facts not being unfamiliar. See Robert Gibson, “Israel: An Economic Ward of U.S.,” LAT, July 20, 1987, for a recent accounting of assistance for which “no parallel exists in the history of international capital flow,” amounting to $1000 a year for each Israeli by his calculation, three-fourths from U.S. government aid (all grants, not repayable loans, since 1985), most of the rest from tax-free private donations. Israel was not recruited for financial contributions, from the U.S. Treasury in any event, but for quite different services. See pp. 53, 161, 177.

8. For details, see the front-page story by Alfonso Chardy, MH, July 5, 1987, who obtained a copy of the North-FEMA documents; Christopher Hitchens, New Statesman, July 17, 1987; Dave Lindorff, Village Voice, July 21, 1987, with further details on similar Reaganite enterprises as governor of California. See Taking the Stand (Pocket Books, 1987), the transcripts of North’s testimony, 643, for the record.

9. For comic relief, we may turn to Commentary, December 1986, where Penn Kemble and Arturo Cruz, Jr. inform us that “the fact that the resistance survived for two years without the direct support of the United States government is especially galling to its opponents, and a source of enormous political strength. It is this transgression against the laws of history—rather than any violation of the laws of the United States—that accounts for the frenzied campaign to prove that such a thing in fact could not have happened.” The article appeared after the first revelations of the extensive support for the contras by the U.S. government and its clandestine network. Note also the fantasies about the opposition, for which they require no evidence, in accordance with standard convention.

10. Alfonso Chardy and Sam Dillon, MH, April 1, 1987.

11. Joel Brinkley, NYT, March 19, 1987.

12. Fred Kaplan, BG, May 20, 1987; Julia Preston, WP weekly, Sept. 21, 1987.

13. On the real meaning of “deterrence,” as understood by U.S. planners, see TTT, 207f. and PI, 105.

14. See TTT, 137.

15. Nancy Nusser, BG, April 21; Philip Bennett, BG, April 10; Stephen Kinzer, NYT, March 23; Julia Preston, WP, March 23, 1987.

16. On the facts available at the time and the extraordinary constructions of Western propaganda systems, see Chomsky and Herman, Political Economy of Human Rights, II, 6. The most serious scholarly analysis is Michael Vickery, Cambodia (South End, 1984), widely and favorably reviewed abroad but ignored in the U.S. because its conclusions lack ideological serviceability. See Herman and Chomsky, Political Economy of the Mass Media, chapter 6, on the rather comical efforts to sanitize the unacceptable factual record of Western response to this and other major atrocities.

17. Gleijeses, op. cit.

18. See chapter 1.

19. February 1966; cited by Gareth Porter, A Peace Denied, 36, from congressional hearings.

20. CSM, July 10, 1987.

21. New Republic, April 6, 1987: Kondracke is quoting General Paul Gorman, with his hearty “Amen.”

22. Lane, ibid.; Rielly, “America’s State of Mind,” Foreign Policy, Spring 1987; Oakes, “The Wrong Risk in Nicaragua,” NYT, Feb. 10, 1987; Morley, “Beyond the Reach Of Our Good Intentions,” NYT Book Review, April 12, 1987.

23. Foreign Affairs, Jan. 1967; secret memorandum of Feb. 7, 1965, Pentagon Papers, Senator Gravel Edition, III, 309 (Beacon press, 1972).

24. David Shipler, “Anxiety Pervades Washington’s Korea Policy,” NYT, June 21, 1987. On the record in recent years, see Tim Shorrock, “The struggle for democracy in South Korea in the 1980s and the rise of anti-Americanism,” Third World Quarterly, Oct. 1986.

25. Wm. Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay (New York, 1978), 550; Christopher Thorne, The Issue of War (New York, 1985), 225, 211.

26. Watt, Foreign Affairs, Winter 1983; see TTT, 187, for further quotes and comment. Toronto Globe & Mail, editorials, March 5, 18, 28, 1986. Editorial, “Elephant and the gnat,” Observer (London), Aug. 23, 1987.

27. See chapter 5, note 72, for one remarkable example. For some examples of British and Canadian subordination to the principles of the U.S. culture of terrorism, see TTT, 144-5.

28. AP, International Herald Tribune, May 6, 1987. Newsweek, May 12, 1986.

29. For comparison, see TTT, 3.5, and my chapter in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas.

30. IADB Report No. DES-13, Nicaragua, January 1983, cited by Dianna Melrose, Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example? (Oxfam, London, 1985); Booth, op. cit.; Burns, At War in Nicaragua, 6-7; Excelsior (Mexico), May 13, 1987; translated in Central America News Update, June 7, 1987.

31. Michael Conroy, in Walker, Reagan vs. The Sandinistas.

32. Wall Street Journal, Aug. 4, 1987.

33. Mexican officials report that U.S. pressures connected to the trade embargo played a role in their decision to halt oil sales to Nicaragua; see Larry Rohter, NYT, June 20. 1987.

34. Quotations are from Philip Abelson, editor, Science, Feb. 20, 1987, reporting the data presented in this study.

35. UPI, “IMF sees global economic gains, says US deficits must be checked,” BG, Sept. 27, 1987, citing the IMF World Economic Outlook released that day.

36. Keith Schneider, “New Product on Farms in Midwest: Hunger,” NYT, Sept. 29, 1987, quoting Dr. Cornelia Flora of Kansas State University and Joanne Komenda, who coordinates a church food pantry network for Nebraska farmers.

37. Frederick Clairmonte (senior researcher at UNCTAD) and John Cavanagh (Institute for Policy Studies in Washington), The National Reporter, Spring 1987. On capital flight, see David Felix, “How to resolve Latin America’s debt crisis,” Challenge, Nov./Dec. 1985.

38. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Spectator, May 16, 1987.

39. On North’s role, and the NSC takeover of the operation after Congress had barred such covert actions, see TTT, 130-1.

40. Bill Nigut, Chicago Media Critic, April 1987, citing NYT, August 8,9, 1985 and other reports in the press, and Times editor Warren Hoge. Cited in Propaganda Analysis Review, Summer 1987; Extra! (FAIR), July 1987.

41. See Philip Taubman, “Nicaragua Rebels Reported To Have New Flow of Arms,” NYT, Jan. 13, 1985, p. 1; Israeli supply of arms to the contras had been reported in a front-page story by Taubman on July 21, 1983. On the Israeli role, see TTT, 133. For more recent and comprehensive analysis of Israel’s role as a mercenary state in the service of U.S. international terrorism, and its own interests in support for terrorist states, see Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, The Israeli Connection (Pantheon, 1987) and Jane Hunter, Israel’s Foreign Policy (South End, 1987).

42. Robert Parry and Brian Barger, AP, April 14, 1986.

43. See Chomsky and Herman, Political Economy of Human Rights, II, and earlier references cited there; also Herman and Chomsky, Political Economy of the Mass Media, chapter 6.

44. WP, Jan. 12, 1982; cited with discussion by William Minter, King Solomon’s Mines Revisited (Basic Books, 1986), 318.

45. Alfonso Chardy, “Reagan weighs Nicaragua options,” MH, March 9, 1986.

46. David Ignatius, WP Weekly, Dec. 22, 1986.

47. “The official who headed the United States humanitarian aid program for the rebels in Nicaragua said today that he twice ordered his planes to shuttle weapons for the contras in Central America at the direction of Elliott Abrams”; AP. NYT, Aug. 15, 1987, a brief item that passed without comment. In his congressional testimony after the public hearings ended, the head of the CIA’s Central American task force, Alan Fiers, testified that he had arranged for military equipment to be shipped to the contras on planes designated for “humanitarian aid”; Adam Pertman, BG, Aug. 26, 1987. That such trickery would take place was, of course, always obvious. See ITT, p. 74.

48. Haynes Johnson, WP Weekly, Aug. 24, 1987.

Notes Chapter Four

1. Reagan, statement on discussions with Prime Minister Shimon Peres of Israel (NYT, Oct. 18, 1985), immediately after the Israeli bombing of Tunis, condemned as “an act of armed aggression” by the UN Security Council, with the U.S. abstaining. Shultz, “Terrorism and the Modern World,” address before the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York, Current Policy, no. 629, Oct. 25, 1984, State Department, Washington D.C.; there is not a word here about U.S. or Israeli terrorism, though they dwarf the examples to which Shultz restricted attention in accordance with the Orwellian principle that the term “terrorism” refers to terrorist acts by them, not us; on the contrary, the Israeli and U.S. records on terrorism are lauded. For more on these topics, including Shultz’s remarkable hypocrisy on this score, see my Pirates and Emperors: International Terrorism in the Real World (Claremont, New York, 1986; expanded edition, Black Rose, Montreal, 1987); on Shultz, p. 95, citing astonishing comments in the same speech. McGovern, “The Constitution, Foreign Policy and the U.S. National Interest,” talk at a conference sponsored by the American-Arab Affairs Council, March 5-6, 1987, American-Arab Affairs, Spring 1987.

2. See editorial, NYT, July 15, 1987; Albert Hunt, Washington Bureau Chief, WSJ, July 15, 1987.

3. David Blundy, Sunday Telegraph (London), July 12, 1987.

4. Volman, CSM, June 8, 1987; McGehee cited by Jack Colhoun, Guardian (New York), July 1, 1987.

5. Jeff McConnell, BG, Aug. 19; Adam Pertman, BG, Aug 20, 1987, paraphrasing Cohen’s comments.

6. See Murray Kempton, Newsday (New York Review, Aug. 13, 1987), on the fiasco that North presented as his proudest exploit. On his incompetence generally, see Joe Conason and Murray Waas, Village Voice, July 21, 1987.

7. Thomas Palmer, BG, July 19, 1987.

8. Newsweek, July 27, 1987; U.S. News & World Report, The Story of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, 1987.

9. Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein, In These Times, June 10, 1987; Polgar, “Decent Men outside the Law,” MH, Dec. 14, 1986, cited by Bielski and Bernstein, who also review Polgar’s careful avoidance of all crucial evidence during his cursory investigation for the committee of possible CIA involvement in the terrorist bombing at La Penca targeting Edén Pastora, among other evasions. Polgar’s son is the legislative aide of Sen. Warren Rudman, vice-chair of the Senate panel, they note.

10. On the evasion of this topic, see Murray Waas, BG, Aug. 5, 1987; he also notes that a report by the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control was misrepresented in the Washington Post and in a memo of the House Iran-contra committee, inaccurately exculpating the contras. On evidence of the CIA-contra-drug connection unearthed during the Iran-contra hearings, see Knut Royce, Newsday (BG, LAT), June 29, 1987, reporting secret Senate testimony on funding of the contras by the Colombian cocaine cartel through former CIA operative Felix Rodriguez, who helped oversee contra supply from the Ilopango military airbase in El Salvador. Also Dennis Volman, CSM, July 15, 16, Keith Schneider, NYT, July 16, 1987, and David Blundy, Sunday Telegraph (London), July 26, 1987, on testimony before the Kerry subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by a convicted drug smuggler who provided detailed evidence on complicity on the part of the CIA and other U.S. authorities. For earlier reports, after the scandals erupted, see Stephen Kurkjian, BG, Dec. 7, 1986; Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein, In These Times, Dec. 10, 1986, and subsequent reports by these authors. Also Rod Nordland, Newsweek, Jan. 26, 1987; CBS TV, “West 57th St.,” March 31, 1987; Jonathan Kwitny, WSJ, April 22, 1987; Knut Royce, Newsday, April 6, 1987; and Joel Brinkley, NYT, Jan. 20, 1987, on drug smuggling by American flight crews ferrying arms to the contras.

11. Joe Conason and James Ridgeway, Village Voice, June 23, 1987. Congressional investigators finally interviewed Wilson after the hearings; AP, BG, Aug. 15, 1987.

12. Peter Grier, CSM, Aug. 11; Godfrey Sperling, CSM, Aug. 25, 1987. The New York Times report on Tower’s reaction to the inquiry omitted this topic.

13. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, WP, July 17, 1987; Jerusalem Post, Dec. 4, 1986.

14. Krauthammer, op. cit. See chapter 13. Also pp. 90, 99, 120.

15. International Court of Justice Year 1986, 27 June 1986, General List No. 70, pars. 251, 252, 157, 158, 233.

16. Editorial, NYT, July 1, 1987; Krauthammer, op. cit. The Times also falsified the Court’s decision, claiming that it had accepted “collective defense” as “a possible justification for America’s retaliation” for “prior attacks against El Salvador from Nicaragua”; the Court had explicitly rejected such justification, ruling that it had no basis in law, even if the U.S. could establish its factual allegations (also dismissed). Compare the editorial reaction in the Los Angeles Times, June 29, 1986, on the weakening of “the rule of law” resulting from the resort by the U.S. government to “brute force rather than the legal instruments of redress to confront a crisis of the region”; cited by Burns, At War in Nicaragua, 138.

17. Jonathan Karp, WP June 28, 1986.

18. Franck, NYT, July 17; NYT. Oct. 29; BG, Nov. 4, 1986.

19. NYT, Nov. 4; BG, Oct 28, 1986.

20. “Terrorism in the Modern World.”

21. A. M. Rosenthal, NYT, Sept. 11, 1987.

22. See my “Watergate: A Skeptical View,” New York Review, Sept. 20, 1973; editorial, More, December 1975; and introduction to N. Blackstock, ed., COINTELPRO (Vintage, 1976).

23. See my Pirates and Emperors, for a review.

Notes Chapter Five

1. Stephen Kinzer, NYT, May 10, 1987; Robert Pear, NYT, Nov. 25, 1985.

2. Editorial, CSM, May 6, 1987; Hempstone, BG, Aug. 21, 1987.

3. For references, see my For Reasons of State (Pantheon, 1973), 71, 158.

4. See TTT, 11.

5. Americas Watch, Human Rights in Nicaragua, 1986, February 1987,144-5.

6. That Nicaragua is a “Marxist society,” whatever that is supposed to mean, is a dogma of the propaganda system standing alongside of the “fact” that there were no elections, etc., requiring no evidence, untroubled by the policies of preserving the private economy and the conclusion of observers concerned with fact that Marxist-Leninists “are a minority” of the Sandinista leadership and that “above all, the two Ortega brothers—the President and the defense minister—are now more powerful than the rest of the leadership combined, and they belong to a rather common breed of third world authoritarian leaders who are not Marxist-Leninist” (Gleijeses, op. cit.). The phrase “Marxist,” as noted earlier, is merely a term of generalized abuse in U.S. political rhetoric, lacking any further content.

7. Michael Kinsley, WSJ, March 26, 1987.

8. New Republic, August 10, 1987.

9. Stephen Kinzer, NYT, July 19, 1987. Correspondent Larry Boyd reported from the scene that at least 10 civilians were killed by the attackers who reached the edge of town and largely destroyed a nearby cooperative; Pacifica radio, July 20, 1987.

10. Times (London), May 26, 1987.

11. Kondracke, New Republic, Aug. 10, 1987.

12. NYT, April 21, 1986. On the events, the fraud and the background, see Pirates and Emperors, chapter 3, and my article “International terrorism: What is the remedy?,” Third World Affairs, Jan. 1988.

13. “Let it Sink,” New Republic, Aug. 24, 1987, a remarkable collage of fabrications and hysterical abuse that merits closer analysis.

14. Lewis was writing on the assumption that the bombing of Libya, with 100 killed, was a response to a bombing in Berlin in which one American GI had been killed, so that a ratio of 100 to one is apparently praiseworthy. Nicaragua, then, should be entitled to bomb U.S. cities killing 1 million people (by accident), or perhaps many more, if we consider relative population size. Apart from this, there was no credible evidence then, nor is there now, of Libyan involvement in the disco bombing in Berlin.

15. Bruce Cameron and Penn Kemble, From a Proxy Force to a National Liberation Movement, ms., Feb. 1986. Philip Bennett, BG, Nov. 25, 29, 1986.

16. See TTT, 12f. Cruz has since dropped out; see below.

17. July 16, 1982 DIA “Weekly Intelligence Summary,” leaked in 1984 (Council on Hemispheric Affairs, “Misleading the Public,” April 3, 1986); Report of Donald T. Fox, Esq. and Prof. Michael I. Glennon to the International Human Rights Law Group and the Washington Office on Latin America, April 1985; AP, Nov. 30, 1986; AP, Feb. 26, 1987; Teófilo Cabestrero, Blood of the Innocent: Victims of the Contras’ War in Nicaragua (Orbis Books (New York), Catholic Institute of International Affairs (London), 1985). See TTT for examples and sources—far from complete—on contra atrocities, and a brief comparison of the U.S and foreign media.

18. V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind (Columbia, 1986), 42.

19. Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us, 59ff. (citing E. D. Morel, The Black Man’s Burden (Monthly Review press, 1969), 116ff.); Minter, King Solomon’s Mines Revisited, 32; Kurt Campbell, “The Warriors of Apartheid,” BG Magazine, March 1, 1987.

20. See “The Road from Laos to Nicaragua,” Economist, March 7, 1987. Fox Butterfield writes that General Richard Secord was “secretly attached to the C.I.A. mission in Laos running the clandestine war against the North Vietnamese”—in reality, against the peasants of northern Laos, though the well-documented facts are inadmissible; NYT, Dec. 6, 1986.

21. Bernard Diederich, Somoza (Dutton, 1981), 12, 311.

22. Stephen Downer, Daily Telegraph (London), July 20, 1987, who estimates the number of the Tontons Macoutes at about 300,000: Joseph Treaster, NYT, Aug. 10, 1987. On the July 1987 massacre, see AP, BG, July 26; Pamela Constable, BG, July 27, 28; Reuters, NYT, July 26; AP, NYT, July 28, 1987. An investigating commission estimated the number killed at more than 200, citing dire poverty and unequal land distribution as factors that “spurred the massacre.” The majority of the population barely survive while the “local bourgeoisie, in certain cases very rich, . . . controls agricultural production, public transport, commerce and political power,” also monopolizing state land, the commission reported. Reuters, BG, Aug. 30, 1987.

23. Paul Ellman, Manchester Guardian Weekly, Jan. 25, 1987; Aryeh Neier, New York Review, April 9, 1987. Clifford Krauss describes the province in question (Chontales) as unique in Nicaragua, noting that under Somoza, “large parts of Chontales were controlled by right-wing ranchers who rented small plots to peasant cattlemen” and that Somoza had distributed land in the province, which was not part of the anti-Somoza struggle; the Sandinistas were unable “to supply the credit and supplies the peasants used to get from the old landowners,” leading to resentment fueled by the conservative church hierarchy; WSJ, Aug. 3, 1987. Much the same is reported in nearby Nueva Guinea, where the Sandinistas forcibly removed 6000 peasants in 1987 from a largely inaccessible region where peasants had been given land by Somoza and where Edén Pastora’s ARDE, in sharp contrast to the CIA-backed FDN, had carried out several years of organizing, according to James LeMoyne (“All Things Considered,” NPR, July 9; see his NYT stories of June 17, June 28, 1987, reporting rights abuses by Sandinista soldiers in the region).

24. LAT, Feb. 22, 1987; Le Monde diplomatique, May 1987. We should add that the resettlement was in large measure forced, not voluntary. See the regular Americas Watch reports for judicious appraisals.

25. James LeMoyne, NYT, March 5, March 3, 1987.

26. Bertrand de la Grange, Le Monde, Feb. 20 (MGW, March 1, 1987); Frederick Kempe and Clifford Krauss, WSJ, March 2, 1987, deploring the failure of the U.S. to consider “Miskito politics” while “the Sandinistas have done much to improve their treatment of the Indians.” For background, see Martin Diskin et al., Peace and Autonomy on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Sept. 1986. On forced recruitment by contras in this area and other terror, intensified after the congressional approval of military aid in June 1986, and their “brutal mistreatment of refugees,” alongside of improvement in government practice, see Americas Watch, Human Rights in Nicaragua 1986, Feb. 1987; they conclude that “Many Miskitos on the Rio Coco now consider [the Miskito contra force] KISAN, not the Nicaraguan government, to be the greater threat to their safety and livelihoods.” They also report that earlier flights of Miskitos to Honduras were “much more involuntary than we first reported,” and that KISAN is now forcibly preventing the return of refugees, of whom thousands returned voluntarily in 1986. The media commonly refer to the CIA-supported rebels as “the Miskitos,” implying that they represent the entire Indian population, with no further qualification; e.g., Neil Lewis, NYT, Sept. 25, 1987.

27. Julia Preston, WP weekly, Sept. 21, 1987.

28. Human Rights in Nicaragua 1986. An Appendix reviews fraudulent claims concerning political prisoners by the State Department, an analysis that applies as well to irresponsible allegations by the International League for Human Rights and its consultant, contra lobbyist Robert Leiken. For further analysis of falsifications in the report by the International League and earlier articles by its then-program director Nina Shea, see David MacMichael, letter, NYT, Dec. 23, 1985; editorial, Nation, Sept. 6, 1986; Alexander Cockburn, Nation, Sept. 13, 1986. The League had no objection to Leiken’s congressional testimony lobbying for contra aid, citing the forthcoming report. One wonders what the reaction would be to a report on Israel by an international human rights group advised by a Libyan lobbyist for Abu Nidal who led them through Israel (to which, of course, the group would never be admitted, in distinction from “totalitarian” Nicaragua). On the remarkable record of the International League in protecting Israel from exposure for human rights abuses, see Towards a New Cold War, 450, and my Peace in the Middle East? (Pantheon, 1974), 197; and material quoted in Palestine Human Rights Bulletin, no 2, pp. 1-5, Aug. 30, 1977, from my correspondence with League Chairman Roger Baldwin on their double standards.

29. Clifford Krauss and Frederick Kempe, WSJ, Feb. 6, 1987.

30. J. of Contemporary Studies, Spring/Summer, 1985; see TTT, 131, on some of the astonishing claims of this weird right-wing research center with respect to Pastora, then their hero.

31. “Pastora Comments on CIA, Contras’ Struggle,” El Siglo (Panama), Feb. 9, 1987 (FBIS VI, Central America, 10 Feb. 1987, p. 19); AFP, April 7, 1987, reprinted in Central America News Update, April 26, 1987; “Pastora: I would like to meet with the Nicaraguan Government,” Excelsior (Mexico), reprinted in Central American NewsPak (Central America Resource Center), July 6-19, 1987.

32. See the lengthy but largely vacuous report of a discussion with Pastora by James LeMoyne, NYT, July 4, 1987.

33. Allan Nairn. Progressive, March 1987.

34. Excelsior (Mexico), April 2, 1987, reprinted in Central America News Update, April 27.

35. Cited by Burns, At War in Nicaragua, 74; Rosenthal, who also owns a bank and an insurance company, quoted in an interview in Israel, Davar, June 1, 1987.

36. Eli Teicher, Ma’ariv (Tel Aviv), March 20, 1987.

37. Rod Nordland, “The New Contras?,” Newsweek, June 1, 1987. His picture shows how little has changed since the period described by Christopher Dickey, With the Contras (Simon & Schuster, 1985) or by the interviews presented in a 1984 German publication: Dieter Eich and Carlos Rincón, The Contras: Interviews with Anti-Sandinistas (English translation, Synthesis, 1985).

38. UPI. “Red Cross rips contras for use of emblem,” BG, June 18, 1987, 125 words; no mention in the New York Times. The London Economist observes in this connection that “misuse of the Red Cross symbol in times or zones of conflict is a war crime, and punishable as such,” under the Geneva conventions; Aug. 29, 1987. On the evacuation of National Guard commanders by a DC-8 jet “disguised with Red Cross insignia,” see Peter Kornbluh, in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas.

39. Knight-Ridder Service, BG, March 18, 1987, paraphrasing Shultz’s House testimony; Kirkpatrick, BG, March 15, 1987, syndicated column. Stephen Engelberg, NYT, July 15, 1987. Cruz rather evasively denied the charge that he was on the CIA payroll while posing as a presidential candidate and withdrawing under U.S. pressure to discredit the elections, and lobbying Congress as an “independent democrat.” See TTT, 138.

40. AP, March 15, 1987. On his assessment of his contra colleagues before agreeing to serve as front man to mislead the American public, see pp. 73, 94.

41. Dennis Volman, CSM, March 11, 1987, paraphrasing Cruz’s remarks in a 7-hour interview; Volman, CSM, May 22, 1987.

42. BG, April 5, 1987.

43. Dennis Volman, CSM, May 18, 1987.

44. WP, May 8, 1983, cited by Peter Kornbluh in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas.

45. James LeMoyne, NYT, Feb. 21, 1987; AP, March 22, 1987, citing the Washington Post.

46. MH, Nov. 25, 1986.

47. James LeMoyne, NYT, Dec. 15, 1986; on current Salvadoran military strength, see William Branigan, WP, March 23, 1987. Assessments of Nicaraguan military strength in the U.S. press are often fanciful constructions, including reservists and militia to support the tales of a massive military machine. According to Paul Knox of Canada’s leading journal, the Globe and Mail (Toronto), reporting from Managua, “Diplomats here put the number of regular soldiers in the armed forces at about 33,000.” The Salvadoran military lists 38,650 Army, 1,290 Navy, 2,700 Air Force (USA Today, April 2, 1987).

48. LeMoyne, NYT, Dec. 15, 1986; Peter Grier, CSM, June 23, 1987, the latter a low-keyed account of the absurdity of the earlier pretense by “contra supporters” in the U.S. that they lacked “the most basic fighting tools.” On contra reliance on U.S. air supply, see Marjorie Miller, LAT, March 1, 1987, Peter Ford, CSM, April 10, 1987. See also Nordland, op. cit., on the scale of the U.S. supply to the proxy army.

49. LeMoyne, NYT, June 28, 1987.

50. “Contra supply flights reach new levels,” Dallas Morning News, June 23, 1987.

51. LeMoyne, NYT, June 28, 1987.

52. Apart from regular overflights, with Nicaraguan protests naturally ignored, the Navy has experimented with Israeli-designed pilotless remote-controlled drones launched from the U.S. battleship Iowa in the Caribbean, used earlier by Israel in Lebanon; International Defense Review (Geneva), March 1987; cited by AP, March 17, 1987.

53. Richard Evans, Observer (London), July 12, 1987; Mike Davies, Daily Telegraph (London), July 12, 1987.

54. Ronald Radosh, Tikkun, 1.2, 1986.

55. James LeMoyne, NYT, Aug. 22, 1987; Dec. 15, 1986.

56. James LeMoyne, NYT, April 5, April 7, 1987; Feb. 16, 1987.

57. Clifford Krauss, WSJ, anonymous staff reporter, WSJ, April 9, 1987.

58. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, NYT, May 14, 1987, reviewing Ray Bonner, Waltzing with a Dictator (Times Books, 1987). Lebmann-Haupt is particularly amazed that “contrary to official assertions at the time, the United States Embassy in Manila knew that President Marcos was about to declare martial law in 1972 and did not act to stop him.” How is such a departure from American traditions conceivable? On the reasons for U.S. support for the Marcos coup, and the enthusiastic response to the coup by the U.S. government and foreign investors, see Chomsky and Herman, Political Economy of Human Rights, I, 230ff., and Stephen Shalom, The United States and the Philippines (ISHI, 1981), chapter 7.

59. Sept. 5, 1987.

60. Fred Barnes, New Republic, Aug. 31, 1987.

61. Randolph Ryan, BG, Feb. 28, 1987.

62. Burns, At War in Nicaragua, 65ff,; on Robelo, Shirley Christian, Nicaragua (Vintage, 1986), 51. Burns adds that he was “once a Somoza vice-president.”

63. See p. 87; for further references, see TTT, 13.

64. For references from the Pentagon Papers, see For Reasons of State, 95ff.

65. Mecklin, Mission in Torment (Doubleday, 1965), 76ff.

66. NYT, Aug. 12, 1973. On the myth of the happy peasant in the “gentle land” and the fanciful constructions about Buddhism, see Vickery, Cambodia, chapter 1.

67. Fall, Street Without Joy (Stackpole books, 1967), 373, revised edition of a book written in the early 1960s.

68. Warner, The Last Confucian (Macmillan, 1963), p. 312.

69. LeMoyne, “Teaching the Contras Leftist Rebels’ Methods,” March 8, 1987. In the style of “objective” journalism, LeMoyne does not present his conclusions as his own, but attributes them to “former Salvadoran rebels and American officials.”

70. Ibid.; “Three Weeks in Managua,” NYT Book Review, March 8, 1987, a tirade masquerading as a review of Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile. See Alexander Cockburn, Nation, April 4, 1987, for appropriate commentary.

71. See also my article and Jack Spence’s in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas and my introduction to Morris Morley and James Petras, The Reagan Administration and Nicaragua (Pamphlet Series, Institute for Media Analysis, New York, 1987); also Marc Cooper, “Whitewashing Duarte: U.S. Reporting on El Salvador,” NACLA Report on the Americas, Jan/March 1986.

72. Reagan, press conference of Aug. 13, 1986; cited in Burns, At War in Nicaragua, 147. Reagan is not alone in this interesting assessment. While his Central America policy is widely condemned in Europe, by 87% of West German opinion for example (Central America Report, Guatemala, July 31, 1987), his view of the world is shared in client states, even on the left. In Israel, for example, Kibbutz Bait Alpha (the oldest Kibbutz in the leftmost branch of the Kibbutz movement, associated with the dovish Mapam Party) manufactures armored cars for the internal security forces in South Africa. But its secretary, who sees “no problem” in supplying South Africa or the Israeli army with armored cars to control African and Arab demonstrators, nevertheless says that they have some standards: “our decision is not to market to Chile or Nicaragua or any totalitarian state.” Aryeh Kiezel, “In South Africa demonstrations are broken up with armored cars from the kibbutz,” Yediot Ahronot, Aug. 18, 1987, a critical report in this right-wing mass circulation journal.

73. Americas Watch, Human Rights in Nicaragua. The colossal scale of Reagan administration lying documented in this and other Americas Watch reports, and elsewhere, will surprise even the most cynical. It is considered perfectly normal by media commentators, who feign outrage that a presidential candidate should have failed to identify the source of a quote in a campaign speech, thus demeaning this august office.

74. New Republic, Aug. 10, 24, 1987; Sept. 29, 1986. The “depredations of the commandantes” that account for this judgment, apart from the failure to maintain the rule of privileged elites linked to U.S. power (“democrats”), include crucially the unwillingness to accord Israel the loyalty required by this Stalinist-style journal—the term is appropriate— as a criterion for its approval. Specifically, the failure to reestablish the links with Israel established by Somoza cost Israel a substantial market for arms, provided through Somoza’s final slaughter; see Beit-Hallahmi, The Israeli Connection, 91f.

75. See TTT, 106, and 109ff. for more on Duarte and his role.

76. Joy Hackel, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 25, 1986. See NYT, Feb. 21, 1981.

77. Central America Bulletin (Berkeley), June, 1987, citing press reports in El Salvador; the responses on the agrarian reform were from a similar poll conducted in late December 1986. Figures rounded throughout.

78. Hackel, op. cit.

79. Mesoamerica, San José, June 1986.

80. Cameron, letter, Nation, April 5, 1986; Radosh, WSJ, Dec. 19, 1986. Both of them claim to be critical of atrocities in El Salvador, but this pose is fraudulent, plainly so in Radosh’s case, as exhibited by his recommendation of the Duarte method for establishing “democracy.” Neither advocates that we organize a “proxy force” to attack El Salvador to put an end to atrocities that are vastly worse than anything chargeable to the Sandinistas; the same is true of the terrorists they support, as documented regularly by Americas Watch and other serious human rights investigators. Cameron received $66,000 to lobby Democrats in favor of contra aid, the source apparently being Carl Channell, now facing a jail sentence for his part in the illegal propaganda operations of the Reagan administration. See Peter Kornbluh, Village Voice, Oct. 13, 1987.

Notes Chapter Six

1. David Broder, WP Weekly, Dec. 15, 1986.

2. See my chapter in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas, for further details. La Prensa support for the contras was barely concealed. In April 1986, for example, one of the owners, Jaime Chamorro, openly supported Reagan’s request for aid to the contras, writing in the Washington Post that “Those Nicaraguans who are fighting for democracy [the standard code phrase for the proxy army] have the right to ask for help wherever they can get it”; WP, April 3. See Right to Survive: Human Rights in Nicaragua (Catholic Institute for International Relations, London, 1987), for discussion of the La Prensa case, and analysis of the human rights situation in Nicaragua in a more general context; an interesting review by Alita Paine and Juan Mendez of Americas Watch describes the study as “carefully researched and fair,” discussing questions that remain ambiguous (The Tablet (London), Sept. 19, 1987). “While La Prensa’s opposition to Somoza is often cited to confirm the newspaper’s democratic credentials, shortly after conservative Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, Jr. took editorial control in 1980, 80 percent of the staff resigned and founded the independent, pro-Sandinista paper El Nuevo Diario” (COHA’s Washington Report on the Hemisphere, July 23, 1986), a fact invariably suppressed here. One of those who left was editor Xavier Chamorro, now editor of El Nuevo Diario, which could claim to be the authentic successor to the journal that courageously opposed Somoza. The fact that the new La Prensa lacks democratic credentials, however, is in no way relevant to its suspension by the government or the earlier censorship, acts that should be deplored by those who honestly hold truly libertarian standards, a group so small in the U.S. or elsewhere as to be virtually undetectable.

3. Council on Hemispheric Affairs Washington Report on the Hemisphere, interview, Nov. 12, 1986. The liberal Washington Office on Latin America describes Barnes as “the most consistently visible and active opponent of Reagan administration policies in Latin America”; Update, Nov./Dec. 1986.

4. Ben Bradlee, Jr., BG, Dec. 7, 1986.

5. Rosenfeld, “Doctrine that Cost Too Much” (the standard liberal complaint), WP-MGW, July 26; Editorial, NYT, Aug. 19, 1987; editorial, WP, June 16; Reston, NYT, July 19, 1987.

6. See TTT, chapter 1.5.

7. “What Went Wrong?,” NYT Magazine, Dec. 7, 1986. To fully appreciate these comments we must bear in mind that their author has been a prominent advocate of U.S. and Israeli international terrorism.

8. See TTT, chapter 3.5.4; Morley and Petras, The Reagan Administration and Nicaragua and my introduction; CIA analyst David MacMichael’s testimony at the World Court (the Court considered and dismissed these charges with some derision), UN Official Document A/40/907, S/17639, 19 Nov. 1985.

9. See particularly the series of judicious appraisals in Dissent by Abraham Brumberg, former editor of the State Department journal Problems of Communism.

10. Envío, Managua, Nov. 1986, a series of interviews with opposition leaders. Within the U.S. doctrinal system, Díaz’s democratic credentials are tarnished by the fact that his branch of the Social Christian Party refused to bend to U.S. pressure and boycott the 1984 elections, thus interfering with the U.S. effort to discredit them and eliminate them from history.

11. Editorials, CSM, May 6, 20, 1987.

12. Bernard Gwertzman, NYT, Jan. 8, 1987.

13. June 2, 1987; NYT, June 3.

14. Richard Halloran, “Latin Guerrillas Joining Forces, U.S. Officers Say,” NYT, March 3, 1987.

15. Wicker, NYT, July 11, 1986; Linowitz, NYT, May 30, 1986, July 3, 1987.

16. Editorial, CSM, Nov. 24, 1986.

17. Nicaragua declared its readiness to sign the Contadora Group’s draft treaty on June 21, 1986; “North-South Monitor,” Third World Quarterly (London), Oct. 1986. The rejection of the treaty by the U.S. client states (London Guardian, June 13, 1986) was not reported by the national press. The Nicaraguan acceptance of the treaty received oblique mention in two small items in the New York Times, under the headings “Nicaragua Makes Offer to Limit Some Weapons,” “U.S. Condemns Offer by Nicaragua on Treaty” (June 22, 23), focusing on Reagan administration rejection of the move as “propagandistic.” Both items appeared in the “Around the World” roundup of marginal news. The Washington Post ignored the acceptance. On the terms of the treaty, see Contadora Primer, International Policy Report, Sept-Nov., 1986.

18. AP, Dec. 10, 1986. The New York Times was able to spare 45 words to report the Nicaraguan request for a Security Council session, Dec. 10. It was not reported in the Washington Post.

19. See chapter 2, and TTT, 144.

20. On these measures in the U.S. and its leading client state, and the general hypocrisy of the current pretense of civil libertarian concern on the part of those who favor—or even most of those who oppose—the terrorist attack against Nicaragua, see TTT, 3.6 and my chapter in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas.

21. See Survey of Press Freedom in Latin America, 1985-6; also press release, Jan. 4, 1987.

22. See my chapter in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas, for a record.

23. CPJ Update, Oct./Nov. 1986; July/Aug. 1987. Americas Watch, The Continuing Terror, Sept. 1985. See also Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections; Jack Spence, in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas. To understand control over information in the region, one must also take into account the extensive foreign (including U.S.) broadcasting operations that dominate access to information within much of Nicaragua; on this matter, see Howard Frederick’s chapter in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas.

24. See references of note 20.

25. Editorial, NYT, Feb. 28, 1987.

26. Jack Spence, in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas.

27. Elaine Sciolino, NYT, May 14, 1987; my emphasis.

28. Editorials, WP Weekly, March 31, 1986, WP, Jan. 9, 1987; my emphasis.

29. Burns, At War in Nicaragua, 62, citing Chamorro in May 1986, after his departure from the contra ranks.

30. Walker, Nicaragua, 45, 88, 104.

31. AP, Nov. 24, 1986.

32. Pentagon Papers, Gravel edition, II, 647.

33. UPI, BG, July 27, 1987.

34. Cited by F. Parkinson, Latin America, The Cold War, & The World Powers (London, 1974), 40.

35. “Communism in Guatemala,” Department of State-Office of Intelligence Research, July 1, 1955; cited by Gordon Bowen, “U.S. Policy Toward Guatemala,” Armed Forces & Society, Winter 1984.

Notes Chapter Seven

1. “Adherence to Agreements: Yalta and the Experiences of the Early Cold War,” International Security, Summer 1986. A more complete accounting on broader grounds would have to include not only Stalin’s duplicity and terror but also, on the Western side, the mass slaughter operations organized by the U.S. in Greece and South Korea and many other operations in the Third World, as well as an analysis of operations in Europe and Japan to ensure a political outcome in the interest of traditional privilege. This has not been seriously attempted since Gabriel and Joyce Kolko’s outstanding studies Politics of War (Random House, 1968) and Limits of Power (Harper & Row, 1972). A great deal of relevant material has since emerged, essentially extending their major conclusions, in my view. See the reference of note 23, chapter 2, for review of some recent work on the topic.

2. For the internal U.S. documentary record through the late 1960s, wrestling with these acknowledged problems throughout, see For Reasons of State, 1.VI.5. See George Kahn. Intervention (Knopf, 1986), for a revealing study of this period. On the immediate U.S. moves to undermine the Paris agreements, announced at once by Washington though suppressed by the media, see my Towards a New Cold War (Pantheon, 1982), chapter 3, reprint of a 1973 article. For more on the matter, see Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power (Summit, 1983), and on the general background, Gareth Porter, A Peace Denied (Indiana U. press, 1975).

3. “Wright plan paves the way to stability in Nicaragua.” BG, Aug. 10, 1987, reprinted from the Los Angeles Times. The concept of “left wing of the Democratic Party” is an intriguing one.

4. See my article in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas, for discussion; the repressive measures instituted during World War I, when there was not even a remote threat of attack against the United States, were still more severe, reaching even as far as a ten-year jail sentence for a presidential candidate who believed absurdly that the right of free expression would be maintained. But we may plead, in extenuation, that this was, after all, only a century and a half after the American revolution, so that the country was still learning democratic ways.

5. NYT, Aug. 10, 1987.

6. For discussion and sources below. see TTT, 143f.; Burns, At War in Nicaragua, 165f.; Smith, “Lies about Nicaragua.” For general discussion of the record see Morley and Petras, The Reagan Administration and Nicaragua and William Goodfellow’s chapter in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas. The Times is not unaware of the facts, and sometimes reports them at least partially; see, e.g., Joel Brinkley, Aug. 6, 1987.

7. Mesoamerica (Costa Rica), Sept. 1987.

8. NYT, Jan. 8, 1987.

9. José Melendez, Excelsior (Mexico City), April 8, 1987; translated in Central America NewsPak, March 30-April 12, 1987.

10. On the vicissitudes of the Arias plan, first supported by the Reagan administration when it was able to have a hand in drafting it, then opposed as it was modified to accommodate Central American priorities, see Central America Bulletin, Aug. 1987.

11. Pamela Constable, BG, March 15, 1987.

12. Rosenfeld, WP, June 26, 1987; editorial, NYT, June 18, 1987.

13. COHA’s Washington Report on the Hemisphere, April 15, 1987. On the terms of the plan and a comparison to the Contadora proposal, see “Arias Primer,” International Policy Report, June 1987.

14. Dennis Volman, CSM, June 26, 1987, paraphrasing Habib’s briefing as reported by participants.

15. Central America Report (Inforpress Centroamericana, Guatemala City), June 26, 1987.

16. James LeMoyne, NYT, March 17, 1987.

17. See TTT, 157f., for evidence on this matter.

18. See TTT, 3.6.3, and for more extensive discussion, Herman and Chomsky, Political Economy of the Mass Media, chapter 3.

19. Dennis Volman, CSM, June 26, 1987.

20. William Goodfellow and Jim Morrell, Guatemala City. Aug. 4, 1987. Also Central America Report (Guatemala City), Aug. 7, 1987. The intervention of Contadora nations seems to have been ignored in the U.S. media. The U.S. government opposition to the peace initiatives of the Latin American states tends to place Contadora under a cloud.

21. Peter Osterlund, CSM, Aug. 10; Michael Allen, WSJ, Aug. 10, 1987.

22. Ibid. See NYT, Aug. 12, 1987, for the text of the Central American agreement.

23. Central America Report, Aug. 14, 1987.

24. Le Monde, Aug. 7; Brummer, MGW, Aug. 16, 1987.

25. Ellen Hume and Robert Greenberger, WSJ, Aug. 14; Joel Brinkley, NYT, Aug. 15, 1987. Shultz quoted by Brinkley, NYT, Aug. 6, 1987.

26. CSM, Aug. 7, 1987; NYT, Aug. 6, 1987.

27. NYT, Aug. 7, 6, 1987.

28. NYT, Aug. 6, 1987. For a recent review of Reagan administration efforts to evade all forms of negotiation in the face of Nicaraguan pressures to initiate them, see Smith, “Lies about Nicaragua.” His record is only partial, excluding, for example, Nicaraguan efforts since 1981, to settle border issues with international monitoring, obviously intolerable to the U.S., which must attack Nicaragua to deter it from aggression.

29. NYT, Aug. 7, 1987; Rosenthal’s contributions since retiring as chief editor give much insight into the mentality that animated the Times over many years under his stewardship. Some further examples follow.

30. BG, Aug. 10, 1987.

31. See p. 159. NYT, Aug. 8, 1987.

32. Central America Report, Aug. 14, 1987. Excelsior (Mexico), Aug 25; in Central America News Update, Oct. 1, 1987.

33. Rosenthal, NYT, Aug. 21, 1987; Ignatius, WP Weekly, Aug. 24, 1987.

34. Editorial, WP, Aug. 31, 1987.

35. Ellen Hune and Robert Greenberger, WSJ, Aug. 14, 1987.

36. Robert Greenberger, WSJ, Aug. 17; Nell Lewis, NYT, Aug. 18, 1987.

37. See references cited in note 2.

38. Not entirely, however. See editorial, BG, Aug. 21, 1987, which states the facts briefly but accurately, something of a historical event in American journalism. This is, to my knowledge, the first time these critically important facts have ever been stated correctly, or even near correctly, in the mainstream U.S. media, though the facts are transparent, and both the facts, and the astonishing willingness of the media to suppress them in favor of the government version, have been discussed in print since early 1973.

39. “Koch Names 8 to Join Him on Nicaragua Trip, NYT, Sept. 14, 1987. For discussion of Freedom House, see Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, Appendix 1: “Freedom House Observers in Zimbabwe Rhodesia and El Salvador.” For examination of the Freedom House conception of the nature of a Free Press, see Herman and Chomsky, Political Economy of the Mass Media, chapters, sec. 5.3 and Appendix.

40. LeMoyne, “Latin Hope and Evasion,” NYT, Aug. 10, 1987, p. 1. There is an oblique reference to “Nicaraguan officials” who expressed optimism about the accords.

41. Reuters. Toronto Globe & Mail, Aug. 10, 1987.

42. James LeMoyne, NYT, Aug. 22, 1987.

43. Joel Brinkley, NYT, Aug. 28, 1987.

44. COHA’s Washington Report on the Hemisphere, Sept. 30, 1987.

45. AP, BG, Aug. 24, 75 words; Stephen Kinzer, “Nicaraguan Hope Rises For Independent Press,” NYT, Aug. 24, 1987. On D’Escoto’s protest, BG, Aug. 2S, a few lines in a Reuters story on another topic; AP, BG. Aug. 27, 90 words.

46. Philip Bennett, BG, Aug. 16, 1987. See also Stephen Kinzer, NYT, Aug. 14, citing promises by Vice President Sergio Ramírez to end censorship, free prisoners, abolish special tribunals, etc., if the U.S. stops aid to the contras.

47. Peter Ford, “Sandinista commission raises questions.” CSM, Sept. 3, 1987. He comments accurately that the “actual political beliefs” of the Commission members are “probably less important than local and international perceptions”; for the U.S., the perceptions will be determined within a framework established in Washington.

48. “Complaint by U.S. Over Latin Panel,” Reuters, NYT, Aug. 27; Stephen Kinzer, NYT, Aug. 30, 1987. Kinzer, NYT, Aug. 30, 1987.

49. Norton, In These Times, Sept. 2-8; Norton, CSM, Sept. 15, 1987. Norton observes that one of the alternates selected was a member of the small Social Democratic Party, the only gesture to openness in the Commission.

50. Mesoamerica (Costa Rica), Sept. 1987. According to this report, “eyebrows were further raised” by this announcement, coming after complaints by Central American diplomats that Honduras was “stalling” during the August meetings. The conference of Honduran Bishops called for the creation of a Commission to “aid the democratic process” and put an end to arbitrary arrests, torture and other atrocities.” (Excelsior. Aug. 30, 1987, also reporting the refusal of the government to form a Commission as required.) This August announcement was reported on October 1 in the New York Times by Lindsey Gruson, noting the pressures from church and other groups after Costa Rica had finally appointed a Commission. President Azcona and the military oppose the formation of a Commission because this “would only provide the small left-of-center and left-wing groups a platform from which to denounce the military and embarrass the country,” an argument that easily passes muster in the United States and called forth no impassioned denunciations. See also William Branigin. WP, Sept 23, 1987, reporting that General Regalado, chief of the armed forces that effectively rule this “democracy” had “ruled out the establishment of a commission.”

51. COHA’s Washington Report on the Hemisphere, Sept. 30, 1987. The Archbishop, the obvious candidate, was not nominated by the Church, presumably by prearrangement with the government.

52. Sara Scribner, CSM, Sept. 29. 1987, selecting an example virtually at random; my emphasis. Scribner is reporting a Monitor interview with President Arias, no doubt accurately.

53. Ibid.

54. Randolph Ryan, “The sinning Sandinista,” BG, Sept. 19, ‘1987, an eloquent critique of the general hypocrisy on these matters; Mesoamerica (Costa Rica), Sept. 1987.

55. Philip Bennett, BG, Aug. 16; Neil Lewis, NYT, Aug. 19, 1987.

56. Steven Roberts, NYT. Aug. 14; Neil Lewis. NYT, Aug. 17, 1987; Sara Fritz, BG-LAT. Aug. 17. 1987, citing House assistant majority leader Tony Coelho. Abrams’s statement was bitterly condemned by Costa Rican chancellor Madrigal Nieto (Excelsior, Aug. 19, 1987).

57. My emphasis. AP, Sept. 10; Neil Lewis, NYT, Sept. 11; text of the agreement, as published by the New York Times, Aug. 12. The Times used the translation provided by the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry. For the Guatemalan version, approximately the same, see Esquipulas II Accord: Plan to Establish a Firm and Lasting Peace in Central America, Special Document of the Central America Report, Aug. 14, 1987.

58. Neil Lewis, NYT, Sept. 17; AP, Sept. 17, 1987.

59. See, for example, Jenny Pearce, Promised Land: Peasant Rebellion in Chalatenango El Salvador (Latin America Bureau, London, 1986), not exactly a best-seller in the United States. Journalists would also not violate their commitment to objectivity by travelling to these areas to see for themselves, just as they have been careful to avoid refugee camps where they might learn about what is happening within El Salvador from the victims; even congressional reports from refugee camps were effectively banned from the press. See Towards a New Cold War, 36f., reprinted in James Peck, ed., The Chomsky Reader (Pantheon, 1987).

60. Kissinger, “When Compromise serves no Purpose,” LAT, Sept. 6, 1987. On Kissinger’s historical fantasies, see Towards a New Cold War, chapter 6. Penn Kemble, “Put Eyes of the World on Sandinistas; A Nov. 7 Rally in Managua Could Give Freedom a Chance,” LAT, Aug. 27, 1987.

61. Julia Preston, “Bennett Criticizes Peace Plan,” WP, Sept. 18; AP, “Secretary Bennett attacks Sandinistas,” BG, Sept. 18; AP, Sept. 17, 18, 1987.

62. AP, BG, Sept. 11, 1987; 80 words. Not reported in the national press.

63. Neil Lewis, NYT, “Reagan Attacks the Central American Peace Plan,” Sept. 13, 1987.

64. Abrams cited in a telephone interview by Norman Kempster, LAT, Sept. 13, 1987. Cruz, “Arias Plan is the Best Hope for Peace, But Central American Pact Needs to Avoid a New Bay of Pigs,” LAT, Aug. 20, 1987. On Israeli mercenaries for the contras, see TTT, 133. Benjamin Linder was assassinated by contras while taking measurements for a dam that was to provide electric power for a “poor and backward village” in northern Nicaragua. According to his father, a pathologist, the autopsy reports show “that they blew his brains out at point-blank range as he lay wounded” (Stephen Kinzer, “Nicaragua Village Mourns American,” NYT, May 6; Philip Bennett, “Contras killed wounded American at close range, autopsy shows,” BG, May 6, 1987). His murder evoked a debate over whether he might have carried a rifle, or someone nearby might have been armed, in which case he presumably got what he deserved.

65. Neil Lewis, NYT. “Reagan Attacks the Central American Peace Plan,” Sept. 13, 1987.

66. For a discussion of the dedicated U.S. efforts to undermine the accords during the initial three-month phase, and the achievements of the Free Press in suppressing the facts, see my article “Is Peace at Hand?,” Z Magazine, January 1988.

Notes Chapter Eight

1. See my Towards a New Cold War and Fateful Triangle. Laird, cited in Ferguson and Rogers, Right Turn, 97. On the role of Nicaragua under Somoza as a base for U.S. operations, see TTT, 98.

2. Glenn Frankel, WP, Nov. 19, 1986.

3. See TTT, chapter 2. On the documents discussed below, see PI, chapter 1.

4. Cape Codder (Orleans, Mass.), Feb. 20, March 10, 1987. On the ordeal of the CoMadres leader who was refused entry, Maria Teresa Tula Pinto, see Marjorie Miller, LAT, Sept. 24, 1986; see also TTT, pp. 22f., on the earlier record, largely suppressed here. See p. 196 for another example. There are numerous others, mostly unknown; for example, the Canadian publisher of TTT and PI. prevented from crossing the border because of his outspoken opposition to the U.S. wars in Indochina.

5. Toronto Globe & Mail, Nov. 13, 1986.

6. AP, March 21, 1987.

7. Recall that there is one major foreign military base in Cuba, namely, the U.S. base at Guantanamo, and the Kennedy administration was prepared to blow up the world to ensure that Cuba did not mirror the status of Turkey.

8. NSC 5432, “U.S. Policy Toward Latin America,” Aug. 18, 1954; “Study of U.S. Policy Toward Latin American Military Forces,” Secretary of Defense, 11 June 1965. The former replaces NSC 5419, 5419/1, “U.S. Policy in the Event of Guatemalan Aggression in Latin America,” a threat overcome by the successful destruction of Guatemalan democracy. See PI for further details and more extensive quotes; also Bowen, “U.S. Policy Toward Guatemala.” The secret discussion relating to NSC 5419 expands on the right of the U.S. to block arms shipments to Guatemala from any source on grounds of “self-defense and self-preservation,” as an “application of the general rule of preventing the extension of the Communist conspiracy to the Western Hemisphere.” It is also noteworthy for the hysterical fantasies apparently advanced by intelligence; the concern over Guatemalan-inspired “internal subversion” elsewhere, such as a strike in Honduras; and the outrage expressed over “the Communist line being followed” by the New York Times, “the most untrustworthy newspaper in the United States” according to President Eisenhower. Communists seeking to destroy us are everywhere.

9. Israel’s role in supporting Latin American state terror dates from 1977, reflecting the constraints imposed on the U.S. executive. The common argument that the Carter administration was unaware of this, or could do nothing to affect it, is hardly credible. In 1977-8, U.S. aid to Israel vastly increased, reaching close to 50% of total U.S. foreign aid worldwide for several years. On these matters, see Fateful Triangle, and for illuminating discussion from a partially shared but somewhat different perspective, see Cheryl Rubenberg, Israel and the American National Interest (U. of Illinois, 1986). See also the references of chapter 3, note 41.

10. See TTT, p. 201.

11. John Simpson and Jana Bennett, The Disappeared (St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 311.

12. Alfonso Chardy, MH, July 5, 1987. See TTT; also Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas.

13. Seymour Hersh, NYT, Jan. 7, 1979, citing the former chief CIA analyst on Iran; Richard Sale, WP, May 9, 1977. On Carter’s record, and his horrendous human rights record generally (soon to be far surpassed by Reagan), see my “The Carter Administration: Myth and Reality,” reprinted in C. P. Otero, ed., Radical Priorities (Black Rose, 1981); Chomsky and Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights (on Iran, vol. I, 13f., 369); and Towards a New Cold War.

14. Huyser, Mission to Tehran (Harper & Row, 1986), 158-60, 194, 199, 231, jacket cover comment by Brzezinski. Huyser nevertheless convinced himself that the population would have welcomed a military coup; 289.

15. On the remarkable extent of this alliance, revealed in the Israeli press after the Shah’s fall, see Towards a New Cold War, 455. Had the U.S. wished to see these operations terminated by its Israeli client, it could doubtless have achieved this objective.

16. Scott Armstrong et al., The Chronology: The Documented Day-by-Day Account of the Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Contras (National Security Archive, Warner, 1987), 7-8, citing the Washington Post, July 27, 1981, and Brzezinski’s Power and Principle.

17. Gelb, NYT, March 8, 1982; Ha’aretz, Nov. 24, 1986. There is occasional reference to the facts in the extensive coverage of the late-1986 scandals; e.g., Stephen Engelberg, NYT, Nov. 15, 1986, last paragraph, noting evidence that “the United States was tacitly approving violations of its arms embargo on shipments to Iran” through Israel from 1982; John Walcott and Jane Mayer, WSJ, Nov. 28, 1986, noting that U.S. authorization of Israeli arms sales to be compensated by the U.S. goes back to 1981, with the knowledge of Haig, Weinberger, Shultz, etc.; Glenn Frankel, WP, Nov. 19, 1986. For accurate discussion, see Alexander Cockburn, WSJ, Nov. 13, 1986, which may well have elicited the oblique references just cited; In These Times, Nov. 26, 1986.

18. NYT, Aug. 3, 1987.

19. Simon du Bruxelles and Farzad Bazoft, Observer, Nov. 30, 1986.

20. Simon de Bruxelles and Hugh O’Shaughnessy, London Observer, July 26, 1987; Die Welt (Bonn), Sept. 29, 1987; Newsday-BG, Aug. 3, 1987.

21. Michael Widianski, “The Israel/U.S.-Iran connection,” Tel Aviv, Austin American-Statesman, May 2, 1986.

22. Patrick Seale, “Arms dealers cash in on Iran’s despair,” London Observer, May 4, 1986.

23. LAT, Nov. 22, 1986.

24. For sources and discussion, here and below, see Fateful Triangle, 457ff.

25. Stephen Engelberg with Jonathan Fuerbringer, NYT, Dec. 23, 1986.

26. Ha’aretz, Nov. 28, 1986; NYT, Dec. 5, 1986.

27. Thomas Friedman, NYT, Nov. 26, 1986.

28. Davar, April 21, Feb. 2, 1987, citing the Paris Nouvel Observateur. Ha’aretz, Jan. 12, 1987.

29. Nathan Shaham, Yediot Ahronot, Nov. 28, 1986.

30. The Tower Commission Report (Bantam-Times, 1987), 179-80. The major fear of the spread of “Shia fundamentalist terrorism” probably has to do with Saudi Arabia, where the Shi’ite population might be aroused by Iran, posing a threat to the oil fields, situated in Shi’ite areas.

31. David Nyhan, BG, Aug. 30, 1987, paraphrasing O’Neil’s earlier surmise, endorsed by a letter in the New York Times, Aug. 23, by Frederick Rarig, former special assistant to the Attorney General in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department.

32. Christopher Hitchens has compiled evidence suggesting that the arms flow to Iran may have been in part a “payoff” by the Reagan administration to Khomeini for delaying the release of the Embassy hostages until after the November 1980 elections, to avoid an “October surprise” that might have swung the election to Carter. See Nation, June 20, July 4, 1987; and for confirming evidence from Reagan staff worker Barbara Honegger, see Honneger and Jim Naureckas, In These Times, June 24, 1987. Flora Lewis reports confirming evidence from former Iranian president Bani-Sadr for a Reagan-Khomeini deal to delay the hostage release until after the election in exchange for arms shipments, noting also similar charges with regard to Prime Minister Jacques Chirac of France; NYT, Aug. 3, 1987.

33. Miles Wolpin. Military Aid and Counterrevolution in the Third World (Lexington Books, 1972), 8, 128.

34. John Murray Brown, CSM, Feb. 6, 1987; Economist, Aug. 15, 1987.

35. See Chomsky and Herman, Political Economy of Human Rights, I, 4.2.

36. NYT, Nov. 1, 1970; cited by Wolpin, Military Aid.

37. Spectator (London). Feb. 7, 1987. Glass was himself held hostage in Beirut from June 1987 until his remarkable escape two months later. The New Republic editors chose the occasion to berate him for not meeting their standards of support for Israel; July 21, Aug. 31, 1987, both published during the period when Glass was held hostage.

38. Lars Shoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy toward Latin America (Princeton, U. press, 1981), 7.

39. On the background in Haiti, see PI, 67f.

40. Joseph Treaster, NYT, Aug. 10, 1987.

41. Among them, possibly Mozambique (see p. 269) and Cambodia, where the U.S. provides support for the Pol Pot-based Democratic Kampuchea coalition; see Herman and Chomsky, Political Economy of the Media. As for Angola, the London Observer reports that there is considerable evidence that the Reagan administration circumvented Clark Amendment restrictions barring aid to the South African-backed UNITA forces in much the ways illustrated in the case of the Boland Amendments and Nicaragua: networks of private wealth in part through the World Anti-Communist League; client states, primarily Saudi Arabia and Morocco; self-financing trading and service companies to generate funds, supply arms, etc., including Southern Air Transport, with close CIA and South African links. Steve Mufson, Toronto Globe & Mail (Observer service), July 28, 1987. Recall the comments of Jonas Savimbi, chapter 3.

42. AP, BG, Aug. 30, 1987. The brief New York Times report of Reagan’s speech the same day omitted these crucial remarks (special, Aug. 30, p. 14).

43. For discussion of these matters in the early days of the Reagan administration, when the course of planning was already obvious, see Edward Herman, The Real Terror Network (South End, 1982); Towards a New Cold War, 47ff.

44. See Fateful Triangle, 209-10; Pirates and Emperors, chapter 3.

45. Ronald Reagan, March 6, 1981; NYT, March 7, 1981.

46. For one recent example, see the decision written by Reagan Supreme Court appointee Antonin Scalia, in an Appeals Court, ruling that the government may install warrantless wiretaps if a “reasonable jury” would have found “that a national security justification was reasonable,” even if it would (if called) have disagreed with the decision to wiretap. AP, Dec. 5, 1986.

47. See Joel Brinkley, “Drug Agency Rebuts Reagan Charge,” NYT, March 19, 1986. The President’s lies in that talk were so outlandish that even the editors of the New York Times felt called upon to issue a gentle admonition; editorial, March 20. For a partial record of the lies in this speech and elsewhere, see COHA, “Misleading the Public”; “Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, March 31, 1986. See TIT and sources cited for an earlier record, particularly, Americas Watch, Human Rights in Nicaragua: Reagan, Rhetoric and Reality, July 1985. See also Thomas Walker in Kenneth Coleman and George Herring, eds., The Central American Crisis (Scholarly Resources Inc., 1985), and Wayne Smith, “Lies About Nicaragua,” among others.

48. Seth Rosenfeld, San Francisco Examiner, March 16; carried on the wire services and hence readily available.

49. The New York Times mentioned the report, and the failure of Congress to investigate it, on July 10 (David Shipler, page B6, second section; there is also an oblique reference in “Washington Talk,” Jan. 13, 1987). On some aspects of the media duplicity on this issue, see Joel Millman, Columbia Journalism Review, Sept./Oct. 1986. After the 1986 scandals erupted, reports on probable U.S. government involvement in the contra drug operations began to appear; see p. 273.

50. See Alfed McCoy et al., The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (Harper & Row, 1972), primarily concerned with the CIA role in drug flow from the Golden Triangle in the Thailand-Burma-Laos region in connection with its secret wars in Indochina; Roy Godson, American Labor and European Politics (Crane, Russak, 1976, 80f., 135), a semi-official labor history that takes pride in the achievements in France, skirting the mafia connection; also Henrik Krueger, The Great Heroin Coup (South End, 1980). The Times managed a story on U.S. efforts to stop the drug flow from the Golden Triangle, including historical background, with not a word on the U.S. role; Peter Kerr, NYT, Aug. 10, 1987.

Notes Chapter Nine

1. For discussion of the background for recent developments surveyed briefly here, see TTT, PI.

2. Serge Schmemann, NYT, March 30, 27, 1986; AP, Berlin, April 21, 1986; Joseph Nye, Foreign Affairs, Fall 1986.

3. Bernard Gwertzman, NYT, March 31, 1986.

4. Paul Lewis, NYT, Aug. 22, 1987. AFP, Sept. 5, 1987; Central America News Update, Oct. 1, 1987.

5. While the timing suggests that this was the proximate cause, there are far more serious issues in the background, as discussed in chapter 8.

6. Some of the Soviet concessions are rather surprising, for example, their willingness to exempt French and British nuclear forces and missiles, which are no less threatening to them than American ones and are by no means trivial in scale. According to secret U.S. reports obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Britain (with other NATO governments) has been implementing plans to add several thousand new nuclear weapons with ranges of 500 to 900 kilometers, including very long range artillery, a successor to the Lance surface-to-surface missile, and short-range cruise missiles that can be launched from American or European aircraft. The nuclear warheads for these programs, which the British government falsely denied were under way, are to be paid for by the United States. Ian Mather, Observer News Service, Toronto Globe & Mail, March 23, 1987. Such techniques, along with offshore deployment, might serve to impede further and more meaningful arms reductions.

7. AP, September 29; BG, Sept. 30, 1986.

8. See TTT and PI for further discussion.

9. MGW, Nov. 9, 1986.

Notes Chapter Ten

1. Jeffrey Smith, WP. Nov. 9, 1986.

2. On the development of these ideas, important for understanding modern Western society as well as the early stages when oppressed people break their bonds, see my “Language and Freedom,” reprinted in For Reasons of State and in Peck, Chomsky Reader. Also chapter 2 of my Problems of Knowledge and Freedom (Pantheon, 1972).

3. Alfonso Chardy, MH, Oct. 13, 1986; July 19, 1987.

Notes Chapter Eleven

1. See my articles in Morley and Petras, Reagan Administration and Nicaragua, and Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas, for a closer analysis, including some qualifications ignored in this brief review and a description of some of the techniques used by contra supporters, notably Ronald Radosh. See the same articles for review of New York Times editorials on Nicaragua and El Salvador through the 1980s, illustrating the same conformity to state propaganda. See Jack Spence, in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas, for detailed analysis of news coverage of Nicaragua through the 1980s, with essentially the same conclusions. Also TTT, particularly pp. 140f.

2. Oxfam America Special Report: Central America, Fall 1985; Melrose, Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example?, 26, 14.

3. BG, Feb. 9, 1986.

4. The latter, the conclusion of the Dutch government observers, who are so committed to Reaganite atrocities that they see no problem in the exclusion of the left from the Salvadoran elections by massive terror; for quotes and references, including the misrepresentation of their report by Robert Leiken in the New York Review, see my introduction to Morley and Petras, The Reagan Administration and Nicaragua; also TTT for citation of commentary on both elections; and for more extensive discussion, Herman and Chomsky, Political Economy of the Mass Media, chapter 3. Also Smith, “Lies About Nicaragua,” noting that even “an American observer delegation led by former Ambassador to Bolivia Ben Stephansky and former Ohio Republican Representative Charles Whalen pronounced [the elections] reasonably fair and an important step towards democracy.” An Irish Parliamentary Delegation dominated by center-right parties was even more positive, and totally ignored, along with others with the wrong conclusions to impart.

5. Lord Chitnis, spokesman of the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group; see TIT, 117, for this and other foreign reactions.

6. Lars Shoultz, National Security and United States Policy toward Latin America (Princeton U. press, 1987), 320, 323.

7. “This year. amid mounting evidence of widespread political repression and human rights violations by the Sandinista government, nearly every lawmaker is on record as expressing distaste for the Nicaragua regime” (Peter Osterlund, CSM. March 21, 1986)—exactly as in the past. There is no such reaction—quite the opposite—to the vastly worse repression and human rights violations in U.S. client states such as El Salvador and numerous others. For a review of congressional opinion, see William LeoGrande’s chapter in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas.

8. R. W. Apple, NYT, March 12, 1986. Leiken, New York Review, Dec. 5, 1985; Statement before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, March 4, 1986; New Republic, March 31, 1986; Soviet Strategy in Latin America (Praeger, 1982), 87-88. The rhetoric is drawn from the Maoist cult literature. According to its principles, the sturdy Nicaraguan peasants of northern Jinotega province, though illiterate and uneducated apart from the influence of the most reactionary elements of the clergy, nevertheless feel “anti-hegemonist sentiments” (in translation, anti-Soviet passion), as a result of the understanding of Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe and of the Soviet threat looming over the rest of the world that is instinctive among the masses. The same healthy instincts inform the peasants of Central America that their neighbor to the north is a lesser threat to their freedom and well-being. As noted earlier, the affinity between Maoist and “conservative” (or “neoliberal”) opinion, and the easy transition from one to the other, is an interesting cultural phenomenon.

9. Interview, COHA’s Washington Report on the Hemisphere, Oct. 1, 1986. On comparison of censorship and other rights violations in Nicaragua with the U.S. and Israel, under far less dire circumstances, see TTT, 72f., and my chapter in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas. Similar comparisons can be drawn elsewhere, but the power of the U.S. doctrinal system is revealed by the fact that Nicaraguan violations are virtually the sole topic of impassioned commentary, among critics of U.S. policies as well, in a burst of narrowly focused and—with rare exceptions—quite novel libertarian sentiment.

10. The Listener, Feb. 26, 1987.

11. Jaime Daremblum, “Costa Ricans Don’t Have High Hopes for Peace Plan,” WSJ, Aug. 21, 1987.

12. UPI, March 18, 1987; cited in Central America News Update, April 12, 1987.

13. See Preface, and TTT, chapter 2.

14. CIIR, Nicaragua, London, Feb. 1987.

15. Comunidad (Argentina), Aug. 1985; translated in The Cry for Peace in Central America (LADOC, Peru), June 1987.

16. Central America Report, May 22, 1987, with the text of the “Summary of Resolution Approved by the Interparliamentary Union Regarding Central American Conflict.”

17. Stephen Kinzer, NYT, April 28, 1987.

18. Amenecer, Dec. 1985, cited in a March 1986 paper by Joseph Mulligan, SJ, Instituto Histórico Centroamericano (Managua); Doug Huss, Guardian (New York), April 16, 1986; Council on Hemispheric Affairs press release, April 12, 1986. Father Mulligan’s paper also cites the pastoral letter by the Baptist Convention in Nicaragua (addressed to the Baptist Churches of the U.S. and the World Council of Churches) supporting “our government’s legitimacy” as shown by the November 1984 elections and denouncing U.S. measures against it, eyewitness testimony by a Jesuit priest working in the northern countryside on hideous contra torture and massacre of civilians and kidnapping of hundreds of peasants, and other important material unreportable here.

19. Cover story, LAT Magazine, April 19, 1987; New Republic, March 10, 1986.

20. Marshall Ingwerson, CSM, July 15, 1987.

21. WP, March 9; CSM, March 12. 1986.

22. Kondracke, New Republic, Dec. 29, 1986 (my emphasis); Leiken, New York Review, June 26, March 13, 1986; Rosenthal, NYT, Aug. 21, 1987.

Notes Chapter Twelve

1. See TTT, 2.4.

2. Richard Boudreaux and Marjorie Miller, LAT, May 20, 1987.

3. Editorial, WSJ, March 10, 1987.

4. Clifford Krauss, WSJ, Dec. 5, 1986. Note that training of guerrillas would be dangerous to states where guerrillas have a popular base and can operate internally without massive air supply and direct superpower intervention to protect them and enhance their effectiveness.

5. Richard Halloran, NYT, March 22, 1987.

6. Krauss, WSJ, May 18, 1987.

7. Editorial, NYT, March 15, 1987.

8. For additional details, see TTT, chapter 3, note 3, PI, 86f.; Morley and Petras, The Reagan Administration and Nicaragua and my introduction; Eldon Kenworthy, in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas; Smith, “Lies About Nicaragua.”

9. George Will, BG, March 16, 1986. The same lie is featured by Ronald Radosh, WSJ, November 13, 1987, among many others.

10. Cited in Kenworthy, op. cit.

11. Imprecisely, in my view, for reasons discussed in TTT. To lie requires a certain competence, specifically, mastery of the concept of truth. We do not describe the babbling of an infant or the oratory of an actor reading his lines as lies, even if the statements are false. In this case, the poor man barely seems to understand the words on his note cards. It is necessary to pretend that he is “in charge” in order to maintain the illusion that this is, after all, government “by the people,” who elected him.

12. NYT, June 25, 1986.

13. Editorial, BG, July 14, 1986. For further examples and more extensive discussion, see PI, 86f., and my article in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas.

14. To select further examples virtually at random, the Nicaraguan government announced on Feb. 10, 1987 that Radio Católica could reopen and that Bishop Vega and another clergyman expelled for supporting the contras could return if they agreed “to obey the law” (Latinamerica press (Peru), Feb. 26, 1987; MacLean’s (Canada), Feb. 23, 1987). This was barely reported in the U.S. (there was a tiny item in the Dallas Morning News, Feb. 11), though these issues are among the major proofs of Sandinista “totalitarianism.” Speaking at the American Society of Newspaper Editors annual convention, Nicaraguan UN Ambassador Nora Astorga stated that freedom of press will be restored and the suspended journal La Prensa will reopen “as soon as the war ends” (AP, April 10, 1987). The Times covered the convention, but not these remarks, nor has it ever compared censorship in Nicaragua to the measures taken by the U.S. end its clients. On the general background of Church-state relations in Nicaragua, see Andrew Reding, Monthly Review, July-August, 1987. Radio Católica was closed after it failed to broadcast an address by President Ortega (a requirement that is standard practice in the Latin American democracies). Earlier broadcasts calling for the Virgin Mary to “liberate Nicaragua from Sandinista oppression,” implicit support for the contras, attempts to boost its signal without a license, etc., had been overlooked. Bishop Vega was expelled after the U.S. “declaration of war” against Nicaragua in June 1986; on the eve of the vote for contra aid in March 1986, he had lied about Sandinista murder of priests in a talk in Washington at the right-wing Heritage foundation, as he quietly conceded later, among other examples of pro-contra activities. Bishop Vega’s lies were suppressed by New York Times Managua correspondent Stephen Kinzer, who certainly knew about them, since they were front page news in the Nicaraguan press, along with refutations by priests in Nicaragua.

15. On this matter, see particularly Abraham Brumberg’s articles in Dissent through 1986.

Notes Chapter Thirteen

1. Not only in the United States, where one has become accustomed to such antics. The most frequently used headline in the Swedish press in 1984 was: “Why is there so much silence over the war in Afghanistan?” Jyllands-Posten, May 11, 1985; Alexander Cockburn, Nation, Aug. 31, 1985.

2. For 1985; see Americas Watch, Settling into Routine, May 1986. The nongovernmental Human Rights Commission CDHES (Comisión de Derechos Humanos de El Salvador), whose figures are generally about the same as those of other human rights organizations for earlier years (actually, somewhat lower), reports 4-5 murders a day for 1986, along with 213 recorded disappearances (CDHES Annual Report, January 1987). The Council on Hemispheric Affairs estimates “government sponsored assassinations” (including disappearance and abduction) at about a dozen a month; News and Analysis, Nov. 10, 1987. Both CDHES and Americas Watch record an increase in “those imprisoned for politically motivated offenses or associations,” to 1100, 90% of them never tried, many claiming that confessions were obtained by torture; Watch Committees and Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, The Reagan Administration’s Record on Human Rights in 1986, Feb. 1987. Recall that El Salvador, like Guatemala, has succeeded in radically reducing the number of political prisoners by assassination and disappearance.

3. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Spectator (London), May 10, 1986.

4. Amnesty International, Amnesty Action, Jan.-Feb., 1986.

5. New Republic, editorials, April 7, 1986; April 2, 1984. See TTT, 167-8, for further details, including the attempted coverup when these statements were exposed beyond the circle of New Republic readers, who apparently found nothing remarkable about them.

6. Reuters, BG, June 30; James LeMoyne, NYT, Aug. 3; Julia Preston, WP Weekly, Aug. 11; Chris Norton, CSM, July 10; COHA News and Analysis, July 28, 1986; Doyle McManus, LAT, Aug. 7, 1986. Also Settling into Routine. For details on the U.S. training of death squad leaders described by a Salvadoran official as “some of El Salvador’s worst killers,” see Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein, “Inviting Death Squads to Tea,” In These Times, Aug. 20, 1986.

7. CDHES, “Torture in El Salvador,” Sept. 24, 1986; distributed by the Marin Interfaith Task Force, 25 Buena Vista, Mill Valley CA 94941. Ron Ridenhour, “In prison, Salvador rights panel works on,” San Francisco Examiner, Nov. 14; Ridenhour is the U.S. combat veteran who tried vainly for almost a year to publicize the My Lai massacre. Also Nov. 18, 1986, with further details, and Larry Maatz, Nov. 10, on the Marin County religious group and its association with the CDHES. See Alexander Cockburn, Nation, Feb. 21, 1987, noting also confirmation of the CDHES findings in extensive interviews by a research team of the Los Angeles-based El Rescate relief organization; its report was also ignored. There is a brief reference to abuses in prison buried in an article by James LeMoyne, NYT, Feb. 16, 1987, possibly an oblique recognition of the existence of the important CDHES study.

8. Stephen Kinzer, “Managua Cracks Down on Group That Presses for Prisoners’ Rights,” NYT, April 5, 1987.

9. Professor Jorge Lara-Braud, San Francisco Theological Seminary, Marin Interfaith Task Force (MITF); see TTT, 123f.

10. See Central America Report of MITF, April, 1987; MITF report, 1987.

11. Excelsior (Mexico), April 14 (Central America News Update, May 10, 1987); NECAN Regional Student Program report, Northampton Mass., April 15, 1987; COHA News Release, April 29, 1987; WP, May 12, 1987.

12. Information received from El Salvador by the Marin Interfaith Task Force, and transmitted by them to the media in the U.S. Reuters, CSM, June 4, 1987. These events merited 38 words in paragraph 14 of an article by James LeMoyne on rebel activities in San Salvador, where CoMadres is identified simply as “a human rights office sympathetic to the rebels” (NYT, June 4, 1987). Frank Smyth, “El Salvador’s Forgotten War,” Progressive, Aug. 1987; Marjorie Miller, LAT, July 6, 1987. See also Julia Preston, WP, June 5, 1987.

13. Excelsior (Mexico), June 6, July 19, 1987.

14. Peter Ford, CSM, July 15, 1987; Chris Norton, In These Times, June 1987; Latinamerica press, July 23, 1987. For more on the June atrocities, attributed in part to the Arce battalion, see special, NYT, June 22, 1987.

15. Ibid.

16. AP, NYT, “Salvador State of Siege Lapses,” Jan. 18, 1987, p. 22; LeMoyne, July 17, Aug. 13, 1987.

17. For details, see my article in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas.

18. René Backmann, Nouvel Observateur (Paris), translated in World Press Review, Aug. 1987. See p. 92, above.

19. Chris Norton, CSM, April 14, 1987; Nov. 26, 1986; and in Latinamerica press, Oct. 9, 1986.

20. NYT, Aug. 13, 1987. Few independent scholars take any of this seriously. See, e.g., the review by Jerome Slater, “Dominos in Central America,” International Security, Fall 1987.

21. Chris Norton, “Salvador: Charges of rampant corruption damage Duarte’s Christian Democrats,” Latinamerica press, Sept. 3, 1987. Norton is one of the very few U.S. journalists reporting regularly from El Salvador. See also Clifford Krauss and Robert S. Greenberger, “Peril to Democracy,” WSJ, Sept. 14, 1987, warning that the corruption under Duarte, more “rampant” even than under his predecessors, is “threatening one of President Reagan’s few foreign-policy successes,” namely “foster[ing] democracy in this tiny Central American nation.” See p. 89.

22. Lindsey Gruson, NYT, Sept. 28, 1987. On early criticisms of the land reform by Oxfam, Salvadoran land reform specialist Leonel Gómez, and others, and sources, see Towards a New Cold War, 43ff.; reprinted in Peck, Chomsky Reader.

23. CSM, Sept. 15, 1987. The Mexican Press reports that the union leader was kidnapped “by five elements of a security body.” On the same day, the government announced the arrest of 12 union leaders. A week earlier, the leader of the agricultural workers union was murdered by members of the armed forces, one of the 46 cases of reported political violence that week. Excelsior, Sept. 1 (Also AFP, Reuters), Aug. 23, 1987. Central America News Update, Oct. 1, 1987.

24. John Goshko, “U.S. to Equip Salvadoran Police Despite Rights Charges,” Sept. 9, 1987, p. 17; “Human Rights Group Says Salvador Fails Peace Plan,” Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 1, 1987, 60 words. See Americas Watch, The Civilian Toll: 1986–1987, Aug. 30, 1987.

25. See TTT, chapters 1, 3.

26. COHA’s Washington Report on the Hemisphere, April 16, 1986. Alan Nairn and Jean-Marie Simon, New Republic, June 30, 1986.

27. Guatemala: the Year of Promises, Inforpress Centroamericana, Guatemala City, Jan. 1987; see also Human Rights in Guatemala During President Cerezo’s First Year (Americas Watch and the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group, Feb. 1987), confirming the “terrible” human rights situation and continued military domination of the government. See James Painter, Guatemala: False Hope, False Freedom (Catholic Institute for International Relations, Latin America Bureau, London, 1987), for more general discussion.

28. Kathryn Leger, CSM, July 23, 1987; Mesoamerica (Costa Rica), Sept. 1987.

29. COHA, News and Analysis, Feb. 6; Kinzer, NYT, May 13; Philip Bennett, BG, Jan. 20; Peter Ford, CSM, March 23, 1987.

30. Kathryn Leger, CSM, July 23, 1987. See the discussion of “worthy” and “unworthy” victims, in Herman and Chomsky, Political Economy of the Mass Media, chapters 2, 5, 6.

31. World Policy Journal, Summer 1987.

32. COHA press release, May 11, 1987; Central America Report, July 31, 1987; Excelsior, July 3, 1987; Crystal Nix, NYT, Aug. 12, 1987.

33. Julio Godoy, Latinamerica press, July 23, 1987.

34. Dave Todd, “Contras uproot 16,000 from Honduras homes,” Montreal Gazette, Dec. 3, 1986; AP, April 29, 1987. See William Long, LAT, Sept. 25, 1986, citing the Honduran press figure of 16,000 displaced and quoting the vice president of the Honduran Association of Coffee Producers who says that “the cause of this whole problem is the policy of Reagan”; cited in Americas Watch, Human Rights in Honduras: Central America’s ‘Sideshow’ May 1987, 84f.

35. AP, April 1, 1987; March 29, 1987, interview on CBS, “60 Minutes.” Americas Watch plausibly regards Lopez’s attribution of atrocities primarily to the contras as “disingenuous,” an effort to exculpate the Honduran security forces, while observing that “the acknowledgement by an official as knowledgeable as Lopez that death squads were run by contras on Honduran soil is significant” (Human Rights in Honduras, 65). There had been accounts for years of contra atrocities in Honduras, rarely reported in the media, though a front-page story by James LeMoyne in the New York Times on May 2, 1987 reports that the Honduran army is linked to the death of 200 suspected leftists according to testimony of a Honduran army defector on torture, death squads, and “‘elimination’ techniques.” His American trainers, he says, recommended “use of such techniques as sleep deprivation, cold and isolation,” but opposed “physical torture” that was carried out in secret. His accounts appear in detail in the Americas Watch report cited, 126ff.

36. Americas Watch, Human Rights in Honduras, 46.

37. Mesoamerica, Sept. 1987.

38. June Erlick, MH, Feb. 19, 1987, describing the “propaganda” that has reduced draft resistance to a “trickle” by “allaying the concerns of mothers and providing special privileges for draftees,” and other such insidious devices invented to control the population.

39. Reprinted in WP, Aug. 25, 1986; cited in Americas Watch, Human Rights in Honduras, 122-3.

40. Ibid., 137f. On the “elaborate deception of Congress” in connection with the Nicaraguan “invasion,” see Steve Stecklow, Dallas Morning News, Jan. 7, 1987; his account is based on Ferch’s report to the General Accounting Office that contrary to U.S. government lies, the U.S. induced Honduras to accept the aid it “requested” to “defend itself” from the Nicaraguan operation. The State Department “did not dispute Ferch’s account,” Stecklow reports, “but said it would be ‘cynical’ to describe the administration’s actions as deception.” Recognition of the truth does tend to induce cynicism.

41. Food First News, Spring 1987; Medea Benjamin, Links, Spring 1987.

42. Bob Dole, “Arias’s Hopes, Ortega’s ‘Circus’,” NYT, Sept. 10, 1987.

43. Kinzer, NYT, Sept. 2, 1987.

44. UPI, BG. March 20, 1986; see pp. 172, 196.

45. Stephen Kinzer, NYT, Sept. 2, 1987. Special, NYT, Sept. 8; Douglas Farah, UPI, WP, Sept. 1, 1987. UPI, BG, Sept. 9, 1987, on the release of the prisoners in Nicaragua. Dole’s response to the photo cited in B.C. Saintes, Guardian (New York), Sept. 16, 1987, in a transcript of a longer section of this exchange, broadcast live over Nicaraguan radio.

46. L. James Binder, Editor in Chief of Army magazine, Army, May 1987.

47. See TTT, 36. For more on his highly selective morality and the remarkable stated principles that underlie it, see Fateful Triangle, and a series of bitter condemnations in the Israeli press on the occasion of his Nobel Prize, some quoted by Alexander Cockburn, Nation, Nov. 8, 1986.

48. See Martin Diskin, “The Manipulation of Indigenous Struggles,” in Walker, Reagan vs. the Sandinistas, for further discussion.

49. Philippe Bourgois, Ethnic Diversity on a Corporate Plantation: Guaymí Labor on a United Fruit Brands Subsidiary in Costa Rica and Panama (Cambridge: Cultural Survival, 1985).

50. Mesoamerica (Costa Rica), Sept. 1987. The DEA spraying is also considered a possible cause for many other deaths from shellfish contaminated with insecticide in areas nearby.

51. Green Papers 2, 1, Environmental Project on Central America (EPOCA), Earth Island Institute, San Francisco.

52. Ibid.

53. Dennis Gilbert; James Austin and Jonathan Fox; in Walker, Nicaragua: The First Five Years, 163, 399.

Notes Chapter Fourteen

1. Editorial, WP Weekly, March 31, 1986.

2. Not a misprint, but the regular demand, as illustrated by numerous earlier citations; see p. 121.

3. P. 239; COHA’s Human Rights Report (Washington, Dec. 31, 1985).

4. See the references of chapter 6, note 8.

5. AP, April 14, 1986. Reference to Nicaragua as a “cancer” is standard; see, e.g., the President’s March 16, 1986 address (NYT, March 17) and the remarks by Vernon Walters, cited above, p. 173. The reference to the “cancer” is excised from the sanitized official version of Shultz’s talk; Current Policy No. 820, U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs. People who attended the talk recall Shultz’s reported remarks well, and deny the press account of “sustained applause,” reporting rather a distinct chill as Shultz thundered on.

6. A.M. Rosenthal, NYT, Aug. 21, 1987; note that well after the government had conceded that this plan was offered in the firm expectation that it would be rejected by the Sandinistas, clearing the way for renewed military aid to the contras, Rosenthal is hard at work to portray it as a serious peace initiative. Note further that the Reagan-Wright plan was, in effect, a demand for capitulation, as discussed earlier.

7. AP, NYT, April 1, 1985.

8. Randolph Ryan, BG, March 10, 1986.

Notes Chapter Fifteen

1. Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide (Harper & Row, 1967). 200-13. The samples of Nazi Party members polled are small, but Cohn concludes from other evidence as well that the figures are probably significant.

2. Richard Morris, The Forging of the Union (Harper & Row, 1987), 173ff. On the Orwellian usage of the terms “special interest” and “national interest” (the interests of the population, the interests of corporations, respectively), see TTT, chapter 5.

3. Carolyn Eisenberg, “Working-Class Politics and the Cold War: American Intervention in the German Labor Movement, 1945-49,” Diplomatic History, 7.4, Fall 1983; Kennan, quoted by John H. Backer, The Decision to Divide Germany (Durham, 1978), 15 5-6; my emphasis. See my paper cited in note 23, chapter 2, and sources cited, for further discussion of these policies, pursued worldwide.

 

Notes to Chapter Sixteen

1. Cited by Thomas Walker, in Coleman and Herring, Central American Crisis, 172.

2. James Reston, March 26, 1986.