Counter-Intelligence 2013 - Oliver Stone TV - Michael Moore TV - America’s Book of Secrets TV - Ronald Reagan - John Stockwell - Celerino Castillo - Terry Reed - US News Report - Gates of Hell TV - Daniel Ortega - General Major Smedley Butler - Simon Reeve TV - John Pilger TV - Secrets of the CIA 2006 TV - Peter Kornbluh - Augusto Sandino - F D Roosevelt - Richard Nixon - Oliver North - Edwin Firmage - Martin Bell - Bill Moyers - John Kerry - The New York Times - Robert Parry - Adam Curtis TV - Noam Chomsky - Horacio Arce - Patti Davis - Walter LaFeber - The Power Principle 2011 - The Guerrilla Fighter TV - Secret Wars Uncovered TV -
Fearing that the Sandinista model may spread to other countries, former treasury secretary George Shultz called the Sandinistas ‘a cancer right here on our land mass’. Trained in neighbouring Honduras as well as back home in Florida, the Contras would unleash a reign of terror on the people of Nicaragua. They focused heavily on economic targets … The Contras had raped, tortured and killed unarmed civilians including children. Counter-Intelligence: Shining a Light on Black Operations s1e2: The Deep State, 2013
Reagan left behind a bloody trail of death and destruction. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States VIII: Reagan & Gorbachev & Third World: Rise of the Right, Showtime 2012
The 15,000 Contra army employing kidnapping, torture, rape and murder targeted health clinics, schools, agricultural co-operatives, bridges and power stations. ibid.
He [Reagan] went so far as to call the Contras ‘the moral equivalents of our founding fathers’. ibid.
1981: Reagan administration trains and funds Contras. 30,000 Nicaraguans die. Michael Moore, Bowling for Columbine, 2002
Arms for hostages ... Why was the Reagan administration so willing to sell arms to a country so openly hostile to America? America's Book of Secrets: Presidential Cover-Ups s2e7, H2 2014
Nicaragua: Reagan believed strongly that the Contras deserved American funding and support. Any such funding had been banned by Congress. ibid.
In the end several high ranking members of the Reagan administration were either indicted, convicted, or had their careers for ever tarnished by the affair and the cover-up ... directed by George H W Bush. ibid.
Coming to grips with these US/CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed – and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola ... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if US tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies.
The six million people the CIA has helped to kill are people of the Mitumba Mountains of the Congo, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of northern Nicaragua. They are people without ICBMs or armies or navies, incapable of doing physical damage to the United States, the 22,000 killed in Nicaragua, for example, are not Russians; they are not Cuban soldiers or advisors; they are not even mostly Sandinistas. A majority are rag-poor peasants, including large numbers of women and children.
Communists? Hardly, since the dead Nicaraguans are predominantly Roman Catholics. Enemies of the United States? That description doesn’t fit either, because the thousands of witnesses who have lived in Nicaraguan villages with the people since 1979 testify that the Nicaraguans are the warmest people on the face of the earth, that they love people from the United States, and they simply cannot understand why our leaders would want to spend $1 billion on a Contra force designed to murder people and wreck the country. John Stockwell, Secret Third World Wars
The connections piled up quickly. Contra planes flew north to the US loaded with cocaine, then returned laden with cash. All under the protective umbrella of the United States Government. My informants were perfectly placed: one worked with the Contra pilots at their base, while another moved easily among the Salvadoran military officials who protected the resupply operation. They fed me the names of Contra pilots. Again and again, those names showed up in the DEA database as documented drug traffickers.
When I pursued the case, my superiors quietly and firmly advised me to move on to other investigations. Celerino Castillo, DEA agent, Powder Burns 1992
I personally witnessed complicity between these two men – Bush and Clinton – in terms of transporting cocaine into the US for the purpose of sale to generate money to fight a war – that war at the time was the conflict in central America involving the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Terry Reed, Air Force Intelligence, interview Alex Jones
Another operation to provide guns for the Contras that was also against the law. In this operation Americans and Israelis provided arms to the Contras and then the same smuggled drugs into the United States. US News report, cited Invisible Empire, 2010
In the heart of Nicaragua, twelve miles from the capital city Managua, is a massive chasm. A volcano called Masaya ... On seeing Masaya the Friars were convinced this was it. Gates of Hell, 2010
The people of Nicaragua were suffering oppression. This made us develop an awareness which eventually led us to commit ourselves to the struggle against the domination of the capitalists of our country in collusion with the US. government, i.e. imperialism. Daniel Ortega
I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for international banking. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests. And I helped make Honduras ripe for American Fruit Companies. General Major Smedley Butler
Nicaragua’s the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Caribbean with Simon Reeve III, BBC 2015
Almost all the people of Nicaragua rose up against the tyrant called Samosa, whose family had been in power for more than forty years put there by the United States marines. That uprising cost fifty thousand lives, almost as many as died for America in Vietnam but out of a population of less than three-million people. John Pilger, Nicaragua – A Nation’s Right to Survive, ITV 1983
This threat, says Reagan, is communist penetration in central America. But the real threat is this: children once denied education under the Samosas now have the same right to school as do children of Britain ... In the past four years two-and-a-half thousand new school have been built. And this is the threat: these middle-aged peasant women can read and write for the first time in their lives. In the last four years illiteracy has been cut to less than ten per cent of the population. And this is the threat: polio has been wiped out. Infant mortality has been cut by a third. Serious malnutrition has been dramatically reduced. The National Health Service has been established in spite of meagre resources. And this is the threat: open roads, freedom of movement, in a region of turmoil there is no turmoil, no threat from within. ibid.
By 1933 Sandino’s mad little army had defeated the marines driving them from Nicaragua. A lesson from history that is apparently overlooked today. ibid.
In addition to the threat from outside, the Nicaraguans face fifteen thousand of these troops, the Contra. Heavily armed by the Americans and operating a hit-and-run war from Honduras. This is effectively a CIA private army ... ibid.
How impoverished, how helpless, does a country have to be before it’s no longer seen as a threat by the United States? ibid.
I reported America’s war against Nicaragua, which had the temerity to overthrow a Washington-backed dictator, Somoza. The CIA attacked Nicaragua with death squads, known as the Contra. Why did Washington attack such tiny countries? Because the weaker they are, the greater the threat. People who can free themselves against all the odds are sure to inspire others. John Pilger, The War on Democracy, 2007
Since the early 1980s the CIA had been interfering in the civil war in Nicaragua. The CIA were funding the right-wing Contra guerrillas in the fight against the left-wing Sandinista government. But in 1983 the American Congress voted to cut off funding for this war. The CIA was brought in to find a secret way to get these funds to the Contras in Nicaragua. Secrets of the CIA, Sky One 2006
The US government, the military and with some help from the CIA, started selling arms to Iran illegally and using some of the profits from those exorbitant sales to fund the Contra wars. Peter Kornbluh, author Bay of Pigs Declassified
The issue is that the United States has no right to invade and humiliate a small country. Augusto Sandino
That guy [Somoza] may be a son of a bitch but he’s our son of a bitch. F D Roosevelt
Now that’s [Somoza] the kind of anti-communist we like to see down there. Richard Nixon
I will tell you right now, Council and all the members here gathered, that I misled the Congress. Colonel Oliver North, testimony to Iran-Contra hearings
And I still to this day, Counsel, don’t see anything wrong with taking the Ayatollah’s money and sending it to support the Nicaraguan freedom fighters. ibid.
I’ve spoken recently of the freedom fighters of Nicaragua. You know the truth about them. You know who they’re fighting and why. They are the moral equal of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French Resistance. We cannot turn away from them, for the struggle here is not right versus left; it is right versus wrong. Ronald Reagan