A~when they dont obey.
monkeyspacedLux
Illegal Payments to the Contras
In the Central American nation of Nicaragua , a war was raging. An army of guerrillas was engaged in a struggle to overthrow the Communist regime which had recently come to power. The Reagan administration supported the revolutionary force, known as the Contras, in their bid to overthrow the Sandinistas and restore a pro-American government to Nicaragua.Unfortunately, the Congress felt differently. Much differently. So differently, in fact, that it passed a set of laws making it a crime to give aid to the Contras. In doing so, the U.S. government had forbidden itself from furnishing the Contras with money or supplies of any kind.
The White House was suddenly facing a crisis. They weren't allowed to send money. But even if they were, where would they get it? During a June 1984 meeting of the National Security Planning Group, the President and his closest advisors weighed their options:
KIRKPATRICK :If we can't get the money for the anti-Sandinistas, then we have to make the maximum effort to find the money elsewhere.
SCHULTZ : I would like to get the money for the Contras also, but ... Jim Baker said that if we go out and try to get the money from third countries, it is an impeachable offense.
CASEY : Jim Baker said that if we try to get money from third countries without notifying the oversight committees it could be a problem.
SCHULTZ : Baker's argument is that the U.S. government may raise and spend funds only through an appropriation of the Congress.
PRESIDENT REAGAN : We must obtain the funds to help these freedom fighters.
VICE PRESIDENT BUSH :The only problem that might come up is if the United States were to promise to give these third parties something in return, so that some people could interpret this as some kind of an exchange.
McFARLANE : I certainly hope none of this discussion will be made public in any way.
PRESIDENT REAGAN : If such a story gets out, we'll all be hanging by our thumbs in front of the White House until we find out who did it.
It didn't take long for somebody to hit on the idea of soliciting donations from private individuals. They set up a front organization and issued newspaper ads urging Americans to contribute $16 a month to sponsor a Nicaraguan rebel. The poster boy -- a Contra soldier with the highly dubious name "Charley" -- appealed simultaneously to both our noblest ideals (as well as our own sense of self preservation) when he wrote:
There is no "country" called Nicaragua. Only a nation of people living under a totalitarian regime funded by Cuba and the Soviet Union.
Aren't you as Americans, committed to governments of the people, by the people, and for the people? Isn't that what you fought for just over 200 years ago?
In America you have so much. We have nothing. Our very future and the future of the democratic world is at stake.
Please help me and my fellow patriots. We haven't got long.
Vaya con Dios,
Charley
But despite the efforts of the White House PR machine, the Contras increasingly appeared to be a particularly ruthless and bloodthirsty bunch. Stories of atrocities against civilian noncombatants certainly didn't help. In the words of human rights group Americas Watch, "the Contras systematically engage in violent abuses ... so prevalent that these may be said to be their principle means of waging war." Another NGO compiled a year's worth of Contra atrocities, which included murder, rape, torture, maiming children, cutting off arms, cutting out tongues, gouging out eyes, castration, bayoneting pregnant women in the stomach, and amputating genitals.
An eyewitness to a Contra raid in Jinotega province said:
"Rosa had her breasts cut off. Then they cut into her chest and took out her heart. The men had their arms broken, their testicles cut off and their eyes poked out. They were killed by slitting their throats and pulling the tongue out through the slit."
And then there were the CIA manuals. The Central Intelligence Agency printed and distributed two booklets to the Contras. One was a 16-page comic book depicting techniques for sabotaging the Sandinista government from within, mostly through vandalism and demolition. It was essentially a course in monkeywrenching.
The other tract was a pamphlet entitled Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare. It was basically a how-to manual for mounting a covert insurgency. One particularly chilling passage described the assassination of government officials:
Selective Use of Violence for Propagandistic Effects
It is possible to neutralize carefully selected and planned targets, such as court judges, mesta judges, police and State Security officials, CDS chiefs, etc. For psychological purposes it is necessary to gather together the population affected, so that they will be present, take part in the act, and formulate accusations against the oppressor.
When asked in November 1984 to clarify this passage from the manual, President Reagan claimed that the problem was just a misunderstanding which stemmed from a simple mistranslation:
PRESIDENT REAGAN : [T]here was nothing in that manual that had anything to do with assassinations or anything of that kind.
[...]
REPORTER :Didn't the manual say "neutralize?" And can't that be construed as meaning "assassination?"
PRESIDENT REAGAN : I suppose you could construe it any number of -- several ways. But in the context in which it was recommended -- actually, that was not the choice, the original choice of the word. The real word was remove, meaning: "remove from office." If you came into a village or town, remove from office representatives of the Sandinista government. When they translated it into the Spanish, they translated it "neutralize" instead of "remove." But the meaning still remains the same.
REPORTER :Well, how would you go about doing that without violence and force?
PRESIDENT REAGAN : No. You just say to the fellow that's sitting there in the office: "You're not in the office anymore.''
Then the press corps broke into laughter. Literally. Which might be the reason nobody asked Reagan why this astonishingly polite technique would be listed under the heading "Selective Use of Violence for Propagandistic Effects." They just let it go. Why spoil the mood?