Read Contra Terror by Reed Brodie [1], former assistant Attorney General of New York State. Read The Contras by Dieter Eich. [4] Read With the Contras by Christopher Dickey. [2] This is a main-line journalist, down there on a grant with the Council on Foreign Relations, a slightly to the right of the middle of the road organization. He writes a book that sets a pox on both your houses, and then he accounts about going in on patrol with the contras, and describes their activities. Read Witness for Peace: What We have Seen and Heard. Read the Lawyer's Commission on Human Rights. Read The Violations of War on Both Sides by the Americas Watch. [15] And there are many, many more documentations of details, of names, of the incidents that have happened.

We claim the justification for this is the arms that are flowing from Nicaragua to El Salvador, and yet in 5 years of this activity, there is no evidence of any arms flowing from Nicaragua into El Salvador.

We launched a campaign to discredit their elections. International observer teams said these were the fairest elections they have witnessed in Central America in many years. We said they were fraudulent, they were rigged, because it was a totalitarian system. Instead we said, the elections that were held in El Salvador were models of democracy to be copied elsewhere in the world. And then the truth came out about that one. And we learned that the CIA had spent 2.2 million dollars to make sure that their choice of candidates - Duarte - would win. They did everything, we're told, by one of their spokesmen, indirectly, but stuff the ballot boxes....

I'll make a footnote that when I speak out, he [Senator Jesse Helmes] calls me a traitor, but when something happens he doesn't like, he doesn't hesitate to go public and reveal the secrets and embarrass the U.S.

We claim the Sandinistas are smuggling drugs as a technique to finance their revolution. This doesn't make sense. We're at war with them, we're dying to catch them getting arms from the Soviet Union, flying things back and forth to Cuba. We have airplanes and picket ships watching everything that flies out of that country, and into it. How are they going to have a steady flow of drug-smuggling planes into the U.S.? Not likely! However, there are Nicaraguans, on these bases in Honduras, that have planes flying into CIA training camps in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, several times a week.

Now, obviously i'm not going to stand in front of you and say that the CIA might be involved in drug trafficking, am I? READ THE BOOK. Read The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. For 20 years the CIA was helping the Kuomantang to finance itself and then to get rich smuggling heroin. When we took over from the French in 1954 their intelligence service had been financing itself by smuggling the heroin out of Laos. We replaced them - we put Air America, the CIA subsidiary - it would fly in with crates marked humanitarian aid, which were arms, and it would fly back out with heroin. And the first target, market, of this heroin was the U.S. GI's in Vietnam. If anybody in Nicaragua is smuggling drugs, it's the contras. Now i've been saying that since the state department started waving this red herring around a couple of years ago, and the other day you notice President Reagan said that the Nicaraguans, the Sandinistas, were smuggling drugs, and the DEA said, `it ain't true, the contras are smuggling drugs'.

We claim the Sandinistas are responsible for the terrorism that's happening anywhere in the world. `The country club of terrorism' we call it. There's an incident in Rome, and Ed Meese goes on television and says, `that country club in Nicaragua is training terrorists'. We blame the Sandinistas for the misery that exists in Nicaragua today, and there is misery, because the world's richest nation has set out to create conditions of misery, and obviously we're bound to have some effect. The misery is not the fault of the Sandinistas, it's the result of our destabilization program. And despite that, and despite some grumbling in the country, the Sandinistas in their elections got a much higher percentage of the vote than President Reagan did, who's supposed to be so popular in this country. And all observers are saying that people are still hanging together, with the Sandinistas.


And that's what we've accomplished now. They've had to get Soviet aid to defend themselves from the attack from the world's richest country, and now we can stand up to the American people and say, `see? they have all the Soviet aid'. Make no doubt of it, it's the game plan of the Reagan Administration to have a war in Nicaragua, they have been working on this since 1981, they have been stopped by the will of the American people so far, but they're working harder than ever to engineer their war there.

Now, CIA destabilizations are nothing new, they didn't begin with Nicaragua. We've done it before, once or twice. Like the Church committee, investigating CIA covert action in 1975, found that we had run several hundred a year, and we'd been in the business of running covert actions, the CIA has, for 4 decades. You're talking about 10 to 20 thousand covert actions.

CIA apologists leap up and say, `well, most of these things are not so bloody'. And that's true. You're giving a politician some money so he'll throw his party in this direction or that one, or make false speeches on your behalf, or something like that. It may be non-violent, but it's still illegal intervention in other countries' affairs, raising the question of whether or not we are going to have a
world in which law, rules of behaviour, are respected, or is it going to be a world of bullies, where the strongest can violate and brutalize the weakest, and ignore the laws?

But many of these things are very bloody indeed, and we know a lot about a lot of them. Investigations by the Congress, testimony by CIA directors, testimony by CIA case officers, books written by CIA case officers, documents gotten out of the government under the freedom of information act, books that are written by by pulitzer-prize-winning journalists who've documented their cases. And you can go and read from these things, classic CIA operations that we know about, some of them very bloody indeed. Guatemala 1954, Brazil, Guyana, Chile, the Congo, Iran, Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Equador, Uruguay - the CIA organized the overthrow of constitutional democracies. Read the book Covert Action: 35 years of Deception by the journalist Godswood. [6]

Remember the Henry Kissinger quote before the Congress when he was being grilled to explain what they had done to overthrow the democratic government in Chile, in which the President, Salvador Allende had been killed. And he said, `The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves'.

We had covert actions against China, very much like what we're doing against Nicaragua today, that led us directly into the Korean war, where we fought China in Korea. We had a long covert action in Vietnam, very much like the one that we're running in Nicaragua today, that tracked us directly into the Vietnam war. Read the book, The Hidden History of the Korean War by I. F. Stone. [14] Read Deadly Deceits by Ralph McGehee [9] for the Vietnam story. In Thailand, the Congo, Laos, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Honduras, the CIA put together large standing armies. In Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, the Congo, Iran, Nicaragua, and Sri Lanka, the CIA armed and encouraged ethnic minorities to rise up and fight. The first thing we began doing in Nicaragua, 1981 was to fund an element of the Mesquite indians, to give them money and training and arms, so they could rise up and fight against the government in Managua. In El Salvador, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Uganda and the Congo, the CIA helped form and train the death
squads.