"Let's see what the Contras and the Americans were doing to Nicaragua in 1986" "The CIA Had Co-opted Several Hundred Journalists to Pump Its False Stories into Our Press" (Quotes in thread)

From "Alternative Views" TV program

"Americans go to Nicaragua, they're welcome there, they go by the dozens of thousands to witness, to document these things. Eight thousand people killed, all civilians, killed. Mostly women and children. And this is a deliberate technique of the CIA, it's part of crippling a country, it's part of forcing it, traumatizing it, paralyzing it, until it grinds to a halt, until you've broken it completely, and then, as Reagan would dream, you can put in the marines eventually, and people will welcome the marines as they hand out care packages from their trucks because they're so crushed and so desperate that anything would make them feel better."

"They're trying to create conditions in Nicaragua, they have in northern Nicaragua for five years, where the farmer can't get his produce to market, where children can't go to school, where the government administration of the country grinds to a halt, where hospitals are treating wounded people instead of sick people where international capital is is scared off, as john was saying so very very well. the techniques are raw terrorism."

"The CIA today is running 50 covert actions, this came out in one of the oversight committee's debates, destabilizing almost one-third of the countries in the world today. That cannot make this world a calmer more peaceful safer place for anybody to live in it. Nicaragua's only the most famous one."

"The Sandinistas searched for an independent position in foreign relations and pluralism at home. They sought to break their economic dependency on north American markets and US transnational corporations, despite tremendous obstacles such goals have been achieved though to varying degrees. Campaigns in health and literacy carried out with enthusiastic popular support have won international praise. A unique land reform plan was developed and implemented winning support even from the US agency for international development in 1981, and elections were held last November. But the heavy weight of external aggression has taken its toll. the country is now focusing much of its energies on defense in order to defeat the Contras."

"By 1984 the united states congress had begun to grow weary of supporting the Contras. Thousands of civilians had been killed and the contras were going nowhere there were the reports of the CIA mining of Nicaragua's harbors and a CIA printed manual containing instructions in assassination and terrorism was revealed. Congressional leaders began to feel that the CIA had gone astray and aid to the Contras was temporarily halted by Congress. However, Contra aid continued to flow from unofficial sources."

"What we've been able to tell there's three routes--first of all, during the time when the countries were getting the official government pay from the united states, it was vastly in excess of the amount of money that had been appropriated--but the three routes, that have since been supposedly shut off, appear to be: One, selling American military equipment at fire sale prices, at unbelievably cheap prices to shell companies that turn out to be companies that are owned by the CIA, which in turn then give it to the Congress. That's one way. The second way is laundering the money through El Salvador, Honduras, and Israel, as we reported in the New York Times about on January 12th. The third way is leaving enormous amounts of military supplies around in Honduras after these incredible war games and then everybody goes out for a beer and the Contras come in and load up a few trucks and drive away and nobody saw it happen."