THE REAGAN YEARS : DEATH SQUADS FOR
DEMOCRACY
The Soviet economy also hit the skids in the late 1970s, beginning a sustained period of stagnation and decline that only worsened when oil prices collapsed in 1982. Military expenditures, which absorbed almost a quarter of the gross domestic product [GDP] , were further weakening the economy. Reagan was determined to exploit the situation. At his first press conference, on January 29,1981, he unleashed an anti-Communist diatribe that reversed almost two decades of progress in easing Cold War tensions :
Well, so far detente's been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims . . . the promotion of world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state, whichever you want to use . . . they,at the same time, have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that, and that is moral, not immoral, and we operate on a different set of standards.
The CIA, which had largely been kept in check by Carter, played a major role in Reagan's new anti-Communist crusade. CIA analysts had long prided themselves on professionalism and distance from the operations side of the Agency. That would not fly with the Reagan team. The assault that began via Bush's Team B reached fruition under Casey. Administration hard-liners wanted intelligence that supported their view of a dangerous, hostile, and expansion-minded Soviet Union regardless of how far such a perception departed from reality. Casey, a multibillionaire Wall Street lawyer and devout Irish Catholic, had come to the CIA, according to his deputy Robert Gates, "to wage war against the SovietUnion." According to Gates, "the Reaganites saw their arrival as a hostile takeover." Casey had read Claire Sterling's The Terror Network and was convinced that the Soviet Union was the front of all international terrorism. According to Melvyn Goodman, head of the CIA's office for Soviet analysis, "Several of us met with Casey to try to tell the director that much of Sterling's so-called evidence was in fact CIA 'black propaganda,' anticommunist allegations planted in the European press." But, he added, "Casey contemptuously noted . . . that he 'learned more from Sterling than from ' " all of them. Others who touted the Sterling line included Haig, Paul Wolfowitz, State Department consultant Michael Ledeen, and State Department official Robert "Bud" McFarlane. CIA experts, however, knew that the Soviets actually discouraged terrorism.
Casey and Gates began a purge of analysts who refused to knuckle under. If their reports failed to support the administration line, Casey just wrote his own conclusions. Goodman, wh served as a senior Soviet analyst from 1966 to 1986, observed, "The CIA caricature of a Soviet octopus whose tentacles reached the world over supported the administration's view of the 'Evil Empire'." Goodman blamed "the fact that the CIA missed the most important historical development in its history --- the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union itself" --- largely on "the culture and process that Gates established in his directorate."
While CIA intelligence was being dismantled, operations were running amok. Colonel John Waghelstein, who headed the U.S military advisory team in El Salvador, stated, "Real counterinsurgency techniques are a step toward the primitive." That description could be applied to the efforts of U.S.-backed and trained government forces in El Salvador and Guatemala and to the U.S.-run insurgency in Nicaragua. These "freedom fighters," as Reagan called them, routinely raped, castrated, mutilated, decapitated, and dismembered their victims." To harden Guatemalan soldiers to the point where they were able to kill some 100,000 Mayan peasants between 1981 and 1983, army recruits were beaten, degraded, even submerged in sewage, and forced to remain covered in shit for extended periods of time. Broken and dehumanized, they carried out brutal acts. In December 1982, in the village of Dos Erres, the army slaughtered over 160 people, swinging the 65 child victims by their feet and smashing their heads against the rocks. Just the day before, Ronald Reagan had visited Honduras as part of a tour of Latin America and complained that Guatemalan president, General Efrain Rios Montt, a born-again evangelical Christian who had recently seized power in a military coup, had received a "bum rap," assuring reporters that the dictator was "totally committed to democracy." Reagan called him "a man of great personal integrity and commitment." In fact, he said that in light of Guatemala's improved human rights record, he was considering restoring military aid, which Carter had cut off in 1977 because of the government's deplorable human rights record. Reagan was apparently comfortable with Rios Montt's explanation that "we have no scorched-earth policy. We have a policy of scorched communists." U.S. Ambassador Frederic Chapin announced, "The killings have stopped . . . The Guatemalan government has come out of the darkness and into the light."
Well, so far detente's been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims . . . the promotion of world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state, whichever you want to use . . . they,at the same time, have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that, and that is moral, not immoral, and we operate on a different set of standards.
The CIA, which had largely been kept in check by Carter, played a major role in Reagan's new anti-Communist crusade. CIA analysts had long prided themselves on professionalism and distance from the operations side of the Agency. That would not fly with the Reagan team. The assault that began via Bush's Team B reached fruition under Casey. Administration hard-liners wanted intelligence that supported their view of a dangerous, hostile, and expansion-minded Soviet Union regardless of how far such a perception departed from reality. Casey, a multibillionaire Wall Street lawyer and devout Irish Catholic, had come to the CIA, according to his deputy Robert Gates, "to wage war against the SovietUnion." According to Gates, "the Reaganites saw their arrival as a hostile takeover." Casey had read Claire Sterling's The Terror Network and was convinced that the Soviet Union was the front of all international terrorism. According to Melvyn Goodman, head of the CIA's office for Soviet analysis, "Several of us met with Casey to try to tell the director that much of Sterling's so-called evidence was in fact CIA 'black propaganda,' anticommunist allegations planted in the European press." But, he added, "Casey contemptuously noted . . . that he 'learned more from Sterling than from ' " all of them. Others who touted the Sterling line included Haig, Paul Wolfowitz, State Department consultant Michael Ledeen, and State Department official Robert "Bud" McFarlane. CIA experts, however, knew that the Soviets actually discouraged terrorism.
Casey and Gates began a purge of analysts who refused to knuckle under. If their reports failed to support the administration line, Casey just wrote his own conclusions. Goodman, wh served as a senior Soviet analyst from 1966 to 1986, observed, "The CIA caricature of a Soviet octopus whose tentacles reached the world over supported the administration's view of the 'Evil Empire'." Goodman blamed "the fact that the CIA missed the most important historical development in its history --- the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union itself" --- largely on "the culture and process that Gates established in his directorate."
While CIA intelligence was being dismantled, operations were running amok. Colonel John Waghelstein, who headed the U.S military advisory team in El Salvador, stated, "Real counterinsurgency techniques are a step toward the primitive." That description could be applied to the efforts of U.S.-backed and trained government forces in El Salvador and Guatemala and to the U.S.-run insurgency in Nicaragua. These "freedom fighters," as Reagan called them, routinely raped, castrated, mutilated, decapitated, and dismembered their victims." To harden Guatemalan soldiers to the point where they were able to kill some 100,000 Mayan peasants between 1981 and 1983, army recruits were beaten, degraded, even submerged in sewage, and forced to remain covered in shit for extended periods of time. Broken and dehumanized, they carried out brutal acts. In December 1982, in the village of Dos Erres, the army slaughtered over 160 people, swinging the 65 child victims by their feet and smashing their heads against the rocks. Just the day before, Ronald Reagan had visited Honduras as part of a tour of Latin America and complained that Guatemalan president, General Efrain Rios Montt, a born-again evangelical Christian who had recently seized power in a military coup, had received a "bum rap," assuring reporters that the dictator was "totally committed to democracy." Reagan called him "a man of great personal integrity and commitment." In fact, he said that in light of Guatemala's improved human rights record, he was considering restoring military aid, which Carter had cut off in 1977 because of the government's deplorable human rights record. Reagan was apparently comfortable with Rios Montt's explanation that "we have no scorched-earth policy. We have a policy of scorched communists." U.S. Ambassador Frederic Chapin announced, "The killings have stopped . . . The Guatemalan government has come out of the darkness and into the light."
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