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Saw it today, it plays very fast and loose with history.
You have your typical 'rogue CIA' in Schafer and rotten apple in Seal - reality: this was a comprehensive operation straight out of the NSC organized by the so called 'secret team' using many veterans of Air America.
'Communist incursion' - reality: for decades Central America has been ruled by US backed dictatorships, by the late 1970s many people in these countries were resisting this, they were nationalists who wanted independence, to use their nations resources and wealth to end their poverty rather than send it abroad to foreign corporations and fund the lavish lifestyles of a ruling elite. In Washingtonese this is described as communism. Brutal counter insurgencies were fought across the region, 200,000 alone were killed in Guatemala, horrendous massacres like El Mozote in El Salvador were committed, by special forces trained at the School of the Americas at Fort Bragg, Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero and six Jesuit priests were assassinated and nuns were raped - Jean Kirkpatrick tried to blame the nuns btw.
But the worst offender was Nicaragua: they successfully defied Washington by overthrowing the three generation Somoza family dictatorship. Somoza once quipped that Nicaraguans do not need education because you can't teach cattle. Nixon once said of Somoza 'who cares if he's a son of a bitch so long as he's our son of a bitch'.
A full blown war was fought by proxy with the Contras, the Somozas former National Guard and not freedom fighters, armed and supplied by the secret teams pilots, directed by the CIA to attack 'soft targets' - civilian infrastructure and clinics, the arms sent to them wound up being sold by the crooked leadership in Honduras and the money supplied spent on Cadillacs and fur coats while the soldiers subsisted on a bowl of rice a day.
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And the pilots supplying them would fly back with coke, the CIA knew this from the get go as the 1998 Inspector General report discovered a memo from CIA Director William Casey to Attorney General William Smith informing him of the criminal backgrounds of some of the pilots and asking if this could be a problem, the reply back was a no. But neither that nor many pilots past with Air America compared to the Contras being trained by Argentinas intelligence service well known for funding its black operations with drug fundings and aiding the Cocaine Coup in Bolivia - which supplied base material to the Colombian cartels.
As for Seals so-called sting, this came as the administration was looking for evidence of Sandinista wrongdoing and immorality, the man was already facing criminal charges, and claims have been made that the alleged government official seen in the grainy blurry pictures was in fact a double agent. They did get Oliver North hanging Seal out to dry right though.
Nicaragua sued the USA for its aid to the Contras and mining its harbor and the USA was found guilty of "the unlawful use of force for political gain" - the technical definition of terrorism - by the International Court of Justice in 1987, it withdrew and still refuses to recognize it to this day and vetoed UN resolution calling on all members to adhere to internal law.
Arms to Iran was just one of the sources of funding the Contras, they got donations from all their friendly dictators including 10 million from the Sultan of Brunai that Oliver North lost when he mixed up the Swiss bank account numbers, domestic far rightwingers like the Coors, evangelicals who they derisively called 'the blue rinse brigade', and of the over 50 million Richard Secord made selling arms to Iran only about 2 million got sent.
When he was asked in Congress why he sent so little to a cause he believed in he explained he wasn't running a charity. The Contra leadership weren't the only corrupt ones.
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ll of this was going on because aiding the Contras was illegal, the Boland Amendment prohibited supporting them. The Executive Office violated the Constitution, I don't recall this being mentioned in the film.
People like Seal get focused on, and Iran Contra gets focused on, to distract from the institutional policies that are at work, to distract from the whole region being attacked.
To say these are just a few bad apples that went too far but we are otherwise all good and these are bad guys who we got misled by in our noble but naive endeavor.
I would recommend reading Alfred W. McCoys book The Politics of Heroin, William Blums book Killing Hope, Holly Sklars book Washingtons War on Nicaragua, and Bob Parrys book Lost History.
John Kerry still had a spine back in the '80s and did a very good investigation titled The Kerry Report that is worth a read, as is the 1998 CIA Inspector General report.
The PBS Frontline documentary Guns, Drugs, and the CIA is also a good source. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpoahXzt-lM
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Thanks for this summation. Fascinating stuff.
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>>87125069
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>>87125157
So how was the movie itself overall?
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Great summary.
More work of American imperialism - this one is probably directly funded by the CIA like Zero Dark Thirty was.
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