posted on March 27, 2001 01:38:37 AM new
again. In a resurrection of Reagan's deceptive and manipulative policy actions in Latin America, Dumbya is about to bring back the players.
excerpts form link:
While tens of thousands of Nicaraguans were fighting and dying in the war, back in Washington an obscure State Department official named Otto Reich was helping the anti-Sandinista cause. Reich’s Office of Public Diplomacy ran a covert propaganda campaign, manipulating the media and U.S. public opinion, to promote American support for the Contras. Meanwhile, next door to Nicaragua, in Honduras, U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte routinely hid human rights violations from the U.S. Congress to ensure support for the Contras, the Baltimore Sun reported in a recent article.
Today President George W. Bush is considering Reich for the position of assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere. From that post he would oversee relations with Central American nations, among others. And Bush recently nominated Negroponte as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Both Reich and Negroponte came to notoriety in the 1980s during the covert wars in Central America -- the era of the Iran-Contra scandal. The Reagan administration feared that impoverished countries like Nicaragua and El Salvador were dominos which could topple one after the other, falling under
communist influence like Cuba. Though Reich and Negroponte may have believed this, their blatant disregard for democratic principles raises many questions about their qualifications for holding more powerful positions as representatives of the United States.
"We would be concerned that such nominations would seem to imply a belligerent and paternalistic attitude towards Latin America such as Reagan had in the 1980s when tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people died because of U.S. policies in the region,"
posted on March 27, 2001 07:19:15 AM new
I see that we have one advantage over the regan Era: the Internet. While the Conservative Republicans are controlling the media's content, the Internet allows US the free exchange of information. With messageboards and e-mail rolls, web sites are being created on a daily basis to fight the propaganda war. This is the one thing that will worry the Bush Administration the most: what information is out there that ordinary citizens have access to that is not under their control? So, let's keep the links comming, the serious replys continued, and a renewed effort to promote the notion that the truth cannot be surpressed forever.
posted on March 27, 2001 04:44:36 PM newgs4 I've heard a lot about the filtering and suppression that goes on in China (and France!) with the Internet. It's just as bad in certain other totalitarian countries. I know that soon enough the Internet will need "policing" of web site's contents; starting first with the old shoe-in-the-door excuse of SEX, and then will come political restrictions! But until then, let's give Republican Voters the heartburn that they deserve by bringing up all the wrong-doings of their leaders everyday!
posted on March 27, 2001 08:37:48 PM new
"It's important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It's not only life of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet."—Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000
