Feingold Blocks Bill to Honor Reagan

...a liberal in a conservative industry.

War Crimes and Double Standards
(of Ronald Reagan and the press)
by Robert Parry

The United States invites the charge of hypocrisy when it accuses "enemy leaders" of war crimes, while it turns a blind eye to equally horrific slaughters committed by allies, sometimes guided and protected by the U.S. government.

With release of truth commission reports in several Central American countries - most recently Guatemala - there can no longer be any doubt about the historical reality.

In the 1980s, U.S.-backed forces committed widespread massacres, political murders and torture. Tens of thousands of civilians died. Many of the dead were children. Soldiers routinely raped women before executing them.
There can be no doubt, too, that President Reagan was an avid supporter of the implicated military forces, that he supplied them with weapons and that he actively sought to discredit human rights investigators and journalists who exposed the crimes.

It is also cleat that the massacres at El Mazote and other villages across El Salvador, the destruction of more than 600 Indian communities in Guatemala, and the torture and "disappearances" of dissidents throughout the region were as horrible as what Slobadan Milosevic's Serb army has done in Kosovo.

But for Milosovic and his henchmen, there is talk of a war crimes tribunal. For Reagan, there are only honors, his name added to National Airport and etched into an international trade center, even a congressional plan to carve his visage into Mount Rushmore.

In the apt phrase of New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner, the 1980s were a time of "weakness and deceit." Yet, the continuing blindness to crimes against humanity in Central America in the 1980s has brought that weakness and deceit into and through the 1990s, now as a permanent trait of Washington's political class.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/WarCrimes_Reagan_iF.html