Jimmy Carter sent on A Hostage Run

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter left Pyongyang Friday after securing the release of an American who had been detained for trespassing, the North's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported.

Carter flew to the North Korean capital three days ago on what the U.S. government called "a private humanitarian mission" and gained a special pardon for Aijalon Mahli Gomes, who was sentenced in May to eight years of labor and fined about US$700,000 for illegal entry in January.

The KCNA said in its English dispatch that Carter's trip "provided a favorable occasion of deepening the understanding and building confidence between the two countries."

The report said Carter apologized to Kim Yong-nam, the president of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly, for Gomes' actions "on behalf of the government of the U.S." and requested his release.

"After receiving a report on the request made by the U.S. government and Carter, (North Korean leader) Kim Jong-il issued an order of the chairman of the DPRK National Defense Commission on granting amnesty to Gomes," the report said, referring to the North by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. "The measure taken by the DPRK to set free the illegal entrant is a manifestation of its humanitarianism and peace-loving policy."

According to the report, Kim Yong-nam, nominal head of state, reiterated the North's willingness "for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and the resumption of the six-party talks," referring to the long-stalled multilateral forum aimed at ending the North's nuclear weapons programs.

It didn't elaborate on how Carter responded to the North Korean position. North Korea and China, its last major ally, have been pushing to reopen the six-party talks, which started in 2003 but have been on hold since late 2008 due to a North Korean boycott

Did former U.S. President Jimmy Carter unwittingly play a part in an elaborate diversionary ploy by the reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to conceal his trip to China early Thursday morning? Carter arrived in the North Korean capital on Wednesday to win the release of an American held captive in the North, only to find his host on the way out.

It is unclear whether the two met before Kim left in his armored train. The North's official Korean Central News Agency at 9 p.m. Wednesday said Carter, who arrived at 4.30 p.m., attended a dinner hosted by North Korea's official No. 2 leader Kim Yong-nam and the North's chief envoy to the six-party nuclear talks Kim Kye-gwan. Meanwhile a train carrying Kim Jong-il crossed the border into China shortly after midnight, according to a senior South Korean source.

That makes it unlikely Kim had time to see Carter, who had sounded out the possibility of a meeting with the North Korean leader through his own channels. Pyongyang had insisted on a visit from a "senior official" if it is to release the captive American, implicitly dangling the prospect of talks in front of the U.S. But all that may have been either an elaborate smoke screen to mask Kim's plan to visit China, or a pointed snub after the U.S. tightened sanctions against the North over its sinking of the South Korean Navy corvette Cheonan

A convenient escape for most Americans. The "I don't dwell on the past" nonsense comes right to the fore unless it's to discuss some other country's sordid past.

That's where you're wrong, CR. The kid glove treatment given Nixon -- he should have done a lengthy jail sentence just for the domestic stuff, the international war crimes, a life sentence or a meeting with a rope -- have simply encouraged other prezes to extend the crimes without fear of punishment.

You didn't answer my question. Do you, a pretty straight moral conservative, from your accounts, want to associate with some of the worst war criminals since WWII?

@CoastalRat,
Quote:

I accept that you believe Bush, Bush and Reagan committed crimes. I'm not surprised. I believe Clinton committed crimes. Fact is, I am on firmer ground in this respect than you are base on the legal proceedings against Clinton,



I don't understand what you mean in the underlined part, CR. It seems there might be a typo/typos. Could you explain, please?

Quote:

Carter arrived in the North Korean capital on Wednesday to win the release of an American held captive in the North, only to find his host on the way out.

http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2010/08/27/2010082700642.html

In actual fact he likely departed at about the same hour Clinton arrived.

Personally, I don't think many politicians are, blame for which may well be attributable to the Nixon era that I came of age in.

If I must, but only to defend the statement. I'm not about to get into a discussion of the past.

But the last time I checked, Clinton was the only one of the presidents under discussion who faced criminal charges both in the Senate and then later. And before you talk about how he was not found guilty, my point is that he was the only one who faced charges. BB&R were never charged with any crimes, thus my comment that I am on firmer ground than you.

"By the end of his term, 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, had been indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal violations. In terms of number of officials involved, the record of his administration was the worst ever."

1. Lyn Nofziger--White House Press Secretary - Convicted on charges of illegal lobbying of White House in Wedtech scandal. The lobbying would not have been illegal had he not been White House Press Secretary.

2. Michael Deaver, Reagan's Chief of Staff, received three years' probation and was fined one hundred thousand dollars after being convicted for lying to a congressional subcommittee and a federal grand jury about his lobbying activities after leaving the White House. Same as with Lyn Nofziger.

3. James Watt, Reagan's Secretary of the Interior was indicted on 41 felony counts for using connections at the Department of Housing and Urban Development to help his private clients seek federal funds for housing projects in Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Watt conceded that he had received $500,000 from clients who were granted very favorable housing contracts after he had intervened on their behalf. Watt was eventually sentenced to five years in prison and 500 hours of community service.

4. John Poindexter, Reagan's national security advisor, guilty of five criminal counts involving conspiracy to mislead Congress, obstructing congressional inquiries, lying to lawmakers, used "high national security" to mask deceit and wrong-doing...

5. Richard Secord pleaded guilty to a felony charge of lying to Congress over Iran-Contra. Appointed by William Casey to assist Oliver North.

6. Elliott Abrams was appointed by President Reagan in 1985 to head the State Department's Latin American Bureau. He was closely linked with ex-White House aide Lt. Col. Oliver North's covert movement to aid the Contras. Working for North, Abrams coordinated inter-agency support for the contras and helped solicit illegal funding from foreign powers as well as domestic contributors. Abrams agreed to cooperate with Iran-Contra investigators and pled guilty to two charges reduced to misdemeanors. He was sentenced in 1991 to two years probation and 100 hours of community service but was pardoned by President George Bush...

7. Robert C. McFarlane, Reagan's National Security Advisor, pled guilty to four misdemeanors and was sentenced to two years probation and 200 hours of community service. He was also fined $20,000. He received a blanket pardon from President George Bush...

8. Alan D. Fiers was the Chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's Central American Task Force. Fiers pled guilty in 1991 to two counts of withholding information from congress about Oliver North's activities and the diversion of Iran arms sale money to aid the Contras. He was sentenced to one year of probation and 100 hours of community service. Alan Fiers received a blanket pardon for his crimes from President Bush...

Thomas G. Clines: convicted of four counts of tax-related offenses for failing to report income from the operations;
Carl R. Channel - Office of Public Diplomacy , partner in International Business- first person convicted in the Iran/Contra scandal, pleaded guilty of one count of defrauding the United States
Richard R. Miller - Partner with Oliver North in IBC, a Office of Public Diplomacy front group, convicted of conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Frank Gomez
13.. Donald Fortier
Clair George was Chief of the CIA's Division of Covert Operations under President Reagan. George was convicted of lying to two congressional committees in 1986. George faced a maximum five year federal prison sentence and a $20,000 fine for each of the two convictions. Jurors cleared George of five other charges including two counts of lying to a federal grand jury. Clair George received a blanket pardon for his crimes from President George Bush...
Rita Lavelle was indicted, tried and convicted of lying to Congress and served three months of a six-month prison sentence.
Philip Winn - Assistant HUD Secretary. Pleaded guilty to one count of scheming to give illegal gratuities.
Thomas Demery - Assistand HUD Secretary - pleaded guilty to steering HUD subsidies to politically connected donors.
Deborah Gore Dean - executive assistant to Samuel Pierce - indicted on thirteen counts, three counts of conspiracy, one count of accepting an illegal gratuity, four counts of perjury, and five counts of concealing articles. She was convicted on twelve accounts. She appealed and prevailed on several accounts but the convictions for conspiracy remained.
Catalina Villaponda - Former US Treasurer
Joseph A. Strauss - Accepting kickbacks from developers
Oliver North - He was indicted on sixteen felony counts and on May 4, 1989, he was convicted of three: accepting an illegal gratuity, aiding and abetting in the obstruction of a congressional inquiry, and destruction of documents (by his secretary, Fawn Hall, on his instructions). He was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell on July 5, 1989, to a three-year suspended prison term, two years probation, $150,000 in fines, and 1,200 hours community service. His conviction was later overturned.


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/10/17/194133/16

@CoastalRat,
Quote:

If I must, but only to defend the statement. I'm not about to get into a discussion of the past.

Now that's a new one. Is it open for other Americans to use to divert attention away from the terrorism, the war crimes, the mass murder, etc?

You have this odd notion that you're on firmer ground because you have no interest in finding out the truth.

On the upside (IMNSHO), is that it also freed the media to report everything. Nothing is off-limits anymore.

Ten signs of an official scandal

...

7) Despite all the hand wringing, the press avoids basic questions that challenge institutional power and not just a few powerful individuals.

8) Even when the proverbial "highest levels" are implicated, a journalistic fog sets in, obscuring trails that could lead to more substantial revelations, or far-reaching solutions.

9) Protracted news coverage makes a big show out of airing certain facts, over and over, but in the end the most powerful and culpable oxen remain ungored.

10) Inevitably, media pundits emphasize that despite the past problems, the system is cleansing itself. "The system works."

Of course, #10 was proven with Clinton; the system works. Then along comes Bush. the system works???

And so it was during the Reagan administration. Mass media seemed oblivious to wrongdoing until the government --via the Meese announcement-- certified that a scandal had occurred. And official disclosures, not aggressive independent reporting, continued to shape the evolution of the Iran-Contra story.

Yes, Reagan took his lumps when he appeared before the press and tried to explain the arms-for-hostages swap. Sam Donaldson went so far as to accuse the president of "duplicity". For a while it seemed that Reagan would be subjected to the kind of probing that ought to be the norm in a democratic society. But with so much at stake, the scandal also triggered a protective impulse within the media. "Nobody wants another Nixon," declared NBC Nightly News commentator John Chancellor. Chigago Times editor James Squires warned his reporters not to repeat the "excesses" of Watergate. And while Washington Post reporters sniffed around for new leads, Katherine Graham chatted with Nancy Reagan to shore up the First lady's spirits.

Olliemania, Olliemania

Unable to muster the resolve for a full-fledged investigative assault, the press began to do the White House damage-control shuffle.

...

During the congressional Iran-contra hearings in the summer of 1987, PBS analyst Elizabeth Drew commented on how ironic it was that people were "searching for a smoking gun in a room filled with smoke."


Unrelaible Sources: A guide to detecting bias in the new media

Martin Lee & Norman Solomon

pg154

I see nothing in your response to indicate war crimes by BB&R.

THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA:

part II

CIA COVERT OPERATIONS IN CENTRAL AMERICA, CIA MANIPULATION OF THE PRESS, CIA EXPERIMENTATION ON THE U.S. PUBLIC

by John Stockwell

a lecture given in October, 1987

By the way, everything I'm sharing with you tonight is in the public record. The 50 covert actions - these are secret, but that has been leaked to us by members of the oversight committee of the Congress. I urge you not to take my word for anything. I'm going to stand here and tell you and give you examples of how our leaders lie. Obviously I could be lying. The only way you can figure it out for yourself is to educate yourselves. The French have a saying, `them that don't do politics will be done'. If you don't fill your mind eagerly with the truth, dig it out from the records, go and see for yourself, then your mind remains blank and your adrenaline pumps, and you can be mobilized and excited to do things that are not in your interest to do....

Nicaragua is not the biggest covert action, it is the most famous one. Afghanistan is, we spent several hundred million dollars in Afghanistan. We've spent somewhat less than that, but close, in Nicaragua....

[When the U.S. doesn't like a government], they send the CIA in, with its resources and activists, hiring people, hiring agents, to tear apart the social and economic fabric of the country, as a technique for putting pressure on the government, hoping that they can make the government come to the U.S.'s terms, or the government will collapse altogether and they can engineer a coup d'etat, and have the thing wind up with their own choice of people in power.

Now ripping apart the economic and social fabric of course is fairly textbook-ish. What we're talking about is going in and deliberately creating conditions where the farmer can't get his produce to market, where children can't go to school, where women are terrified inside their homes as well as outside their homes, where government administration and programs grind to a complete halt, where the hospitals are treating wounded people instead of sick people, where international capital is scared away and the country goes bankrupt. If you ask the state department today what is their official explanation of the purpose of the Contras, they say it's to attack economic targets, meaning, break up the economy of the country. Of course, they're attacking a lot more.

To destabilize Nicaragua beginning in 1981, we began funding this force of Somoza's ex-national guardsmen, calling them the contras (the counter-revolutionaries). We created this force, it did not exist until we allocated money. We've armed them, put uniforms on their backs, boots on their feet, given them camps in Honduras to live in, medical supplies, doctors, training, leadership, direction, as we've sent them in to de-stabilize Nicaragua. Under our direction they have systematically been blowing up graineries, saw mills, bridges, government offices, schools, health centers. They ambush trucks so the produce can't get to market. They raid farms and villages. The farmer has to carry a gun while he tries to plow, if he can plow at all.

If you want one example of hard proof of the CIA's involvement in this, and their approach to it, dig up `The Sabotage Manual', that they were circulating throughout Nicaragua, a comic-book type of a paper, with visual explanations of what you can do to bring a society to a halt, how you can gum up typewriters, what you can pour in a gas tank to burn up engines, what you can stuff in a sewage to stop up the sewage so it won't work, things you can do to make a society simply cease to function.

Systematically, the contras have been assassinating religious workers, teachers, health workers, elected officials, government administrators. You remember the assassination manual? that surfaced in 1984. It caused such a stir that President Reagan had to address it himself in the presidential debates with Walter Mondale. They use terror. This is a technique that they're using to traumatize the society so that it can't function.

I don't mean to abuse you with verbal violence, but you have to understand what your government and its agents are doing. They go into villages, they haul out families. With the children forced to watch they castrate the father, they peel the skin off his face, they put a grenade in his mouth and pull the pin. With the children forced to watch they gang-rape the mother, and slash her breasts off. And sometimes for variety, they make the parents watch while they do these
things to the children.

This is nobody's propaganda. There have been over 100,000 American witnesses for peace who have gone down there and they have filmed and photographed and witnessed these atrocities immediately after they've happened, and documented 13,000 people killed this way, mostly women and children. These are the activities done by these contras. The contras are the people president Reagan calls `freedom fighters'. He says they're the moral equivalent of our founding fathers. And the whole world gasps at this confession of his family traditions.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Stockwell/StockwellCIA87_2.html

I see nothing in your response to indicate war crimes by BB&R.

However, the money, the millions and millions of dollars we put into this program [helping Central America] inevitably went to the rich, and not to the people of the countries involved. And while we were doing this, while we were trying, at least saying we were trying, to correct the problems of Central and Latin America, the CIA was doing its thing, too. The CIA was in fact forming the police units that are today the death squads in El Salvador. With the leaders on the CIA's payroll, trained by the CIA and the United States.

We had the `public safety program' going throughout Central and Latin America for 26 years, in which we taught them to break up subversion by interrogating people. Interrogation, including torture, the way the CIA taught it. Dan Metrione, the famous exponent of these things, did 7 years in Brazil and 3 in Uruguay, teaching interrogation, teaching torture. He was supposed to be the master of the business, how to apply the right amount of pain, at just the right times, in order to get the response you want from the individual.

They developed a wire. They gave them crank generators, with `U.S. AID' written on the side, so the people even knew where these things came from. They developed a wire that was strong enough to carry the current and fine enough to fit between the teeth, so you could put one wire between the teeth and the other one in or around the genitals and you could crank and submit the individual to the greatest amount of pain, supposedly, that the human body can register.

Now how do you teach torture? Dan Metrione: `I can teach you about torture, but sooner or later you'll have to get involved. You'll have to lay on your hands and try it yourselves.'

.... All they [the guinea pigs, beggars from off the streets] could do was lie there and scream. And when they would collapse, they would bring in doctors and shoot them up with vitamin B and rest them up for the next class. And when they would die, they would mutilate the bodies and throw them out on the streets, to terrify the population so they would be afraid of the police and the government.

And this is what the CIA was teaching them to do. And one of the women who was in this program for 2 years - tortured in Brazil for 2 years - she testified internationally when she eventually got out. She said, `The most horrible thing about it was in fact, that the people doing the torture were not raving psychopaths.' She couldn't break mental contact with them the way you could if they were psychopath. They were very ordinary people....

There's a lesson in all of this. And the lesson is that it isn't only Gestapo maniacs, or KGB maniacs, that do inhuman things to other people, it's people that do inhuman things to other people. And we are responsible for doing these things, on a massive basis, to people of the world today. And we do it in a way that gives us this plausible denial to our own consciences; we create a CIA, a secret police, we give them a vast budget, and we let them go and run these programs in our name, and we pretend like we don't know it's going on, although the information is there for us to know; and we pretend like it's ok because we're fighting some vague communist threat. And we're just as responsible for these 1 to 3 million people we've slaughtered and for all the people we've tortured and made miserable, as the Gestapo was the people that they've slaughtered and killed. Genocide is genocide!

Now we're pouring money into El Salvador. A billion dollars or so. And it's a documented fact that the... 14 families there that own 60% of the country are taking out between 2 to 5 billion dollars - it's called de-capitalization - and putting it in banks in Miami and Switzerland. Mort Halper, in testifying to a committee of the Congress, he suggested we could simplify the whole thing politically just by investing our money directly in the Miami banks in their names and just stay out of El Salvador altogether. And the people would be better off.

Nicaragua. What's happening in Nicaragua today is covert action. It's a classic de-stabilization program. In November 16, 1981, President Reagan allocated 19 million dollars to form an army, a force of contras, they're called, ex-Somoza national guards, the monsters who were doing the torture and terror in Nicaragua that made the Nicaraguan people rise up and throw out the dictator, and throw out the guard. We went back to create an army of these people. We are killing, and killing, and terrorizing people. Not only in Nicaragua but the Congress has leaked to the press - reported in the New York Times, that there are 50 covert actions going around the world today, CIA covert actions going on around the world today.

You have to be asking yourself, why are we destabilizing 50 corners of the troubled world? Why are we about to go to war in Nicaragua, the Central American war? It is the function, I suggest, of the CIA, with its 50 de-stabilization programs going around the world today, to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize the American people to hate, so we will let the establishment spend any amount of money on arms....

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Stockwell/StockwellCIA87_1.html

In November 16, 1981, President Reagan allocated 19 million dollars to form an army,