CONTRA-DRUG SCANDAL: Sen.Kerry's Extremely Brave Act

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Senator Kerry, at 42 years of age, was a freshman senator and Pres.Reagan was serving his second term, as the 40th President of United States of America. Bush Sr., as VP, oversaw the drug policy of the administration.

What hapened with the Sandanistas and drugs-Contra Affair, we all know. But most of us are not aware that it was Senator John F.Kerry, who took a grave risk and exposed this scandal. Obviously, the affair has left a black spot as large as Nicaragua, on Pres.Reagan's legacy. Ollie North was given a pardon by the President. But it was the beginning of Kerry's career as a brave, honest, patriotic and courageous Senator.

I am surprised as to why this news had not been publicised until now by Kerry Campaign. Maybe they have their reasons. Read it all here in the link provided.

Senator Kerry, bravo! It took real guts and you are a hero in many eyes including mine!

Drugs Contra Scandal Exposed by Senator Kerry

Excerpts:-

"| In December 1985, when Brian Barger and I wrote a groundbreaking story for the Associated Press about Nicaraguan Contra rebels smuggling cocaine into the United States, one U.S. senator put his political career on the line to follow up on our disturbing findings. His name was John Kerry.

Yet, over the past year, even as Kerry's heroism as a young Navy officer in Vietnam has become a point of controversy, this act of political courage by a freshman senator has gone virtually unmentioned, even though -- or perhaps because -- it marked Kerry's first challenge to the Bush family.

In early 1986, the 42-year-old Massachusetts Democrat stood almost alone in the U.S. Senate demanding answers about the emerging evidence that CIA-backed Contras were filling their coffers by collaborating with drug traffickers then flooding U.S. borders with cocaine from South America.

Kerry assigned members of his personal Senate staff to pursue the allegations. He also persuaded the Republican majority on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to request information from the Reagan-Bush administration about the alleged Contra drug traffickers.

In taking on the inquiry, Kerry challenged President Ronald Reagan at the height of his power, at a time he was calling the Contras the "moral equals of the Founding Fathers." Kerry's questions represented a particular embarrassment to Vice President George H.W. Bush, whose responsibilities included overseeing U.S. drug-interdiction policies.

Kerry took on the investigation though he didn't have much support within his own party. By 1986, congressional Democrats had little stomach left for challenging the Reagan-Bush Contra war. Not only had Reagan won a historic landslide in 1984, amassing a record 54 million votes, but his conservative allies were targeting individual Democrats viewed as critical of the Contras fighting to oust Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. Most Washington journalists were backing off, too, for fear of getting labeled "Sandinista apologists" or worse.

Kerry's probe infuriated Reagan's White House, which was pushing Congress to restore military funding for the Contras. Some in the administration also saw Kerry's investigation as a threat to the secrecy surrounding the Contra supply operation, which was being run illegally by White House aide Oliver North and members of Bush's vice presidential staff.

Through most of 1986, Kerry's staff inquiry advanced against withering political fire. His investigators interviewed witnesses in Washington, contacted Contra sources in Miami and Costa Rica, and tried to make sense of sometimes convoluted stories of intrigue from the shadowy worlds of covert warfare and the drug trade. "

See the link for full text.

Thanks!

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I heard Kerry mention it briefly the other day in a campaign speech. An article I read right after that indicated he hadn't been talking about it because it is very difficult to get it into a speech given its complexity. How does one turn all of the BCCI and Iran Contra into a sound bite?

I had learned of this a couple of months ago, and had wondered the same thing, especially when Bush was slamming Kerry for not having a record in the Senate..

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squinney, I was not aware that he mentioned the same in a speech. But really, Sen.Kerry has earned my respect, for what I admire most in a politician is to stand up for truth, regardless of the consequences involved.

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Wow - I didn't know that!

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Re: CONTRA-DRUG SCANDAL: Sen.Kerry's Extremely Brave Act

rainforest wrote:

Senator Kerry, at 42 years of age, was a freshman senator and Pres.Reagan was serving his second term, as the 40th President of United States of America. Bush Sr., as VP, oversaw the drug policy of the administration.

What hapened with the Sandanistas and drugs-Contra Affair, we all know. But most of us are not aware that it was Senator John F.Kerry, who took a grave risk and exposed this scandal. Obviously, the affair has left a black spot as large as Nicaragua, on Pres.Reagan's legacy. Ollie North was given a pardon by the President. But it was the beginning of Kerry's career as a brave, honest, patriotic and courageous Senator.

Leaving a communist government in Nicaragua unnecessarily would have been a much bigger black eye.

Now, I am not aware of any official source ever having laid this whole thing out logically for the American people to view or read up on, but it never seemed terribly complicated at the time. Here's the way the whole thing appeared to work:

Democrat wars like VietNam or Kosovo typically are grandiose and typically involve causes which no rational person could justify, with the single large exception of WW-II which was unavoidable.

Ike on the other hand was always at pains to avoid anything like that and, in particular, managed to avoid a repeat of WW-II by emphasizing nuclear weapons and covert activities, which were vastly less expensive. Ike and Reagan were bright enough to play the necessary geopolitical games of the cold war with petty cash and handsfull of profesional soldiers and soldiers of fortune, and not with vast sums of treasure and hundreds of thousands of draftees.

Now, after 35 years of the debilitating expense and danger of the cold war, and after it was abundantly clear that there was no redeeming social value to communism, Reagan made the forthright and bold decision to put an end to communism and the cold war outright and he clearly had to start in our own hemisphere. The miserable democrats, however, insisted on denying him the necessary petty cash to do that in Nicaragua. Reagan obviously told George HW Bush and Ollie North to do whatever was needed to fix that problem, and not to bother telling him (Reagan) whatever they had to do to accomplish that.

Ollie, George HW, and one of George's employees, a certain William J. (Slick) Clinton, who was serving as governor of Arkansas at the time, thereupon established a sort of a circular trade such as had existed in colonial times, with airplanes flying back and forth from the Mena airport in Arkansas to Nicaragua, and cocaine travelling North from Nicaragua, and arms and munitions south TO Nicaragua.

Everybody was happy. Nicaraguans were happy because they were libarated from the lunatic pervert Ortega, Reagan was happy because he got rid of communism in the Americas other than for Castro and he didn't know anything about any illegal activities, democrats in America were happy because they had lots of cheap cocaine to snort, Slick Clinton was happy because he had lots of nice money and cocaine to party with underage girls with in his governor's mansion ('In Arkansas did Bill Clinton a stately pleasure dome decree...') as Cooleridge would have put it...

George HW clearly figured that whatever damage all of this caused could be repaired later and was preferable to another 40 years of the cold war which was the alternative, but the real basic problem in the whole picture was the democrats in congress who refused to let Reagan have the money for the Nicaraguan operations in the first place.

Kerry claiming to have exposed anything nefarious in this picture is just more grandiosity and posturing on his part. Kerry is no hero and the whole world pretty much knows what he's about by now.

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Your synopsis is rather skewed, missing facts and making up others. The full report can be read online.

http://fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/

http://www.webcom.com/pinknoiz/covert/contracoke.html

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Yes Gunga. We know what he is about. He is about exposing one of the darker chapters of American terrorism abroad. And also exposing the true horrors of Vietnam.

Pity he wasn't around to expose America's machinations in Chile when you helped overthrow yet another duly elected governemnt - joining Iran, the Congo - and how many others?

Ortega was so hated by the Nicaraguans, by the way, that he scored 42% of th evote in 2001.

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Here - according to Encyclopaedia Brittanica, is the terrible Sandinista government - warts, for sure - but worthy of the outrageous horror perpetrated upon it by US backed criminals? I think not.

Named for César Augusto Sandino, a hero of Nicaraguan resistance to U.S. military occupation (1927?33), the FSLN was founded in 1962 by Carlos Fonseca Amador, Silvio Mayorga, and Tomás Borge Martínez as a revolutionary group committed to socialism and to the overthrow of the Somoza family. Over the next 10 years the FSLN organized political support among students, workers, and peasants. By the mid-1970s its attacks on the Nicaraguan National Guard from sanctuaries in Honduras and Costa Rica were serious enough that Somoza unleashed bloody reprisals against the Sandinistas. Fonseca and Mayorga were killed, and the FSLN split into three tendencias, or factions, that differed over whether the group should organize revolutionary cells only in the cities, continue to gradually accumulate support throughout the country, or coalesce with other political groups in the growing rebellion. The Nicaraguan revolution of 1978?79 reunited the Sandinistas under the third tendencia, headed by Daniel and Humberto Ortega Saavedra, and the FSLN, now numbering about 5,000 fighters, defeated the National Guard and overthrew Somoza in July 1979.

A nine-member National Directorate, composed of three comandantes from each faction, was then set up to lead the FSLN and set policy for a governing junta that was headed by Daniel Ortega. Once in power in Nicaragua, the FSLN organized itself into local and regional committees and built up support through mass organizations of workers, young people, and other groups. To fight off the attacks of the counterrevolutionary forces known as the contras, who were based in Honduras and were in part armed and financed by the United States, Humberto Ortega created the 50,000-strong Sandinista Popular Army, and Tomás Borge organized a secret-police force to guard against espionage and dissent. The resignations of various non-Marxist members of the Sandinista leadership, chiefly over issues of political rights, pushed the party and Nicaragua progressively to the left, and both became dependent on the support of the Soviet Union and Cuba.

The Sandinista government confiscated the Somoza family's vast landholdings and nationalized the country's major industries, but the central planning typical of Soviet-style socialist economies was never adopted, and small and medium-sized private farms and businesses were tolerated. Having committed itself to political pluralism, the FSLN grudgingly tolerated moderate opposition groups and agreed to elections only after considerable pressure at home and abroad. In 1984 the FSLN won more than 60 of 96 seats in a new National Assembly and sent Daniel Ortega to the presidency in an election that was widely criticized for its lack of safeguards for opposition parties. In 1990, however, the Nicaraguan populace, weary of war and economic depression, voted for the 14 parties of the National Opposition Union, which formed a government while the Sandinistas relinquished power. Though reduced to an opposition party, the FSLN retained a considerable power base in the country's army and police forces. It also performed strongly in national elections; in 1996 the Sandinistas won 37 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections, and in 2001 the party captured 42 percent of the vote and won 43 seats in the 90-seat National Assembly.

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31,000 Nicaraguans killed in the Contra wars.

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here is Wikipedia on these darlings of the Reagan Administration, the Contras:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contras

here - for those who have forotten, or never knew, is a little account from Wikipedia of the wondrous Iran/Contra affair:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_scandal

An account of a reporter with the Contras:

http://www.fumento.com/nicar.html
(I have friends who saw the effects of their attacks upon villagers in their campaign of terror.)

A little about drug dabbling:

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/nsaebb2.htm

A little more - a committeee chaired by Kerry:

http://www.webcom.com/pinknoiz/covert/contracoke.html

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New batteries, dlowan? Very Happy

Thanks for the additional links. I didn't have time to do more.

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I'll never forget all the democrats dying of shock when the Nicaraguans threw the sandinistas out first chance they ever got, courtesy of Ronald Reagan.

There is simply no instance in worldhistory of anybody thriving under communism, least of all a country as small as Nicaragua and with no more resources.

The hell of it is that if there is any one country where communism absolutely had to work if it was capable of working, it was Russia, basically a huge land with every sort of natural resource and an educated and industrious population, and we all know how well comunism worked in Russia.

Russian friends tell me that as early as the sixties they were hearing friends in Eastern Europe telling them that they were being destroyed by communism at that time, basically saying "Hey, Russia is so big and naturally rich a country that it might take another twenty years for communism to destroy Russia, but it's destroying us NOW!"

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Gunga,

If you had to choose between supporting Terrorists or supporting Communists, which would you choose?

Or should I say, which would you have chosen?

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ebrown_p wrote:

Gunga,

If you had to choose between supporting Terrorists or supporting Communists, which would you choose?

Or should I say, which would you have chosen?

The people of Nicaragua obviously chose to get rid of the commies, didn't they?

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No! I can't believe you don't understand this.

The people of Nicaragua, for the most part, WERE the communists. That's why we empowered, trained, and supported their government in slapping the people down by any means neccessary....

Cycloptichorn

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Cycloptichorn wrote:

No! I can't believe you don't understand this.

The people of Nicaragua, for the most part, WERE the communists.

If that were the case, then what happened would have amounted to the same thing as the owner of a business firing himself...

Forgive my chuckling a bit.

The contras were basically the former middle and upper-middle classes of the country which had been persecuted and chased into the mountains. In other words, the sadinistas basically started a class war (like democrats are always trying to do) and then lost their own class war. Why would anybody feel sorry for them?

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And this has what to do with Kerry's investigation into the ILLEGAL Iran Contra and BCCI activity? It was illegal. Kerry reported it. People were indicted that are running our government today.

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gungasnake wrote:

I'll never forget all the democrats dying of shock when the Nicaraguans threw the sandinistas out first chance they ever got, courtesy of Ronald Reagan.

There is simply no instance in worldhistory of anybody thriving under communism, least of all a country as small as Nicaragua and with no more resources.

The hell of it is that if there is any one country where communism absolutely had to work if it was capable of working, it was Russia, basically a huge land with every sort of natural resource and an educated and industrious population, and we all know how well comunism worked in Russia.

Russian friends tell me that as early as the sixties they were hearing friends in Eastern Europe telling them that they were being destroyed by communism at that time, basically saying "Hey, Russia is so big and naturally rich a country that it might take another twenty years for communism to destroy Russia, but it's destroying us NOW!"

Yes, yes - on and on - but what has that to do with your defense of US sponsored terrorism and your condemnation of Kerry for exposing it?

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gungasnake wrote:

ebrown_p wrote:
Gunga,

If you had to choose between supporting Terrorists or supporting Communists, which would you choose?

Or should I say, which would you have chosen?

The people of Nicaragua obviously chose to get rid of the commies, didn't they?

Again! Keep avoiding. They were VOTED OUT.

What of the terrorism which you, it seems, support when it is perpetrated against others under American sponsorship, and condemn only when it is against you?

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dlowan wrote:

Yes, yes - on and on - but what has that to do with your defense of US sponsored terrorism and your condemnation of Kerry for exposing it?

My condemnation of Kerry???

Where have I condemned Kerry over this? All I really did on this thread was describe what actually happened in the case of the Contras and who the original villians in the picture were, i.e. congressional democrats who refused to fund whatever it was going to take to eliminate the commie regime in Nicaragua.

As to terrorism, sure the contras might be described as terrorists, nonetheless all commie governments arise via terrorism and in this case again, what you had was the sandinistas starting a class war and then losing it. In theory the sandinistas had the numbers, they had the love of the people, they had at least as much weaponry supplied by the CCCP as anything Ollie North and his two or three airplanes flying out of Clinton's little airport could possibly have supplied the contras with, by all rights they should have prevailed.

Something is seriously wrong with the picture which the leftists try to paint here.

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CONTRA-DRUG SCANDAL: Sen.Kerry's Extremely Brave Act

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