Word: contras
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After months of lying low, Nicaragua's contra rebels are on the attack once more. Last week, in action more vigorous than any seen in a year, the guerrillas staged a quick series of assaults that were bound to alarm the country's Sandinista rulers. Outside the village of La Palmita, 80 miles north of Managua, the capital, the rebels ambushed a military convoy, killing 29 government soldiers. Over the next two days, on the outskirts of the northwestern city of Esteli (pop. 75,000), they damaged two bridges on Nicaragua's main artery, part of the north-south...
...long ago, I called Coulter's mother and read her one of her daughter's more rakish lines. Last year, after the New York Times published a Reagan obituary that mentioned the Iran-contra scandal 15 times, Coulter wrote that Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is "a little weenie who can't read because he has 'dyslexia.'" "Oh, dear," said Nell Martin Coulter, 76, with a laugh...
Funding for the 15,000-man contra force was provided more or less covertly through the CIA starting in 1981. It was effectively cut off by Congress last summer, following revelations that the intelligence agency had participated in the mining of Nicaraguan harbors. The U.S. has managed to keep pressure on the Sandinistas in a variety of other ways, including the staging of large-scale "training exercises" with Nicaragua's pro-U.S. neighbor Honduras. Convinced that a resumption of U.S. aid was needed not only to bolster the contras 'morale but also as a gesture of U.S. resolve, Reagan...
...could mobilize all the White House resources, we never lost a major battle--tax cuts, budget, AWACS, MX missiles. In the past we used to fight one battle at a time in one House of Congress. Now we have three battles going at once [the budget in the Senate, contra funds in both the Senate and the House] and on their ground. It is high risk. And if we lose that aura of invincibility, we are in trouble...
...trouble is, plausible deniability just doesn’t work. From its inception as a policy in the 1950s up to today, from Watergate to Iran-Contra, the degree of control that plausible deniability requires the central government to relinquish has opened the door to abuses that, well, aren’t plausibly deniable...