Word: manual
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Neither candidate dealt especially well with questions about Central America. Reagan was defensive and unsure in discussing a CIA manual that gave U.S.-supported contra guerrillas battling the Sandinista government of Nicaragua advice on how to assassinate Sandinista officials. The President said the manual had been written by "a gentlemen down in Nicaragua [he meant in Central America] who is on contract" to the CIA, and the CIA both in Central America and Washington had excised several pages. "Some way or other," however, the offending pages had stayed in copies of the manual distributed to the contras. Reagan strongly denied...
Similarly, it was easier for Mondale to harp on the controversy over the CIA manual on political assassination in Nicaragua than to specify exactly how, where and when covert action is a legitimate instrument of American policy. Mondale also tried to harass Reagan on the issue of responsibility for the bombings in Lebanon rather than tackle the broader, more difficult and more important question in the Middle East: not how to protect embassies from terrorists, but how to advance the Arab-Israeli peace process...
...could be a manual for the Viet Cong or the Cuban-backed rebels in El Salvador. If it were, the Administration would likely be waving it as proof of its thesis about the sources of insidious world terrorism. In fact, however, it is a publication of the CIA, written for Nicaraguan contras seeking to overthrow the Sandinista regime. Its disclosure last week came as a political embarrassment to the Administration and a major moral one for the U.S. It stirred memories of CIA abuses that were supposedly outlawed a decade ago and gave Democrats a potentially hot new campaign issue...
...gather together the population affected, so that they will be present and take part in the act." If "it should be necessary" to shoot a "citizen who is trying to leave town," guerrillas should claim that he was "an enemy of the people." Targets who fail to cooperate, the manual instructs, should be "exposed" to police "with false statements from citizens." The finale of a successful local insurgency is a mob riot. "Professional criminals will be hired to carry out specific selective jobs" like provoking a shooting that will "cause the death of one or more people who would become...
...declared, "It is not hard to tell, as we look around the world, who are the terrorists and who are the freedom fighters . . . The contras in Nicaragua do not blow up school buses or hold mass executions of civilians." (Asked how to reconcile Shultz's statement with the manual, a State Department spokesman said he was prohibited from discussing intelligence matters...