Word: manuals
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
Intended for the American backed Anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicauragua, this nifty manual contains all the techniques a tyroterrorist could ever want to know, from choosing your next assassination to blackmailing people into turning stoolie. The guiding theme is that a policy of infiltration and "implied terror" can force the populace to switch its allegiance from the ruling government to the rebels...
What are the contras supposed to do with their American supplied weapons except blow up things and kill people? What else does CIA training entail? This manual simply spells out the common sense measures that groups from the Boers to the Rhmer Rouge have taken to mount effective insurrections. But aided by a lack of press coverage of that region Reagan has been able to play down the real consequences of his policies, making the contras sound like cartoon GI Joes fighting for truth and justice with guns that only kill Commies. The matter-of-fact Macchiavellianism...
...group of Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and Venzuela. Rather than budge the Nicaraguan junta, Reagan's policies have succeeded only in winning sympathy for the Sandinistas, no easy trick given the regime's lengthening track-record of repression and economic failure. The current furor over the publication of a CIA manual for political terrorism, assassination, and psychological terror only underscores the moral turpitude of the Reagan Administration, and takes the pressure of the Sandanistas to behave...