Saw it today, it plays very fast and loose with history.
You have your typical 'rogue CIA' in Schafer and rotten apple in Seal - reality: this was a comprehensive operation straight out of the NSC organized by the so called 'secret team' using many veterans of Air America.
'Communist incursion' - reality: for decades Central America has been ruled by US backed dictatorships, by the late 1970s many people in these countries were resisting this, they were nationalists who wanted independence, to use their nations resources and wealth to end their poverty rather than send it abroad to foreign corporations and fund the lavish lifestyles of a ruling elite. In Washingtonese this is described as communism. Brutal counter insurgencies were fought across the region, 200,000 alone were killed in Guatemala, horrendous massacres like El Mozote in El Salvador were committed, by special forces trained at the School of the Americas at Fort Bragg, Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero and six Jesuit priests were assassinated and nuns were raped - Jean Kirkpatrick tried to blame the nuns btw.
But the worst offender was Nicaragua: they successfully defied Washington by overthrowing the three generation Somoza family dictatorship. Somoza once quipped that Nicaraguans do not need education because you can't teach cattle. Nixon once said of Somoza 'who cares if he's a son of a bitch so long as he's our son of a bitch'.
A full blown war was fought by proxy with the Contras, the Somozas former National Guard and not freedom fighters, armed and supplied by the secret teams pilots, directed by the CIA to attack 'soft targets' - civilian infrastructure and clinics, the arms sent to them wound up being sold by the crooked leadership in Honduras and the money supplied spent on Cadillacs and fur coats while the soldiers subsisted on a bowl of rice a day.
And the pilots supplying them would fly back with coke, the CIA knew this from the get go as the 1998 Inspector General report discovered a memo from CIA Director William Casey to Attorney General William Smith informing him of the criminal backgrounds of some of the pilots and asking if this could be a problem, the reply back was a no. But neither that nor many pilots past with Air America compared to the Contras being trained by Argentinas intelligence service well known for funding its black operations with drug fundings and aiding the Cocaine Coup in Bolivia - which supplied base material to the Colombian cartels.
As for Seals so-called sting, this came as the administration was looking for evidence of Sandinista wrongdoing and immorality, the man was already facing criminal charges, and claims have been made that the alleged government official seen in the grainy blurry pictures was in fact a double agent. They did get Oliver North hanging Seal out to dry right though.
Nicaragua sued the USA for its aid to the Contras and mining its harbor and the USA was found guilty of "the unlawful use of force for political gain" - the technical definition of terrorism - by the International Court of Justice in 1987, it withdrew and still refuses to recognize it to this day and vetoed UN resolution calling on all members to adhere to internal law.
Arms to Iran was just one of the sources of funding the Contras, they got donations from all their friendly dictators including 10 million from the Sultan of Brunai that Oliver North lost when he mixed up the Swiss bank account numbers, domestic far rightwingers like the Coors, evangelicals who they derisively called 'the blue rinse brigade', and of the over 50 million Richard Secord made selling arms to Iran only about 2 million got sent.
When he was asked in Congress why he sent so little to a cause he believed in he explained he wasn't running a charity. The Contra leadership weren't the only corrupt ones.
Levi Smith
All of this was going on because aiding the Contras was illegal, the Boland Amendment prohibited supporting them. The Executive Office violated the Constitution, I don't recall this being mentioned in the film.
People like Seal get focused on, and Iran Contra gets focused on, to distract from the institutional policies that are at work, to distract from the whole region being attacked.
To say these are just a few bad apples that went too far but we are otherwise all good and these are bad guys who we got misled by in our noble but naive endeavor.
I would recommend reading Alfred W. McCoys book The Politics of Heroin, William Blums book Killing Hope, Holly Sklars book Washingtons War on Nicaragua, and Bob Parrys book Lost History.
John Kerry still had a spine back in the '80s and did a very good investigation titled The Kerry Report that is worth a read, as is the 1998 CIA Inspector General report.
The PBS Frontline documentary Guns, Drugs, and the CIA is also a good source.
Nathaniel Martinez
tldr kys
Hunter Cox
No
Gabriel Peterson
BASED Immortal Technique user.
Brody Brown
>You have your typical 'rogue CIA' in Schafer and rotten apple in Seal
>A full blown war was fought by proxy with the Contras, the Somozas former National Guard and not freedom fighters
It kind of told you full frontal that they weren't politically motivated though
>1998 Inspector General report discovered a memo from CIA Director William Casey to Attorney General William Smith informing him of the criminal backgrounds of some of the pilots and asking if this could be a problem, the reply back was a no.
Part of me thinks the CIA was getting a slice of that cake themselves to fund ops off the books.
Gary Webb was a pulitzer prize winning investigative journo who revealed the CIA link to drugs flooding the US market
>Gary Webb was a pulitzer prize winning investigative journo who revealed the CIA link to drugs flooding the US market
No he did not reveal that.
Alfred McCoy revealed in 1975 when he published The Politics of Heroin that disclosed CIA involvement in the French Connection and the Golden Triangle Involvement in the Contra guns for coke trade was uncovered in the 1980s by Bob Parry and others Webb wrote in the... mid-1990s
Why is Webb focused on and no one else? All alive and well incidentally.
Luke Smith
Sup Forums is being slid like fucking mad right now. Wikileaks mysteriously went down and pizzagate arrests close to the Clintons are happening! A retired US army colonel who was on the advisory board of a Haitian mining company along with Hillary Clintons brother Anthony Rodham was arrested for "Bribing Haitian Officials" yesterday:
Charles Wright
Well hes certainly the guy who made it a bit more open
Chase Powell
no such arrests are coming for anything
your sad little fantasy pales in comparison to the real crimes and mass murders and genocide discussed here
Liam Roberts
No he wasn't, Bob Parry broke Iran Contra in the western media
Isaiah Perez
>A retired US army colonel who was on the advisory board of a Haitian mining company along with Hillary Clintons brother Anthony Rodham was arrested for "Bribing Haitian Officials" yesterday:
Good old Clintons
>Klaus Eberwein, a former Haitian government official, was found dead Tuesday in a South Dade motel room in what the Miami-Dade medical examiner’s office is ruling a suicide.
“He shot himself in the head,” said Veronica Lamar, Miami-Dade medical examiner records supervisor. She listed his time of death at 12:19 p.m.
Eberwein was scheduled to appear Tuesday before the Haitian Senate’s Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, the head of the commission, Sen. Evalière Beauplan confirmed. The commission is investigating the management of PetroCaribe funds, the money Haiti receives from Venezuela’s discounted oil program.
I'll file it under general untouchable agencies smuggling
Besides how much can be said about drugs alone?
Thomas Adams
>its someone tangentially related to clinton so it must be pizzagate
no
>smuggling
where
>drugs alone
that was simply the cream, when you engage in criminal acts and employ criminals guess what extra crimes get committed.
The meat of what they were doing was aiding the dictatorships in Central America with their brutal counter-insurgencies in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and a proxy war against Nicaragua.
Nathan Hernandez
The bit of history you are ignoring is that the Sandinistas were organized and funded as a KGB/Cuban operation and supported by Libtards Democrats in the USA. Surely an easily overlooked detail through accident and not intentional. /s
Luke Adams
I just hope that you at least didnt go to the cinema and pay the goyim tax and torrented isntead
also
>watching 2017 jewish production kys
Bentley Davis
And the Sandinistas were organized and funded by the KGB/Cubans and supported an encouraged by Libtard Democrats who created the "Boland Amendment" specifically to hamstring Reagan. IOW "collusion" between Lintard Democrats and the KGB". If you are going to get into the history, let's have the WHOLE" history, not some lame attempt to smear the USA and exonerate Libtards.
Isaac Reyes
>organized and funded by the KGB/Cubans
zomg! our brutal 3 generation family dictatorship has been ousted! the population alone could not have done this it must be outside agencies attacking us
Really? This was an independent nationalist cause, more closely aligned with the policies of European social democratic parties and the Soviets. Did they buy arms from them? Sure, they had the Contras roaming rhe country side butchering and raping people - they had to defend themselves. They'd have bought from France if they could but the USA had placed sanctions on them.
>supported by the Libtards Democrats
lolno. The Democrats had supported Somoza for years. They supported ousting the Sandinistas and having a nice quiet compliant client state. They supported sanctions and covert operations. What they did not support was the ugly overt stuff, the stuff that draws attention and is noticed by the public. Thats the key difference between the Republicans and Democrats, the Republicans smash peoples faces into walls in broad daylight and dont care who sees while the Democrats maintain a polite facade and then knife you in an alleyway at night.
The International Court of Justice found the USA guilty of 'the unlawful use of force' in 1987 for its attacks on Nicaragua, an easily overlooked detail through accident and not intentional on your part I am sure.
Adrian Peterson
Let's travel back in time with Alex Jones, shall we?
The Boland Amendment prohibited funding, didn't stop sanctions or other efforts to isolate and strangle Nicaragua.
>lets get into the whole history
Sure lets discuss the Contras butchering people wholesale
Lets discuss the CIA directing them to attack "soft targets" Lets discuss their smuggling coke
Lets discuss the USA mining Nicaraguas harbors
Lets discuss the crimes going on in the rest of the region: 200,000+ dead in Guatamala, many of them Mayan, many villages wiped out in practices that later truth and reconciliation commissions would describe as "genocide" - these commissions were in the 1990s so I'd like to see you blame the Soviets for that
Lets discuss El Salvador and Arch Bishop Oscar Romero being assassinated, Jesuit Priests blown up, the El Mozote Massacre
Lets discuss the School of the Americas and the assassins and torturers and death squad commanders it has graduated
