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El Salvador detains ex-soldiers for 1989 Jesuit priest killings
Source: Reuters
El Salvador detains ex-soldiers for 1989 Jesuit priest killings
Sat Feb 6, 2016 1:11pm EST
SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) - El Salvador said on Saturday it had detained four former soldiers accused of killing six Jesuit priests during the country's civil war, and would keep searching for 12 other suspects who remain at large.
In January, the government said it would help arrest former soldiers linked to the 1989 killings after a Spanish judge sent a new petition for the soldiers' arrest to the international police agency Interpol.
The four were captured in a Friday night operation. Another member of the group is facing extradition to Spain from the United States.
Prosecutors say Salvadoran soldiers shot the priests at their home at a university to silence their criticism of rights abuses committed by the U.S.-backed army during the 1980-1992 civil war, which claimed an estimated 75,000 lives.
Read more: http://ca.reuters.com/article/idCAKCN0VF0R3?rpc=401
7 replies
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And it was Bush, he was running Ollie North and the Death Squads throughout this hemisphere and that. All legal-like.
"Like I Wasn’t President at All"
By Robert Parry
May 26, 1999
In 1992, less than four years after leaving the White House, Ronald Reagan claimed to have forgotten virtually every fact about the Iran-contra scandal, according to a newly released transcript of a formal deposition.
"It's like I wasn't president at all," Reagan said in response to one inquiry.
Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh accepted that Reagan's memory loss was a consequence of the ex-president's Alzheimer's disease. But the deposition also reveals that Reagan answered in rich detail when questioned about coincidental events not connected to alleged Iran-contra crimes.
Despite Reagan's unresponsive answers, the deposition offered a look at unreleased Reagan diary entries that were read into the record. The diary demonstrated that Reagan was intimately involved with the Iran-contra operations and fully aware that some of his actions violated the law.
Yet, when Walsh and his prosecutors questioned Reagan about even basic facts that connected to the scandal, the ex-president asserted a near-total lack of memory.
SNIP...
At another point, Reagan was reminded that "you had a task force on counter-terrorism. Do you remember? I think Vice President Bush headed it."
CONTINUED...
http://www.consortiumnews.com/1999/052699c.html
Somewhere in Detroit, 1980 GOP Convention:
After the election, the relationship really, ah, evolved:
George Bush Takes Charge
The Uses of "Counter-Terrorism"
By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58
A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.
During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.
Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.
The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.
SNIP...
Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.
CONTINUED...
More details from the good professor:
EXCERPT...
NSDD 159. MANAGEMENT OF U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS, (TOP SECRET/VEIL‑SENSITIVE), JAN. 18,1985
The Reagan administration's commitment to significantly expand covert operations had been clear since before the 1980 election. How such operations were actually to be managed from day to day, however, was considerably less certain. The management problem became particularly knotty owing to legal requirements to notify congressional intelligence oversight committees of covert operations, on the one hand, and the tacitly accepted presidential mandate to deceive those same committees concerning sensitive operations such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, on the other.
The solution attempted in NSDD 159 was to establish a small coordinating committee headed by Vice President George Bush through which all information concerning US covert operations was to be funneled. The order also established a category of top secret information known as Veil, to be used exclusively for managing records pertaining to covert operations.
[font color="red"]The system was designed to keep circulation of written records to an absolute minimum while at the same time ensuring that the vice president retained the ability to coordinate US covert operations with the administration's overt diplomacy and propaganda.
Only eight copies of NSDD 159 were created. The existence of the vice president's committee was itself highly classified.[/font color] The directive became public as a result of the criminal prosecutions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved in the Iran‑Contra affair, hence the designation "Exhibit A" running up the left side of the document.
CONTINUED...
CovertAction Quarterly no 58 Fall 1996 pp31-40.
This all matters because there's a steady bloody red line from 1981 to the present day few write about. More would, were the nation's news media honest and lived up to their constitutional mandate. Thus, We the People are left holding the bag, trillions and trillions and trillions worth, again and again and again.
Thank you for the heads-up, Judi Lynn. Godspeed Justice for the innocent people who did nothing but help alleviate suffering.
