He is far too nuanced on foreign policy, so if you take a 20 second sound bite you can definitely spin it and attack him.
But when you talk about him supporting dictators it frankly funny considering the type of allies the rest of the candidates have.
It's frankly pathetic if he is attacked for not denouncing Fidel Castro, while US maintains close relations with Saudi Arabia. As bad as Cuba is on the grand scale of dictatorships is nowhere near as bad as some other close US allies.

It find it facsinating how it's now fashionable for Democrats to support the "contras" and Henry Kissinger is the "go to" for foreign policy. Just fascinating.

definitely watch this when you get a chance. It's a side of Bernie that doesn't come across in the soundbites.

I look forward to watching this tonight and then I'm going to rock out to the Clash's !Sandinista!

Yanno, since we're all enjoying our tour through the 80's.

There is a lot of forgotten history there for people to pay attention to.

Win or lose, Bernie is giving this country a much-needed education!

been coming from, a slice of the state of the world and the U.S. propaganda bubble which has for far too long kept so many Americans; ignorant, fearful and manipulated to our own detriment.

Thanks for the thread, Armstead.

Last edited Thu Mar 10, 2016, 08:08 PM - Edit history (1)

I could not remember why the US government was so concerned about the Sandinista government back in the 1980's. I listened to the entire clip and evidently Bernie Sanders thought that they all about helping the Nicaraguan people. I began reading up on the subject and came across this entry on the Sandinista's in Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandinista_National_Liberation_Front

Sure enough much of the entry described some of the programs Sanders described. It appeared that the Sandinista government did have many good programs. But then came across a section about how the Sandinista government aligned itself with the Cuban communist government of Fidel Castro. Now remember this was at the height of the cold war so that gave me some insight into our government's concern. But at the time Reagan was President so figured that our government may well have been overreacting. Remember it was under Reagan that Ollie North ran drugs in South America to covertly fund the Contras, so their judgement can't be trusted. Then I came across this section in the Wikipedia entry.

Relationship with eastern bloc intelligence agencies

According to Cambridge University historian Christopher Andrew, who undertook the task of processing the Mitrokhin Archive, Carlos Fonseca Amador, one of the original three founding members of the FSLN had been recruited by the KGB in 1959 while on a trip to Moscow. This was one part of Aleksandr Shelepin's 'grand strategy' of using national liberation movements as a spearhead of the Soviet Union's foreign policy in the Third World, and in 1960 the KGB organized funding and training for twelve individuals that Fonseca handpicked. These individuals were to be the core of the new Sandinista organization. In the following several years, the FSLN tried with little success to organize guerrilla warfare against the government of Luis Somoza Debayle. After several failed attempts to attack government strongholds and little initial support from the local population, the National Guard nearly annihilated the Sandinistas in a series of attacks in 1963. Disappointed with the performance of Shelepin's new Latin American "revolutionary vanguard", the KGB reconstituted its core of the Sandinista leadership into the ISKRA group and used them for other activities in Latin America.

According to Andrew, Mitrokhin says during the following three years the KGB handpicked several dozen Sandinistas for intelligence and sabotage operations in the United States. Andrew and Mitrokhin say that in 1966, this KGB-controlled Sandinista sabotage and intelligence group was sent to northern Mexico near the US border to conduct surveillance for possible sabotage.[82]

In July 1961 during the Berlin Crisis of 1961 KGB chief Alexander Shelepin sent a memorandum to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev containing proposals to create a situation in various areas of the world which would favor dispersion of attention and forces by the US and their satellites, and would tie them down during the settlement of the question of a German peace treaty and West Berlin. It was planned, inter alia, to organize an armed mutiny in Nicaragua in coordination with Cuba and with the "Revolutionary Front Sandino". Shelepin proposed to make appropriations from KGB funds in addition to the previous assistance $10,000 for purchase of arms.

Khrushchev sent the memo with his approval to his deputy Frol Kozlov and on August 1 it was, with minor revisions, passed as a CPSU Central Committee directive. The KGB and the Soviet Ministry of Defense were instructed to work out more specific measures and present them for consideration by the Central Committee.[83]

Cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies during the 1980s

Other researchers have documented the contribution made from other Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies to the fledgling Sandinista government including the East German Stasi, by using recently declassified documents from Berlin[84] as well as from former Stasi spymaster Markus Wolf who described the Stasi's assistance in the creation of a secret police force modeled on East Germany's.[85]

This gave me some insight as to why our intelligence might have believed that the Sandinistas might have been a tool of the Soviet Union as it tried to spread its influence and political control in South America.

Also in another part of the Wikipedia article I learned the Sandinista government wasn't above dealing harshly with their political enemies. In section of the Wikipedia entry called "Civil Rights Violations" I found this:

Time magazine in 1983 published reports of human rights violations in an article which stated that "According to Nicaragua's Permanent Commission on Human Rights, the regime detains several hundred people a month; about half of them are eventually released, but the rest simply disappear." Time also interviewed a former deputy chief of Nicaraguan military counterintelligence, who stated that he had fled Nicaragua after being ordered to kill 800 Miskito prisoners and make it look like they had died in combat.[107] Another article described Sandinista neighbourhood "Defense Committees", modeled on similar Cuban Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, which according to critics were used to unleash mobs on anyone who was labeled a counterrevolutionary. Nicaragua's only opposition newspaper, La Prensa, was subject to strict censorship. The newspaper's editors were forbidden to print anything negative about the Sandinistas either at home or abroad.[107]

There's more on civil rights violations in the piece; you can read it for yourself if you would like. The bottom line is that back at the time of Sanders' visit to Nicaragua, the Sandinista Government wasn't exactly the group of saints which Bernie described in the interview.

It's no biug secret that they were aligned with the Soviet Union and the US would be right to be wary of them and spy on them in case of mischief.

But hiring a group of right wing thugs to overthrow their government because we don't like them is a whole otehr matter. Bermnie was making the point that we have no business invading -- or surreptitiously funding insurrections -- aghainst governments simply because we don't like them.

And if you're worried about human rights abuses and opporssing their population -- we didnlt seem to give a shit about that under Somoza. Just like we propped up an awful dictatorship of Batista in Cuba.

If you really did watch it all the way through, you will also note that he referred to blowback. One reason anti-America governments popped up is because we treated them like shit.

Same kind of blowback we're experiencing in the Middle East today.

And certainly Castro's Cuba was also aligned with the Soviet Union at the time. It was also known at the time that some of the leaders of the Sandinista were Communist agents and our intelligence agencies certainly knew they were plotting terrorist acts in the United States. This at the time when our country was under threat of nuclear attack by that same Soviet Union.

So here we have this Burlington mayor traveling to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandinista leaders and to Cuba were he tried very hard to meet with Fidel Castro. Then Sanders came back to this country and praised both of those government extensively while dismissing their alignment with our sworn enemy, their killing and torturing their political opponets, and suppression of civil rights by saying "they have their problems". Why did he make those trips and later praise those governments? The obvious answer is that he was aligned with their socialist ideals and that trumped everything else. Notice Sanders didn't travel to countries where our government was working against right wing dictators.

Now perhaps he was just naive at the time and he really didn't understand what was really going behind the scenes. That's certainly a possibility; he was a young idealist. If that was the case he is no longer naive, he knows the score. Yet when he was given an opportunity to repudiate those statements he made back in 1985 during last night's debate, he did not. He instead stood by them.

This is not the image most Americans have of the man or woman who will occupy the most powerful office in the country.

And who do you think helped put right wing dictators into power?

But I can detest Oliver North while at the same time saying that what Bernie Sanders did and said in 1985 were huge mistakes, but standing by actions and statements made as young man more than 30 years ago during the debate was an even bigger mistake. I just hope that the Democratic party doesn't have to pay for all of those mistakes.

And the people of Nicaragua elected them in 1984.

It was none of our business who the people of Nicaragua wanted as their government.

Not then. Not now.

And it was none of our business who the people of Hunduras wanted as the government.

We should never have supported the coup there in 2009.

...and are promoting Soviet style take overs throughout our among our neighborhood our country would be stupid to ignore them. When Sandinista members are encouraged by the KGB to perform terrorist acts here in the United States, we should have done more than take notice.

And there was never any chance of "Soviet-style takeovers" in Central America. The uprisings there in the Eighties were driven by legitimate grassroots rage over exploitation and misery.

The way to have prevented that would have been for the U.S to stand with the poor and the workers in Central America...not throw in, over and over, with the generals and the rich.

We should have accepted the right of people to democratically elect socialist or social democratic governments. When we wouldn't do that we made things like the Cuban revolution inevitable.

"The uprisings there in the Eighties were driven by legitimate grassroots rage over exploitation and misery" and the Soviet Union and Cuba tried every thing in their though the Sandinistas and other allied groups to use those uprisings to secure influence and control in South America.

The way to have stopped that would have been for the U.S. to accept that conditions had to change in Central America. Not to defend the reactionary status quo by any means necessary.

And I'd be wary of trusting anything out of the Soviet archives if I were you. A lot of the people who were selling access to those archives were "on the take" and willing to say anything(or falsify anything) that right-wing Americans looking to validate the Cold War were willing to hear.

(BTW, would you agree that the best way to reduce ties between the Sandinistas and the USSR and Cuba would have been for the U.S. to pledge never to invade or otherwise militarily interfere with Nicaragua again? And to do the decent thing and demobilize the Contras?)

We chose to support tyrants like Samoa and Batists because they were right wing corporate lackeys. We got blowback for it.

For example:
Prior to the first Iraqi war there were more hospitals in Iraq, more schools in Iraq, infrastructure was better and for the average citizen life wasn't so bad. Now then, did I anywhere just now say that Saddam was an angel?

Fast forward to the point shortly after 9-11. Recall that simple but deadly meme that aided the Bush Family Evil Empire: 'You are with us or you are with the terrorists'. It was very effectively used to take us to war against Saddam Hussein. How did that work out, for us $$ wise, for the citizens of Iraq, for stability throughout the entire middle east? I am so damned sick of being treated as if I am with the terrorists when just like Bernie points out throughout this video: despite the bad things attributable to the Sandinista, to Fidel, (and later to Saddam and etc), the country itself belongs to it's citizenry, it is NOT the plaything of multinational corporations who use our military as their strongmen!

Bernie points out in this video that under the Sandinista, employment is vastly improved, education is also improved and hospital care although substandard by our own standards was also muchly improved but most importantly 56% of the Nicaraguan population supported these guys! Did I anywhere call them angels either?

Yes Saddam was indeed a bad guy, but we need to let history be our guide here: "You are with us or you are with the terrorists" is proven not to be in the interests of the American citizenry when it comes to deciding on regime change. Suggesting that Bernie or I am calling Saddam, Fidel, or the Sandinista 'angels' is equal to saying that 'we are with the terrorists'. I am so sick of that deadly label, far too many lives have been lost because of it. Hearing Hillary use it against Bernie last night sickens my stomach.
nuff said

It is a half/truth used time and again to take the American public off to needless war. I am NOT with you nor am I with the terrorists. I am with the citizenry, you pick: Iraq, Cuba, Nicaragua, or Iran in the future. What Bernie said in that video holds true then as now and moving forward. nuff said

and you started out talking about Iraq, I trashed the rest because it was totally off subject. I am glad to see that I was not wrong to do so.

Sanders went to Nicaragua and Cuba because their governments were built on a socialist model regardless of the fact that both were backed by the Soviet Union, high ranking members of the Sandinista government had been successfully recruited by the KGB, and both government killed their political opponents and openly suppressed the basic human rights of their people. Then he came back to the united states and praised those governments while dismissing all of their crimes against their own citizens by saying, "of course they had problems".

You would try to smear Sen. Sanders with a page from Wikipedia? So you have no proof, NONE, as to the actual intentions of Bernie Sanders's trip and yet these bold claims you make!. Furthermore you ask us to disbelieve his very words in that interview-words which fit the personality we have come to admire in this man. He stands by the citizenry, he did so in that interview, he does so now and despite those who would smear him, as our POTUS he will continue to do so.

As you have only Wikipedia and your obviously biased interpretations we have nothing further to chat about on this matter. Like some of my other fellow DUers have done in this thread, I wish you a good day.

Yep, I didn't think so. But again you're right, we should definitely put more credence in your impressions of a politician than the knowledge of historical scholars who have researched the Sandinista movement and for which there footnoted references to their work in the article.

I'm also sure that you have evidence that those scholars are conservative stooges who knew in advance that Sanders would be trying to secure the Democratic nomination and that this would become an issue. So they therefore planted false information about the Sandinistas' crimes against their own people and that some of their leaders were taking orders from the KGB in order to sabotage Bernie's candidacy. '

Yep, I can see that it all fits together now. I don't know what I would done with out your learned insight.

Red dawn!!!!

If this is even true, Wikipedia is not vetted, and this is from one persons account only you didn't supply another - it 's from the 1960s and irrelevant to the Sandinistas who were in power in the 80s. But you've got people who don't know history going... oh commies connected to evil Soviets. Give it a rest.

Pre-Revolution

According to Cambridge University historian Christopher Andrew, who undertook the task of processing the Mitrokhin Archive, Carlos Fonseca Amador, one of the original three founding members of the FSLN had been recruited by the KGB in 1959 while on a trip to Moscow. This was one part of Aleksandr Shelepin's 'grand strategy' of using national liberation movements as a spearhead of the Soviet Union's foreign policy in the Third World, and in 1960 the KGB organized funding and training for twelve individuals that Fonseca handpicked. These individuals were to be the core of the new Sandinista organization. In the following several years, the FSLN tried with little success to organize guerrilla warfare against the government of Luis Somoza Debayle. After several failed attempts to attack government strongholds and little initial support from the local population, the National Guard nearly annihilated the Sandinistas in a series of attacks in 1963. Disappointed with the performance of Shelepin's new Latin American "revolutionary vanguard", the KGB reconstituted its core of the Sandinista leadership into the ISKRA group and used them for other activities in Latin America.

According to Andrew, Mitrokhin says during the following three years the KGB handpicked several dozen Sandinistas for intelligence and sabotage operations in the United States. Andrew and Mitrokhin say that in 1966, this KGB-controlled Sandinista sabotage and intelligence group was sent to northern Mexico near the US border to conduct surveillance for possible sabotage.[82]

....the records of the KGB and and other East European spy agencies with regard to their involvement with leaders of who founded the Sandinista organization and formed the core of its organization. It would as if the fathers of our country were a bunch of scoundrels.

By the way, that one person quoted, that scholar, is Christopher Maurice Andrew, "Andrew is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, former Chairman of the History Faculty at Cambridge University, Official Historian of the Security Service (MI5), Chairman of the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, and former Visiting Professor at Harvard, Toronto and Canberra. Professor Andrew is also co-editor of Intelligence and National Security, and a regular presenter of BBC Radio and TV documentaries, including the Radio Four series What If?. His twelve previous books include a number of path-breaking studies on the use and abuse of secret intelligence in modern history." Sounds to me like he is an expert in his field.


These were the people who founded the Sandinista movement and many were still members of the government during Sanders' visit. In addition, the Sandinista government was still "disapearing" their political opponents, though to a lesser extent than immediately after the revolution, and they were still suppressing the basic human rights of the people under their control when Sanders visited. There is also evidence that they were involved in fermenting insurrections in several other South American countries.

All of this was also true of the Cuban government at the time of Bernie visit to that island nation. Yet Sanders spent much of his time during the interview praising the efforts of both governments while virtually skipping over their very serious human rights violations and iron control of their people.

At the time of those visits and the interview Bernie Sanders was either naive or he turned a blind eye to the dark underside of both the Sandinista and Cuban governments. I would rather think that he was naive. After all, he was as a young idealistic socialist who was enamored with those functioning socialist governments and I'm sure they let him see only what they wanted him to see.

However, he is now neither young nor naive. He was given the chance to disavow or at least explain his comments on the clip which was shown during the debate. It would have been easy to do; that was 31 years ago, he was young and relatively innocent, and a lot more is known now about the situation those two countries now than was known at the time. However, instead of at least trying to explain his remarks, he doubled down. Now maybe that was the honest thing to do, but if so it shows that his head is still in the same place it was at in 1985.

Bernie Sanders is a Democratic candidate for the Presidency. Just as the actions and antics of the Republican candidates reflect back on the Republican Party, Sanders actions or lack there of reflect not only on him, but also the Democratic Party. So we have ample reason to be concerned because all of this and a lot more is widely known by our opponents. If he stays in the race long enough, and its going to plastered all over the internet and TV. And I'll guarantee that the Republican hit teams aren't going to be a charitable as I have been here.

explain that his concern was the US intervening in sovereign countries. And it's still true that with all of its faults Cuba has helped the poor all over the world by sending doctors and Obama admired them for this as well. I don't think people are as easily agitated by the red scare .. and if a person has half a brain they'll learn that Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile were a result of the USA forcing them to look for Soviet support because the only other choice was brutal US backed dictatorship, and that's a fact.

From the Wiki on Carlos Fonseca:

According to Vasili Mitrokhin, Fonseca was supported by the KGB. In his book The World Was Going Our Way, Mitrokhin relates how, as part of Aleksandr Shelepin’s strategy of using national liberation movements to advance the Soviet Union's foreign policy in the Third World, Shelepin organized funding and training in Moscow for twelve individuals that Fonseca handpicked, and the twelve were the core of the new Sandinista organization.[2] However, UCLA historian J. Arch Getty, whose specialty is Russia, writing in the American Historical Review, raised questions about the trustworthiness and verifiability of Mitrokhin's material about the Soviet Union, doubting whether this "self-described loner with increasingly anti-Soviet views" would have had the opportunity to "transcribe thousands of documents, smuggle them out of KGB premises", etc.[3] Former Indian counter-terrorism chief Bahukutumbi Raman also questions both the validity of the material and the conclusions drawn from them.[4]

Not that the while historian "distrusts" Andrew's research, there is no disputing Andrews credentials as an expert on the history of intelligence services and that neither gentleman offer a shred of evidence to disprove Andrew's assertions. That's not how it works in academic circles. Andrew has copies of the documents he cites. These other two guys have nothing but hunches.

J. Arch Getty: Getty established himself as a forerunner among revisionist historians of the Soviet Union with his first book, Origin of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge 1985). Most recently, Getty has published a biography of N.I. Yezhov (2008). He is a controversial figure in the field of Soviet studies, as he was one of the first to put forth the thesis that the Great Purge was planned and commanded not only by Stalin, but by Yezhov and others among Stalin's subordinates as well.[2][3][4] He has studied the Soviet constitutions and elections of the 1930s,[5] as well as the ancient antecedents of Soviet political practices. Note, not one reference to his knowledge of the workings of the KGB

Bahukutumbi Raman ....also referred to as B. Raman, was an Additional Secretary of the Cabinet Secretariat of the Government of India and one-time head of the counter-terrorism division of the Research and Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency. I wonder how much a gentleman who specialized in "Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma and China" knew about the inner workings of the KGB.

I have to go with the more authoritative source. After all, did Andrew just make up the specific details of the relationship of Sandinista leaders with the KGB including naming names?

But all of this is a distraction, the real issue is that of Bernie Sanders was an outspoken supporter of governments that were murdering their own people and suppressing their human rights at the time of his visits in 1985. These are facts that should have been available to him at the time and are certainly available to him now. Yet he currently sticks by and refuses to even explain those statements he made thirty one years ago.

They were in power and the war was over.

Any idea that they were committing atrocities was here and there during the war when huge numbers of atrocities were being committed against the Sandinistas.

I lived through all of this, I'm guessing you didn't so you're relying on what someone wrote in a Wiki. I lived through a lot of the mistruths involved since I was working for the New York Times and saw exactly how it came down. The Sandinistas were never the bad guys, you need to stop spreading misinformation, especially when someone like Somoza is involved, research him.

I posted my own speculations on Bernie's intent. So now to watch it, to see if Bernie was 'with us or with the terrorists' or if he saw beyond that deadly sound-bite to the much larger picture.

.... I stand by him now. It's all about helping the citizenry....wherever they may be.

The Castro quote from the debate was completely out of context. I am sure the Hillary supporters will be along any minute now to say that their candidate was wrong to condemn this wonderful cultural exchange and efforts toward world peace.

I read your posts, but found no reason why the US CIA should be involved in funding and training those who seek to overthrow a democratically elected government.

The Sandinistas originally overthrew the existing government in an armed revolution in 1979, though I thoroughly understand that government was corrupt. Then, like the Nazis, they were elected by a small percentage of the citizens of Nicaragua.

Once they got in power they killed off their political opponents and they continually suppressed the basic human rights of their citizens. High ranking members of the Sandinista government had been successfully recruited by the KGB and other members of the government were trained by the KGB to cause unrest in neighboring countries. At one point this group was even directed by the KGB to perform terrorist acts in the United States though the most that they did was set up observation stations in Mexico near the US border. They shared many of these traits with Castro's government in Cuba.

Yet in this interview, Sanders has nothing but praise for the Sandinistas and Castro's government, dismissing all of the crimes against their own people by saying, of course they had problems.

In my humble opinion, anyone, be they liberals, socialists or conservatives, who value their ideology over basic human rights, human life, and morally acceptable behavior is not qualified to be President of the United States.

Check out the Wikipedia entry "Sandinista National Liberation Front". You will find it is a well balanced account of the history of SNLF. It also points out the organization's attempts to improve the lives of the Nicaraguan people. However, I listened to Sanders' entire account of his trips to Nicaragua and Cuba and he spoke only in glowing terms of both governments, dismissing their murders and suppression of the rights of the own people by saying that they had their problems. Such a one sided account was an attempt of a young socialist to defend tyrannical socialist governments.

Everyone is aware of the situation in the 1980's in Cuba. If you are unsure of dark nature of the SNLF read the section of the Wikipedia article which I provided above at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandinista_National_Liberation_Front:
Specifically read these two sections:
7 Human rights violations by the Sandinistas
8 US government allegations of support for foreign rebels

I am certainly not going to defend the Reagan administration's attempts overthrow the Sandinista government which was certainly no worse that the right wing dictatorship that they replaced. And the Iran/Contra affair was one of the worst stains on our history. But Sanders' account of his observations of the SNLA and Castro's government were at the time at best naive and at worst disingenuous. I tend to think the was naive because they obviously showed him only what they wanted him to see, but he became their propaganda tool.

Regardless, his failure to disavow or at least explain those remarks during the debate will be taken as a direct insult to Cuban Americans and many immigrants from South American who fled from the brutality of socialist governments in their native countries. I don't need to remind you that we need the Hispanic vote to win the White House. That failure not only damaged Sanders' campaign, but also our chances of winning the general election if he manages to win the nomination.

Need to figure out how to share!! We must get him elected, what a perceptive heart and mind, also I need to figure out how to recommend