Did the Reagan Administration MURDER an American Citizen? (Ben Linder)

Ben Linder wasn't a soldier working for the Sandinistas or a revolutionary agent.

Ben Linder was a humanitarian activist, working on vaccinating poor Nicaraguans, entertaining children, and working on projects to bring power to the Nicaraguan people.

It was that last thing that got him and two other innocent Nicaraguan people killed by the Contras.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Linder

I'm no law expert, but I know enough to know that when you tell someone to murder someone and they go through with it, then you are just as responsible for that person's death as the actual murderer is.

Linder wasn't caught in the "crossfire", it was the Reagan/Contra doctrine to target social services and the people who worked on them. Linder was targeted by the Contras.

As far as I'm concerned, the members of the Reagan Administration threw a grenade and shot Linder in the head as well as the Contras who did it.

And the people behind this murder, they aren't in prison, they're in the White House.

...so, yeah, more than one.

nt.

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/mphammer.htm
February 1981 issue of State Magazine
"Michael P. Hammer, 42, director of the Agrarian Union Development Department of the American Institute for Free Labor Development, was killed by gunmen in San Salvador on January 3, 1981. Also killed in the incident, which took place in a hotel dining room, were Mark Pearlman, recently employed by the institute, and Rodolfo Viera, president of the Peasants Workers' Union, El Salvador. The three men were working on an agrarian reform program for the rural poor."

(Mark Pearlman was a friend and neighbor. School of the Americas Watch has a lot of links too.)...ADW

Linder's parent's tried to get some sort of restitution from the Government for their son's death, and were unsuccessful.

On edit: The Sting song "Fragile" was inspired by Ben Linder.

They didn't run a roadblock, as the Reagan Administration maintained. They were run off the road, beaten, raped, murdered, and left in a ditch to rot by men our government trained at the School of the Americas. What about El Mozote? That was probably with our assent, too.

Reagan and his cronies were blacker than black in their hearts. They were hell-bent on destroying Central America and South America, too. People there still remember. I was in Nicaragua in 1994, and there were memorials and murals to those killed by the CIA.

The La Penca bombing was a terrorist attack that occurred in Nicaragua in 1984, during the early days of the Civil War.

The bombing was carried out .... using a suitcase bomb planted to kill revolutionary Edén Pastora ....

The bombing led to an investigation by the Christic Institute, set against the backdrop of public hearings on the Iran-Contra Affair. The Institute filed a lawsuit against several individuals; many of them reputed illegal drug dealers and mercenaries, whom it is alleged were engaged in trafficking and terrorism on behalf of the U.S. government through several CIA operatives.

Part of this campaign involved the illegal shipment of arms by airplane, for whom the CIA enlisted known traffickers in illegal drugs — notably cocaine and marijuana. Arms provided by sources within the U.S. government intended for the Contras were shipped on the return flights of cocaine shipments. The final investigation report named John F. Hull, identified as a CIA associate who had properties in Nicaragua and Costa Rica ostensibly used as Contra supply bases, and Felipe Vidal, a Cuban-American contra figure, as planners of the assassination attempt against Pastora. The U.S. government has refused to declassify documents related to the case......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Penca_bombing

=============================================

LINDA FRAZIER

News Organization: THE TICO TIMES
Died 1984 ....

Bio:
Killed May 30 by a bomb blast at a press conference called by a Nicaraguan rebel leader just inside the border with Costa Rica. Three others were also killed, including two journalists. Other rebel factions initially were blamed, but several years later a journalistic investigation said that the evidence points to an Argentine who worked for Nicaragua's Sandinista government.

http://www.frontpagenews.org/scripts/Journalist/Detail.asp?PhotoID=433

Costa Rica and Nicaragua; Remember La Penca and Ronald Reagan
NotiCen, 9:23, 17 June 2004

Former US President Ronald Reagan died just days after the 20th anniversary of the bombing at La Penca, a place inside Nicaragua on the Costa Rica border. The bombing, an act of terrorism almost entirely forgotten in the US, is well-remembered in a region that was once the focus of Reagan's foreign policy.

The May 30, 1984, explosion at a press conference called by Eden Pastora, the famed Sandinista Comandante Cero of the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution, left four dead, three of them journalists. Since then, books have been written and lawsuits launched, but no one has ever been tried for a multiple murder that Costa Rica still treats as an active case that is seriously stalled.

Attorney General Francisco Dall'Anese has blamed US obstruction in the form of blocked access to classified documents. In a Feb. 27, 2004, letter to Costa Rica's Defensor de los Habitantes Jose Manuel Echandi, he enumerated the reasons for the deadlock: ....

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/47/460.html

Subject: CONTRAGATE - A REVIEW
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

LAWSUIT REVEALS DEPTH OF IRAN/CONTRA CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

* * *

a special prosecutor to investigate the Iran/hostage/arms/drugs/Contra
scandle. I thought it would be useful to post some historical background
information relevant to the issue. The following piece comes from The
Christic Institute, 1324 N. Capitol St., N.W.; Washington, D.C. 20002 (202)
797-8106]

* * *

In a civil lawsuit filed last May in Miami Federal Court, the Christic
Institute, an interfaith law and public policy center in Washington, D.C.,
charged that the contra leadership and their private supporters bombed a
press conference in order to assassinate contra leader Eden Pastora, kill
U.S. journalists, and blame the attack on the Sandinista government of
Nicaragua.

The Institute represents U.S. journalists Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey.
Avirgan was seriously injured in the bombing. Honey, his wife, suffered
emotional distress and financial damages resulting from this terrorist act.

The principal issue in the case, however, is the covert operations of a
"Secret Team" of current and former intelligence community and military
personnel allied with anti- Communist extremists. According to the
Institute's sources, this "team" was reactivated by Lt. Col Oliver North to
train and equip the contras when the Congress passed the Boland Amendment
cutting off official U.S. aid to the contras.

Among the 29 defendants are the chief of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force
(F.D.N.), retired generals in the United States Army and Air Force, former
senior officials of the Central Intelligence Agency, two leading underworld
figures in the Colombian cocaine industry, and members of Cuban-American
terrorist organizations.

Documents filed by the Christic Institute in Miami Federal court charge
that the contras, aided by the Secret Team: ......

http://www.skepticfiles.org/socialis/contrarv.htm

The following is a transcript of a speech delivered by
Daniel P. Sheehan, general counsel and public-policy director
for the Christic Institute, and was given on Fed. 1, 1987 in
Los Angeles.

Mr. Sheehan graduated with honors from Harvard College
in 1967 and from the Harvard School of Law in 1970. Mr.
Sheehan also attended the Harvard Divinity School. For the
next 10 years, he participated in a very long list of legal
cases, most of which dealt with constitutional and/or civil-
liberties issues.

From 1976 to 1987, Mr. Sheehan was chief counsel in the
Karen G. Silkwood case and achieved a landmark victory.
During that case, a spirited and very talented team was
assembled. The Christic Institute was organized after the
Silkwood case was settled in order to keep this team together
and involved with public policy and attendant legal issues.

The team was successful in the prosecution of the Ku
Klux Klan and Nazis in Greensboro, N.N. Mr. Sheehan has
represented the people of Three Mile Island and successfully
defended Mayor Eddie Carthan, the first elected Black mayor
in the Mississippi Delta since the Civil War.
The Christic Institute is an interfaith public-interest
law firm and public-policy center. ......

http://www.skepticfiles.org/socialis/sheehan.htm

Lasher - Wed Jul-04-07 05:14 AM
Bush Pardons 6 in Iran Affair, Aborting a Weinberger Trial; Prosecutor Assails 'Cover-Up'

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1246687