63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read - Jesse Ventura [16]
Well, North may still be standing but his credibility sure isn’t. His diary entries actually had numerous reports of drug smuggling among the Contras, none of which North alerted the DEA or other law enforcement agencies about. One mentions $14 million in drug money being funneled into an operation.
I have to laugh and, in the immortal words of Nancy Reagan, “just say no” to drugs. The hypocrisy of the double standard is ludicrous. All you can do is laugh, or cry. I guess it’s okay to deal drugs if it’s for the cause of war.
I’m including here an exchange between North and his boss, Admiral John Poindexter, about Manuel Noriega, the Panamian dictator who our government later overthrew. Noriega is still doing time for drug-running, and it turns out that he and North had “a fairly good relationship.” Poindexter said he had “nothing against him other than his illegal activities.” (He misspells “assassination.”)
For more details on all this, check out National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 113 on-line (February 26, 2004).
18 & 19
RWANDA ATROCITIES
America’s Blind Eye to Genocide
The callousness of our government—and how we’ll only put something on the line when our own self-interest is involved (think oil in Iraq)—is shockingly clear when you look back at the Clinton administration’s position on the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994. For a three-month period starting in April that year, Hutu death squads slaughtered an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate members of their own tribe.
A few years later, when Clinton visited the Rwandan capital of Kigali, the president said: “It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.”
I visited Clinton in the White House after I was elected governor of Minnesota, and we played golf together and enjoyed each other’s company. But I’ve got to be blunt: that statement he made in Rwanda was a bald-faced lie. The CIA’s national intelligence daily, a secret briefing that went to Clinton and Vice President Gore and hundreds of senior officials, had almost daily reports on what was happening in Rwanda. But let’s face it, this was a small country in central Africa with no minerals or strategic value.
Clearly, there was nothing in Rwanda for corporate America to profit from, and it seems today that’s the only time we get involved. If there’s no oil or lithium or what-have-you, we really don’t have time. Humanitarian reasons aren’t good enough, there’s got to be financial gain. So we turned our backs on one of the worst mass murders in history. Even our support for the United Nations’ initiatives was less than lukewarm.
In 2004, again thanks to a FOIA lawsuit by the National Security Archive, the government released a set of documents related to our Rwanda policy ten years earlier. These are highly educational, as to how things work in D.C., beginning with some talking points by the State Department for a dinner engagement with Henry Kissinger! This spells out, early on, how not-far we were willing to go—even though it was likely that “a massive (hundreds of thousands of deaths) bloodbath will ensue.” But be sure not to mention genocide, or we might be committed to “actually ‘do something.’”
The second memo takes up the subject of “Has Genocide Occurred in Rwanda?” (you bet!) and how best to keep our international credibility while doing zip.
20
SOLDIERS AS GUINEA PIGS
Military Experiments on Our Own Troops
As a veteran who served his country for six years (1969–75), I think I’ve earned the right to be outraged at how my fellow servicemen have been treated by our government. But I can’t say this surprises me. Our patriotism toward our veterans is appalling and actually laughable.