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From the Archives
Ronald Reagan’s Torture
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | September 8, 2009
The 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report, released in August 2009, referenced as “background” to the Bush-era abuses the spy agency’s “intermittent involvement in the interrogation of individuals whose interests are opposed to those of the United States.” The report noted “a resurgence in interest” in teaching those techniques in the early 1980s “to foster foreign liaison relationships.”
The report said, “because of political sensitivities,” the CIA’s top brass in the 1980s “forbade Agency officers from using the word ‘interrogation” and substituted the phrase “human resources exploitation” [HRE] in training programs for allied intelligence agencies.
The euphemism aside, the reality of these interrogation techniques remained brutal, with the CIA Inspector General conducting a 1984 investigation of alleged “misconduct on the part of two Agency officers who were involved in interrogations and the death of one individual,” the report said (although the details were redacted in the version released to the public).
In 1984, the CIA also was hit with a scandal over what became known as an “assassination manual” prepared by agency personnel for the Nicaraguan Contras, a rebel group sponsored by the Reagan administration with the goal of ousting Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.
Despite those two problems, the questionable training programs apparently continued for another two years. The 2004 IG report states that “in 1986, the Agency ended the HRE training program because of allegations of human rights abuses in Latin America.”
While the report’s references to this earlier era of torture are brief – and the abuses are little-remembered features of Ronald Reagan’s glorified presidency – there have been other glimpses into how Reagan unleashed this earlier “dark side” on the peasants, workers and students of Central America. … continue
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Aletho News 
“If we wish to impose a regime more to our liking in Tehran”?,
You mean like the USA Government is doing Venezuela? That would be anti-democratic wouldn’t it? The American Government needs to fix its own problems.
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Pat Buchanan can be sooo good. He can also be sooooooo bad (I’m thinking of his domestic white-supremacist proclivities).
He’s sooo good here–except for “Iran’s hundreds of swift boats and handful of submarines would be sunk. Its ports would be mined or blockaded. Oil exports and oil revenue would halt. Air fields and missile bases would be bombed. The Iranian economy would crash. Iran would need years to recover.” Uhhh, Pat: What about hundreds of thousands or millions of Iran’s people? Their very lives don’t deserve a mention, Pat?
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What a difference between the so-called “main-stream media” reporting on this war build-up, and what is presented in the alternative press of the internet.
Its only equivalent is how Israel goes about blaming the Palestinians for the demolition of their houses, the bombing of their hospitals, the assassinations and deliberate shooting to make amputees and cripples… on and on.
Cui bono, indeed! Perpetual war to benefit Israeli land thievery, perpetual war to ensure billions of American tax-payer foreign aid, perpetual war to financially strangle Palestinians, perpetual war to ensure continued production of military purchasing paid for by American tax-payers.
The so-obvious control of Israel, to the dictates of Israel is ruinous and if the Zionists and their promoters have their way, what is said above and by the authors of these stories which expose the lies and reveal the machinations, what is written will be declared as anti-Semitic and thereby a criminal offense.
Cui bono? Count the ways…
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“Like”! Superlative, analogy-on-point comment, Michael! It’s all simply…perverse, isn’t it? (that’s the word that pops up at me as I review your words and ponder this surreal trap we’re “entangled” in, like it or not…as I write so often, we’re all Palestinians now)
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who?
yid.
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