Reagan S War On Terrorism In Nicaragua

During the first two years of Ronald Reagan’s second term the United States developed an offensive strategy for dealing with conflict in the developing world. Nicaragua was a primary target of this policy. Scholars refer to this as the Reagan offensive: the first time that the United States eschewed the norms of containment and sought to “roll-back” the gains of communism. However, the Reagan offensive was also significantly driven by a response to the emergent threat of international terrorism. Terrorism provided a vehicle that justified its use of aggressive proxy war and pursuit of regime change in Central America. U.S. policy with Nicaragua demonstrates the importance of terrorism to the development of a more aggressive United States in the post-Cold War world. This book examines the influence of the U.S.-Contra War in establishing a precedent for the use of overt pre-emptive force against sovereign nations in the name of counterterrorism. In the 21st century, the United States undertook a policy with the world based on a broad definition of self-defense that called for an array of actions that often violated traditional norms of international law and recognition of sovereign rights. This book demonstrates that the precedent for this change occurred in the late Cold War as the United States sought to respond to an escalation of global terrorism. The emergent problem of terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s transformed how and when the United States applied force in the world.

An account of U.S. policy from the Sandinista revolution through the Iran-contra scandal and beyond. Sklar shows how the White House sabotaged peace negoatiations and sustained the deadly contra war despite public opposition, with secret U.S. special forces and an auxiliary arm of dictators, drug smugglers and death squad godfathers, and illuminates an alternative policy rooted in law and democracy.

Major Motion Picture based on Dark Alliance and starring Jeremy Renner, "Kill the Messenger," to be be released in Fall 2014 In August 1996, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb stunned the world with a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News reporting the results of his year-long investigation into the roots of the crack cocaine epidemic in America, specifically in Los Angeles. The series, titled “Dark Alliance,” revealed that for the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs and funneled millions in drug profits to the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras. Gary Webb pushed his investigation even further in his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Drawing from then newly declassified documents, undercover DEA audio and videotapes that had never been publicly released, federal court testimony, and interviews, Webb demonstrates how our government knowingly allowed massive amounts of drugs and money to change hands at the expense of our communities. Webb’s own stranger-than-fiction experience is also woven into the book. His excoriation by the media—not because of any wrongdoing on his part, but by an insidious process of innuendo and suggestion that in effect blamed Webb for the implications of the story—had been all but predicted. Webb was warned off doing a CIA expose by a former Associated Press journalist who lost his job when, years before, he had stumbled onto the germ of the “Dark Alliance” story. And though Internal investigations by both the CIA and the Justice Department eventually vindicated Webb, he had by then been pushed out of the Mercury News and gone to work for the California State Legislature Task Force on Government Oversight. He died in 2004.

In 1987, the death of Ben Linder, the first American killed by President Reagan's "freedom fighters" -- the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contras -- ignited a firestorm of protest and debate. In this landmark first biography of Linder, investigative journalist Joan Kruckewitt tells his story. In the summer of 1983, a 23-year-old American named Ben Linder arrived in Managua with a unicycle and a newly earned degree in engineering. In 1986, Linder moved from Managua to El Cuá, a village in the Nicaraguan war zone, where he helped form a team to build a hydroplant to bring electricity to the town. He was ambushed and killed by the Contras the following year while surveying a stream for a possible hydroplant. In 1993, Kruckewitt traveled to the Nicaraguan mountains to investigate Linder's death. In July 1995. she finally located and interviewed one of the men who killed Ben Linder, a story that became the basis for a New Yorker feature on Linder's death. Linder's story is a portrait of one idealist who died for his beliefs, as well as a picture of a failed foreign policy, vividly exposing the true dimensions of a war that forever marked the lives of both Nicaraguans and Americans.

In 9-11, published in November 2001 and arguably the single most influential post 9-11 book, internationally renowned thinker Noam Chomsky bridged the information gap around the World Trade Center attacks, cutting through the tangle of political opportunism, expedient patriotism, and general conformity that choked off American discourse in the months immediately following. Chomsky placed the attacks in context, marshaling his deep and nuanced knowledge of American foreign policy to trace the history of American political aggression--in the Middle East and throughout Latin America as well as in Indonesia, in Afghanistan, in India and Pakistan--at the same time warning against America’s increasing reliance on military rhetoric and violence in its response to the attacks, and making the critical point that the mainstream media and public intellectuals were failing to make: any escalation of violence as a response to violence will inevitably lead to further, and bloodier, attacks on innocents in America and around the world. This new edition of 9-11, published on the tenth anniversary of the attacks and featuring a new preface by Chomsky, reminds us that today, just as much as ten years ago, information and clarity remain our most valuable tools in the struggle to prevent future violence against the innocent, both at home and abroad.

For the last two years, the author has been investigating the secret funding of the Contras by the White House. Here, she identifies the network of National Security Council staff (led by Colonel Oliver North), CIA operatives and ex-agents who set up this illegal support system, after the passage of the Boland Amendment in October 1984 made it illegal for the US government to give direct and indirect aid to the Contras.