THE SHOW GOES ON The Right After Reagan
WHEN IT WAS REPORTED IN OCTOBER that 5,000 contras had fled Honduras for Miami, financing the trip by selling their rifles and handguns to the FMLN, it seemed the war might finally be coming...
...For the rogues' gallery of the Right, the show goes on...
...WHEN IT WAS REPORTED IN OCTOBER that 5,000 contras had fled Honduras for Miami, financing the trip by selling their rifles and handguns to the FMLN, it seemed the war might finally be coming to an end...
...I N "BEYOND THE SECRET TEAM," JANE Hunter, editor of Israeli Foreign Affairs and co-author of The Iran-Contra Connection, examines two key players in the war on Nicaragua-"private" operatives and foreign governments-and finds them still in the business of covert warfare...
...With the exception of Oliver North's gun-running "Enterprise," these networks were virtually untouched by the Iran-contra scandal...
...Like the CIA's foreign and private collaborators, the broadcasters, ideologues and hands-on counterinsurgency operatives of the Christian Right are out of the reach of Congressional control and may well become valuable assets in the foreign adventures of the Bush Administration...
...That George Bush is less enamored of the religious Right than Ronald Reagan will surely reinforce their overseas bent...
...She paints an incestuous relationship which fatally compromises the already limited jurisdiction exercised by the oversight committees and the Congress at large...
...When the Agency was reined in, foreign governments seeking leverage with Washington moved to fill the gap...
...military personnel, the foreign governments, the big-time drug dealers, and the evangelical missionaries...
...Some would maintain that it is a passing phenomenon, the fluke result of one president's singleminded zeal to overthrow the Sandinista Revolution...
...In fact, the Congressional hearings, calculated more to reassure the public than to reveal wrongdoing, refused to examine the broader criminal context in which the "Enterprise" operated...
...The introduction of Christian Right activists to counterinsurgency warfare established a very dangerous precedent," writes Sara Diamond in "Holy Warriors...
...Congress confirmed the propriety of covert warfare and made it clear that the punishment for violating the law is minimal...
...In "Overseeing the Overseers," Hunter shows how "Congressional oversight of the CIA invited CIA counter-oversight of Congress, to ensure that key legislators remained on the Agency team...
...When covert operatives were dismissed, they put their contacts and skills to profitable use in the "private sector...
...Besides going private and international, CIA covert warfare took a third step over the past decade to circumvent Congressional and Executive restraint...
...and international law came into being as a consequence of restrictions placed on the CIA in the 1970s...
...For this Report, we set out to question common wisdom...
...According to common wisdom, it was Reagan's determination to buck Congressional and popular opposition which brought this international league of the Right into existence and placed it at the cutting edge of his foreign policy...
...U.S...
...Thus, with the not-so-veiled encouragement of elements of the national security establishment, covert action grew far beyond the reach of Congress and even the White House...
...Ironically, Hunter argues, the private and foreign networks which so blatantly violated U.S...
...C ONGRESS ALSO FAILED TO SCRUTINIZE the Christian Right's role in the war on Nicaragua...
...missionary" operations in Central America continue unhampered-ranging from running anti-Sandinista schools, to filling El Salvador's airwaves with progovernment propaganda, from preaching about the ordained right to kill communists, to providing material as well as spiritual aid to the contras...
...Their skill at manipulating theology and ideology and their enthusiasm for the task have proven quite effective in the psychological operations characteristic of low intensity conflict...
...Evangelicals turned to Central America when their domestic social agenda was largely frustrated, asserts Diamond, whose book, Spiritual Waifare, will be published by South End Press in 1989...
...Now we have a former director of central intelligence as president...
...And, after eight years of covert operations, we have the vast constellation of right-wing forces which waged the war on Nicaragua-the ex-CIA operatives, the active and retired U.S...
Vol. 22 • August 1988 • No. 5
