In January 1981, a U.S.-armed and trained military battalion massacred close to 1,000 unarmed civilians in El Salvador. At the time, the Reagan administration denied the U.S.-backed troops were responsible. That was a lie. “Thirty-nine years later,” the Washington Post reports, “the suspected killers are on trial, and the judge is seeking a crucial piece...
Tag: El Salvador
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The Last Assassination of the Cold War
[This review was first published in The Intercept, Nov. 17, 2019) Review of November, by Jorge Galán (London, Constable, 2019) The assassination of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador 30 years ago this month was the last great crime of the Cold War. It happened on November 16th, 1989, a week after German protesters began...
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Elliott Abrams’ Bloody Lies
Elliott Abrams, President Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela, first became well known in 1982 after he was named assistant secretary of state for human rights in the Reagan administration. Abrams served as a junior point man for the Reagan administration’s wars in Central America. He was an aggressive, articulate defender of pro-U.S. forces that committed...
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RIP William Blum: CIA Critic and Independent Journalist
When I first started reporting on the CIA in the 1980s, I learned early on Bill Blum was a good source for stories. He wrote for Covert Action Information Bulletin (later Covert Action), a notorious publication in Reagan’s Washington. The CAIB that had the feel of samizdat, the underground publications of dissidents in the Soviet Union....