Ron Paul Had Accurate Conspiracy Theory: CIA Was Tied To Drug Traffickers 30DEZ11

THIS is not news, anyone who thinks the cia has been working to defend the average American has been living in a dream world. The majority of these people live and work on the dark side, employing the same tactics, embracing the same evil as their opponents, leaving one to wonder what the difference between them really is? The cia has been involved in drug trafficking at least since WW II (read 'The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade' by Alfred W McCoy) through Vietnam and the Central American insurgencies and in Afghanistan. Why? Because their activities have not been to protect American democracy and to foster democracy around the world, they have not been interested in protecting the American people from becoming enslaved under a communist government or dictatorship. NO, they have been controlled by corporate America and the military-industrial complex to protect the wealth and profits of the rich, the 1% who control our nation and it's destiny, and their actions and involvement in drug trafficking has just been one of the tools they have been allowed to use to achieve their goals. Just as they have overthrown governments and waged wars, killing those who stood in the way of American corporate profitability so too have they encouraged, facilitated, developed, enabled and facilitated drug trafficking and the drug underworld in the U.S. for the same reasons, the protection of American corporate profits and the U.S. military-industrial complex. All this, all the killing, the corruption, the government created drug addictions, all done in the name of and for the greed and lust for power of corporate America and the American military-industrial complex. And as long as the American public tolerates the cia continuing as the rogue agency it is, they commit these atrocities in our name too. From HuffPost....
WASHINGTON -- According to a former aide, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has long been drawn toward conspiracy theories. Eric Dondero, who served Paul off and on from 1987 to 2003, wrote recently that the Texas Republican suspected that George W. Bush may have had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and that Franklin Roosevelt knew in advance about Pearl Harbor. Paul's writings and speeches spotlight a host of other plots, including the "war on Christmas."
But just because not all of Paul's theories are backed by good evidence doesn't mean none of them are.
In 1988, while running for president on the Libertarian Party ticket, he highlighted yet another conspiracy theory, and this one doesn't collapse under investigation: The CIA, Paul told a gathering of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, was involved in trafficking drugs as part of the Iran-Contra debacle.
Drug trafficking is "a gold mine for people who want to raise money in the underground government in order to finance projects that they can't get legitimately. It is very clear that the CIA has been very much involved with drug dealings," Paul said. "The CIA was very much involved in the Iran-Contra scandals. I'm not making up the stories; we saw it on television. They were hauling down weapons and drugs back. And the CIA and government officials were closing their eyes, fighting a war that was technically illegal."
Earlier this week, I looked into Paul's claim in the same speech that the war on drugs had racist origins and that the medical community played a role in lobbying for drug prohibitions. That charge was more or less accurate.
So is Paul's claim about the CIA and drug trafficking, a connection I explore in the book "This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America." (An excerpt of the chapter on the CIA appeared in The Root.) The following is drawn from my book.
Since at least the 1940s, the American government has organized and supported insurgent armies for the purpose of overthrowing some presumably hostile foreign regime. In Italy, the United States helped pit the Corsican and Sicilian mobs against the Fascists and then the Communists. In China, it aided Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang in its struggle against Mao Zedong's communist forces. In Afghanistan, it once backed the mujahedeen in their fight against the Soviet Union and today backs warlords in opposition to the mujahedeen.
All of these and other U.S.-supported groups profited, or still profit, heavily from the drug trade. One of the principal arguments made by the Drug Enforcement Administration in support of the global drug war is that the illegal drug trade funds violent, stateless organizations. The DEA refers specifically to al Qaeda and the Taliban, but the same method of fundraising has long been used by other violent, stateless actors whom the United States befriended.
AN 'UNCOMFORTABLE' STORY
Douglas Farah was in El Salvador when the San Jose Mercury News broke a major story in the summer of 1996: The Nicaraguan Contras, a confederation of paramilitary rebels sponsored by the CIA, had been funding some of their operations by exporting cocaine to the United States. One of their best customers was a man nicknamed "Freeway Rick" -- Ricky Donnell Ross, then a Southern California dealer who was running an operation the Los Angeles Times dubbed "the Wal-Mart of crack dealing."
"My first thought was, 'Holy shit!' because there'd been so many rumors in the region of this going on," said Farah 12 years later. He'd grown up in Latin America and covered it for 20 years for the Washington Post. "There had always been these stories floating around about [the Contras] and cocaine. I knew [Contra leader] Adolfo Calero and some of the other folks there, and they were all sleazebags. You wouldn't read the story and say, 'Oh my god, these guys would never do that.' It was more like, 'Oh, one more dirty thing they were doing.' So I took it seriously."
The same would not hold true of most of Farah's colleagues, either in the newspaper business in general or at the Post in particular. "If you're talking about our intelligence community tolerating -- if not promoting -- drugs to pay for black ops, it's rather an uncomfortable thing to do when you're an establishment paper like the Post," Farah told me. "If you were going to be directly rubbing up against the government, they wanted it more solid than it could probably ever be done."
In the mid to late 1980s, a number of reports had surfaced that connected the Contras to the cocaine trade. The first was by Associated Press scribes Brian Barger and Robert Parry, who published a story in December 1985 that began, "Nicaraguan rebels operating in northern Costa Rica have engaged in cocaine trafficking, in part to help finance their war against Nicaragua's leftist government, according to U.S. investigators and American volunteers who work with the rebels."
Only a few outlets followed Barger and Parry's lead, including the San Francisco Examiner and the lefty magazine In These Times, which both published similar stories in 1986, and CBS's "West 57th" TV series, which did a segment in 1987. A Nexis search of the year following Barger and Parry's revelation turned up a total of only four stories containing the terms "Contras" and "cocaine," one of them a denial of the accusation from a Contra spokesperson. Stories popped up here and there over the next decade, but many of them made only oblique reference to a couldn't-possibly-be-true conspiracy theory.
Then came the San Jose Mercury News article, a 20,000-word three-parter by Pulitzer Prize-winning staffer Gary Webb, published under the headline "Dark Alliance." "For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found," the story began.
The series initially received little attention from major media outlets, but it was eventually spread across the nation by the Internet and black talk radio. The latter put its own spin on the tale: that the U.S. government had deliberately spread crack to African-American neighborhoods to quell unruly residents. The Post newsroom was bombarded with phone calls asking why it was ignoring the story, the paper's ombudsman later reported.
In response, the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times would all weigh in with multiple articles claiming that Webb's assertions were bunk. His career was effectively ruined, and even his own paper eventually disavowed "Dark Alliance," despite having given it a cutting-edge online presentation complete with document transcriptions and audio recordings.
The big papers had been pushing their same line for years. In 1987, New York Times reporter Keith Schneider had dismissed out of hand a lawsuit filed by a liberal group charging that the Contras were funding their operations with drug money. "Other investigators, including reporters from major news organizations, have tried without success to find proof of aspects of the case," he wrote, "particularly the allegations that military supplies for the contras may have been paid for with profits from drug trafficking."
In These Times later asked Schneider why he'd rejected the Contra-coke connection. He was trying to avoid "shatter[ing] the Republic," he said. "I think it is so damaging, the implications are so extraordinary, that for us to run the story, it had better be based on the most solid evidence we could amass."
The American republic, of course, is an idea as much as it is a reality. That idea is of a nation founded on freedom and dedicated to the progress of human rights around the globe. It's most certainly not of a country that aids the underground drug trade -- even if it does.
WHAT DRUG RUNNERS DO
If Webb didn't have ironclad proof that the CIA had knowingly done just that, he did, as one Senate investigator later noted, have "a strong circumstantial case that Contra officials who were paid by the CIA knew about [drug smuggling] and looked the other way." He based his series on court records and interviews with key drug-runners. One of them, Danilo Blandón, was once described by Assistant U.S. Attorney L.J. O'Neale as "the biggest Nicaraguan cocaine dealer in the United States."
Webb had been unable to persuade Blandón to talk, but the cocaine dealer testified at a trial shortly before "Dark Alliance" came out. Blandón wasn't on trial himself, wasn't facing any jail time, and was in fact being paid by the U.S. government to act as an informant. In other words, he had no obvious incentive to lie to make the United States look bad. Nevertheless, in sworn testimony, he said that in 1981 alone, his drug operation sold almost a ton of cocaine in the United States and that "whatever we were running in L.A., the profit was going to the Contra revolution."
Blandón's boss in the operation was Norwin Meneses, the head of political operations and U.S. fundraising for the Contras. Meneses was known as "Rey de la Droga" -- King of Drugs -- and had been under active investigation by the U.S. government since the early '70s as the Cali cocaine cartel's top representative in Nicaragua. The DEA considered him a major trafficker, and he had been implicated in 45 separate federal investigations, Webb discovered through government documents. Regardless, Meneses had never served any time in federal prison and lived openly in his San Francisco home.
In 1981, Blandón testified, he and Meneses had traveled to Honduras to meet Col. Enrique Bermúdez, the military leader of the Contra army and a full-time CIA employee. "While Blandon says Bermudez didn't know cocaine would be the fund-raising device they used," Webb wrote, "the presence of the mysterious Mr. Meneses strongly suggests otherwise." The reporter drew on court documents and government records to show that anyone involved in or familiar with the drug world at the time knew exactly how Meneses went about raising revenue.
Blandón sold the Contras' product to Ross for prices well below what other dealers could command, allowing him to expand his business throughout Los Angeles, then to Texas, Ohio and beyond. Ross told Webb that he owed his rise to Blandón and his cheap coke. ''I'm not saying I wouldn't have been a dope dealer without Danilo,'' Ross said. ''But I wouldn't have been Freeway Rick.''

Farah, the Washington Post reporter, said that his reporting on Webb's trail led to one of the biggest battles of his career. "There were maybe, in my 20 years at the Post, two or three stories out of however many hundreds or thousands I wrote where I had this kind of problem, and this was one of them. I wasn't in general in confrontation with my editors but ... this thing was weird and I knew it was weird," he said. "I did have a long and dispiriting fight with the editors at the Post because they wanted to say ultimately -- their basic take was that I was dealing with a bunch of liars, so it was one person's word against another person's word, and therefore you couldn't tell the truth. But it was pretty clear to me."

The official government response was provided to Post national security reporter Walter Pincus, who had at one time served in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps. "One of my big fights on this was with Pincus," Farah remembered, "and my disadvantage was that I was in Managua and he was sitting in on the story meetings and talking directly to the editors. And we had a disagreement over the validity of what I was finding. At the time, I didn't realize he had been an agency employee for awhile. That might have helped me understand what was going on there a bit."
Pincus, who said that his involvement with the CIA several decades before is overblown, recalled the developing story differently. "To be honest, I can't remember talking to Doug at the time," he said. "To me, it was no great shock that some of the people the agency was dealing with were also drug dealers. But the idea that the agency was then running the drug program was totally different."
Pincus said that Webb's core story about the Contras and cocaine didn't resonate not because it didn't have any truth to it, but because it was obviously true. "This is a problem that came up -- it's probably a question of how long you cover these things," he said. "It came up during the Vietnam War, where the U.S. was dealing with the Hmong tribes in Laos and some of the people that were flying airplanes that the agency was using were also [running] drugs."
Through his reporting, Farah concluded, he'd confirmed the greater part of Webb's story. "The Contra-drug stuff, I think, was there," Farah said. "Largely, I think it [Webb's story] was right."
THE MEDIA ONSLAUGHT
The editorial cuts and pushback, however, discouraged Farah from pursuing a further investigation into the Contras' drug-running history. "I was really sort of disappointed at how things had run there at the Post on that story, and there wasn't much incentive to go forward after that," said Farah. (The Post's top editor at the time, Leonard Downie, told me that he didn't remember the incident well enough to comment on it.)
Although Pincus said that he didn't have any role in neutering and burying Farah's story, he did say that he sympathized with his fellow reporter. "I was writing about there being no weapons in Iraq, and it was put in the back of the paper," Pincus said. "I've been through the same thing."

The Washington Post, like the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, published a massive package dedicated to debunking Webb's story. When a congressional investigation later confirmed the major elements of Webb's reporting, the papers barely covered it. (I go into the media attack in more detail in the book.)
In the face of the media onslaught, Webb's editor retracted the story. Webb was demoted and sent to a dustbin bureau 150 miles from San Jose. He resigned after settling an arbitration claim and went to work for a small alt-weekly. Over the next several years, his marriage fell apart and his wages were garnished for child support. On Dec. 10, 2004, Webb was discovered dead, shot twice in the head with his father's .38. The local coroner declared the death a suicide.
Obituaries in the major papers referenced his "discredited" series. The Los Angeles Times obit recalled his "widely criticized series linking the CIA to the explosion of crack cocaine in Los Angeles," noting that "[m]ajor newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Washington Post, wrote reports discrediting elements of Webb's reporting." The New York Times ran a five-paragraph Reuters obit that began, "Gary Webb, a reporter who won national attention with a series of articles, later discredited." The obit continued, "The articles led to calls in Congress for an investigation, but major newspapers discredited parts of Mr. Webb's work." It made no mention of the fact that those calls for an investigation were heeded and that the investigation confirmed a great deal of Webb's reporting.
The headline "Web of Deception" ran atop Howard Kurtz's story in the Washington Post. "There was a time when Gary Webb was at the center of a huge, racially charged national controversy. That was eight years ago, and it turned out badly for him," Kurtz wrote. "The lesson," he concluded, "is that just because a news outlet makes sensational charges doesn't make them true, and just because the rest of the media challenge the charges doesn't make them part of some cover-up."
Reading the obituaries at the time, Farah recalled, was dispiriting. "Everybody, especially in the news business when you're working fast, makes mistakes," he said. "But I don't think that should stand as the final word on what he did."
Kurtz, however, stands by what he wrote then. "Of course it's very sad what happened to [Gary Webb] in the end, but I just did some basic reporting on him," Kurtz said. "I wasn't going out on a limb."

Reagan’s Legacy (at 100) & REMEMBERING BENJAMIN LINDER from SOJOURNERS 3FEB11 & LIBERATIONTHEOLOGY.ORG

IT was during reagan's presidency that I was arrested at the cia for taking part in a non violent protest against his illegal covert wars in Central America. I still remember the event that outraged me enough go to the protest and be arrested. Benjamin Linder was a 27 year old American performing humanitarian work in Nicaragua when he was murdered on 28 APR 1987 along with two Nicaraguans, Sergio Hernandez and Pablo Rosales by cia supported contra rebels. To me, this represented the real reagan, someone who would be smiling at you while sticking a knife in your gut, and then walk away laughing. His administration was evil, corrupt and served the greedy interest of the wealthy and the military-industrial complex. This remembrance of him on what would be his 100th birthday this Sunday, 6 FEB 2011, from Sojourners followed by a remembrance of Benjamin Linder, Sergio Hernandez and Pablo Rosales from LiberationTheology.org
This Sunday would be Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday, and the predictable tributes have come from across the political spectrum. President Barack Obama, for instance, wrote in USA Today, “No matter what political disagreements you may have had with President Reagan, and I certainly had my share, there is no denying his leadership in the world, or his gift for communicating his vision for America.” Mitt Romney called Reagan “a transformative president.”
Most commentators praise Reagan for his “optimism” and personal affability. But, as we wrote after his passing in 2004:

[P]residents — as all leaders — must be judged by history not on the basis of their personal likeability, but by the real-world effects of their policies. And Reagan’s policies were disastrous and destructive. While poverty worsened at home and abroad, he spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the largest peacetime military buildup in history, including $80 billion (and counting) for the fantasy of Star Wars and tens of billions for first-strike-capable nuclear weapons. Conventional wisdom, of course, holds that Reagan’s militarism “brought down the wall” of communism. Historians might well debate the opposite view: That his militaristic approach helped bolster the hardliners in the Soviet Union and forestalled rather than caused the inevitable downfall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War.
The Reagan administration ignored the burgeoning AIDS epidemic while tens of thousands died. Reagan’s crew sold arms to Iran — illegally — to support the U.S.-initiated contra war in Central America, where tens of thousands of other people died. The U.S. wars in Central America — mostly fought through death squads, paramilitaries, and U.S.-backed local armies — resulted in the death of untold thousands throughout the region, bookended by the 1980 murders of four U.S. churchwomen and the 1989 assassination of six Jesuits and their housekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador.
Closer to home, Reagan’s policies were equally devastating. He opposed virtually every civil and human rights initiative, from the 1964 Civil Rights Act through and including efforts to dismantle South Africa’s apartheid regime. On virtually every social issue – from race, welfare, and tax policy to school lunch programs and the environment – Reagan’s policies worked against the interests of the poor and marginalized and further enriched the wealthy and powerful.

Reagan’s most destructive legacy could very well be the mania for “deregulation” that he unleashed, starting with his declaration in his first Inaugural address that “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Reagan’s intensive assault on checks and balances and the removal of reasonable constraints started a wave that washed up decades later as the tsunami that swamped Wall Street.
So go ahead, praise Reagan as a likeable man. Hold him up as a model of civility in contrast to the flame-throwing rhetoric his successors wield today. Even give him credit for recognizing the horror of nuclear weapons and seeking their abolition. But don’t let the revisionists whitewash one of the most damaging presidencies of the 20th century and the dangerous legacy it left us.
Jim Rice is editor of Sojourners magazine.

Ben Linder (1959-1987) The gift of a dreamer

Adapted from the web site of the Religious Task Force on Central America and Mexico
 

"Ben Linder reminds me very much of those women and men who came from the South in the Civil Rights movement and by whose sacrifice and suffering we have the opportunity to be as free as we are in these United States... Black and white, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish. Ben Linder, I understand happened to be Jewish. The intensity of his dedication is really one of the finest examples of the prophetic and service tradition of Judaism in the world today." "This was not an accidental death. This was a deliberate assassination. They knew he was an American. They knew what he was doing. He was simply building dams to provide fresh water and electricity to people in villages. But when you look at the other people the [Nicaraguan] contra have killed -- there were eight other foreign volunteer workers killed before Ben Linder. Approximately 100 medical workers killed. And a Baptist Center burned to the ground. There were more than 300 school teachers that have been killed. The war of the contras is not a war against the Sandinista government. It's a war against the Nicaraguan people -- against teachers, doctors, people trying to grow food." "The United States of America cannot consider itself a bastion of freedom and human dignity if it continues to support the likes of these contras..." "Ben Linder gave his life for us, that we might become partners in development, partners in freedom, with the people of Central America. God has blessed us by his sacrifice and his service. Hopefully your response tonight indicates that it will not be in vain." Mayor Andrew Young Memorial Service Decatur, Georgia May 3, 1987

Benjamin Linder had a dream. He wanted his life to make a difference. He wanted to contribute something important, something of service to those in need, something of his own to give back to others.

In his three and a half years in Nicaragua, this is exactly what he did. Graduating in 1983 with a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Washington, he left his home in Oregon to live and work in Nicaragua, developing and building small hydroelectric plants in the town of El Cuá and San José de Bocay, bringing electricity to villages in northern Nicaragua for the first time.

The challenges were enormous -- battles with agency bureaucracies, uncertain water supplies through the dry and wet seasons, logistical challenges that required great ingenuity, the struggles of trying to fit into isolated communities where he was decidedly the stranger -- and always around him, the dangers of war, the fears of imminent attack by contras bent on destroying any efforts to make a success of the Nicaraguan revolution.

He didn't have to make this choice. He did not have to work in one of the most dangerous parts of the country. His doing so was a witness, a countersign to the policies of his own government in the United States.

In July 1979, the US-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza was overthrown by a popular insurrection led by the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN). Not long after, the administration of President Jimmy Carter authorized the first financial and logistical assistance for the remnants of Somoza's brutal, US-trained National Guard. The original intent was to harass the new revolutionary government and try to influence the direction of its policies.

With the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, the intent changed. Soon the secret policy goal of the US was to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. This goal was not officially acknowledged, since it is against the law. US CIA and military intelligence personnel began training the contras, built base camps for them along the border in Honduras, provided sophisticated weapons and equipment, carried out surveillance, provided logistical support, ordered the mining of Nicaraguan harbors, and provided an infamous counterinsurgency training manual that encouraged executions, torture, and other forms of terror.

The policy mushroomed into a full-fledged war, the infamous contra war, the main strategy of which was to undermine or destroy the Nicaraguan revolutionary experiment. By the war's end in 1990, over 30,000 Nicaraguans had been killed.

The US Central Intelligence Agency helped direct the war, sometimes selecting contra targets. Destruction of the country's electrical system was an essential part of the strategy.

This support continued even after Congress prohibited military aid to the contras, leading to the infamous Contragate scandal in which it was revealed that numerous US officials were involved in an illegal contra supply network.

Ben Linder's dream was cut down when he was only 27 years old. Linder and two Nicaraguans -- Sergio Hernández and Pablo Rosales -- were murdered in a contra ambush on April 28, 1987, as they had begun a day's work at the construction site for a new dam near San José de Bocay. The autopsy showed that Ben was first wounded by a grenade, then shot at point-blank range in the head. The two Nicaraguans were also murdered at close range, Rosales by a stab wound to the heart.

Linder's electrification project was indeed typical of contra targets, as were other sites in the area. Near El Cuá, the agricultural cooperative of El Cedro had been attacked three times resulting in several deaths. On March 19, 1987, four coop members tried to stave off a contra attack, providing cover for residents as they fled the assault. Two of them were killed, one a close friend of Linder's. The health clinic at the coop, its food supply center and a house were burned to the ground.

Many people involved in civilian projects supported by the government armed themselves in self-defense militias because of these attacks, and workers, including Linder, began to carry rifles. While this was later used as an excuse to justify Linder's murder by both contra and US officials, at the time of the ambush, Linder's rifle was lying on the ground and he was writing in a notebook.

In addition to sudden attacks and ambushes, land mines were a constant threat. The contras placed them on roadways used by civilian transport. Because of the poverty and isolation of the area, the main mode of transportation for most people was walking, horseback-riding, or grabbing a ride on a truck. By April 1987 scores of people had been killed or maimed in mine explosions. Even the simplest trip became a test of nerve. On May 24, 1986, a contra mine killed nine health workers on the road between El Cuá and San José de Bocay. Two months later, 35 people, including 12 children, were killed when a public transport truck ran over a mine.

Just one month before Linder's death, some 100 contras attacked the power plant in El Cuá. A mortar shell destroyed the home of the plant operators who barely escaped with their lives. In another incident, contras kidnapped a relative of one of the plant operators and threatened to kill everyone working on the project. The contras who killed Linder later admitted that they knew Linder and his work crew were building the hydroelectric plant.

The ambush was deliberate, part of a strategy to undermine support for the Sandinistas by destroying any benefits the revolution brought to the poorest of Nicaraguans, and demonstrating the cost to the people if they continued to support their government.

"My brother's death was not an accident. His death was policy," said John Linder after Ben's death.

Edgar Chamorro, a former contra leader who left the movement because of its brutality, claimed, "The CIA is very much in control of the contras. The CIA is sending a message to those in the international community who provide political support for Nicaragua that they are no longer safe there. The CIA and the contras are killing the best, the people who want the best for Nicaragua" (Witness, Vol. 70, No. 6, June 1987).

The Center for Constitutional Rights which took up the case on behalf of the family issued a report in April 1988 in which lawyers conclude: "The ambush was planned in advance and under the direct supervision of high-ranking contra leaders. The contras knew they were attacking a civilian development project and that there was at least one foreigner among its workers.

"The assassination of Benjamin Linder was part of a deliberate contra policy to murder civilians working in education, health and development programs. In 1986 the contras extended this policy of targeting development workers to include foreign as well as Nicaraguan civilians. Their goal was to dissuade foreigners from working in Nicaragua and to cut off support for development programs.

"The murder of Benjamin Linder also typifies the contra practice of executing prisoners.

"The government of the United States has armed and supplied the contras. It has trained and supervised them, and encouraged them to commit abuses through, for example, the CIA manual [Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, 1985]. As the contras developed the policies of targeting civilians and foreigners and carrying out summary executions, the US government served as an apologist for contra behavior. By its consistent and uncritical support of the contras, the US government shares responsibility for the assassination policy which resulted in Linder's murder."

Ben's death created a sensation in the US. The personal tragedy of one family became the subject of fierce ideologically divided political debate. US embassy officials in Nicaragua admitted that they not only did not investigate the incident, but had no interest in doing so.

White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater blamed the victim, saying US citizens working in Nicaragua "put themselves in harm's way" (NYT, April 30, 1987). Of course, this was exactly the fear that Linder's murder was designed to instill in others. Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, one of the contras' foremost champions and key player in the illegal network, said Linder simply should have known better than to be in a combat zone.

In May 1987, a Congressional hearing turned into a sordid display as contra apologists on the House Western Hemisphere Subcommittee made personal attacks on Linder's family and other witnesses who came to testify in support of Linder and his work. The Village Voice reported one exchange between Ben's mother Elizabeth, who had just given moving testimony to her son's work and motivations, and rightist Republican Rep. Connie Mack of Florida.

Said Mack: "I guess what really has me upset is that I just cannot understand how you can use grief that I know you feel, use it to politicize this situation. Or to allow yourself to be used to politicize this situation... I guess the reason I find this so difficult is that I don't want to be tough on you, but I really feel you have asked for it."

Over the visible gasps and hissing from the audience, Linder responded, "That was about the most cruel thing you could have said" (Village Voice, May 26, 1987).

The murder of Ben Linder and the growing distaste in the US for the dirty war in Nicaragua finally led to the prohibition of US military aid to the contras. But the contra policy, combined with a tight economic embargo on the impoverished country, had its effect. The country has never recovered.

In Nicaragua in the last days of April 1987, people around the world were deeply moved by the dignity and grief of the Linder family as they arrived in the country to bury their son. They walked at the head of a procession that stretched for seven blocks along the streets of Matagalpa.

Included among the grief-stricken throng was a group of children dressed as clowns. Besides being an engineer, Linder was an accomplished amateur juggler and clown. He had brought his unicycle with him to Nicaragua and delighted children and adults alike in many communities by riding through the streets, participating for a time in one of the country's circuses. He used his clowning to help children overcome their fears in vaccination campaigns, or to educate them on the dangers of diseases.

Just three weeks before his death, he participated in a vaccination campaign in Bocay by dressing up as the "Measles Monster," then went house to house on his unicycle to remind families to come to the clinic to be vaccinated.

The clowns in the funeral procession had been trained by Ben, and their presence in costume was their way of paying tribute to him.

The love of the people was a mirror reflecting who Ben Linder was in Nicaragua, a human being in a place of terrible violence inflicted on the hopes of the people. He was an expression of that hope, of the belief that with determination and persistence, dreams can come true -- lights can go on even in an impoverished isolated community such as El Cuá.

Said Elizabeth Linder: "My son was brutally murdered for bringing electricity to a few poor people in northern Nicaragua. He was murdered because he had a dream and because he had the courage to make that dream come true. Not many of us can say that. What was the dream? to make it possible for the peasants of a few villages to have a light bulb in their homes so their day doesn't have to end at six o'clock when it gets dark, to get drinking water to them so that their children don't have to die of diarrhea in the first years of their lives, to raise them out of poverty so they can raise their children with hope for the future... We understand why Ben came to Nicaragua, and we now understand even better why he stayed... Ben told me the first year that he was here, and this is a quote, 'It's a wonderful feeling to work in a country where the government's first concern is for its people, for all of its people.' I am grateful that he had his three and a half years in Nicaragua."

For the Nicaraguan people, Ben's witness showed the best, instead of the worst, of North Americans. A banner held at his funeral read: El pueblo norteamericano no es el pueblo de Reagan, es el pueblo de Benjamin Linder!!! -- "The people of the United States are not the people of Ronald Reagan, they are the people of Benjamin Linder!!" The importance of this witness to a people under siege for their very hopes of light and life is incalculable -- as it is to this day -- the meaning of solidarity.

Said brother John at the funeral, "He came here because Nicaragua represents hope... He knew that the suffering of a person knew no boundaries, and that, for him, to give all he had in a country where he was not born was just the same as giving it to his people... This hope is too deep to die with one person... This hope lies within all of us. Today all of us take a part of my brother, take a part of his hope, take a part of your hope, to do what we have to until Nicaragua can live in peace."

In a journal entry dated October 5, 1984, Ben wrote into his journal the words of Rabbi David Einhorn, a pioneering reform rabbi of the 1800s: "When justice burns within us like a flaming fire, when love evokes willing sacrifice from us, when, to the last full measure of selfless devotion, we demonstrate our belief in the ultimate triumph of truth and righteousness, then your goodness enters into our lives; then you live within our hearts, and we through righteousness behold your presence.

"The bush is burning, but the Voice has not yet spoken aloud; we can only feel, guess, hope; we cannot yet hear. But it may be that we must act in order to hear.

"I'm working in El Cuá. It is...the reality of the war. Zelaya province is falling under Contra control. They are killing children.

"I've asked myself what is my path. I've asked myself about my love for Alison and my family. I've asked myself about my love for my people. But we must act before we hear.

"I must not cower from the task ahead. In Nicaragua I was shown the trail ahead. Tonight I vow to set forth upon that trail...

"Great is the eternal power at the heart of life; mighty the love that is stronger than death."

Benjamin Linder, Sergio Hernández, Pablo Rosales, ¡Presente!

 http://www.liberationtheology.org/library/ben_linder_remembrance.htm

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The Death of Ben Linder
Book about Ben Linder by Joan Kruckewitt