Ronald Wilson Reagan died Saturday. The media will be filled with praise for this “great” American president for the next week. Few commentators are likely to review Reagan’s record of terrorism, war crimes, and lies. Let us scratch the surface.
Reagan funded the contra terrorists in their war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Among other atrocities, the contras targeted volunteer literacy teachers and health care workers for murder. For this Ronald Reagan called them “freedom fighters”. Not all our aggression against Nicaragua was through proxies; Reagan had the CIA mine Nicaragua’s harbors in an illegal effort to destroy that country’s economy. The Sandanistas took their case to the International Court of Justice in the Hague (popularly known as the World Court) and won, though the administration refused in advance to recognize the court’s jurisdiction.
Reagan prosecuted a war of aggression against Grenada, one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere. Perhaps 500 civilians were killed. Reagan claimed that the invasion was a “rescue mission” for American medical students, but there is convincing evidence that this was a lie.
The medical school’s chancellor, Charles Modica, polled students and found that 90% did not want to be evacuated. Despite repeated inquiries as to whether Washington was considering military action, he was told nothing of the sort was being considered. As the invasion commenced, Dr. Modica angrily denounced the invasion as totally unnecessary and a far greater risk to the students’ safety than Grenada’s domestic crisis. Vice-chancellor Geoffrey Bourne and Bursar Gary Solin also declared their steadfast opposition. The U.S. media focused great attention on the students who were first evacuated and “debriefed” by U.S. officials who generally supported the invasion. However, virtually no attention was given to those who stayed behind, who tended to be more familiar with the island and who largely opposed U.S. intervention. There were no confirmed reports of any American civilians harmed or threatened before or during the invasion. It was three days after U.S. troops initially landed before they decided to take control of the second medical school campus, raising questions as to whether the safety of Americans was really the foremost priority.
Reagan lavished U.S. government support on every right-wing government or movement in Central America, no matter how brutal.
The death toll was staggering — an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political “disappearances” in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala.
By comparison with these crimes, Reagan’s telling lies about his military record pales by comparison.
On November 29, 1983 Reagan told Isreali Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that he himself had assisted in the liberation of the Nazi death camps. On February 15, 1984, he repeated this clain to Simon Wiesenthal. On March 3, 1984, Cannon wrote a column confirming that both Shamir and Wiesenthal had heard the preposterous claim. Shamir had even retailed the story to the Isreali Cabinet, an incident corroborated by the Cabinet Secretary, Dan Merridor. In The Nation for March 4, 1985, Alexander Cockburn made some pithy comments on the claim in the light of Bitburg. Just after his column went to press, Reagan told a group of foreign journalists: “Yes, I know all about things that happened in that war. I was in uniform for four years myself.” Even the minor detail is a lie here: Reagan’s war service was notoriously confined to the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps at the Hal Roach studios in Hollywod, where he never donned a uniform.
Never mind the phony Medal of Honor story that he featured in his stump speeches:
His infamous WWII anecdote, delivered to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society in 1983, involved a damaged B-17’s captain who told his trapped gunner, “We’ll ride it down together,” after the rest of the crew had bailed out. Except it wasn’t real at all: it came from the film, A Wing and a Prayer, a fact that most ignored when Reagan explained that the noble captain was posthumously awarded a Medal of Honor himself.
or this anti-Sandinista whopper:
Reagan once told a story about agents of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government pulling a freedom-loving newspaper editor from his home and executing him in front of his pleading children. He related this tale with unbridled anger and contempt for cowards who would do such a thing. But like many a Reagan tale told with utter conviction, it was an utter fabrication. When the Great Communicator’s press office was asked for the details of this atrocity, they had to admit it hadn’t happened — or anything like it.
