Fear and Loathing in Guatemala City

As I mentioned in my last post, many of those now leading the human rights charge in Iraq are themselves veterans (in a policy, if not a military sense) of the U.S. government's own dirty war in Central America.

But they were on the other side back then -- supporting and if necessary concealing the mass murders of their thuggish surrogates. If not worse.

I say "if not worse," because for years, these bureaucrat warriors insisted they had no idea who controlled the shadowy death squads running the Central American reign of terror.

These were such feeble lies, such pathetic lies, that they raise the question in my mind of whether they were even intended to conceal official knowledge of the death squads and their supporters.

Instead, I suspect the deceptions may have been designed to steer investigative attention away from the question that should have been asked, which was: Were the death squads in fact controlled directly from Washington?

I'll never know the answer. But of the feebleness and transparency of the Reagan Administration's lies I am certain. Why? Because I was there. Because I saw the death squads. I even saw where they worked.
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