Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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had once called “a gathering place for extremists and anti-Semites.”
According to US sources, Israel supplied the contras with several million
dollars of aid, apparently through a South American intermediary, aid
which may be repaid through the huge US subsidy to Israel, which is
guaranteed a free ride through Congress. 127
As elsewhere in the world, the US has many ways to finance and
organize terror and subversion.
Participation in the war by US mercenaries has also been reported.
John Gerassi interviewed captured contra soldiers in Nicaragua, who
informed him that their chiefs were Cuban exiles. One had Puerto Rican
identification papers. He estimates that there are some 5000 foreigners,
mostly Cuban exiles from Miami, among the contra forces, and cites
reports that documents found among the dead left after an attack from
Costa Rica by Pastora’s forces identified some as Guatemalan,
Panamanian, Cuban exiles and Puerto Rican. 128
The Israeli press reports that Israeli mercenaries are receiving salaries
of $10,000 a month for service with the contras, and that contra
spokesman Edgar Chamorro, before he defected, “on many occasions in
the past expressed . . . his high regard for the contribution of Israelis to
helping the contras.” 129
US mercenaries also serve with the Salvadoran state terrorists. A
former US Marine employed as a mercenary in El Salvador dismisses the
news reports, which falsely describe a war against guerrillas, whereas
the reality is the “beautiful technique” of “murdering the civilians who
side with them.” “By terrorizing civilians, the army is crushing the
rebellion without the need to directly confront the guerrillas . . . Kill the
sympathizers and you win the war.” Massacres of civilians are not
scattered human rights abuses, he reports, but rather “the game plan”:
“The murders are not a peripheral matter to be cleaned up while the war
continues, but rather, the essential strategy,” and a successful one, he