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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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It was subsequently learned that Cruz was on the CIA payroll. He had
“secretly received money from the Central Intelligence Agency, according
to U.S. government officials . . . A CIA spokesman refused to comment,
but intelligence sources said the money was funnelled to Mr. Cruz
through organizations supported by the agency as part of an effort to
encourage political opposition to the leftist Sandinista government,”
leading House Intelligence Committee Chairman Lee Hamilton to
complain to Secretary of State Shultz that Cruz was lobbying Congress
while receiving CIA funds, intelligence sources said. Confronted with the
charges, Cruz “said he had received assistance in the past ‘for a short
period’ from an ‘institution’ dedicated to support the ‘struggle for
liberty’,” which he declined to name. 142 A senior official of the new
United Nicaraguan Opposition organized by the US said that Cruz, along
with his fellow-democrat Alfonso Robelo, “had been given money in the
past by the Central Intelligence Agency to carry out what the official
called ‘political work’.” 143
As for Cruz’s “democratic credentials,” Christopher Hitchens
comments that “He would not take part in an election that he felt to be
insufficiently democratic, but he will take part in a war of sabotage and
attrition that has no democratic pretenses at all” 144 —serving in Duarte
style to legitimate the “damnable atrocities” of his associates, as he fully
recognizes. Whatever the facts may be about the commitment to
democracy on the part of Cruz, Robelo, and other leaders of the
Nicaraguan business community, it seems clear enough that they are
labelled “democrats” by US commentators not on the basis of any
information about such commitment, but because their concept of
democracy rejects the “‘logic of the majority,’ which meant that
Nicaragua’s poor majority would have access to, and be the primary
beneficiaries of, public programs” (LASA report). This stance suffices to
confer “democratic credentials.”