Letters to the Editor

• Kirkpatrick: Apologist for assassinations

  [Read the article: Burying the Kirkpatrick doctrine]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Let us not forget the true legacy of Jeane Kirkpatrick...rationalization of terrorism on the part of Reagan administration surrogates:

  Common Dreams: "...excuses and distortions pour forth from then-U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick ("these nuns were not just nuns; they were also political activists") and Secretary of State Al Haig (the nuns "may have tried to run a roadblock").

  Commentators on Kirkpatrick's death should consider the following comments from Ray Bonner's "Weakness and Deceit" and "Manufacturing Consent," by Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky.

  "Murder of the Four U.S. Churchwomen Witnesses who found the grave said it was about five feet deep. One woman had been shot in the face, another in the breast. Two of the women were found with their blood-stained underpants around their ankles (Dec. 5, 1980)."

  "On December 2, 1980, four U.S. churchwomen working in El Salvador -- were seized, raped, and murdered by members of the Salvadoran National Guard. This crime was extremely inconvenient to the Carter administration, which was supporting the Salvadoran junta as an alleged 'reformist' government."

  "A commission headed by William P. Rogers...reported that it had 'no evidence suggesting that any senior Salvadoran authorities were implicated...,' (It) proposed no independent investigation..."

  "With the arrival of the Reagan administration, the already badly compromised concern to find the culprits diminished further...Haig stated before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs that the evidence 'led one to believe' that the four women were killed trying to run a roadblock -- a shameless lie that was soon acknowledged as such by the State Department." The Reagan ambassador to the U.N., Jeane Kirkpatrick suggested that "...the four women were political activists for the 'Frente' -- as with Haig's statement, an outright lie..."

  When the bodies were found this news merited only a back-page item in the Times. The "...accounts of the violence done to the four murdered women were very succinct, omitted many details, and were not repeated after the initial disclosures. No attempt was made to reconstruct the scene with its agony and brutal violence."

  For example, consider the Time account: [After naming the victims] "Two of the women had been raped before being shot in the back of the head."

  Contrast the above succinct account with Bonner's account from "Weakness and Deceit"

  "In the crude grave, stacked on top of each other were the bodies of four women. The first hauled out of the hole was Jean Donovan, twenty-seven years old, a lay missionary from Cleveland. Her face had been blown away by a high calibre bullet that had been fired into the back of her head. Her pants were unzipped; her underwear twisted around her ankles. When area peasants found her, she was nude from the waist down. They had tried to replace the garments before burial. Then came Dorothy Kazel, a forty-year-old Ursuline nun also from Cleveland. At the bottom of the pit were Maryknoll nuns Ita Ford, forty, and Maura Clarke, forty-nine, both from New York. All the women had been executed at close range. The peasants who found the women said that one had her underpants stuffed in her mouth; another's had been tied over her eyes. All had been raped."

  "These and other details given by Bonner and suppressed by Time and the Times (and Newsweek and CBS News) add emotional force and poignancy to the scene."

  The press largely ignored or suppressed the funerals in the United States of these four American churchwomen.

  Ambassador Kirkpatrick rationalized the United State's indirect complicity in these murders by indicating that the victims may have been asking for it. As Newsweek observed (Dec. 15, 1980), "The violence in El Salvador is likely to focus with increasing ferocity on the Roman Catholic Church. Many priests and nuns advocate reform, and some of them are militant leftists. Such sentiments mean trouble, even for moderate members of the clergy." The Newsweek article nowhere mentions that it was the U.S.-backed government which initiated and carried out the bulk of the murdering.

  In the case of the killing of these four women "...the media found it extremely difficult to locate Salvadoran government involvement in the murders, even with evidence staring them in the face."

  "Gradually, ...much evidence seeped out to show that the women had been murdered by members of the National Guard. A two-part process of 'damage limitation' ensued, expounded by Salvadoran and U.S. officials and faithfully reflected in the media."

  "The most important goal of the immediate damage-containment process was to stifle any serious investigation of the responsibility of the officials of the Salvadoran government. The Salvadoran strategy was foot-dragging from beginning to end... The U.S. official strategy... was to get the low-level killers tried and convicted -- necessary to vindicate the system of justice in El Salvador, at least to the extent of keeping the dollars flowing from Congress -- while protecting the 'reformers' at the top."

  The U.S. government "...engaged in a systematic cover-up -- of both the Salvadoran cover-up and the facts of the case. The U.S. mass media, while briefly noting the Salvadoran stonewalling, failed to call attention to the equally important lies and suppressions of their own government.

  (T)he Carter and Reagan administrations put protection of their client above the quest for justice."

  "A second form of official U.S. participation in the cover-up was a refusal to make public information on the investigations... The Rogers report was released belatedly, in an edited version.. [A later report] was kept under wraps for a long time, again apparently because it had some serious criticism of the Salvadoran judicial process that would have interfered with Reagan administration plans to claim progress..."

  "The victims families of the found the U.S. government unwilling to release information on the case."

  In April 1998, The Times reported that four Salvadoran National Guardsmen who were convicted and jailed for killing three American nuns and a lay worker in December 1980 confirmed they acted on orders from higher-ups.

  Permalink Saturday, December 9, 2006 06:29 AM