The righties are going....well... nuts over the fact that Obama just sat there and listened to Daniel Ortega school him on the history of U.S. intervention in Nicaragua. Apparently it was just an awful anti-American diatribe about installing and supporting some family of dictators...
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It's pretty obvious that Obama and Clinton didn't want to hear similar anti-US diatribes of truth over Israel and the Palestinians at the UN conference on human rights, delivered by the president of Iran...
The UN gig could be conveniently boycotted, but the Summit of the Americas couldn't. So he had to just sit and listen.
There was a local wheelchair and rehab project to assist Nicaragua here, that was one of the last of my direct political participations. In the field our project worked under the supervision of one of the Sandanista government ministries... One very strange thing was part of the money for this project came from the US Navy, department of technology research.
In some completely weird internal way the US government was fighting the Nicaraguan civil war it kept going, inside its own bureaucracy. The dialectic of who was co-opting who was very confusing. It could have been s CIA front project, in which our statistical reports became intelligence information gathering ... but then I thought, so what? The Nicaraguans were learning to build their own wheelchairs and learning to live independent lives.
Malraux writes about this dialectic of co-option, political intrigue, and forces of revolution inside the early Chinese revolution in the 1920s and then again in Spain in the 1930s. The erie feeling of not knowing who is playing what side and why.
This also reminds me that these games from the CIA created the link between Iran and Latin America, through Iran-Contra. What a tangled web we weave...
If anybody has a link to a text version of the speech, it would be nice to read at least some of it...
CG