FReeregards . . .
Posted on 11/29/2001 10:27:17 AM PST by callisto
State Department kept quiet about connection before Nicaragua vote
© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
Had Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega won his bid for the Nicaraguan presidency this month, the U.S. was prepared for to charge his government with aiding and abetting global terrorism.
Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Bush administration officials had publicly expressed their concerns that a victory by Ortega's Sandinista National Liberation Front could mean a return to the era in which Sandinistas flouted democratic principles and basic human rights, seized property without compensation and destroyed the economy.
U.S. State Department sources now say that in an Oct. 4 meeting with Nicaragua's foreign minister, Secretary of State Colin Powell discussed the fact that five Nicaraguan passports were found in the apartments of a suspected terrorist linked to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York. On Oct. 5, a speech by a State Department official participating in a conference at the University of Pittsburgh, singled out three FSLN leaders – Tomás Borge, Lenin Cerna and Alvaro Baltonado – for harboring violent extremists from the Middle East, Europe and Latin America. However, at that time he did not offer any proof of the involvement.
State Department officials say they were concerned about the Sandinistas' ties to states that sponsor terrorism, such as Libya and Iraq, and international terrorist organizations such as the Colombian leftist guerrilla FARC and the Basque separatist group ETA. They say these ties have been maintained and, if elected, the FSLN would need to drop them or risk being added to a terrorist list that now includes only one country in the Americas, Cuba.
Countries on the list are considered states that sponsor terrorism and face sanctions and isolation.
"They are basically saying that if the Sandinistas got to power ... the U.S. government would have submitted them to a long trial period that would have frozen relations," said a high Nicaraguan official.
"Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists," said Bush in his address to Congress in September. A Nicaragua with Ortega in power would have been the first country in Latin America to face this new anti-terrorism litmus test, the basis for the so-called Bush doctrine.
FReeregards . . .
Don't bother digging up the quotes, they will simply say that Sandinsta involvement would be justified by our involvement in their war. (hurl)
If there is a connection . . . it will certainly come out from named and ranking administration officials.
FReeregards . . .
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