The Real Iran-Contra Scandal
Our Hidden History
Rev. Bill Davis: The Christic Institute is a public interest law firm, and I think probably the easiest way to get a handle on who we are is to look at what we've done over the years.
We've taken cases like the Karen Silkwood case, that was our very first case, the young woman in Oklahoma who worked for a nuclear plant and got run off the road and killed. We don't just do a lawsuit. We always organize around the lawsuit and try to get information out to the public that is being withheld from them.
We are doing a case, currently, for two journalists who were injured by Contra activity, injured in Central America. It's their injury that gives standing to get in front of the court. We filed a civil lawsuit in federal court in Miami around a press conference bombing where one of them was severely hurt, and then ... that's Tony Avirgan, he was an ABC television camera man at the time ... and his wife, Martha Honey, who is a professional journalist in her own right. They began to look into who had done this bombing and who was behind it, and they discovered that it wasn't the Sandinistas, as people originally thought, but rather a shadowy group of characters that operated out of John Hull's ranch. John Hull, H-U-L-L, is a North American millionaire rancher who has extensive holdings in northern Costa Rica.
And Tony and Martha discovered early on that some of the people who planned the La Penca bombing were operating out of his ranch. They also discovered that arms traffic was going through there, that a character named Rob Owen, who we later learned, of course, was the right hand man, the "courier", as he called himself, for Oliver North, used to go to that ranch frequently. Plane loads of arms were flown in there, they were unloaded, and sometimes the same planes loaded back up with drugs for transshipment up to the US.
So that's just the overall context of how we got into the lawsuit. Once we got into it, though, we wanted to bring to this lawsuit information that we knew from other sources and from other cases that we did. We were already firmly convinced that there is massive cocaine traffic coming into this country that officials are looking the other way on. There's selective law enforcement going on around drug trafficking. We also knew that this drug trafficking was connected with a number of intelligence agents, former agents, people who now operate in the private sector, but who were doing a similar kind of thing while in the agency.
While they were in Southeast Asia there was considerable opium/heroin traffic coming out of the Golden Triangle with the knowledge and, indeed, sometimes the direct assistance of this group of men. So in doing a lawsuit around the press conference bombing, we didn't want to just go after the bomber, although we've named him, nor the group of Cuban Americans who operated out of John Hull's ranch, although we also named them. John Hull himself is one of our defendants. We wanted to go after the people for whom they were agents. Who were the men further up, who were the higher ups who planned this kind of an event, or who released agents to plan this kind of an event, and what's their past history?
We discovered a group of men who in fact have been, for a long time, operating, first of all, within the US government doing illegal arms traffic and illegal drug traffic to produce funds for things that are so secret that they don't want to have to report even to a complacent Congress.
And what we discovered is what we sometimes refer to as "the shadow government", or at first we were calling them "the secret team", but that's a little conspiratorial. We discovered a group of men who in fact have been, for a long time, operating, first of all, within the US government doing illegal arms traffic and illegal drug traffic to produce funds for what they like to call their black operations, things that are so secret that they don't want to have to report even to a complacent Congress. So they generate funds through the drug smuggling and through arms trafficking in order to be able to do the kinds of assassination programs and other operations that can be well documented.
So basically what this lawsuit said was that the injury to Tony Avirgan and his wife Martha Honey wasn't just some group of crazies but rather, technically, is known as a racketeering enterprise. It was done by people who have a history and pattern, and who therefore fit under the RICO laws, it's called. RICO stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. It has a civil component which we are using, and in order to get the RICO jurisdiction, racketeering jurisdiction, we have to show that in addition to injuring these people, they have previous violations. Each defendant has to have at least two violations of that racketeering law within any given 10 year period.
We're alleging that some of them have a history that clear back to the '60s, that some of the key players in our lawsuit, such as Theodore Shackley, who was formerly the head of covert operations for the CIA while George Bush was its director. Theodore Shackley and his partner Thomas Clines, and some of the others that we've named, started really, we pick up their trail in the early '60s when they were in Miami, in the CIA stationed in Miami, and were even then planning assassinations of people like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Che Guevara, etc. We know that their operation, even then, was involved with drug trafficking, but when that was discovered, rather than prosecute these people, they were shipped off to Southeast Asia. They got a long history first of all in Laos and later in Vietnam, the Phoenix Program.
When that ended in the mid '70s, rather than shut down the operation that they had going, they moved it to Iran, where they became the protectors and the patrons of the Shah of Iran, helping to stamp out any opposition that he had, including the moderate democratic opposition. And while there they began to contact people like Somoza in Central America. He was the bloody dictator in Nicaragua whose bank loans and foreign aid and so on were somewhat curtailed by the Harkin Amendment long before - people now are focusing on the Boland Amendment and try to pretend that all of this Iran-Contra stuff started because Congress cut off funds to the Contras - it was back in the late 70s that Somoza was cut off because of his gross pattern of violation of human rights. And these people moved in and began to supply Somoza. He fell anyhow, in 1979, and so they immediately then went to bolstering his former national guardsmen, forming them into a fighting force which became known as the Contras or "the democratic opposition", as some in the executive branch like to call it.
This thing did not start with Oliver North and the Boland amendment and the little conspiracy that has been revealed now in the public. It has a pretty long history, and the Central American episode is only the last episode in a rather long epic.
But the point is that this thing did not start with Oliver North and the Boland amendment and the little conspiracy that has been revealed now in the public. It has a pretty long history, and the Central American episode is only the last episode in a rather long epic. And what we wanted to do through this lawsuit, of course, is to nail them for this injury to our clients, expose the arms trafficking and drug trafficking that's gone on around supporting the Contras, but we also want to show that while they're now operating in the private sector for this most recent episode, these people come from government, they work hand in glove with government, they are, in a sense, almost a professional mercenary group that gives government policy a little bit more deniability by doing it in this sort of off-the-shelf way.
You may remember that Oliver North, when he was testifying in front of Congress, used the term "off-the-shelf operation". Actually he was talking about CIA director Casey, and he said that Casey liked to go to the off-the-shelf, standalone, self-financed capacity. And of course the Congresspeople, almost immediately, started to pretend like that was something that was being developed. "Oh, wouldn't this be awful if this happened in the future, it would threaten our own democracy." The fact is, the off-the-shelf operation is in existence. It was in existence before the Boland amendment, and now that Oliver North and that phase of it have been exposed it is still in existence. And that's what we're going after, with the Christic Institute La Penca project.
Interviewer: Okay. This shadow government, the secret team of CIA, ex-CIA, of military, ex-military, intelligence officers, Oliver North, it's not just that they were involved in assassination programs, disinformation, terrorism, drug smuggling, right? Arms dealing and basically just, basically to topple Ortega.
Rev. Bill Davis: Yes, but not all of them were involved in all phases of the operation, and this is one of the things that we have to be very clear about. It's not as though these people had a board of directors, and one man at the top, and you can draw out the lines of authority and all the rest of it. There are a variety of people who move in and out of this racketeering enterprise for a variety of reasons. Some of them don't even like each other, some of them don't even know each other. But it doesn't matter. Legally, at law, they constitute a racketeering enterprise. Some of them, I am convinced, for instance, are motivated only by money, and want to make more money off of the drugs. Others are more motivated by a kind of ideology, a kind of rabid anti-communism whereby anything that they do is okay, because after all they're fighting the evil empire. Notice how some of their language gradually starts to get very theological. Others are in it, I think, because they got literally thrown out of the intelligence community back during the time of Carter.
When president Carter came in he appointed Stansfield Turner as CIA director, and Turner cleaned house to some extent. They fired some 600 covert operatives, most of whom I don't think are pumping gas or running restaurants. I think most of them are doing pretty much the same things they did while they were in the agency, except they're now doing it through a kind of privatized network. But what it amounts to for the public, and this is a very important key point with me, what it amounts to is that it's a threat to our democracy. It's not just what they're doing in Nicaragua that is awful, although I think that is pretty bad in Nicaragua and El Salvador and other parts of the third world.
I think their activities are very unchecked, there's no system of checks and balances, and they are very devastating to those people, but ultimately it's our democracy, it's Constitutional democracy that is at stake. Because if you can have government policy being carried out through the private sector, self-financed, they don't even have to go to Congress for the funds because they have massive amounts of money through arms trafficking and drug trafficking and so on. If that is true, then it doesn't really matter, even, what the president wants. If we have a president who disagrees with them, they will work more quietly and more off-the-shelf, if they have a president who agrees with them they can bring it back in, indeed, even into the basement of the White House.
if you can have government policy being carried out through the private sector, self-financed, they feel that they know what's best for the rest of us, and it's that kind of very dangerous, very elitist, very racist attitude that I think is a fundamental threat on some of our dearest American values... it's ironic, they're threatened by people who see themselves as the saviors of these values.
So it can shift in or out of government, but it amounts to a system where there are no checks and balances, where there is no accountability to the public, and it's a fundamental attack on democracy, is what it amounts to. And it not only picks up the danger of having a CIA which can do covert operations that the public has very little check on, it makes it one step further removed. It gives greater deniability by doing it through the private sector, and that means that these people are a virtual law unto themselves. They are self-financed, they feel that they know what's best for the rest of us, and it's that kind of very dangerous, very elitist, very racist attitude that I think is a fundamental threat on some of our dearest American values. Our most cherished values are really, it's ironic, they're threatened by people who see themselves as the saviors of these values.
It's almost like the old thing in Vietnam where we heard, you know, we had to destroy the village in order to save it, the kind of mad logic that took over. These people are, in effect, saying we have to go around the Constitution in order to protect it. So they're ... the same sort of logic, we had to destroy the Constitution in order to save it.
Interviewer: So they will do anything to justify the ends. If they think the ideology is to stop communism, they will do any kind of terrorist acts, they will kill anybody, they will manipulate anything, they will break any laws, to complete their agenda.
Rev. Bill Davis: That's correct. There's a certain pragmatism takes over and it's okay ... they not only will do it, but they'll feel good about it. They will feel like they're some sort of Messianic figure, somebody saving western civilization. When Albert Hakim was asked about his ideology in front of Congress, he said, “I'm a businessman. I'm in it for the money.” In a sense, he was probably the most honest of most of them. He wanted to make a buck, you know. Communism schmommunism, he didn't care. It wasn't an ideological question. Whereas for others ... I think the ones that I find the scariest are what I would call the true believers, the Ollie Norths who think that they are so dedicated and so righteous about what they're doing, that they're ... Ideology can be a real set of blinders. It's like putting on something that gives you tunnel vision and disallows the entrance of other data or other considerations.
That, I think, is the most scary. I mean, a man like Hakim, you know where he's coming from, but the ideologues are hard to deal with. You know, one of the things I have to point out, of course, is the Christic Institute are frequently thought of as being some kind of ideologues ourselves, and so we have to, I guess, ask ourselves the same questions that we wish these people would ask themselves. I think we try to do that. I think we try to keep in touch with grassroots communities, we've been, we get information from a lot of different sources. We have our own professional investigators, but we've had people inside of government, we've had people inside of the intelligence agencies come to us and tell us stuff that's going on. Don't want to be a whistleblower, don't want to go public, but they will either verify certain things for us when we ask them, or they will bring information to us.
So our point of view, I don't think, is one of some kind of rabid ideology, it's one of trying to expose the truth. For us the bottom line is always the truth. We tell our clients, anybody who hires us to take their case, we tell them, look, if the truth exposes you, you're gonna go down too. We will divulge the truth to the public as we know it, whenever we know it.
Interviewer: Tell me, what was Richard Nixon's role in this, what, going back to Cuba, what was Gerald Ford's role, Ronald Reagan's role, and George Bush's role.
Rev. Bill Davis: Well, that's a tall order, and none of those men are defendants of ours, so I must say we haven't gone specifically after any one of them. We bumped into all of them at one point or another. I think probably, let me deal with the beginning of it, starting with Richard Nixon and ending with George Bush. Those are the more important aspects to it.
With Richard Nixon, it is quite clear that he was involved at least with setting up some kind of shooter team, an "S squad", as they called it, to go after people like Che Guevara, Raul Castro, Fidel Castro, etc., that some of those people were trained in Mexico, as a matter of fact, in triangular fire. That this was known to, this was done through the official structures, through the CIA at the time. So there were direct connections, in the early days, of at least establishing this kind of activity, but it was done under, at least, under a certain executive control at that time.
Later, when the whole thing came apart in Vietnam, and they saw president Carter coming into the White House emphasizing human rights and all that sort of wimpy stuff, some of them were thrown out of the intelligence community, others left voluntarily, but they knew that they had to set up something in the private sector to be able to continue the same level of activities, because it would be harder now, with a president who wasn't quite as sympathetic to it. It isn't as though Mr. Carter cleaned up all of the evil. There's abundant of evidence that Carter, for instance, knew, as well as other presidents knew, that Noriega, the strong man from Panama, was a drug dealer, but looked the other way. Carter probably looked the other way because he wanted the Panama Canal Treaty as one of the crowning jewels of his foreign policy.
So I think presidents knew. I think that the one that's been the hardest to pin down as to what he knew, of course, was Reagan. One can posit almost anything and still not reach the boundaries of his ignorance. So it's a little fuzzier with him, and we were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but there can be no doubt, now, as a result of some of the recent trials, that Reagan himself knew and signed the finding, for instance, that John Poindexter tore up so that it wouldn't become public. And Poindexter has now been convicted of destroying government evidence and keeping it from Congress, and he knew exactly what was in that.
So there's no doubt that, I think, that we can no longer ignore the fact that Reagan, at least in the broad outlines, he did know that arms were going to the Iranian government. He was lying about what he knew about that, and trying to pretend it wasn't arms for hostages. And if he knew, then certainly his vice president, one George Bush, whose main two tasks as vice president were drug interdiction and anti-terrorism. It was under the anti-terrorist rubric that a lot of this stuff got brought right back into the White House basement, as I say, and set up through the National Security Council. Got brought out of the private sector. And then of course when they got the Boland amendment, got hit with that, they had to move it back into the private sector, but they kept the liaison. They kept an official government liaison and his name was Oliver North.
But going more specifically to what it is that Bush knew, and again, we weren't looking for Mr. Bush in this, but in investigating we found out, first of all, that a lot of the supervision of the flow of arms to the contras was going through a man named Felix Rodriguez in Ilopango airbase in El Salvador. Rodriguez is a long time operative with the CIA. He goes clear back to the Cuban days. He was with these people in Southeast Asia. He got his job in Central America, now supposedly in the private sector, but he got it through the recommendation of George Bush. He kept in constant liaison with George Bush's right hand man, Donald Gregg.
We took the deposition of Donald Gregg, and in discovery, and through the subpoena power that we have, we turned up documents like, for instance, one document that showed that George Bush was meeting directly with Felix Rodriguez and Donald Gregg, and that, it says right on one of the memos that we got, one of the topics of discussion was, quote, "Resupply of the Contras." We presented that to Donald Gregg in his deposition and said, "How do you explain that?" And you know what his answer was? Under oath, this rather brilliant man sat there and said, "It puzzles me. It just puzzles me to this day. I can't figure out how that got on that memo, because we didn't talk about that."
So he was later asked, of course, when his confirmation hearings came up, he's now the ambassador to Korea, but when his confirmation hearings came out, Senator Cranston from California and others questioned him about that memo again and he said, oh, he's finally figured it out. It must have meant that they were talking about resupply of the copters and it got written down resupply of the Contras. He's changed his story on it three or four times. It's quite clear that the man did know that this illegal transfer of arms to the contras was going on at the very time when Congress had forbidden it. So this is all right under George Bush's nose, so to speak.
Interviewer: Wasn't there a situation, was it where when Hasenfus went down at the ... that Gregg immediately put a call in to Bush's office-
Rev. Bill Davis: No, the other way around. The very first person, when Eugene Hasenfus, who, by the way, also used to fly for Air America, which was the CIA proprietary in Southeast Asia that was directly involved in bringing the opium heroin products out of the Golden Triangle. That's where Hasenfus got his start. He was now flying for Southern Air Transport, taking arms into Nicaragua and dropping them in the field when his plane got shot down. As soon as that happened, Felix Rodriguez, the very first phone call that he made was to the office of the vice president, and he spoke with Donald Gregg. And yet they're trying to claim that, “Oh gosh, this wasn't vice presidential enough, and so the boss didn't know about it." It doesn't add up. There's no way that you can pretend that these people didn't know what was going on. The phone calls that were made, the documents out of their own office that say they were talking about resupply of the Contras, and the connections that we know that these people have historically. This crowd has worked together before within the intelligence community. It's not as though George Bush didn't know who Felix Rodriguez was and what his specialties were, because he worked with him directly when he was the head of the CIA in 1976.
So, as I say, we haven't gone directly after Bush, but there's no way that one can conclude that he was, quote, “Out of the loop.” And again, that too is being confirmed now from a lot of sources outside of the Christic Institute. During one of the first trials that came up, I think it was the Oliver North trial, the government had to admit they wouldn't show certain documents, but in order to come to a compromise on the documents, they had 42 pages of admissions, things that they were stipulating to being true. One of those admissions was that, first of all, there was an agreement with the president of Honduras, Suazo Cordova, that if you give aid to the Contras then we will replace that aid, with the so-called quid pro quo. They love these Latin terms. I like to remind audiences, of course, that quid pro quo is just a fancy Latin term for bribe. You know, that's what it means. You do what we want you to, and we will pay you for it, out of taxpayer money, I might add.
So we know that there was that quid pro quo arrangement. We know that-
Interviewer: Excuse me, which George Bush said there wasn't.
Rev. Bill Davis: Which he said there wasn't. We know that he was not only in the loop, he was a key player. He was the one who personally went to Honduras a couple days after this agreement was made to talk to Suazo Cordova, to do the arm twisting necessary, and immediately after his visit, of course, the grants of material were made, and then they were later replaced out of our taxpayers' money. So for them to pretend he was out of the loop, or that he was somehow at the Yale football game when these things were discussed, doesn't make sense. I think it completely lacks credibility.
Interviewer: Yeah. The incredible hypocrisy of the Reagan and Bush administration, they say they're against terrorists but they work with terrorists and this entire secret government, shadow government, was instilling and inspiring terrorist acts all over the world. They say they were against drugs, and are against drugs, but they were cooperating with, basically, addicting Americans by bringing drugs in on the same planes.
Did Oliver North know about the drug trafficking? The fact is, he clearly knew about it. He has, in his handwritten diary, which is some 1100 pages, we know that there are 543 pages that have drug references in them.
Rev. Bill Davis: And I think one of the greatest ironies of all is the sentence to a man like Oliver North. Oliver North may not have been directly involved in the drug trafficking. From what I can tell of his background, I would doubt that he was. Did he know about the drug trafficking? The fact is, he clearly knew about it. He has, in his handwritten diary, which is some 1100 pages, we know that there are 543 pages that have drug references in them. In one of them, for instance, he's talking about an arms place in Honduras, it's called the "arms supermarket", that was the way they referred to it. And he wrote, in his own handwriting, that 14 million dollars to finance that place came from drugs. So here we have a man who, for his own ideological reasons, or however he justified it, I don't know, but he clearly was involved with those who were bringing drugs into this country.
You know what his sentence was? He's now to do community service counseling inner city kids who are involved with a drug problem in Washington DC. Guess which color most of those kids are going to be? Also, here's this white, bemedaled criminal, and it's still somehow assumed that he has something to say to the devastated black communities of this country. It's Kafka-esque, you know? It really is.
Interviewer: It's awesome. Okay. Getting into the Nicaraguan activities and the La Penca bombing. There's two things I want to talk about, about the secret, the shadow government, that they would do anything to complete their agenda. One, the plot to assassinate a US ambassador, and two, the fact that the La Penca bombing was not simply to kill Eden Pastora who wouldn't unify the Contras, but really to kill US journalists so that the United States could be outraged and invade Nicaragua.
Rev. Bill Davis: To kill international journalists, that seemed to be one of their goals. Yeah, it's hard to say. Usually these operations have a variety of goals. One of them was to get rid of Pastora, because he was a pain in the neck. He wouldn't go along with the CIA, he wouldn't join UNO and fight under the direction of the CIA as they wanted him to. In fact, he was calling the press conference precisely to tell them, to tell the CIA that he wasn't gonna be their boy. So that was a bit of a problem. We think, also, he was probably unwittingly interrupting the flow of drugs, because he wouldn't let the Cubans join his group. And these Miami Cubans, who had for years been funding their operations there with drug traffic, knew that this southern front coming up from Costa Rica was going to be a major new artery opening up that they wanted in on.
So there could have been drug reasons, there almost certainly was, as you suggested, the idea of setting up the Sandinistas. If international journalists are killed, it will outrage people. In fact, there was even a discussion where they referred to an NBC camera man, an NBC journalist who had been killed by the Somoza forces on camera, and when the US public saw that, of course, they were outraged. And that was what they wanted, was a similar kind of thing. Blame it on the Sandinistas.
This business of setting up terrorist events that are then going to be blamed on the left, of course, is not terribly new... they were actually casing the US embassy in Costa Rica to kill Ambassador Tambs who was himself a right winger.
But this business of setting up terrorist events that are then going to be blamed on the left, of course, is not terribly new, and it's quite clear that they had other plans to go forward like that. They were actually casing the US embassy in Costa Rica to kill Ambassador Tambs who was himself a right winger, so of course it would be blamed on the left, it would be blamed on the Sandinistas. But Mr. Tambs had, among other things, angered the Medellin Cartel when he had operated in Colombia previously, and so there was a price on his head. They would get rid of him, collect the bounty, but, more importantly, it would clearly be blamed on the Nicaraguans. And part of their plan was to leave a dead Nicaraguan with papers on him that would implicate the Nicaraguan government. When Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey, in the course of their investigation of the La Penca bombing found out about this, they informed the embassy, the plan never happened, they were able to take counter measures and that didn't actually happen.
We know, though, that not only was that planned, but similar kinds of events were being planned in places like Honduras and other places. So these people are not at all beyond doing terrorist acts and then blaming them on the very people they want to get rid of, that they will then label as terrorists, or label as communists, when in fact the acts are things that they themselves have planned and carried out.
Interviewer: And they say that they're doing this for national security, and they're doing this to defend democracy all over the world, and in reality they will set up Americans and kill anybody.
Rev. Bill Davis: That's correct. And as you mentioned, they do it, very often, using democracy as kind of the shibboleth. And as I pointed out, I think that one of the biggest threats to democracy is precisely this kind of off-the-shelf operation, this kind of government that is privatized and that bypasses the system of checks and balances. It's probably a far greater threat to democracy than the Russians or others have ever been.
But one thing I should point out, of course, is that our lawsuit was dismissed on summary judgment by the court just prior to going to trial. Now, in non-legalese, what that means is the judge substituted his judgment for the judgment of a jury and wouldn't let this evidence be put in front of a jury, probably because it would have been too disturbing to have it go down as it would have right in the middle of a presidential campaign. And one party in particular would have looked rather bad, if this information were exposed.
Interviewer: So he was paid off, then.
Rev. Bill Davis: Well, it's hard to say. Paid off? No, I have no evidence of that. These people, however, generally drink at the same watering holes. They generally have many of the same interests. This judge was a Nixon appointee, he used to be on the board of directors at one of the banks in Miami that's been involved in laundering the money that was skimmed off the casinos and the drug money. So it's hard to say whether he did it entirely on his own, or whether he was paid off or ordered to do it or what, but the fact is, he dismissed it using the excuse that the enterprise, which now couldn't be denied, didn't get clearly linked to the bombing.
So he said, “Well, okay, you have this enterprise, this illegal criminal enterprise going on, but you haven't shown clearly enough that it's linked to the injury to your people.” What's happened in the meantime, now, while we have that issue on appeal in Atlanta, we should be hearing from the appellate court by the end of this year, what's happened is that the Costa Rican government has reopened the La Penca bombing investigation, because again they realized that the one who supervised the first investigation was on the CIA payroll. They came out, their official judicial police came to the new conclusion that John Hull, and the bomber, and a Cuban American who we've named as a defendant, Felipe Vidal, were clearly involved in this thing together, and that there is enough evidence to indict them for murder.
So the Costa Rican government has now come down with criminal murder indictments for the La Penca bombing, and they've tied it right back to John Hull, which of course is wonderful for us because if you say, well, there isn't enough of a link between this particular event, this injury, and the enterprise, you clearly have that once you reach John Hull. John Hull was working with the enterprise, with Secord, with Rob Owen, with Oliver North. He was the CIA agent, you might say, the CIA asset in the whole of northern Costa Rica.
Interviewer: So does this mean, then, that this is going to be heard? Is it gonna go to trial?
The Judge hit us with a million dollars in fines and court costs because we had filed the equivalent of a frivolous lawsuit. Meanwhile, eight or nine of our defendants have now been charged criminally for the same kinds of things ... It clearly is not a frivolous lawsuit.
Rev. Bill Davis: We're quite confident that it will, yes. We've finished all the paperwork, now, on the appeal. There was another sort of major element that delayed it. The judge, even though we took it up on appeal, rather than let the appeal go forward he tried to wipe us out, virtually, with a ruling that's called a Rule 11 sanctions. He hit us with a million dollars in fines and court costs because we had filed the equivalent of a frivolous lawsuit. And of course, meanwhile, eight or nine of our defendants have now been charged criminally for the same kinds of things, and the most recent one being the Costa Rican government coming down ... It clearly is not a frivolous lawsuit.
It has been, 90% of what we've said has already been substantiated by forces or organizations outside the Christic Institute. So we're convinced that the sanctions will be taken away and that the original dismissal will be reversed, and that we'll be back in court. Which means that we will once again have subpoena power to pursue, now, some of the things that we didn't know existed then. In a sense it's going to hurt them, this long delay in getting our suit to trial is gonna hurt them, because we will be better positioned now to expose to the American public what's really at stake here and what kinds of connections these people have at the present and have had, historically.
We're not simply dealing with some privatized group that sprung whole cloth from the private sector. These people have government connections. They are, in a sense, a shadow government.
Because, see, again, this is an important factor. We're not simply dealing with some privatized group that sprung whole cloth from the private sector. These people have government connections. They are, in a sense, a shadow government. Again, even people like Ollie North established that. I think it was during his trial, in his trial testimony, he said some very interesting things. He said that director Casey, CIA director Casey, came to him and told him to get this done, this aid to the Contras, and that he should go to people in the private sector. Go to people like Richard Secord and his partner Albert Hakim, because these people had formed, according to Ollie North, a virtual mirror image of the intelligence community.
You can call it a mirror image, you can call it a shadow government, you can call it whatever you want, but if you think that this is simply conspiratorial nonsense then I think you should reexamine it because it is what even Newsweek magazine has called, “probably the scariest and most serious aspect to the whole Iran-Contra affair.”
So you can call it a mirror image, you can call it a shadow government, you can call it whatever you want, but if you think that this is simply conspiratorial nonsense then I think you should reexamine it because it is what even Newsweek magazine has called, “probably the scariest and most serious aspect to the whole Iran-Contra affair.” And it has not been seriously looked at by Congress. They've refused to deal with the drug issue at all. The so-called "war on drugs" is not making war upon these people who work together with our intelligence community. That aspect of the war on drugs is being totally forgotten.
Noriega is not unique. He was a known drug dealer, but he was our boy. He was doing intelligence favors for us with the Cubans, he was helping to provide arms for the Contras, and so we looked the other way on his drug dealing. And this is what has happened. A number of drug dealers have had, in effect, their ticket punched. You know, if you do a favor for the intelligence community, if you help with certain State Department goals, it's like getting your ticket punched. They're not gonna come after you later when you're doing deals that are totally on your own.
And so I think most of the drug dealing is not being done by the government or even by intelligence agents. It's being done through the private sector, but it can't be reached by law enforcement because law enforcement has been compromised. Deals have been cut, favors have been done, there are too many skeletons in too many closets, and that's why the war on drugs is a war of words. Well, it's more than that, it's a ghastly and expensive waste of taxpayer money, but it is not a war that's going to stop the drug dealing, because they're going after, primarily, street level vendors and that sort of thing, rather than going to the people that they know very well are bringing in drugs by the tons.
Interviewer: And apparently the CIA will tell customs not to search certain planes.
Rev. Bill Davis: Well, at least during the Contra operation. The Contra supply operation, of course, is ideally suited for the drug smuggling. When you set up a whole series of bases, secret bases and flights that come and go, that bypass customs, customs is told, "No, no, that's a national security operation, don't mess with it." So the plane goes out, the plane comes back, nobody looks. At times we know that they were bringing the drugs back right into US bases, like Homestead Air Force Base up in Florida.
So, yes. It's hard to say that this isn't done with a certain amount of collusion. Now, that doesn't mean that all law enforcement is corrupt. Customs agents are told this is national security, don't mess with it. They don't mess with it. It's not because they're evil, it's, first of all, because they like their job, they don't want to get transferred to Alakanuk Alaska the next day, or because they honestly believe it's a national security affair and, you know, it's not part of my job to question.
So a lot of people will cooperate unwittingly with an operation like this, and that's what happens. And it's quite clear that the drugs have not been stopped, that they're not going to be stopped, and that the perpetrators of this massive fraud on the American public are basically running free. When you stop to think about the part of it that has been exposed, I mean, these are really startling revelations. The whole Iran-Contra thing and the fact that we practically had a junta operating out of the basement of the White House that supposedly the president didn't know about. And then you reflect on the fact that Zsa Zsa Gabor got more time for slapping a cop than all of the Iran-Contra criminals combined, at least so far. Poindexter hasn't been sentenced.
I think it gives you some measure of how serious this effort is at stopping these people. Most of them got a slap on the wrist, two years unsupervised probation, hey. All they have to do is next time be a little more careful, because this was embarrassing. But nobody, you know, nobody went to jail. It's really quite startling when you think about it. Two protesters stood up during the Iran-Contra hearings and unfurled a big banner. You may recall that they unfurled a banner that said, "Ask about cocaine," and they started to shout, "Ask them about the drugs!" Those protesters went to jail. They got months and months in jail for doing that, and yet, you know, these people who have devastated the streets of America, and have shredded the Constitution, got two years unsupervised probation. That's about the most serious-
Interviewer: And the actual, and the Iran-Contra hearings were a total joke because any time anything real came up about terrorist acts or drugs or Oliver North's plans to suspend the Constitution, in a way, we'd say, "This is national security, we'll have a secret session,"-
Rev. Bill Davis: Right.
Interviewer: And nothing came out.
Rev. Bill Davis: It got ruled out and you don't have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to know that some of the follow up questions that should have been asked, you know, it was just absurd. Let me give you one for instance, this one was especially interesting to us because we helped to get the information to Congress about the fact that Rob Owen, who was Ollie North's courier, his right hand man, so to speak, the private part of a government operation. When he was about to testify, we found out from some friends of ours that he had been to Costa Rica. He went to Costa Rica the day before the La Penca bombing, was there during the bombing, and then left the next day.
So he gave this information to a Congressman and suggested that suggested that he ask him some questions about it. He did not, but he obviously gave the information on to Orrin Hatch, Senator Hatch from Utah, who then said, “Well, now, Mr. Owen, there are some scurrilous rumors here about you being in Costa Rica at the time and implying you may have had some connection with that bombing. You want to tell us about that so that we get on the record your explanation?”
Owen admitted, on the record, that he did go there just prior to it. He said, "as a matter of fact, I was meeting, the night of the bombing, I was meeting with John Hull, the CIA station chief, and somebody came to our meeting and informed us at 3:30 in the morning that this terrible bombing had happened, and oh, we felt so awful about it and I left the next day." And nobody, on that whole committee, thought to ask him, "Why were you meeting at 3:30 in the morning in that particular place, with that particular group of people? What was your mission for Oliver North on that trip?" There wasn't a single followup question to that rather startling statement on his behalf. They simply went right on to other questions like, "Oh, aren't the walls straight up and down today?" And, you know, "Isn't the sky up?" Yeah, so you're quite right, it was a joke.
The hearings were an expensive joke, because of course the American taxpayer paid for it, and it was a lot of PR grandstanding. Congressman Brooks from Texas asked about, "Wasn't there a plan to suspend the Constitution and didn't Oliver North have something to do with that?" And of course he was gaveled down.
And again, it was an expensive joke, because of course the American taxpayer paid for it, and it was a lot of PR grandstanding on the part of Congresspeople. Only a few like, who was it, Congressman Brooks from Texas, asked the key question. He asked about, "Wasn't there a plan to suspend the Constitution and didn't Oliver North have something to do with that?" And of course he was gaveled down. They would not let him talk about that. They said, "Oh, this is national security, we dare not talk about it." To the American public, after all.
Interviewer: And what was the threat to national security? The fact that the American people find out that all of these people in power are racketeers and terrorists-
Rev. Bill Davis: Well, of course they often use national security as a cover up for anything that's really embarrassing. It isn't that the Russian bear is going to come over and gobble us up if they find out that this stuff is going on. The Russians know more about what's going on, probably, than the average American on the street does.
Interviewer: And the average Congressman.
Rev. Bill Davis: And the average Congressman. I know certainly people in the intelligence part of the Russian empire would know more about it. Central Americans certainly know this stuff is going on, so the question is, from whom are they keeping it. I think it's quite clear that that national security argument is simply used to stop stuff that's embarrassing. Again, let me give you a for instance, because it involved us directly.
During the course of Ollie North's trial, his own lawyer, his lawyer that was defending him, wanted to use certain memoranda that had been written by Rob Owen, certain memoranda that said, you know, where he was going in Central America and some of the things that he had done. He was forbidden by the US government to ... first of all, they wouldn't give him those memoranda at all, and then when they gave them to him, they gave them only in an excised form, cut out the parts that would be kind of embarrassing to them. They said, "Oh, national security is at stake here." Well, his lawyer, Brendan Sullivan, pointed out, "Come on, these same memoranda have already been made public by a group called the Christic Institute who introduced them into public court in their lawsuit." And we have. So here's stuff that the court had seen, the public had seen, journalists had written articles about them, and the government, the US government was still trying to say that this is going to be harmful to national security if this gets out. It was preposterous.
So of course, in that instance, they gave in. But it's a concrete example of the fact that this national security argument is simply being used, and I think again, it's very very dangerous doctrine. It used to be the old anti-communist, now that we probably aren't going to have to worry as much about the Eastern Bloc or Russia itself, I think the next thing is going to be more of this cry of national security, and subversives and, you know, third world people, anybody that they can make into the new boogie man, the new enemy, because this crowd of people has to have enemies. They have to, in order to justify, in their own heads and in their own hearts, what they're doing. They have to have enemies, so they will create them.
Interviewer: Isn't that, isn't the reason why Oliver North, all the key charges against him were thrown out because the national security agency basically hid all the evidence.
Rev. Bill Davis: Well, absolutely. If you charge people with conspiracy, for instance, than the natural question is going to be, "With whom did they conspire?" And it's gonna go on up the ladder. And so, with most of these people, they simply dropped the conspiracy charges. They didn't go after them for violations of the neutrality act and arms import export and so on. The major issues were neglected and they went after for things like misuse of money and didn't you buy snow tires. You have, you know, and it's no wonder that a lot of the public had a hard time figuring out who the heel was and who the hero was, because Ollie North, on balance, didn't look too bad, when they start going after him for these picky little things. And he was a tough and articulate person who was single minded and looked good, by comparison.
Interviewer: I think he lied very well and consistently. Yeah. And why didn't, during these Iran-Contra hearings, why didn't these Senators and Congressmen, why didn't they speak out? Why didn't anybody really push this?
I think the bottom line is the business of Congress is primarily getting reelected. You don't get reelected if you attack and expose the intelligence community. You don't get reelected if you offend the people who pay your campaign bills and if those people are in league with certain bankers and certain drug dealers.
Rev. Bill Davis: Well, again, it's a complex problem. I think the bottom line is the business of Congress is primarily getting reelected. You don't get reelected if you attack and expose the intelligence community. You don't get reelected if you offend the people who pay your campaign bills and if those people are in league with certain bankers and certain drug dealers, hey, why dig up a can of worms when you don't have to? You can slide by talking about snow tires and oh, isn't this awful, you misused money and you lied to Congress, a few kind of minor things that'll look like, it'll give the appearance of the pursuit of justice.
And so we have these public hearings that were televised, and it's all calculated to giving the appearance of something being done about it, when in fact, nothing was seriously done to wound this operation or even to expose what was behind the operation.
My guess is that, once this gets exposed, a lot of Americans are going to say, "Come on. We need intelligence, but we don't need that."
That's why it's so important that we have something like the Christic Institute lawsuit. We're going after why these things were done, and we're trying to expose to the American public what these connections are, so that they can judge for themselves who they want to elect, what kind of legal reforms they may want, what kind of laws do we pass. Do they want an intelligence community, for instance, that's in bed with drug dealers? My guess is that, once this gets exposed, a lot of Americans are going to say, "Come on. We need intelligence, but we don't need that." And, furthermore, we don't need an intelligence community that lies to the American public. If it's a crime to lie to Congress, the representatives of the public, why is it okay for government officials to publicly lie to the citizens who are supposed to be the very foundation of the democracy. The people who govern derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
So we have a number of reforms in mind like that that people may want to consider, but I think it's terribly important that you have private watchdogs coming after these people. That we have good journalists pursuing them. That we have people like the Christic Institute doing a civil lawsuit because it's quite clear that law enforcement has been compromised. It's quite clear that it's just not in the interests of getting reelected in Congress, so most people aren't going to touch it. They would only touch it if they knew that enough of their constituents knew about it and were demanding it, then they would go after it.
Interviewer: What was Oliver North's plan to suspend the Constitution?
Rev. Bill Davis: The specific plan that we think Brooks was referring to was something, again, that we had run into many months earlier. It was a FEMA plan. FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Administration, or Agency. And it was something that was set up to help in times of earthquake and flood, and to coordinate the Red Cross and other relief agencies, and make sure that things are done in a coordinated fashion.
Well, under Mr. Reagan, who brought, from California, Louis Giuffrida, an old buddy of his who had worked in intelligence in the state in the '60s against dissenters, FEMA began to experiment and expand with, well, how about besides physical disasters, how about looking at disruption and threats to the national security because of civic unrest. And wouldn't it be important to have some contingency plans going.
One of the plans that they had was known as REX 84... part of it was if there are these civil disturbances, if there are massive demonstrations, we will declare that a national emergency and suspend the Constitution so that people can be rounded up.
So one of the plans that they had was known as REX 84, R-E-X. It stands for Readiness Exercise, and it began in 1984, interestingly enough. It was a readiness exercise to plan to develop 10 bases, almost like the old Japanese internment camps, where, theoretically, if Central Americans who had come to the United States, potential terrorists, were on the ground and were ready to cause trouble if there were a land war in Central America, they might have to be rounded up and put in these detention camps because they would be potential saboteurs, much like we thought the Japanese Americans might be saboteurs during the war effort. So that was kind of the original concept, and they actually took steps to rehearse these readiness exercises.
It went through a couple of different phases, but part of it was if there are these civil disturbances, if there are massive demonstrations, we will declare that a national emergency and suspend the Constitution so that people can be rounded up, and oh yes, in practicing this, and in thinking about it, they justified it, of course, on the grounds that, “Well, we're gonna be rounding up these potential terrorists.” They also, though, started asking for the lists of subversives, in other words, people who didn't think like they think, and might be objecting, for instance, to a US invasion of Nicaragua. And so rather than have those people in the streets of Washington, as happened during the Vietnam era, they were probably going to find themselves in one of these 10 detention camps.
So it was a rather interesting and scary plan, and part of it was that they would simply suspend the Constitution, by executive decree, not by going to Congress. Not by going to Congress.
Interviewer: And then they would violate everyone's rights and-
Rev. Bill Davis: Jack Brooks thought that this was a rather startling and kind of dangerous thing to... and wanted to at least talk about it. Wanted to at least know, wasn't Oliver North somehow connected with that? Fact is, he was. He helped to draft part of this plan. And he was gaveled down. He was, “May I respectfully submit that you not talk about it at this time.” Well, if not then, when? If you can't talk about this to the American public, for whom these government agents are working, in the course of their investigation of our affairs, when can you talk about it? When can the American public hear what is actually being planned in their name, and being justified on the grounds of some kind of national security threat and suspending the Constitution of the United States?
How these people were ever labeled conservatives, I don't know. In the strict sense of the word, they are subversives. They are undermining the system of checks and balances that was so carefully set up in this country. And they are dangerous.
So, again, I say these people are very, very dangerous to our own democracy. How these people were ever labeled conservatives, I don't know.
Interviewer: They're the subversives.
Rev. Bill Davis: They really should be, in the strict sense of the word, they are subversives. They are undermining the system of checks and balances that was so carefully set up in this country. And they are dangerous. They're not conservatives, they are dangerous subversives. And so far they've gotten away with it.
Interviewer: And it's almost as if, basically, a military coup has taken place in our country, but it's all off-the-shelf.
Rev. Bill Davis: That's right. The whole Iran-Contra thing, in any other country, would have been called a coup. It would have been ... they would be designed a junta, because they are running government affairs without any kind of colorable Constitutional authority to do so.
Interviewer: And now this goes, this gets me to the idea of, well, now they could round up anybody. Any dissidents, anybody who disagrees with them, anybody who's in favor of dealing with global warming and the environment could be on George Bush's hit list, they could get put away.
Rev. Bill Davis: They could especially do it if they had some rationale whereby this person, or group of people, are a threat to national security. They're worried about global warming, but they might as well be against nuclear power, or nuclear weapons, and therefore they're a threat to our military or to our national security. There are a whole variety of ways that that could be justified, but you're absolutely right. If you can declare a national emergency by executive decree, you don't even have to go to Congress, and you have these plans in place whereby people can be rounded up, no habeas corpus, no rights of counsel and all that sort of thing-
Interviewer: You've got 1984.
Rev. Bill Davis: You do, you do. It's a very dangerous situation.
Interviewer: Yeah. Now, Rob Owen, who we've talked about, is basically the bag man working with Oliver North and John Hull, and also dealing with a shrimp company which was running drugs. He initial was an assistant to then-Senator Quayle, wasn't he?
Rev. Bill Davis: Yes, as a matter of fact, when John Hull came up to Washington in 1983, precisely to start complaining about Pastora, the Contra leader that they didn't like and were turning against 'cause he wouldn't go along with the game plan. Hull came accompanied by a couple of other Contras, came to Washington DC, went to the office of the Indiana Senator because after all Hull is from Indiana, but he was introduced, at that point, to Rob Owen, who was the chief legislative assistant for Latin American affairs of Senator Quayle. Rob Owen then took Hull, the very next day, and personally took him over to the White House and introduced him to Oliver North. So it's quite clear that this man was involved with Senator Quayle long before. When Quayle was chosen as vice president. You know, everybody said, "Oh, it's because he has a pretty face." I don't think so. And I don't think it was because he was a Rhodes Scholar. I think it probably had to do with his connections with this off-the-shelf operation, and his ability to continue to run it out of the vice president's office, which is where it had been run out of for the previous eight years.
Interviewer: Right, so Quayle is not just the benign buffoon. He is a player in this, and they're grooming him for the presidency to carry on his legacy.
Rev. Bill Davis: Hard to say what they're grooming him for, but it's quite clear that he has connections to people like Rob Owen and John Hull and this kind of nonsense. I noticed that whenever the president gives Quayle's rather short list of qualifications, one of the things that he always mentioned was that he is, how does he put it? He's an "expert in national security affairs". And of course no one ever asked, “Well, what does that mean?" Surely it wasn't his military record that made him an expert in national security affairs, so what was it? Was it his ability to know about and deal with and be in bed with this whole kind of off-the-shelf-
Interviewer: Do you think the CIA and the shadow government was involved in the assassination of John Kennedy?
Rev. Bill Davis: Again, that's not something that we're directly investigating. We do know that some of the people that we're dealing with were involved in that early shooter S squad that I talked about, it was an assassination team, that was set up and was trained, as a matter of fact, to triangular fire. I think one of the most startling things about the whole Watergate revelation is that you have, inside the Watergate, not just any old burglars, but these people who were part of that S squad, that shooter team.
One of the key players in that, by the way, was Felix Rodriguez, the guy who ran the whole meeting with the vice president and ran the whole resupply of the contras. Another was Rafael Chi Chi Quintero, one of our defendants in our lawsuit. It's, put it this way. It is highly likely that the people who did the Kennedy assassination, and now even Congress has concluded that it wasn't a lone gunman, that it was more likely some kind of conspiracy, some kind of, they said, members of the dissident Cuban community in Miami, and/or members of organized crime. What they didn't say is that it's probably this same crowd of people that were involved in that assassination team, that group of men trained in assassinations. And we think, yes, that it's quite likely that some of the people that we're dealing with were involved in the Kennedy. But that's a whole 'nother can of worms-
Interviewer: Why-
Rev. Bill Davis: That we'll only later understand.
Interviewer: Why didn't, what happened to Kennedy's challenge that would be ... challenge to the Warren commission?
Rev. Bill Davis: It's hard to say, it's hard to say. Possibly, again, because there are compromises. People, if some of the illegal privatized black operations were set up through the Kennedy family itself, it becomes very hard to go after that and expose it.
Interviewer: Wow.
Rev. Bill Davis: And I think it's quite clear that Bobby Kennedy, when he was attorney general, did set up certain schools of wiretapping and illegal surveillance because he wanted to get the Mafia, or at least the Hoffa wing of the mafia. And it's okay to break the rules and fight fire with fire and all that sort of thing. I don't know. I'm speculating, but my guess is that there were compromises like that, that are liable to come out if you pursue. Plus it doesn't seem to be a terribly healthy thing to do, pursue, to cause further pain and trauma in the family.
I don't know why the Kennedys didn't, but I think that it's quite clear now to rather serious people that there was more to the Kennedy assassination than the lone gunman. And what more, we've never gotten at yet.
Interviewer: Who are some of the Senators who are working towards dismantling this shadow government and stopping the atrocities in El Salvador and other places?
Rev. Bill Davis: Well, I don't want to single out any one or two. There are a number of progressive people, though, who realize that our whole policy toward Central America is wrong. What bothers me so much is so-called liberals, some that are very unprincipled and will say things like, "Well, we've got to stop aid to the Contras because it isn't working." As though, what, if it worked it would be okay? And I think very often it's kind of an unprincipled viewpoint.
But there are both Congresspeople and Senators who I think are becoming aware of this. None of them are very actively going after this shadow government, though, because they, if they do have the consciousness and the will to do it, they sometimes aren't in the right committees or don't have the right jurisdiction. I think Jack Brooks, who is now chair of the House Judiciary Committee, is in a very key spot. And if he can muster enough support, I think Congressman Brooks from Texas, Nederland, Texas, is a very key person, and that he will go after it.
I've spoken to a number of the Congressional Black Caucus, they know that this stuff is going on. I think thank if they could get more support they would be willing to go after it. There are people who are willing to go after it, but they don't want to do it if it's gonna be totally fruitless and it's just gonna generate problems for them.
Interviewer: They need other people.
Frank Church, of Idaho, for instance, had the so-called Church Hearings, and did establish that the CIA was in bed with the mafia to do assassination programs. That's all part of the record of history, it's also true that Frank Church is history.
Rev. Bill Davis: They need other people, they need to be covered. Because, you see, what happened back in the '60s when a number of Senators and Congressmen started going after the intelligence community, Frank Church, of Idaho, for instance, had the so-called Church Hearings, and did establish that the CIA was in bed with the mafia to do assassination programs. That's all part of the record of history, it's also true that Frank Church is history. He got, massive ... these political action committees, with a lot of right wing money, came in to... they targeted about six Senators. Church, of Idaho, who had been involved in exposing them, Clark of Iowa, Senator Clark of Iowa, who had exposed the CIAs illegal involvement in Angola, and he became history. Birch Bayh of Indiana was attacked, he was chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and that, by the way, is how Dan Quayle got his job. It was because of a direct attack of right wing money on Senator Birch Bayh, who was perceived to be some kind of progressive or some kind of threat to the national security.
Interviewer: So all this money came, right wing money came in, and the media cooperated also-
Rev. Bill Davis: Relatively unknown person like Danforth Quayle got elected. That's where he comes from. So it's not just that he's connected to people like Rob Owen, we have to look at where this guy comes from to begin with.
Interviewer: So that's what these people that they target, the people who are a threat to exposing them.
Rev. Bill Davis: That's right. And even good Senators and good Congresspeople, who would like to do something about this, don't like to get unelected.
Interviewer: What do you think of Tom Harkin?
Rev. Bill Davis: And they don't like to lose the millions of dollars that it now takes to get elected, because you know that the right people aren't going to be paying.
I think Tom Harkin is one of the truly principled people in Congress. I think there's a lot of hope for him. I think Senator Simon, I think ... I don't want to start naming names, but there are a number of good, solid pe- not a big number, I might add, but there are a few good solid principled people in Congress. They need to be supported and encouraged and know that they'll be protected if they stick their head up.
You know, the so called war on drugs and you see how much of is directed at the banks? After all, it's laundered, this money. How much of it is directed at the chemical industry. Everybody always talks about, "Oh, cocaine, that comes from these farmers that grow the coca leaf, etc." Cocaine is only one small part coca leaf. A large part of it is chemical, which comes from the US, which could be easily traced, and you know. The war on drugs isn't targeting much of that. It would much rather go after Blacks in south central LA and consider them, somehow, the problem.
I never found a plane on John Hull's ranch that belonged to the Crips or the Bloods. There were planes there, that belonged to the CIA, or to their shadowy mercenary friends in the private sector.
I never found a plane on John Hull's ranch that belonged to the Crips or the Bloods. There were planes there, that belonged to the CIA, or to their shadowy mercenary friends in the private sector.
Interviewer: Mentioning John Hull again, I just have to read a quote. When asked what to do about opponents to Reagan's Central American foreign policies, he said that people like Senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry should, quote, "Be lined up against the wall and shot tomorrow at sunrise." That does not sound like the American way.
Rev. Bill Davis: It hardly does, and in fact, he was being asked questions at that time by Edith Hollerman, a woman working with the Christic Institute, and she was so startled that one of the questions she went on, she said, "Well, I suppose you would like to have me shot, or us shot, as well." And he said, "No, I'd like to have you in bed." This is the guy testifying to these kinds of things under oath, and this is the guy that a dozen or more Congresspeople wrote a letter to the President of Costa Rica, basically trying to get him to back off and not prosecute John Hull. He's the kind of man that gets protection from Congress, rather than people saying go for it.
The recent elections in Nicaragua, everybody's bragging about what a wonderful advance for democracy this is, I think it's a disaster for democracy because what it means is that 10 years of unfair and sometimes totally illegal pressure has succeeded.
I think the recent elections in Nicaragua, everybody's bragging about what a wonderful advance for democracy this is, I think it's a disaster for democracy because what it means is that 10 years of unfair and sometimes totally illegal pressure has succeeded, now, in getting a validation of a position that people wanted validated. And if that's what they mean by democracy, I don't think that's what the founding fathers had in mind.
Interviewer: No. 'Cause basically the whole time was to destabilize the country, right? Terrorize the civilians, destroy their infrastructure, so that basically Ortega couldn't make the country work.
Rev. Bill Davis: But my point is, having succeeded in bringing that kind of devastating economic and military pressure against them, and succeeded to the point where the people themselves voted for something else, they're tired of being starved and they're tired of being shot at, I think what we can expect is a lot more of the same. And, in fact, I think it's now gonna be trained on Cuba, next, we can see that happening already-
Interviewer: So basically this reinforced that these, in the eyes of these shadow people, that, “Hey, it worked. We did it. We destroyed this country and we got our people back-"
Rev. Bill Davis: Combination of covert operations done by our own intelligence community, done by contracts going out to these privatized operations, economic pressures, etc., those are the tools of the 20th century that I think are going to be more and more employed.
'Cause the other causes too much protest. You have a draft, you start sending kids, kids start coming home in body bags, causes problems here at home. So don't do it that way, do it by counterinsurgency, get locals to do the dirty work for you, contract with private companies, because if you get them to mine the harbors it gives you greater deniability, so we're going to see more of that, I'm quite convinced.
Interviewer: Where, you said Cuba, where else?
Rev. Bill Davis: Angola, the Philippines, it's hard to say where else. Wherever they perceive that their need for control has to establish itself.
Interviewer: Right. Tell me about the Wednesday Morning Coalition.
Rev. Bill Davis: Well, the Wednesday Coalition has been a rather interesting phenomenon here in Los Angeles. People from all walks of life, so a few celebrities but a lot of very ordinary schoolteachers and mechanics and clergy and so on, have been gathering once a week at the Federal Building to engage in protests, both legal protests and civil disobedience. People willing to get arrested because they feel that this is so outrageous, what's going on.
We're involved in a trial right now, some of us, by the way, who have engaged in that, where the judge is at least allowing to be heard so-called necessity defense. In other words, you say, "Yes, we did this and we broke the law, but there was a necessity to do it." It's like if you see a child in an automobile with all the doors locked and windows rolled up, and the child is dying of the heat that's being generated in that automobile, you break the window. You break in. You have a necessity to do something about it, even though it means you break a law and break the person's window. Ordinarily you wouldn't do that.
So that argument is being heard by this judge. Now, whether or not they'll rule on it, we don't know. The trial isn't finished yet. It's going to be continued on May 2nd. But meanwhile the Wednesday Morning Coalition is not having civil disobedience now every Wednesday, but they are continuing to meet and are continuing to try to carry the message to the public that what is going on in Central America is fundamentally unfair, it's fundamentally immoral and fundamentally un-American. It's not according to our finest traditions. And that we got to stop it.
Interviewer: And this is primarily focused on El Salvador?
Our dollars are not only killing there, they're killing here as well, because we have homeless, we have problems right here in this city where people are dying for lack of those dollars.
Rev. Bill Davis: It is. It has an interesting LA focus in the sense that one of the things we're trying to show is that dollars sent there kill twice. Because they kill people like my own Jesuit brothers in El Salvador. The six Jesuits who were killed, I knew three of them personally, and the two women workers. Our dollars are not only killing there, they're killing here as well, because we have homeless, we have problems right here in this city where people are dying for lack of those dollars.
Interviewer: So this war economy is just destroying our economy.
Rev. Bill Davis: Absolutely. That's absolutely correct. We're sending money out to kill third world people that ought to be used to build schools in Los Angeles so that the kids wouldn't have to go to school, we're using the school buildings now 12 months a year because there aren't enough buildings. Why couldn't we have more buildings for schools and at the same time create jobs for carpenters, and have a spin off effect here so that you would, the dollars would not only help people here, it would prevent this kind of massive rip off and oppression in Central America that our dollars have been supporting.
Interviewer: What can people do, what can people do to help the Christic Institute expose the shadow government?
Rev. Bill Davis: Well, I think there are a lot of things. First of all, people can get more acquainted with it themselves, so that they feel comfortable with it. We have a variety of things like books and videotapes that are available for that purpose. Then I think they can start to inform others. It isn't a very different organizing technique to get a videocassette and invite some neighbors in and serve a cup of tea and show up and discuss it. And there's not only our videos, there are things like the Empowerment Project has a very good film called Coverup, there's a Bill Moyers program about this shadow government. When he was given 90 min during the bicentennial of the Constitution, he made a program called The Shadow Government: Our Constitution in Crisis, and this is by, you know, somebody like Bill Moyers.
So there are tools available like that that people can use to educate themselves and to educate others. And besides education there is, of course, legislation. We can make more demands on our Congresspeople. There is agitation, one can join things like the Wednesday Morning Coalition, there's a whole variety of things, but I think finally what I always try to get people to do is use their own talents and their own self. Each person can do something, and I think it's up to each one of us to find out what it is that I can do that's different.
Christic Institute can do some lawsuits and we're gonna do that. You can help us with those, we always need help financially, we need volunteers to work and all that kind of thing, but I think it's important that people find what it is I can do if I'm an artist, what it is I can do if I am a mother with children, what it is I can do no matter where I am. There are some things that one can do in that position, because nobody else has that window on reality that you do. So it's very important, I think, to discover one's own peculiar calling, if you will, or way to use your own talents for the effort.
Interviewer: So basically it's a matter of we get more informed about this, talk about it to other people, and whoever you are, whatever you are, let this be an extension of what you are.
Rev. Bill Davis: Educate, organize, use your own talents so that it's an extension of what you are. If you're a filmmaker, make films about it, you know? Yeah, and the one thing, absolutely, that I think we need to be wary of in this country is the attitude that says, "Oh, there's nothing you can do." As long as that's around, these people will succeed. And they deliberately try, I think, to get that attitude accepted. I've never accepted the notion that there's nothing you can do about it. And one of the things that intrigues me is that I run into people in places like El Salvador, people with very little education, people who make less than $100 a year, and they're not saying, "There's nothing I can do." They're filled with hope and creativity and they see themselves as the actors of history, and not just the objects of it anymore. And that's exciting, so if they can find a way to do something about it with so little by way of resources, what's our excuse? We've got all kinds of resources, educational and material and otherwise. So I ... there's always something that everyone can do.
And another aspect of it too is that it may not seem like much, but if you grab a loose thread on the edge of a tapestry and you pull on that thread, who knows where it will take you and to which parts of the picture. First thing you know you'll be in ... you'll see a different piece of the puzzle that you haven't seen before. So, but it's important to grab onto a thread, somewhere, any kind of a thread. Any kind of injustice, be it local or global, and work on it, and study it, and analyze it, and see how it's a microcosm of the bigger picture. And there is always something that we can do, that everybody can do.
Interviewer: Thank you for your courage and your commitment and for giving us your time here.
Rev. Bill Davis: My pleasure.