The Big City

I really can’t make my point about Oliver North any better than Mark Weisbrot in Z Magazine.

Imagine Osama bin Laden visiting the United States ten or 15 years from now, telling Americans who to vote for if they want to avoid getting hurt. It would never happen, but in Nicaragua something very similar is happening in the run-up to their election on November 5.

Former US Lt. Col. Oliver North, who helped organize and raise funds for a terrorist organization that decimated Nicaragua in the 1980s, returned to that country’s ground zero in late October to warn the citizens there against re-electing Daniel Ortega.

The irony doesn’t end there. Now that Ortega has won, the US will no doubt be carrying out its threat to cut off aid to Nicaragua because the people there didn’t vote for a pro-US candidate.
Do you remember back in 2004 during the US presidential campaign when the Guardian launched a letter-writing campaign, getting people from around the world to write to voters in a swing state? The campaign didn’t go down too well with our special friends, who objected vigorously to this intrusion into their precious democratic process. Need I go on?