Tag: Iran-Contra

Treaties, Illegal Weapons Sales, & More In Peace & Justice History for 10/10:

October 10, 1699
The Spanish issued a royal decree which stated that every African-American who came to St. Augustine, Florida, and adopted Catholicism would be free and protected from the English.
October 10, 1963
The Limited Test Ban Treaty—banning nuclear tests in the oceans, in the atmosphere, and in outer space—went into effect. The nuclear powers of the time—the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—had signed the treaty earlier in the year.
In 1957, Nobel Prize-winner (Chemistry) Linus Pauling drafted the Scientists’ Bomb-Test Appeal with two colleagues, Barry Commoner and Ted Condon, eventually gaining the support of 11,000 scientists from 49 countries for an end to the testing of nuclear weapons. These included Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and Albert Schweitzer.

Linus Pauling
Pauling then took the resolution to Dag Hammarskjöld, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, and sent copies to both President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev. The final treaty had many similarities to Pauling’s draft. It went into effect the same day as the announcement of Pauling’s second Nobel Prize, this time for Peace.
October 10, 1967
The Outer Space Treaty (Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies) demilitarizing outer space went into force.It sought to avoid “a new form of colonial competition” as in the Antarctic Treaty, and the possible damage that self-seeking exploitation might cause. Discussions on banning weapons of mass destruction in orbit had begun among the major powers ten years earlier.

1949 painting by Frank Tinsley of the infamous “Military Space Platform” proposed by then Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in the December 1948 military budget.
The text of the treaty 
Read more 
October 10, 1986
Elliott Abrams, then assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (in closed executive session) that he did not know that Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, a White House employee in the Reagan administration, was directing illegal arms sales to Iran and diverting the proceeds to assist the Nicaraguan contras.
Abrams pled guilty in 1991 to withholding information on the Iran-contra affair during that congressional testimony, but was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush.  
   
Elliott Abrams

Presidents George W. Bush & George H.W. Bush

Oliver North 
Read more about the pardons  
October 10, 1987
Thirty thousand Germans demonstrated against construction of a large-scale nuclear reprocessing installation at Wackersdorf in mostly rural northern Bavaria.
October 10, 2002 
The House voted 296-133 to pass the “Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq,” giving President George W. Bush broad authority to use military force against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, with or without U.N. support. 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october10

IOKIYAR, & More, In Peace & Justice History for 6/16

June 16, 1961
Following a meeting between South Vietnamese envoy Nguyen Dinh Thuan and President John F. Kennedy, the United States agreed to increase the presence of American military advisors in Vietnam from 340 to 805, and to provide direct training and combat supervision to South Vietnamese troops.
The number of U.S. personnel rose to 3,200 by the end of 1962.
President Ngo Dinh Diem and President Eisenhower in DC, five years earlier
June 16, 1965
A planned civil disobedience turned into a five-hour teach-in on the steps and inside the Pentagon about the escalating war in Vietnam.
In two days, more than 50,000 leaflets were distributed without interference at the building that houses the U.S. Department of Defense. A World War II artillery officer, Gordon Christiansen, turned in his honorable discharge certificate in protest.
June 16, 1976

South African police opened fire on black students peacefully protesting the requirement to learn Afrikaans, the language of the small white minority that enforced the racially separatist regime known in Afrikaans as apartheid.
Neither black nor colored (other non-white or mixed race) South Africans could vote or live where they chose.
Over 150 South African children were killed and hundreds more were injured in the shooting—what became known as the Soweto Massacre.
fact: Soweto stands for: SOuth WEst TOwnships
The History of Apartheid in South Africa 
Read more on Soweto 
June 16, 1992
Former Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was indicted for his participation in the Iran-Contra affair, charged with four counts of lying to Congress and prosecutors.
He had concealed the secret arrangement to provide funds to the Nicaraguan insurgent contra rebels with profits from selling arms to Iran, which in turn were to encourage the release of hostages held by groups allied with Iran.

President Ronald Reagan with Caspar Weinberger, George Shultz, Ed Meese, and Don Regan, discussing the President’s remarks on the Iran-Contra affair.
The Reagan administration (1981-1989) had been circumventing the legal ban on material support for the terrorist activities of the contras. Iran had needed the weapons for its war with Iraq, and it was hoped that Iran would respond by encouraging the release of hostages being held by Islamist groups in Lebanon.
President Reagan had publicly and repeatedly promised never to negotiate with terrorists, and had maintained the break in diplomatic relations with the Iranian revolutionary government.
Weinberger and the five others charged were all pardoned by President George H.W. Bush six months later, days before the trial was to start, and shortly before President Bush would be leaving office.
More on Iran-Contra pardons 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjune.htm#june16

Peace & Justice History for 12/24

December 24, 1865
Months after the fall of the Confederacy and the end of slavery, several veterans of the Confederate Army formed a private social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, called the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Its first priority, declared in its creed, was “to protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs, and outrages of the lawless, the violent, and the brutal.”
In fact, the Klan terrorized and killed former slaves, sympathetic whites and immigrants.

Three Ku Klux Klan members, September 1871.
The building where it happened still stands with a bronze plaque reading, “Ku Klux Klan organized in this, the law office of Judge Thomas M. Jones, Dec. 24, 1865.” When the building was purchased in 1990, the new owner, Don Massey, instead of removing the plaque, simply reversed it, showing the smooth back side.
More on the Klan 
December 24, 1924

Costa Rica indicated its intention to withdraw from The League of Nations to protest lack of progress on regional issues, particularly U.S. dominance of the hemisphere.
The Monroe Doctrine, declared by President James Monroe in 1823, established the U.S. sphere of influence encompassed the entirety of North and South America, as well as the Caribbean island nations.
Read more 
December 24, 1947
President Truman pardoned 1,523 of the 15,805 World War II draft resisters who had been convicted and served time in prison for their offense. Five years later on the same day, shortly before leaving office, he granted full pardon and restoration of civil and political rights to former convicts who had served in the peacetime army or who had not been covered by his earlier pardon, as well as all convicted peacetime deserters.
Read more 
December 24, 1991
Parents of reservists from Grocka protested at Army headquarters in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, worried their sons would be caught up in the war threatened by Serbian nationalist expansionism.
December 24, 1992
President George Herbert Walker Bush pardoned six Reagan administration appointees in the Iran-Contra case, among them former Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, and Robert McFarlane, the President’s former national security advisor.He did so with less than one month to go in his presidency, and one week before Weinberger’s trial on four felony charges was to begin.
These people and others were responsible for selling arms to the revolutionary government of Iran in hope of the release of hostages held in Lebanon, despite then-President Ronald Reagan’s repeated pledge not to negotiate with hostage-takers.

The Iran-Contra Boys

Otto Reich /Elliott Abrams /John Poindexter/Edwin Meese George H.W. Bush/Casper Weinberger/Oliver North/Robert McFarlane

The money raised through the arms sales was used to fund the Contra insurgents in Nicaragua, who were violently trying to overthrow the government. This support was in violation of an explicit legal ban on such activities under the Boland Amendment [see December 21, 1982].

Text of Bush’s Grant of Executive Clemency
U.S. presidential pardon history: 
More about presidential pardons: 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorydecember.htm#december24

Peace & Justice History for 10/10:

October 10, 1699
The Spanish issued a royal decree which stated that every African-American who came to St. Augustine, Florida, and adopted Catholicism would be free and protected from the English.
October 10, 1963
The Limited Test Ban Treaty—banning nuclear tests in the oceans, in the atmosphere, and in outer space—went into effect. The nuclear powers of the time—the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—had signed the treaty earlier in the year.
In 1957, Nobel Prize-winner (Chemistry) Linus Pauling drafted the Scientists’ Bomb-Test Appeal with two colleagues, Barry Commoner and Ted Condon, eventually gaining the support of 11,000 scientists from 49 countries for an end to the testing of nuclear weapons. These included Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and Albert Schweitzer.

Linus Pauling
Pauling then took the resolution to Dag Hammarskjöld, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, and sent copies to both President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev. The final treaty had many similarities to Pauling’s draft. It went into effect the same day as the announcement of Pauling’s second Nobel Prize, this time for Peace.
October 10, 1967
The Outer Space Treaty (Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies) demilitarizing outer space went into force.It sought to avoid “a new form of colonial competition” as in the Antarctic Treaty, and the possible damage that self-seeking exploitation might cause. Discussions on banning weapons of mass destruction in orbit had begun among the major powers ten years earlier.
1949 painting by Frank Tinsley of the infamous “Military Space Platform” proposed by then Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in the December 1948 military budget.

Read more 
October 10, 1986
Elliott Abrams, then assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (in closed executive session) that he did not know that Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, a White House employee in the Reagan administration, was directing illegal arms sales to Iran and diverting the proceeds to assist the Nicaraguan contras.
Abrams pled guilty in 1991 to withholding information on the Iran-contra affair during that congressional testimony, but was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush.    
 
Elliott Abrams

Presidents George W. Bush & George H.W. Bush

Oliver North 
Read more about the pardons  
October 10, 1987
Thirty thousand Germans demonstrated against construction of a large-scale nuclear reprocessing installation at Wackersdorf in mostly rural northern Bavaria.
October 10, 2002 
The House voted 296-133 to pass the “Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq,” giving President George W. Bush broad authority to use military force against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, with or without U.N. support.
 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october10