Government’s Covert Actions

I am sick and tired of being lied to by the Reagan Administration about our government’s involvement in the war against Nicaragua. Nobody I have spoken to believes for a moment the claim that our government did not at least know about and encourage the flight that was shot down inside Nicaragua.

We are not the idiots that the Administration takes us for. We can figure out for ourselves that when a plane takes off from a Salvadoran military base with a number of Americans on board on a mission to deliver weapons to the contras inside of Nicaragua, the U.S. government has something to do with the operation.

It’s not as though we haven’t been lied to in the past. Didn’t the Administration deny mining Nicaragua’s ports? Didn’t it deny that the CIA was distributing a manual on psychological warfare among the contras? Didn’t it deny having anything to do with contras several years ago, when the press had not yet revealed the now accepted fact that the CIA organized the contras in the first place? How much credibility does the Administration think it has with the American people with regard to its conduct of foreign policy?

I think the real issue is that our “dirty war” is not a campaign issue, so the Administration and our representatives in Washington can do as they please and lie to the public as much as they need to without serious political repercussions.

Some of us, however, are getting fed up with this government by deceit, and the eroding credibility of our elected officials may some day affect them at the polls. Hopefully, they will realize this and “leak” a little bit of the truth now and then.

ERIC R. CROWTHER

Los Angeles