https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/wl/wpelsal.html
WASHINGTON POST: METRO, 04/06/93
Copyright (c) 1993 The Washington Post Co.
By COLEMAN MCCARTHY
Five months after six Jesuit priests and their housekeeper and her daughter were murdered in El Salvador in November 1989, Rep. Joe Moakley (D-Mass.) wrote of what he and 18 members of a congressionally appointed task force learned from their investigative interviews in San Salvador: We "heard the murders of the Jesuits described by high military officials as 'stupid,' 'self-defeating' and 'dumb.' But no military official with whom we talked said it was wrong."
A similar summary could be written today about U.S. officials who backed the training and bankrolling of Salvadoran triggermen responsible for most of the 75,000 deaths in the 12-year Salvadoran civil war. Who is saying -- even with a qualifying perhaps or maybe -- that what the United States did to the Salvadoran people was wrong?
Ronald Reagan, who presided over most of the killing years? Elliott Abrams, the rabid Reagan underling who played the apologist role for the murderous Salvadoran military and who now claims, incredibly, that "the administration's record in El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement"? Members of Congress who ignored Archbishop Oscar Romero's 1979 plea not to send weapons to El Salvador and who regularly voted for legislation that would eventually sanction $6 billion in military and economic aid to a government that was systematically slaughtering its own people?
None has come forward.
Propagandists and ideologues rarely do. Whether they can be forced to depends on what Rep. Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.) uncovers after he reviews for possible lies "every word uttered by every Reagan administration official" in testimony on El Salvador.
All of this surfaces as the report from the United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission fingers those responsible for the 12 years of murder, torture and abduction in El Salvador. Eighty-five percent of the 22,000 atrocities the commission examined were attributed to government security forces or right-wing death squads, the darlings of the Reagan- Abrams crew. It is now known who ordered the murders of the Jesuits, the killing of the four churchwomen in 1980 and the massacre of 500 villagers in El Mozote in 1981.
It is also known now that U.S. officials themselves were either aware of who committed the crimes or did not ask questions to learn who did. The Washington Post reported that two declassified cables in 1980 and 1981 from the U.S. Embassy said that Maj. Roberto d'Aubuisson was behind the murder of Archbishop Romero. He chaired a meeting during which "some of the participants drew lots for the privilege of killing the archbishop."
During the height of the killing, those reporters who sought to send back the facts to the United States found themselves derided. On Feb. 10, 1982, a page-length editorial in the Wall Street Journal titled "The Media's War" charged that "perceptions are badly confused" about the bloodshed in El Salvador because "the U.S. press" is doing much of the confusing. The editorial singled out Raymond Bonner of the New York Times for his Jan. 27, 1982, story on the massacre in El Mozote. The editorial ridiculed Bonner for reporting "it is clear" that the massacre happened. The Journal sided with the State Department's version that this was a military operation. Because Bonner and another reporter were taken to the village by guerrillas, "this was a propaganda exercise," according to the Journal.
With the U.N. report now issued, you would think the Journal would want to retract its 1982 smear and apologize to Bonner. Dream on. On March 19, 1993, the Journal came back with another editorial titled "On Credulity." After making the modest concession that "it was clear enough at the time that something awful had happened" in El Mozote, it again attacked Bonner.
We can expect a run of such denials from the pro-war press as typified by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and their heroes in the Reagan administration who believed in killing peasants as the way to stop the commies. This postwar stonewalling is part of what Father Martin Baro, one of the slain Jesuits, called "a sate of dominating violence by . . . the powerful against the weak."
And who are the weak? Start with El Salvador's estimated 11,000 amputees. Who will ask them how they feel about being part of the Reagan- Abrams "fabulous achievement."