Reply #20: I hope his journal will throw some light upon his obsession with nailing

[Judi Lynn]

people he considered to be "communists."

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1980, he arrived with a set of assumptions regarding internal subversion which he had developed and refined while leading a purge of alleged communists in Hollywood as head of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1950's. Like Ronald Reagan, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had cast itself in a central role during the 1950's political witch hunts, as had a network of right-wing political vigilantes who ferreted out subversion and publicized their findings in newsletters such as "Red Channels," which identified those it felt belonged on the Hollywood blacklist.

Reagan facilitated a concerted and successful attempt by the intelligence agencies and their counter-subversion allies to abolish the reforms which had restrained them during the late 1970's. The early 1980's also saw tremendous growth in the private security industry coupled with an authorization for the contracting of intelligence investigations to private firms outside the reach of Congressional oversight and laws protecting privacy. The FBI and other agencies also redefined the terms "terrorism" and "foreign intelligence" to reflect a broad and self-serving interpretation; and then argued their investigations into social change groups met the terms of specific legal language allowing the FBI greater investigative latitude in probes involving political violence and foreign spying. The result was that by 1983, FBI agents and private security specialists had launched broad intrusions into the lives of ordinary citizens engaged in otherwise legal activities.
(snip/...)

http://www.publiceye.org/huntred/Hunt_For_Red_Menace-09.html

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Reagan & Guatemala's Death Files
by Robert Parry
iF magazine, May/June 1999



Ronald Reagan's election in November 1980 set off celebrations in the well-to-do communities of Central America.
After four years of Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the region's anticommunist hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House who understood their problems.

The oligarchs and the generals had good reason for the optimism. For years, Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes that engaged in bloody counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist enemies.

In the late 1970s, when Carter's human rights coordinator, Pat Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its "dirty war" -- tens of thousands of "disappearances," tortures and murders -then-political commentator Reagan joshed that she should "walk a mile in the moccasins" of the Argentine generals before criticizing them.
(snip/...)

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/Reagan_Guatemala.html

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How many voices were silenced in Latin American due to his love of power, as in entire villages wiped off the face of the earth with his involvement in fortifying right-wing, U.S.-supported, puppet dictatorships?

He looked affable and benign, but the powers making the decisions for him wrought havoc in this hemisphere among those without the ability to defend themselves: the poor and utterly helpless.