Not too bad of a book. Explains alot of the details in the Iran-contra affair and he explains his personal involvement in the Vietnam War.

How could a Marine (North) even consider selling weapons to a nation (Iran) that financed the suicide attack (carried out by Hezbollah) that murdered over 140 of his fellow Marines in Beruit in '83? It boggles the mind. He is a traitor who should have been sent to Leavenworth, along with all of the morally challanged officers and politicians above him.

How could a Marine (North) even consider selling weapons to a nation (Iran) that financed the suicide attack (carried out by Hezbollah) that murdered over 140 of his fellow Marines in Beruit in '83? It boggles the mind. He is a traitor who should have been sent to Leavenworth, along with all of the morally challanged officers and politicians above him.

The main issue, unacknowledged in North's disgusting, self-justifying book and unmentioned in most of these reviews, is not whether North was acting 'illegally' or without Reagan's consent - it's the fact that he was involved in siphoning money to fascist death squads so that they could overthrow a democratic government. The Contras murdered, mutilated, tortured and raped civilians; 30,000 people lost their lives in the civil war between the Contras and the government. The victims of the Contra attacks were not 'evil Communists', but priests, teachers, nurses and schoolchildren.

The Sandinista government itself was not, as another reviewer claimed, a Soviet stooge, but a non-aligned, Leftist government who favoured a mixed economy, human rights and democracy. The Sandinistas introduced free healthcare and education, land reform and fair elections; they started a massive literacy campaign and abolished the death penalty. The Sandinistas' only serious human rights violation, their treatment of the indigenous Miskito population, was acknowledged as such after pressure from human rights groups, and the Sandinistas ultimately granted the Miskito full autonomy. This is in marked contrast to the US's refusal to even acknowledge, let alone attempt to rectify, its many abuses...

Many of the Contra fighters were loyalists of the previous Somoza regime, a vicious military dictatorship that the US had supported for years. All of the guff about restoring 'democracy' to Nicaragua was either a lie or a gross misunderstanding of reality; it would have been more accurate to talk about restoring fascism. The freedom-loving US appears often to get these two political systems mixed up, given that they also funded, armed and trained barbarous military juntas in Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and El Salvador, a country where 70,000 people were killed.

So the issue is not the 'illegality', by US terms, of North's actions. The shocking reality is that North was only carrying out standard US foreign policy. The crimes here are not those of a lone individual, but of an entire administration. After all, in the early 1980s, the World Court indicted the US for conducting a campaign of state terrorism against Nicaragua.

This said, North's role in the funding of the Contras makes him, by any rational standards, a war criminal, an abetter of terrorism, an accomplice in mass murder. That's the real story here.