A SICK POLICY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000504100023-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 20, 2012
• Sequence Number: 23
• Publication Date: August 8, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/20: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504100023-0
ARTICLE AP
ON PAGE E
MUM
WASHINGTON POST
8 August 1985
MARY McGRORY
~a-1
a sick Policy
Before making definitive
judgments about Nicaragua as a
terrorist state-President
Reagan put it on his list of international
outlaws-consider testimony of Anne
Lifflander, 29, a New York doctor who
spent two years in Nicaragua and
survived a terrorist attack by the
U.S.-sponsored counterrevolutionaries.
On July 23, Lifflander was on a ferry
traveling the Escondino River from
Rama to Bluefields, a city on
Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast, when
gunfire hit the ship.
"It was terrible," she says. "People
threw themselves on the deck. They
were praying and crying and
screaming."
In the 15 hellish minutes that
followed, three rockets were fired. A
government soldier, one of nine aboard,
was shot in the face as he stood
guarding the bridge. He died two hours
later. A civilian construction worker
shot through the head died that night.
Dr. Lifflander, a quiet, round-faced
1980 graduate of the State University
of New York, identified herself as a
doctor to the military commander.
Although shot in the arm, he refused
treatment and directed her to minister
to the civilians. A 9-year-old girl, shot
in the leg, went into shock.
Lifflander had no instruments and
made do with what fellow passengers
could provide as bandages from shirts
or slips. In all, 17 were injured, most by
shrapnel. The boat limped in to
Bluefields, where it was met by
ambulances and such medical facilities
as the city can provide.
Eden Pastora, a contra leader who
has variously accepted and rejected
Central Intelligence Agency aid, later
took credit for the attack, citing the
government soldiers on board. but the
boat was being guarded because of a
previous attack on the ferry, which had
four soldiers aboard.
Pastora, the revolutionary hero who
has become the most erratic contra
commander, is back in the news
because he has kidnaped 29 American
"witnesses for peace" traveling the
river between Costa Rica and
Nicaragua. He poses an intriguing
dilemma for the Reagan administration
and a first test of the threat issued a
month ago that the United States would
hold Nicaragua responsible for violence
against Americans in the area. Pastora
may be Reagan's idea of a "freedom
fighter" but, if kidnaping is not a -
terrorist act, there is no such thing.
Lifflander had decided to leave
Nicaragua even before bullets flew over
her head. After two years with a family
in Managua and working in one of the
city's below-par hospitals and a pitiful
health clinic provided by the
Sandinistas, she decided she could do
Nicaraguans more good by returning
here to try to heal a sick policy. She
plans to work part time in a Washington
clinic and lobby on Capitol Hill, under
the aegis of Nicaragua Network, the
liberal anti-contra organization headed
by actor Ed Asner.
Since June 12, when the House gave
way to presidential bullying and voted
them $27 million in "humanitarian" aid,
the contras have grown bolder.
In Lifflander's Managua
neighborhood, where she shared a
home with Helen Salgado, divorced
mother of two daughters, almost every
family has a son fighting at the
front-"there are funerals all the time."
Civilian casualties are mounting. Eight
women traveling to visit their sons in an
army camp were killed when contras
attacked their bus. Seventeen people
were injured in what certainly sounds
like a terrorist raid.
When she returned to her Managua
home after her near-miss with the
contras, she expected a "heroine's
welcome." But perspective was
immediately restored. A neighborhood
woman had lost her only son, her sole
support. He was in a coffee-harvesting
brigade attacked by contras who, after
shooting it up, set fire to the
brigadistas' truck bearing wounded.
Lifflander does not think that the
contras will prevail. "You don't win a
military victory by killing eight women,
she says, adding that she thinks that
Nicaraguans will fight tp keep their
revolution.
"Helen Salgado was probably better
off during the Somoza years. It was
easier for her to get hair dye and
eyebrow makeup and spare parts for
her car. But she remembers the
Somozistas and the raping and looting
that went on in her neighborhood, and
she doesn't want to go back," she says.
Lifflander is one of 25,000 Americans
who have spent time in Nicaragua to
give a hand to the hard-pressed
Sandinistas. But she'll urge students to
stay here and try to change the Reagan
policy.
"There is so much misinformation,"
she says, "it has to be stopped here. I
don't understand why Congress buys all
this emotional nonsense from the
president-I'm an internist, not a
psychiatrist."
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/20: CIA-RDP90-00965R000504100023-0