1983 - Color, President Reagan: Cabinet Meeting Announcing Grenada Invasion. 25Oct83

NOTE: FOR ORDERING See: www.footagefarm.co.uk or contact us at: Info@Footagefarm.co.uk 1983 - Color, President Reagan: Cabinet Meeting Announcing Grenada Invasion. 25Oct83 President Reagan: “...planning going on, I want to tell you, if you ever have a chance to go on a golfing weekend do it! But its so great when at 2:30 in the morning they tap you on the shoulder & say Get Up & come out in the other room...Seriously you all know the situation that has been going on in Grenada. October 12 or 13th to keep things straight, Bishop...put in house arrest; then a crowd estimated at 10,000 or 1/10th of the whole country’s population, arrived at that house & supported him & that crowd was fired upon by people who had arrested Bishop, really leftist thugs, and they took him & his cabinet prisoners & they later executed him & several of his cabinet members, they fired into the crowd, they killed people including children. There is the only semblance of law on the island is a 24 hr curfew w/ orders to shoot on sight. Now we have about 1000 Americans there, several hundred of them are in the St. George Medical School, medical students. They have been confined...because of this curfew. Grenada, and five other countries in the Eastern Caribbean are members of a thing called the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States. And they met several days ago, maybe they’ve been meeting longer than that, with the exception of Grenada because it has no government to speak of. These nations then appealed, all of them are former colonies of Great Britain, they then appealed to Jamaica & Barbados to join them - w/ whatever military forces they can put together - to restore order & protect their own people on the island of Grenada. 17:02:34 “Before this ever happened, before we ever knew that anyone else was interested in this, we had a rotation force of Marines on its way on a flotilla of ships to Beirut; we had diverted / turned that task force, that flotilla to go into the area & simply stand by someplace in immediate range in case we had to make an immediate evacuation of our Americans. But on October 23rd we got a request from the OECD, the request it was an urgent plea to join them because these countries had been so peaceful, two of them don’t have any military at all & the others just have a few. But they had joined together as I say, & asked these other two, and then this group OECD, plus Jamaica & Barbados, made this urgent plea to the United States to join them in a joint effort to restore order to Grenada. 17:03:43 “You may find this hard to believe w/ all these early morning meetings & everything else we had managed to keep one thing in the administration from leaking. And at 05:15 this morning the joint force landed at two spots on Grenada. The paratroopers in the south, the Marines & other forces in the north secured both airports. They are 8 miles apart....the one w/ the Cuban buildings further north. Both airports are under our control, we have secured the school for the safety of people. There is now fire & combat going on; there have been casualties evacuated to USS Guam. We are going to see if we’ve got any updates on reports in a minute, but it was our feeling in making this decision, and believe me it wasn’t easy & certainly in the face of what had happened in Lebanon to order a thing of this kind, but first of all was our consideration for our own people & second was that once this urgent plea had come to us none of us believed that the US could say no to that w/o, in the eyes of the world, revealing that when the chips were down we backed away. And I don’t know what credibility we’d have in the Middle East or anyplace else if we had done that...we hope we’ll be shortly out of there... On the way to the operation a short time ago I appeared before the press & the Chairman of the OECD, Charles is also the Prime Minister...she is here & she appeared w/ me before the press...this was done legally in connection w/ the Treaty....of mutual assistance...they are all the same people... I better turn it over to... Invasion Justification; Military Diplomacy; Secrecy; Government Secrets; NOTE: Sold at per reel rate. NOTE: FOR ORDERING See: www.footagefarm.co.uk or contact us at: Info@Footagefarm.co.uk