that the CPDH continues to play an important role in the protection of human rights, and that a good number of people who consider that their human rights have been ignored by the Government are constantly coming to it." The IACHR continued to meet with representatives of the Permanent Commission and report their assessments in later years. The Heritage Foundation stated that: "While elements of the Somoza National Guard tortured political opponents, they did not employ psychological torture." The International Commission of Jurists stated that under the Somoza regime cruel physical torture was regularly used in the interrogation of political prisoners. Throughout the 1980s the Sandinista government was regarded as "Partly Free" by Freedom House. United States government allegations of support for foreign rebels The United States State Department accused the Sandinistas of many cases of illegal foreign intervention. The first allegation was supporting the FMLN rebels in El Salvador with safe haven, training, command-and-control headquarters, advice, weapons, ammunition, and other vital supplies. Captured documents, testimonials of former rebels and Sandinistas, aerial photographs, the tracing of captured weapons back to Nicaragua, and captured vehicles from Nicaragua smuggling weapons were cited as evidence. El Salvador was in a civil war in the period in question and the US was heavily supporting the Salvadoran government against the FMLN guerrillas. There were also accusations of subversive activities in Honduras, Costa Rica, and Colombia, and in the case of Honduras and Costa Rica outright military operations by Nicaraguan troops. In 2015, Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell claimed during an interview with CNN that John Kerry, then Secretary of State, had visited Nicaragua and met Daniel Ortega and denounced the Reagan Administration's support for the Contras as supporting terrorism during Kerry's tenure as a United States senator. During the Nicaraguan Revolution in the 1980s, American Democratic politician and then mayor Bernie Sanders expressed support for the Sandinistas and condemned US support for the Contras, he wrote letters to the group denouncing the US media portrayal of the conflict, and also visited Nicaragua during the war where he attended a Sandinista rally where anti-American chants were reportedly being done. Symbols The flag of the FSLN consists of an upper half in red, a lower half in black, and the letters F S L N in white. It is a modified version of the flag Sandino used in the 1930s, during the war against the U.S. occupation of