HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- Subject: [Cuba SI] Saul Landau -US Double Standards on
Terrorists Subject: Do Unto Others Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 10:20:15 -0500 US DOUBLE STANDARDS ON TERRORISTS By Saul Landau In light of the US anti-terrorist campaign and the recent sentencing of [5?] spies in south Florida whom the Cuban government sent to stop terrorism, we need clarity: about words, facts and motives. It appears as if some US officials, pious Christians mostly, have memorized only the first three words of their religion's moral dictum: "Do Unto Others." Since September 11, self-righteous discourse has reverberated about the evil done to us. Yes, in a few hours, we lost several thousand people, jobs, and perhaps our national innocence. But what the Al-Qaeda terrorists did to New York and Washington, our agents have done to other peoples and places; or we have licensed others to do our terrorism. Indeed, some of the terrorism was planned and even carried out in the United States. Post 1959 US-Cuban relations offer a most dramatic illustration of this point. Just as the Al-Qaeda fanatics expressed their hatred for our system -- although it's still not clear what the United States had done to them -- by destroying the twin towers and a piece of the Pentagon, so too did the CIA aid and abet anti-Castro fanatics to bomb, commit arson and assassinations in Cuba and later, on US soil as well. Yes, Fidel Castro had nationalized US companies, engaged with the Soviet enemy and tried to export revolution. Although as children we memorize the first lines of the Declaration of Independence, the world's best argument for revolution, we have long since dropped all support for its contents. Indeed, beginning in 1959, the US counter-revolutionary campaign against Castro's Cuba, took terrorist forms. Given our current state of alert over airplane security, it would do well to recall, that the US government encouraged Castro-hating pilots to use US territory to fly into Cuba to drop leaflets and more dangerous objects. Imagine the US response if anti-Americans based in Cuba should try to fly their planes over south Florida to drop leaflets! From 1959-1963, as declassified documents reveal, US agencies launched or gave green lights for thousands of sabotage operations directed at Cuban property and hundreds of assassinations missions targeting Cuban leaders. Some of this terrorism proceeded under the umbrella of "Operation Mongoose," launched in late 1961; other missions proceeded under a plan called "autonomous operations." As former CIA official Sam Halpern described these "operations," in March 2001, the CIA would deliver explosives, weapons, boats, planes and money to anti-Castro exiles without knowing the exiles' targets. "A violation of tradecraft," complained Halpern, but he did it anyway, under orders from the brothers Kennedy. US-based planes regularly bombed and strafed Cuban targets. (Think, on a smaller scale of course, of the Bin Laden tape where he says: "Gee, I didn't realize the planes would do that much damage!") In 1990, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's economy nose dived. The cradle-to-grave security on which Cubans had counted disappeared. By 1991, lacking jobs and sufficient food, thousands of Cubans propelled themselves toward Florida on inner tubes. In response to this wave of rafters, some of whom died at sea, Brothers to the Rescue emerged, ostensibly as volunteer pilots to spot rafters in the dangerous waters separating Cuba and the Florida Keys and radio their position to nearby ships. However, by 1995, after Washington and Havana signed a Migration Accord, the wave of rafters subsided. The Brothers changed their mission from alleged humanitarian rescue of rafters to outright provocation. In the Spring of 1995, Jose Basulto, leader of Brothers to the Rescue, filed a false flight plan, claiming a mission to the Bahamas and, instead flew his plane from Florida to Cuba and dropped anti-Castro leaflets over Cuban territory. On July 13, 1995, he returned to drop religious medals on populated areas, objects that could have hit people on the ground. Imagine how the US Air Force would have reacted to such shenanigans! These flights coincided with a parallel campaign by militant anti-Castro exiles to cripple Cuba's tourist economy, her largest foreign exchange earner. Luis Posada Carriles told a New York Times reporter that executives of the prestigious Cuban American National Foundation had financed a scheme to plant bombs at tourist sites. The FBI showed little enthusiasm, however, in responding to Cuba's request to investigate the Florida-based exiles' role in the tourist bombings; nor did US authorities expend much energy looking into other terrorist actions emanating from south Florida. Clinton national security bureaucrats did plead with the Brothers to stop their over- flights and warned them that they could be shot down. In January 1996, one National Security Council official even wrote a letter on White House stationary to the FAA Commissioner requesting that he suspend the Brothers' pilots licenses for having filed false flight plans. But the FAA, like the FBI, did nothing. And the White House did not follow up. After getting little satisfaction from its formal demands that the State Department stop the over-flights, Cuba threatened that there would be grave consequences. Castro had already concluded that the US government would not protect Cuba from Florida-based terrorism. So, covertly, Cuba infiltrated [5] spies into south Florida. Posing as Castro-haters, the spies penetrated some of the violent anti-Castro groups for the purpose of thwarting their terrorist activities. The FBI, instead of monitoring the activities of the US-based terrorists, targeted the Cuban spies, or so-called Wasp network, whose mission was to thwart terrorism. Cuba's intelligence chiefs considered Brothers to the Rescue as a serious threat to island security. So, they directed some of the spies who were pilots to infiltrate the Brothers' operations. On February 24, 1996, when a trio of aircraft headed for Cuba with Brothers' boss Jose Basulto flying the lead plane, Cuban intelligence knew of the planned over-flight; not only from the spies but from US government sources as well. On the night before the fatal flights, at a Washington, DC concert, Richard Nuccio, the White House's Cuba point man, had informed two reporters that he knew of a planned over-flight the next day. One of the reporters then called a Cuban official in Washington to get his reaction. So, a US official had indirectly informed the Cuban government of the Brothers' flight plan, a fact that the prosecutors downplayed or ignored when they charged some of the spies with complicity in murder. On February 24, 1996, after receiving warnings from the US government not to fly over Cuban air space and direct orders from Cuban air control not to enter its territory, Basulto and his air partners entered Cuban air space. Cuban MIGs took off and shot down two of the three encroaching planes. (A debate continues as to whether the actual shootdowns occurred over Cuban or international air space). Ironically, Basulto's plane escaped the missile attacks. The shootdown of the planes not only set back US-Cuba relations, but led also to the trial of the five spies. But, seen in light of the September 11 acts, some of the government's witnesses who testified against the five men appear as anti-Castro equivalents of Al-Qaeda terrorists. In 1960-61, the CIA had trained Jose Basulto as a young man in the arts of violence, preparing him and thousands of others to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. In August 1962, a year and a half after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Basulto went on a CIA-authorized raid into Cuba during which he shot at a hotel, fired into a theater, and blasted a Havana residential section. Cubans died in this attack. At the trial of the spies, Basulto testified that he had changed the violent approach of his youth to that of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, except, of course, in the case of Cuba where, he maintained, violence was still necessary. Why could the jury that condemned the spies not imagine those days before and during the Bay of Pigs, when the CIA concocted an air force that bombed and strafed Cuban targets? Why could they not envision the thousands of occasions when Cuban victims died, when family members mourned, when small children lost a parent? Indeed, when the US government has brought cases to court for terrorist acts committed by anti-Castro Cubans, often with eyewitnesses testifying to the violence, juries have almost always acquitted the defendants. (Perhaps, given that the south-Florida based terrorists had acted with impunity over decades and those who have spoken against them have received threats or worse, the jury members might have felt intimidated?) In pre September 11 times, Washington had consistently scoffed at Cuba's grievances. In the immediate post Bay of Pigs era, Cuba complained of more than 75 overflights of its territory by US based planes. "Do unto others," Washington officials might have said, "what others cannot do unto you." But what would the US Air Force have done -- or what would they do now -- if unauthorized planes entered our air space? Ironically, in the case of the Brothers, the Cuban government showed patience, giving repeated warnings to the State Department through 1995 and into 1996. This soft approach by Cuba was unusual in light of the terrorist air tragedy that anti-Castro exiles had inflicted on a Cuban commercial airliner. In October 1976, two terrorists with strong links to US agencies blew up a Cubana Airlines passenger jet carrying 73 people. Orlando Bosch, who co-authored that mission, now lives comfortably in Miami, where he continues to plot terrorism against Cuba. In 1991, George Bush I give him special dispensation to live here despite his long history of terrorist acts and despite objections from the FBI. Some influential Cuban-American Republicans had pleaded Bosch's case, calling this man who had fired bazookas at commercial targets and blown up an airplane, a "patriot." Luis Posada Carriles, Bosch's 's co-author on the airline caper, worked for the US government in the 1980s after his south Cuban-American patrons bribed Venezuelan authorities to allow him to break out of prison. He immediately went to work for Oliver North to help supply the Nicaraguan Contras. Posada today sits in a Panamanian jail cell with three other violent Castro-phobes on charges of conspiring to assassinate the Cuban leader when he visited Panama for a head of states meeting some two years ago. The fact that President George W. Bush has declared his intention to rid the world of terrorists has not had an impact on the US government's view of Bosch and Posada, who have world-class terrorist ratings. The apparent double standard rhetoric does not appear to bother the President when he warns other nations about the dire consequences of harboring terrorists. He continues to protect the violent Florida-based anti-Castroites. Indeed, Bush the President and Jeb Bush the Florida governor have implicitly exempted anti-Castro terrorists from the general rules regarding terrorism. Indeed, even some anti-Castro Cubans who have spoken openly and proudly of their violent strategies, use Florida as both a residence and plotting headquarters. In case anyone doubts Orlando Bosch's intentions, listen to his own words. In 1979 he proudly proclaimed that: "You have to fight violence with violence. At times you cannot avoid hurting innocent people." He has never renounced that tactic. In a Dec 12, 2001 Miami New Times article Bosch told reporter Kirk Nielson "When they attack this guy, some innocents will be killed," he predicted, referring to the military assaults the United States would launch two days later in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. "It's like Churchill said: "War is a competition of cruelty.'" According to Nielson, Bosch admitted in early December of shipping explosives to Cuba. Fidel Castro in a recent speech raised the apparent contradiction in US anti-terrorist policy. "We have the right to ask," Castro declared, "what will be done about Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, the perpetrators of that monstrous terrorist act [the 1976 airliner sabotage]Öand about those who planned and financed the bombs that were placed in the hotels in [Havana], and the assassination attempts against Cuban leaders, which haven't stopped for a minute in more than 40 years." The anti-Castro terrorists have not limited their damage to Cuban targets. They have struck repeatedly in the United States, sometimes killing US citizens and others in what has become a love of violence. In 1970, according to the FBI, members of the Cuban Nationalist Movement (CNM) bombed a movie theater in New York, showing my documentary film, "Fidel." Several weeks later, the same group burned down a theater in Los Angeles where the film was to have shown. In 1974, CNM activists bombed the Center for Cuban Studies in New York. Sandra Levinson, its director, narrowly escaped death. In one of the most brazen acts of terrorism, a group of CNM activists worked with Chilean intelligence officials under General Augusto Pinochet in September 1976 to car-bomb Orlando Letelier as he drove to work in Washington, DC. Ronni Moffitt, a young American woman, also died in the blast. The Cuban American National Foundation and other Miami-based organizations raised money for the killers' legal defense. Indeed, CANF appointed Guillermo Novo, convicted of lying about his knowledge of the Letelier-Moffitt plot, to one of its Boards. Cuban Americans who promoted dialogue instead of war against revolutionary Cuba also suffered from the terrorism. Eulalio Negrin, who called for reconciliation in the late 1970s was assassinated in New Jersey. Carlos Muniz, a travel agent who arranged charter flights to Cuba, was gunned down in Puerto Rico. In Miami, Emilio Milian, a popular radio commentator had his legs blown off in an assassination attempt. Milian took exception to the terrorist approach to dealing with Castro. How peculiar that as President Bush warns other nations of the consequences of their harboring terrorists, he and his brother host a long list of men who have done and swear they will continue to do terrorism against Cuba. By contrast, the convicted spies did no terrorist acts. Rather, as the trial evidence shows, they thwarted terrorism. At some point, a truly religious man -- we need Martin Luther King right now -- will instruct US rulers in the words that follow "Do unto others." Until then, we will fight a most contradictory war against terrorism. We deny or ignore our own terrorist actions and our acceptance of anti-Castro terrorists on our soil, while preaching a non-negotiable line on terrorism to everyone else. Cuba has been the recipient of US terrorism for more than four decades. During certain presidencies US-based terrorism against Cuba abated, but never entirely ceased. Even during the Clinton years, the FBI's monitoring of violent anti-Castro exiles received low priority and government prosecutors failed to make convincing cases against Cuban-Americans charged with conspiring to assassinate Fidel Castro, even though the group was caught off the Puerto Rico coast on a boat with special sniper rifles and one of the assassins admitted the nature of his mission to a US official. And, even when the FBI objected to freeing from detention Jose Dionisio Suarez and Virgilio Paz, who pled guilty to conspiring to assassinate Letelier and Moffitt in that 1976 Washington DC car bombing, the Bush Administration overrode their objections to please some high anti-Castro donors in south Florida. The "Do unto others" approach worked until September 11, when Americans realized the true horrors of terrorism. The US bombed other countries, assassinated some of its enemies abroad and overthrew some "disobedient" foreign governments. Cuba's revolutionary government survived US terrorism, but its people paid a price. Yet, neither US officials nor the mass media have conveyed a sense of what Cuban authorities might have felt when a genuine terrorist threat approached their air space. Instead, Washington still insists that shooting down Basulto's air provocateurs was simply murder. After September 11, Americans may better understand what Cubans felt when unauthorized planes entered their air space. But that understanding did not translate to the government prosecutor or judge in the case of the five spies. Cuba had sent those men to Florida to defend itself against US based terrorists because US authorities were not fulfilling their police function. US officials have refused to include this logic in their terrorism context. Fresh from victory over the Taliban, the Bush Administration basks in a kind of asymmetrical imperial triumphalism. So, our government continues to harbor some terrorists, as if this policy in no way contradicted the idea that terrorism is the world's worst sin. Periodically, a high US official warns us of another imminent terrorist attack, but none of them mention the terrorists within. A strange group of conservatives in the White House who ignore Edmund Burke, the grandfather of modern conservatism. "You are terrifying yourself with ghosts and apparitions," warned Burke, "whilst your house is the haunt of robbers." **** Saul Landau is Director of Digital Media and International Outreach for the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences at the California State Polytechnic University Pomona. His new film is MAQUILA: A TAKE OF TWO MEXICOS copyright © 2001 - Radio Progreso, Inc. ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://TOPICA.COM/u/?a84x2u.a9WB2D Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================ |
