Peter Mclaren

Counterinsurgency in Chiapas
By John Gibler
In These Times

Wednesday 23 January 2008

Around 3 p.m. on Jan. 2, nine shots were fired into the air. The perpetrators withdrew, leaving behind a button-down shirt with the cuffs tied to two lone trees in the cornfield. Machetes had hacked the shirt and cut a thick cross into one of the tree trunks at chest height. A bullet case was embedded at the center of the cross.

“This is an example of what they want to do to us,” says José Morales, a 22-year-old Tzeltal Indian who used a pseudonym to protect his identity. “Grab us and hang us from the trees.” Morales is a member of the Zapatista community of Bolon Ajaw, one of dozens of Zapatista communities across the southern state of Chiapas facing almost daily attacks, land invasions and death threats.

After hearing the gunshots, Pedro Alvarez, another member of the community who also preferred to use a pseudonym, had run down the mile-long path from the cornfield where he was cutting wood, to Bolon Ajaw’s center, a cluster of houses made of old boards, corrugated tin roofs, and dirt floors and none with electricity or running water. Alvarez then led the authorities and five observers back to the cornfield where they found the hanging shirt and the cross freshly cut into the tree.

Since early 2007, aggressions against scores of communities, affecting 800 families and threatening more than 12,000 hectares of Zapatista-controlled territory, have taken place, reports the Center for Political Analysis and Social and Economic Investigation (CAPISE), which is based in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas.

“This is clearly a systematic counterinsurgency strategy,” says Ernesto Ledesma, director of CAPISE. “We haven’t seen an offensive this intense for at least 10 years.”

During the last half of 2007, Ledesma and a handful of CAPISE staff and volunteers have released an average of three reports a month documenting the new “government onslaught” against the Zapatista indigenous communities.

“The Mexican state has re-activated paramilitary groups,” says Ledesma. “They are doing what the Spaniards did during the conquest and what the ranchers and local mafias did after the Mexican Revolution: They are dispossessing once again the indigenous peoples from their lands, from their territory.”

In 1994, when the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) rose up in arms in Chiapas, indigenous insurgents forced the ranchers from the land and became collective owners of the very fields they worked as slaves for hundreds of years. Since then, the EZLN has resettled thousands of landless people on former haciendas, a process the Zapatistas call “recuperating the land.”

In 1996, the Mexican government signed the San Andres Accords with the EZLN, recognizing indigenous regional autonomy. But the government then balked after signing and never implemented the accords.

On Dec. 22, 1997, 45 Tzotzil indigenous people in Acteal, 2 hours north of San Cristobal, were massacred by the paramilitary group, Peace and Justice (Paz y Justicia), and the impunity that followed led the EZLN to suspend all dialogue with the government.

Then, five years later, the government passed a gutted version of the accords that rejected indigenous regional autonomy and instead further subjected Mexico’s estimated 10 million indigenous citizens to federal authority by defining them as “entities of public interest,” in the text of the law.

As a result, the EZLN cut off communication with the government and set about implementing the accords on its own, creating autonomous municipalities and regional governance structures based on rotating councils of local villagers elected in open assemblies. Road signs throughout Chiapas announce to travelers: “You are now entering autonomous, rebel territory.”

Throughout his six-year term (2000-2006), former Mexican President Vicente Fox built on the previous administrations’ attempts to divide Zapatista communities by using handouts and governmental assistance programs. Fox, like his predecessors, also tried to create and train anti-Zapatista paramilitary groups to masquerade as rural indigenous rights organizations, such as the Organization for the Defense of Indigenous and Peasant Peoples (OPDDIC).

Now, with many communities divided between pro- and anti-Zapatista, organizations like OPDDIC are using government aid programs to get land grants to Zapatista territories. Once the government provides the grants, OPDDIC would have a “legal” pretext to dispossess the Zapatista families from their lands.

The Zapatistas, in turn, refuse to enter into government aid programs, and they refuse to leave the land.

“We spilled our blood for the land, not for a government handout,” says one member of the Zapatista autonomous municipality of San Manuel, which is also under threat.

Meanwhile, the Mexican army has built 56 military bases in Zapatista regions, surrounding communities that support the EZLN, and often providing aid to OPDDIC and other anti-Zapatista organizations.

Morales of Bolon Ajaw says that the aggressions began in 2006 when OPDDIC began to recruit among government sympathizers in the area.

“They are not doing this alone,” he says, “they come on behalf of the government. Whenever there is a problem, the helicopters and police come right away, as if they already knew what was going to happen.”

Over the past four months, according to CAPISE reports and local press accounts, in Bolon Ajaw alone, the OPDDIC has ambushed Zapatista villagers with guns and machetes, badly beating four people.

In response to attacks in late November, CAPISE organized observation brigades to camp out in Bolon Ajaw and other communities to document aggression and threats against the Zapatistas.

“This is a new onslaught of the Mexican state, with all levels of government participating,” says CAPISE’s Ledesma. “They are going for the land. They are going for territory and all the natural resources therein. But now there is an entire movement and indigenous peoples opposed to their project and, moreover, developing another, alternative project, autonomous and their own.”

——-

Counterinsurgency in Chiapas
By John Gibler
In These Times

Wednesday 23 January 2008

Around 3 p.m. on Jan. 2, nine shots were fired into the air. The perpetrators withdrew, leaving behind a button-down shirt with the cuffs tied to two lone trees in the cornfield. Machetes had hacked the shirt and cut a thick cross into one of the tree trunks at chest height. A bullet case was embedded at the center of the cross.

“This is an example of what they want to do to us,” says José Morales, a 22-year-old Tzeltal Indian who used a pseudonym to protect his identity. “Grab us and hang us from the trees.” Morales is a member of the Zapatista community of Bolon Ajaw, one of dozens of Zapatista communities across the southern state of Chiapas facing almost daily attacks, land invasions and death threats.

After hearing the gunshots, Pedro Alvarez, another member of the community who also preferred to use a pseudonym, had run down the mile-long path from the cornfield where he was cutting wood, to Bolon Ajaw’s center, a cluster of houses made of old boards, corrugated tin roofs, and dirt floors and none with electricity or running water. Alvarez then led the authorities and five observers back to the cornfield where they found the hanging shirt and the cross freshly cut into the tree.

Since early 2007, aggressions against scores of communities, affecting 800 families and threatening more than 12,000 hectares of Zapatista-controlled territory, have taken place, reports the Center for Political Analysis and Social and Economic Investigation (CAPISE), which is based in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas.

“This is clearly a systematic counterinsurgency strategy,” says Ernesto Ledesma, director of CAPISE. “We haven’t seen an offensive this intense for at least 10 years.”

During the last half of 2007, Ledesma and a handful of CAPISE staff and volunteers have released an average of three reports a month documenting the new “government onslaught” against the Zapatista indigenous communities.

“The Mexican state has re-activated paramilitary groups,” says Ledesma. “They are doing what the Spaniards did during the conquest and what the ranchers and local mafias did after the Mexican Revolution: They are dispossessing once again the indigenous peoples from their lands, from their territory.”

In 1994, when the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) rose up in arms in Chiapas, indigenous insurgents forced the ranchers from the land and became collective owners of the very fields they worked as slaves for hundreds of years. Since then, the EZLN has resettled thousands of landless people on former haciendas, a process the Zapatistas call “recuperating the land.”

In 1996, the Mexican government signed the San Andres Accords with the EZLN, recognizing indigenous regional autonomy. But the government then balked after signing and never implemented the accords.

On Dec. 22, 1997, 45 Tzotzil indigenous people in Acteal, 2 hours north of San Cristobal, were massacred by the paramilitary group, Peace and Justice (Paz y Justicia), and the impunity that followed led the EZLN to suspend all dialogue with the government.

Then, five years later, the government passed a gutted version of the accords that rejected indigenous regional autonomy and instead further subjected Mexico’s estimated 10 million indigenous citizens to federal authority by defining them as “entities of public interest,” in the text of the law.

As a result, the EZLN cut off communication with the government and set about implementing the accords on its own, creating autonomous municipalities and regional governance structures based on rotating councils of local villagers elected in open assemblies. Road signs throughout Chiapas announce to travelers: “You are now entering autonomous, rebel territory.”

Throughout his six-year term (2000-2006), former Mexican President Vicente Fox built on the previous administrations’ attempts to divide Zapatista communities by using handouts and governmental assistance programs. Fox, like his predecessors, also tried to create and train anti-Zapatista paramilitary groups to masquerade as rural indigenous rights organizations, such as the Organization for the Defense of Indigenous and Peasant Peoples (OPDDIC).

Now, with many communities divided between pro- and anti-Zapatista, organizations like OPDDIC are using government aid programs to get land grants to Zapatista territories. Once the government provides the grants, OPDDIC would have a “legal” pretext to dispossess the Zapatista families from their lands.

The Zapatistas, in turn, refuse to enter into government aid programs, and they refuse to leave the land.

“We spilled our blood for the land, not for a government handout,” says one member of the Zapatista autonomous municipality of San Manuel, which is also under threat.

Meanwhile, the Mexican army has built 56 military bases in Zapatista regions, surrounding communities that support the EZLN, and often providing aid to OPDDIC and other anti-Zapatista organizations.

Morales of Bolon Ajaw says that the aggressions began in 2006 when OPDDIC began to recruit among government sympathizers in the area.

“They are not doing this alone,” he says, “they come on behalf of the government. Whenever there is a problem, the helicopters and police come right away, as if they already knew what was going to happen.”

Over the past four months, according to CAPISE reports and local press accounts, in Bolon Ajaw alone, the OPDDIC has ambushed Zapatista villagers with guns and machetes, badly beating four people.

In response to attacks in late November, CAPISE organized observation brigades to camp out in Bolon Ajaw and other communities to document aggression and threats against the Zapatistas.

“This is a new onslaught of the Mexican state, with all levels of government participating,” says CAPISE’s Ledesma. “They are going for the land. They are going for territory and all the natural resources therein. But now there is an entire movement and indigenous peoples opposed to their project and, moreover, developing another, alternative project, autonomous and their own.”

——-

Published on Tuesday, January 22, 2008 by The Guardian/UK
Pre-Emptive Nuclear Strike a Key Option, NATO Told
by Ian Traynor
The west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the “imminent” spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, according to a radical manifesto for a new NATO by five of the west’s most senior military officers and strategists.

Calling for root-and-branch reform of NATO and a new pact drawing the US, NATO and the European Union together in a “grand strategy” to tackle the challenges of an increasingly brutal world, the former armed forces chiefs from the US, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands insist that a “first strike” nuclear option remains an “indispensable instrument” since there is “simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world”.

The manifesto has been written following discussions with active commanders and policymakers, many of whom are unable or unwilling to publicly air their views. It has been presented to the Pentagon in Washington and to NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, over the past 10 days. The proposals are likely to be discussed at a NATO summit in Bucharest in April.

“The risk of further [nuclear] proliferation is imminent and, with it, the danger that nuclear war fighting, albeit limited in scope, might become possible,” the authors argued in the 150-page blueprint for urgent reform of western military strategy and structures. “The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction.”

The authors — General John Shalikashvili, the former chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff and NATO’s ex-supreme commander in Europe, General Klaus Naumann, Germany’s former top soldier and ex-chairman of NATO’s military committee, General Henk van den Breemen, a former Dutch chief of staff, Admiral Jacques Lanxade, a former French chief of staff, and Lord Inge, field marshal and ex-chief of the general staff and the defense staff in the UK — paint an alarming picture of the threats and challenges confronting the west in the post-9/11 world and deliver a withering verdict on the ability to cope.

The five commanders argue that the west’s values and way of life are under threat, but the west is struggling to summon the will to defend them. The key threats are:

Political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism.
The “dark side” of globalization, meaning international terrorism, organized crime and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
Climate change and energy security, entailing a contest for resources and potential “environmental” migration on a mass scale.
The weakening of the nation state as well as of organisations such as the UN, NATO and the EU.
To prevail, the generals call for an overhaul of NATO decision-taking methods, a new “directorate” of US, European and NATO leaders to respond rapidly to crises, and an end to EU “obstruction” of and rivalry with NATO. Among the most radical changes demanded are:

A shift from consensus decision-taking in NATO bodies to majority voting, meaning faster action through an end to national vetoes.
The abolition of national caveats in NATO operations of the kind that plague the Afghan campaign.
No role in decision-taking on NATO operations for alliance members who are not taking part in the operations.
The use of force without UN security council authorization when “immediate action is needed to protect large numbers of human beings”.
In the wake of the latest row over military performance in Afghanistan, touched off when the US defense secretary, Robert Gates, said some allies could not conduct counter-insurgency, the five senior figures at the heart of the western military establishment also declare that NATO’s future is on the line in Helmand province.

“NATO’s credibility is at stake in Afghanistan,” said Van den Breemen.

“NATO is at a juncture and runs the risk of failure,” according to the blueprint.

Naumann delivered a blistering attack on his own country’s performance in Afghanistan. “The time has come for Germany to decide if it wants to be a reliable partner.” By insisting on “special rules” for its forces in Afghanistan, the Merkel government in Berlin was contributing to “the dissolution of NATO”.

Ron Asmus, head of the German Marshall Fund thinktank in Brussels and a former senior US state department official, described the manifesto as “a wake-up call”. “This report means that the core of the NATO establishment is saying we’re in trouble, that the west is adrift and not facing up to the challenges.”

Naumann conceded that the plan’s retention of the nuclear first strike option was “controversial” even among the five authors. Inge argued that “to tie our hands on first use or no first use removes a huge plank of deterrence”.

Reserving the right to initiate nuclear attack was a central element of the west’s cold war strategy in defeating the Soviet Union. Critics argue that what was a productive instrument to face down a nuclear superpower is no longer appropriate.

Robert Cooper, an influential shaper of European foreign and security policy in Brussels, said he was “puzzled”.

“Maybe we are going to use nuclear weapons before anyone else, but I’d be wary of saying it out loud.”

Another senior EU official said NATO needed to “rethink its nuclear posture because the nuclear non-proliferation regime is under enormous pressure”.

Naumann suggested the threat of nuclear attack was a counsel of desperation. “Proliferation is spreading and we have not too many options to stop it. We don’t know how to deal with this.”

NATO needed to show “there is a big stick that we might have to use if there is no other option”, he said.

The Authors:

John Shalikashvili

The US’s top soldier under Bill Clinton and former NATO commander in Europe, Shalikashvili was born in Warsaw of Georgian parents and emigrated to the US at the height of Stalinism in 1952. He became the first immigrant to the US to rise to become a four-star general. He commanded Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq at the end of the first Gulf war, then became Saceur, NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe, before Clinton appointed him chairman of the joint chiefs in 1993, a position he held until his retirement in 1997.

Klaus Naumann

Viewed as one of Germany’s and NATO’s top military strategists in the 90s, Naumann served as his country’s armed forces commander from 1991 to 1996 when he became chairman of NATO’s military committee. On his watch, Germany overcame its post-WWII taboo about combat operations, with the Luftwaffe taking to the skies for the first time since 1945 in the Nato air campaign against Serbia.

Lord Inge

Field Marshal Peter Inge is one of Britain’s top officers, serving as chief of the general staff in 1992-94, then chief of the defense staff in 1994-97. He also served on the Butler inquiry into Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and British intelligence.

Henk van den Breemen

An accomplished organist who has played at Westminster Abbey, Van den Breemen is the former Dutch chief of staff.

Jacques Lanxade

A French admiral and former navy chief who was also chief of the French defense staff.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

Canada puts US on ‘torture list’

The manual refers to Guantanamo Bay where a Canadian is being held
The United States has been listed as a country where prisoners are at risk of torture in a training document produced by the Canadian foreign ministry.
It also classifies some US interrogation techniques as torture.

The manual - part of a training course on torture awareness for diplomats - also includes Israel, China, Iran and Afghanistan on its watch list.

A government spokesman said the manual did not reflect the views of Canada, which is an ally of the US and Israel.

“The training manual is not a policy document and does not reflect the views or policies of this government,” said a spokesman for Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier.

The manual lists US interrogation techniques such as forced nudity, isolation, sleep deprivation and the blindfolding of prisoners under “definition of torture”.

It also refers to the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where a Canadian man is being held. Critics say it ridicules Ottawa’s claims that Omar Khadr is not being mistreated.

There was no immediate response from either the US or Israel.

Exonerated

The document was provided to Amnesty International as part of a court case it is bringing against the Canadian government over the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan.

Canada has come under growing criticism following allegations that detainees were tortured in Afghanistan after its soldiers transferred suspects to Afghan security forces.

Amnesty is calling for stopping all transfers of prisoners to the Afghan authorities.

The torture awareness course was introduced after Ottawa was strongly criticised for its handling of the case of a Canadian who was deported from the US to Syria in 2002.

Syrian-born Maher Arar - who was accused of being an al-Qaeda member - says he was tortured during his 10 months in a Damascus jail - a claim strongly denied by Syria.

A Canadian government inquiry exonerated Mr Arar of any links with terrorist groups. It also showed that Canadian diplomats had not had any formal training on how to detect whether detainees had been abused.

Why US troops are occupying Haiti

By Richard Dufour and Keith Jones
5 April 2004

Use this version to print | Send this link by email | Email the author

The World Socialist Web Site has received several letters from readers asking why the Bush administration has deployed US troops to occupy Haiti. Typical were the following two comments:

“I don’t dispute your reporters’ overall fact finding and analysis on Haiti,” wrote GW. “But what I can’t fathom, digest or whatever, is why France, the US, etc. would go to such lengths on this hapless, resourceless country, when the imperialists have so much bigger fish to fry at this moment?”

Wrote a second reader: “In Iraq it is obviously the oil, not love of humanity, which guides US policy. But what does Haiti have?”

That oil was a key motivation for last year’s invasion of Iraq is a basic truth that the US political establishment and corporate media have sought to hide with a litany of lies about weapons of mass destruction and Sadam Hussein’s ties to al-Qaeda. From its first days in office, the Bush administration began searching for a suitable pretext for military action aimed at seizing control of the world’s second largest oil reserves.

Haiti, by contrast, did not figure high on the Bush administration’s list of foreign policy concerns, let alone targets for military action, in January 2001 or even January 2004. The prevailing attitude of US business and political leaders toward Haiti has been one of callous indifference as exemplified in Secretary of State Colin Powell’s talk of Washington’s “Haiti fatigue.”

The small Caribbean island-republic has been so decimated by decades of imperialist oppression—much of the population is illiterate and malnourished and what little infrastructure exists is crumbling—that despite far and away the lowest wages in the Western hemisphere, Haiti has failed to attract significant foreign investment over the past two decades and most of the off-shore assembly operations that were established in the early and middle 1980s have closed down or moved elsewhere.

The basic truth that US foreign policy expresses the predatory interests and ambitions of Wall Street should not be taken to mean, however, that the drive to secure natural resources and markets are its only determinant. Even in the case of the invasion of oil-rich Iraq, other factors were at play. These included, US imperialism’s attempt to bolster its position vis a vis its European and East Asian rivals by securing a stranglehold over the world’s oil resources and the Bush administration’s attempt to use the war as a means to divert the attention of the American people from mounting social and economic problems at home.

As we shall show below, the current US military occupation of Haiti is aimed at upholding the US’s role as the principal economic, military and geo-political power in the Caribbean region; ensuring that the turmoil in Haiti does not cut across the Bush administration’s agenda; and establishing a government in Port-au-Prince even more pliant to Washington and Wall Street.

The greater Caribbean region, with its geographical proximity to the United States and major assets like the Panama Canal and Venezuelan oil, has long been pivotal to US foreign policy—from the turn of the last century when it became the launching pad for America’s ascent as an imperialist power, to the Cold War conflict with the Stalinist Soviet bureaucracy over Cuba in the 1960s, and the bloody counter-insurgency interventions in Central America in the 1980s.

Here is not the place to retrace the bloodstained history of US-Haitian relations. But it is impossible to understand the reasons for the current US occupation or why the country has been reduced to such wretched poverty without recognizing that Haiti has been in US imperialism’s grip since at least 1915, when Marines invaded the island-country. That occupation, which lasted till 1934, had three principal objectives: to thwart German designs on Haiti; to bolster the US’s hold on the Panama Canal; and to reorganize Haiti’s state and political economy so US companies could benefit from its agricultural resources and cheap labor. (For much of the eighteenth century, Haiti was arguably the world’s most profitable colony).

US troops would return in the 1990s, but throughout the intervening six decades Haiti remained in the US’s shadow. For more than a quarter-century Washington sustained the bloody Duvalier dictatorship. Indeed, the Duvaliers and the Somoza family dictatorship in Nicaragua were viewed by Washington as pillars of its Cold War strategy in the Caribbean region.

Containing the fallout from the collapse of the US-sponsored Duvalier dictatorship
Since 1986, the pivot of US foreign policy toward Haiti has been to try to contain the fallout from the collapse of the Duvalier dictatorship and above all prevent any challenge to the country’s socio-economic order—the markets and investments of US firms, but also the property of their allies and clients, the Haitian bourgeoisie.

Initially, Washington hoped to accomplish a surgical removal of Duvalier, creating a new pro-US regime that would both enjoy greater popular legitimacy and support the dismantling of the state-owned companies, state-licensed export and import monopolies, and tariff barriers the Duvaliers had used to promote a thin layer of “crony capitalists.”

But Washington’s attempt to find a new stable political basis for maintaining the prevalent conditions of abject poverty foundered in the face of the popular ferment unleashed in the toppling of the Duvalier regime. The first four post-Duvalier years saw a series of military strongmen and civilian figureheads come and go as the working class and peasantry resisted state repression and kept pushing for a better life.

In 1990 Washington insisted that Haiti’s next government be chosen through elections. US policy-makers felt confident that they could manipulate the process to the benefit of their preferred candidate, former World Bank official Marc Bazin, and thereby give Haiti’s new-made-in-the US government greater legitimacy in the eyes of the Haitian masses and world opinion. But the more Washington touted Bazin, the more Haiti’s poor, who had not forgotten the thirty years of American support for the hated Duvaliers, grew suspicious of him.

It is within this context that Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former priest who had emerged in the mid-1980s as a leading figure of the struggle against the crumbling Duvalier regime and the following military juntas, abruptly reversed his previous calls for a boycott of the “US-made elections.” He ran as the presidential candidate of a broad coalition of business leaders and grassroots organizations known as Lavalas (flood in creole), coupling promises of wide-ranging social reforms with appeals to the private business sector and calls for a “marriage” between the people and the army. Aristide’s landslide victory took Washington completely by surprise.

Undoing the results of the 1990 elections
The next fourteen years of American policy toward Haiti can be summarized as an unrelenting attempt by Republican and Democratic administrations to undo—not without bitter divisions within the US ruling elite over the appropriate means—the results of the 1990 elections, the first time a Haitian president had been chosen not by Washington or the country’s venal bourgeois elite but by Haiti’s poor majority.

The first attempt came in September 1991, a mere eight months after Aristide took office, in the form of a bloody coup led by General Raoul Cédras which enjoyed de facto support from the Bush senior administration. A wave of terror was then unleashed by the military and CIA-backed paramilitary death squads in the poor neighborhoods of the capital where support for Aristide remained strong. Thousands of Haitians tried a desperate escape on board overcrowded boats sailing for Florida, only to be denied refuge on US soil by American officials. Rather they were incarcerated en masse in makeshift refugee camps at the US base of Guantanamo, Cuba.

In the initial period after the 1992 US elections, the new Democratic administration took no serious steps against Haiti’s military junta and, notwithstanding Clinton’s previous criticisms of the inhumane treatment of Haitians fleeing the Cédras dictatorship, even maintained the refugee policy of Bush Sr. A 1993 attempt to bring in unarmed United Nations “peace keepers” on board a US Navy ship was prevented by rock-throwing mobs of Cédras supporters in the harbor of Port-au-Prince. This, coupled with the Somalia fiasco the same year, convinced the Clinton administration that the continuation of the Cédras regime was damaging the international prestige of the United States and subjecting the Clinton administration to ridicule from its domestic opponents.

Even then, it took another full year for the Clinton administration to push Cédras out. The intervening time was used to extract further pledges of loyalty from Aristide, who had responded to the 1991 coup by proclaiming that the only force to which the Haitian masses could turn in opposing Cédras and his supporters in Haiti’s traditional political and economic elite was Washington.

In exchange for the Clinton administration’s restoring him to power, Aristide firstly agreed there should be no extension of his five-year presidential mandate even though he had spent three years of it in exile; secondly promised to incorporate leading members of the business elite and the old Duvalier political machine into his government and thirdly gave a written pledge he would carry out IMF-mandated privatizations of state companies and cuts in social spending.

In other words, Aristide was flown back in September 1994 in the baggage of a 20,000-strong US occupation force as little more than a political reincarnation of Marc Bazin, the “US candidate” he had defeated in the 1990 elections.

Nevertheless, Aristide’s return was bitterly opposed by the Republican Party. Its far right elements such as Senator Jesse Helms, for many years the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, denounced Aristide as a mentally deranged communist. This expressed most crudely the sentiments of those elements of the US ruling elite who would capture the White House in the 2000 elections. For them any infringement on the right to pile up obscene levels of private wealth by plundering the planet is tantamount to high treason. If such elements couldn’t be reconciled to an administration headed by such a proven defender of US imperialism as Bill Clinton, they certainly weren’t about to tolerate US support for a de-frocked priest who had gained a mass following among Haiti’s poor by denouncing US imperialism.

Aristide managed to survive longer than the Clinton administration probably planned for. He maneuvered to have his protégé René Préval chosen as his party’s presidential candidate in the 1995 election campaign. Préval won, then went on to impose a sweeping program of privatizations, mass layoffs in the public sector and the abolition of state subsidies on food and transportation.

While Haiti’s constitution bars two consecutive presidential terms, Aristide was eligible to run again in December 2000, which he did successfully, a reflection not so much of continuing popular enthusiasm for his Lavalas party as the deep popular hostility to the traditional ruling elite.

This elite, for its part, was incensed at its continued political marginalization. Because of Haiti’s poverty and backwardness, control of the state apparatus has long been the principal source of enrichment and thus the focus of the most intense power-struggles. But the vehemence of the traditional elite’s opposition to Aristide was also rooted in his previous association with a popular challenge to their privileges—the call for a redistribution of wealth in favor of the country’s poor.

The Republican Party establishment likewise remained bitterly hostile to Aristide. It considered his restoration to be one of Clinton’s “crimes” and held Haiti up as the number one exhibit in its campaign against the so-called folly of US-led “nation-building.” Aristide’s promotion of warm bilateral relations with Cuba and subsequently the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez, also incensed the Republican right, as well as Florida’s anti-Castro Cuban exile community, which has come to exert such a disproportionate influence in the formulation of US government policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean basin.

The Clinton administration responded to Lavalas’ sweep of the May 2000 elections by once again trying to force Aristide to include representatives of the traditional elite in the government, so as to make it even more subservient to Washington. Some relatively minor violations of democratic procedure were declared gross electoral fraud and steps taken to block hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and aid to Haiti.

Bolstered by this move and by Bush’s theft of the 2000 elections, Haiti’s right-wing opposition forces—with political and financial backing from the International Republican Institute—tried to take the offensive. Soon after Bush came to power they initiated a campaign to unseat Haiti’s newly elected president, going so far as to designate their own “president” of Haiti, as part of a scheme to win international recognition for a parallel government.

But to their dismay, the expected support from Washington didn’t materialize. Bush administration officials doubted that opposition had sufficient popular support to topple Aristide, an assessment confirmed by the opposition’s decision not to stand a candidate against him in the 2000 elections. More importantly, Washington had other more pressing concerns: first among them, its plans to invade Iraq and the need to fabricate a suitable pretext.

The Bush administration, therefore, chose to contract out the task of regime change in Haiti to US-dominated regional bodies such as the OAS (Organization of American States) and Caricom (the Caribbean Community). To tie Aristide’s hands and push him further right, aid to Haiti was tied to his ceding opposition leaders key positions in the government. Aristide repeatedly bowed before the OAS’s demands. For example, he quickly agreed to annul the contested election of nine Lavalas senators. But the right-wing opposition refused these concessions and the OAS responded by demanding that Aristide do more to facilitate a “power-sharing” agreement.

The toppling of Aristide and the US occupation of Haiti
By the end of 2003, the Aristide government was mired in corruption and presiding over a deepening economic and social crisis—a crisis exacerbated by the cut-off of foreign aid and for which it had no solution except state repression and the mobilization of lumpen-criminal elements based in the slums of Port-au-Prince.

Emboldened by Aristide’s mounting unpopularity and the rallying to its side of sections of the professional middle class that had previously supported the government, Haiti’s traditional business and political elite launched a new drive to bring down the government. Although claiming majority support, they refused to cooperate in the organization of new legislative elections and instead mounted a destabilization campaign aimed at pressuring the Bush administration to intervene.

Initially, the Bush administration resisted the opposition’s appeals for it to invade Haiti and maintained the previous policy of pressing for a power-sharing agreement. Not only were US military forces stretched thin due to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the administration was increasingly under threat from the unravelling of the lies it used to justify the Iraq war and by mounting economic problems.

But whilst it viewed the Haitian crisis as an unwanted distraction, the Bush administration could not ignore the political turmoil that its longstanding campaign to subvert Aristide’s government and restore the unfettered domination of its Haitian clients had produced in the island-republic.

Two weeks after Defence Secretary Rumsfeld declared that there were no plans to deploy US troops to Haiti, Bush ordered the third US military occupation of the country in the past century.

Why this reversal?

The administration feared chaos in Haiti could lead to a mass exodus of impoverished and terror-stricken Haitians that would destabilize the Caribbean region as a whole. Their first concern was the impact a refugee exodus would have on Florida, a key battleground in the coming presidential elections. But Washington also feared a further shock to the Dominican Republic. An important site of US assembly operations, the Dominican Republic has been rocked over the past year by an economic crisis, including the failure of the country’s third largest bank, and mounting social struggles.

An even more important reason to dispatch US troops to Haiti was to ensure that the anti-Aristide coup gave rise to a government tailored to Washington’s specifications.

The Bush administration’s readiness to use a rebel force led by thugs of previous dictatorial regimes to oust Aristide’s government was causing considerable international dismay and further undermining the Bush administration’s claims to be acting on the world arena, and especially in Iraq, as a force for democracy. By dispatching US troops to Haiti when the rebels were at the gates of Port au Prince, but after Aristide had been hustled from the country, the Bush administration could claim to be overseeing a constitutional handover of power. Moreover, Washington wanted to ensure that the rebels did not unleash a reign of terror so horrific as to fatally undermine the new regime or at the very least strip it any international legitimacy. In pressing for Aristide to quit Haiti, US diplomatic and military personnel themselves repeatedly invoked the threat of a rebel bloodbath.

A further reason for the dispatch of US troops was the need to reassert US predominance in the Caribbean, if only to calm criticism from within the US foreign-policy establishment. Alarm bells had been set off in many a Washington think tank and New York editorial office when the French government took the initiative in demanding that Aristide resign and announced its readiness to deploy French troops once he was forced from office. The French soon made clear that their aim was to assist and placate Washington, not cut across US interests. Nevertheless, there was pointed commentary in leading papers and journals that the Bush administration was failing to give proper attention to minding the US’s traditional “backyard.”

Last but not least, the US military intervention in Haiti must be seen within the context of growing concern in Washington over the growth of opposition to Wall Street and to IMF-imposed “liberalization” across Latin America. Last week, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, General James T. Hill, the head of the US military’s Southern Command, observed: “The security picture in Latin America and the Caribbean has grown more complex over the past year. … Some leaders in the region are tapping into deep-seated frustrations over the failure of democratic reforms to deliver expected goods and services. By tapping into these frustrations, which run concurrently with frustrations caused by social and economic inequality, the leaders are at the same time able to reinforce their radical positions by inflaming anti-US sentiment.”

There is a now a debate in Washington over the objectives and duration of the current US military occupation of Haiti. The Bush administration is eager to contract out the job of propping up the new pro-US government, and may well be willing—now that international attention has been turned elsewhere—to see the rebels incorporated into Haiti’s security forces.

However, the nature of imperialist oppression is that it repeatedly produces “failed states” to which US troops must be dispatched to ensure US economic and geo-political domination and the perpetuation of a grossly unjust and outmoded social order.

“Outlaw regimes” and the harboring of terrorists: the case of Posada Carriles

By Bill Van Auken
23 September 2006

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In the run-up to the fifth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, President George W. Bush delivered a series of speeches aimed at recouping the fading credibility of his “global war on terrorism” and reversing the stunning growth in popular sentiment against the war in Iraq.

Similar phrases appeared in every speech. One theme that was monotonously repeated was the vow, made after 9/11, that states that harbored terrorists would be treated the same as the terrorists themselves.

On September 5, Bush declared: “We’re determined to deny terrorists the support of outlaw regimes. After September the 11, I laid out a clear doctrine: America makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those that harbor and support them, because they’re equally guilty of murder.”

In another speech on September 9, the US president said, “After 9/11, I set forth a new doctrine: Nations that harbor or support terrorists are equally guilty as the terrorists, and will be held to account.”

And in his televised address to the nation on September 11 itself, Bush stated: “On September the 11th, we resolved that we would go on the offense against our enemies, and we would not distinguish between the terrorists and those who harbor or support them.”

In the aftermath of 9/11, this “principle” was invoked to justify not only the imminent invasion of Afghanistan, but also the subsequent attack on Iraq, for which the administration manufactured a phony connection between Al Qaeda and Baghdad. In the present situation, it is being used to prepare for military aggression against Iran, where, once again without any evidence, the administration is proclaiming an Al Qaeda link.

Given this pervasive theme, it is all the more extraordinary that the national media ignored an event on the day of the 9/11 anniversary that touched directly on the harboring of terrorists by a national government—in this case, the government of the United States.

Because of the Bush administration’s refusal to either deport or bring charges against a terrorist who organized the bombing of a civilian airliner in which 73 people were killed, a federal magistrate in Texas ruled that he should be set free. A federal judge must render a final decision, but if normal procedures are followed, within 30 days this mass murderer will be walking the streets of the US, a free man.

The October 1976 airline bombing—one of the worst acts of terrorism committed in the Western Hemisphere before 9/11—is only the most infamous in a series of terrorist crimes carried over the past 30 years by Cuban-born Luis Posada Carriles.

Barely two years ago he was released from a Panamanian prison in an extra-legal pardon by the country’s outgoing president, Mireya Moscoso. The pardon was widely believed to have been issued as a result of either official US pressure or bribes from Cuban exile groups, or both. Posada Carriles had been in prison there for nearly four years for plotting to kill Cuban President Fidel Castro and potentially hundreds of others by bombing a public conference held in conjunction with the 2000 summit of Latin American leaders.

He freely acknowledged his role in a 1997 bombing campaign against hotels and restaurants in Cuba, which claimed the life of an Italian tourist.

He helped organize the 1976 assassination of Orlando Letelier and his aide Ronni Moffit. Letelier, a former Chilean defense minister in the government of President Salvador Allende, who was at the time one of the most prominent opponents of the US-backed military dictatorship in Chile. The car-bomb assassination on Washington’s Embassy Row was then considered one of the worst acts of terrorism ever carried out in the US capital.

He has been linked to numerous other plots and acts of violence that extend right up to the present. On September 11, the same day that the magistrate in Texas issued his ruling, a wealthy south Florida developer and Cuban exile who served as Posada Carriles’s chief spokesman and paid his expenses pleaded guilty to a single conspiracy charge in federal court in Fort Lauderdale. The plea bargain arrangement stemmed from the police seizure last year of an arsenal of automatic weapons, ammunition, hand grenades and military explosives from an apartment complex he owned in south Florida

The New York Times—America’s “newspaper of record”—carried not a word on the extraordinary decision by the US magistrate in Texas to set free an infamous international terrorist—a ruling announced on the very day that the government and the media were focusing national attention on terrorism in conjunction with the 9/11 anniversary.

A terrorist trained by the CIA and the US military
The reasons are clear. As far as the US ruling establishment is concerned, Posada Carriles may be a terrorist, but he’s “our terrorist.” As a right-wing exile from the Cuban revolution of 1959, he was recruited by the CIA for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. He was subsequently trained by the US Army in intelligence.

There is documentary evidence that Posada Carriles stayed on the CIA payroll into the late 1960s, and ample indication that he remained one of the agency’s “assets” for decades afterwards.

In the early 1970s, he moved to Venezuela, became a citizen of that country, and was appointed by the right-wing regime of President Carlos Andres Perez as head of DISIP, the country’s secret police, where he directed the murder and torture of left-wing oppositionists. After Perez’s fall, he headed a private security agency, from which he plotted the bombing of the Cuban airliner.

Arrested for the bombing, Posada Carriles escaped in 1985, thanks to bribes provided by the Cuban American National Foundation. He went to El Salvador where he directed the covert and illegal operation to supply the Nicaraguan contra terrorist army under the direction of Lt. Col. Oliver North, a Reagan White House aide who held the title of “counter-terrorism coordinator.” Posada Carriles has been accused of using the supply operation in El Salvador as a conduit for shipping cocaine into the US.

After his release from the Panamanian prison, Posada Carriles hid for a time in Central America and then returned to the US, sneaking into the country without a visa. Hours after he held a press conference in south Florida in May 2005, he was picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and has been held in detention ever since.

While the normal procedure would have been to seek his deportation, no countries will accept Posada Carriles outside of Venezuela, where he is a citizen and is wanted for trial on the airline bombing, and Cuba, where he was born and is wanted in connection with that and other terrorist crimes.

While Venezuela has pressed for extradition, Washington has flouted its treaties with the country, whose president it sought to overthrow in an abortive 2002 coup. The US has defended its actions on the spurious grounds that if Posada Carriles were extradited to Venezuela, he would face torture. The savage irony of this pretense is twofold. First, while there is no evidence of government-sanctioned torture under the current Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez, the former CIA agent himself directed the torture of political dissidents while serving the same elements who now seek Chavez’s overthrow. Second, the Bush administration is notorious for kidnapping alleged terrorists and sending them to foreign governments that practice torture, a practice known as “extraordinary rendition.”

When the US government detained Posada Carriles, it decided to charge him only with a simple immigration violation—not with the myriad crimes he has committed around the world. Nonetheless, government officials clearly recognized his criminal past as a primary reason for keeping him behind bars.

In a letter to Posada Carriles obtained by Time magazine, an official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement explained why the agency wanted to continue detaining him:

“You have a history of engaging in criminal activity, associating with individuals involved in criminal activity, and participating in violent acts that indicate a disregard for the safety of the general public and a propensity for engaging in activities… that pose a risk to the national security of the United States.”

Making a reference to the 1976 bombing of the Cuban passenger plane, the official continued, “Due to your long history of criminal activity and violence in which innocent civilians were killed, your release from detention would pose a danger to both the community and the national security of the United States.”

While all this is acknowledged by the government, the Bush administration’s Justice Department chose not to make such a case or present any evidence of Posada Carriles’s crimes in court, which would allow his indefinite detention as a terrorist suspect.

Lawyers for the terrorist have pressed for his release. Under a 2001 Supreme Court ruling, the government is not allowed to detain foreign nationals who cannot be deported for more than six months.

The ruling of the federal magistrate in Texas was based on this ruling and on the fact that the White House and US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales have elected to do nothing to certify, as required by law, that Posada Carriles is a terrorist or a “threat to the community,” or to detain him under terms of the USA Patriot Act, something that has been done repeatedly in the case of Middle Eastern immigrants not charged with any acts of terrorism.

In the end, Washington refuses to either charge Posada Carriles as a terrorist or abide by international law and extradite him to face pending charges in Venezuela because the US government is a full accomplice in his crimes. It knows that were he to be placed on trial, further evidence would emerge of US state-sponsored terrorism.

The Bush administration’s protection of a mass murderer, airline bomber and assassin places it squarely within the category of an “outlaw regime” that “harbors and supports terrorists.”

Nor is this a matter merely of the right-wing Republican ideologues in the White House. The silence of the media on the Texas magistrate’s decision was in sync with the silence of the Democratic Party. Not a single major Democratic political figure has denounced the Bush administration’s illegal protection of Posada Carriles or demanded his extradition to Venezuela.

The former CIA agent and asset, it should be recalled, carried out his crimes under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Moreover, the Democrats have increasingly sought to compete with the Republicans for the allegiance of the anti-Castro Cuban-American lobby, particularly the Cuban American National Foundation, which Posada Carriles once identified as one of his paymasters.

See Also:
Posada Carriles to stay in US: Washington shields CIA terrorist from prosecution
[29 September 2005]
Venezuela demands US hand over CIA terrorist for trial
[17 June 2005]
Bush silent as top terrorist seeks US asylum
[14 April 2005]

Philip Agee, former agent who exposed CIA crimes, dies in Cuba

By Patrick Martin
14 January 2008

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Philip Agee, the former CIA operative who broke with the agency and devoted his life to exposing its role in political subversion, assassination, torture and support for military dictatorships, died January 7 in Cuba. Cuban sources said that he died of peritonitis after ulcer surgery. He was 72.

Agee joined the CIA in 1957, at the age of 22, soon after graduating from the University of Notre Dame. He worked for the agency for 12 years, with three tours of duty in Latin America, in Ecuador, Uruguay and Mexico. He resigned in 1969, after witnessing the US-backed bloodbath against student protesters on the eve of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

After a six-year effort to write an exposé, find a publisher and evade CIA efforts to suppress his revelations, Agee saw his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary published by Penguin Books in London. It gave a meticulous account of CIA activities in the three Latin American countries, including the recruitment of officials in each country as CIA informants, the sponsoring of right-wing media and political parties, and close collaboration with local repressive forces, both police and military, in the arrest, torture and murder of leftist students, workers and political activists.

The book was filled with details of CIA tradecraft, including the codenames and descriptions of numerous operations, and concluding with a list of nearly 250 CIA operatives, local agents and informants, whom Agee identified under their real names as well as their pseudonyms.

Inside the Company was a political bombshell, coming amid widespread revelations of CIA assassination plots, involvement in military coups such as the 1973 bloodbath in Chile, and illegal surveillance against the American people, particularly those opposed to the Vietnam War. The book became a bestseller despite efforts by the US government to block its publication and distribution, and it sparked additional efforts by left-wing political activists to expose CIA operations.

Agee participated in these efforts, co-sponsoring Covert Action Information Bulletin, a magazine devoted to blowing the cover on CIA activities, and co-authoring several books that named thousands of CIA agents in Africa and Western Europe. He drew on his knowledge of CIA practices and combed lists of US diplomatic and military personnel stationed abroad to identify those likely to be undercover operatives.

Agee was at pains to declare his political motivation in turning against the agency. He was not a mercenary defecting to the Stalinist side in the Cold War, he maintained, and he publicly refused collaboration with the Soviet KGB and the Cuban DGI. His goal was to help save the lives of those targeted for mass murder by US imperialism, and to contribute to the victory of popular revolutionary movements. He told the New York Times in 1974, on the eve of the publication of Inside the Company, “I wrote it for revolutionary organizations in the United States, in Latin America and everywhere else. I wrote it as a contribution to the socialist revolution.”

Even before publication of Inside the Company, Agee faced death threats originating in the US intelligence apparatus. After the book’s release, he was a marked man, targeted by the CIA and the US government as a whole. Country after country expelled him or refused admission, under pressure from Washington.

In 1978, the British Labour government of Prime Minister James Callaghan deported him in response to his efforts to expose CIA backing of a right-wing, pro-US political party in Jamaica.

In 1979, the Carter administration revoked his passport, citing national security reasons. In 1982, the Democratic-controlled Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, making it illegal to deliberately expose the identities of CIA officers, even if the information was gathered from publicly available sources.

In 1987, Agee published a memoir, On the Run, which gave more details of his break with the agency and the CIA’s efforts to retaliate. He had formed a relationship with a leftist Brazilian woman who had been tortured under the military junta that seized power in that country in 1964. Even after leaving the agency, he struggled with the decision to expose its operations.

He wrote: “It was a time in the ’70s when the worst imaginable horrors were going on in Latin America. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador—they were military dictatorships with death squads, all with the backing of the CIA and the US government. That was what motivated me to name all the names and work with journalists who were interested in knowing just who the CIA were in their countries.”

In his review of On the Run, published in the New York Times, Thomas Powers wrote: “Did Mr. Agee’s activity hurt the agency? You bet it hurt. The best evidence of how much can be found in his careful account of CIA efforts to convince him he had been neither forgiven nor forgotten—following him on his travels, spreading rumors about his alleged connection with the KGB and DGI, surrounding him with agents, tapping his telephone and even providing him with an elaborately wired typewriter in order to monitor what he was putting down on paper. Most difficult of all was a two-year period in the mid-1970s, when the agency, with high-level help, managed to bar him from residence in Britain, France, Italy and the Netherlands, apparently hoping to hound him until he was forced to take up residence in the Soviet bloc, where his true allegiance (from the agency’s point of view) would no longer be in doubt”

Agee survived this campaign, and eventually settled in Hamburg, Germany, where he lived with his second wife, American ballerina Giselle Roberge Agee. He also maintained an apartment in Havana, and operated a small business promoting American travel to Cuba.

He remained a continual target of harassment and smear tactics by the US government. One of the more notorious slanders was that Agee’s revelations had led to the assassination of Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, who was shot to death by a Greek terrorist organization in 1975. Welch was not named in Inside the Company, which focused on Latin America, and it is now known that his identity was uncovered by local journalists in Athens.

This did not stop President George H. W. Bush, who was CIA director in 1976-1977, from accusing Agee of responsibility for Welch’s death in a 1989 speech at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia (in the building now named after himself). The slander was repeated by Barbara Bush, the former first lady, in her 1994 autobiography. Agee sued her for libel, forcing a legal settlement in which Mrs. Bush agreed to remove the charge from subsequent editions of her book.

Agee remained committed to exposing the CIA, and at the time of his death was reportedly working on a book about CIA subversive activities in Venezuela. His trajectory was a singular one: he is the only CIA covert operative known to have broken with the agency out of revulsion against its crimes, and possessed of the moral courage to make that break public, thus risking repression or assassination.

Despite his avowal of socialism—which he wrongly identified with the Cuban state—Agee’s was the voice of outraged moral conscience rather than politically educated understanding. As he wrote in Inside the Company, “When I joined the CIA I believed in the need for its existence…. After 12 years with the agency I finally understood how much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports.”

Agee wrote of one interrogation session in Uruguay that he overheard from an adjoining room: “The moaning grew in intensity, turning to screams. By then I knew we were listening to someone being tortured…. I’m going to be hearing that voice for a long time.”

The crimes exposed by Agee and others have the utmost relevance today, when the role of the CIA in torture, secret prisons and illegal detentions is once more the focus of public attention.

See Also:
Bush threatens escalation of aggression against Cuba
[25 October 2007]
“Outlaw regimes” and the harboring of terrorists: the case of Posada Carriles
[23 September 2006]
Why US troops are occupying Haiti
[5 October 2004]

Italian judge seeks trial of 140 over Operation Condor repression

By Bill Van Auken
15 January 2008

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An Italian judge has issued orders for the preventive arrest pending deportation of at least 140 former officials of military dictatorships that ruled seven Latin American countries between the 1960s and 1980s. They are charged with responsibility for the deaths of 25 Italian citizens, who were among the tens of thousands of opponents of these regimes murdered, tortured and illegally imprisoned under a US-backed campaign of repression known as Operation Condor.

During the 1970s and 1980s, dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Peru, with the aid of the US CIA, developed Operation Condor as a program of coordinated continental repression, pooling their police-military resources in order to hunt down exiles and send them back to their deaths, while allowing secret police death squads to freely cross borders.

Among those the Italian judge, Luisanna Figliola, has asked be arrested are former Argentine dictator Jorge Videla, his fellow junta member and navy chief Emilio Eduardo Massera, and Jorge Maria Bordaberry, who headed Uruguay’s dictatorship between 1973 and 1976, as well as Francisco Morales Bermúdez, who was Peru’s dictator between 1975 and 1980, and Pedro Richter, another Peruvian ex-general who served as Peru’s prime minister.

Others charged are military officers and secret policemen, including 61 from Argentina, 32 from Uruguay, 22 Chileans and 13 Brazilians. Also accused are former Bolivian and Paraguayan officials

The Italian government has one of the accused in custody—Nestor Jorge Fernandez Troccoli, a former member of FUSNA, Uruguayan naval intelligence. Troccoli, who recently became an Italian citizen, was arrested in Salerno in southern Italy on Christmas Eve. He also faces charges in Uruguay in a case in which Gregorio Alvarez, the Uruguay’s last de facto president under the dictatorship that ruled that country from 1973 and 1985, has been jailed on charges related to the abduction and disappearance of political prisoners who were sent back to Argentina to be killed.

According to court documents, Troccoli was a regular visitor to the Argentine navy’s infamous Escuela Superior de Mecánica, which served as a torture and execution center under that country’s dictatorship, which murdered an estimated 30,000 workers, students and other perceived enemies of the regime in the 1970s.

During this period, drugged prisoners were thrown out of helicopters into the sea, headless and handless corpses washed up on the beaches of the Rio de la Plata and tens of thousands were subjected to hideous forms of torture in clandestine prisons throughout Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and other countries.

Whether any of the other defendants will join Troccoli in the prisoner’s dock in Italy is far from certain. Previous attempts by European governments to bring charges related to the “dirty wars” in Latin America—most notably Spain’s 1998 bid to have Chile’s ex-dictator extradited from Britain to stand trial—have been frustrated. Initial reaction from several Latin American governments has been largely hostile to the Italian case.

Peruvian President Alan Garcia called the charges “a judicial exaggeration” and denied that Peru had even participated in Operation Condor. Of Morales Bermudez, who seized power in a 1975 coup, he said, “We will give him all the help necessary. He is a respectable personality and we owe him respect and honor.”

In Brazil, Paulo Vannuchi, secretary for human rights, said he welcomed the Italian charges and called for the government to repeal a so-called amnesty law enacted in 1979, which granted members of the dictatorship full immunity from charges related to the murders, torture and disappearances carried out during two decades of military rule. The act was typical of the so-called “laws of impunity” enacted during the period of “transition to democracy” that began in Latin America during the late 1970s. It has prevented the prosecution of any of Brazil’s repressors and largely blocked any official investigation into their crimes. Vannuchi stressed that the law stood in contradiction to a number of international treaties and represented a potential impediment to Brazil’s campaign to secure a seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Other officials in the Workers Party (PT) government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva made it clear, however, that there is no intention of complying with any Italian extradition request. “Brazilian law doesn’t permit extradition,” said Justice Minister Tarso Genro. He suggested that the government could investigate the case of two Italians abducted in 1980 and sent to their deaths in Argentina—no mention of the thousands of Brazilians who suffered similar fates—but indicated that no one could be punished.

And Defense Minister Nelson Jobim insisted that the government could take no action to reopen any case stemming from the dictatorship’s repression. “This is not a matter for the Ministry of Justice, nor is it a theme for the executive branch,” he said.

Jobim learned his lesson last August when he and Lula participated in a conference organized by the National Congress in which relatives of the dictatorship’s victims participated. The head of a government-formed Special Commission on the Death and Disappearance of Political Prisoners used the event to call for changes in the amnesty law.

The comment provoked an emergency meeting and an angry declaration from the joint chiefs of staff of the Brazilian military, who threatened that any attempt to amend the law would represent a “step backwards for national peace and harmony.” The commanders solidarized themselves with the dictatorship, stressing that throughout Brazilian history “we have been the same army of Caxias [the nineteenth century Brazilian military leader],” and that “historical facts have different interpretations, depending upon viewpoint of their protagonists.”

Lula and Jobim quickly capitulated to the military’s threat.

Meanwhile, one of those wanted by the Italian courts boasted to the Brazilian media about his role. Agnaldo del Nero, a former section chief in Brazilian army intelligence, told the daily O Estado de Sao Paulo: “We didn’t kill. We arrested people and handed them over. There’s no crime in that.” He cynically claimed that Brazil’s role in Operation Condor was limited to sharing information with and training the agents of other Latin American secret police agencies and “monitoring subversives.”

However, recent reports in the Brazilian press—including a January 13 article in the daily Folha de Sao Paulo—have exposed the close collaboration between Brazilian military intelligence and its counterparts in Chile and Argentina in the abduction and murder of opponents of the military regimes, even before Operation Condor was formally launched in 1975.

While all the cases in the Italian indictments involve Italian citizens, many of them holding dual citizenship in Argentina and Uruguay, they are representative of the thousands of victims of Operation Condor.

Refugees abducted in Lima
For example, in Peru, the case against Morales Bermudez and Richter stems from the June 1980 abduction in Lima of two Argentines and one Italian woman who were leftist refugees from the dictatorship in Argentina.

This state crime, carried out in the waning day of Morales Bermudez’s military regime, began with the arrest of Maria Ines Riverta, an Argentine, in front of the Church of Miraflores in Lima. She was then subjected to prolonged electric shock torture to force her to reveal the whereabouts of the two others, Julio Cesar Ramirez and Noemi Gianotti de Molfino. They too were soon picked up.

The Italian, Gianotti de Molfino, 55, had reached Lima with her youngest child at the beginning of 1980 after her husband had been murdered by the Argentine dictatorship, her oldest son imprisoned, her two grandchildren disappeared and her daughter exiled to France.

One month after her abduction in Lima, her body was discovered in a hotel room in Madrid. Her two comrades were sent back to Argentina and disappeared.

Italian prosecutor Giancarlo Capaldo has been investigating the crimes of the Latin American dictatorships since 1999 in response to charges brought by relatives of Italian victims of repression. Under Italian law, magistrates are empowered to investigate and prosecute the murder of Italians overseas.

According to the UPI news agency, Capaldo’s position is that “the United States was aware of Operation Condor but did not participate in it.”

There is ample evidence however, that the CIA and the US government had a direct hand in the repression. Capaldo’s position likely represents either a political decision not to directly antagonize Washington or a tactical calculation based on the recognition that no US official would ever be extradited to stand trial on matters of international law.

The Italian judge’s arrest orders came just weeks after one of the key figures in the reign of terror inflicted upon the people of Chile following the CIA-backed coup of September 11, 1973, gave fresh testimony on the intimate involvement of the CIA in the crimes committed under Operation Condor.

In a December 2 televised interview, Manuel Contreras, the former head of Chile’s notorious secret police, the Directorate of National Intelligence, or DINA, said that two assassinations carried out against the Chilean dictatorship’s opponents had been approved by and jointly organized with the CIA.

The first was that of Gen. Carlos Prats, the ex-chief of the Chilean army, who had opposed the US-backed coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Prats and his wife were murdered in a car bombing in Buenos Aires, where they had gone into exile.

The second was that of Orlando Letelier, the former foreign minister in the overthrown government of Salvador Allende and a key figure in the international opposition to Pinochet. He was also killed in a car bombing together with his aide, Ronni Moffitt, in the streets of Washington, D.C. At the time, the bombing was considered the worst act of foreign terrorism ever to have occurred in the US capital.

“Pinochet along with [US CIA deputy director Vernon] Walters were in agreement about all of the problems that existed with respect to international activities,” Contreras said in the interview with the Chilean television channel TVN.

Contreras said that the decision to kill Letelier had been reached during meetings between Pinochet and Walters in 1976.

Documents released by the US government in 2000 confirmed that Contreras himself was a paid “asset” of the CIA, while the leading figure convicted in the Letelier assassination was US-born Michael Townley, an operative of DINA, whom Contreras has said was also employed by the CIA. Townley, who has since also confessed to the assassination of Prats and his wife as well as other opponents of the Pinochet dictatorship, was tried in the US for the Letelier murder and sent into the FBI’s witness protection program after just five years in jail.

In Uruguay, one of the attorneys for the victim’s families in the case now unfolding over Operation Condor has demanded that the government seek the extradition of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for his role in the state terror and repression during that period.

The dictatorships in Latin America “were mere executors” of a “plan of extermination” worked out in Washington by leading US officials, including Kissinger—a firm defender of the military regimes—the lawyer, Gustavo Salle said.

Nor is it just Kissinger, a leading advisor to the Bush administration, who should be called to account for these crimes. While Walters is dead, at the time of his reported meetings with Contreras, the CIA’s director was George H.W. Bush, the current president’s father. Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s ex-defense secretary, meanwhile, held the same post at the Pentagon between 1975 and 1977, overseeing US backing for the Latin American military as it carried out repression throughout the continent. And Vice President Dick Cheney worked as White House chief of staff.

In the midst of its relentless propaganda campaign about a US global war on terror, Washington continues to protect professional terrorists like Townley and the CIA-trained anti-Castro Cuban airline bomber and assassin Luis Posada Carriles. Moreover, the political establishment itself counts among its leading figures men who are deeply implicated in the wave of state terror and repression that claimed the lives of tens of thousands in Latin America 30 years ago.

See Also:
Philip Agee, former agent who exposed CIA crimes, dies in Cuba
[14 January 2008]
“Outlaw regimes” and the harboring of terrorists: the case of Posada Carriles
[23 September 2006]

Guardian interviews Miami Five lawyer

‘Society has become more punitive’

09 January 2008

For 40 years, Leonard Weinglass has been the defence lawyer in some of America’s most spectacular trials, representing the Chicago Eight, the kidnappers of Patty Hearst and the man who helped bring down President Nixon. He tells Duncan Campbell why the current case of the Cuban Five shows how politics is derailing the US justice system.

This month a series of billboards will start appearing in US cities informing pass- ers-by about five prisoners serving up to life sentences in US jails. While the Cuban Five, as they are known, are heroes in their home country and in parts of Latin America, they are virtually unknown in the land where they are incarcerated. Soon they are due back in court and Leonard Weinglass, their lawyer, believes the case should be as famous as any political trial in the US over the past four decades.

Weinglass should know. In fact, if you wanted to understand American politics over the past four decades, you could do worse than to study the casebook of this quietly spoken New York-based lawyer whose task it is to try and free them. From the Chicago Eight to Jane Fonda, from Angela Davis to the kidnappers of Patty Hearst, from Daniel Ellsberg to Amy Carter, Weinglass has represented the defendants in many of the most spectacular real-life courtroom dramas.
He is in London to meet British parliamentarians and raise awareness of the Cuban Five, a story that has hovered under the radar in the US. The five young Cuban men, who had infiltrated anti-Castro groups in Miami that were planning sabotage in Cuba, were convicted of espionage offences in 2001. Weinglass believes they are victims of a grave miscarriage of justice and that the courtroom acts as a barometer of a country’s political health.

It was the trial of the Chicago Eight, the anti-Vietnam war protesters arrested in the wake of the riots at the Democratic party’s convention in 1968, that first propelled Weinglass into the legal limelight. The defendants included Abbie “Steal This Book” Hoffman; Tom Hayden, a political activist who would later become a Democrat congressman; and Bobby Seale, who appeared in court manacled and with his mouth taped shut. The trial is the subject of a forthcoming Steven Spielberg film. A few years later, Weinglass found him self defending Daniel Ellsberg, the man who, in 1971, leaked the Pentagon papers on the hidden history of the Vietnam war, which were instrumental in the downfall of President Nixon. He has kept in touch with many of his old clients.

“Last summer, Dan Ellsberg and Tom Hayden and I were speaking at a community east of Vancouver that was founded by a group of Russians who had their way there paid by Tolstoy during the Tsar’s period because they had thrown down their weapons and burned them in a ceremonial bonfire,” says Weinglass. “During the Vietnam war, they welcomed American war resisters and they are still helping those [soldiers refusing to fight in the Iraq war] who are coming now.”

What perplexes Weinglass is that his current case has had scant attention in the American mainstream media. “There is very little coverage except in the leftwing or Latin press. I was on Wolf Blitzer on CNN about six months ago, and I received many calls afterwards from people who were shocked to learn about it for the first time. It’s inexplicable. Here you have a case, the longest trial in the US at the time it was heard, with a US admiral, the adviser to the president, Cuban generals, all testifying in a criminal trial that covered the 40-year history of US-Cuban relations and it received no press.”

He draws parallels between the Cuban case and that of Ellsberg. “In Dan’s case, the court process had to examine the 40-year history between the US and Vietnam, so both cases are the product of foreign policy failures and responses to those failures, which is rare in court proceedings. Most cases are two-dimensional - what happened, who did it? In these cases you went into a third dimension - why? That gives it political content.”

The trial had started on the heels of the case involving Elian Gonzalez, the shipwrecked boy who was eventually returned to his father in Cuba. “There were 100,000 people in the street protesting against Elian’s return approximately three months before the case began. There is great fear and intimidation in Miami. Some of those called to serve on the jury said they thought they could be fair, but they were afraid for their families if they reached a verdict that was unacceptable to the Cuban exile community. A banker said he felt he would lose his business. The jury foreman was asked about Cuba and he said it was a ‘communist dictatorship and I will be pleased when it is removed’.”

Weinglass drew up the trial brief for Angela Davis, the black radical, when she stood trial for murder in 1972. She, unlike the Cubans, was acquitted. “Angela’s case involved a black woman, a member of the Communist party, tried for the murder of a judge in a rural Californian community, in front of an all-white jury. She was defended by excellent African-American lawyers and a decision was made correctly that her legal team would be all of colour, but I wrote the trial brief. The issue was: could she be acquitted without testifying? They were afraid that if she testified the prosecution would get into a lot of her political associations which she would not publicly reveal. So she had to run the risk of a life sentence in order to keep private her political associations. She prevailed, I believe, largely because the whole world was watching.

“In the Cuban Five case, there were demonstrations in front of the courthouse, people dangling nooses, calling for the hanging of the five, editorial comment in the local paper saying this was the first step in getting Fidel Castro and urging the indictment of Castro in a Noriega-type attack on Cuba. The environment was more hostile in the case of the Cuban Five. Angela, I believe, was saved by the international and domestic support network which the Five did not have.”

So what has changed in the decades since the Chicago Eight, Ellsberg and Davis were all cleared? “Society has become far more punitive and the system reflects that. The UN general assembly considered a ban on life sentences for juveniles - people under 18 - and the vote was 185 in favour of the ban with only the US voting against. That is because we have 2,300 juveniles doing life, including some from 13 years old. This generates no discussion in the US. In the 60s, a life sentence would mean that after 24 years you would be eligible for parole, and you would have to be released after 34. Under the Clinton administration, they abolished parole. If you get life, you are in prison until you die.

“When I argued the Chicago Eight appeal, the court set aside two days for argument; when we argued the case of the Five, all five were given a total of 15 minutes, so I had three minutes to argue my client’s life sentence. That is attributed to judicial efficiency which, of course, curtails the rights of the accused. So the system operates faster and more punitively, and there is no groundswell to address this in either party. We now have distinguished liberal professors, like Alan Dershowitz of Harvard, calling for the courts to issue warrants for torture and an attorney-general who refuses to acknowledge that water-boarding is torture. There can’t even be a robust debate in the US on an issue as fundamental as torture.”

Why the change in climate? “I think it’s a reaction to the 60s, to what most people considered an overly permissive era, which was followed by a sharp increase in crime, which was followed by a vindictive reaction, which we are still undergoing. In the 60s there were 700,000 people in prison and 600 on death row. Now there are 2m in custody and 3,200 on death row.” He also believes that verdicts reflect public moods. “The Chicago Eight were right on the issues of war and racism. Dan Ellsberg was right on the Vietnam war. Angela was clearly innocent and was tried at the height of the black liberation struggle in the US.”

One of Weinglass’s best-known cases was that of Emily and Bill Harris for kidnapping Patty Hearst in 1974. They were convicted, but Weinglass believes they had a fair trial. “It was a sensational kidnapping. It had the largest ransom ever paid and her father had to come up with several million dollars worth of food for the poor.” Remarkably, the Harrises were free within a decade. How come? “Let me just say that they benefited from the influence of the Hearst family, who didn’t want their daughter to testify.”

Weinglass’s Wikipedia biography has apparently been written by a malign rightwinger. It suggests, falsely, that he was an adviser to the Hanoi government. “I think it’s hilarious,” he says. “I can’t imagine anyone believing it as an honest source.” He did defend Jane Fonda after she went to Hanoi and broadcast to the US pilots who were bombing the city, asking them to consider the consequences of what they were doing. There was a call to charge her with treason and the House Committee on Un-American Activities subpoenaed her to testify. “I sat with a group of lawyers who felt we should file a lawsuit to quash that, but after talking to Jane we decided to take a totally different tack: she would publicly thank the committee for the subpoena and say she was willing to testify. The strategy was correct. The committee met and withdrew the subpoena. They were afraid of having Jane there. They never charged her.”

Another client was Amy Carter, daughter of the former president, who was arrested in 1987 with 15 others for occupying a university building which was used by the CIA for recruitment during the war waged by the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The students were charged with criminal trespass. “We used the defence of justification and necessity which says, ‘Yes, I did the crime, but it should be excused because I did it to prevent a greater wrong.’ A conservative jury in Massachusetts acquitted, which was a wonderful victory.”

Weinglass is also currently dealing with the case of Kurt Stand and his wife, Theresa Squillacote, who were jailed a decade ago for attempted espionage (for the former East Germany) and obtaining national defence information “to be used to the injury of the United States”. The FBI bugged every room of the Stands’ home and used what they heard to brief a psychologist who would then train an undercover agent to penetrate the family. “It’s quite a story,” says Weinglass. “Most Americans would not believe that the FBI records bedroom conversations and then brings in psychologists to train an undercover agent to betray a family.”

Each case, he says, has its “heartbreak and satisfaction”. Now 74, he sees no reason to stop. “The typical call I get is one that starts by saying, ‘You’re the fifth attorney we’ve called.’ Then I get interested”.

The history of the Cuban Five

Three of the Cuban Five are serving life sentences, the others 19 and 15 years, after being convicted in a US federal court in Miami on June 8 2001. They are Gerardo Hern�ndez, Ram�n Laba�ino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando Gonz�lez and Ren� Gonz�lez. All were accused of committing espionage. Their defence was that they were involved in infi ltrating and monitoring Miami-based anti-Castro groups to prevent terrorist attacks on Cuba. These organisations have mounted various attacks on the island over the years; the Five claimed that as many as 3,000 people have died as a result.

The seven-month trial began in November 2000 in a hostile atmosphere, but motions from defence attorneys for a change of venue were denied. In 2005, a three-judge panel of the circuit court of appeals overturned the convictions and ordered a new trial outside Miami. This decision was reversed by a 12-judge panel. Nine remaining issues of appeal are before the three-judge panel and a decision is expected shortly.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/cuba/story/0,,2237566,00.html

What better way to manipulate the masses of people than to propagate lies disguised as truth, and to say nothing of substance in the name of being crystal clear. This is the double-speak by America’s latest well known cynical opportunist, Barack Hussein Obama. Indeed, it is being demonstrated yet again that, “America is like a melting pot. The people at the bottom get burned and the scum floats to the top.”

The superficiality and racism of white America is amply shown by its current propensity to equate real economic and political “change” with skin color. This is a fact, which for a certainty, does not escape Mr. Obama or his handlers. As a college-educated white woman - Barack Obama supporter - recently stated on national television, she wants to see the “color” component of “affirmative action eliminated ” because after all (according to her) there is now color equality in America, and she made it quite plain that she felt justified in her racist quest because, as she proudly asserted, she is after-all, “voting for Barack Obama, a black man” for US President. In the very name of supposedly empowering the people, Barack Obama and many of his supporters are actually about the business of disempowering people, most especially Black, Brown, and Red peoples.

Does anyone remember Condoleezza Rice? She is, by the way, biologically Black, and she sure as hell does not represent economic and political “change” in the vein of truly empowering the people. Oh yes, and what about that biologically Black man Colin Powell? You remember him, don’t you? The first biologically Black US Secretary of State, who went to the United Nations and told the entire world the big lie that Iraq “possessed weapons of mass destruction” that, in turn, provided political cover for the colossal debacle of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. It must be reiterated that equating genuine and much needed economic, social and political change with skin color is absurd, cynical, and enormously dangerous. Yet, this appears to be an important part of what Barack Obama and his handlers are cynically counting on. They know that a significant portion of the American people, including many whites, want real change, so why not give them clean-sounding superficiality instead of truth, coupled with a huge dose of double-speak. This strategy serves to please and engender trust of the corporate backers while confusing many potential voters, especially young and/or first time potential voters. It might be an effective strategy but it is also a cynical and dishonest one.

Then of course, notwithstanding the huge dose of political double-speak, there is the Obama-disguise of rhetorically cloaking himself as a candidate of peace when in fact he is a candidate of war who has indicated that he favors “unilateral” US military actions in other nations - supposedly in “pursuit of the real terrorists.” In other words, he favors unilateral, state-sanctioned terrorism in order allegedly to pursue individual and/or organizational terrorists in other nations. While such simplisticly cloaked militaristic rhetoric on the part of Obama might make for tasty media sound bites, it is the stuff of cynicism, betrayal of the people, and madness.

For over seven years now, George W. Bush and clique repeatedly have illustrated the folly of such a dangerous policy, both at home and abroad. Yet, Obama, a so-called candidate for “change,” is simply repackaging the same old, dangerous and failed US foreign policy with shiny but perilous rhetoric. He is not a candidate of peace. By his own admission, he is merely desirous of waging war “the right way,” i.e. with a more effective killing machine. Of course, he has never personally been in mortal combat in this nation or outside of its national boundaries, where limbs are broken and life is snuffed out. He has never been confined and tortured in US prisons as have some of his own Black constituents who were tortured by members of the police department in Chicago, Illinois. There is no “right way” to wage war. War is not antiseptic. It is not clean. It is bloody and it is horrible; the only “right way” to wage it is to avoid it, and most especially the use of “unilateral” US military force.

The Democrat and Republican parties long ago divorced themselves from promoting, in any real sense, the interests of the vast majority of the people. The politics of these parties continue to move America, as a nation, from the frying pan straight into the proverbial fire. For Black, Red, and Brown people in America and throughout the world this must be and is of particular concern.

Ironically, the one serious candidate of the people who is outside of the joined-at-the-hip Democrat and Republican parties is former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who had the guts and integrity to leave the mire of the Democratic party and declare her support for the national “Power To The People Coalition,” which in turn supports her candidacy for US President. For this, she has been outright ignored and/or repeatedly attacked by the US corporate media. Much of America, collectively, even in the 21st century, simply cannot abide integrity, only hypocrisy. Nonetheless, real change and real power/empowerment must come not from cynical, corporate and shiny insubstantial rhetoric that is, in reality, callously pimping and manipulating the “hope” of people. Rather, it must come from systemic change that begins with the people - who are fed up with the machinations and hypocrisy of the Democrat and Republican parties. No matter what occurs in the upcoming and ongoing corporate media circuses referred to as caucuses and primaries throughout the United States, and no matter who the big corporate media presents as the so-called “front runners” in these circuses of, for, and by the Democrat and Republican parties, justice and integrity can never emanate from an intrinsically unjust, amoral and hypocritical US system. Moreover, when viewing the candidates of these parties, including the candidacy of Barack Obama, it behooves all of us to remember and apply the age-old African adage: “Beware of the naked man who offers you clothes.”

This is the year 2008 and it is time to truly analyze, organize, educate, and liberate ourselves and our brothers and sisters. It’s time to keep it real. Onward then. The struggle continues….

BC Editorial Board member, Larry Pinkney is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil/political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn].