Over the years, the CIA has spied on the diplomatic and military communications of hundreds of nations by using encryption machines from a Swiss company owned by the CIA and Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND), as revealed by the National Security Archive, an independent research center.

Both the Washington Post and the German public-service television broadcaster (ZDF) have recently published this investigation, with great media impact worldwide, as hundreds of international news agencies reported the news and commented on the information.

It turns out that the Swiss company Crypto AG, owned by the CIA and BND, has for years sold and installed thousands of encryption machines in several nations, including Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Spain, Greece, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, Indonesia and the Philippines, among others.

The encryption machines enabled the CIA to decode, for example, thousands of messages closely related to Operation Condor; the 1973 military coup against the Popular Unity Government in Chile; the 1976 coup in Argentina; the 1976 assassination of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in Washington; the Falklands War; and more than a few others.

According to the National Security Agency, the CIA used Crypto AG’s machines to spy on those implementing Operation Condor – a coordinated extermination plan carried out by several Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s to eliminate leftist, democratic and revolutionary forces in those nations, They, the executioners, encrypted their communications, “without knowing the United States might be listening.”

The encryption machines used by “Condortel”, Operation Condor’s communications network, were provided by Crypto AG by agreement with the CIA and the repressive governments involved in Operation Condor.

According to The Washington Post and ZDF, the spy project was first known as “Thesaurus”, and then “Rubicon”. The Post pointed out that both the CIA and the U.S. National Security Agency have controlled nearly all aspects of Crypto AG since 1970, in collaboration with BND.

Most of the media outlets, that commented on or simply published the information, put forward the incredible theory that the CIA acquired knowledge of crimes committed by Operation Condor through the spy operation. Referring to either Thesaurus or Rubicon, some went further in their “naiveté” and took up the story that some CIA officials were “frightened” by information regarding the horrors perpetrated by the military dictatorships, and wanted to denounce them.

Did the CIA know about Operation Condor or not?

Plans for repression, the forerunners of Operation Condor, emerged from the School of the Americas and the Conferences of American Armies in the 1960s, where U.S. sponsored “preventive” actions in the region were mapped out, as part of intelligence, psychological and cultural warfare operations conducted under the slogan of “no more Cubas.”

Declassified CIA documents dated June 23, 1976, published by the Uruguayan newspaper La República, July 29, 2007, revealed that security officials from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia met in Buenos Aires as early as 1974, “to organize coordinated actions against subversive targets.”

The National Intelligence Daily’s top secret report, prepared by the CIA director for high-ranking officials only, likewise reported that Argentines had conducted spy operations against subversive elements, as did Chileans and Uruguayans.

U.S. researcher Patrice McSherry states that this document proves that coordination of repressive efforts by South American dictatorships began in 1973 and 1974, before the extraterritorial plans were named “Operation Condor” at a meeting in Chile in 1975, and that the CIA was deeply involved in the planning and execution of the actions.

Operation Condor was an intelligence plan designed and coordinated by the CIA and security services of Latin American military dictatorships, to annihilate the left. Along with the Gladio and Phoenix Operations, it was part of the United States’ global strategy during the Cold War to confront “the advance of communism in the world.”

Declassified CIA files indicate that, in 1975, Chilean Chief of Intelligence Manuel Contreras was invited to the CIA’s Langley headquarters, where he stayed for 15 days. After this visit, Contreras met with leaders of military intelligence services from Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay on November 25, 1975. Later, Brazil joined the group.

According to the “Archives of Terror” discovered in Paraguay, Operation Condor led to the tragic loss of more than 50,000 civilian lives, over 30,000 missing, and some 400,000 prisoners.

Gladio was a secret organizational structure composed of military and civilians who, in collaboration with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), operated in Europe from the late 1950s through October 1990. Gladio’s secret armies in Europe, mainly Italy, carried out multiple acts of terrorism and selective crimes, under the pretext of confronting the threat of the Red Army occupying the region, in the event of a third world war.

It was Cuban-born terrorist Orlando Bosch Avila, involved in the infamous Barbados bombing with Luis Posada Carriles, who fired the machine gun that seriously wounded Bernardo Leighton and his wife in Rome, in an assassination attempt organized by Italian terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie, a member of Operation Gladio.

Phoenix was a top secret program, developed by the CIA in Vietnam in 1967, in an attempt to “neutralize” the Vietcong by killing South Vietnamese civilians suspected of supporting combatants in the North and Vietcong soldiers.

William Colby, CIA director in that time, admitted in 1976 that Phoenix operations killed more than 20,000 between 1967 and 1972. The My Lai massacre was just one Phoenix operation.

Phoenix methods and techniques were used in Operation Condor.

United States intelligence services did not learn about Operation Condor via espionage. The CIA organized, planned, advised and was involved in implementing the gruesome extermination plan. It is responsible for crimes against humanity, crimes for which the U.S. government should be brought to justice. The CIA has enjoyed impunity for years, but cannot escape history, which has already conducted a trial and issued its ruling.

IN CONTEXT

A few examples of Operation Condor crimes:

-In Buenos Aires, Chilean Army General Carlos Prats and his spouse Sofia Cuthbert were killed by a remote-controlled bomb.

-High-ranking Uruguayan army officers secretly travelled to Porto Alegre, capital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, and kidnapped a couple, activists in the Uruguayan opposition, Universindo Rodriguez Diaz and Lilian Celiberti, with their two children, Camilo and Francesca, eight and three years of age, respectively.

-Orlando Letelier, former minister in Salvador Allende’s government, was killed by a car bomb in Washington. His assistant, Ronni Moffitt, a U.S. citizen, also died in the explosion.

-Kidnapping and disappearance of the Zaffaroni couple in Argentina.

(Source: Ecured , Prensa Latina)

This is the same organization that trained Juan Guaidó, and has been linked to sectors of the Venezuelan opposition since 2006.

Popovic writes in his 2010 memo: “A key to Chávez’s current weakness is the decline in the electricity sector” in Venezuela. Likewise, he notes that the Guri hydroelectric plant would be one of the important objectives in the case of power failure.

The memorandum identifies the potential collapse of the Venezuelan electricity grid as a “watershed event” that “would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate.” It also specifies that there is a “grave possibility that some 70 percent of the country’s electricity grid could go dark,” and suggests that a well-trained opposition group could serve the purpose of destabilizing the then Chávez government.

As U.S. journalist Max Blumenthal pointed out: “Flash forward to March 2019, and the scenario outlined by Popovic is playing out almost exactly as he had imagined.”

Guaidó, trained by CANVAS, is taking advantage of the consequences of the national blackout, due to what the Maduro government described as “cybernetic and electromagnetic attacks,” as a political issue to call people onto the streets.

Venezuela lost at least 875 million dollars in four days as a result of the power outage, the equivalent of one percentage point of its gross domestic product.

It cannot have been purely coincidental that three figures tweeted just moments after power failed across the country, thus implicating themselves in the sabotage:

• U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo threatened: “No food. No medicine. Now, no power. Next, no Maduro.”

• Florida Senator Marco Rubio tweeted just three minutes after the power failure, with precise information that no other media had access to.

• Juan Guaidó tweeted that the light would return when Maduro was gone, in a message reminiscent of that of a kidnapper.

In April of 2011, the real identity of Daniel and Pablo as one and the same person was announced; writer and university professor, Raúl Capote.

Among the missions the CIA gave their agent in Havana was the recruitment of intellectuals and youth to train as leaders to challenge the Revolution.

Another of their obsessions was the creation of a platform for an internet connection on the island, under U.S. control.

The author of the book, La guerra que se nos hace (The war they wage against us), which was presented during the recent International Book Fair in Havana, recalled when members of U.S. intelligence services showed him how to use a satellite telephone to connect directly to the internet, without being detected by Cuban authorities.

The U.S. State Department’s creation of a new Internet Task Force is the latest version of those old subversive plans, with antecedents that date back to the very beginning of the Revolution.

The first meeting of the Task Force took place February 7, with government officials and non-government authorities on hand, as expected.

While all those aspiring to carry out these plans are not known publicly, sources close to the events report that there were participants from the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Aid to Development (USAID), and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB), that manages two “relics” of an era of even greater aggression against Cuba: Radio and TV Martí.

The proposal is the same one in which agent “Pablo” was engaged, the same exposed and dismantled by “Daniel” and Cuban state security.

You learned first hand of U.S. subversive plans in Cuba based on the use of new technologies. Do you think this new Task Force will be successful?

No, they don’t have a chance. We have experience in confronting this type of aggression; we’re not talking about anything new. I’ll cite a few examples:

In February of 2006, a list was published of 17 Cuban-American institutions that were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). With these funds, numerous cyberspace publications were financed, meant to promote internal subversion on the island.

The International Republican Institute (IRI) gave their activists in Cuba cell phones and information technology equipment, an effort, they say, to continue breaking barriers to communication, to promote the free flow of information and access to the internet for Cubans.

In 2009, especially after the Information Technology Fair here, the CIA showed a great deal of concern about the development Cuba could achieve in the area of informatics security, and what this development could mean as a brake on their internal subversion plans.

To prevent this, they ordered the rapid distribution of software and hardware to be used on their internal networks. With financing provided by the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, the International Republican Institute began a project to gather software, references, news, and digital resources. Through this initiative called “CiberLibre,” the IRI prepared prototypes of CDs, with a capacity of approximately one gigabyte, containing a variety of software programs, e-mails, websites, etc. The programs included software to access the internet in a “safe” manner without being detected by the Cuban government’s servers.

The plan included putting into operation BGAN equipment (satellite cell phones with the ability to establish an internet connection), to create wireless networks that would link their agents via cell phones and laptops in different places in Havana, so that, at a later time in the implementation of their plans, these networks could be utilized to manipulate users and mobilize them in protest actions against the government.

Of particular interest to the CIA was studying illegal antennas for satellite TV that existed in the country in those days, and the possibility of switching them over to an internet connection.

Cuban authorities have frustrated innumerable subversive plans over the years. Photo: Granma
We could also refer to the projects well known among Cubans, failed projects like ZunZuneo, Piramideo, and Commotion, denounced by Cuba at the time.

Is Cuba ready to face these attacks?

The war they are waging on us is a war to restore capitalism in Cuba; we must be clear about this. The new plans were developed in the context of this war. Moreover, there exists a broad, active coalition of government, military, and business interests that includes the computer and information industry, and communications media, who are consistent defenders of a world dominated by the United States. They are convinced that the way to accomplish this is based on the electronic control of information and the communications media, which confer cultural and political power in general. Cuba is emerging as a formidable enemy of this imperial vision of the world. Cubans are resisting this formidable force.

Cuba advocates the safe, democratic, responsible use of the internet, which has been the intention of the Cuban government, especially Fidel, in the development of new technologies and full access to the internet. And we have faced obstacles created by the U.S. government since the beginning. The absolute prohibition of their enterprises doing business with Cuba in the area of information-communications technology, for years, has reached incredible heights, the persecution of any attempt by our country to purchase hardware or software. The odyssey we were obliged to undertake to acquire the first micro-computers is an example of this policy. The impossibility of access to fiber optic cables that surround the island is an example of the double standards and manipulations of a government that, after all this, presumes to accuse the Cuban government of not allowing its citizens to use the internet.

I have the impression that a clear perception of the danger this war entails does not always exist. It is a new, complex field, for which we must prepare ourselves. We cannot make naïve mistakes. Our enemies are very clear about their objectives.

What is the best strategy to combat this new offensive by the Trump administration?

Cuba has one great strength: the preparation of our human resources. The Revolution has trained thousands of engineers and technicians, and has a highly trained, educated population, capable of handling new technologies.

The level of internet access in Cuba has increased rapidly; the country has developed in a sovereign manner, thanks above all to the ability and determination of this trained workforce and the government’s political will.

This enemy plan will be defeated with more internet. Fidel has already said so, “Internet appears to have been made for revolutionaries.” We have the ability to generate content to defend the Revolution.

More access to the internet means more Cubans telling how they really live in Cuba, and this is what the enemy most fears. That is why they do not allow their companies to do business in Cuba, despite their media promises. They want us poor, hungry, and disarmed. Can you imagine what would happen if the poor, the exploited of the world knew the truth about Cuba – capitalism wouldn’t last a day.
What can all Cubans do, from their own positions, to confront this threat?

Let everyone do their part of the duty, and nothing can defeat us, Martí said. Our duty is to prepare ourselves, close ranks, arm ourselves with culture and confront every plan with a counter-plan; organize ourselves, be pro-active, pounce on the lies and distortions with the power of our truth; talk openly, make intelligent use of the increasingly accelerated, sovereign digitalization of our society. Fight with audacity, intelligence, and realism; never lie, armed with the profound conviction that there is no force on earth capable of crushing the power of the truth and ideas.

(Granma)

As usual, the Bolivarian leader was gracious and respectful to all those present. When anyone asked for the floor to make a clarification, he granted it as soon as possible. When one of the members of parliament, who had warmly greeted Chavez as did other opposition members, asked to speak, in a great political gesture Chavez interrupted his report presentation and gave her the floor. What surprised me was the extreme severity of the rebuke, launched against the president with words that really put to test Chavez’ chivalry and cold blood. The MPs statement was undoubtedly an insult, although this was not her intention. He alone was capable of calmly responding to the offensive word ‘thief’ that she had used to judge the president’s conduct in terms of the adopted laws and measures.

After verifying the exact term that was used, Chavez responded to the individual challenge for debate with an elegant and sedated phrase, “An eagle does not hunt flies,” and without adding another word he calmly proceeded with his report.

It represented an insurmountable test of mental agility and self control. Another woman, of unquestionable humble origins, expressed her astonishment in moving and heartfelt words over what she had just witnessed and the overwhelming majority present broke out in applause. Judging by the sheer volume, the applause seemed to be coming from all of Chavez’ friends and many of his adversaries as well.

Chavez’ report lasted more than nine hours without the people ever losing interest. Maybe because of that incident, his words were heard by an immeasurable number of people. Many times I have given extensive speeches on difficult topics, always striving to make the ideas I was transmitting understandable. And I was really at a loss to explain how that soldier of humble origins was able to keep his mind so agile and his incomparable talent to deliver such an address without losing his voice or strength.

To me politics is an extensive and decisive battle of ideas. Publicity is the work of publicists, who perhaps know the techniques to get listeners, spectators and readers to do what they are told to do. If that science, or art, or whatever they call it is employed for the good of human beings, they deserve some respect; the same respect merited by those who teach people how to think.

Venezuela today is the site of a great battle. Internal and external enemies of the revolution prefer chaos —as Chavez has said— to the just, organized and peaceful development of the country. Being accustomed to analyzing the events that have occurred over more than half a century, and to observing, with greater foundations for judgment, the eventful history of our time and human behavior, one learns to almost predict the future development of events.

To promote a far-reaching Revolution in Venezuela was no easy task. Venezuela is a country full of glorious history, but extraordinarily rich in resources that are of vital importance to the imperialist powers that have, and continue to map out guidelines in the world.

Political leaders the likes of Romulo Betancourt and Carlos Andres Perez lack the most minimal personal qualities to carry out such a task. Furthermore, Betancourt was excessively vain and hypocritical. He had many opportunities to learn about the situation in Venezuela. As a young man he was a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Costa Rica. He had a strong grasp of Latin American history and the role of imperialism, of poverty rates, and the ruthless plundering of natural resources in South America. He could not ignore that in a vastly rich country such as Venezuela, the majority of the people lived in extreme poverty. The archival footage is irrefutable proof of that reality of life.

As Chavez has explained many times, for more than half a century Venezuela was the world’s major oil exporter. At the beginning of the 20^th century, European and Yankee warships intervened to support an illegal and tyrannical government that handed the country over to foreign monopolies. It is well known that incalculable funds flowed out of Venezuela to swell the wealth of monopolies and the Venezuelan oligarchy.

I remember when I visited Venezuela for the first time —after the triumph of the Revolution, to give thanks for the support and friendliness afforded to our struggle—, oil was worth barely two dollars a barrel.

Afterwards when I went to Venezuela to take part in the swearing-in ceremony for Chavez, the day he took an oath on the “dying constitution” held by Calderas, oil was worth seven dollars a barrel, despite 40 years having passed since my first visit and almost 30 years since the “distinguished” Richard Nixon had cancelled the direct convertibility of the United States dollar to gold and the US began to buy the world with pieces of paper. For a century, Venezuela was a supplier of cheap fuel to the empire’s economy and a net exporter of capital to developed and rich countries.

Why did these repugnant situations dominate for more than a century?

Latin American Armed Forces’ officials went to their privileged schools in the United States, where the Olympic champions of democracies gave them special courses on maintaining imperialist and bourgeois order. Coups d’état were always welcomed if their objective was to “defend democracies,” safeguarding and guaranteeing this repugnant system, in league with the oligarchies. Whether voters knew how to read and write, whether they had homes, employment, medical services and education were unimportant as long as the sacred right to property was maintained. Chavez brilliantly explains this situation. No one knows as well as him what happened in our countries.

Even worse was that the sophisticated nature of weapons, the complex workings and use of modern armaments that require years of learning, the training of highly qualified specialists, and the almost prohibitive cost of such weapons for the weak economies of the continent created a very strong mechanism of subordination and dependence. The US Government, employing mechanisms that did not require prior consultation with the other governments, set guidelines and policies for the military. The most sophisticated techniques of torture were passed on to the so-called security agencies to interrogate those who rebelled against the dirty and repugnant system of hunger and exploitation.

Despite all this, many honest officials, tired of so many indignations, bravely attempted to eradicate that embarrassing treason against the history of our independence struggles.

In Argentina, military official Juan Domingo Peron was able to design an independent and worker-based policy in his country. A bloody military coup overthrew him, expelled him from his country, and kept him in exile from 1955 to 1973. Years later, under the aegis of the Yankees, they once again attacked the government, murdering, torturing and disappearing tens of thousands of Argentines. They were not even able to defend the country during the colonial war that England carried out against Argentina with the conspiratorial support of the United States and henchman Augusto Pinochet with his cohort of fascists officers trained at the School of the Americas.

In Santo Domingo, Colonel Francisco Caamaño Deño; in Peru, General Velazco Alvarado; in Panama, General Omar Torrijos; and in other countries captains and officers who gave their lives anonymously were the antithesis of the traitorous behavior embodied by Somoza, Trujillo, Stroessner and the cruel tyrannies in Uruguay, El Salvador and other countries in Central and South America. The revolutionary military personnel did not expound elaborate theories, nor was this to be expected. They were not academicians educated in political science, but rather men with a sense of honor who loved their country.

But how far can honest men —who deplore injustice and crime— go along the path of revolution?

Venezuela is an outstanding example of the theoretical and practical role that the military can play in the revolutionary struggle for the independence of our peoples, as they did two centuries ago under the brilliant leadership of Simon Bolivar.

Chavez, a Venezuelan military officer of humble origins, stepped into the political life of Venezuela inspired by the ideas of the Liberator of America. On Bolivar, an inexhaustible source of inspiration, Marti wrote: “he won sublime battles with soldiers barefoot and half naked [...] who never fought so much, nor fought better, in the world for freedom …”

“… Of Bolivar, he said, you can talk only after climbing up a mountain to use it as a platform [...] or after freeing a bunch of peoples united in one fist …”

“… what he did not do, still remains undone today, because Bolivar still has things to do in the Americas.”

More than half a century later the famous, award-winning poet Pablo Neruda wrote a poem on Bolivar which Chavez frequently quotes. The final stanza reads:

“I met Bolivar one long morning, in Madrid, at the head of the Fifth Regiment, Father, I said, you are or not or who you are? And looking at the Mountain Headquarters, he said:

‘I wake up every hundred years when the people awaken.’ ”

But the Bolivarian leader is not limited to theoretical elaborations. His concrete measures are implemented without hesitation. The English-speaking Caribbean countries, which have to contend with modern and luxurious Yankee cruise ships for the right to receive tourists in their hotels, restaurants and recreation centers, quite often foreign-owned, but at least they generate employment, will always welcome fuel from Venezuela, supplied by that country with special payment facilities, when the barrel reached prices that sometimes exceeded US $100.

In the tiny state of Nicaragua, the land of Sandino, the “General of Free Men”, the Central Intelligence Agency organized the exchange of guns for drugs through Luis Posada Carriles after he was rescued from a Venezuelan prison. This operation resulted in thousands of deaths and mutilations among that heroic people. Nicaragua has also received the solidarity support of Venezuela. These are unprecedented examples in the history of this hemisphere.

The ruinous Free Trade Agreement that the Yankees intend to impose on Latin America, as they did with Mexico, would turn Latin America and the Caribbean not only into the region with the world’s worst distribution of wealth, which already is. It will turn it into a huge market where corn and other staple foods that are traditional sources of plant and animal protein would be displaced by subsidized U.S. crops, as is already happening in Mexico.

Used cars and other goods are displacing Mexican industry manufactures; job opportunities are decreasing in both cities and the countryside; the drug and arms trades are escalating, growing numbers of youngsters aged 14 or 15 years are turned into fearsome criminals. Never before, buses or other vehicles full of people who even paid to be transported across the border in search of employment, have been kidnapped and mass murdered. Known figures grow from year to year. More than ten thousand people are now losing their lives each year.

It is impossible to analyze the Bolivarian Revolution without taking these realities into account.

The armed forces, in such social circumstances, are forced into endless and wearisome wars.

Honduras is not an industrialized, financial or commercial country, or even a major producer of drugs. However, some of its cities break the record of drug-related violent deaths. There instead stands the banner of a major base of the strategic forces of the United States Southern Command. What is happening there, and is already happening in more than one Latin American country, is the Dantesque picture painted above, from which some countries have begun to escape. Among them and first, Venezuela, not just because it has considerable natural resources, but because it has been rescued from the insatiable greed of foreign corporations and has sparked considerable political and social forces capable of great achievements. Venezuela today is quite another from that I went to only 12 years ago, which had already deeply impressed me, seeing it as a Phoenix rising again from the ashes of its history.

Mentioning the mysterious computer of Raul Reyes, in the hands of the U.S. and the CIA after the attack organized and supplied by them in full Ecuadorian territory, which killed Marulanda’s replacement as well as several unarmed American youths, a version has been released that Chávez supported the “narco-terrorist organization FARC.” The true terrorists and drug traffickers in Colombia are the paramilitaries that supplied drugs to American dealers to sell them in the largest drug market in the world: the United States.

I never spoke with Marulanda, but I did speak with honored writers and intellectuals who came to know him well. I discussed his thoughts and history. He was undoubtedly a brave and revolutionary man, which I do not hesitate to affirm. I explained that I did not agree with him on his tactics. In my view, two or three thousand men would have been more than enough to defeat a conventional army in the territory of Colombia. His mistake was to devise a revolutionary army with almost as many soldiers as the enemy. That was extremely expensive.

Today, technology has changed many aspects of war; the forms of struggle also change. In fact, the clash of conventional forces between powers possessing nuclear weapons has become impossible. We do not have to have the knowledge of Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and thousands of other scientists to understand that. It is a latent danger and the result is known or should be known. Thinking beings could take millions of years to repopulate the planet.

Nevertheless, I hold the duty to fight, which in itself is something innate in man, to find solutions that will enable a more reasoned and dignified existence.

Since I met Chavez, now as president of Venezuela, from the final stages of the Pastrana administration, I always saw him interested in promoting peace in Colombia. He facilitated meetings between the Colombian government and the revolutionaries that took place in Cuba, note well, on the basis of reaching a true peace agreement and not a surrender.

I do not recall ever having heard Chavez promote anything but peace in Colombia, nor mention Raul Reyes. We always addressed other issues. He particularly appreciates the Colombians, millions of them live in Venezuela and everyone benefits from the social measures taken by the Revolution, and the people of Colombia appreciate that almost as much as those of Venezuela.

I wish to express my solidarity and appreciation to General Henry Rangel Silva, Head of Strategic Operational Command of the Armed Forces, and newly appointed Minister of Defense of the Bolivarian Republic. I had the honor of meeting him when he visited Chavez in Cuba a few months ago. I could see in him an intelligent, well-meant, capable, and yet modest man. I heard his calm, brave and clear speech, which inspired confidence.

He led the organization of the most perfect parade of a Latin American military force that I have ever seen. We hope it will serve as encouragement and example to other brother armies.

The Yankees had nothing to do with that parade, and would not be able to do better.

It is extremely unfair to criticize Chavez for the resources invested in the excellent weapons which were displayed there. I’m sure they will never be used to attack a neighboring country. The weapons, resources and knowledge must go along the paths of  unity to see America, as  The Liberator dreamed, ”… the greatest nation in the world, greatest not so much by virtue of her area and wealth as by her freedom and glory..”

Everything unites us more than  Europe or the United States itself, except the lack of independence imposed on us for 200 years.

Fidel Castro Ruz

January 25, 2012

8:32 p.m.

Jose Marti was among the glorious legion of patriots who throughout the second half of the 19th century fought against the loathsome colonialism brandished by Spain for 300 years. Marti most clearly foresaw such a dramatic destiny and expressed this view in the last lines he would write prior to engaging in tough combat against a well-equipped and battle-hardened Spanish column. He declared that the primary objective of his struggles were “… preventing in time, by Cuba’s independence, that the United States should expand through the Antilles and pounce with that added strength on our lands of America. Everything that I have done up to now and will do in the future shall be done for this purpose.”

Today one cannot be a patriot or a revolutionary without thoroughly understanding this profound truth.

Without a doubt, the mass media, the monopoly of technical resources, and the substantial funds earmarked for misleading and making the masses mindless today represent considerable but not insurmountable obstacles.

Cuba showed that —despite being a factory of Yankee colonialism with widespread illiteracy and generalized poverty— it was possible to stand up to the country that threatened to definitively takeover the Cuban nation. No one can argue that at the time there was a national bourgeoisie that was opposed to the empire. In fact, the Cuban bourgeoisie at the time had developed such close ties to the empire that, shortly following the triumph of the Revolution, it sent 14,000 unprotected children to the United States based on the horrendous lie that Cuba was to abolish parental authority. History would come to remember this event as Operation Peter Pan and as one of the worst manipulations of children for political ends ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere.

Barely two days after the triumph of the Revolution the national territory was invaded by mercenary forces —made up of former Batista soldiers and sons of landowners and the bourgeoisie— armed and escorted by the United States with ships from the US Navy fleet including aircraft carriers with equipment ready for action. The defeat and capture of almost the entire force of mercenaries in less than 72 hours, and the destruction of their planes that were operating out of Nicaraguan bases and naval transportation means, represented a humiliating defeat for the empire and their Latin American allies who had underestimated the Cuban people’s capacity to fight.

Responding to the stoppage of oil supplies from the US, the previous total suspension of traditional Cuban sugar quotas in the US market, and the ban on trade in place for more than 100 years, the USSR began to supply fuel, to buy our sugar, to trade with our country and, finally, to supply the arms that Cuba could not acquire in other markets.

The idea of a systematic campaign of pirate attacks organized by the CIA, sabotages and military actions by groups created and armed by the US, before and after the mercenary attack and that would culminate with the United States’ military invasion of Cuba, gave rise to the events that pushed the world to the brink of total nuclear war that no sides or even humanity itself would have survived.

Those events no doubt cost Nikita Jruschov his job. He had underestimated his adversary, ignored opinions and information, and did not consult his final decision with those of us who were in the frontline. What could have been a significant moral victory became a costly political setback for the USSR. For many years the US continued to commit the worst crimes against Cuba and many, such as its criminal blockade, are still carried out today.

Jruschov made extraordinary gestures to our country. At the time I did not hesitate in strongly criticizing the agreement reached with the United States without consultation. But it would be ungrateful and unjust to not acknowledge his extraordinary solidarity at difficult and decisive junctures for our people in their historic battle for independence and their revolution in face of the powerful US empire. I understand that the situation was extremely tense and that he did not want to lose a minute when he made his decision to remove the missiles and the Yankees, very secretly, agreed to not carry out their invasion.

Despite all the decades that have passed and make up more than half a century, the Cuban fruit has not fallen into Yankee hands.

Current news from Spain, France, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Syria, England, the Malvinas and several other parts of the planet are serious and all foretell political and economic disaster due to the foolhardiness of the United States and its allies.

I will limit myself to just a few topics. I must point out that the campaign to select a Republican candidate as the possible future president of this globalized and far-reaching empire has become —I say this in all seriousness— the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been heard. But as I have things to do, I cannot dedicate any time to this topic. I knew it would be like this.

I prefer to analyze some other press dispatches that show the incredible cynicism generated by the decadence of the West. One of these reports, with amazing tranquility, tells the story of a Cuban “political prisoner” who, according to the article, died after a 50-day hunger strike. A journalist from Granma, Juventud Rebelde, radio or any other [Cuban] news agency might make a mistake writing on any given topic, but they would never make up a news story and fabricate a lie.

The article published in Granma confirms that the 50-day hunger strike did not take place. The prisoner was in jail for committing a common crime and sentenced to four years for an assault that left his wife’s face battered. The man’s own mother-in-law went to the police to request their help. All family members were aware of all the procedures taken regarding the medical care he received and were thankful of the efforts carried out by the specialist doctors who attended him. The article goes on to say that he received care at the best hospital in eastern Cuba, as any other citizen would have received. He died as a result of secondary multiple organ failure associated with an acute respiratory infection.

The patient had received all the available medical care from a country that possesses one of the best medical systems in the world and that provides these services free-of-charge, despite the empire’s blockade against our country. It simply represents a duty in a country where the Revolution proudly respects, as it always has for more than 50 years, the principles that gave it its invincible force.

Given their excellent relations with Washington, it would be best if the Spanish government went to the United States to take a look at what happens in Yankee prisons, their ruthless treatment of millions of prisoners, their electric chair policy, and the horrors committed against prisoners and public protesters.

On Monday, January 23, Granma published a full-page, hard-hitting editorial entitled Cuba’s Truths. The article details the exceptional degree of shamelessness in the latest campaign of lies launched against our Revolution by some governments “traditionally committed to anti-Cuban subversion.”

Our people are well aware of the standards that have governed over the irreproachable conduct of our Revolution since the first combat and that has never been sullied throughout more than half a century. They also know that they can never be pressured or blackmailed by their enemies. Our laws and regulations will invariably be abided by.

This is worthwhile to point out with total clarity and openness. The Spanish government and the beat-up European Union, in the midst of an acute economic crisis, should know what to abide by. It is a disgrace to read declarations from both regions in news reports that are full of shameless lies attacking Cuba. Try to save the Euro first if you can, try to resolve chronic unemployment that increasingly affects young people, and respond to the indignados who have only received attacks and constant beatings from the police.

We cannot ignore that those who currently govern in Spain are admirers of Franco, who sent members of the Blue Division along with SS and SA Nazis to kill Soviets. Close to 50,000 of them participated in the bloody attacks. In the most cruel and painful operation of that war, the Leningrad Blockade where one million Russian citizens died, the Blue Division were part of the forces that attempted to strangle the heroic city. The Russian people will never forgive that horrendous crime.

The rightwing fascists led by Aznar, Rajoy and other servants of the empire must know about the 16,000 fatalities suffered by their predecessors of the Blue Division and the Iron Crosses that Hitler awarded the officials and soldiers of that division.

It is not a surprise then to see how the Gestapo police are treating the Spanish men and women who demand the right to work and bread in the country with the highest unemployment in Europe.

Why do the mass media outlets of the empire lie so shamelessly?

Those who control those media outlets are determined to deceive and make the world mindless with their gross lies, maybe believing that they represent the main recourse necessary to maintain the global system of domination and plunder, especially against those victims close to the mother country —the close to 70 million Latin Americans and Caribbean people who live in this hemisphere.

The fraternal republic of Venezuela has become one of the main targets of this policy. The reason is obvious. Without Venezuela, the empire would have imposed its Free Trade Agreement on all of the people of the continent living south of the United States; an area that holds the planet’s largest reserves of land, fresh water and minerals as well as great energy resources, which, when managed in solidarity with the other people in the world, constitutes resources which cannot and must not fall into the hands of transnationals that impose a suicidal and despicable system.

It is enough, for example, to look at the map to understand the criminal dispossession carried out against Argentina of a piece of its territory in the far south. In the Malvinas, the British employed their decadent military apparatus to assassinate inexperienced Argentine recruits dressed in summer clothing in the middle of winter. The United States and their ally Augusto Pinochet shamelessly supported England in this endeavor. Currently, with the London Olympics on the horizon, British Prime Minister David Cameron is once again proclaiming, as did Margaret Thatcher, his right to use nuclear submarines to kill Argentines. The British government is unaware that the world is changing and that the disdain felt in our hemisphere by the majority of the people against the oppressors is growing with each day.

The case of the Malvinas is not alone. Does anyone know how the conflict in Afghanistan will end? A few days ago US soldiers committed outrages against the bodies of Afghani combatants, killed by NATO drone aircraft.

Three days ago a European news agency published an article stating that Afghani President Hamid Karzai gave his support of a negotiated peace settlement with the Taliban, stressing that it must be resolved by citizens in his country. Hamid Karzai added that the peace and reconciliation process belongs to the Afghani nation and that no foreign country or organization can take away this right from Afghanis.

An article in the Cuban press written in Paris reported, “Today France suspended all its military training and support operations in Afghanistan and threatened to move up the date for the withdrawal of its troops after an Afghani soldier killed four French military officers in the Taghab valley in the province of Kapisa…Sarkozy gave instructions to Defense Minister Gerard Longuet to immediately travel to Kabul, and warned of the possibility of an early withdrawal of troops.”

When the USSR and the Socialist Camp disappeared, the United States government thought that Cuba would not be able to support itself. George W. Bush had already prepared a counterrevolutionary government to preside over our country. The same day that Bush began his criminal war against Iraq, I requested that our authorities stop with the policy of tolerance towards the counterrevolutionary leaders in Cuba that had been hysterically calling for an invasion of Cuba. In reality, their actions constituted an act of treason against the Homeland.

Bush and his stupidities reigned for eight years at a time when the Cuban Revolution had already lasted for more than half a century. The ripe fruit has never fallen into the lap of the empire. Cuba will never become another force used by the empire to expand over the people of the Americas. Marti’s blood will not have been shed in vain.

Tomorrow I will publish another Reflection article to complement this one.

Fidel Castro Ruz

January 24, 2012

7:12 p.m.

As fate would have it, the other day marked the 94^th anniversary of the glorious Soviet Socialist Revolution. Unforgettable pages in history were written by Russian workers, peasants and soldiers and the name of Lenin shall always be shining among men and women who dream of a just future for humankind.

These topics are ever more complicated and the efforts poured into educating the new generations shall never suffice. Therefore, today I dedicate some time to comment on this event, in the midst of so many occurring on a daily basis on our planet and the news of which arrives by a growing number of channels that were barely imaginable just a few decades ago.

I must say that the Nicaraguan election was held in a traditional and bourgeois style, having nothing fair or equitable about it, since the sectors of the oligarchy who have an anti-national and pro-imperialist character have, as a norm, the monopoly on economic and publicity resources which, generally speaking, and in a special way on our hemisphere, are at the service of the political and military interests of the empire; all that underlines the magnitude of the Sandinista victory.

It is a truth that our Homeland knows well from the time Marti died at Dos Ríos on May 19 of 1895, to “timely prevent, with the independence of Cuba, that the United States could expand over the Antilles and fall with additional force over our American lands”.

We shall never tire in repeating it, especially after our people have been able to steadfastly stand up to half a century of sustained economic blockade and the most brutal aggressions of that empire.

However it is not hatred that moves our people; it is ideas. From these ideas our solidarity with the people of Sandino, the general of free men, was born; we read about him with admiration when, more than 60 years ago, we were university students and without the marvellous cultural outlook of those who, in a few days and along with the students in secondary education, shall be taking part in something that by now is a beautiful tradition: the University Festival of Books and Reading.

The heroic death of the Nicaraguan hero who fought against the Yankee occupation forces in his territory was always a source of inspiration for Cuban revolutionaries. Our solidarity with the Nicaraguan people is not surprising; it was expressed from the very first days of the revolutionary triumph in Cuba on January 1^st of 1959.

Yesterday, on the 8th, the newspaper Granma was reminding us of the heroic fall in November of 1976, just two and a half years before the triumph, of the founder of the FSLN, Carlos Fonseca Amador, “tayacán[1] victor over death”, as the lovely song written in his memory “sweetheart of the Red-Black Homeland, all of Nicaragua shouts ‘Present!’”.

I know Daniel well; he never adopted extremist positions and was always invariably faithful to basic principles. Given the responsibility of the presidency on the basis of a group political directorship, he was characterized by his respectful conduct in terms of the points of view of his comrades coming from within the Sandinista movement at a determinate stage in the struggle before the triumph. He thus became a unifying factor among the revolutionaries and sustained contacts with the people. This was due to the great ascendancy he acquired among the more humble sectors of Nicaragua.

The depth of the Sandinista Revolution earned him the hatred of the Nicaraguan oligarchy and Yankee imperialism.

The most atrocious crimes were perpetrated against his country and his people in the Dirty War that Reagan and Bush promoted from the presidency and the CIA.

Many counter-revolutionary gangs were organized, trained and supplied by them; drug trafficking became the instrument for funding the counter-revolution and tens of thousands of weapons brought into the country caused the death or injury of thousands of Nicaraguans.

The Sandinistas held elections in the midst of that unequal and unfair battle.

The fall of the Socialist bloc is added to this situation, along with the imminent collapse of the USSR and the beginning of the Special Period in our Homeland. Such difficult circumstances and despite the support of the majority of the Nicaraguan people, expressed in every opinion survey, made an electoral victory impossible.

The Nicaraguan people were forced to once more put up with almost 17 years of corrupt and pro-imperialist governments. The rates of health, literacy and social justice installed in Nicaragua began to painfully go downhill. Nevertheless, the Sandinista revolutionaries, under Daniel’s leadership, continued their fight throughout those long, bitter years and again the people recovered the government even though it was in greatly difficult conditions that demanded a maximum of experience and political wisdom.

Cuba was continuing under the brutal Yankee blockade and suffering, moreover, the rough consequences of the Special Period and the hostility of one of the worst murderers that has governed the United States, George W. Bush, son of the father who had promoted the Dirty War in Nicaragua, freedom for the terrorist Posada Carriles to distribute weapons to the Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries and reprieved Orlando Bosch who was the other author of the Barbados Crime.

However, a new phase was beginning in Our America with the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and the coming to power in Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay of governments committed to the independence and integration of Latin American peoples.

Furthermore, I can state with satisfaction that the solidarity of Cuba with the country of Sandino never ceased in the field of political and social solidarity. I must point out with total fairness that Nicaragua was one of the countries that best used Cuba’s cooperation in health and education.

The thousands of doctors who have provided their services in that heroic sister country feel really motivated by the excellent use the Sandinistas made of their efforts. The same can be asserted about the thousands of teachers who, during one day in the first phase of the process, were sent into the most remote mountain areas to teach the peasants to read and write. Today the education experiences in general and especially the practices of teaching medicine coming from the Latin American School of Medicine where thousands of excellent doctors have been trained have been transferred to Nicaragua. Such realities constitute an excellent stimulus for our people.

These details I am mentioning are nothing more than an example of the prolific effort of the Sandinista revolutionaries in favour of the development of their Homeland.

The fundamental nature of Daniel’s role and the reason for my opinion about his overwhelming victory is that he never distanced himself from contact with the people and the never-ending struggle for their well-being.

Today he is a truly experienced leader who has been capable of handling complicated and difficult situations from the years when his country was once more under the aegis of rapacious capitalism. He knows how to intelligently handle complex problems; he knows what he can and cannot do, what he should and should not do in order to ensure peace and the sustained advance of the economic and social development of the country. He is very much aware of the fact that he owes the overwhelming victory to his heroic and courageous people, because of their broad participation and almost two-thirds of the votes cast in his favour. He was able to establish close ties with the workers, peasants, students, young people, women, technicians, professionals, artists and all progressive sectors and forces that sustain and carry out the advances made in the country. In my opinion, it is very right to call on all the democratic political forces willing to work for independence and the economic and social development of the country.

In today’s world, problems are extremely complicated and difficult. But while the world exists, we, the small countries, can and must exercise our right for independence, cooperation, development and peace.

Fidel Castro Ruz

November 9, 2011

8:12 p.m.

[1] Tayacán: Nicaraguan word used to describe a brave and hardworking person seen as a leader.

Bridgetown, Barbados

At the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies in Barbados, Professor Cecilia Karch-Braithwaite also heard the loud droning of a passenger plane overhead. She told me, “It was unusual, because the aircraft was flying too low and was on a path that planes never take when they approach the airport.” She remembers seeing smoke coming from the side of the plane as it banked to the right and dove nose first into the waters of Paradise Beach. The university is located on a hill five miles from the beach.

I met Guiller and Karch-Braithwaite in Barbardos during last week’s ceremonies to commemorate the 35^th anniversary of the murder of the 73 people aboard the Cuban passenger plane that crashed only a few minutes after takeoff from Seawell International Airport in Barbados. Their memories of that day are still vivid.

THE VICTIMS

The aircraft was a DC-8, flown by Cubana de Aviación. It had received its regular maintenance only 10 days earlier and carried 73 persons the day it crashed. The average age on board was a mere 30 years of age, because 24 members of the Cuban  fencing team were returning to Cuba after having swept the gold medals at the Pan American games in Caracas, Venezuela. They boarded the plane wearing their medals. In total, there were 57 Cubans, 11 Guyanese, and 5 Koreans. http://www.granma.cu/barbados/galeria.html

THE BOMBS

At 1:23 p.m., local time, Seawell International Airport reported that the pilot, Wilfredo Pérez, called to report an emergency on board, “Seawell! Seawell! CU-455 Seawell…! We have an explosion on board….. We have a fire on board.” A forensic investigation made by Dr. Julio Lara Alonso established that two bombs exploded aboard CU-455, causing it to crash into the sea. The first bomb—under a passenger seat—ignited a fire near the front of the plane, and the second bomb, which exploded about eight minutes later in the rear bathroom of the plane, brought the plane down in seconds.

“I KILLED MORE THAN THE JACKAL”

Two Venezuelan nationals, Hernán Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, had left the bombs on the plane, before disembarking in Barbados. Lugo later told police officials that Ricardo boasted that the 73 people he killed on the plane were “more than the Jackal,” alluding to the famous terrorist Carlos the Jackal. “Now I’m the one who has the record, because I’m the one who blew up that thing,” he told Lugo.

Ricardo confessed to Barbadian and Trinidad officials who were investigating the crime that he and Lugo bombed the plane and that they worked for the CIA and Luis Posada Carriles. He even drew a diagram for them of the detonator he used to ignite the C-4 explosives he placed in the aircraft. He admitted to receiving $25,000 for downing the plane.

Lugo and Ricardo were extradited to Venezuela by Trinidad and Tobago. There they were convicted for their role in downing the plane and sentenced to 20 years. After serving their time, they were released. Lugo still lives in Caracas, driving a taxi to earn his living. The Miami Herald reported that Ricardo is now an undercover operative in Florida for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

THE MASTERMIND

In 1985 Luis Posada Carriles was indicted and prosecuted as the mastermind of the murder of the 73 persons aboard that plane. But before the Venezuelan court could pronounce a verdict, he escaped from prison.  Within a few weeks, he landed a job with the CIA in an operation that later became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. The United States has never bothered to explain how it was possible for an international fugitive charged with 73 counts of first-degree murder to so quickly land a $120,000-a-year job with the CIA, arming Nicaraguan Contras.

THE HORROR

When he saw the plane crash into the water, Dalton Guiller immediately swung his small ski boat around and in two minutes arrived on the scene. “I was with two other chaps, and we went to see whether there were any survivors. Unfortunately, there were none,” he said. Surrounded by a strong of smell of fuel, Guiller surveyed the horror. “I saw suitcases, seats, and personal effects.  I saw bodies: only one or two of them intact. The others were not full bodies.” He added, “They were suspended at the level of the sea. Perhaps the seat belts cut them off, I could not tell. It was just striking that two or three of the bodies were perpendicular under the sea. Trousers, but no top. Top, but no bottom.”

The forensic report performed by the Barbadian coroner describes the condition of the body of little Sabrina, a nine-year old Guyanese girl who was traveling with her family to Cuba: “Body of a girl around 9 years of age…. Brain missing, only facial bones, scalp, and hair remaining. Lungs and heart destroyed. Liver and intestines shattered. Buttocks missing on right lower limb. Compound fracture of tibia and fibula …“

THE HATRED

The impetus for the horror that invaded paradise that day in Barbados was hatred. Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, terrorists have murdered 2,478 Cubans and incapacitated 2,099 others.

Declassified U.S. intelligence cables reveal that Luis Posada Carriles had spoken of plans to “hit” a Cuban airliner only days before Ricardo and Lugo blew up CU-455. The CIA informed Washington, but no one uttered a word of warning to the Cuban or Venezuelan governments.

What happened in Barbados three and a half decades ago is not an isolated incident. The threat persists.  From his lair in Miami, one of the masterminds of the attack on the Cuban airliner, Luis Posada Carriles, continues to call for violence against the Cuban people. His friends continue their efforts to violently lash out at the people of Cuba in an effort to terrorize them into supporting the forceful overthrow of the Cuban government.

OUR MAN IN LATIN AMERICA

Posada Carriles readily admits his relationship with the CIA. His lawyer told a federal court judge that everything his client did in Latin America he did in the “name of Washington.”

What, then, is it that Mr. Posada did in Latin America “in the name of Washington”? Besides the mass murder of the people aboard that passenger plane, Posada tortured Venezuelans in the 1970s, assisted in the murder of Nicaraguans in the 1980s, and trained Guatemalan and Salvadoran death squads in the 1980s and 1990s.  He also planned a series of bombings at prominent Cuban hotels and restaurants in 1997, resulting in the murder of Italian businessman Fabio DiCelmo and the wounding of several others. He also conspired to assassinate the president of Cuba, Fidel Castro, several times, including in 2000 at the University of Panamá, where he planned to use 100 pounds of C-4 explosives to blow up a university auditorium full of students along with the Cuban president.

The cruelty of a 50-year war of terror against Cuba is abhorrent. The training that the United States has given Cuban-American terrorists is immoral. Providing them with weapons is a scandal: continuing to protect them an outrage.

THE DOUBLE STANDARD

In contrast to the United States, Venezuela does not assassinate those it alleges are terrorists. It relies on the rule of law to pursue them, but for the rule of law to be effective, the other parties to those laws, including the United States, must observe their legal obligations. When Posada Carriles illegally arrived in the United States in 1985, Venezuela immediately filed an extradition request, based on an extradition treaty that dates back to 1922 and on an international convention designed to combat terrorism: the Montreal Convention on Civil Aviation. Rather than extraditing Posada Carriles to Venezuela, the U.S. government instead tried him for minor immigration violations in El Paso, and a jury acquitted him of those in April of this year. He now lives freely in Miami.

United Nations Resolution 1373 forbids the harboring of terrorists by member nations. This resolution was introduced by the United States to combat terrorism after the tragedy of 9-11. Does it not also oblige the United States to extradite the terrorists it harbors?

THE CUBAN FIVE

Thirteen years ago, the United States government arrested, convicted and subsequently sentenced Five Cubans in Miami to long prison terms, but they were not terrorists.

The Five had gone to Miami to gather evidence against Cuban-American terrorists. In 1998, Cuba turned the evidence over to the FBI in the hope that the terrorists would be arrested and prosecuted. Yet the U.S. government didn’t arrest or charge the terrorists. Instead it arrested, charged, and imprisoned those who had gathered the evidence. The Cuban Five have been in jail now for 13 cruel years.

Gerardo Hernández is serving two life terms plus 15 years. The Court of Appeals ratified his sentence. Even if he dies in prison twice and resurrects each time, he would still not have completed his sentence.

Ramón Labañino was sentenced to a life term plus 18 years—subsequently the Court of Appeals ruled the sentence to be in violation of the law for being too harsh, vacated it and remanded his case to the same judge who had sentenced him. Judge Joan Lenard in Miami re-sentenced him and reduced the sentence to “only” 30 years.

Antonio Guerrero was sentenced to a life term plus 10 years. The Court of Appeals vacated his sentence, and Judge Lenard reduced it to “only” 21 years and ten months.

Fernando Gonzalez was sentenced to 19 years. The Court of Appeals vacated it, and Judge Lenard reduced it to “only” 17 years and 9 months.

René González was sentenced to 15 years. The Court of Appeals ratified his sentence, and he was released from jail on October 7. However, his release comes with conditions. He is not allowed to return to Cuba, as he wishes, to rejoin his wife and children but must instead remain in the United States for three more years—an additional punishment as cruel as it is irresponsible. The terrorists that the United States protects are free and would relish exacting their revenge on the man who monitored their activities on behalf of Cuba.

INDIFFERENCE VS. INDIGNATION

Getting the United States to extradite Luis Posada Carriles is not easy, and convincing President Barack Obama to free the Cuban Five will also be difficult. Neither case appears on the radar of American public opinion. The United States counts on the indifference of people. It knows that indifference is the unsung ally of injustice.

But as people learn about the history of terrorism against Cuba they grow indignant and demand justice.  Indifference crumbles when confronted with indignation.

THE MEMORY OF THOSE KILLED

The 73 persons assassinated in cold blood 35 years ago in Barbados are not forgotten. As I stood on Paradise Beach in front of the monument to their memory, I listened to the national anthems of Cuba and Barbados and scanned the sea before me, where the plane lies at the bottom of Deep Water Bay., remembering that the remains of 58 persons were never recovered.

Standing next to me at the monument was the son of Wilfredo Pérez, the brave pilot who steered the aircraft away from the sandy beach to avoid killing dozens of Barbadians on shore. Wilfredo (he is named after his father) could have easily allowed hatred to consume him, but instead he became a psychologist.  His life’s work is to help broken people to mend.

Killed aboard that plane was also Nancy Uranga, a pregnant 22-year-old fencer from Cuba. It is well known that 73 persons were killed that day over Barbados, but few know that Nancy was pregnant and that the terrorists killed her unborn child as well.

The terrorists also killed Carlos Cremata that day. Carlos was 41 years old. He was a member of the crew and also an actor. His friends and family recall that Carlos always greeted them with, “Viva la vida” (Long live life). One of his sons, Carlos Alberto Cremata, founded one of the world’s most renowned children’s theater companies—La Colmenita (The Little Beehive)—whose mission is “sembrar el amor” (to sow love). La Colmenita is now on tour in the United States.

There is a history of injustice in the waters of Paradise Beach in Barbados. The cold-blooded murder of the 73 people aboard that passenger plane was a crime against them, their families, and their countries. It was also a crime against Barbados and its people.

THE BAJAN-AMERICAN

The Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder Jr., is a Bajan-American. He was raised in a Bajan household in New York. His father, Eric Sr., was born in Barbados and married the daughter of Barbadian immigrants.

When he visited Barbados in 2008, the soon-to-be nominated Attorney General said, “I feel that I grew up partly in Barbados and partly in New York.”

History has now given him an opportunity to solve a mass murder that occurred in his parents’ home country 35 years ago. Mr. Holder can present to a United States District Court Venezuela’s request for the extradition of Luis Posada Carriles. He can also recommend that President Obama exercise his constitutional power of executive clemency to free the Cuban Five.

THE CHARACTER OF THE UNITED STATES AS A NATION

The extradition of Luis Posada Carriles to Venezuela and the liberation of the Cuban Five are the responsibility of the United States and its people. More than merely legal issues, they are a moral imperative. At stake are not simply the facts of two particular criminal cases but bedrock principles of social justice and the character of the United States as a nation.

Will Eric Holder and President Barack Obama be up to the task? Will the people of the United States demand justice?

José Pertierra is an attorney. He represents the government of Venezuela in the extradition case of Luis Posada Carriles.

(Tlaxcala)

Since June 18, 2004, when the CIA began its policy of extrajudicial killings in Pakistan, it has left nearly 250 such stains on Pakistani soil, daubed with the remains of more than 2,500 individuals, mostly civilians. More recently, it has taken to decorating other parts of the world.

Since the Pakistani government and its shadowy intelligence agencies have been complicit in the killings, the CIA has been able to do all this with complete impunity. Major human rights organisations in thrall to the Obama Administration have given it a pass. So have the media, who uncritically accept officials’ claims about the accuracy of their lethal toys.

Two recent developments might change all this.

The unlawful combatant

On July 18, 2011, three Pakistani tribesmen, Kareem Khan, Sadaullah, and Maezol Khan, filed a formal complaint against John A Rizzo, the CIA’s former acting General Counsel, at a police station in Islamabad. Until his retirement on June 25, 2009, Rizzo served as legal counsel to the program whose victims have included Kareem Khan’s son and brother, Maezol Khan’s seven-year-old son, and three family members of Sadaullah (who also lost both legs and an eye in the attack).

In an interview with Newsweek‘s Tara McKelvey, Rizzo bragged that he was responsible for signing off on the “hit list” for “lethal operations”. The targets were “blown to bits” in “businesslike” operations, he said. By his own admission, he is implicated in “murder”. Indeed, he boasted: “How many law professors have signed off on a death warrant?” And that is not the full extent of Rizzo’s derring-do: he claims he was also “up to my eyeballs” in Bush’s program of torture in black sites in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The detailed First Information Report (FIR) that barrister Mirza Shahzad Akbar prepared on behalf of the tribesmen was filed at the Secretariat Police Station in Islamabad, whose territorial jurisdiction includes the residence of Rizzo’s leading co-conspirator Jonathan Banks, the CIA station chief who has since fled Pakistan. As a party to a conspiracy to commit murder in Pakistan, Akbar believes that Rizzo is subject to the country’s penal code.

Clive Stafford Smith, the celebrated human rights lawyer best known as George W Bush’s nemesis over Guantanamo, is leading the campaign to secure an international arrest warrant for Rizzo. Asked about the question of jurisdiction, Smith told me that that “there is no issue of jurisdiction – these are a series of crimes, including murder … committed on Pakistani soil against Pakistani citizens”. The CIA, he says, is “waging war against Pakistan”. He insists that “there is no question that [Rizzo] is liable for the crimes he is committing. The only issue is whether he will face the music or be kept hidden by the authorities”.

Smith, who heads the legal charity Reprieve, is a practical man, uninterested in mere symbolic gestures. Earlier, he successfully sued the Bush administration for access to prisoners at Guantanomo and has so far secured the release of 65 of them. He is confident that once the Islamabad police issues a warrant, Interpol will have no choice but to pursue the case. Furthermore, he notes, depending on the success of this test case, they will broaden it to also include drone operators.

The US position so far is to either claim that it is engaged in legitimate self-defence, or to make the policy more palatable by downplaying its human cost. Neither argument is tenable.

The laws of war do not prohibit the killing of civilians unless it is deliberate, disproportionate or indiscriminate. However, Akbar and Smith reject the applicability of these laws to CIA’s drone war. “The US has to follow the laws of war,” Smith recently told the Guardian. But “the issue here is that this is not a war” - there is no declared state of conflict between the US and Pakistan. Moreover, Gary Solis of Georgetown University, an expert in the laws of war, told Newsweek that “the CIA who pilot unmanned aerial vehicles are civilians directly engaged in hostilities, an act that makes them ‘unlawful combatants’ and possibly subject to prosecution”.

Murder by numbers

The US government has made bold claims for the extraordinary accuracy of its wonder-weapons. In a press conference earlier this year, US president Barack Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan insisted that “nearly for the past year there hasn’t been a single collateral death” in the CIA’s drone war.

This would be remarkable indeed if it weren’t demonstrably false. A major investigation by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) has shown that in just ten CIA drone attacks since August last year there were a minimum of 45 individuals killed who were confirmed civilians. These include women, children, policemen, students and rescuers among others. TBIJ has also identified an additional 15 attacks in which 65 more civilians might have been killed.

Unlike the New America Foundation or the neoconservative Long War Journal - the two most frequently cited, and least reliable, sources on drone casualties – TBIJ’s investigation does not rely on official claims or the media reports that exclusively rely on them. Chris Woods, the journalist who led the TBIJ investigation, told me earlier this month that, besides reviewing thousands of media reports about the attacks - including those written days, weeks, or even months after the initial incident - the Bureau has worked with journalists, researchers, and the lawyers representing the civilians killed in the attacks. The Bureau has also employed its own researchers in Waziristan to corroborate the evidence it has gathered.

However, as the Bureau notes, its figures for civilian casualties are a “conservative estimate”. It has only included those in its list whose civilian status it can confirm through multiple sources. The actual figures are likely much higher. But given the restrictions on travel to the region, a more comprehensive assessment of the war’s human cost remains impossible.

The respected Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai told me that it is no longer possible for journalists from outside to travel to the tribal region and, as a result, most of the reporting comes from a handful of stringers based in Miranshah and Mir Ali.

Confined to the environs of the region’s two main cities, even the journalists based in FATA have to call up the military’s press office for information on all strikes that occur beyond those limits. The kind of courage exhibited by 39-year-old Noor Behram, who photographed the aftermath of 27 drone attacks in North and South Waziristan between November 29, 2008, and June 15, 2011, is rare. The photos are currently on display at London’s Beaconsfield gallery. Unsurprisingly, the picture that emerges does not quite jibe with the CIA’s claims. “For every ten to 15 people killed,” he told the Guardian, “maybe they get one militant”.

The CIA claims that of the nearly 2,500 Pakistanis killed in the drone attacks, 35 were “high value targets” - that is, people it actually intended to kill. The rest it claims were mostly “suspected militants”. The world of think-tankery is even more linguistically challenged – in the New America Foundation’s database there is no category for “civilian” – there are only “militants” and “others”. Until now we had only the CIA and the ISI’s word for the presumed guilt of those killed. Given the history of both organisations there is ample ground for scepticism, but in the light of the Bureau’s investigation, the public would be wise to treat all future victims of the drone war as civilians unless proven otherwise.

But even where guilt is established, the killings would still constitute extra-judicial murder since no declared state of hostilities exists between the US and Pakistan. Things have come a long way since July 2001, when following Israel’s “targeted killing” of Palestinians, the then US Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk declared: “The United States government is very clearly on record as against targeted assassinations … They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that.”

Under Obama, extrajudicial killings have been adopted as a less complicated alternative to detention. Earlier in the year, Newsweek quoted one of Obama’s legal svengalis – American University’s Kenneth Anderson, author of an essay on the subject that was read widely by Obama White House officials – as saying: “Since the US political and legal situation has made aggressive interrogation a questionable activity anyway, there is less reason to seek to capture rather than kill.”

“And if one intends to kill, the incentive is to do so from a standoff position because it removes potentially messy questions of surrender.”

Deferred reckoning

So far, the drones policy has been an unmitigated disaster. The handful of Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders killed have been replaced by a more ruthless leadership which has progressively expanded its operational ambit into the Pakistani mainland. To the extent that “militants” are killed, they are mostly foot soldiers whose death has no discernible impact on the outcome of the insurgency; indeed, it merely helps deepen resentment and broaden the militants’ support base. The CIA practice of bombing funerals and rescuers has ensured that even those who might otherwise disdain the Taliban identify with them as common victims of a uniquely barbarous adversary. Unable to strike back at the US, the Taliban instead revenge themselves on Pakistani soldiers and civilians in attacks that are no less brutal.

Two years ago, when I spoke to Yusufzai amid one of the most ferocious wave of terrorist attacks on Peshawar, he remained optimistic that, once the US withdrew from Afghanistan the militancy would recede. Events of the past two years have tempered his optimism. Last week when I spoke to him again, he told me that conditions have deteriorated so much that Pakistan will have to live with the consequences of America’s reckless war long after it has withdrawn. The drone attacks are merely compounding the mess.

Campaigners in Britain and Pakistan are determined to bring transparency to Obama’s secretive war and justice to its victims. Barrister Akbar told me in an email that with his team of researchers, he is “working to dig out information beyond the news reports, trying to find out the identities of individuals killed in drone strikes”. He is now representing a growing number of individuals who have lost family members to the CIA drones, and many more are coming forward.

“This is only the start of a long, long, peaceful battle to stop this kind of ‘murder by videogame’,” says Smith. “What we most need are allies willing to work with us, and help provide truthful information about what is really happening on the ground in Pakistan’s border regions.”

By http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/

We live in an age where insider deals, conflicts of interest, revolving doors between “regulators” and the “regulated” (lubricated with oceans of cash) accompanies the generalized looting of social wealth by deviant capitalist elites.

That such behavior by our corporate masters no longer raise an eyebrow, let alone elicit action by authorities charged with stopping criminal miscreants destroying other people’s lives, is an unmistakable sign that the much-vaunted “free market” system, staring into an abyss of its own creation, has entered a terminal phase.

It now appears that insiders at Standard and Poor’s or the Treasury Department, take your pick, may have leaked information to privileged clients on the recent U.S. credit downgrade, with confirmation coming from a surprising source.

Last week, AntiSec cyber-guerrillas (a loose alliance amongst individuals affiliated with LulzSec and Anonymous) released a 1GB cache of emails filched from security contractor Vanguard Defense Industries (VDI).

Previously Anonymous and LulzSec have wrapped their keyboards around defense grifters Booz Allen Hamilton, ManTech International, NATO, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, InfraGard (a “public-private” security alliance amongst corporate heavy-hitters and the Bureau), the CIA, the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center (a so-called “fusion center” staffed by cops, federal agents, private contractors and the U.S. military), the Bay Area Rapid Transit agency (BART), Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency, PBS, Fox News, and repressive governments such as Egypt, Tunisia and Zimbabwe.

Their latest campaign targeted VDI, a Texas-based firm, which specializes in the “development and deployment” of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS, killer drones). VDI “draws on specialized experience of senior aerospace engineers, former military special operations officers, military instructor pilots as well as retired Senior Executive Service Federal Agents,” claiming their “background and operational knowledge has afforded us the unique vision to provide a platform that will extend the security and response capabilities of any organization,” according to a blurb on their web site.

While VDI touts their ability to offer “support” to the “military, local, state and federal law enforcement as well as the private sector,” the firm also offers “a full scope of consulting services independent of our aerial technology.”

That “unique vision” however, didn’t prevent AntiSec from spiriting away thousands of emails from VDI’s Senior Vice President Richard T. Garcia, a former FBI Assistant Director in Los Angeles who recently left a well-paid position as Global Security Manager for the environment-killing Shell Oil Corporation (can you say Niger Delta?) for “greener” pastures.

A press statement from AntiSec announced that the leak “contains internal meeting notes and contracts, schematics, non-disclosure agreements, personal information about other VDI employees, and several dozen ‘counter-terrorism’ documents classified as ‘law enforcement sensitive’ and ‘for official use only’.”

“Vanguard Defense Industries,” AntiSec writes, “manufactures unmanned ‘ShadowHawk’ drones which cost $640,000 and are equipped with grenade launchers and shotguns. ShadowHawks are currently in use by law enforcement, military, and private corporations deploying them in the US, the Horn of Africa, Panama, Columbia [sic], and US-Mexico border patrol operations. These emails contain contracts, schematics, non-disclosure agreements, and more. Additionally we found evidence of a Merrill Lynch wealth management advisor giving private advance notice to Garcia about upcoming S&P US credit rating downgrades.”

Improper Disclosures

In an April 25, 2011 email from Garcia to Gloria Newport, Cindy Cook, a Wealth Management Advisor with Bank of America-owned Merrill Lynch “advised that Standard and Poors, may lower the credit rating of the US Government which could cause a run on US Banks that will affect the Federal Reserve. They give the US Govt. 2 years to correct the current situation, which they believe both the Republican and Democratic solutions do not do enough and both parties may make this a political situation for the 2012 Presidential election and never come up with a answer to correct the situation within the two years set by Standard and Poors. She did not see any real Cyber issue that could change the situation.”

Investigative journalist Steve Ragan, writing at The Tech Herald(the publication that broke the story on Anonymous’s HBGary hack) informs us that “the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating whether there was any sort of insider trading done by S&P employees before the downgrade was official. The story hinged on comments made to the paper by sources close to the investigation itself.”

“On the day S&P cut the U.S.’s credit rating” Ragan writes, “Wall Street was flooded with downgrade rumors. These rumors started earlier in the day while trading was active. It turned out they were true.”

According to Bloomberg News the SEC “is scrutinizing the method Standard & Poor’s used to cut the U.S.’s credit rating and whether the firm properly protected the confidential decision, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.”

Reporter Joshua Gallu wrote August 14 that SEC staff are “looking into whether certain market participants learned of the downgrade before its announcement.”

Downplaying speculation that S&P employees may have breached SEC rules by leaking sensitive information to privileged clients, The New York Times, as is their wont, claimed “it is arguable whether S.&P.’s announcement on Aug. 5 of the rating change was all that confidential, given the speculation about it.”

“Assuming information about the downgrade was confidential,” the Times pontificates, “it must also be material, which means a reasonable investor would consider it important. This seems to be an easy element to establish because the wild gyrations in the market on the first trading day after the downgrade shows how investors viewed it.”

But Cook’s email to Garcia didn’t arrive in his in-box “on the first trading day after the downgrade” but nearly four months earlier, long before July’s political shenanigans over raising the federal debt ceiling, the ostensible reason why S&P downgraded America’s credit worthiness.

Maxine Waters (D-CA), wrote to SEC chairwoman, cover-up specialist Mary Schapiro, demanding that the commission “conduct an investigation into whether S.&P. selectively disclosed information related to the U.S. government debt downgrade to any financial institutions, and whether any institutions that had that nonpublic information traded on that information prior to the official announcement.”

It appears that Cook’s email to Garcia would confirm that S&P insiders did just that, providing information to Merrill Lynch and one can assume other financial firms.

Throwing cold water on charges that the rating’s agency acted improperly, the Times argues that “even if if the S.E.C. finds that the information was improperly disclosed, proving insider trading will be difficult.”

Why might that be?

According to the Times, “while S.&P. and other credit rating agencies are required to adopt policies to prevent such disclosure, it is questionable whether just leaking information violates any federal regulations, even if it breaches a corporate confidentiality policy.”

Lest readers believe however, that the SEC will mount a comprehensive investigation of leaks by S&P insiders, they would do well to read Matt Taibbi’s latest piece for Rolling Stone.

According to congressional testimony by an SEC whistleblower, which sparked an investigation by that agency’s Inspector General, the commission’s enforcement division, under orders from higher-ups, who went on to secure well-paid positions with the firms they were charged to regulate, shredded a mountain of incriminating evidence detailing wrongdoing by some of the world’s top financial firms.

How many files, called “Matters Under Investigation” or MUI were destroyed? According to whistleblower Darcy Flynn, the SEC’s enforcement division “disappeared” some 18,000 files, including those of convicted fraudster Bernie Madoff, accused swindler, suspected CIA banker and drug money launderer R. Allen Stanford, as well as accusations that top-tier Wall Street investment banks such as J.P. Morgan Chase had engaged in insider trading.

Taibbi writes that “under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency’s records–’including case files relating to preliminary investigations’–are supposed to be maintained for at least 25 years. But the SEC, using history-altering practices that for once actually deserve the overused and usually hysterical term ‘Orwellian,’ devised an elaborate and possibly illegal system under which staffers were directed to dispose of the documents from any preliminary inquiry that did not receive approval from senior staff to become a full-blown, formal investigation.”

It’s a nice deal if you can get it, which of course firms like Goldman Sachs, J. P. Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, AIG and Lehman Brothers (before their 2008 collapse) managed to get in spades.

“We’ll never know,” Taibbi avers, “what the impact of those destroyed cases might have been; we’ll never know if those cases were closed for good reasons or bad. We’ll never know exactly who got away with what, because federal regulators have weighted down a huge sack of Wall Street’s dirty laundry and dumped it in a lake, never to be seen again.”

In this light, AntiSec’s hack of VDI is instructive. If for nothing else, it demonstrates that well-connected insiders reap billions from the collapse of the global economy, divvying-up the spoils amongst privileged friends and clients, including those inhabiting the nethermost regions of the secret state.

Cyberwar: Bringing it All Back Home, and Waging War on the Global Economy

As global elites scramble to seize as much advantage as possible over their rivals as the economy craters, intelligence methods deployed as part of imperialism’s endless “War on Terror” have migrated with a vengeance onto Wall Street.

Revelations by Anonymous earlier this year that a passel of Pentagon-linked security contractors had joined forces to run covert ops on whistleblowers and journalists set alarm bells ringing.

February’s release of some 75,000 emails filched from servers controlled by security grifters HBGary Federal and HBGary, uncovered a sordid scheme by the Bank of American and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to target supporters of WikiLeaks and left-wing corporate critics.

That hack, in addition to exposing BofA’s illicit “Team Themis”gambit, a co-production of white shoe law firm Hunton & Williams, HBGary Federal, HBGary, Palantir Technologies (a recipient of CIA slush funds from its venture capital arm In-Q-Tel) and Berico Technologies, also revealed that the Pentagon and giant defense contractors such as General Dynamics had teamed up with HBGary to develop undetectable malware or “rootkits” for America’s emerging Cyberwar-Intelligence Complex, according to a series of documents published by the secrecy-shredding web site Public Intelligence.

Additional files revealed that HBGary and ManTech International had partnered-up with the National Security State for what they described as “Internet Based Reconnaissance Operations” that use “non-attributable internet access” methodologies (approvedhacking by the secret state) for “operating system and network application identification,” “identification of possible perimeter defense” for “intelligence gap fill” and “counterintelligence research.” In other words, broad based internet spying on an array of “adversaries” (e.g., political dissidents, antiwar activists, anticorporate campaigners and other enemies of the state).

Further research by Project PM’s OpMetalGear revealed that defense giant Northrop Grumman and other firms such as HBGary Federal, TASC and ManTech International were engaged in a bidding war to spear the Pentagon’s Romas/COIN program (since renamed Odyssey).

That program, researcher Barrett Brown writes, is “a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once.” (For additional background see: “Security Grifters Partner-Up on Sinister Cyber-Surveillance Project,” Antifascist Calling, July 3, 2011)

We can assume that once intelligence sources and methods intended to target external enemies are turned inward and attack the American people, financial insiders too, would find such tools an exemplary means to crush their competitors and adversaries, the global working class.

Bankrupting and Criminalizing the State

“Economic warfare,” economist and researcher Michel Chossudovsky, writing in The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century, “consists in destabilizing countries and impoverishing their respective populations.”

Chossudovsky argues that “the manipulation of market forces through the imposition of strong ‘economic medicine’ under the helm of the IMF supports U.S.-NATO strategic and geopolitical objectives.”

Similarly,” Chossudovsky observes, “the speculative attacks waged by powerful banking conglomerates in the currency, commodity and stock markets are acts of financial warfare,” one in which the “financing of an oversized U.S. war economy triggers imbalances in the U.S. monetary system, destabilizes the U.S. fiscal structure and creates imbalances in the allocation of human and material resources.”

This tragedy is playing out today. The on-going market meltdown in the wake of the U.S. credit downgrade and the crisis in the Eurozone has affected tens of millions of workers who saw their retirement funds gobbled up by speculators. Additionally, states and municipalities “carrying debt tied to federal creditworthiness,” The Tech Herald avers, “each took a hit.”

Hard hit cities and states struggling under an enormous debt burden due to falling revenues, are held hostage by the credit rating agencies. As economist Michael Hudson points out inGlobal Research credit rating agencies such as Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch “are playing the political role of ‘enforcer’ as the gatekeepers to credit, to put pressure on Iceland, Greece and even the United States to pursue creditor-oriented policies that lead inevitably to financial crises.”

Hudson writes that these “crises in turn force debtor governments to sell off their assets under distress conditions. In pursuing this guard-dog service to the world’s bankers, the ratings agencies are escalating a political strategy they have long been refined over a generation in the corrupt arena of local U.S. politics.”

As the World Socialist Web Site observes, “the crisis of the world’s stock exchanges and financial markets is increasingly spiraling out of control. Governments are being driven by developments which they are unable to influence.”

Socialist critic Peter Schwarz notes that “the panic on the stock markets shows that traders are expecting a deep recession, already heralded by stagnating growth and rising unemployment rates,” and that “corporations will respond with new waves of layoffs, governments with further budget cuts.”

In a climate stoked by fear, war and those all-purpose boogeymen, “debt,” “terror” and now, “cyberwar,” the cost of bailing-out a looted capitalist economy are shouldered by the working class. These pressures in turn increase the downward spiral as employment, wages, manufacturing and consumer spending go into a tail-spin, a self-destructive feed-back loop that further exacerbates levels of unemployment, home foreclosures and generalized misery. The tentacles of this manufactured “debt crisis” reach everywhere–from the smallest town to the largest city.

Hudson avers that “localities are pressured when their rising debt levels lead to a financial stringency. Banks pull back their credit lines, and urge cities and states to pay down their debts by selling off their most viable public enterprises.”

And waiting in the wings are a new class of corporate vultures and rentier vampires who swoop down to reap the rewards gleaned by gobbling-up (looting) public assets at fire sale prices.

The rating agencies who profit at both ends of any transaction according to Hudson, “offer opinions” that have become a “big business” for the agencies. “So it is understandable why their business model opposes policies–and political candidates–that support the idea of basing public financing on taxation rather than by borrowing. This self-interest colors their ‘opinions’.”

Accordingly, “to acquiescence in such economically destructive financial behavior is the opposite of fiscal responsibility. Cutting federal taxes and Social Security payments to obtain a more positive S&P ‘opinion,” Hudson writes, “would give banks an ability to ‘pull the plug’ and force privatization and anti-labor austerity plans by refraining from rolling over the U.S. debt–and cutting taxes Tea-Party style rather than funding spending by taxation on a pay-as-you-go-basis.”

In this light, one can certainly understand why a Merrill Lynch “wealth management advisor” would offer her “knowledgeable judgement” (clubby insider info) to a dodgy security outfit such as VDI.

Working classes across Europe have not “gone gently into the night” of impoverishment; the great fear here in the heimatamongst corporatists and militarists alike, is that once working people realize the game is up they just might impose some “shock therapy” of their own!

As Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald (a target of “Team Themis’s” dirty tricks campaign) avers, speaking out about “the sprawling Surveillance State and the attempted criminalization of WikiLeaks and whistleblowing are so vital” to the defense of democracy.

“The free flow of information and communications enabled by new technologies–as protest movements in the Middle East and a wave of serious leaks over the last year have demonstrated–is a uniquely potent weapon in challenging entrenched government power and other powerful factions,” Greenwald writes.

“And that is precisely why those in power–those devoted to preservation of the prevailing social order–are so increasingly fixated on seizing control of it and snuffing out its potential for subverting that order: they are well aware of, and are petrified by, its power, and want to ensure that the ability to dictate how it is used, and toward what ends, remains exclusively in their hands.”

This is why actions by disparate groups such as AntiSec, Anonymous and WikiLeaks are informational beacons in an otherwise homogenized media landscape, one characterized by celebrity gossip, sex scandals and “crimes” carried out by poor and marginalized populations–never the filthy rich or the warmongers who murder millions as they launch resource wars that steal other people’s social property.

While firms such as VDI, Boeing, General Atomics and Lockheed Martin hawk drone technologies that transform human beings into red mist, and do so as their “patriotic” (and highly-profitable) duty as the Pentagon wholeheartedly embraces hypermodern forms of robotized mass murder, the bill for American hubris, long past due, is coming faster than most people think.

As we know, while our species remains alive, everybody has the sacred duty to be optimistic. Ethically, any other behaviour wouldn’t be admissible. I remember well that one day, almost 20 years ago, I said that there was an endangered species: Man.

In front of a select group of bourgeois government leaders, flatterers of the empire, among them being the immense well-fed bulk of the German Helmut Kohl, and others like those forming the chorus of Bush Sr., less dismal and alienated than his own son, W. Bush, I couldn’t help but express that truth which I was seeing as being very real, even though it was more distant than it is today, with the greatest sincerity possible.

Turning on the television at about 12:15 at midday, because someone told me that Barack Obama was giving his announced speech on foreign policy, I paid attention to his words.

I don’t know why, despite the piles of dispatches and news I listen to on a daily basis, not one of them mentioned that the guy would be speaking at that time.  I can assure the readers that there are not a few stupidities and lies that, among the dramatic truths and facts of all kinds, I read, I hear or see in pictures every day. But this case was something special. What was the guy going to say at that time in this world overwhelmed with imperial crimes, massacres or unmanned planes dropping deadly bombs, that not even Obama, now master of some life and death decisions, was imagining when he was a student at Harvard just a few decades ago?

Of course nobody should suppose that Obama is master of the situation; he merely handles some important words that the old system in its origin granted the “Constitutional President” of the United States. At this point, 234 years after the Declaration of Independence, the Pentagon and the CIA still have the basic instruments of the imperial power created: technology capable of destroying the human race in a matter of minutes, and the means to penetrate those societies, dupe them and manipulate them shamelessly for as long as they need to do so, thinking that the power of the empire is boundless. They trust they are handling a docile world, without even a single disturbance, for all future time.

It is the absurd idea upon which they base tomorrow’s world, under “the kingdom of liberty, justice, equal opportunities and human rights”, incapable of seeing what is really happening with poverty, the lack of the basic services of education, health, jobs and something worse: meeting life’s needs such as food, drinking water, house and many others.

Strangely enough, can anyone wonder for example what would happen with the 10 thousand dead per year as a result of drug-related violence, basically in Mexico, to which we could add the countries of Central America and several of the most populated countries in the southern part of the continent?

I harbour absolutely no intention of offending those peoples; my purpose is just to point out what is happening to others almost on a daily basis.

There is one question that has to be asked almost immediately: what is going to happen in Spain where crowds are protesting in the country’s main cities against the unemployment of 40% of the young people, just to quote one of the causes of the demonstrations of that fighting people? Could it be perhaps that they are going to start bombing that NATO country?

Nevertheless, at this time, at 4:12 p.m., they still haven’t published the blessed official Spanish version of Obama’s speech.

I hope you will forgive me for this improvised reflection. I have other things to take care of.

Fidel Castro Ruz

May 19, 2011

4:16 p.m.