Aspirational Preemption By Stan Goff

The arrest of seven mentally disturbed Black men in Miami by Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department, on the word of an informant who entrapped them, was charcterized by Gonzales as arrest for being "aspirational, not operational." The only aspiration I am seeing here is the kind that happens when a drunk aspirates his own vomit.... at least from the press. Any news organ that fails to note this as the latest act of media abjection in the face of rule by malevolent morons qualifies. This arrest doesn’t call for cautious skepticism; it calls for howling ridicule. I've been wondering for almost five years now, ever since September 11th, how they'd target Black folk with this terrorism shtik. I’ve been saying for over ten years now how Haitians (whose own elected governments get overthrown by the US) serve as poster children for white supremacy. Now I’m going to talk trash about Miami, because that's how this gets put into perspective. Miami is a giant eco-catastrophe that has turned the Everglades and the ocean into cesspools, a vast energy sink that serves as the doorway to selectively exploit and exclude all the people south of there whose lives have been ripped apart by the projection of US global power. It is politically embedded in a state run by one of the Bush brothers, and its local politics is run by the gusano Mafia -- long used as both political and paramiltary mercenaries by the US intelligence underground. It is the enclave of the very worst of the US lumpen-bourgeoisie, that overlapping sphere where plain thug-venality maps directly onto financial power. It’s a shithole of conspicuous consumption alongside one of the most shameful homeless problems I have seen outside the third world, and a place where that gros-bourgeois flash is always right in the face of people who can barely keep the rent paid or put food on their tables. It breeds mental disturbances out of its combinaton of profound need and its creepy fashion-runway superficiality. That's why its no surprise that the FBI and the Bush Justice Department (that must be a joke) thought to use a police informant (quite often the absolute lowest form of primate life, or someone whose life has gone so far awry that cops can use them as virtual slaves) to entrap seven Miami men on charges that will likely make the Wen Ho Lee incident look like a prima facie case. This administration has gotten so zany that even many of the most rock-ribbed of the Republican Party -- now a freakish caricature of latter-day delusion -- have begun to distance themselves from their cognitively-challenged, narcissistic commandante and his band of merry loon-lieutenants. While the rest of the country is pulling back from the abyss that this administration has careened alongside, these nimrods are advancing their design to impose fascism, the real thing, on the US. It starts with the reclamation of blood-and-soil, anti-intellectual machismo, moves into vigilantism, but then requires its scapegoats for when the pampered, endebted-to-their-eyeballs middle class finally inherits the inevitable results of running what Kenneth Boulding referred to as a madman economy. There weren't enough foreign-born Muslims in the US to constitute a respectable analog to pre-WWII European Jewry, so it was really only a matter of time before they found a way to paint the internal enemy Black. At least once they found out that scapegoating Hispano-Latinas would end in either mass deportations or a crippling pan-Latin@ strike… result the same, that film "A Day Without a Mexican" becomes reality. Go for it all, Alberto Gonzales said, and Georgy-Porgy -- encouraged no doubt by his honoorary-gusano sibling who presides over Florida -- said let's round up some Miami Negroes, and claim they wanted to blow up the Sears Building. Anyone left who defends these viscious buffoons would defend them if Shrub molested a child on national television. Meanwhile, the legal ground is being sought to practice preemptive war at home.

Shut Up, Go Shopping, Support the War...and Nobody Gets Hurt! by JASON MILLER

We’re Bending the Arc of the Universe Toward Injustice:

Shut Up, Go Shopping, Support the War...and Nobody Gets Hurt!
by JASON MILLER

Remember Martin Luther King and his dreams? Recall how that hopeless idealist dared to conjure notions of the United States treating all people with equality and letting freedom ring? Recollect how he was murdered because he believed a better world was possible and courageously strove to make that world a reality?

Sorry Dr. King. Your martyrdom was wasted. Your glorious dream is on life support and the prognosis is quite grim.

Until recently, dark clouds were gathering on the horizon for America’s ruling elite. Public opinion was rapidly souring against them. Less than 1/3 of their subjects favored their corporate welfare programs, shredding of the Constitution, eradication of the middle class, implementation of an official state religion, elimination of social programs, and endless war against a phantom enemy.

But social conservatives, nationalists, wealthy elites, the Religious Right, the Neocons, Fox “News”, major corporations, and several other factions have “stayed the course”. Abandoning common sense and humanity, this loose coalition comprised of dogmatic devotees of imperialism, Social Darwinism, and American Exceptionalism manned the bulwarks to avert disaster in the November elections.

What nightmare spurred them into action? It was becoming a distinct possibility that the Not Quite as Evil Party would break the Blatantly Evil Party’s stranglehold on our government by gaining a majority in Congress.

Herculean efforts by these champions of the “American Way” have reaped rich results. Numerous events over the last few months have breathed new life into their cause. All of us Americans need to get down on our knees and thank OUR Christian God for the cornucopia of blessings He has recently bestowed upon His chosen nation.

Our Congresspeople led the charge by reassuring the American public that they will not rest in their noble battle to crush those heinous gays who are subverting the sanctity of marriage in the United States. They also sent a clear message to those would-be desecrators of the Red, White, and Blue. Our “elected representatives" will not relent until the United States has a law punishing those who dare to burn a nationalistic symbol of imperial conquest. However, one wonders why we would need such a law. How would a flag so drenched in the blood of innocent victims even ignite?

Our $600 billion a year military finally ended two years of futile efforts by killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Two eyes and a mouthful of teeth were merely enough to further whet the American appetite for vengeance and more killing. Mission accomplished again, eh Mr. Bush?

In its infinite benevolence and wisdom, the Bush Regime (buttressed by its accomplices at AIPAC and in the mainstream media) has maintained the illusion of the righteousness of Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinians. Washington received Ehud Olmert and Bush kissed the ring of yet another leader of the parasites dwelling on Palestinian land and thriving on billions of US tax dollars. Ardent supporters of Israel's right to exterminate the Palestinians can rest easy knowing that the United States will continue doing the “right thing”.

Earlier this month, three of the suspected terrorists from Guantanamo Bay validated the existence of the American Gulag and the use of torture by the United States in the "War on Terror". In a cunning and calculated move of “asymmetrical warfare” they committed suicide. Their attempt to expose the standard-bearer of human rights as ruthless torturers back-fired miserably. In their pathetic attempt to manipulate public opinion by hanging themselves, these three men demonstrated that the United States has no choice but to keep suspected Middle Eastern terrorists caged like animals under brutal conditions. Just ask Don Rumsfeld.

Kim Jong-il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the leaders of the two nations in Bush's "Axis of Evil" which the United States has yet to invade, are each attempting to join the decreasingly exclusive “Nuclear Club”. As the self-appointed “clubhouse monitor”, the United States is thus compelled to maintain its bellicose posture, vast nuclear arsenal, devotion to global military hegemony, and willingness to wage preemptive war.

How fortuitous for our ruling elite that the FBI arrested the seven “homegrown terrorists” in Miami Thursday night. Allegedly, the “Miami 7” were conspiring with undercover FBI agents (whom they purportedly thought were members of Al Qaeda) to blow up the Sears Tower and the FBI building in Miami.

Naturally the “War on Terror” must continue if American citizens are plotting attacks on American soil. The FBI apprehended these seven men just in time to convince a malleable American public that NSA eavesdropping and analysis of cell phone records without judicial oversight is essential to our security. This arrest will also validate Friday’s announcement by Treasury Secretary Snow that the United States has been monitoring banking transactions in the “War on Terror”.

And as an added bonus for social conservatives, the suspects are Black. The United States already has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. We have 23% of the world’s prison population and only 5% of the world’s overall population. Half of the prison population in the United States is Black. How can 13% of our population comprise 50% of the prison population? Simple. Our laws and law enforcement actions are rife with racial bias.

Virtually each time a social problem arises in the United States, our leaders pass another law. Their goal is to punish and control rather than attempting to eradicate causes like poverty, unemployment, racism, and woefully inadequate educations. Seven suspected Black American terrorists “prove” the necessity of the prison industrial complex to control the “inferiors” in our population and to compensate for the loss of that “peculiar institution”.

After the arrest, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales stated:

"They were persons who for whatever reason came to view their home country as the enemy."

Once could readily conclude from our chief law enforcer’s conclusion that these seven men are guilty until proven innocent. How closely will their experience with America’s “justice” system resemble that of Jose Padilla?

If these men are guilty of conspiring to blow up buildings, it is indeed disturbing that American citizens born and raised on domestic soil would be that enraged with one or more facets of our country. It is equally as disturbing that our attorney general blithely commented that they view the United States as “the enemy” for “whatever reason”. Wouldn’t an analysis of the source of their hatred be prudent so we could determine what profound changes the United States, its leaders, and its institutions need to make so that they are not creating enemies amongst our citizenry?

Yet from the perspective of those wanting to perpetuate war and justify the creation of a police state, Gonzales summarized the situation well. To examine why Americans would want to inflict carnage and mayhem on their fellow citizens would expose the true agenda of our ruling elite.

A substantial number of Americans see our leaders’ moral turpitude, are furious, and are working diligently to evoke change. Perhaps the seven men in Miami simply reached a tipping point. After all, an act of terror is an extreme means to bring about political or social change.

Rather than working to create a more equitable and humane society based on the Bill of Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ruling elite and their aforementioned allies prefer to perpetuate a sociopolitical system based upon intolerance, bigotry, avarice, exploitation, militarism, and gross injustice. Meanwhile, “rage against the machine” continues to fester and foment. Hopefully most of the enraged will embrace evolution over revolution, but if they did indeed plot to commit terrorism, the seven from Miami may be a sign of ill portent.

On 6/22, Dick Cheney, a man noted for his deep love of humanity and concern for the average American, reminded us that US troops will not be coming home soon:

"I realize some have advocated a sudden withdrawal of our forces. This would be unwise in the extreme - a victory for terrorists, bad for the Iraqi people and bad for the United States. To leave that country before the job is done would be to hand over Iraq to car-bombers and assassins."

Underscoring and empowering Cheney’s determined stance, both houses of Congress had voted down proposals to impose a timetable for troop withdrawal.

Someone forgot to ask Mr. Cheney and our esteemed legislators two important questions:

1. Why would they continue to bomb and assassinate once America's occupying army withdrew from Iraq?

2. Excepting the Green Zone, when did the car-bombers and assassins hand Iraq over to the United States?

The fact that these deeply troubling events occurred just in time to bolster an imploding Bush Regime is further evidence that our constitutional republic is on the verge of extinction. Americans are experiencing a profoundly distressing paradigm shift. A theocratic corporatocracy with powerful nationalistic tendencies is weaving itself into the very fabric of our social, economic, and political systems. And its dynamics and underlying principles are frighteningly similar to those of the fascism implemented by the National Socialists.

Remember that from 1933 to 1945 most ordinary Germans complacently and quietly supported their regime. After all, they were not suffering. The Bush Regime is counting on you and your children to do the same.


Jason Miller is a 39 year old sociopolitical essayist with a degree in liberal arts and an extensive self-education (derived from an insatiable appetite for reading). He is a member of Amnesty International and an avid supporter of Oxfam International and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.

The alliance between the European Union and Bush is pathetic

AS is widely known, in his speech during the High-Level Segment of the new Human Rights Council in Geneva on June 20, our Foreign Minister, Felipe Pérez Roque expressed a resounding condemnation of the growing conspiracy between the United States and the European Union.

Just 24 hours later, the European Union has once again demonstrated its shameful double standard in the area of human rights, and its traditional subordination to the aggressive policies of the United States against the Third World, including Cuba, which is to host the Non-Aligned Movement Summit this September.

On June 21, the annual Transatlantic Summit between the United States and Europe took place in Vienna, and concluded by passing a Final Declaration in which the superpower and its junior ally present a hegemonic, neocolonial, threatening and manipulative vision of the international situation and some 20 mostly Third World countries.

In that declaration, the United States and its European partners once again act as planetary judges and indulge their liking for invading other nations’ sovereignty and dictating policies to a group of countries that, interestingly, are the same as those blacklisted by the U.S. government for years.

What is most scandalous, however, is that the Joint U.S.-European Declaration does not contain the slightest reference to the dramatic situation of the prisoners held by the United States on the illegal Guantánamo naval base, and who are victims of atrocious torture, much less the fact that it is Cuban territory illegally occupied by the U.S. government that should be returned to our country. Or is it that colonialist Europe is thinking about donating it to the United States?

Neither is there mention of the hundreds of “secret flights” used by the United States to transport, drugged and blindfolded, people abducted in other nations and making stopovers in European Union member states with the obvious complicity of their governments.

Leading up to this Summit, European representatives had ardently declared their firm intentions of demanding that Bush shut down the Guantánamo concentration and torture camp, but when he arrived, their enthusiasm disappeared, and it had to be Bush himself who took the initiative to mention it during his press conference. In a sickly-sweet way, Bush stated that he wished to close down the torture center, adding that he shared European concerns, but that everyone would be in danger if he released the abductees, and made no promises whatsoever. The extraordinary European response was that “we should not be naïve in response to the latest threats” of terrorism.

Last year, the European Union blocked the approval by the Human Rights Commission of an investigation into the massive, flagrant and systematic violations of human rights at the Guantánamo naval base.

But what was new at this Summit was that the old policies of subordination and double standard should become an official public EU position.

It was the Summit of just one side of the Atlantic. Europe cowardly ceded in everything and, on the one hand, exposed its subordination, and on the other, its strategic agreement with the United States in the plundering of the billions of human beings who live in Third World countries.

The Declaration’s mention of the so-called Millennium Development Goals is purely rhetorical; they have not been met and they will never be met under the unjust world order that the new document upholds and attempts to highlight. Africa, which merited several pages in the previous Summit, is now excluded. There is a snide reference to the environment, but Europe does not dare to demand that the United States join the Kyoto Protocol.

The single paragraph on Iraq completely omits the war of aggression and occupation in that country, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians as a result of that unjust war, torture and the now well-known fact of how the U.S. people were deceived, along with others in Europe, into unleashing that brutal invasion.

There are several pages regarding the energy question that serve to state that now “energy security” is being sought rather than cooperation, to slip in veiled threats in circumstances in which a war for oil is being waged, and to warn that the market and the agreements contracted with their transnationals are untouchable. There is not one word of acknowledgement of their responsibility in the energy crisis or of any commitment to modify the irrational patterns of consumption that are creating it.

They defend, in the text, the “war against terrorism,” and propose to increase cooperation with the pretext of denying refuge to terrorists, but Europe and Bush have to remain silent about the scandalous sanctuary created by the U.S. president himself for Posada Carriles and anti-Cuba terrorism, and about the abduction of five Cuban anti-terrorist fighters whose sentences were annulled months ago.

Neither do the European representatives dare to condemn the extrajudicial executions carried out in other countries of which Bush publicly boasts, the arbitrary arrests, illegal monitoring of U.S. citizens, or other violations of civil rights.

CUBA COULD NOT BE ABSENT...

Cuba, of course, could not fail to be an object of this transatlantic conspiracy. The empire’s pathological obsession with destroying the Cuban Revolution is such that it did not hesitate to commit its European allies to this crusade to a ridiculous extent.

On June 21, for the first time, in a joint document with the United States, the European Union accepted the inclusion of its concern regarding the human rights situation in Cuba, a new, shameful and cynical chapter in its submission to Washington’s dictates.

Obviously, the document does not mention the genocidal U.S. economic, financial and commercial blockade of Cuba, nor its extraterritorial application in Europe via the Helms-Burton Act and others. The EU is thus demonstrating that it lacks the ability to resist U.S. pressure and to articulate its own and independent policy on Cuba.

The European Union is taking this step precisely at a time when the Bush government is intensifying the blockade and its aggression against Cuba, not dismissing the military option, and proclaiming openly that its policy on our country is “regime change.” The European Union should clarify whether or not this means it has decided to join the “Plan Bush” against Cuba, and if now, along with agreeing on its goals, it is also in agreement with the fascist methods being applied under it. Contempt is what both parties deserve from Cuba.

Cuba is not at all surprised by this loss of reservations by a European Union that was rejected by voters in several countries, is suffering a serious crisis of legitimacy and identity, and has never been weaker or more dependent on the United States than it is now, when some of its new members, with frank vocations as satellites — such as the Czech Republic — are working from within at the service of the most spurious interests of the U.S. extreme right and the Miami mafia.

In December 1996, the so-called Common Position was adopted on the initiative of José María Aznar – known as the lapdog of the empire – based on a draft written in English and sent by then- U.S. Undersecretary of Trade Stuart Eizenstat, which conditioned EU relations with Cuba on changing our economic, political and social system.

In April 1997 and in May 1998, the European Union gave in to U.S. pressure and signed two memorandums of understanding, via which it renounced its right to protect its entrepreneurs who wanted to invest in Cuba. On July 20, 2005, it reached an agreement with the United States, in exchange for nothing, to withdraw from a WTO lawsuit against the theft of the Havana Club trademark, despite the damage being caused to a large European company, and renounced any exercise of its rights in that respect in the future.

In 2000 and later in 2003, also under U.S. pressure, the European Union boycotted Cuba’s entry into the Cotonou Agreement, which would have enabled our country to have access to preferential treatment in our trade relations with this bloc.

A few weeks ago, the European Union reached a secret agreement, negotiated in Brussels, via which it promised not to vote for Cuba and to work closely with the United States against our candidacy to the new Human Rights Council, for which Cuba obtained a well-deserved and broad vote, and from which the United States was excluded by refusing to submit itself to an election in which it surely would have been defeated.

Just a few days ago, on June 12, the European foreign ministers, meeting in Luxemburg, assumed U.S. language for the first time regarding the acceleration of a supposed transition in Cuba, and proposed strategies to practically and officially support the counterrevolution organized and paid for by the U.S. Interests Section and government. Once again, they left in suspense the diplomatic sanctions against our country, which they used in 2003 to try to isolate us and which turned out to be a ridiculous failure that led to their suspension the following year, and which they have not had the dignity to acknowledge as an error and definitively eliminate.

The European Union alliance with Bush is pathetic. It does not have the moral authority or ability to dictate conditions or impose decisions on Cuba. The empire itself has not been able to do so. The power of lackeys is very limited.

The Orphans of July Third - The Zapatistas Challenge the Sanctity of the Vote by John Gibler

I.

When the Zapatistas launched the Other Campaign in San Cristobal de Las Casas on January 1, 2006—exactly twelve years after they took that city by force—they made clear that the stakes would be high.

“We are putting everything we have into the Sixth [Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle] and the Other [Campaign],” Subcomandante Marcos told the crowd of 20,000. “Our lives are the least of what we have—our moral authority, our prestige, everything we built is in this effort.”

Now, after four months on the road, four hundred Other Campaign meetings held across twenty states, and two hundred and twenty political prisoners taken during the brutal police raid on San Salvador Atenco on the morning of May 4, the Zapatistas have cast their “everything” against the most sacrosanct day of the Mexican political calendar: election day.

At a national Other Campaign gathering in Mexico City on May 29, Subcomandante Marcos called on members of the Other Campaign across the country to gather in Mexico City on June 30 for two days of debate and, on election day, Sunday July 2, to “interrupt into the calendar of the elite [los de arriba] with civil and peaceful organizing and mobilizations.”

A thousand people exhaled simultaneously, filling the old Venustiano Carranza Cinema with the “sssss” sound of worry.

“If the elite now want to pretend as if nothing is going on and have their party without freeing our comrades,” Marcos continued, “then we must step into their calendar and place the demand for liberty there.”


II.

Since the beginning, the Zapatistas' Other Campaign has been unashamed to demand the quixotic, to aim for the highest standards of economic and social justice, calling out the roots of exclusion and violence in Mexico with utter disregard for whom they might offend or isolate with their explicit and unyielding description of Mexico's entrenched system of oppression.

The Other Campaign's founding document, the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, and Subcomandante Marcos' numerous communiqués and speeches over the past months leave no doubt as to how the Zapatistas define responsibility for Mexico's back-breaking poverty, marginalization, and political violence: these social ills, they say, are the necessary results of capitalism, coordinated and protected in Mexico by a small class of political elite.

The snowball effect of the Other Campaign—pulling small grassroots struggles into a national political context, and gathering momentum and numbers with each stop along the road—has been completely ignored by the press, political parties, and most intellectuals. Nearly everyone on the outside of the campaign reduces the entire effort to a failed display of Marcos' enormous ego. They compare the Other Campaign to the Zapatista march from Chiapas to Mexico City in 2001, and conclude that the Other Campaign has been a flop simply because it has pulled fewer people to the public speaking events in town squares. This measurement of social value by the sheer summation of numbers shows how little the critics understand of the political project behind the Other Campaign.

The 2001 march, a caravan through 14 states known as the March of Indigenous Dignity, sought to gather support for an indigenous rights bill based on the 1996 San Andres Accords that were widely supported by indigenous communities across Mexico and signed by both the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and the government of then-president Ernesto Zedillo. The public events along the march mixed social outcry and political analysis with cultural fair and rock star like appearances by Marcos and the EZLN commanders. The march was informally dubbed the “Zapatour,” half-mocking the more entertainment like aspects of the trip.

The media pundits and intellectuals now call the 2001 march a success (they did not then) in order to show that the Other Campaign is a failure. Time and time again they repeat that in 2001 there were so many more people, the plaza was filled, one could barely move, and this is their measure of success, plazas filled with people.

But the 2001 march had a specific political objective: incorporating the indigenous rights protections from the San Andres Accords into Mexican law. And here, the march failed. The legislators passed a gutted version of the law that led the Zapatistas to file back to Chiapas and cut off all relations with the government and the major political parties. All those people who filled the plazas went back to their daily grinds, they did not take to the streets to demand the implementation of the San Andres Accords, nor did they vote the offending legislators out of office in the following 2003 elections. The supposedly left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) turned their backs on the indigenous rights law, failing to put up even a theatrical fight in the Mexican Senate. They voted for the gutted version, didn't vote, or simply didn't show up for work that day.

While more people came out for the March of Indigenous Dignity than the Other Campaign, much less was being asked of them.

The Other Campaign is not a Zapatour. It is a call to action, a call to participate in a national organizing effort with the impossible-sounding objective of uprooting capitalism in Mexico along with the corresponding concentration of political power in a small elite class. Whereas the March of Indigenous Dignity called for support within the electoral political system—support for a piece of legislation presented to the legislative branch of government—the Other Campaign calls not only for a sharp split from that very system, but to overthrow it.

The challenge of the first phase of the Other Campaign is not whether it can fill plazas, parks, and auditoriums—which it mostly has, though not as tightly as in 2001—but whether it can pull people into a new, national social movement that overcomes the deep and historic divisions amongst the left. The early results are positive, though not euphoric: since the Other Campaign paused its nationwide road trip to fight for the liberty of the political prisoners taken during the police raid on San Salvador Atenco, thousands of people have answered the call for solidarity, taking to the streets in marches and protests across the country, and on May 28 and 29 bus loads of Other Campaign participants from every state in the country drove into Mexico City for a national march and assembly.

III.

It comes as no surprise that the right wing political parties who have always sought to delegitimize the Zapatista struggle would sling mud at the Other Campaign. What is new, since 2001, however, is the number of left-leaning sympathizers from middle class and academic circles who have turned their backs on the Zapatista initiative.

For the first time in Mexican history a presidential candidate who openly describes himself as a leftist has a good chance of winning the elections. Andres Manual Lopez Obrador, the PRD candidate and former mayor of Mexico City with an activist background in his home state of Tabasco, is running neck-and-neck against the far right, social conservative candidate from President Vicente Fox's Party of National Action, Felipe Calderon.

There is little that is leftist about Lopez Obrador or the PRD. They plan to follow the same macro-economic model as the previous right wing governments, promising only to “put the poor first” by flooding state money into infrastructure programs, many of which—such as the planned shipping corridor across the Isthmus of Tehuántepec, Oaxaca, a spin off project from the Fox administration's Plan Puebla Panama—face serious national and local opposition by indigenous groups, small farmers, and environmentalists.

During the past six-years the PRD has become something of a half-way house for disenchanted politicians defecting from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the dinosaur that ruled Mexico for over 70 years until its defeat by the PAN in 2000. Many of the politicians that aided PRI president Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) as he eviscerated the indigenous rights and land reform protections in the Mexican Constitution in order to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement, have fled to the PRD, and found a home in Lopez Obrador's campaign team. Mexican historian Adolfo Gilly writes in a recent issue of Latin American Perspectives that former Salinas administration officials such as Manuel Camacho, Marcelo Ebrard, Ricardo Monreal, Federico Arreola, Socorro Diaz, and Leonel Cota, are now “the pillars of the presidential campaign of the PRD and its candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.”

Many are able to ignore the uncomfortable details of Lopez Obrador's candidacy and economic program by focusing on the overall leftist framing of his campaign: the way to fight crime is by fighting poverty, creating employment opportunities, creating a just economy. One of Lopez Obrador's strongest points, however, is that he is not Felipe Calderon, who presents himself as an iron-fisted protector of the “rule of law,” which in Mexico is code for a regime of violent repression and corresponding impunity.

It is very likely that Lopez Obrador's administration would be less corrupt and less bloody than Calderon's. In the context of 7 decades of PRI dictatorship and 6 years of the PAN's special blend of ineptitude and cartel market economics, a Lopez Obrador victory would be a serious shake-up in the power struggles of the elite in Mexico. Add in the celebratory mood over recent left-wing victories in Latin America and it is easy to understand the combination of hope and delusion that accompanies Lopez Obrador's candidacy.

Thus Subcomandante Marcos' pointing out all the ugly particulars about Lopez Obrador, his campaign team, and the PRD has incurred the unique spirit of wrath reserved for spoilers. It is highly likely that a Calderon victory would unleash a tide of fury and resentment against Marcos and the Zapatistas, not criticism of Lopez Obrador's economic program, his ex-PRI campaign team, or his stilted, clumsy, and facile campaign (in the past few months Lopez Obrador refused to attend the first debate, called Vicente Fox a loud bird (chachalaca), failed for months to answer Calderon's smear campaign against him, did not say a word about the atrocities in San Salvador Atenco, and came out in the second debate unveiling a ready made corruption scandal implicating Calderon).

Few are those who are able to walk the middle path between the Other Campaign and the PRD, agreeing with the Zapatista analysis, supporting the Other Campaign, and planning nonetheless to wake up on July 2nd and vote for Lopez Obrador. In the grand tradition of the left, most have chosen sides and curse their opponents as egoists and traitors. And the divisions are now deep.

Although there is reason to believe that Lopez Obrador would lean more to dialogue than Calderon (read: not send in the riot police or the army in the first five minutes of conflict), there is also reason to doubt the depth and sincerity of his commitment to human rights protections and seeking peaceful solutions to social conflicts. Lopez Obrador has refrained from denouncing the massive human rights violations—sexual violence, mass beatings, torture, arbitrary detentions, killings—carried out by local, state, and federal police in Texcoco and San Salvador Atenco on May 3 and 4. Rather than taking on the most calculated and brutal state repression in Mexico in decades, Lopez Obrador has focused the energy of his campaign on bringing out documents linking Calderon to a corruption scandal involving his brother-in-law, Diego Zavala.

During the scripted presidential “debate” on June 6th, no one mentioned the violence in Atenco, though Calderon made reference to the iron-fist (mano dura) necessary to beat back the unruly machetes of protesting farmers. Instead, the three major candidates paraded through the two-hour debate reciting their slogans and general promises and showing their props. Lopez Obrador brought copies of the documents incriminating Calderon's “uncomfortable brother-in-law” in corruption and tax-evasion, as an example of the kind of government for the rich that he would do away with. Calderon brought a full-color PRD flier for Arturo Núñez, a former PRI leader who helped secure a multi-million dollar tax-payer bailout for politicians near bankruptcy in the 1994 peso crisis, the very same scandal that Lopez Obrador uses to smear Calderon and the PAN.

IV.

The Zapatistas launched the Other Campaign challenging the legitimacy of the vote in the context of a repressive economic system controlled by a single political class. There are no choices for us, the underdogs of the left, they said. The challenge, however, was more than anything else, an invitation. The Zapatistas did not call for abstention; they called for reflection, for analysis. Take a close look at all these ugly details in the plans and histories of the three parties and the three candidates, and think: do any of these options address the social forces that push me down? Do any of these candidates offer a program of social change?

Think for yourselves, the Zapatistas reiterated throughout the Other Campaign, but we think you will find that the answer is no, that the answer is: the only change, the only hope for a program of social change that uproots the culture of state corruption, repression, and cartel market economics will come through grassroots organizing, from below, and from the anti-capitalist left. This has been the call of the Other Campaign: it does not matter whom you vote for on July 2nd, if you place your hope and your faith in any of those options, you will be an orphan on July 3rd.

The Zapatistas planned to hold a national Other Campaign assembly in Mexico City on June 24 and 25, and then return to the jungle in Chiapas to spend the days surrounding the presidential elections at home, away from the polls and the television cameras.

No more.

In response to the brutal repression in Atenco, the government's continued denial of the extent and nature of the violence, and the continued incarceration of 31 people detained arbitrarily in Texcoco and Atenco on May 3 and 4, the EZLN and the Other Campaign, are betting everything on taking to the streets in protest on election day.

The risk is extreme. Any act that could be viewed as impeding the vote—a highway or bridge blockade, or even a march—could not only bring down the wrath of the State—police units, the army, clubs, machine guns—but could turn millions of supporters across Mexico and the world against the Zapatistas and the Other Campaign. A highway blockade on July 2 could give the federal government the pretext to once and for all rid themselves of Marcos and his closest supporters.

If done well, however, the Other Campaign could create a mass mobilization of social protest that does not physically threaten or impede voters, that draws from the Zapatistas' world famous sense of humor and artistic creativity, to expose the fallacy of electoral options in Mexico, to mock the sanctity of the vote in a country with 50 percent abstention, a deeply entrenched culture of electoral fraud, and an elite political class with a monopoly-control over government and the resources of the State.

The participants in the Other Campaign will define and agree upon plans for the mobilization on July 2nd during a two-day assembly in Mexico City on June 30 and July 1. It is impossible to know what they will decide, and thus how great the risk will be, beforehand.

The Uprising of Oaxaca – How Far Can it Go? By Nancy Davies

The Uprising of Oaxaca – How Far Can it Go?
Two Issues Must Now Be Resolved: Removal of Governor Ulises Ruiz and Resolution of the Teachers' Educational Demands

By Nancy Davies
Commentary from Oaxaca
June 24, 2006

OAXACA CITY, June 24, 2006: Oaxaca is a contentious state, with conflicts in towns, on public and communal lands. Assassinations each year number between 20 and 30. The state has 570 municipalities, but in 2004, 750 cases of agrarian conflict.

Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO) has united the people of Oaxaca – in opposition to him, and to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, in its Spanish initials), which has maintained a strangle-hold on Oaxaca for more than seventy years, maintaining caciquismo (the power of local political bosses) and aggravating the agrarian conflicts to divide the people. Selling their votes to the PRI is how towns obtain what should be rightfully theirs, including schools and educational supplies.

The Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO) has now met three times. Today, June 24, 2006, at the close of the APPO, the general secretary of the Section 22 of the National Education Workers’ Union (SNTE), Enrique Rueda Pacheco, held a press conference in which he assured the public that the teachers’ strike will be settled this weekend.

Now the question becomes, can the education demands, which may be settled soon, be separated from the demand for URO to resign?

By all reports, the range of APPO attendees extends from the PRI-affiliated, to the anarchists and revolutionaries on the far left. The APPO declared itself unified by a desire to oust URO. Today’s decisions, beyond Pacheco’s statement, are not yet known.

However, Pacheco announced on Friday, June 23, 2006 that the threatened boycott of the July 2 election won’t happen. That’s a withdrawal of previous threats by the union.

Pacheco announced a new group of mediators for the education negotiations, among them some of the least militant personalities of Oaxaca: artist Francisco Toledo, Archbishop José Luis Chávez Botello, the emeritus bishop of Tehuantepec, and businessman Carlos Guzmán Gardeazábal.

The union refuses to negotiate with Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz or with any federal official of second rank – the union demands talks with somebody who has real power, that is, the Secretary of Government (“Segob,” equivalent to Secretary of Interior), Carlos Abascal Carranza, or somebody equivalent.

Segob has made it clear that it cannot negotiate with regard to URO’s removal, but will negotiate with regard to education, which is as much a federal matter as a state one.

Meanwhile, the city of Oaxaca bubbles with spontaneous demonstrations of support for Section 22’s call to remove URO. Yesterday, Section 22 received ten tons of supplies delivered in solidarity by the Union of Mexican Electricians, and an unscheduled people’s march sprang up in the Oaxaca City neighborhood of Rosario, picking up anti-Ruiz voices along its way to the center. It replaced the previously announced and then cancelled fourth SNTE “mega-march.”

Blockades and work-stoppages were announced by Radio Universidad, the united student-teacher station operating out of the Benito Juarez Autonomous University.

Presentations aired on Radio Universidad discuss the exploitation of Oaxaca under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Plan Puebla-Panama, neoliberalism and globalization – previously unmentioned subjects. Information percolates among the general public, which formerly held few conversations on subjects which were the province of “intellectuals” and student radicals. In call-ins to the station, housewives and retired people are suddenly talking about “class” differences. They mention the World Trade Organization and the benefits the rich receive. They mention URO as aligned with capitalist powers and decry how some who call for a return to the classrooms by the teachers actually send their own kids to private school. Many voices are indigenous.

The consciousness-raising politicization of Oaxaca has arrived.

The APPO is having a moderating effect on the teachers, while the strike is radicalizing the people. The foremost demand, that URO resign as governor, has not softened; it’s hard to see how either the APPO or Section 22 could back off on this issue – now that the entire state is ungovernable – without losing any future support from the public.

The astonishing unification of Oaxacan society may be what pushes the teachers’ Section 22 to bury its own internal differences – something that could not be achieved during the tour of Oaxaca by Subcomandante Marcos in his role as Delegate Zero for the Zapatista Other Campaign. At that time, Delegate Zero expressed his unwillingness to meet with groups that could not resolve their own internal conflicts to unite in a common struggle against the authoritarian government.

The Zapatista method of permitting everyone to speak, and listening to them indefinitely, is not practical for the APPO (not surprising given this urgent and stressful time period), but the sessions are still very long. Also, the APPO decided not to function by consensus, but by majority vote. The APPO declared that political parties, like the press, are not allowed in the assembly, but naturally many individuals espouse positions in accord with their politics.

In a marathon session, the second meeting of the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca took place on June 20, 2006 lasting from noon to nine o’cock at night. The participating unions included the Health Workers Union, the Telmex (private telephone company) workers’ union, the Benito Juarez University workers, and the bus drivers’ union. A total of 79 groups participated, including popular and student organizations, municipal authorities, social organizations and independent citizens. Today, the day of the third APPO, I hear the student announcers on the radio calling for the presence of colonos and colonas – residents of the suburbs.

At the second meeting several accords were achieved, including how the assembly should be made up and how to maintain communications between different sectors. A very difficult issue will be how to maintain civil peace and conduct a parallel government – before, after or parallel to Governor Ruiz, who is now optimistically referred to as the ex-governor.

Among the action points discussed were the boycott of the federal elections of July 2 (which was cancelled) and further marches and blockades of offices and highways. A statewide work stoppage called for Friday, June 23 was cancelled. A shopping boycott called against the supermarket Pitico, the pharmacy Ahorra, and some of the zócalo (central plaza) restaurants didn’t happen. The Oaxaca zócalo, still in the hands of the teachers, was well-guarded on all sides but open enough for pedestrians to enter.

The entrance to the university building where the second APPO met was controlled by students and other youngsters, all of them members of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights who, with faces covered with bandannas, carried sticks and machetes and blocked access to the press.

Among the groups present were the Wide Front for Popular Struggle (FALP), and the Revolutionary Popular Front (FRP), as well as the Union of Revolutionary Youths of Mexico, the Committee for Defense of the People, and the General Strike Council of the Autonomous National University of Mexico.

An anarchist faction seeks the removal of powers from all the branches of government in Oaxaca: legislative, judicial and legislative.

A substantial number of the teachers and delegates are adherents to the non-violent Other Campaign of the Zapatistas.

The majority of delegates belong to social non-governmental organizations, which work in Oaxaca to improve conditions for the people without overt politic affiliations, as is required by Mexican law. These organizations were among the first to call for non-violence after the June 14 attack, and pledged their support to the united struggle against Ruiz. They constitute non-militant, middle-of-the-road factions which hope to forge from the APPO a unified popular sector which will act in a reasonable and balanced way (read, non-radical) in negotiating with the government, and continue as an ongoing public voice, regardless of the outcome of the current negotiations.

Many young folks, of course, are implacably radical.

How to maintain the startling moment of unity is the big question. The question for many teachers after this weekend may be, can I go home now? Within Section 22 itself divisions break out between PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) and PRI supporters. The national SNTE, led by Elba Esther Gordillo (a widely disliked PRI militant known for both her fierce combativeness and corruption) opposes the presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo. Section 22 is split within, into pro-Gordillo and anti-Gordillo factions, as well as PRD supporters.

The outcome of the federal presidential elections July 2 looms on the horizon. Although Fox won’t jeopardize the candidacy of the PAN candidate Calderón by interfering (the reports of federal troops nearby turned out to be rumors planted to intimidate the teachers), should Calderón or Madrazo be elected, the situation changes. Thus it looks more urgent for Pacheco to agree to some resolution of the teachers’ educational demands before July 2.

The teachers’ educational demands focus on the neglected educational infrastructure and restructuring teachers’ salaries. Education in Oaxaca is poor, and the illiteracy rate is around 25 percent (compared to about 8 percent nationally), with most of the illiterate being indigenous women. Many teachers complain of having to conduct classes in shacks made of laminated cardboard and of a lack of books, supplies and food for the children who arrive hungry. URO was roundly denounced for his neglect of education.

“Ruiz has remained deaf to all demands and necessities of Oaxacan society, causing widespread dissatisfaction in all civil sectors,” the APPO declared in its first meeting. Ruiz is accused of the unauthorized use of public resources for Madrazo’s campaign. So when he claims there’s no money for education the public response is understandable outrage.

Ruiz is also accused of the destruction of the historical, natural and cultural patrimony, harassment of independent media, excessive use of police and repression of unions and independent organizations.

Section 22 went on strike on May 21, 2006, establishing an encampment in downtown Oaxaca City, which effectively brought to a halt the center city’s tourist and commercial activities.

The police attacked the teachers’ strike encampment on June 14 before dawn. A popular corrido (ballad) hit the airwaves of Radio Universidad on June 16, celebrating the teacher-heroes.

The new people’s assembly held its first meeting on June 18, 2006. Today, June 24, the third APPO took place at the Hotel Magisterial. Two clear issues must now be resolved: removal of URO and resolution of the educational demands.

Tomorrow, Sunday, a cultural fiesta in support of the teachers will be held in the zócalo.

Terrorists in tractor factories

As if it isn't enough that the U.S. is tapping peoples phones, intercepting their e-mails, and, it now turns out, monitoring their financial transactions, it is also closely monitoring Iran's and Venezuela's growing commercial relationships:

CIUDAD BOLIVAR, Venezuela — The VenIran low-rise tractor factory in remote eastern Venezuela is one of the signs of Iran's growing presence in Venezuela, which is being monitored by a U.S. government on alert for any evidence that Iran may be exporting terrorism.

Such evidence would come in handy to the United States, which is engaged in a pull-out-the-stops campaign to prevent Venezuela from securing the rotating Latin American seat on the United Nations Security Council. The vote is scheduled for October.

The United States has said Venezuela would be a "disruptive" and "non-consensus-seeking" force on the Security Council. As evidence, officials point to Venezuela's refusal, along with North Korea's, to support the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency board of governors' resolution in March criticizing Iran's nuclear-material development program.

That same month, the first bright-red tractors rolled out of the factory in this sprawling industrial town on the massive Orinoco River. Now producing 40 tractors a week, the plant will be followed by a bus factory and a cement plant involving joint Iranian-Venezuelan ventures.

Venezuelan officials say it is merely an extension of the friendship between the two members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, and that the host country has a lot to learn from Iran's formation of its many socialist cooperatives, a central part of the new economic model being followed by President Hugo Chavez.

The tractor factory is a so-called Nucleus of Endogenous Development, the term for the state-sponsored job-creation program that Chavez is pushing to lure workers away from overcrowded, traffic-choked cities such as Caracas and Maracaibo. Iran has formed dozens of hybrid worker-state companies such as VenIran, said a Venezuelan government official.

U.S. government officials say they are monitoring the Iranian presence and watching for nefarious activities.

There may be much to monitor before long. On a visit to Venezuela this month, an Iranian industry vice minister said his country planned to invest $9 billion in 125 projects here. Among them is the cement factory under construction in Monagas state, along with 2,500 nearby housing units for workers.

As for the tractor factory, U.S. officials joke about what it is really producing — an example of the mistrust and rancor permeating United States-Venezuela relations in recent years.

Chavez has railed against U.S. "imperium," whereas top American officials paint Chavez as sympathetic to terrorists, namely the biggest Colombian rebel group, known by its Spanish initials FARC and officially branded as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department.

U.S. officials suspect that Chavez affords guerrilla groups rest-and-recreation space along his country's border with Colombia. A Venezuelan cattlemen's association in western Venezuela this week said that the FARC was rustling significant numbers of cattle while the Venezuelan military looked the other way.

Chavez has strenuously denied giving aid to Colombian leftist guerrillas.

U.S. officials acknowledge that there is no evidence of Chavez engaging directly in terrorism. They dismissed as unfounded a rumor that Venezuela was or soon would be selling uranium to Iran. Venezuela is known to have uranium deposits in Amazon state but the mineral is not being mined, they said.

The tractor factory is in an industrial park in underpopulated Bolivar state, of which Ciudad Bolivar is the capital. About 70 Venezuelan workers are on the payroll here, with eight Iranian managers. The building sat abandoned for 30 years after another state-sponsored job-creation program, also to build tractors, collapsed months after the factory opened in the mid-1970s, local officials said.

Despite low-key projects such as this one, Western diplomats in the region are clearly uneasy about Iran establishing a commercial beachhead in Venezuela, fearing the Islamic Republic's designs in the region may not be strictly business. Some have said that Iran's increasing links with Venezuela already have helped make the South American country a center of intrigue.

Although it has no proof that Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant organization, has set up operations in Venezuela, U.S. government sources note that Iranian embassies have funded, accommodated and, in some cases, housed Hezbollah operations. The group, labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. and Israel, is suspected of involvement in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.

"It would be an unfortunate thing if the Iran-Venezuelan alliance were to create a base of operations closer to the shores of the United States," a U.S. official said. "Iranian embassies and Hezbollah seem to go together."

U.S. officials are also worried about whether Iran will share its know-how on jury-rigging U.S.-made jets, which it has been doing since the U.S. hostage crisis in 1979 when U.S. diplomatic relations and military aid were cut off, leaving Iran with numerous U.S. military aircraft to maintain.

The U.S. has refused to give Chavez spare parts for the 24 F-16 fighters his country acquired in 1982, and is worried that Tehran may show him how to keep them flying without them, as Iran's military seems to be doing with its fleet of F-111s, F-14s and F-5 fighter jets purchased when the shah was in power.

The BBC reported this week that, according to a U.S. diplomatic note it had obtained called "Defeating Venezuela in the 2006 non-permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council," the United States fears that Venezuela would use the seat for "ideological grandstanding."

The Bush administration is campaigning for Guatemala to get the open seat and is putting pressure on other Latin American nations to support it as well, U.N. sources told The Times this week.

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Ali Rodriguez said that Venezuela's would be an independent voice on the council and that it would not automatically vote against the U.S. on issues of international importance.

"We will use our position there to support peace in the world and refuse all kinds of attacks on peaceful countries," Rodriguez said.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John R. Bolton has criticized Venezuela's campaign for a seat, saying it would not contribute to the effective operations of the Security Council.

"I think we're making our position very clear, very persuasively too," Bolton said when asked Wednesday whether the U.S. was encouraging other countries not to support Venezuela.

Given the recent discussion regarding foriegn investment in Venezuela Iran's plans to invest $9 billion in Venezuela certainly sounds good. In fact, while the opposition often jumps all over any investments Venezuela makes in other countries they completely ignore these multi-billion dollar investments. One has to wonder why they view trade and cross border investment good except when it involves countries like Venezuela, Iran, China, Argentina, and Brazil.

And the tractor factory sure sounds like a good idea. Agricultural equipment is an important part of land reform. One of the problems with previous land reform efforts in Venezuela was that the farmers were given land, but nothing else. This time around the government is determined to avoid that mistake and ensure that the farmers have what they need to successfully raise crops and bring them to market. Truth be told, thats probably what the tractor factory is all about - not giving terrorists a foothold in the Americas.

World event for the release of the Five being planned

SOME 300 friendship associations and solidarity groups that support the cause of the five Cubans unjustly imprisoned in the United States for combating terrorism and preparing a world event for their release, Cuban television informed this Wednesday.

The event starts on September 12, eight years to the day after the illegal incarceration of the Five, as Fernando González, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, René González and Gerardo Hernández are known to the campaign for their freedom.

That new expression of solidarity at international level, which covers more than 90 countries, also demands that notorious international terrorists like Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles should be sent for trial, the source added.

The U.S. government is still sheltering Posada Carriles, while officially acknowledging his criminal record.

Posada Carriles was arrested in May 2005 and since then Washington has refused to deal with the extradition application presented by Venezuela to try him for pending crimes, including the sabotage of a Cuban passenger plane in 1976, which killed 73 people.

Ricardo Alarcón, president of the Cuban Parliament, called for support for the event as a new way of breaking the silence surrounding the case of the Five and telling the world the truth about it.

He stated that the event is scheduled from September 12 through October 6 with many actions throughout the world to demand the release of those anti-terrorist Cubans.

The Five were sentenced in a rigged trial in Miami with terms of up to double life for infiltrating anti-Cuban terrorist groups responsible for more than 3,000 deaths.

A panel of three judges from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled on August 9 last year to overturn the sentences imposed on the five Cubans.

The U.S. government challenged that decision before the plenary of 12 judges from the abovementioned circuit, in a hearing on February 14. No decision has been announced to date.

In May 2005 a team of experts from the UN Arbitrary Detentions Working Group had previously declared the incarceration of the five anti-terrorist Cubans as arbitrary and illegal and urged the White House to immediately release them. (PL)

Great Moments in the History of Imperialism - The Anti-Empire Report by William Blum

The Anti-Empire Report
Some things you need to know before the world ends
June 21, 2006
by William Blum

Great Moments in the History of Imperialism

National Public Radio foreign correspondent Loren Jenkins, serving in NPR's Baghdad bureau, met earlier this month with a senior Shiite cleric, a man who was described in the NPR report as "a moderate" and as a person trying to lead his Shiite followers into practicing peace and reconciliation. He had been jailed by Saddam Hussein and forced into exile. Jenkins asked him: "What would you think if you had to go back to Saddam Hussein?" The cleric replied that he'd "rather see Iraq under Saddam Hussein than the way it is now."[1]

When one considers what the people of Iraq have experienced as a result of the American bombings, invasion, regime change, and occupation since 2003, should this attitude be surprising, even from such an individual? I was moved to compile a list of the many kinds of misfortune which have fallen upon the heads of the Iraqi people as a result of the American liberation of their homeland. It's depressing reading, and you may not want to read it all, but I think it's important to have it summarized in one place.

Loss of a functioning educational system. A 2005 UN study revealed that 84% of the higher education establishments have been "destroyed, damaged and robbed".

The intellectual stock has been further depleted as many thousands of academics and other professionals have fled abroad or have been mysteriously kidnapped or assassinated in Iraq; hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, other Iraqis, most of them from the vital, educated middle class, have left for Jordan, Syria or Egypt, many after receiving death threats. "Now I am isolated," said a middle-class Sunni Arab, who decided to leave. "I have no government. I have no protection from the government. Anyone can come to my house, take me, kill me and throw me in the trash."[2]

Loss of a functioning health care system. And loss of the public's health. Deadly infections including typhoid and tuberculosis are rampaging through the country. Iraq's network of hospitals and health centers, once admired throughout the Middle East, has been severely damaged by the war and looting.

The UN's World Food Program reported that 400,000 Iraqi children were suffering from "dangerous deficiencies of protein". Deaths from malnutrition and preventable diseases, particularly amongst children, already a problem because of the 12 years of US-imposed sanctions, have increased as poverty and disorder have made access to a proper diet and medicines ever more difficult.

Thousands of Iraqis have lost an arm or a leg, frequently from unexploded US cluster bombs, which became land mines; cluster bombs are a class of weapons denounced by human rights groups as a cruelly random scourge on civilians, especially children.

Depleted uranium particles, from exploded US ordnance, float in the Iraqi air, to be breathed into human bodies and to radiate forever, and infect the water, the soil, the blood, the genes, producing malformed babies. During the few weeks of war in spring 2003, A10 "tankbuster" planes, which use munitions containing depleted uranium, fired 300,000 rounds.

And the use of napalm as well. And white phosphorous.

The American military has assaulted hospitals to prevent them from giving out casualty figures from US bombing attacks that contradicted official US figures, which the hospitals had been in the habit of doing.

Numerous homes have been broken into by US forces, the men taken away, the women humiliated, the children traumatized; on many occasions, the family has said that the American soldiers helped themselves to some of the family's money. Iraq has had to submit to a degrading national strip search.

Destruction and looting of the country's ancient heritage, perhaps the world's greatest archive of the human past, left unprotected by the US military, busy protecting oil facilities.

A nearly lawless society: Iraq's legal system, outside of the political sphere, was once one of the most impressive and secular in the Middle East; it is now a shambles; religious law more and more prevails.

Women's rights previously enjoyed are now in great and growing danger under harsh Islamic law, to one extent or another in various areas. There is today a Shiite religious ruling class in Iraq, which tolerates physical attacks on women for showing a bare arm or for picnicking with a male friend. Men can be harassed for wearing shorts in public, as can children playing outside in shorts.

Sex trafficking, virtually nonexistent previously, has become a serious issue.

Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims have lost much of the security they had enjoyed in Saddam's secular society; many have emigrated.

A gulag of prisons run by the US and the new Iraqi government feature a wide variety of torture and abuse -- physical, psychological, emotional; painful, degrading, humiliating; leading to mental breakdown, death, suicide; a human-rights disaster area.

Over 50,000 Iraqis have been imprisoned by US forces since the invasion, but only a very tiny portion of them have been convicted of any crime.

US authorities have recruited members of Saddam Hussein's feared security service to expand intelligence gathering and root out the resistance.

Unemployment is estimated to be around fifty percent. Massive layoffs of hundreds of thousands of Baathist government workers and soldiers by the American occupation authority set the process in motion early on. Later, many, desperate for work, took positions tainted by a connection to the occupation, placing themselves in grave danger of being kidnapped or murdered.

The cost of living has skyrocketed. Income levels have plummeted.

The Kurds of Northern Iraq evict Arabs from their homes. Arabs evict Kurds in other parts of the country.

Many people were evicted from their homes because they were Baathist. US troops took part in some of the evictions. They have also demolished homes in fits of rage over the killing of one of their buddies.

When US troops don't find who they're looking for, they take who's there; wives have been held until the husband turns himself in, a practice which Hollywood films stamped in the American mind as being a particular evil of the Nazis; it's also collective punishment of civilians and is forbidden under the Geneva Convention.

Continual American bombing assaults on neighborhoods has left an uncountable number of destroyed homes, workplaces, mosques, bridges, roads, and everything else that goes into the making of modern civilized life.

Hafitha, Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi ... names that will live in infamy for the wanton destruction, murder, and assaults upon human beings and human rights carried out in those places by US forces.

The supply of safe drinking water, effective sewage disposal, and reliable electricity have all generally been below pre-invasion levels, producing constant hardship for the public, in temperatures reaching 115 degrees. To add to the misery, people wait all day in the heat to purchase gasoline, due in part to oil production, the country's chief source of revenue, being less than half its previous level.

The water and sewage system and other elements of the infrastructure had been purposely (sic) destroyed by US bombing in the first Gulf War of 1991. By 2003, the Iraqis had made great strides in repairing the most essential parts of it. Then came Washington's renewed bombing.

Civil war, death squads, kidnaping, car bombs, rape, each and every day ... Iraq has become the most dangerous place on earth. American soldiers and private security companies regularly kill people and leave the bodies lying in the street; US-trained Iraqi military and police forces kill even more, as does the insurgency. An entire new generation is growing up on violence and sectarian ethics; this will poison the Iraqi psyche for many years to come.

US intelligence and military police officers often free dangerous criminals in return for a promise to spy on insurgents.

Iraqis protesting about various issues have been shot by US forces on several occasions.

At other times, the US has killed, wounded and jailed reporters from Al Jazeera television, closed the station's office, and banned it from certain areas because occupation officials didn't like the news the station was reporting. Newspapers have been closed for what they have printed. The Pentagon has planted paid-for news articles in the Iraqi press to serve propaganda purposes.

But freedom has indeed reigned -- for the great multinationals to extract everything they can from Iraq's resources and labor without the hindrance of public interest laws, environmental regulations or worker protections. The orders of the day have been privatization, deregulation, and laissez faire for Halliburton and other Western corporations. Iraqi businesses have been almost entirely shut out though they are not without abilities, as reflected in the infrastructure rebuilding effort following the US bombing of 1991.

Yet, despite the fact that it would be difficult to name a single area of Iraqi life which has improved as a result of the American actions, when the subject is Iraq and the person I'm having a discussion with has no other argument left to defend US policy there, at least at the moment, I may be asked:

"Just tell me one thing, are you glad that Saddam Hussein is out of power?"
And I say: "No".
And the person says: "No?"
And I say: "No. Tell me, if you went into surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon mistakenly amputated your entire leg, what would you think if someone then asked you: Are you glad that you no longer have a knee problem? The people of Iraq no longer have a Saddam problem."

And many Iraqis actually supported him.

Revolutionary Radio in Venezuela By: Peter Lackowski

Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution is not the kind of thing that any dictator could decree. In reality, it involves a mass movement of people who have taken the initiative to make it happen. The story of the revolution is only partly the story of Hugo Chavez. It is also the story of all of the organizations and campaigns of the Venezuelan people, more stories than will ever be written. This is the story of one of those countless organizations that make up what Venezuelans call "the process."

Merida is a city of 250,000 people in a beautiful Andean valley at the foot of Venezuela’s highest mountain, Pico Bolivar. The University of the Andes has about forty thousand students, and the charming setting makes the city a magnet for tourists. It is the capital and commercial center of the mountainous state of Merida, population about 750,000.

In March of 2002 the oligarchy used their control of the mass media to create huge demonstrations of mostly upper and middle class people in Caracas to demand that President Hugo Chavez resign. According to television news, the vast majority of people were against him.

People in Merida, three hundred miles to the west, were in contact with friends and relatives in Caracas and in the army. (In Venezuela there is one cell phone for every two people.) They knew that what the media were telling them was not the whole story, but they needed information about what really was going on.

A few friends decided to set up a low power FM transmitter in Merida and broadcast whatever reliable information they could gather. This was not unique. Around that time radio stations were being set up all around Venezuela for similar reasons.

The first problem was getting the equipment. There was a young man in the neighborhood who had only finished sixth grade, but he had a reputation as an electronic genius. He managed to construct a transmitter that worked very well. In fact it is still working, and the people at the station worry about it, because the young man has gone off to seek his fortune in Brazil, and if it breaks down they won’t know how to fix it. You can’t just buy parts for a piece of equipment that is, as they put it, "artisanal."

The next problem was building an audience. They found a frequency that was not being used in Merida, and they set up an intermittent schedule. Given the thirst for reliable news, the word spread quickly.

They had to keep this work clandestine, so the current director of the station, Jorge Luis Hernandez, hid the transmitter in an old fashioned washing machine in a corner of his kitchen. They were not worried about any Venezuelan equivalent of the FCC tracking them down, but there are about eight commercial radio stations in Merida, and they were concerned that someone from one of those stations would get the police to hassle them.

They decided to call their station Radio Zamorana, after General Ezequiel Zamora, a revolutionary hero of the 1800’s whose slogans were "Tierras y hombres libres, Eleccion Popular, and Horror a la Oligarquia." (Free land and free men, Election by the people, and Horror to the Oligarchy.)

On April 11, 2002, the coup d’etat finally came, Chavez was kidnapped, and the constitution that had been ratified in 1999 by a vote of 72 % was declared null and void. The commercial media presented their usual one sided version, and the upper classes of Merida, wild with joy, were demonstrating in the Plaza Bolivar.

The next day, Radio Zamorana broadcast the follow up story: that huge crowds of people were pouring into the center of Caracas from the poor neighborhoods in the hills, even coming by bus and car from other cities. The oligarchs lost the support of the army when the soldiers learned that their generals and the media had lied. The self appointed "government" of the oligarchy fled from the presidential palace. After 47 hours in captivity, Chavez was back in charge.

These developments were not reported by the big Caracas media, who put routine programming on TV and music on the radio, and pretended that the oligarchy was still running the government. Finally, with community radio stations broadcasting, and the government TV station back on the air, people learned that the president and the constitution were safe.

People in Merida took heart when they heard the truth, came out in great numbers, and drove the upper class supporters of the coup out of Merida’s Plaza Bolivar and city hall.

Similar things happened in cities and towns all across Venezuela. Afterwards, there was a lot of pressure on Conatel, the government agency, to issue regular licenses to community stations. Radio Zamorana came out of the washing machine and is now housed in the city’s cultural center, a large concrete building downtown. There is a full day’s worth of varied programming, with a lot of flexibility to allow people from the community to have their say. Often they contribute information, like the professor from the medical school who has presented programs about health, or a bright young boy of seven who has a Sunday morning program of Andean legends.

The station also provides a forum for controversy. One example of that was a group of hospital workers who came to the station with well documented evidence that certain members of management were stealing and reselling hospital supplies.

The station has maintained its role in mobilizing people by providing up to date news. For example, some months after the coup failed, the opposition tried to create chaos in the country by a general strike, and by staging what Venezuelans call guarimbas, where people set fire to tires and trash in the streets to disrupt things. When this would happen, Radio Zamorana would broadcast the news, and large numbers of people would go to the scene with banners, put out the fires, and take back the streets.

The University of Latin America is a private university, with a student population drawn largely from the upper classes. Therefore it is not surprising that right wing student organizations are very strong on the campus. In the fall of 2005 a student was killed in a mugging, and some students called a demonstration to demand more police protection. The radical right wing groups on the campus managed to turn the demonstration into a rampage, with fires, looting of stores, and battles in which several police were injured. Most people in town had no idea what was going on, so people turned to Radio Zamorana for an explanation and updates.

I had a demonstration of how quickly the station responds to the community on December 4, the day of the elections for the National Assembly. I happened to be walking through the Plaza Bolivar in the late afternoon. As I passed the cathedral I saw that a crowd was watching police and firemen going in and out. A bystander told me that a tear gas bomb had been set off in the sanctuary, presumably by the opposition, some of whom had threatened to disrupt the election by violence. I went to a phone to call Jorge, and when I said I had just come from the cathedral he said, "You mean the bomb? We have someone there now, reporting."

Even though the station is officially recognized, the struggle goes on. The previous director of the community center had been a friend of the station and established them in their current home. He was a popular community leader, and he was planning to run for an elective office, when he was shot to death by someone on a motorcycle who was never caught. There is a portrait of him in the mural of national and local heroes on the wall across from the cultural center.

The next director was different. He claimed to be a supporter of Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution, but when people from the neighborhood came on the station to complain about the way he was running things, he had someone go up on the roof and cut the wire that runs to the station’s antenna.

A group of friends of the station campesinos, artisans, neighbors got together to figure out what to do. They decided that they would do just what their station’s namesake Ezequiel Zamora would do in a similar situation. They notified the director of the center that if he ever did that again, they would beat him with the flat of their machetes. There has been no further trouble.

This is not the picture of people living under a dictatorship. Radio Zamorana is an independent entity that answers only to the people who it serves; nobody tells them what to do except their community.

Nor are they bribed with lavish gifts from the government. Conatel does not hassle them, but while it promises material aid, it does not always get around to providing it. Jorge is really worried about the transmitter, and he wishes he could afford a good omni-directional microphone. Their signal reaches out beyond the valley now that they have more power, but the studio is a barely adequate space in the basement.

The Bolivarian revolution includes countless independent organizations. Some have to do with communication, like Radio Zamorana, or like the motorcyclists who rode between the barrios like Paul Reveres to mobilize people to fight the coup. Others are cooperatives, or cultural organizations, or they are set up to deal with a wide range of community problems. Some are political; there are several different parties in the governing coalition in the National Assembly.

Participation goes beyond people who support Chavez. For example, the committees on urban lands handle the process by which people in certain neighborhoods acquire titles to the houses that they have built on public land around the cities. A community organization settles all the details of who owns what, and then contracts for basic services to the neighborhood. Everybody, regardless of their political opinions, has an interest in seeing that things are handled efficiently and honestly, so they get involved.

The government provides micro-loans, technical advice, and oversight to the coops, and funding to neighborhood organizations that have a budget and transparent accounting. But the main role of the government has been to enable people to get things done by getting the bureaucracy to work with them instead of against them. Since Chavez, they are sailing with the wind at their backs.

Taken all together, these coops, neighborhood associations, radio stations, political groups, and other organizations are making the Bolivarian revolution happen. Many of them started long before Chavez was president, and they haven’t needed him or anyone else to "dictate" to them how to do it. Venezuelans are creating what they call "participatory democracy," where the lower classes who make up the majority of the population are actively taking control of their government, their society, and their own lives.

Terrorists in Miami, Oh My! By Robert Parry

The Bush administration finally took action against alleged terrorists living in plain sight in Miami, but they weren't the right-wing Cuban terrorists implicated in actual acts of terror, such as blowing a civilian Cuban airliner out of the sky. They were seven young black men whose crime was more "aspirational than operational," the FBI said.

As media fanfare over the arrests made the seven young men, many sporting dreadlocks, the new face of the terrorist enemy in America, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales conceded that the men had no weapons or explosives and represented "no immediate threat."

But Gonzales warned that these kinds of homegrown terrorists "may prove to be as dangerous as groups like al-Qaeda." [NYT, June 24, 2006]

For longtime observers of political terrorism in South Florida, the aggressive reaction to what may have been the Miami group's loose talk about violence, possibly spurred by an FBI informant posing as an al-Qaeda operative, stands in marked contrast to the US government's see-no-evil approach to notorious Cuban terrorists who have lived openly in Miami for decades.

For instance, the Bush administration took no action in early April 2006, when a Spanish-language Miami television station interviewed Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch, who offered a detailed justification for the 1976 mid-air bombing of a Cubana Airlines flight that killed 73 people, including the young members of the Cuban national fencing team.

Bosch refused to admit guilt, but his chilling defense of the bombing - and the strong evidence that has swirled around his role - left little doubt of his complicity, even as he lives in Miami as a free man, protected both in the past and present by the Bush family.

The Bush administration also has acted at a glacial pace in dealing with another Cuban exile implicated in the bombing, Luis Posada Carriles, whose illegal presence in Miami was an open secret for weeks in early 2005 before US authorities took him into custody, only after he had held a press conference.

But even then, the administration has balked at sending Posada back to Venezuela where the government of Hugo Chavez - unlike some of its predecessors - was eager to prosecute Posada for the Cubana Airlines murders.

Summing up George W. Bush's dilemma in 2005, the New York Times wrote, "A grant of asylum could invite charges that the Bush administration is compromising its principle that no nation should harbor suspected terrorists. But to turn Mr. Posada away could provoke political wrath in the conservative Cuban-American communities of South Florida, deep sources of support and campaign money for President Bush and his brother, Jeb." [NYT, May 9, 2005]

Bush Family Ties

But there's really nothing new about these two terrorists - and other violent right-wing extremists - getting protection from the Bush family.

For three decades, both Bosch and Posada have been under the Bush family's protective wing, starting with former President George H.W. Bush (who was CIA director when the airline bombing occurred in 1976) and extending to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and President George W. Bush.

The evidence points to one obvious conclusion: the Bushes regard terrorism - defined as killing civilians to make a political point - as justified in cases when their interests match those of the terrorists. In other words, their moral outrage is selective, depending on the identity of the victims.

That hypocrisy was dramatized by the TV interview with Bosch on Miami's Channel 41, which was cited in articles on the Internet by Venezuela's lawyer José Pertierra, but was otherwise widely ignored by the US news media. [For Pertierra's story, see Counterpunch, April 11, 2006.]

"Did you down that plane in 1976?" asked reporter Juan Manuel Cao.

"If I tell you that I was involved, I will be inculpating myself," Bosch answered, "and if I tell you that I did not participate in that action, you would say that I am lying. I am therefore not going to answer one thing or the other."

But when Cao asked Bosch to comment on the civilians who died when the plane crashed off the coast of Barbados in 1976, Bosch responded, "In a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Fidel Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach."

"But don't you feel a little bit for those who were killed there, for their families?" Cao asked.

"Who was on board that plane?" Bosch responded. "Four members of the Communist Party, five North Koreans, five Guyanese." [Officials tallies actually put the Guyanese dead at 11.]

Bosch added, "Four members of the Communist Party, chico! Who was there? Our enemies ..."

"And the fencers?" Cao asked about Cuba's amateur fencing team that had just won gold, silver and bronze medals at a youth fencing competition in Caracas. "The young people on board?"

Bosch replied, "I was in Caracas. I saw the young girls on television. There were six of them. After the end of the competition, the leader of the six dedicated their triumph to the tyrant.... She gave a speech filled with praise for the tyrant.

"We had already agreed in Santo Domingo, that everyone who comes from Cuba to glorify the tyrant had to run the same risks as those men and women that fight alongside the tyranny." [The comment about Santo Domingo was an apparent reference to a strategy meeting by a right-wing terrorist organization, CORU, which took place in the Dominican Republic in 1976.]

"If you ran into the family members who were killed in that plane, wouldn't you think it difficult?" Cao asked.

"No, because in the end those who were there had to know that they were cooperating with the tyranny in Cuba," Bosch answered.

In an article about Bosch's remarks, lawyer Pertierra said the answers "give us a glimpse into the mind of the kind of terrorist that the United States government harbors and protects in Miami."

The Posada Case

Bosch was arrested for illegally entering the United States during the first Bush administration, but he was paroled in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush at the behest of the President's eldest son Jeb, then an aspiring Florida politician.

Not only did the first Bush administration free Bosch from jail a decade and a half ago, the second Bush administration has now pushed Venezuela's extradition request for his alleged co-conspirator, Posada, onto the back burner.

The downed Cubana Airlines flight originated in Caracas where Venezuelan authorities allege the terrorist plot was hatched. However, US officials have resisted returning Posada to Venezuela because Hugo Chavez is seen as friendly to Castro's communist government in Cuba.

At a US immigration hearing in 2005, Posada's defense attorney put on a Posada friend as a witness who alleged that Venezuela's government practices torture. Bush administration lawyers didn't challenge the claim, leading the immigration judge to bar Posada's deportation to Venezuela.

In September 2005, Venezuela's Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez called the 77-year-old Posada "the Osama Bin Laden of Latin America" and accused the Bush administration of applying "a cynical double standard" in its War on Terror.

Alvarez also denied that Venezuela practices torture. "There isn't a shred of evidence that Posada would be tortured in Venezuela," Alvarez said, adding that the claim is particularly ironic given widespread press accounts that the Bush administration has abused prisoners at the US military base in Guatanamo Bay, Cuba.

Theoretically, the Bush administration could still extradite Posada to Venezuela to face the 73 murder counts, but it is essentially ignoring Venezuela's extradition request while holding Posada on minor immigration charges of entering the United States illegally.

Meanwhile, Posada has begun maneuvering to gain his freedom. Citing his service in the US military from 1963-65 in Vietnam, Posada has applied for US citizenship, and his lawyer Eduardo Soto has threatened to call US government witnesses, including former White House aide Oliver North, to vouch for Posada's past service to Washington.

Posada became a figure in the Iran-Contra scandal because of his work on a clandestine program to aid Nicaraguan contra rebels fighting Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. The operation was run secretly out of the White House by North with the help of the office of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush.

Posada reached Central America in 1985 after escaping from a Venezuelan prison where he had been facing charges from the 1976 Cubana Airlines bombing. Posada, using the name Ramon Medina, teamed up with another Cuban exile, former CIA officer Felix Rodriguez, who reported regularly to Bush's office.

Posada oversaw logistics and served as paymaster for pilots in the contra-supply operation. When one of the contra-supply planes was shot down inside Nicaragua in October 1986, Posada was responsible for alerting US officials to the crisis and then shutting down the operation's safe houses in El Salvador.

Even after the exposure of Posada's role in the contra-supply operation, the US government made no effort to bring the accused terrorist to justice.

Secret History

As for the Cubana Airlines bombing, declassified US documents show that after the plane was blown out of the sky on Oct. 6, 1976, the CIA, then under the direction of George H.W. Bush, quickly identified Posada and Bosch as the masterminds of the Cubana Airlines bombing.

But in fall 1976, Bush's boss, President Gerald Ford, was in a tight election battle with Democrat Jimmy Carter and the Ford administration wanted to keep intelligence scandals out of the newspapers. So Bush and other officials kept the lid on the investigations. [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]

Still, inside the US government, the facts were known. According to a secret CIA cable dated Oct. 14, 1976, intelligence sources in Venezuela relayed information about the Cubana Airlines bombing that tied in anti-communist Cuban extremists Bosch, who had been visiting Venezuela, and Posada, who then served as a senior officer in Venezuela's intelligence agency, DISIP.

The Oct. 14 cable said Bosch arrived in Venezuela in late September 1976 under the protection of Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, a close Washington ally who assigned his intelligence adviser Orlando Garcia "to protect and assist Bosch during his stay in Venezuela."

On his arrival, Bosch was met by Garcia and Posada, according to the report. Later, a fundraising dinner was held in Bosch's honor during which Bosch requested cash from the Venezuelan government in exchange for assurances that Cuban exiles wouldn't demonstrate during Andres Perez's planned trip to the United Nations.

"A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, 'we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,' and that 'Orlando has the details,'" the CIA report said.

"Following the 6 October Cubana Airline crash off the coast of Barbados, Bosch, Garcia and Posada agreed that it would be best for Bosch to leave Venezuela. Therefore, on 9 October, Posada and Garcia escorted Bosch to the Colombian border, where he crossed into Colombian territory."

The CIA report was sent to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, as well as to the FBI and other US intelligence agencies, according to markings on the cable.

A Round-Up

In South America, investigators began rounding up suspects in the bombing.

Two Cuban exiles, Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, who had left the Cubana plane in Barbados, confessed that they had planted the bomb. They named Bosch and Posada as the architects of the attack.

A search of Posada's apartment in Venezuela turned up Cubana Airlines timetables and other incriminating documents.

Posada and Bosch were arrested and charged in Venezuela for the Cubana Airlines bombing, but the men denied the accusations. The case soon became a political tug-of-war, since the suspects were in possession of sensitive Venezuelan government secrets that could embarrass President Andres Perez. The case lingered for almost a decade.

After the Reagan-Bush administration took power in Washington in 1981, the momentum for fully unraveling the mysteries of anti-communist terrorist plots dissipated. The Cold War trumped any concern about right-wing terrorism.

By the late 1980s, Orlando Bosch also was out of Venezuela's jails and back in Miami. But Bosch, who had been implicated in about 30 violent attacks, was facing possible deportation by US officials who warned that Washington couldn't credibly lecture other countries about terrorism while protecting a terrorist like Bosch.

But Bosch got lucky. Jeb Bush, then an aspiring Florida politician, led a lobbying drive to prevent the US Immigration and Naturalization Service from expelling Bosch. In 1990, the lobbying paid dividends when Jeb's dad, President George H.W. Bush, blocked proceedings against Bosch, letting the unapologetic terrorist stay in the United States.

In 1992, also during George H.W. Bush's presidency, the FBI interviewed Posada about the Iran-Contra scandal for 6 ½ hours at the US Embassy in Honduras.

Posada filled in some blanks about the role of Bush's vice presidential office in the secret contra operation. According to a 31-page summary of the FBI interview, Posada said Bush's national security adviser, Donald Gregg, was in frequent contact with Felix Rodriguez.

"Posada ... recalls that Rodriguez was always calling Gregg," the FBI summary said. "Posada knows this because he's the one who paid Rodriguez' phone bill." After the interview, the FBI agents let Posada walk out of the embassy to freedom. [For details, see Parry's Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & Project Truth.]

More Attacks

Posada soon returned to his anti-Castro plotting.

In 1994, Posada set out to kill Castro during a trip to Cartagena, Colombia. Posada and five cohorts reached Cartagena, but the plan flopped when security cordons prevented the would-be assassins from getting a clean shot at Castro, according to a Miami Herald account. [Miami Herald, June 7, 1998]

The Herald also described Posada's role in a lethal 1997 bombing campaign against popular hotels and restaurants inside Cuba that killed an Italian tourist. The story cited documentary evidence that Posada arranged payments to conspirators from accounts in the United States.

Posada landed back in jail in 2000 after Cuban intelligence uncovered a plot to assassinate Castro by planting a bomb at a meeting the Cuban leader planned with university students in Panama.

Panamanian authorities arrested Posada and other alleged co-conspirators in November 2000. In April 2004, they were sentenced to eight or nine years in prison for endangering public safety.

Four months after the sentencing, however, lame-duck Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso - who lives in Key Biscayne, Florida, and has close ties to the Cuban-American community and to George W. Bush's administration - pardoned the convicts.

Despite press reports saying Moscoso had been in contact with US officials about the pardons, the State Department denied that it pressured Moscoso to release the Cuban exiles. After the pardons and just two months before Election 2004, three of Posada's co-conspirators - Guillermo Novo Sampol, Pedro Remon and Gaspar Jimenez - arrived in Miami to a hero's welcome, flashing victory signs at their supporters.

While the terrorists celebrated, US authorities watched the men - also implicated in bombings in New York, New Jersey and Florida - alight on US soil. As Washington Post writer Marcela Sanchez noted in a September 2004 article about the Panamanian pardons, "there is something terribly wrong when the United States, after Sept. 11 (2001), fails to condemn the pardoning of terrorists and instead allows them to walk free on US streets." [Washington Post, Sept. 3, 2004.]

But a whole different set of standards is now being applied to the seven black terrorism suspects in Miami. Even though they had no clear-cut plans or even the tools to carry out terrorist attacks, they have been rounded up amid great media hoopla.

The American people have been reassured that the terrorists in Miami have been located and are being brought to justice.


Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'