Two-Faced On Terrorism
By Ken Fuller
THE PHILIPPINES, April 26, 2011.- On July 14, 2009, this column discussed the case of the Cuban 5. At that time, Fernando L. Gonzales, Rene S. Gonzales, Antonio R. Guerrero, Gerardo N. Hernandez and Ramon S. Labanino had been in US prisons for 11 years, having been convicted of “espionage.”
In reality, all they had done was infiltrate anti-Castro terrorist networks in Florida, and in June 1998 Cuban officials had handed over the evidence they had collected to Federal Bureau of Investigation officials invited to Havana to receive it. Instead of hailing the five men as heroes in the war against terrorism, US officials hunted them down and arrested them, having in the meantime tipped off the terrorists. When I last wrote on this subject, the US Supreme Court had declined to even consider the five’s appeals, provoking a letter from the Philippine Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban 5 to Obama in which the latter was urged to grant them an amnesty.
At the time, I wrote that “this is one of the decisions by which Obama will be judged.” It has to be said, however, that since then he has taken other decisions (one of which has earned him the dubious distinction of being the first black US president to bomb an African country) which history may decide deserve prior consideration. On the question of the Cuban 5, anyway, he has done absolutely nothing.
There is, of course, a rationale for this hypocrisy, as the terrorists fingered by the Cuban 5 have directed their terrorism at Cuba. Regular readers may recall that chief among them is Luis Posada Carriles, a documented CIA agent in the 1960s and part of the 1970s. For his role in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner on which all 73 passengers and crew were killed, he was indicted in Venezuela, where the flight had commenced, but escaped in 1985. He has also been accused of being behind the bombing of Cuban hotels in 1997, and served time in Panama for an attempt in 2000 to bomb a stadium at which Fidel Castro was due to speak.
Pardoned in 2004, reportedly as a favor to George W. Bush, he made his way to the USA, where the authorities have consistently refused to extradite him to either Cuba or Venezuela, the two countries seeking to prosecute him for his previous crimes. In April 2009, however, Posada was indicted on 11 counts, including perjury and obstruction of a federal proceeding — a development which at the time, although no terrorism charges had been brought against him, I perhaps foolishly described as “a glimmer of hope.”
On April 8, 2011, a court in El Paso, Texas acquitted Posada of all these charges. An angry statement by Cuba’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs denounced the trial, which had opened 13 weeks earlier, as a “farce,” and charged that the “shameless verdict at El Paso is in full contradiction with the anti-terrorist policy that the US government is said to profess, which has even led to military interventions against other nations, taking a toll of thousands of human lives.” The statement held the US government responsible for this outcome and challenged it “to take on its obligations in the struggle against terrorism, without hypocrisy or double standards.”
Cuba’s sense of outrage is shared by the Philippine Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban 5, which on April 17 wrote once again to President Barack Obama, urging that he accede to the request, made by Venezuela over five years ago, for the extradition of Posada, thus complying “with your government’s legal obligations under relevant international covenants and UN Security Council resolutions.”
Understandably, the letter devotes considerable space to the issue of the Cuban 5, pointing to the fact that hundreds of international parliamentarians, lawyers’ organizations and academics “including 10 Nobel laureates who were among those who filed Amicus briefs before the US Supreme Court,” have called for their release.” Even Jimmy Carter, it seems, has joined this chorus, pointing out that their trial “was very doubtful and violated standards.”
In 2005, a three-member panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit “unanimously overturned the convictions… on finding that pervasive community prejudice in Miami against the Cuban government merged with other factors to prejudice their right to a fair trial.” Then, however, the same court, meeting en banc, overturned this verdict. The Philippine committee’s letter points out that a new appeal was filed last June, partly based on new evidence, i.e. that “journalists who had written prejudicial articles and commentary about the case at the time of the trial were paid employees of the US government while working for anti-Cuba media outlets in the USA.”
Once again, the Philippine committee urges Obama to amnesty the Cuban 5.
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This, presumably, is the kind of freedom and justice which Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy wish to introduce into Libya by means of Nato airstrikes. These three have now openly called for regime change in that country — a demand which not even the most fanciful interpretation of UN Security Council 1973 can justify. For the past eight years, the USA and the UK have been governed by war criminals — leaders who have waged illegal wars. France has now joined the club.
In this latest illegal war, it seems to me that the BBC (along with other Western media outfits, it must be said) is not a reporter but an active participant, acting as the propaganda arm and cheerleader of Whitehall and Washington. An article in London’s Morning Star by Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn makes a similar point.
Cockburn also speculates that the Western intervention may not just be about oil but the future of the dollar and the euro. More next week…
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