Nice post with an interesting rant for a preface.
For the archive
2B-Clear wrote:
> Agee's article is one of the clearest and concisest to appear on my
> screen in some time. If only our so called "liberal" media would share
> this guy's work/observations with their audiences, then perhaps the
> people would begin to wake up and see the same reality that people
> outside the USA have been seeing for years. The American people are
> told that they're free, but that is a filthy lie. The American people
> are NOT free, they are like slaves, who are drowning in a cesspool of
> lies and deception. Their (our) nation is not great, it is the
> greatest obstacle to world peace and there's nothing great about that!
>
> ---------------------------------
>
> Orwell Rolls In His Grave
> 1 hr 45 min -"Could a media system, controlled by a few global
> cor****ations with the ability to overwhelm all competing ... all »
> voices, be able to turn lies into truth?..."
> This chilling documentary film examines the relation****p between the
> media, cor****ate America, and government. In a country where the "top
> 1% control 90% of the wealth", the film argues that the media system
> is nothing but a "subsidiary of cor****ate America."
>
> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1925114769515892401
>
> On Mar 31, 8:46 pm, "RH" <halcon7r...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> Please share this article with others who like to know what's going on
>> in the world:
>>
>> http://www.counterpunch.org/agee03142007.html
>>
>> A Stunning Contrast
>> TheDescent of the US; the Rise of Latin America
>> By PHILIP AGEE
>>
>> Havana.
>>
>> Anyone following the news in recent times cannot be unaware of the
>> wave of progressive change sweeping Latin America and the Caribbean.
>> For many lonely years Cuba held high the torch through its exemplary
>> programs to provide universal health care and education, both gratis,
>> along with world class cultural, s****ts and scientific achievements.
>> Although you won´t find a Cuban today who says things are perfect, far
>> from it, probably all would agree that compared with pre-revolutionary
>> Cuba there is a world of improvement. All this they did against every
>> effort by the United States to isolate them as an unacceptable example
>> of independence and self-determination, using every dirty method
>> including infiltration, sabotage, terrorism, assassination, economic
>> and biological warfare and incessant lies in the cooperating media of
>> many countries. I know these methods too well, having been a CIA
>> officer in Latin America in the 1960´s. Altogether nearly 3500 Cubans
>> have died from terrorist acts, and more than 2000 are permanently
>> disabled. No country has suffered terrorism as long and consistently
>> as Cuba.
>>
>> All through the years, beginning even before taking power in 1959, the
>> Cuban revolution has needed to have intelligence collection
>> capabilities in the U.S. for defensive purposes. Such was the fully
>> justified mission of the Cuban Five, jailed since 1998 with long
>> sentences after conviction for various crimes in Miami where they had
>> no chance for a fair trial. Convictions were for conspiracy to commit
>> espionage to murder. Nevertheless their sights were exclusively set on
>> criminal terrorist planning in Miami for operations against Cuba,
>> activities ignored by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. They
>> neither sought nor received any classified U.S. government
>> information. Their cases are still on appeal, and will be for years to
>> come, but their completely biased convictions rank with the legal
>> lynching in the 1920's of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the
>> anarchist immigrants, as among the most shameful injustices in U.S.
>> history. Freedom for the Cuban Five should be the cause of everyone
>> for whom fairness, human rights and justice are im****tant, both in the
>> United States and around the world, joining in the activities of the
>> 300 Free the Five solidarity committees in 90 countries.
>>
>> Current U.S. policy with its means and goals can be found in the
>> nearly 500-page 2004 re****t of the Commission for Assistance to a Free
>> Cuba together with an update published in 2006 that has a secret
>> annex. A fundamental goal, the same in 2007 as I remember it was in
>> 1959, is isolation of Cuba to keep this bad example from spreading,
>> and the current policy if successful, would mean no less than Cuban
>> annexation to the U.S. and complete dependence, in fact if not in law,
>> as Cubans rightfully claim. Other fundamental goals from 1959 are
>> still, nearly 50 years later, to foment an internal political
>> opposition and to cause economic hard****p in Cuba leading to
>> desperation, hunger and despair. It is no exaggeration to call these
>> goals genocidal.
>>
>> Yet, U.S. economic warfare of nearly 50 years against Cuba hasn't
>> worked even though the Cubans who keep book estimate its cost at more
>> than $80 billion. After the Cuban economy's free fall in the early
>> 1990's, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it began to recover in
>> 1995. By 2005 growth was 11.8% and in 2006 it was 12.5%, the highest
>> in Latin America. Some sectors have surpassed their development levels
>> of the late 80's, before the collapse, and others are nearly back.
>> Cuba's ex****ts of services, nickel, pharmaceutical and other products
>> are booming, and try as it may, the U.S. has not been able to stop
>> this.
>>
>> In the end U.S. efforts to isolate Cuba have also totally failed. In
>> September 2006 Cuba was elected, for the second time, to lead the Non-
>> Aligned Movement of 118 countries, and two months later, for the 15th
>> consecutive year, the United Nations General Assembly voted to condemn
>> the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba, this time 183 to 4. In 2007 Cuba
>> has diplomatic or consular relations with 182 countries. Havana
>> meanwhile is the site of seemingly endless international conferences
>> on every imaginable theme with thousands of people from around the
>> world attending. And not least, Cuba in recent years has been hosting
>> more than 2 million foreign tourists annually at its world-class
>> resorts. Far from isolating Cuba, the U.S. has isolated itself.
>>
>> More than 30,000 Cuban doctors and health workers are saving lives and
>> preventing disease in 69 countries, many in the most remote and
>> difficult areas where few or no local doctors will go. Meanwhile
>> 30,000 young foreigners from dozens of countries are studying medicine
>> in Cuba on full scholar****ps. All were selected from areas lacking
>> doctors, and all are committed to return to these areas in their home
>> countries to practice.
>>
>> In education the Cuban literacy program known as "Yes I can" has been
>> adopted in nearly 30 countries on five continents where thousands more
>> Cuban volunteers are teaching. Through this program, in Spanish,
>> ****tuguese, English, Creole, Quechua and Aymara, some 2 million people
>> have learned to read and write, most of whom continue their education
>> afterwards through a variety of other programs.
>>
>> Thanks to these international assistance programs, Cuban prestige and
>> influence, and international solidarity with Cuba, have never been
>> greater. It was to defend these worthy programs that the five Cubans,
>> unjustly convicted, went to Miami in the 1990's.
>>
>> Then in 1999 came Hugo Chavez, the U.S.'s latest worst nightmare in
>> the region, admittedly following the Cuban example in Venezuela, with
>> its enormous income from petroleum, to establish what he calls a
>> Socialism for the 21st Century with a foreign policy of regional
>> integration under his innovative Bolivarian Alternative for the
>> Americas, ALBA, excluding the United States altogether. The program is
>> already underway through institutions such as Mercosur in trade,
>> Petrocaribe, Petroandino and Petrosur in the energy sector, the Banco
>> del Sur in finance, and Telesur in electronic media.
>>
>> Another program under ALBA is Operación Milagro (Operation Miracle)
>> for offering free eye surgery to people unable to afford it for
>> cataracts, glaucoma, diabetes and other vision problems. It began in
>> 2004 as a joint Cuban-Venezuelan effort to bring Venezuelans by air to
>> Cuba cost free for operations. Within two years 28 countries of Latin
>> America and the Caribbean were participating, and operations restoring
>> sight numbered 485,000 of whom 290,000 were Venezuelans. Jet liners
>> loaded with patients come and go from Havana everyday, but by early
>> 2007 thirteen modern eye clinics were being built in Venezuela, and
>> several had already performed thousands of operations there. Other
>> clinics were being established in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala,
>> Honduras and Haiti, all with Cuban planning and staffing. The ten-year
>> goal of Operación Milagro is to restore sight to 6 million people of
>> Latin America and the Caribbean, and the program is expanding to
>> Africa.
>>
>> The Cuban example of so many years, and now Venezuela, have also
>> recently inspired the peoples of Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina,
>> Uruguay and Nicaragua to elect progressive leaders. Most have rejected
>> the 1990´s "Wa****ngton Consensus" and the neo-liberal model along with
>> determined U.S. efforts to establish a hemispheric free trade zone.
>> All are developing grassroots social and economic programs, each in
>> its own way, aimed at improving the quality of life for all,
>> especially the long-excluded majorities of their populations where
>> this injustice prevailed. Although achievements in Cuba continue to
>> ****ne, the torch of revolution in the region has effectively passed
>> from the towering figure of Fidel, ailing at eighty, to Chavez, a
>> military man and teacher inspired by Simón Bolívar and José Martí.
>>
>> Reflecting on these new hopes for hundreds of millions in such a vast
>> region, one cannot avoid recalling the old professor, Próspero,
>> addressing his class for the last time in Ariel, the classic essay by
>> José Enrique Rodó, still read by students in Latin America. In
>> borrowing from The Tempest, and urging his students to follow the
>> soaring spirit of virtue and good, represented by Ariel, and to reject
>> the crass materialism of the U.S. personified by Calibán, Próspero
>> drew a contrast between Latin American idealism and the United States
>> that is as valid today as in 1900 when the essay first appeared.
>>
>> While Latin America is fast moving in progressive directions, almost
>> unimaginable less than ten years ago, in contrast the United States,
>> at least since the Reagan era, has been moving step by step toward a
>> Fascism for the 21st Century. And the pace has quickened in the last
>> six years of Republican government under George W. Bush with passage
>> of the Patriot Act under emergency circumstances just after the
>> attacks on the Twin Towers in September 2001, and then adoption in
>> 2006 of the Military Commissions Act, both with substantial sup****t
>> from Congressional Democrats. Other legislation sup****ts this trend.
>>
>> The U.S. Federal Government now has legal powers to secretly monitor
>> one´s communications, whether by telephone, ordinary mail, e-mail, or
>> fax, plus your bank accounts, credit cards, the web sites you visit,
>> and the books you buy or read in libraries. Torture, secret prisons,
>> kidnapping, and jailing indefinitely without trial or recourse to
>> courts through habeas corpus---all are now legal. So is "extraordinary
>> rendition" whereby U.S. captives are delivered to other governments
>> where they will likely be tortured and possibly assassinated.
>> Investigations by the European Parliament have identified around 1200
>> secret CIA flights carrying these people through European air****ts to
>> secret prisons. To qualify for this treatment, anyone in the world,
>> U.S. citizens and any others, only need be designated by the
>> government as an "illegal enemy combatant" whose only definition is
>> someone who has "purposefully and materially sup****ted hostilities
>> against the United States." Hostilities or a hostile act can be
>> interpreted as almost anything that opposes U.S. policies, from a
>> speech expressing solidarity with Cuba to a picket line protesting the
>> war in Iraq. If an "enemy combatant" ever gets a trial, it will not be
>> by a jury of peers but by a U.S. military court that can use hearsay
>> and evidence obtained under torture.
>>
>> These powers reminiscent of the Nazi regime are not just a global U.S
>> Sword of Damocles waiting to fall on perceived enemies. The full range
>> of repression has been going on since the invasion of Afghanistan in
>> 2001 with plenty of evidence coming from the prisons and concentration
>> camps of Bagram, Abu Graib and Guantánamo as well as from testimony of
>> various released innocents swept up in the process. It is an on-going
>> worldwide application of fascist power in a non-defined, nebulous "war
>> on terrorism" that has no end or geographical limits. Since September
>> 2001 the Bush government has given one specious reason after another
>> for what it believes are the motives of Islamic terrorism, never
>> admitting that it is a reaction and resistance to U.S. imperial
>> policies, starting with U.S. sup****t for Israel's continued occupation
>> and colonization of Arab lands and Israel's refusal to return to its
>> borders before the Six-Day War in 1967.
>>
>> By 2006 the U.S. had designated some 17,000 people around the world as
>> "enemy combatants," according to press re****ts. Combine this
>> repression with gargantuan contracts to private U.S. firms, as in
>> Iraqi security and "reconstruction," along with forcing the Iraqi
>> government, always with eyes on the prize, to contract highly
>> prejudicial 30-year "production sharing agreements" to American and
>> British oil majors, excluded from Iraq before the invasion, plus
>> historic lows in trade union power, and you have the marriage of
>> government and cor****ate power that Mussolini, who invented the word
>> in 1919, described as the essence of fascism. The one bright spot are
>> the recent indictments of 13 CIA people in Germany and 26 others in
>> Italy for kidnapping and other violations of their laws. They will
>> never be brought to trial, of course, but the indictments are
>> refre****ng developments.
>>
>> Protection of terrorists who serve U.S. interests is still another
>> feature of American Fascism of the 21st Century. There are many
>> examples, especially among Cuban exiles, but two stand out from the
>> others: Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles. Both have long, well-
>> documented pedigrees as international terrorists, but one of their
>> joint crimes was historic: the first bombing in flight of a civilian
>> airliner in the Western Hemisphere. It was Cubana flight 455 that on
>> October 6th, 1976 exploded just after takeoff from Barbados killing
>> all 73 people on board.
>>
>> Bosch and Carriles, both of whose CIA careers began around 1960,
>> planned the bombing in Caracas and provided the explosives to two
>> Venezuelans recruited by Posada. These two were discovered, convicted,
>> and sentenced to long prison terms. Not so with Bosch and Posada who
>> were protected by then-Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez who
>> has his own history of working with the CIA. Although they were both
>> arrested and tried separately in Venezuelan courts as the intellectual
>> authors of the crime, neither was convicted.
>>
>> Bosch was found not guilty and released in 1988, returned to Miami but
>> was arrested for an old parole violation. The Justice Department then
>> ordered his de****tation as an "undesirable" and as "the most dangerous
>> terrorist" of the Western Hemisphere. But Jeb Bush, son of then-
>> President Bush, persuaded his father in 1990 to quash Bosch´s
>> de****tation order. Since then Bosch has lived freely in Miami where he
>> gives television interviews in which he makes every effort to justify
>> terrorism against Cuba.
>>
>> For his part Posada´s trial in Venezuela never ended because in 1985
>> he escaped from prison, fled the country, and soon turned up in El
>> Salvador working in the CIA´s Contra terrorist operation against
>> Nicaragua. When this ended he stayed underground in Central America
>> and from the early 1990´s organized more terrorist operations against
>> Cuba. In 2005 he was arrested in Miami for illegal entry to the U.S.,
>> and although he admitted to the New York Times to terrorist bombings
>> of hotels and other tourist facilities in Cuba, in one of which an
>> Italian tourist died, he has only been indicted for lying to the FBI
>> and in his request for naturalization. The Bush administration refuses
>> to certify him as a terrorist so that he can be tried as such, at the
>> same time ignoring Venezuela's extradition request as a fugitive from
>> justice, alleging absurdly that he might be tortured there. His
>> treatment suggests that he will eventually be pardoned by Bush,
>> perhaps on Christmas Eve of 2008 just before leaving the White House,
>> just as his father on Christmas Eve of 1992 pardoned former Defense
>> Secretary Casper Weinberger and various CIA officers for crimes in the
>> 1980´s Iran-Contra scandal, thus precluding their trials scheduled to
>> begin the following month.
>>
>> One need not dwell on the obvious. The conviction of the Miami Cuban
>> Five for their anti-terrorist efforts, in contrast with the official
>> protection of terrorists like Bosch and Posada, speaks volumes on the
>> U.S. as the pre-eminent state sponsor of international terrorism.
>>
>> The major disguise used to cloak this U.S. program of worldwide
>> aggression from the 1980´s to the present has been "promotion of
>> democracy," a hypocritical claim used ad nauseum by Presidents,
>> Secretaries of State and others that has never fooled anyone. It has
>> always been clear that the "democracy promotion" programs of the
>> National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department, the Agency for
>> International Development and associated foundations and agencies are
>> nothing more that attempts to foment and strengthen internal political
>> forces in countries around the world that will be under U.S. control
>> and will protect and cater to U.S. interests. Their origins are in the
>> CIA's political operations starting in the 1940´s, and they have
>> included the overthrow of democratically elected governments and the
>> institution of unspeakable repression as in Brazil in 1964 and Chile
>> in 1973 to name only two of many examples.
>>
>> To be sure there has been, and is, im****tant and worthy resistance in
>> the U.S. to this developing fascism both within Congress and among
>> private organizations and individuals. But it has been mostly isolated
>> attempts of a defensive and rear-guard nature, with little mention in
>> the cor****ate media. Bills have been introduced in Congress to ease or
>> end the economic blockade of Cuba, to amend the worst of the
>> repressive laws, even to impeach Bush and Cheney, but they seem
>> unlikely ever to prevail or become law. The two parties, actually
>> competing branches of a one-party state, have simply adopted ever more
>> extreme measures to maintain their monopoly of power.
>>
>> Even the judicial system, once perhaps the last hope for enforcing the
>> Constitution, has been riddled with neo-conservatives who ignore it.
>> Take only the appeal of the Miami conviction by the Cuban Five. The
>> original three appellate judges of Atlanta´s 11th Circuit issued a
>> compelling 93-page unanimous decision upholding the defense position
>> that no fair trial of self-admitted Cuban agents was possible in Miami
>> ´s prevailing anti-Cuban atmosphere and that the trial venue should
>> have been moved. Nevertheless the other 10 judges of the Circuit voted
>> to hear another appeal en banc and then unanimously overturned the
>> first decision with only two of the original three judges voting
>> against (the third had retired). That 10 of the 13 Circuit Court
>> judges would uphold Miami as a place where Cuban agents could get a
>> fair trial is a good example of how morally and intellectually corrupt
>> the federal judiciary has become.
>>
>> So these are grim days indeed for the United States and by extension
>> for its allies, starting with its junior partner, the U.K., and
>> extending through NATO. There have been other periods of shameful
>> repression in the U.S., like the years following World War I, but
>> never with a global reach like this.
>>
>> Predictably U.S. prestige around the world, what there ever was of it,
>> has disappeared, replaced by contempt and scorn. Testimony to this is
>> the repudiation of Bush and what he stands for expressed by so many
>> thousands in the streets protesting his presence as he traveled around
>> Latin America attempting to lure five countries away from regional
>> integration. What a contrast with the enlightened, idealistic, and
>> progressive social and political movements now flowering in Latin
>> America!
>>
>> =============================
>>
>> Philip Agee, 72, was a CIA secret operations officer in Latin American
>> from 1960 to 1969. He is the author of the best-selling Inside the
>> Company: CIA Diary (Penguin Books, 1975) plus other books and
>> articles. De****ted in 1977 by the U.K and four other NATO countries,
>> he has lived since 1978 with his wife in Hamburg, Germany. He travels
>> frequently to Cuba and South America for solidarity and business
>> activities, and in 2000 he started an online travel service to
Cuba:www.cubalinda.com.
>>
>> ==============================================
>> This article can be found
at:http://www.counterpunch.org/agee03142007.html
>> &http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/03/26/18383417.php
>>
>> -----------------------
>>
>> The time for corrupt politicians & their filthy wars has past. Bush,
>> Cheney, Rice, & Gonzalez must go -http://www.impeachbush.org
>>
>> =============
>>
>> "Man must change or die. There is no other course."
>> The World Teacherhttp://www.Share-International.org
>
>
>
|
