From: NY Transfer News <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 18:35:35 -0400 (EDT)
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Subject: [CubaNews] Intensification of the Cold War-Granma
Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit
Granma International Digital, August 28, 2001
<www.granma.cu>
INTENSIFICATION OF THE COLD WAR
Six terrorists and four fundamentalists under Bush's wing
THE selection of ultra-right winger Cuban-American Otto Reich as
Undersecretary for Hemispheric Affairs forms one link in a chain of
political appointments that have intensified Washington's cold war policy
towards Latin America.
The Senate's current Democratic majority decided to oppose Reich's election.
Democratic leaders like Christopher Dodd and John Kerry declared to CNN that
Reich is but one among many of a long list of extremist candidates for
important policy-making positions in relation to both the region and
domestic power structures.
But this decision by the Democratic Party rests on thin ice at best. The
potency of the presidential veto and political blackmail on the part of the
Republican Party has an extensive history of affecting the legislative
process. Moreover, it will prove very difficult to counteract the influence
of Secretary of State Colin Powell, protector of many of these candidates
since the 1980s.
In fact, the selection of Reich points to a larger strategy aimed at
politicizing state administrative institutions to the extreme right. These
include foreign policy organs and the Departments of Justice and Defense,
with the nominations of John Negroponte, Mauricio J. Tamargo, Roger Pardo
Maurer, Elliot Abrams and Roger Noriega.
Reich's history speaks for itself. During the formative years of the Reagan
administration, he was director of the Agency for International Development
(AID). In a declassified report, former Attorney General and ex-general
advisor to the Agency, John R. Bolton, admitted that AID "is a subsidiary of
the CIA which serves to promote political and economic interests of the
federal government through financial assistance programs abroad."
Between 1983 and 1986 Reich upheld the position as Chief of the Office of
Public Diplomacy (OPD). The OPD was a covert psychological operations
department whose primary task was to discredit progressive governments and
social movements throughout the hemisphere.
Through this office, a full-scale anti-Sandinista propaganda campaign was
waged against the U.S. Congress and public during the span of almost a
decade, reflecting revolutionary Nicaragua as a gulag and Soviet beachhead.
More importantly still, his work was to ensure that the image of Contra
narco-insurgents as "freedom fighters" remained untainted. The objective: to
maintain the flow of money and arms to the mercenaries at all costs.
The ODP reported directly to the National Security Council during the
Iran-Contra maneuvers, in which the Reagan government engaged in illegal
arms sales abroad to continue destabilization efforts against Nicaragua's
revolutionary government. Furthermore, according to the Tower Commission,
the Senate investigative organ designated to the case, there was a
combination of tolerance from the U.S. government and active collaboration
on the part of the CIA with respect to Contra drug trafficking.
One document, declassified in 1998, by then CIA Director Robert Gates
(1986-89), spells out the narcotics connection: "It was a question of
preservation not only of the Contras, but also of the Agency's project...
During periods of aid suspension, the Contras continued to receive food,
medicine, munitions and other forms of assistance; the narcotics paid for it
all. Guatemala, Mexico, and El Salvador were the transit points to the
American market."
According to The New York Times, terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, presently
in a Panamanian prison for having organized an armed attempt on the life of
Cuban President Fidel Castro during the Ibero-American Summit last year, was
employed by the CIA during that period as second-in-command of arms and
narcotics re-supply operations from the U.S. military base in Ilopango, El
Salvador. The CIA and Jorge Mas Canosa were the organizers and financiers of
Posada Carriles' immoral escape from a Venezuelan prison, where he was
completing a sentence for the sabotage of a Cuban commercial airliner in
1976, in which 73 persons of distinct nationalities perished.
Urban zones throughout the United States were targeted for cocaine shipments
where the CIA facilitated the clandestine business. In the name of justice,
a Congressional legal investigation is currently underway, sponsored by
California Representative Maxine Waters, for damages to affected black and
Hispanic populations.
Thanks to the repugnant commerce of arms and drugs, the mercenaries were
able to continue their war against the Nicaraguan people.
Aid to the insurgents was suspended by the U.S. Congress under the Boland
Amendment of 1982, upon the discovery of illegal activities on the part of
the CIA and wholesale massacres of civilians by the Contras. Reich did
everything in his power to discredit Senator Tower and his legal team,
including a slander campaign labeling him, among other things, an alcoholic
and Sandinista agent.
Reich's personal vendetta against the Cuban Revolution is also very well
known. His intimate relation with the Miami mafia and reactionary
paramilitary groups based in Florida date back three decades.
During the '80s, the OPD conducted a constant offensive against Cuba through
the mass media, accusing the island of "exporting revolution" throughout
Latin America. As if abject poverty and state-sponsored terrorism were
insufficient factors in explaining the roots of armed leftist opposition,
the propaganda campaign presented Cuba as the main "instigator" of regional
conflict.
His stint in Venezuela as the American ambassador proved quite beneficial
for the anti-Cuban right in Miami. Reich pressured the Venezuelan
authorities to block a petition by Cuba to extradite Orlando Bosch and
Posada Carriles, jailed counterrevolutionary terrorists of Cuban origin.
Between the intervention by the U.S. embassy and the financial backing of
the ultra-right Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), the two were able
to continue their paramilitary activities.
Reich currently directs the RMA International lobby group whose main clients
are none other than the CANF and its intimate friend the Bacardí
Corporation, which, according to public registers, has contributed some
$600,000 USD to his organization.
According to the Boston Globe, Reich was the "architect of the 1996
Helms-Burton Act, promoted by the CANF-Bacardí partnership." The legislation
penalizes U.S. subsidiaries attempting to conduct business with Cuba. The
legislation even goes to the extreme of taking legal action against foreign
firms utilizing former U.S. properties nationalized by the Revolution in its
early years--including former properties corresponding to Cubans who
emigrated to the United States during the 1960s.
But Reich merely represents one domino. Bush has recently announced the
nomination of Mauricio J. Tamargo as president of the Federal Legal
Committee of the U.S. Justice Department.
Tamargo, yet another extremist Cuban-American and, "coincidentally," legal
defense to Congresswoman and vehement counterrevolutionary Cuban-American
Ileana Ros Lehtinen, would oversee all legal issues related to Cuba.
According to The Washington Post, the European Union is in an uproar over
the nomination, given the number of lawsuits by European companies in U.S.
courts due to the extraterritorial nature of the Torricelli and Helms-Burton
Acts.
The selection of former Contra political officer, Roger Pardo Maurer, as
Secretary of Defense for Inter-American Issues, has produced even more
controversy. Defense Department analysts have publicly expressed, on more
than one occasion, a series of preoccupations concerning the penetration of
the radical right in that institution. In an interview with The Washington
Post, one Defense Department functionary, who preferred to remain anonymous,
emphasized that the "new administration simply has failed to take note as to
how fragile U.S.-Latin American relations are these days."
John Negroponte, former U.S. ambassador to Honduras during Reagan's mandate,
has been nominated as the new U.S. representative to the United Nations.
Negroponte played an important role in the conversion of Honduras into a
colossal U.S. military base and training center for the Contras during the
dirty war against Nicaragua.
In a series of articles regarding Negroponte's role in Honduras, The Los
Angeles Times affirmed that the U.S. embassy collaborated with both the CIA
and the Honduran Armed Forces, under the direction of General Alvarez, in
the creation and training of Battalion 316. According to the human rights
organization Human Rights Watch and the Honduran authorities, this
paramilitary group was responsible for numerous acts of sabotage and
torture, homicide and no less than 184 disappearances of political
opponents.
And the list continues. Former Under-Secretary for Hemispheric Affairs under
Reagan and current coeditor of the ultra-right magazine National Review,
Elliot Abrams, is the present candidate for a position in the National
Security Council.
Left up to Bush, Roger Noriega, current Latin American Issues Advisor to
extremist Senator Jesse Helms, could very well be the next U.S. ambassador
to the Organization of American States (OAS); while Daniel Fisk, Noriega's
predecessor as advisor to Helms, is in the waiting room for a position as
advisor to either the U.S. Defense or State Department.
Editorials published in the most widely read U.S. dailies, The New York
Times and The Los Angeles Times, expressed their opposition to Bush's
"chosen ones," labeling them as "cold war relics of Reagan's United States
of America."
(c) 2001, Granma International Digital.
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