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THE TORONTO STAR, Sunday, March 14, 2004
How America
determines friends and foes
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Every self-respecting president has a doctrine attached to his
name. The core principle of the Bush II doctrine is that the United States
must "rid the world of evil," as the president said right after 9/11.
A special responsibility is to wage war against terrorism, with the
corollary that any state that harbours terrorists is a terrorist state and
should be treated accordingly.
Let's ask a fair and simple question:
What would the consequences be if we were to take the Bush doctrine seriously,
and treat states that harbour terrorists as terrorist states, subject to
bombardment and invasion?
The United States has long been a sanctuary
to a rogues' gallery of people whose actions qualify them as terrorists, and
whose presence compromises and complicates U.S. proclaimed principles.
Consider the Cuban Five, Cuban nationals convicted in Miami in 2001 as
part of a spy ring.
To understand the case, which has prompted
international protests, we have to look at the sordid history of U.S.-Cuba
relations (leaving aside here the issue of the crushing, decades-long U.S.
embargo).
The United States has engaged in large- and small-scale
terrorist attacks against Cuba since 1959, including the Bay of Pigs invasion
and the bizarre plots to kill Castro. Direct U.S. participation in the attacks
ended during the late '70s — at least officially.
In 1989, the first
president Bush granted a pardon to Orlando Bosch, one of the most notorious
anti-Castro terrorists, accused of masterminding the bombing of a Cuban
airliner in 1976. Bush overruled the Justice Department, which had refused an
asylum request from Bosch, concluding: "The security of this nation is
affected by its ability to urge credible other nations to refuse aid and
shelter to terrorists, whose target we too often become."
Recognizing
that the United States was going to harbour anti-Castro terrorists, Cuban
agents infiltrated those networks. In 1998, high-level FBI officials were sent
to Havana, where they were given thousands of pages of documentation and
hundreds of hours of videotape about terrorist actions organized by cells in
Florida.
The FBI reacted by arresting the people who provided the
information, including a group now known as the Cuban Five.
The
arrests were followed by what amounted to a show trial in Miami. The Five were
sentenced, three to life sentences (for espionage; and the leader, Gerardo
Hernandez, also for conspiracy to murder), after convictions that are now
being appealed.
Meanwhile, people regarded by the FBI and Justice
Department as dangerous terrorists live happily in the United States and
continue to plot and implement crimes.
The list of
terrorists-in-residence in the United States also includes Emmanuel Constant
from Haiti, known as Toto, a former paramilitary leader from the Duvalier era.
Constant is the founder of the FRAPH (Front for Advancement of Progress in
Haiti), the paramilitary group that carried out most of the state terror in
the early 1990s under the military junta that overthrew president
Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
At last report, Constant was living in Queens,
N.Y.
The United States has refused Haiti's request for extradition.
The reason, it is generally assumed, is that Constant might reveal ties
between Washington and the military junta that killed 4,000 to 5,000 Haitians,
with Constant's paramilitary forces playing the leading role.
The
gangsters leading the current coup in Haiti include FRAPH leaders.
For
the United States, Cuba has long been the primary concern in the hemisphere. A
declassified 1964 State Department document declares Fidel Castro to be an
intolerable threat because he "represents a successful defiance of the United
States, a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a
half," since the Monroe Doctrine declared that no challenge to U.S. dominance
would be tolerated in the hemisphere.
Venezuela now presents a similar
problem. A recent lead article in the Wall Street Journal says, "Fidel Castro
has found a key benefactor and heir apparent to the cause of derailing the
U.S.'s agenda in Latin America: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez."
As
it happens, last month, Venezuela asked the United States to extradite two
former military officers who are seeking asylum in the United States. The two
had taken part in a military coup supported by the Bush administration, which
backed down in the face of outrage throughout the hemisphere.
The
Venezuelan government, remarkably, observed a ruling of the Venezuelan supreme
court barring prosecution of the coup leaders. The two officers were later
implicated in a terrorist bombing, and fled to Miami.
Outrage over
defiance is deeply ingrained in U.S. history. Thomas Jefferson bitterly
condemned France for its "attitude of defiance" in holding New Orleans, which
he coveted. Jefferson warned that France's "character (is) placed in a point
of eternal friction with our character, which though loving peace and the
pursuit of wealth, is high-minded."
France's "defiance (requires us
to) marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation," Jefferson advised,
reversing his earlier attitudes, which reflected France's crucial contribution
to the liberation of the colonies from British rule.
Thanks to Haiti's
liberation struggle of 1804, unaided and almost universally opposed, France's
defiance soon ended. But, then as now, the guiding principles of American
outrage over defiance remain in place, determining friend and foe.
Author and political activist Noam Chomsky is a professor of
linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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