CounterPunch Diary New York Times Screws Up Again; Uday, Qusay Deaths are Bad for Bush and Blair; Kroeber and the Indians: General Hitchens Visits the Front By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Reeling from one blunder to the next, the New York Times plummeted to new depths on July 25, combining a serious falsehood with possible misrepresentation of authorship.
On the op page for 7/25 appeared a column, datelined Havana, under the name Gustavo Arcos Bergnes, identified as Secretary General of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights, and titled "A Prisoner Becomes A Warden". The column narrated how its author had been with Castro in the original attack on the Moncada in 1953, had been imprisoned by Batista along with Castro and other comrades, had eventually turned against Castro. The thrust of the column was to compare the relatively decent prison and trial conditions (and eventual amnesty) enjoyed by Castro and the others in l953, with the grim sufferings and stinted rights of political prisoners in Cuba today.
Towards the end of the piece came the following sentence: "(Although there is no doubt in my mind that my younger brother, Sebastián, died in prison in 1997 because of deliberate lack of medical attention.)"
In fact Sebastian Arcos died in Miami of cancer, a couple of years after he was released from prison for humanitarian reasons. But surely, you ask, Gustavo Arcos would remember where his brother died.
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn07262003.html
Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
