Posted on 06/19/2007 4:43:36 PM PDT by DAVEY CROCKETT
Saudi King Says Middle East Crisis Will Affect The World
DUBAI, June 19 (Bernama) -- The Saudi king has warned of an impending "explosion" in the Middle East, saying that it will not only affect the region but will spread all over the world, the English daily Gulf News reports.
"The Middle East region suffers from the longest conflict in our contemporary history which is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and Israel's occupation of Arab lands," King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz, said in an interview with the Spanish El Pas newspaper which was published simultaneously in Al Riyadh newspaper yesterday.
"At this point in time we are exerting efforts to solve this conflict, but we are witnessing an expansion of the crisis to include other countries like Iraq and Lebanon," he said.
"This makes the region replete with troubles that pose grave concerns for us. My fears are the fears of all reasonable men that the explosive situation will not be confined to the region but will extend to the whole world," he added.
The Saudi monarch yesterday began a five-nation trip that will take him to Spain, France, Poland, Egypt and Jordan.
King Abdullah also underlined the importance of solving the problem of Iran's nuclear programme peacefully in a way that guarantees all countries in the region to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes in accordance with the standards of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v3/news_lite.php?id=268361
(Excerpt) Read more at bernama.com ...
Ujaama’s words may help U.S. win extradition
Ujaama’s words may help U.S. win extradition
By David Bowermaster
Seattle Times staff reporter
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=200384450&zsection_id=2002111777&slug=ujaama20m&date=20070820
7
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2003844507&zsection_id=2002111777&slug=ujaama20m&date=20070820
James Ujaama’s testimony in U.S. District Court in New York City last
week
could bolster U.S. efforts to bring three suspected al-Qaida operatives
to
this country for trial on terrorism charges, legal experts say.
Ujaama, who grew up in Seattle, told Judge John Keenan under oath that
he
sought to establish a jihad training camp in Bly, Ore., in 1999 after
conferring with radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri and two of his
alleged henchmen, Haroon Rashid Aswat and Oussama Kassir.
“The U.S. has more information now that [it] can use to supplement the
extradition requests,” said Douglas McNabb, an expert in international
extradition law with the law firm McNabb Associates in Washington, D.C.
McNabb has no connection to the Ujaama case.
Since 2004, the U.S. has been trying to persuade the United Kingdom to
send
al-Masri to the U.S. to stand trial on an 11-count indictment related
to the
planned development of the Bly site and a 1998 attack in Yemen on 16
tourists, including two Americans.
Al-Masri, who is serving a seven-year sentence in the United Kingdom
for
fomenting racial hatred and urging his followers to kill non-Muslims,
gained
notoriety for his fiery preaching at the Finsbury Park Mosque in north
London. He emerged as a militant preacher in the 1990s, and his sermons
were
attended by Sept. 11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui and shoe-bomber Richard
Reid.
In May, after several procedural delays, formal extradition proceedings
against al-Masri were begun in England, and three more days of hearings
are
scheduled in late October, during which the U.S. could introduce
Ujaama’s
testimony. However, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for
the
Southern District of New York, which is handling the case, declined to
say
whether the U.S. plans to use it.
Aswat is being held in England, and Kassir, a Swede of Lebanese
descent, is
being held in the Czech Republic. He was arrested in Prague in December
2005
on an international arrest warrant.
Conspiracy described
In his testimony last week, Ujaama detailed to Judge Keenan his
collaboration with the three men.
After discussing plans for the terrorist training camp in Oregon,
Ujaama
told the judge that al-Masri sent Kassir and Aswat to Seattle to help
Ujaama
raise money and develop the site, although the camp was never
established.
Ujaama also said that in late 2000, “Abu Hamza [al-Masri] requested
that I
assist Ferroz Abassi [another al-Masri follower] to travel from London,
England, to Afghanistan to attend a jihad training camp operated by a
front-line commander.”
During the trip, Ujaama said, “at the direction of Abu Hamza, I
delivered
currency and other things to persons in the territory of Afghanistan
controlled by the Taliban,” the militant group that formerly controlled
Afghanistan.
Ujaama had gone to great lengths to avoid making the statements he
eventually delivered last week.
In 2003, the 41-year-old Ingraham High School graduate pleaded guilty
to
aiding the Taliban, and he promised to testify against his alleged
co-conspirators in exchange for a two-year prison term, which he
completed
in 2005.
But late last year, Ujaama got cold feet. Fearful of the retribution he
might suffer if he testified, he fled to Belize in December with a fake
Mexican passport.
continued.............
Thanks for this to Milford421:
Update: Suspect questioned over package found at recruiting offices
Suspect questioned over package found at recruiting offices
8:11 AM EDT, August 21, 2007
STAMFORD, Conn. (AP) _ A suspect has been detained after a
suspicious package turned up at a military recruitment office
Monday, the second such incident in the past month, police said.
The suspect in the delivery of the suspicious envelope was expected
to be arrested, according to Assistant Police Chief Robert Nivakoff.
The suspect, described as a white Stamford man in his 40s, was being
questioned by police Monday night. Evidence gathered at the scene
led to this man, Nivakoff said.
The envelope, slipped into the recruiting station mailbox on Bedford
Street Monday morning, contained batteries and other “bomb-making
components,” Lt. Sean Cooney, a police department spokesman said.
The package was nearly identical to an envelope left at the same
U.S. Army/U.S. Air Force station on July 19, police said.
Both bore “unusual writing” and were placed in the station’s
mailbox, Cooney said.
___
Information from: The Advocate, http://www.stamfordadvocate.com
Uniting To Exclude Saudi Arabian Airlines
BY DANIEL PIPES
August 21, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/60966
Saudi Arabian Airlines declares on its English-language
http://www.saudiairlines.com/services/travelguide.jsp
Web site that
the
kingdom bans “Bibles, crucifixes, statues, carvings, items with
religious
symbols such as the Star of David.” Until the Saudi government changes
this
detestable policy, its airline should be disallowed from flying into
Western
airports.
Michael Freund brought this regulation to international attention in an
August 8 Jerusalem Post article, “Saudis
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1186557401034&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull
might take Bibles from tourists,” in which he points
out
that a section on the Saudia Web site, “Customs Regulations,” lists the
forbidden articles under the rubric “Items and articles belonging to
religions other than Islam.”
Mr. Freund followed up by calling the Saudia office in New York, where
an
employee identified only as “Gladys” confirmed that this rule really is
applied: “Yes, sir, that is what we have heard, that it is a problem to
bring these things into Saudi Arabia, so you cannot do it.” An unnamed
official at the Saudi consulate in New York further confirmed the
regulation: “You are not allowed to bring that stuff into the kingdom.
If
you do, they will take it away. If it is really important to you, then
you
can try to bring it and just see what happens, but I don’t recommend
that
you do so.”
Responding to the Saudi ban on churches and Bibles and Stars of David,
some
would ban mosques, Korans, and crescent moons in the West, but that is
clearly untenable and unenforceable, given the freedoms of speech and
worship. The Koran, for example, is not a Saudi artifact and cannot be
held
hostage to Saudi policies. However closely it identifies with Islam,
the
Saudi government does not own the religion.
continued..............
“Muslims have been hostages of their own belief systems for 1400 years.
There is no way we can keep the Koran.”
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/017843.php
“(As a Muslim) your mission on this earth is to fight for Islam and to
kill
or to be killed”
continued.........
Islamic income fund to launch
Aug 20, 2007 10:45 AM
Canadian Press
FrontierAlt Oasis Funds Management said today it is launching a
Canadian
income fund based on Islamic investment principles.
Investments in the fund will focus on Shariah-compliant companies
within the
Dow Jones Islamic Market Index “that have demonstrated consistency in
rewarding their shareholders with strong dividend payments.”
The FrontierAlt Oasis Global Income Fund will also invest in sukuk,
types of
Islamic bonds that do not pay interest, which is not permitted by
Islamic
investing principles. Instead, sukuk provide income from underlying
assets
or services.
“As Canada’s first Shariah-compliant income fund and the first to
invest in
sukuk, this is a unique investment product in the Canadian market,”
Asif Khan, president and CEO of Toronto-based FrontierAlt Oasis said in
a
release.
“We believe this fund is an excellent income alternative for Muslim
investors and provides an opportunity for all Canadian investors to
participate in this growing investment category.”
The fund will be managed by Zaigham Shah, chief investment strategist
at
MAK, Allen & Day.
Shariah investment principles preclude investments in securities of
companies dealing in certain products and services and those that
operate
with high financial ratios of liquid assets, debt or interest income.
The fund pays a monthly distribution and will distribute any excess
income
and capital gains annually in December.
http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/248000
Pakistan next Qaeda centre’
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007\08\21\story_21-8-2007_pg1_5
‘Pakistan next Qaeda centre’
WASHINGTON: A majority of top US foreign policy experts say that
Pakistan is
most likely to become the next Al Qaeda stronghold and most likely to
transfer nuclear technology to terrorists in the next three to five
years, a
new survey shows. According to the survey, 35 percent of the 108
experts
polled by Foreign Policy magazine and the Centre for American Progress
said
that Pakistan was most likely to become the next Al Qaeda stronghold
followed by Iraq 22 percent, Somalia 11 percent, Sudan 8 percent and
Afghanistan 7 percent. Seventy-four percent of the experts said that
Pakistan was most likely to transfer nuclear technology to terrorists.
Forty-two percent said North Korea, thirty-eight percent said Russia,
thirty-one percent said Iran and five percent said the US. Respondents
were
asked to name more than one country. A modest number of the experts
favoured
threatening Pakistan with sanctions. Yet about the same number support
increasing US aid to the country. More than half of those surveyed
believed
the current US policy towards Pakistan was having a negative impact on
national security. A majority of the experts said they would expect
another
September 11-scale attack within the next decade.
The truth always wins out in the end :)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1884493/posts
Lots of Photos...........
Minneapolis I-35W Bridge Collapse Failure Analysis
opinion | 8-21-2007 | jeffers
Posted on 08/21/2007 3:20:52 PM PDT by jeffers
Minneapolis I-35 bridge collapse: Failure Analysis
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1884306/posts
Black Muslim Bakery leader allegedly told suspect to take the fall
San Francisco Chronicle ^ | 8/21/7 | Henry K. Lee
Posted on 08/21/2007 8:02:59 AM PDT by SmithL
Your Black Muslim Bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV promised the man accused of killing an Oakland journalist that he could avoid prison time if he would just “be a good soldier” and falsely confess to the shotgun slaying, the suspect’s attorney said Monday.
Davey, you must post any googles you do on this list, I suggest you ignore the post, as it is toooo interesting....LOL
On August 23 the president issued National Security Memorandum No. 181, “a directive to engineer an internal revolt that would be followed by U.S. military intervention,” involving “significant U.S. military plans, maneuvers, and movement of forces and equipment” that were surely known to Cuba and Russia. Also in August, terrorist attacks were intensified, including speedboat strafing attacks on a Cuban seaside hotel “where Soviet military technicians were known to congregate, killing a score of Russians and Cubans”; attacks on British and Cuban cargo ships; the contamination of sugar shipments; and other atrocities and sabotage, mostly carried out by Cuban exile organizations permitted to operate freely in Florida. A few weeks later came “the most dangerous moment in human history.”
“A bad press in some friendly countries”
Terrorist operations continued through the tensest moments of the missile crisis. They were formally canceled on October 30, several days after the Kennedy and Khrushchev agreement, but went on nonetheless. On November 8, “a Cuban covert action sabotage team dispatched from the United States successfully blew up a Cuban industrial facility,” killing 400 workers, according to the Cuban government. Raymond Garthoff writes that “the Soviets could only see [the attack] as an effort to backpedal on what was, for them, the key question remaining: American assurances not to attack Cuba.” These and other actions reveal again, he concludes, “that the risk and danger to both sides could have been extreme, and catastrophe not excluded.”
After the crisis ended, Kennedy renewed the terrorist campaign. Ten days before his assassination he approved a CIA plan for “destruction operations” by US proxy forces “against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships.” A plot to kill Castro was initiated on the day of the Kennedy assassination. The campaign was called off in 1965, but “one of Nixon’s first acts in office in 1969 was to direct the CIA to intensify covert operations against Cuba.”
Of particular interest are the perceptions of the planners. In his review of recently released documents on Kennedy-era terror, Dominguez observes that “only once in these nearly thousand pages of documentation did a U.S. official raise something that resembled a faint moral objection to U.S.-government sponsored terrorism”: a member of the NSC staff suggested that it might lead to some Russian reaction, and raids that are “haphazard and kill innocents . . . might mean a bad press in some friendly countries.” The same attitudes prevail throughout the internal discussions, as when Robert Kennedy warned that a full-scale invasion of Cuba would “kill an awful lot of people, and we’re going to take an awful lot of heat on it.”
http://www.chomsky.info/books/hegemony02.htm
Did you really have to dig up hilary’s favorite author?
Before I said anything about chomsky, I thought I should check on him...........he is as far left as left goes and sticks well to the communist manifesto.
He is the ‘grandfather’ for all those names we do not vote for.
granny
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky
[snipped]
Beginning with his critique of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Chomsky has become more widely known — especially internationally — for his media criticism and politics. He is generally considered to be a key intellectual figure within the left wing of United States politics. Chomsky is widely known for his political activism, and for his criticism of the foreign policy of the United States and other governments.
[snipped]
Communist forum:
Welcome to RevolutionaryLeft.com, one of the world’s largest leftist forum communities where over 7,000 leftists from around the world come to discuss politics, history, political theory, philosphy, music, literature, films and much more in over 500,000 posted discussions!
http://www.revleft.com/lofiversion/index.php/f65.html
Suggestions for a good book on marxism: [learn to be one]
http://www.revleft.com/lofiversion/index.php/t69864.html
Marxist scientists:
http://www.revleft.com/lofiversion/index.php/t66065.html
Anarcho-Syndicalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-Syndicalism
[snipped from end of Marx article]
In several parts of Capital I allude to the fate which overtook the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each cultivating his own piece of land on his own account. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement which divorced them from their means of production and subsistence involved the formation not only of big landed property but also of big money capital. And so one fine morning there were to be found on the one hand free men, stripped of everything except their labour power, and on the other, in order to exploit this labour, those who held all the acquired wealth in possession. What happened? The Roman proletarians became, not wage labourers but a mob of do-nothings more abject than the former “poor whites” in the southern country of the United States, and alongside of them there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but dependent upon slavery. Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.
http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm
last one found here:
http://www.revleft.com/lofiversion/index.php/t66942.html
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID={46117F23-711B-44B1-93EA-BA91E5198269}
Monster
By Humberto Fontova
FrontPageMagazine.com | 7/15/2005
This is the first in a series of articles we are preparing on “Left-wing Monsters” and that will include Che Guevara, Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, Lenin etc. The entire series will be permanently posted on DiscoverTheNetworks.org — The Editors.
Fidel Castro entered Havana on January 8, 1959, to wild acclaim from all quarters. Most Cubans were jubilant; Castro was promising an end to the corrupt governments that had plagued Cuba since independence. Far from any Communism, Castro was promising a revolution “as green as Cuba’s palm trees!” with national elections in three months. Private property would be secure, a free press guaranteed, friendly relations with the U.S. were essential.
“Fidel esta es tu casa!” read impromptu signs that were springing up across the front of thousands of Cuban homes, including mansions, humble country shacks and everything in between.
The New York Times had been singing Castro’s praises since the first interview with him as a rebel in February 1957. By now most of the international press had joined the cheerleading. Jack Paar never treated a guest on his Tonight Show as deferentially as he treated honored guest Fidel Castro. Ed Sullivan hailed Castro as “Cuba’s George Washington.” Retired president Harry Truman called Castro a “good young man trying to do what’s best for Cuba. We should extend him a hand.” The U.S. actually accorded diplomatic recognition to Castro’s government more quickly than it had recognized Batista’s in 1952. In fact, the promptness of this U.S. recognition set a record for recognition of a Latin American government. Usually the process took weeks; for Castro, it took mere days.
Yet within three months of his entry into Havana, Castro’s firing squads had murdered an estimated 600-1,100 men and boys, and Cuba’s jails held ten times the number of political prisoners as under Fulgencio Batista, who Castro overthrew with claims to “liberating” Cuba.
Barely a year in power, Castro was referring to the U.S. as “a vulture preying on humanity!” And most of Cuba’s newspapers and TV stations (Cuba had more TVs per capita at the time than Germany, Canada or France) were under government control, to better serve “the people.” Six months later he confiscated all U.S. properties on the Island, 5,911 businesses worth $2 billion worth, along with most property and businesses owned by Cubans.
On January 3, 1961, outgoing President Eisenhower finally declared, “there’s a limit to what the United States in self-respect can endure. That limit has been reached.” He broke diplomatic relations with Cuba. During the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, Castro finally declared his revolution “Socialist,” and in December of that year he declared himself “a lifelong Marxist-Leninist!” Cuba was now officially Communist.
They say you can boil a live frog in a pot by gradually turning up the heat. He will not jump out, because he can’t tell the temperature’s changing. Something like this happened to Cuba. Castro’s Revolution was a stealth revolution, done in stages, dividing and conquering till he had the whole prize. “First they came for the Batistianos and I didn’t protest because I had no connections with Batista’s government. Then they came for the big landowners and I didn’t protest because I didn’t have a Sugar mill; I had a small tobacco farm. Then they came for the big businessmen and I didn’t protest because I was a small shopkeeper not a factory owner. Finally they came for me...” and, well, we’ve heard this song before.
Large landholdings were initially “nationalized” on the pretext of “land reform” where the massive latifundia would be parceled out to landless peasants. A New York Times editorial hailed the confiscations: “This promise of social justice brought a foretaste of human dignity for millions who had little knowledge of it in Cuba’s former near-feudal economy.”
As with so much else regarding pre-Castro Cuba, major misconceptions abound in this editorial. To wit: in the 1950’s the average farm-wage in “near-feudal” Cuba was higher than in France, Belgium, Denmark, or West Germany. According to the Geneva-based International Labor Organization, the average daily wage for an agricultural worker in Cuba in 1958 was $3. The average daily wage in France at the time was $2.73; in Belgium $2.70; in Denmark $2.74; in West Germany $2.73; and in the U.S. $4.06. Also, far from huge latifundia dominating the agricultural landscape, the average Cuban farm in 1958 was actually smaller than the average farm in the U.S.: 140 acres in Cuba vs. 195 acres in the U.S. In 1958 Cuba, a nation of 6.2 million people, had 159,958 farms — 11,000 of which were tobacco farms. Only 34 percent of the Cuban population was rural.
Confiscated farms remained in Cuban government hands as state farms on the Soviet model. By early 1959, Soviet advisers from the Ukraine were already directing Castro’s Institute of Agrarian Reform. As the pattern became clear a major rebellion broke out in the Cuban countryside. According to Raul Castro (Castro’s brother and the head of Cuba’s military), the rebellion involved 179 different “counterrevolutionary bands.” This guerrilla war lasted from 1960 to 1966. It took the Castroites 6 years, tens of thousands of troops, scores of Russian advisors, squadrons of Soviet tanks, helicopters, flame throwers, and a massive and brutal “re-location” campaign where thousands of rural families were uprooted at gunpoint and relocated to concentration camps the very western tip of Cuba, to finally crush the rebellion.
“Cuban military units commanded by Russian officers employed flame-throwers to burn hundreds of rural palm-thatched cottages,” reads one account of the rebellion. “We fought with the fury of cornered beasts,” recalls one veteran from Miami today. And alone, one might add. The Kennedy-Khrushchev pact that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis completely starved the rebels of even the meager supplies they’d received by airdrop in 1961.
*****
Two years into his revolution Castro managed to turn Cuba’s traditional immigration pattern on it’s head. Prior to 1959 Cuba experienced net immigration. In fact—as a percentage of population— Cuba took in more immigrants in the 20th century than the U.S. took in—and this includes the Ellis Island years. In 1958 the Cuban embassy in Rome had a backlog of 12,000 applications for immigrant visas from Italians clamoring to immigrate to Cuba. From 1903-1950 Cuba took in over one million Spanish immigrants. (notice: pre-Castro Cuba’s wetbacks came from the first -world.) Also, before Castro, more Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the U.S. Back then people were as desperate to enter Cuba as they are now to escape. Come Castro and half-starved Haitians ( a short 60 miles away) turn up their nose at Cuba.
By 1992 two million Cubans had fled Cuba, most against staggering odds and with only the clothes on their back. By most estimates this is a tiny fraction of those who desired to leave. A causeway from Havana to Key West in 1961 with the same free travel as existed in Cuba (indeed, in all civilized countries) in 1958 would have emptied the island in two months. According to Cuban-American scholar Dr Armando Lago, 83,000 Cubans have died at sea while attempting to leave Cuba.
Also revealing of the misery and desperation created by the Castro regime is Cuba’s suicide rate, which reached 24 per thousand in 1986- making it double Latin America’s average, making it triple Cuba’s pre-Castro rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal in the world, and making death by suicide the primary cause of death for Cubans aged 15-48. At that point the Cuban government ceased publishing the statistics on the self-slaughter. The figures became state secrets. The implications seem to horrify even the government.
In 1958 Cuba had a higher standard of living than any Latin American country and half of Europe. I’ll quote a UNESCO report from 1957: “One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class. Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population)than U.S. workers... the average wage for an 8 hour day in Cuba 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 68 per cent. 44 per cent of Cubans were covered by Social legislation, that’s a higher percentage then in the U.S. at the time.”
In 1958 Cubans had the 3rd highest protein consumption in the hemisphere. But in 1962 Castro’s government introduced ration cards that persist to this day. While comparing a Cubans’ daily rations as mandated by Castro’s government to the daily rations of Cubans slaves as mandated by the Spanish King in 1842, an intrepid Cuban exile uncovered this fascinating info:
Food Ration in 1842 for slaves in Cuba: Castro Gov. Ration since 1962
meat, chicken, fish—8 oz 2 oz.
Rice— 4 oz. 3 oz
Starches— 16 oz. 6.5 oz
Beans 4 oz. 1 oz.
The half-starved slaves on the ship Amistad ate better than Elian Gonzalez does now. Yet Eleanor Cliff told us on in her column and again on the McLaughlin Group that: “To be a poor child in Cuba may be better than being a poor child in the U.S.”
The Soviets ended up pumping some $130 billion into Cuba. That’s ten Marshall plans, and pumped— not into a war-ravaged continent of 300 million— but into an island of 7-9 million. Yet the ration cards persist to this day
*****
Promptly upon entering Havana on January 8, 1959 Fidel Castro abolished Habeas Corpus and appointed Che Guevara his main executioner. “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary,” The Argentine Ernesto “Che” Guevara declared. “These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredon (the execution wall)”
Given the rate of firing squad executions in Cuba in the early 60’s, thousands of gallons of perfectly good, perfectly valuable blood gushed from the bodies of young men only to soak uselessly into the mud, wash into gutters or get sopped up by buckets of sawdust. By 1961 Cuba’s government was already desperately short on foreign exchange. In two short years Castro had rendered a nation with a living standard higher than half of Europe and with a peso always on par with the U.S. dollar, utterly destitute, utterly bereft of foreign exchange. The massive Soviet subsidies could never compensate for the destruction of Cuba’s vibrant pre-Castro economy.
In 1961 an ocean of fresh, plasma-rich Cuban blood was being freed from its confines by bullets and spilling in torrents daily. The Castroites hit upon the scheme of collecting it and selling it. Dozens of those murdered after sham trials were U.S. citizens. Here’s official court records – from the suit that Howard Anderson’s family filed against Castro’s regime.
Anderson vs Republic of Cuba, No. 01-28628 (Miami-Dade Cir. April 13, 2003): “In one final session of torture, Castro’s agents drained Howard Anderson’s body of blood before sending him to his death at the firing squad.”
Eighteen thousand bodies would eventually join Howard Anderson’s in mass graves. This tally comes— not from some Cuban-exile scandal sheet in Miami,—but from The Black Book of Communism, written by French scholars and translated into English by Harvard University press, not exactly an outpost of the vast right-wing conspiracy. But this cold statistic doesn’t tell the whole story.
Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when the bullets shattered his bound body. His twin brother and father collapsed beside Carlos from the same volley. All had resisted Castro’s theft of their humble family farm.
On Christmas eve 1961 Juana Diaz spat in the face of the Castroite executioners who were binding and gagging her. They’d found her guilty of feeding and hiding “counterrevolutionaries” When the blast from that firing squad demolished her face and torso Juana was six months pregnant.
Traditionally, firing squads have only or two of its members with loaded guns. The rest shoot blanks. Not Castro’s. In his, all ten members shoot live ammo—all ten bullets rip into the staked hero or heroine. This incorporates more members into Castro’s criminal organization, more members to resist desperately any overthrow of the system with the consequent settling of accounts.
Cuba’s population in 1960 was 6.2 million. According to the human Rights group Freedom House, 500,000 Cubans (young and old, male and female) have passed through Castro’s prison camps. At one time during 1961-62, 300,000 Cubans were jailed for political offenses islandwide. This makes Castro’s political incarceration rate higher than Stalin and Hitler’s.
Also, the longest serving political prisoners of the century spent their hell in Castro’s Gulag. Senores Mario Chanes de Armas, Angel de Fana and Eusebio Penalver all served thirty years in Castro’s dungeons. Consider that Alexander Solzhenitsyn served 8 years in Stalin’s Gulag as did Natan Scharansky. Many Cubans served over three times as long.
“For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell,” recalls one prisoner, Eusebio Penalver (the longest serving black political prisoner of the Century, by the way—jailed longer than Nelson Mandela.) “That’s 4 feet high, so you couldn’t stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide.”
Credit for finally exposing the horrors of Castro’s Gulag to a mass international audience must go to former political prisoner Armando Valladares and especially to his prison memoirs titled Against All Hope released in 1984. Castro’s extensive and murderous Gulag had been in operation for over two decades by then and had been exposed and denounced by many, as had Stalin’s (Malcolm Muggeridge, Eugene Lyons, Arthur Koestler, etc.) in the 30’s and 40’s.
But just as it took the novelist Alexander Solzhenitzyn to finally shake the world awake about the Gulag thirty years after its murderous height, it took the poet Armando Valladares to expose Castroism to the mainstream, however late in the game. In 1960 Valladares had been arrested in his office for the crime of refusing to display a pro-Castro sign on his desk. He was summarily sentenced to 30 years of prison for the offense.
In prison, Valladares, like Eusebio Penalver, Chanes De Armas, Ernesto Diaz Rodriguez, Huber Matos and so many others refused “to commit spiritual suicide.” Which is to say, they rejected any “rehabilitation,” or “re-education” by their jailers. They balked at any “confession” of their political sins. They knew all this applied only to their jailers. For this Armando Valladares paid dearly. To this day he remains crippled from the beatings and starvings he endured in Castro’s Gulag.
Valladares managed to get his writings smuggled out of prison and into Europe. In December 1977, forty-seven US Senators signed an appeal for his release, and Amnesty International took up his cause. In 1979 a book of Valladares’s poems titled, Prisonnier de Castro appeared in Paris, translated by Pierre Golendorf, a former member of the French Communist Party. The book was dedicated to Valladares’ fellow prisoners and described their plight in harrowing detail, including the plight of women prisoners, “Berta, Ann Lazara, Maria Amalia, Esther, Miriam…roses amidst barbed wire, beaten mercilessly by the guards.”
International pressure including personal appeals to Castro by his friend Francois Mitterand finally won Valladares’ release in 1982. In 1984 he released his prison memoirs titled Against all Hope, and in 1986, immediately after having read them, Ronald Reagan appointed Valladares U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. Here Valladares had his work cut out for him.
“Unbelievably, there has been a continuing love affair on the part of the media and many intellectuals with Fidel Castro.” He recalls. “While I was on book tours in the mid-1980s I encountered many individuals who argued fiercely on behalf of the Castro regime. The thousands of accusations of violations of human rights in Cuba conflicted with the double standard then current at the U.N. The posture of many countries was governed by their hostility against the United States, and they excused Castro out of a reflexive anti-Americanism.”
*****
By 1965 counterrevolutionary activity was winding down in Cuba. The Kennedy-Khrushchev deal with it’s subsequent round up and jailing of anti-Castro fighters in the U.S. (men who’d been trained by the CIA for the very purpose a month before) pulled the plug on much of the anti-Castro resistance. Now the Castro regime, needing new pretext for mass-jailings and the cowing of the population, turned it’s police loose on “anti-social elements,” on “deviants” and on “delinquents.” Youths were the target here, with special emphasis on long-hairs, rock & roll listeners and—especially— homosexuals.
In fact any youth who didn’t display a gung-ho “revolutionary” attitude was fair game. Jehovah’s Witnesses, active Catholics and Protestants along with children of political prisoners were swept up in the dragnet.. “My charge read: ‘active in Catholic Associations’” recalls Emilio Izquierdo, rounded up at the age of 17 in 1965, and today President in Miami of the UMAP Political Prisoners Association.
A special set of forced labor camps named UMAP were set up for these young prisoners. The initials stood for Unidades Militares del Ayuda de Produccion” (Military Units to Help Production). The official title did little to hide the pretext for the camps—forced labor. These camps were completely enclosed by high barbed wire, had machine guns in each watchtower and ferocious dogs keeping watch below. The one enclosing the homosexuals had a sign “Work Will Make Men Out of You” above the entrance gate, eerily reminiscent of Auschwitz’ “Work Will Set You Free.”
“There seems to be an unusually strong emotional aversion to homosexuals in Cuba which Castro shares,” wrote Herbert Matthews of the New York Times, Castro’s original and foremost champion in the U.S. media. Not even he could deny it. Yet prior to Castro, homosexuals in Cuba lived perfectly normal lives. In fact the Cuban people had elected one President in 1945, Ramon Grau San Martin. Actually, Castroite persecution of Cuba’s homosexuals began two years before UMAP in 1963 with a government campaign called “Operation P” for (prostitutes, pimps and pederasts.) In this campaign homosexuals were identified, rounded up and thrown in prison where their uniforms sported a big P. In the early and mid 60’s in Cuba, outing a homosexual to the police became a common practice for those seeking special favors or to ingratiate themselves with the authorities.
The UMAP camps featured brutal labor in the tropical sun, and summary beatings and executions for any laggards. Word about this savagery soon got out amongst the general population and discontent was rife. After all, none of these prisoners had been convicted, even in the sham Castroite courts, of any counterrevolutionary crimes. Military and police trucks would simply surround an area of Havana known as, say, a homosexual hang-out, and every person in sight would be herded into the military trucks at gunpoint.
In 1968, according to official government notice, UMAP was disbanded. Their reputation had become too notorious. Technically the notice of this disbanding was accurate. After 1968 those “deviants” and other “anti-social elements” started being herded into “Battalions of Decisive Effort”the “Young People’s Column of the Centennial” and the “Young People’s Work Army.” Different names, same forced labor camps.
In a film titled “Cursed Be Your Name, Liberty,” Cuban exile Vladimir Ceballos documents how in the mid 80’s over one hundred Cuban youths deliberately injected themselves with the aids virus. At the time Castro’s Cuba had developed a very efficient method of dealing with the malady. The patients were banished to “sanatoriums” in the middle of the countryside and basically left alone till they died. “Left alone” is the key phrase here.
Apparently to some tortured souls banishment in those AIDS sanatoriums smacked of freedom, as compared to life on the outside. Dr. Jorge Pérez, an exiled Cuban physician and AIDS specialist, now living in Spain reports that in the mid 80’s the Cuban government ran ads on national TV showing that these AIDS sanatoria featured air-conditioning, color TV, swimming pools, and three meals of excellent food daily. Cuba’s population, of course, savor these things only in their dreams.
The ad was actually an attempt to snare volunteers for government experiments with AIDS vaccines. Any successful vaccines discovered as a result would translate into a deluge of foreign currency for Castro. As expected, the response to the ads was overwhelming, and the volunteers were interned in a sanatorium near Santiago de las Vegas in Havana province where they were inoculated with the AIDS virus. Dr. Pérez reports that the strain used was particularly strong and ninety percent of the volunteers died the typically agonizing and prolonged AIDS death within two years.
*****
JFK’s “dreary account of mismanagement, timidity and indecision” as Eisenhower described his handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion emboldened the Soviets to install Nuclear missiles in Cuba the following year. Khrushchev documents in his memoirs how Castro pleaded with him to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the U.S. in October of 1962. The telegram making the plea sits in the Kennedy Library today. Some think Khrushchev’s fear of Castro’s officers somehow getting hold of the Nuclear buttons was a bigger factor in his decision to remove the Missiles than the “blockade” (in fact, 55 ships breached it) imposed by the Kennedy administration around Cuba at the time.
The prudence of Khrushchev’s decision was revealed the following month by Castro’s second- in - command, Che Guevara. “If the missiles had remained,” he told The London Daily Worker in November 1962 “We would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. We must never establish peaceful co-existence. In this struggle to the death between 2 systems we must gain the ultimate victory. We must walk the path of liberation even if it costs millions of atomic victims.”
He didn’t get his hands on the missiles but Castro emerged the big winner of the Missile Crisis. “Many concessions were made by the Americans about which not a word has been said...perhaps one day they’ll be made public,” said Fidel Castro in a speech in 1966.
“We can’t say anything public about this agreement. It would be too much of a political embarrassment for us.” That’s Robert F Kennedy to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in October of 1962.
In his memoirs Nikita Khrushchev himself clarified the matter: “It would have been ridiculous for us to go to war over Cuba—for a country 12,000 miles away. For us, war was unthinkable. We ended up getting exactly what we’d wanted all along, security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy’s death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba.”
With these factors in mind, the Castro regime’s longevity (so puzzling to many) becomes much easier to understand.
*****
The Cuban Revolution started devouring its own children very early. Revolutionary Cuba’s first figurehead president, Manuel Urrutia, fled into exile for his very life exactly 6 months after his appointment by Castro, who shortly went on TV to brand Urrutia a “traitor” and threatened him with the paredon! President Urrutia’s offense had been some mild criticism of Communism. The badly rattled Urrutia watched Castro’s TV tirade from his very Presidential office that night in July of 1959 while convulsed in sobs. Within minutes he noticed mobs forming in front of his office shrieking. “paredon!- paredon!” Quickly gathering his wits he scrambled out the back door of the building and later that night slunk into the Venezuelan embassy disguised as a milkman.
Commander Huber Matos was credited by Castro himself with “saving the revolution” when he flew a planeload of arms into the Sierra Maestra from Costa Rica in March of 1958. The arms were donated by leftist Costa Rican President Jose “Pepe” Figueres and may have originated with the CIA, who in keeping with its support of the “Democratic Left” at the time, was very friendly with both Figueres and Castro’s July 26th Movement. “Me and my staff were all Fidelistas!” proclaimed Robert Reynolds, the CIA’s Caribbean desk chief from 1957-60. Reynolds made his pronouncement during a friendly chat with Fidel Castro himself at a “Bay of Pigs, 40 Years After” Conference held in Havana, April 2001.
After arriving with the arms, Matos, a July 26th underground operative till then, was quickly named a “comandante” in the Rebel army as well. In December of that year he led a rebel column into the city of Santiago then entered Havana on January 8th atop the same Sherman tank with Fidel Castro.
Upon the Revolutionary triumph, Castro appointed Matos military commander of Camaguey province where Matos signed off on the prompt firing-squad executions of over 60 Batista soldiers, including a wounded one who was carried to the stake on a stretcher. Nine months later Matos was facing a firing squad himself, accused by Castro of “treason.”
“Fidel, you are destroying your own work.” Matos, alarmed at what he saw as the Communist usurpation of the Revolution, had written to Castro. “You are burying the revolution. Perhaps there is still time. I plead with you, comrade. Help us save the revolution....Fidel, we fought in the name of Truth, for all the sound principles that bind civilization and mankind together. Please, in the names of our fallen comrades, Fidel, do not bury the revolution.”
That letter sealed Matos’ doom. Raul Castro and Che Guevara wanted him immediatly lined up at the paredon and executed. Castro thought it over and countered that he didn’t want to make Matos “a martyr.” With Matos trial most of the “moderates” (democratic socialists) still in Castro’s government had to finally face the music. Most resigned, went underground then into exile—in that order.
Matos ended up suffering 20 years in Castro’s dungeons. He refused any and all “rehabilitation” by his jailers and suffered horribly for it. He was finally released in 1979 and lives in Miami today where he heads the political group Cuba Democratica y Independente (CID).
Among other Revolutionary “Comandantes” who fought alongside Castro against Batista, served early in his regime, but weren’t quite as fortunate as Matos were Humberto Sori Marin and William “El Americano” Morgan. Both fell out with La Revolucion over Communism. And the way Castro saw it, they were the traitors, not him.
Humberto Sori Marin was arrested in April of 1961 as a counterrevolutionary and his brother Mariano went to visit Castro, pleading clemency for his brother. If for no other reason, than for “for old times sake,” pleaded Mariano, recalling when Fidel and Humberto had been Revolutionary comrades.
“Don’t worry, Mariano,” a smiling Castro said while slapping him affectionately on the back. “In the Sierra I learned to love your brother. Yes, he’s in our custody, but completely safe from harm. Absolutely nothing will happen to him. Please give your mom and dad a big hug and big kiss from me and tell them to please calm down.”
The next day Mariano collapsed at the sight of his brother, Humberto’s, mangled corpse in a mass grave. Castro’s firing squad had pumped over 20 shots into his brother’s body that very dawn. Humberto Sori Marin’s head was almost completely obliterated, his face unrecognizable.
“Kneel and beg for your life!” Castro’s executioners taunted the bound and helpless William Morgan as he glowered at Castro’s firing squad in April 1961.
“I kneel for no man!” former Rebel Comandante Morgan snarled back, according to eye witness John Martino in his book, I Was Castro’s Prisoner..
“Very well, Meester Weel-yam Morgan,” replied his executioners, who were aiming low, on purpose – “FUEGO!”
The first volley shattered Morgan’s knees. He collapsed snarling and writhing. “See, Meester Morgan?” giggled a voice from above. “We made you kneel, didn’t we?” Over the next few minutes as he lay writhing, four more bullets slammed into Morgan, all very carefully aimed to miss vitals. Finally an executioner walked up and emptied a Tommy gun clip into Morgan’s back.
Castro had saddled Rebel army Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos with the unhappy task of arresting his friend Huber Matos after the latter’s “treason.” Cienfuegos was right up there with the Castro brothers and Che in the Revolutionary hierarchy. He’d landed on the Granma expedition from Mexico then fought in the Sierra from day one, climaxing the rebellion by commanding rebel forces in the decisive “battle” (skirmish, actually, like all the others) of Santa Clara that finally forced Batista to lose hope and flee the island. Camilo actually entered Havana before Castro, where he promptly took command of the military headquarters at Camp Colombia.
Camilo Cienfuegos was handsome, charismatic, and in the eyes of many, actually outshone Fidel at early Revolutionary rallies, often stealing the limelight with his ready smile and humor. “Simpatico,” is the term Cubans use for Camilo Cienfuegos’ personality. Castro seemed to recognize this and actually turned to Camilo one day on the podium during a rally, “Voy bien, Camilo?” Fidel asked (am I doing OK, Camilo?) Such deference was—to say the least— not a Castro trademark.
Camilo had flown to Camaguey from Havana for the hateful task of arresting his friend and ally Matos. The two had often discussed, with growing alarm, what they saw as the Communist usurpation of the Cuban Revolution. Once in Camaguey, Camilo had a violent row with Raul Castro, whom he’d always loathed. They were on the verge of fisticuffs and drawn pistols when finally separated.
On the flight back to Havana after he dutifully arrested Matos, Camilo Cienfuegos disappeared without a trace. His plane crashed and vanished, said the authorities, though the evening had excellent weather according to all records. The Castro brothers made a big show of a search and rescue but nothing turned up. To many, including Huber Matos, Camilo’s death seemed much too convenient. To this day Matos (along with most Cuban-exiles) blame Fidel and Raul for Camilo’s death.
Cienfuegos was too obviously their competitor for leadership. Interestingly, two of Camilo’s loyal lieutenants died in “accidents” within days of their commander’s disappearance. The head of Camaguey’s small airport, from where Camilo had taken off, was also suspicious and was starting to ask questions about the rescue effort. Two weeks after Camilo’s disappearance, he was found with a bullet through his head. His death was ruled a “suicide.” Camilo Cienfuegos was far from the last Fidelista Comandante to run afoul of Fidel’s megalomania.
Arnaldo Ochoa was the Cuban General widely credited with Cuba’s victories in both The Angolan Civil War and in Ethiopia’s early crushing of the Eritrean rebellion. “Every officer in the Cuban armed forces admired Ochoa, “ according to Cuban defector General Rafael Del Pino, who was close to Ochoa both personally and professionally. “General Ochoa always fulfilled his duty. He was an austere individual devoted to military life and his hands are not stained with blood.”
They say he was a soldiers’ general, who always showed genuine interest in the welfare of his men and so had the respect and admiration of the lowliest troops. Ochoa was also close and on very friendly terms with both Fidel and Raul Castro, the latter being Ochoa’s immediate superior, whom the General always affectionately called “jefe.” Besides his African ventures, Arnaldo Ochoa had fought in the Sierra as a Rebel and helped crush the Escambray peasant rebellion in 1961. In 1963 he infiltrated Venezuela to train and lead guerrillas trying to overthrow Romulo Betancourt. Later he transferred to Nicaragua where he led the fight against the Contras. In 1980 Fidel himself had personally awarded General Ochoa with the medal officially naming him a “Hero of the Revolution.”.
In the dawn hours of July 13, 1989 General Arnaldo T. Ochoa was executed by a firing squad outside of Havana.
In brief, he’d grown to big for his britches. Even Stalin could tolerate (or perhaps never quite figured out how to eliminate, or perhaps even feared) a Zhukov. Nothing of the sort with Fidel Castro and his generals, no matter how battle-hardened or loyal.
A court martial had found Ochoa guilty of , “Corruption and dishonest use of economic resources,” of “departing from the principles of the Revolution” and of “committing grave moral and legal violations of socialist law.” The official charge was drug smuggling, and Ochoa was almost certainly guilty. In Africa, Ochoa had used black marketing of everything from Elephant tusks to diamonds to liquor to help finance his military operations. He obviously had approval for these ventures from on high.
By 1989, U.S. Federal prosecutors had uncovered the Cuban Military’s role in Cocaine smuggling into the U.S. Fidel and Raul watched the case building against them with growing alarm. So they served up Ochoa (and Comandante Tony De la Guardia who was executed alongside him) as scapegoats. In fact, some of the evidence used against Ochoa at his trail is rumored to have originated with the FBI.
Rafael Del Pino mentions another reason for Ochoa’s elimination. In the defecting Air Force General’s very well-informed opinion ,Castro executed Ochoa, “to rid himself of an independent-minded man while diverting public attention from the island’s mounting problems..Castro used the excuse of corruption to destroy Ochoa because he often chose his own course in making decisions. Ochoa was a pragmatic, nonideological man who was flexible enough to recognize the sense behind Gorbachev’s reforms of the time. Even worse, Ochoa, like many other Cuban military officers, was trained in the Soviet Union and had close ties to the Soviet leaders then involved in the reforms.”
That Glasnost and Perestroika stuff could be contagious, in other words.
Naturally Ochoa’s and De la Guardia’s deaths did nothing to curb Cuba’s role in drug smuggling. On December 3, 1998, Colombian police seized seven tons of cocaine in Cartagena, Colombia. They found that the shipment was consigned to a Cuban state-owned venture and was destined for the U.S. In 1996 a federal prosecutor in south Florida told the Miami Herald. “The case we have against Fidel and Raul Castro right now is much stronger than the one we had against Manuel Noriega in 1988.” Four grand juries at the time had disclosed Cuba’s role in Drug smuggling into the U.S. The Clinton administration, hellbent on cozying up to Castro at the time, refused to press ahead with the case against the Castro brothers’ dope trafficking.
*****
Castro’s career in terrorism started while he was a student at the University of Havana. He’s credited with the murder of fellow student, Manolo Castro, and the attempted murder of Leonel Gomez, whom he shot through the throat but who survived. Both were Castro’s rivals for leadership in a University student group. Both were shot from behind in ambushes. University policeman, Fernandez Caral, had witnessed the shootings, was prepared to testify and was himself murdered by Fidel Castro on July 7th 1948. The off-duty Caral sat on his doorstep with his 5 year old son on his knee when Fidel Castro approached and shot him point-blank in the chest. Raphael Diaz-Balart, Castro’s brother-in-law at the time, recalls an agitated Fidel bursting into his apartment that day. “You gotta hide me!” Castro blurted.”I just killed Caral!”
That same year Castro traveled to Bogota, Colombia where he was among the ringleaders in the famous Bogotazo, a Communist inspired riot that ended up killing 5,000 people. Castro’s July 26th Movement (his anti-Batista revolutionary group, named after the failed attack on Cuba’s Moncada military barracks on July 26th 1953 that touched off his rebellion against Batista) was actually a pioneer in 20th century terrorism. They carried off among the first airplane hijackings in history. In the last months of 1958 members of Castro’s movement hijacked three different Cubana airliners at gunpoint. The last one was a flight from Miami to Varadero that was diverted at gunpoint to rebel-held territory in Cuba’s eastern Oriente province. Despite the pilot’s frantic pleas the plane was forced to attempt a landing on a tiny airstrip near Raul Castro’s rebel camp, where it crashed in a huge fireball. 17 of the 20 passengers died in the explosion.
A few months earlier Castro’s rebels kidnapped 50 U.S. citizens near Guantanamo. Most were Marines and Navy men on leave. A few were civilian workers from a U.S. mining company headquartered nearby. Though the term was not in vogue at the time, Castro’s guerrillas used these American hostages as “human shields” against Batista’s air force’s sporadic bombings of rebel-held areas. And it worked. The last thing Batista wanted was more raging by the U.S. media against him—not that it could have gotten much worse.
Castro had only been in power two months when he started sending armed guerrillas to attempt the overthrow of neighboring nations. The Dominican Republic, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela were the early targets. In fact Castro’s very first trip abroad as head of state was to Caracas where on January 25th, 1959 he implored then Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt to join his “master plan against the gringos!” Basically this involved massive loans, financial aid and shipments of free oil to Castro from Venezuela. Betancourt balked and no sooner had Castro returned home empty handed than he was planning subversion in Venezuela, including assassination attempts against Betancourt.
It took Hugo Chavez to finally enlist with Castro’s plan. In 2004 Cuba got 1.3 billion in essentially free oil from Venezuela. By mid 2005, 160,000 barrels of oil were flowing from Venezuela to Cuba daily. This is much more oil than Cuba’s refineries can process, because most of this oil is resold to Central American nations by Cuba, who pockets the handsome profit. Here’s the second half of the “master plan against the gringo’s.” that Castro had originally proposed to Romulo Betancourt. .
Castro’s subversion, not just of his neighbors, but throughout Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, reached a point where a U.S. defense Department estimates that 42,000 foreign guerrillas and terrorists have received their training in Cuba. Not that Castro’s own home-grown terrorists have been exactly idle.
In November 17th 1962, the FBI uncovered a terrorist plot that targeted Manhattans’s Grand Central Terminal and Statue of Liberty , along with department stores Macy’s, Gimbels and Bloomindales. The plotters had 12 detonators and 500 kilos of TNT. The explosions were planned for November 27th 1962, the day after Thanksgiving, the busiest shopping day of the year. The chief plotter was Roberto Santiesteban, chief aide to Cuba’s U.N. ambassador, Carlos Lechuga. Under him were Elsa and Jose Gomez, also employed by Cuba’s diplomatic mission at the U.N. The rest of the plotters belonged to The Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Had those detonators gone off, 9-11’s death toll would have almost certainly taken seconds. In 2003 alone, the U.S. was forced to expel 14 Cuban “diplomats.” All worked at the United Nations.
On March 19, 1976 the Los Angles Times ran the headline “Cuban Link to Death Plot Probed.” Both Republican candidates of the day, President Ford and Ronald Reagan, were to be assassinated during the Republican National Convention in San Francisco. The Emiliano Zapata Unit, a Bay Area radical- terrorist group, would make the hits. When arrested, one of the would-be assassins named Gregg Daniel Adornetto, revealed the Cuban connection. The Zapata Unit’s Cuban intelligence officer was named Andres Gomez. Adornetto had met him years earlier when he’d traveled to Cuba for training and funding as a member of the Weather Underground.
Much evidence points to an earlier assassination plot by Castro against a U.S. President succeeding. “U.S leaders who plan an eliminating Cuban leaders should not think that they are themselves safe!” warned Castro on Sept 7 1963. “We are prepared to answer in kind!”
Many of those closest to the early evidence (prior to the Warren Commission’s) are convinced that Castro made good on his boast. “I’ll tell you something that will rock you,” Lyndon Johnson told Howard K. Smith in 1966. “Kennedy tried to get Castro— but Castro got Kennedy first.”
General Alexander Haig agreed with LBJ. Haig served as a military aide under both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. “As I read the secret report I felt a sense of physical shock, a rising of the hair on the back of my neck..” he writes about an incident one month after the Kennedy assassination when a classified report crossed his desk. “I walked the report over to my superiors and watched their faces go ashen. “From this moment, Al.” said his superiors, “You will forget you ever read this piece of paper, or that it ever existed.”
The classified intelligence report that so rattled Haig and caused so many faces to go ashen described how a few days before the Dallas assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, accompanied by Castro intelligence agents, had been spotted in Havana, where he’d traveled from Mexico city.
Amidst a stack of declassified Soviet correspondence that Boris Yeltzin made a available to President Bill Clinton in the early 90’s was a letter from Jacqueline Kennedy to Nikita Khrushchev dated just ten days after the assassination. In it Mrs Kennedy assures the Soviet leader that she doesn’t suspect Soviet involvement in her husband’s assassination. She wrote that she was convinced the culprit was Castro.
For 34 years Markus Wolf was the chief of East Germany’s foreign intelligence service, a branch of the STASI with many contacts and operations in Castro’s Cuba. It was the STASI rather than the KGB that undertook the training of Castro’s police and intelligence services. Wolf’s autobiography is titled, “Man Without a Face” and subtitled “The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster.” Most intelligence experts agree that the subtitle fits. Wolf was once asked about the Kennedy assassination and quickly replied. “Don’t ask me—ask Fidel Castro.”
*****
In 1966 Havana hosted the Tri-Continental Conference, a worldwide convention for guerrillas and terrorists; the first of its kind, where Castro vowed to aid any group anywhere who were fighting “colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism.”
Among other initiatives at the Conference, Cuba formed OSPAAAL (Organization of Solidarity with the People from Africa, Asia and Latin America.) and the DLN (National Liberation Directorate.) This later was under the direction of KGB Col. Vadim Kotchergine and set up massive terrorist training camps in western Cuba. These were soon filled with guerrillas and terrorists from Al Fatah, to the Sandinistas, to El Salvador’s FMLF, to the Tupamaros to the Weather Underground to the IRA and Spain’s ETA. In 1968 Castro sent military instructors into Palestinian bases in Jordan to train Palestinian Fedayeen. In November 1974 Castro personally decorated his brother-in-arms, Yasir Arafat, with Cuba’s highest honor, the Bay of Pigs Medal. The Egyptian newspaper Ahar Sa’ah reported in September 13, 1978 that 500 Palestinian fighters were training in Cuba.
Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the infamous “Carlos The Jackal” known as the world’s most notorious terrorist throughout the 1970’s received his training in Cuba and lived in Cuba for years. Everyone from America’s Black Liberation Army to Puerto Rico’s Macheteros, to South Yemen’s NLF, to Argentina’s Monteneros, to Colombia’s ELN , to Namibia’s SWAPO, to the Black Panthers, To Western Sahara’s Polisaro to the IRA have received training and funding from Castro. “Thanks to Castro” boasted Colombia’s FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) commander Tiro-Fijo in a 2001 interview, “we are now a powerful army, not a hit and run band.”
Scholar Walter Laquer sums it up in his work, The Age of Terrorism. “Multinational terrorism reached a first climax in the early 1970s. It involved close co-operation between small terrorist groups in many countries with the Libyans, Algerians, Syrians, North Koreans and Cubans acting as the paymasters and suppliers of weapons and equipment.”
The U.S. State department still lists Cuba prominently among its, “State Sponsors of Terrorism.”
*****
As of mid 2005 Cuba provides haven for 77 fugitives from U.S. law including several on the FBI’s most wanted listed. Among these are cop-killers Michael Finney, Charlie Hill and Joanne Chesimard along with Victor Gerena, responsible for a $7 million heist of a Wells Fargo truck in Connecticut in 1983 as a member of the Puerto Rican terrorist group Los Macheteros. All requests for their extradition had been repeatedly ignored or rebuffed.
By 1976 Castro’s intervention abroad became more blatant when he sent tens of thousands of troops to Africa. Most, 50,000, went to fight Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA forces in Angola. Thousands more went to prop up the Marxist Mengistu regime in Ethiopia. And others were scattered throughout the continent from Guinea Bissau to Bourkina Fasso to Sierra Leone to Mozambique to Zimbabwe. All told, by 1983, Cuban troops were stationed in 20 sub-Saharan African nations. In 1988 Dr. Aubin Heyndrickx, the senior United Nations consultant on chemical warfare, documented that : “There is no doubt anymore that the Cubans are using nerve gases (Sarin) against the troops of Mr. Jonas Savimbi.”
“War against the United States is my true destiny.” Fidel Castro had confided to a friend in 1958 while still a rebel in the hills “When this war’s over I’ll start that much bigger war.” (Please note: Castro said this before any of the alleged “bullying” by the U.S. that leftists claim as the reason he turned to Communism and the Soviet Union.)
After defecting in 1964, Castro’s own sister brought the unmistakable message to Congress. “Fidel’s feeling of hatred for this country cannot even be imagined by you Americans,” she testified to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. “His intention—his OBSESSION—is to destroy the U.S.!”
According to General Rafael del Pino, one time head of Castro’s Air Force who defected in 1987, during the U.S. invasion of Grenada Castro ordered military plans for the destruction of the Turkey Point Nuclear Plant South of Miami. His Nuclear weapons having been snatched back by Khruzchev in October of 1962, Castro was here opting for the next best thing. “I want to do something that the Yankees will remember for the rest of their lives!” Del Pino recalls Castro raving. “And when we’re gone, history will remind the Yankees that we were the only ones who made them pay dearly for their imperialistic arrogance around the world!”
“Together Iran and Cuba can bring America to her knees!” raved Castro to a thunderous ovation at Tehran University in August 2001.
“Iran is strengthening her economic and political relations with Cuba, and there exist other areas for cooperation.” Declared Iranian Majlis Speaker Gholam-Ali Haddad Adel in a meeting with the visiting Cuban Vice President, Jose Ramon Fernandez, on January 16, 2005.
Cuban-born Humberto Fontova came to the United States when he was six years old and grew up in New Orleans. He is the author of the new book Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant.
Humberto Fontova is the author of Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, a Conservative Book Club “Main Selection.”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=EC923DFC-AA14-46AE-9E4B-0B7B75207FBC
Lethal Shade of Green
By Walter Williams
The Washington Times | 8/22/2007
Environmentalists, with the help of politicians and other government officials, have an agenda that has cost thousands of American lives.
In the wake of Hurricane Betsy, which struck New Orleans in 1965, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed building flood gates on Lake Pontchartrain, like those in the Netherlands that protect cities from North Sea storms. In 1977, the gates were about to be built, but the Environmental Defense Fund and Save Our Wetlands sought a court injunction to block the project.
According to John Berlau’s recent book, “Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism is Hazardous to Your Health,” U.S. Attorney Gerald Gallinghouse told the court not building the gates could kill thousands of New Orleanians. Judge Charles Schwartz issued the injunction despite the evidence refuting claims of environmental damage.
We’re told DDT is harmful to humans and animals. Mr. Berlau, a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, says, “Not a single study linking DDT exposure to human toxicity has ever been replicated.” In one long-term study, volunteers ate 32 ounces of DDT for a year and a half, and 16 years later, they suffered no increased risk of adverse health effects.
Despite evidence that, properly used, DDT is neither harmful to humans nor animals, environmental extremists fight for a continued ban. This has led to millions of illnesses and deaths from malaria, especially in Africa. After World War II, DDT saved millions upon millions of lives in India, Southeast Asia and South America. In some cases, malaria deaths fell to near zero. With bans on DDT, malaria deaths and illnesses have skyrocketed.
Environmental extremists see DDT in a different light. Alexander King, co- founder of the Club of Rome, said: “In Guyana, within almost two years, it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time, the birthrate had doubled. So my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it greatly added to the population problem.”
Jeff Hoffman, environmental attorney, wrote on grist.org, “Malaria was actually a natural population control, and DDT has caused a massive population explosion in some places where it has eradicated malaria. More fundamentally, why should humans get priority over other forms of life? ... I don’t see any respect for mosquitos in these posts.” Mr. Berlau’s book cites many other examples of contempt for human life by environmentalists and how they’ve made politicians their useful idiots.
In 2001, thousands of Americans perished in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. In the early 1970s, when the complex was built, the asbestos scare had just begun. The builders planned to use AsbestoSpray, a flame retardant that adhered to steel. The New York Port of Authority caved in to the environmentalists’ asbestos scare and denied its use. An inferior substitute was used as fireproofing.
After the attack, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) confirmed other experts’ concerns about asbestos substitutes: “Even with the airplane impact and jet-fuel-ignited multifloor fires, which were not normal building fires, the building would likely not have collapsed had it not been for the fireproofing.”
Through restrictions on asbestos use, our naval vessels are more vulnerable to our enemies, a disaster waiting in the wings. The Columbia spaceship disaster was due to the Environmental Protection Agency’s demand that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration not use freon in its thermal insulating foam.
Congress mandates auto fuel mileage standards — Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, standards — resulting in lighter, less crashworthy cars. In 2002, the National Academy of Sciences calculated CAFE standards caused 2,000 additional traffic deaths each year. In 1999, a USA Today analysis of government and Insurance Institute data found that since the 1970s CAFE standards went into effect, 46,000 people died in crashes they would have likely survived had they been riding in heavier cars.
None of this is news to politicians. It’s just that environmental extremists have the ears of politicians, and potential victims don’t.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University, Fairfax, Va., and a syndicated columnist.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=5BA45BF2-4BE8-4696-B483-1BAF74DE199E
Anti-Islamist Rally Banned in Brussels
By Vasko Kohlmayer
FrontPageMagazine.com | 8/22/2007
An eagerly awaited public rally was to take place in Brussels – the capital of the European Union – on September 11 of this year. Called ‘Against Islamisation of Europe,’ its intent was to protest the spreading of Islamic sharia law across the European continent and honor by a minute of silence the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks.
The event was being organized by SIOE (Stop the Islamisation of Europe), an alliance of people from across Europe whose objective is to prevent Islam from ‘becoming a dominant political force in Europe.’ Concerned about the Muslim subversion of the continent’s cultures and institutions, SIOE’s has this to say about Islam:
No other religion demands more from those who do not adhere to its doctrine. This would not be a problem if our leaders actually stood up for Western values and insisted that Muslims live within our laws and accepted our cultures and social systems. Instead, it is we who are told we must abandon our values, cultures and societies in order not to offend Muslims. It is Islam that is being rammed down our throats and the throats of our children. It is not only in the West that Islam is causing misery and mayhem. All around the world Islam is battling the “infidels”.
In a clear sign of public support for the planned demonstration, 20,000 people from across Europe have pledged their participation.
But now it looks the event will not be allowed to proceed. On August 13, Brussels’ Mayor Freddy Thielemans, a socialist, made the decision not to issue a permit for the march.
The Mayor’s decision is a very unusual one, because Brussels is known as a demonstration friendly city. In fact, it is the demonstration capital of the world with two or three events taking place on average every day. In the last six years alone, the Mayor’s office has received 3,600 requests for public protest permits of which only 6 have been denied.
But the Mayor is trying to do more than just stop people from voicing their concerns about the ongoing Islamization of their culture. This is what he wrote on August 20 in an op-ed piece in the Belgian newspaper De Standaard:
First and foremost the organizers have chosen the symbolic date of 9/11. The intention is obviously to confound the terrorist activities of Muslim extremists on the one hand and Islam as a religion and all Muslims on the other hand. […] Such incitement to discrimination and hatred, which we usually call racism and xenophobia, is forbidden by a considerable number of international treaties and is punished by our penal laws and by European legislation. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly pronounced judgments condemning this type of acts.
In what is a truly surreal development, a European public official calls those concerned about the encroachment of Islam on their life extremists and threatens criminal prosecution if they don’t desist.
The Mayor’s concern about extremism is very selective, however. In December of 2004, for example, he allowed a demonstration to proceed where more than 20,000 Iranians protested against the inclusion of People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran in EU’s list of terrorist organizations. This is how this group was once described by the US Department of State:
The Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a leftist revolutionary group, was formed in 1963. Its founding principles included the creation of a Marxist-oriented Islamic government in Iran; opposition to ‘imperialism’ as supposedly embodied by the United States; opposition to Zionism and Israel; and a close affinity to Third World radical movements. […] To achieve its political objectives, the MEK almost from its inception has engaged in acts of terrorism and violence; the organization was responsible for fatal attacks on several Americans in Iran in the 1970s.
Not only was the demonstration allowed to go on – it took place in front of the EU’s headquarters – it received extensive official backing. Numerous speeches were made by European parliamentarians and various public personalities seeking to remove the group’s terror designation.
This makes for a remarkable situation: In the EU capital, Iranian Muslims are allowed to show their solidarity with a questionable organization while native citizens are being turned into criminals for seeking to voice their concerns about the unfolding Islamic takeover of their lands.
To add insult to injury, on the very day the organizers of the 9/11 rally were protesting the decision to block the event, Mayor Thielemans approved a permit for another demonstration to take place on September 9. Organized by an alliance of ‘various truth, peace and human right movements in Europe’ calling themselves United for Truth, they claim that the 9/11 attacks were staged by the Bush administration with possible support from some European governments. A message posted on their website on July 30 reads in part:
Recently the French Minister for Housing and the City Mme Christine Boutin expressed her doubts about the official 9/11 report. Before, Michael Meacher, secretary of state in Britain and Andreas Von Bulow, ex Minister from Germany, stated clearly that 9/11 and the war on terror are orchestrated by the Bush administration. Prof. David Ray Griffin held on September 14th, 2006 a lecture (’Should the truth be revealed or concealed’) in Copenhagen. In this lecture he asked for a European investigation to the facts of September 11, 2001. To make this demand stronger, the United for truth organization in Belgium is organizing a European protest rally through Brussels. […] They [protesters] agree the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist acts, no matter if they were carried out by some so-called Afghan cavemen or by the governments themselves, inflicted the current policy of fear.
It is hard to believe that in Europe Muslims and far-left radicals are allowed to march in support of their causes and inane theories while those concerned about the ongoing disintegration of their societies are not only being silenced but threatened with legal action.
The controversy surrounding the planned 9/11 rally in Brussels is emblematic of Europe’s rapid descent into madness. Today Europe is a place where things are turned upside down and where common sense is not only commonly disregarded but actively suppressed.
Having lost both its sense of identity and sanity, Europe stands on the brink of being overtaken by Muslims who may well be able to claim their prize without so much as a fight. Brussels’ socialist Mayor Freddy Thielemans is only one of many among Europe’s leftist elites who are not only willing to capitulate to the barbarian invaders of our age but are actively facilitating their progress. America better take heed, for these are the very people its own liberals admire and in whose steps they would like to follow.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.aspx?GUID=6A734D7A-4CA7-43BB-9B8B-3211318F5E0C
Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine
By Seth Frantzman
The Jerusalem Post | 8/22/2007
As negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority aimed at creating a Palestinian state willing to live side-by-side with Israel in peace resume, one of the major sticking points continues to be the Arab refugee issue. Bitter arguments among politicians and scholars continue to surround the creation of the refugee problem during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948.
It has become fashionable in recent decades to frame the 1948 war as one in which the Arabs were victims of Zionist aggression. Anti-Zionist scholars such as Noam Chomsky, Rashid Khalidi and Ilan Pappe have presented the war as if the only important events were Deir Yassin and the flight or expulsion of Arabs from Haifa, Acre, Tiberias, west Jerusalem, Jaffa and numerous villages.
In this context, Ilan Pappe’s work deserves special attention. He was born to a German Jewish family in Haifa in 1954. The former senior lecturer in the University of Haifa’s Department of Political Science recently announced he was moving to the UK because it had become “increasingly difficult to live in Israel” with his “unwelcome views and convictions.”
These views are those of the “new historians” - leftist scholars who in the 1980s began to reinterpret Israeli and Palestinian history. He is the author of six works on the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict and the Middle East. In his recently released book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappe claims that Israel prepared a special plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s Arab population known as Plan D for dalet. Pappe’s “evidence” is derived from his interpretations of files found in the Hagana and Israel state archives.
One of his most damning pieces of evidence is the village surveys carried out by the Hagana’s intelligence units. These surveys go into minute detail about many Arab villages, including the number of armed men, the mukhtar and any anti-Jewish activity in the village. Pappe lends further evidence to his thesis by showing that Jewish forces, whether Hagana, Irgun or Lehi, attacked Arab villages even before the declaration of the state on May 15, 1948.
But Pappe makes one egregious mistake. He never bothers to ask the same question of the Arabs he does of the Jews: What about their lists, their intelligence reports and their ethnic-cleansing plans? What were Arab intentions in the five months between the passage of the UN partition plan on November 29, 1947, and the birth of Israel?
The archives of The Palestine Post, now The Jerusalem Post and then the newspaper of record of Mandatory Palestine, provide some of the answers and tell a very different story from the one presented by Pappe.
Sixty-two Jews were murdered by Arabs in the first week after the UN partition plan was passed, and by May 15, 1948, a total of 1,256 Jews had been killed, most of them civilians. These deaths were caused by Arab militias, gangs, terrorists and army units which attacked every place of Jewish inhabitation in Palestine.
The attacks succeeded in placing Jerusalem under siege and eventually cutting off its water supply. All Jewish villages in the Negev were attacked, and Jews had to go about the country in convoys. In every major city where Jews and Arabs lived in mixed neighborhoods the Jewish areas came under attack. This was true in Haifa’s Hadar Hacarmel as well as Jerusalem’s Old City.
Massacres were not uncommon.
Thirty-nine Jews were killed by Arab rioters at Haifa’s oil refinery on December 30, 1947. On January 16, 1948, 35 Jews were killed trying to reach Gush Etzion. On February 22, 44 Jews were murdered in a bombing on Jerusalem’s Rehov Ben-Yehuda. And on February 29, 23 Jews were killed all across Palestine, eight of them at the Hayotzek iron foundry.
Thirty-five Jews were murdered during the Mount Scopus convoy massacre on April 13. And 127 Jews were massacred at Kfar Etzion on May 15, 1948, after 30 others had died defending the Etzion Bloc.
In Arab countries more than 100 Jews were also massacred and synagogues were burned in Aleppo and Aden, driving thousands of Jews from their homes.
Back in Palestine many small kibbutzim were subjected to attacks, including Gvulot, Ben-Shemen, Holon, Safed, Bat Yam and Kfar Yavetz - all in December. In January and February, it was the turn of Rishon Lezion, Yehiam, Mishmar Hayarden, Tirat Zvi, Sde Eliahu, Ein Hanatziv, Magdiel, Mitzpe Hagalil and Ma’anit.
In March and April these attacks culminated with an assault on Hartuv by 400 Arabs based in the village of Ishwa and an attack on Kfar Darom by members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Arab attackers also bombed The Palestine Post in February. In March, the Jewish Agency, the Solel Boneh building in Haifa and an Egged bus were also bombed.
Some of today’s scholars prefer to present every massacre of Jews as a “response” to some Jewish deed, and to portray as a “myth” the very idea that Israel struggled desperately for existence in 1948.
But it was no myth.
The fact is 1,256 Jews were killed in five months. Even before the first Arab villages were captured in April, 924 Jews had already been killed. Ilan Pappe should have pondered what might have been if those Jews had not been slaughtered.
What if attacks and riots had not been the first Arab reaction to the partition plan?
Plan Dalet was a plan, it was one of many plans. The lists compiled by the Hagana had been cobbled together for a decade before 1948, but they were not blueprints - merely intelligence assessments. The British also kept lists of everything; they knew about weapons in various kibbutzim, about the Hagana and illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine. Those lists weren’t blueprints for ethnic cleansing anymore than were the Hagana files on Arab villages.
When a Jewish area was overrun - and some were - the homes were looted or destroyed and any survivors were killed, as at Kfar Etzion (only three of the defenders survived the massacre).
The potential for the ethnic cleansing of Jewish Palestine was never realized because of the discipline, determination and sheer luck of the Yishuv.
If the Arabs had not carried out across the board attacks throughout the Yishuv between 1947 and 1948, perhaps the nature of the subsequent Jewish victory would have been different. As it was, the ceaseless attacks against all isolated Jewish settlements only gave Zionist commanders every reason to see neighboring Arab villages as threatening and to act accordingly.
Scholarship - including that of the “new historians” - on the 1948 war will remain incomplete until methodical studies are carried out about widespread and often well-planned Arab assaults on the Yishuv.
The writer is in the doctoral program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His master’s thesis was on the 1948 war.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=A13C9539-D0A4-41A1-A694-26563778BBBA
Islamic Jihad and Leftist Dreams
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | 8/22/2007
Abdullah Al-Muhajir, also known as Jose Padilla, was convicted on Thursday of supporting terrorist activity and, according to Associated Press, “conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people overseas.” At the Leftist website Daily Kos, Padilla was hailed as an “American Martyr to ‘War on Terror,’” and his trial was compared to the witch hysteria: “As was the case during the witch trials of yesteryear, only the socially unpopular, the mentally ill, and the politically dangerous end up at the end of a noose or in yet another bonfire of political vanity.” The barely literate posting went on to complain that the case against Padilla “hinged on one piece of papar [sic]: an application with his fingerprints.” No mention was made of the fact that this “one piece of papar” happened to be an Al-Qaeda application.
The Kos entry was just one small example of the Left’s tendency to see virtually all defensive efforts against the global jihad as manifestations of an encroaching Bushitler police state. Michael Moore said it a few years ago: “There is no terror threat in this country. This is a lie. It’s the biggest lie we have been told.” This has become conventional wisdom on the Left, coalescing neatly with a notable solicitude toward Islamic jihadists: one notorious example was radical feminist lawyer Lynne Stewart who became a water-carrier for the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, now in prison for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The activities of various members of the “nonviolent” International Solidarity Movement have given rise to numerous questions about its ties to violent jihadists.
So what kind of a world will it be for Leftists who turn a blind eye to the jihad, if the jihadists achieve their objectives? Writing in the entertainment paper TimeOut London in June, TimeOut editor at large Michael Hodges imagined an Islamic London. London under Sharia law, Hodges wrote, would be healthier: “the Muslim act of prayer is designed to keep worshippers fit, their joints supple and, at five times a day, their stomachs trim.” It would be sober: “Forbid alcohol throughout the country, and you’d avoid many of the 22,000 alcohol-related deaths and the £7.3 billion national bill for alcohol-related crime and disorder each year.” It would also be ecologically sound, and Islamic education would raise “general levels of discipline and self-respect among London’s young people.”
Meanwhile, “application of halal (Arabic for ‘permissable’) dietary laws across London would free us at a stroke from our addiction to junk food, and the general adoption of a south Asian diet rich in fruit juice, rice and vegetables with occasional mutton or chicken would have a drastic effect on obesity, hyperactivity, attention deficit disorders and associated public health problems.” Religious bigotry would disappear as Jews, Christians, and – probably — Hindus became protected dhimmis under the benevolent rule of Islamic law.
Unfortunately for future dhimmis, however, and for like-minded liberals, Hodges left a few things out of his Islamic Leftist paradise. He didn’t mention that in exchange for the “protection” they would receive from their new Islamic overlords, religious minorities would have to accept a humiliating second-class status that institutionalized their humiliation and denied them equality of rights with Muslims in numerous ways – ensuring that they “feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29). Nor would life be any more comfortable for trendy liberal atheists.
An Islamized country in the West, meanwhile, would be filled with liberal bugaboos: prayer in schools; abortion made illegal (except, most likely, in cases involving the life of the mother); punishments (varyingly draconian) for homosexuals; and even legalized polygamy (Qur’an 4:3) and wife-beating (Qur’an 4:34). Freedom of speech would also probably disappear, at least where discussion of the elements of Islam that incite to violence are concerned — but given their propensity to smear rather than answer their opponents, Leftists probably wouldn’t miss it much.
Nonetheless, there is no doubt that a world in which Jose Padilla’s activities continued unhindered, and the jihadists finally succeeded in imposing their will on the rest of us, would hardly be comfortable for liberals. Evidently they believe that there is no real challenge to the West from the Islamic world, and that Christianity (as I detail in my new book Religion of Peace?) represents the real theocracy threat to Western pluralism and non-sectarian government. The multiculturalist anti-Americanism from which this delusion springs may be more lethal to the American Republic in the short run than the jihad itself; but in the long run, the two threats coalesce quite easily.
Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of six books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=07B9FE1C-CC08-4F5B-9944-EB094F4C5E05
The Towering Evidence Against the Holy Land Foundation
By Nicholas Van Zandt
FrontPageMagazine.com | 8/22/2007
The trial against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) is well underway and pressure against the defendants is mounting as the government lays out its case.
On Monday, Ghassan Elashi, the only defendant in the case who is not released on his own recognizance due to an earlier conviction, began shouting his frustrations at the court as it was clearing for mid-morning recess. He was escorted out of the courtroom and the judge, U.S. District Judge Joe Fish, threatened to waive Elashi’s right to sit in on his own trial if disruptions continued. It was reported that this outburst was a combination of frustration because Judge Fish was continuing to allow the government to introduce evidence that was deemed too old or irrelevant which included videos of Hamas rallies found at the offices of various Palestinian charities.
These videos were felt to be highly damaging to Elashi’s defense and he felt that because some of them took place before HAMAS was designated as a foreign terrorist organization, they were deemed irrelevant. A reporter from the Dallas Morning News who was present in court reported that another aspect of Elashi’s frustration came from his perception that “this trial is an extension of a Zionist conspiracy”.
Following the lunch recess on Monday came the conclusion of the testimony of the Israeli government agent working under the pseudonym “Avi”. This man, who is an attorney for the Israeli Security Agency and an expert on the Hamas social network, continued to testify about the list of charities which were created by Hamas leadership in the 1990s and how they were deliberately connected as part of a regional and worldwide network.
As “Avi” stepped down, the government continued to call their witnesses. For the remainder of Monday afternoon, there was a total of three witnesses called to the stand. First up, was the testimony of Dawn Goldberg, an IRS Revenue Agent whose primary duty with the IRS is to investigate tax-exempt organizations in order to ensure they are adhering to the tax code. She testified as to the status of the Holy Land Foundation as well as the Occupied Land Fund, which was the organization that preceded HLF. The purpose of this witness was to establish for the record, the background of the Holy Land Foundation’s financial records as part of their 501(a) tax-exempt charity status.
The next witness called was a Dallas Morning News general assignments reporter named Steve McGonigle. He had been reporting on the Holy Land Foundation for several years prior to its closure in 2001. In 1999 he traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories in order to investigate a connection between the Holy Land Foundation and Hamas. As he arrived at the Gaza Strip crossing point, he met with a Palestinian journalist and interpreter who he referred to as being “a fixer”. This man would show him around and arrange for his interviews with key Hamas leadership.
McGonigle held three interviews in his time in Gaza. The first two were with known Hamas leaders, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Mahmud Zahar (unindicted co-conspirators to this case), who both told McGonigle that they knew nothing of the HLF. From there, McGonigle made an unannounced visit to the Holy Land Foundation office in Gaza where he met with Asaad Abu Sharkh and Muhammad Muharam—(unindicted co-conspirators as part of Hamas’ social infrastructure in the Palestinian territories in this case). They discussed the HLF charitable activities throughout the region and, most importantly, how they were in no way involved with Hamas. It would have seemed that McGonigle had reached a dead end.
Then, the prosecution played an audio tape which was intercepted on December 2, 1999—the date in which McGonigle was present in Gaza and was speaking with the Gaza HLF office. This conversation took place between Shukri Abu Baker, the HLF CEO in Richardson, Texas and Mohammad Muharam, the Gaza office director. Muharam had called Baker immediately following McGonigle’s visit to advise him of the situation. They discussed that McGonigle could not be trusted because he was part of the Jewish lobby. Muharam advised Baker that McGonigle wanted to speak to some of the people HLF was helping in Gaza and Baker stressed to Muharam that under no circumstances should he be taken to visit the families of the martyrs or prisoners in Israeli jails who were receiving HLF aid. It was clear that McGonigle’s visit did stir up some tension and based upon the transcript of this phone conversation, there was something they had to hide.
The government’s next witness, Special Agent Robert Miranda of the FBI, was called to the stand. Agent Miranda stated that he is assigned to the counter-terrorism division in Dallas working specifically with Hamas. He has been involved with the Holy Land Foundation case as well as the Infocom case—the case which brought Ghassan Elashi his first conviction and six year sentence in federal prison.
The purpose of his testimony was to highlight the links between HLF and Hamas. The first tool he used to do this was with an overseas speakers list entered into evidence as Government Exhibit 1-6. This list, which holds 66 names, are people who were invited by the Holy Land Foundation to the United States to attend conferences, mosques, and forums and gives speeches as a way of raising money for HLF. Some of these speakers would call in through a conference call which would be connected to several dozen Islamic Centers at the same time. In one such conference call a speaker was recorded as saying, “Muslim people all over the world are standing up with the Palestinian people who stand with Hamas.” Agent Miranda then took this list and cross-referenced it with other articles of evidence compiled.
One of the most enlightening examples of evidence was a phonebook belonging to Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook found at the home of one his former assistants. Nearly 30 names from Marzook’s phonebook matched up with the HLF’s overseas speakers list. Then, a pamphlet from the Islamic Action Front—a Muslim Brotherhood organization in Jordan—that was found in HLF Richardson was discussed. Agent Miranda stated that within this pamphlet was a list of names that were to be chosen as suitable candidates for political office. Nearly a dozen of these Muslim Brotherhood potential candidates were also listed on the Holy Land Foundation’s overseas speakers list. In addition to the speakers who are known Hamas or Muslim Brotherhood officials, members of other designated foreign terrorist organizations like al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya like were on the list.
The government then went on to question Agent Miranda about the defendant’s connections with Hamas based on familial relations. From this line of questioning came a number of facsimile transmissions and telephone calls intercepted by FISA that were entered into evidence. These communications were conversations between the defendant, Shukri Abu Baker and his brother, Jamal Abu Baker; a Hamas leader.
Jamal Abu Baker, in a conversation dated August 2, 1998, mentioned to Shukri Abu Baker that it was his belief that HLF should open up a regional office in Gaza and employ full time staff. Not too long after, this office did open up. Then, in December 1999, Jamal spoke to Shukri about opening a bank account for him under the name Abu Issa. He stated that the account should be opened and that he should then provide him with the account number. This interaction, in which the CEO of HLF opened a bank account with a $50 startup deposit for a known Hamas leader, occurred four years after Hamas had been designated as a foreign terrorist organization.
Agent Miranda also spoke of the connection with Ghassan Elashi and Marzook. Elashi’s cousin, Nadia Elashi, is the wife of Marzook.
Nearly everyday, just outside the courthouse, there is a line of protestors holding up signs reading, “feeding children is not a crime” or—with less frequency—there is a statement from the Council on American Relations—an organization that received $5,000 in seed money from HLF and an unindicted co-conspirator in this case—stating that this trial is nothing more than Islamophobia. They are basing their protests on their belief that this trial is about a charity organization being wrongfully accused and one that had nothing to hide in the first place. The assumption that the HLF had nothing to hide was wholly contradicted by Agent Miranda on Tuesday when Government Exhibit 2-101 was entered into evidence. This document, the HLF operational security directorate, laid out in great detail how the HLF should maintain its internal security. Listed in this document were instructions to: check for listening devices before engaging in meetings; avoid talking about meetings over the phone or by fax; avoid using real names over the phone; agree on a system of encryption for letter writing; exposed individuals are not to contact unexposed persons from home phones but only by public phones; do not carry unnecessary documents, hide them well and establish a pretext for having them if caught; and avoid letting activists in your homes so to not expose our members. The document even prescribed a system of classification for documents depending on their level of sensitivity; general, limited, private, very private. It is unlikely that other charities like the Salvation Army have an OPSEC plan like this one.
Special Agent Miranda, who was instrumental in bringing the evidence against HLF together, is set to testify for the remainder of the week assisting the government in their case. This trial, which is set to continue for several more weeks, will determine the outcome not only of the defendants Ghassan Elashi, Shukri Abu Baker, Mohammad el-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader, Khalid Mishal and Abdulraham Odeh, but will also set the framework for further investigations and possible indictments for the many individuals and Muslim organizations that were affiliated with the Holy Land Foundation.
Thanks to Cindy for pulling up the Russian articles, there are a couple that I missed.
See her list here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1875105/posts?page=1498#1498
You’re very welcome Granny.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1884594/posts
Worried about Putin’s Russia?: Read on
International Herald Tribune ^ | August 20, 2007 | Paul Kennedy
Posted on 08/21/2007 6:50:35 PM PDT by neverdem
For the past several years, the Russia of Vladimir Putin has been sending very clear signals that it is no longer the weakened, troubled and Western-dependent state that it was following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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