Conghaileach
25th February 2003, 16:49
ZNet Commentary
Terrorists Are On The Run...Some Away From Bush, Others...
Toward His Nurturing Arms
February 24, 2003
By Saul Landau
If you had taken up terrorism as your life's vocation, or even as a
means to a political end, President Bush's State of the Union words
would have put you into a state of terrible gloom. "We have the
terrorists on the run," he boasted, "we're keeping them on the run. One
by one the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice."
He referred to "3000 terrorists arrested in many countries." He alluded
to other terrorists killed by the forces of good.
"My God," the anti-Castro Cuban terrorist would say, "Bush seems
serious about punishing terrorists or anyone even harboring a
terrorist. My professional life is over. How will I make a living and
God willing, overthrow Fidel Castro with force and violence? For forty
years I have plotted safely with my co-conspirators in the United
States," he complains, "and now Bush, whom we helped elect
by intimidating the vote counters in Dade County Florida and by voting
ourselves early and often rewards us by making such terrible threats
against terrorists? Damn him and those crazy Al-Qaeda Arabs as well! By
crashing those planes into the twin towers and Pentagon, they gave
terrorism a bad name."
Not so fast, I say to myself. President Bush excoriated the terrorists
who had done the 9/11 deeds. He even called them "cowards," which I
couldn't quite understand. But he had a silent qualifying clause:
terrorists who want to kill Castro, bomb Cuban targets, hijack Cuban
planes or ships or do any other kinds of violence against Cuba still
have the green light from the White House.
Indeed, he, his brother Jeb, the Florida Governor and his Attorney
General John Ashcroft, have made a point of not only harboring, but
actually coddling in 1950 Joe McCarthy falsely accused the State
Department of "coddling communists" terrorists. On May 20, 2002, Bush
specifically invited several famous notorious? terrorists to hear
his speech in Miami.
Orlando Bosch at first received an invitation to sit on the platform.
Later, when one of his advisers discovered that Bosch had earned the
FBI's label of the Western Hemisphere's most dangerous terrorist, the
seating arrangement changed and Bosch got dis-invited off the platform
and moved into the audience.
Bosch claimed credit in an interview with the Miami New Times (see Oct.
4, 2001 for further reference) for helping to blow up a Cuban
commercial airliner over Barbados in October 1976. The police caught
him after he fired a bazooka at a Polish ship in the Miami Harbor in
1967. This former pediatrician has cared little about children's
health, but found his calling in violence and spent much of his
adult life after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959
practicing that vocation. Observers noted the Bush family attachment to
violent Cubans when President George Bush I (41), with help from
Otto Reich, his then Ambassador to Venezuela, overruled strong advice
from the FBI and INS and admitted Orlando Bosch into the United States.
Similarly, just before 9/11, Bush (43) also disregarded strong opinions
from the FBI and INS and ordered the freeing from INS deportation
custody of Virgilio Paz and Jose Dionisio Suarez. Both men had received
twelve year sentences for confessing to conspiring with Chilean Secret
Police officials to assassinate Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in a
September 1976 car-bombing in Washington DC.
But a photograph showed a lesser terrorist actually sharing the
platform with President Bush. According to a former, federal law
enforcement official, the Prez must have told the Secret Service to
find a seat for "that good old boy."
This referred to Sixto Reinaldo Aquit Manrique (aka El Chino Aquit).
The Secret Service apparently seated Aquit, arrested in Florida in
1994, a few rows behind the President as he spoke.
After his speech, Bush attended a $25,000-a-couple Florida Republican
Party dinner to help finance the reelection campaign of his younger
brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is running for re-election. Some of
the big donors, members of the governing board of the Cuban American
National Foundation, have also financed terrorists like Bosch and
his erstwhile partner in the airplane bombing, Luis Posada Carriles.
That's what Carriles told Anne Bardach of the July 12-13, 1998 New York
Times
We've gotten used to the war on terrorism as a fact of daily life,
inured ourselves to the security procedures following 9/11, the long
airport waits, the somewhat embarrassing "wanding" process and even the
routine shoe removal and carry-on bag search. Some of us even suppress
yawns when Attorney General Ashcroft or Homeland Security Tsar
Tom Ridge warn of the next imminent terrorist attack and encourage us
to join TIPS, a national informers' association to spy on neighbors and
anyone who might be suspicious.
Why then does the Secret Service not apply a standard set of rules? The
answer, according to a former FBI Special Agent, is that the President
told the Secret Service that there are good former terrorists
especially those who strongly backed his younger brother Jeb for
reelection as Florida governor and bad ones.
"There's no way the Secret Service didn't know that the man had been
busted for a terrorist rap," the former federal police officer said.
Indeed, the Miami Herald (Nov 4, 1994), on November 2, 1994, reported
that the FBI anti-terrorism squad nailed Aquit after he and two
colleagues had "pulled up to a Southwest Dade warehouse...armed with 10
gallons of gas, fuses, and a loaded semiautomatic handgun." The
story cited police saying "the men smashed a window and tried to get
inside before officers moved in."
Miami Herald reporter Gail Epstein cited FBI Special Agent Paul Miller
of the FBI's Terrorism Task Force who said "there was enough fuel to
destroy several warehouses." The warehouse stored supplies for the
Pastors for Peace who intended to ship them to Cuba.
In 1993, according to Cuban authorities, Aquit fired a 50 caliber
machine gun at a Cypriot tanker in Cuban waters off the province of
Matanzas. The UN Rapporteur cited this event in his 1994 annual report
on human rights in Cuba.
Aquit proudly claims membership in the anti-Castro Secret Armed Army.
He was tried and convicted and sentenced to five years by a Florida
court. But, according to El Nuevo Herald reporter Cynthia Corzo, the
state office of the public prosecutor let Aquit and his terrorist co-
conspirators off with two years of house arrest (allowing them to go to
work, church or to the market) followed by three years of probation and
an additional 150 hours of community service.
More importantly, Aquit's terrorist actions took on near epic status
for the violent anti-Castroites when the President apparently made a
special exception and contradicted his own rules in the war against
terrorism. Or did Bush omit a paragraph in his speeches that
specifies that the "terrorism" charge applies only to those who have an
Abu or Bin in their names?
Those who have followed the course of Bush's "war against terrorism"
will appreciate the nuance that he has aimed his aggression at violent
Islamic people, not at violent anti-Castro Cubans whose patriotic zeal
impels them to use explosives against targets located in the United
States. By inviting Bosch and placing Aquit on the platform with
him, Bush acknowledged his debt to certain Miami Cubans. What's a long
history of terrorism compared to loyalty to the Bush family?
The Bush family rewards those who help their campaigns and helps them
get asylum and prestige if they are criminals or high level
appointments if they merely represent criminals. Bush appointed the
Cuban-born Otto Reich Interim Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-
American Affairs after the Senate refused to confirm him. He has made
several Cabinet and sub-Cabinet appointments of prominent Cubans as
well like Commerce Secretary Mel Martinez.
He even moved the ubiquitous Reich to a National Security Council job
after a Republican-controlled Senate told him to ditch the ultra
reactionary whose policies aimed at hurting Fidel Castro, not helping
the United States and helped give the Administration a bad name
throughout Latin America. In April of 2002, various newspapers reported
that Reich had collaborated with the unsuccessful Venezuelan
putschists that tried to kidnap and then replace elected President
Hugo Chavez.
In is State of the Union, Bush called Saddam Hussein an imminent threat
because he was arming terrorists. He also had unkind words for the
Iranian regime, part of his infamous Axis of Evil. I wondered if he had
forgotten that his own father had helped send weapons of mass
destruction to an even more radical Islamic government in Iran
during the Iran-Contra affair of the mid 1980s.
I wondered as well if he had forgotten that several of his top level
appointments had gone to men who had participated in the illegal arming
of the Iranian government: John Poindexter, head of TIPS (the ultra
secret snitch operation), Elliot Abrams, now a policy planner,
John Negroponte, the UN Ambassador and of course the omnipresent Reich.
So, count on Bush to reward his old friends no matter what their role
in previous harboring or arming of terrorists and also rely on him give
anti-Castro terrorists get out of jail passes and opportunities to
share his platform as long as they don't have Arab-sounding names.
With this kind of presidential support it is small wonder that no jury
in south Florida convicts anti-Castro Cubans any more. Indeed, the
juries down there award them large settlements in cases that other
juries and judges would laugh at or just throw out of court. In a
default judgment
Fidel Castro didn't show up for the trial because he claimed the court
lacked jurisdiction --in late January, a south Florida jury awarded $40
plus million in damages to Jose Basulto, founder of Brothers to the
Rescue. In February 1996, Cuban MIGs shoot down two planes flown by
Brothers' pilots. Basulto escaped. Like Bosch and Aquit, Basulto has
a long record of violence. He told a Florida court just two years ago,
however that he had converted to pacifism, except for Cuba where
violence was necessary.
In December 2002, a Cuban hijacked a plane and flew it safely through
the Florida radar and landed. He got a hero's welcome and a shifty
lawyer filed suit demanding that the plane, Cuban state property, be
auctioned off and the proceeds given to his "emotionally wounded"
client. What a precedent for skyjacking planes! What a lesson
for prospective terrorists! The violent anti-Castroites, dense as they
are, have noted the different standards Bush has set for them and the
other terrorists.
I told my wife that the scriptwriters for The Sopranos, HBO' s hit
program about the life of a mafia gangster, his family, friends and
world, must have spent time in South Florida courtrooms. In one
episode, a mob guy informs a juror at the trial of Tony Soprano's uncle
that he has a nice family and he hopes they live a long and
prosperous life sufficient to insure that the juror will vote
not guilty in the government's absolutely airtight case against Tony's
uncle.
Is life imitating TV? "The Sopranos" is a well-produced farce. Real
life is not as well scripted.
Saul Landau teaches at Cal Poly Pomona University and is a fellow of
the Institute for Policy Studies. His October 2001 film, IRAQ: VOICES
FROM THE STREETS, is distributed by Cinema Guild, 1-800-723-5522.
Commentaries from Z Magazine are a premium sent to Sustainer
Donors of Z/ZNet and that to learn more folks can consult
ZNet at http://www.zmag.org
Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/200...02/13landau.cfm (http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003-02/13landau.cfm)
Terrorists Are On The Run...Some Away From Bush, Others...
Toward His Nurturing Arms
February 24, 2003
By Saul Landau
If you had taken up terrorism as your life's vocation, or even as a
means to a political end, President Bush's State of the Union words
would have put you into a state of terrible gloom. "We have the
terrorists on the run," he boasted, "we're keeping them on the run. One
by one the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice."
He referred to "3000 terrorists arrested in many countries." He alluded
to other terrorists killed by the forces of good.
"My God," the anti-Castro Cuban terrorist would say, "Bush seems
serious about punishing terrorists or anyone even harboring a
terrorist. My professional life is over. How will I make a living and
God willing, overthrow Fidel Castro with force and violence? For forty
years I have plotted safely with my co-conspirators in the United
States," he complains, "and now Bush, whom we helped elect
by intimidating the vote counters in Dade County Florida and by voting
ourselves early and often rewards us by making such terrible threats
against terrorists? Damn him and those crazy Al-Qaeda Arabs as well! By
crashing those planes into the twin towers and Pentagon, they gave
terrorism a bad name."
Not so fast, I say to myself. President Bush excoriated the terrorists
who had done the 9/11 deeds. He even called them "cowards," which I
couldn't quite understand. But he had a silent qualifying clause:
terrorists who want to kill Castro, bomb Cuban targets, hijack Cuban
planes or ships or do any other kinds of violence against Cuba still
have the green light from the White House.
Indeed, he, his brother Jeb, the Florida Governor and his Attorney
General John Ashcroft, have made a point of not only harboring, but
actually coddling in 1950 Joe McCarthy falsely accused the State
Department of "coddling communists" terrorists. On May 20, 2002, Bush
specifically invited several famous notorious? terrorists to hear
his speech in Miami.
Orlando Bosch at first received an invitation to sit on the platform.
Later, when one of his advisers discovered that Bosch had earned the
FBI's label of the Western Hemisphere's most dangerous terrorist, the
seating arrangement changed and Bosch got dis-invited off the platform
and moved into the audience.
Bosch claimed credit in an interview with the Miami New Times (see Oct.
4, 2001 for further reference) for helping to blow up a Cuban
commercial airliner over Barbados in October 1976. The police caught
him after he fired a bazooka at a Polish ship in the Miami Harbor in
1967. This former pediatrician has cared little about children's
health, but found his calling in violence and spent much of his
adult life after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959
practicing that vocation. Observers noted the Bush family attachment to
violent Cubans when President George Bush I (41), with help from
Otto Reich, his then Ambassador to Venezuela, overruled strong advice
from the FBI and INS and admitted Orlando Bosch into the United States.
Similarly, just before 9/11, Bush (43) also disregarded strong opinions
from the FBI and INS and ordered the freeing from INS deportation
custody of Virgilio Paz and Jose Dionisio Suarez. Both men had received
twelve year sentences for confessing to conspiring with Chilean Secret
Police officials to assassinate Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in a
September 1976 car-bombing in Washington DC.
But a photograph showed a lesser terrorist actually sharing the
platform with President Bush. According to a former, federal law
enforcement official, the Prez must have told the Secret Service to
find a seat for "that good old boy."
This referred to Sixto Reinaldo Aquit Manrique (aka El Chino Aquit).
The Secret Service apparently seated Aquit, arrested in Florida in
1994, a few rows behind the President as he spoke.
After his speech, Bush attended a $25,000-a-couple Florida Republican
Party dinner to help finance the reelection campaign of his younger
brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is running for re-election. Some of
the big donors, members of the governing board of the Cuban American
National Foundation, have also financed terrorists like Bosch and
his erstwhile partner in the airplane bombing, Luis Posada Carriles.
That's what Carriles told Anne Bardach of the July 12-13, 1998 New York
Times
We've gotten used to the war on terrorism as a fact of daily life,
inured ourselves to the security procedures following 9/11, the long
airport waits, the somewhat embarrassing "wanding" process and even the
routine shoe removal and carry-on bag search. Some of us even suppress
yawns when Attorney General Ashcroft or Homeland Security Tsar
Tom Ridge warn of the next imminent terrorist attack and encourage us
to join TIPS, a national informers' association to spy on neighbors and
anyone who might be suspicious.
Why then does the Secret Service not apply a standard set of rules? The
answer, according to a former FBI Special Agent, is that the President
told the Secret Service that there are good former terrorists
especially those who strongly backed his younger brother Jeb for
reelection as Florida governor and bad ones.
"There's no way the Secret Service didn't know that the man had been
busted for a terrorist rap," the former federal police officer said.
Indeed, the Miami Herald (Nov 4, 1994), on November 2, 1994, reported
that the FBI anti-terrorism squad nailed Aquit after he and two
colleagues had "pulled up to a Southwest Dade warehouse...armed with 10
gallons of gas, fuses, and a loaded semiautomatic handgun." The
story cited police saying "the men smashed a window and tried to get
inside before officers moved in."
Miami Herald reporter Gail Epstein cited FBI Special Agent Paul Miller
of the FBI's Terrorism Task Force who said "there was enough fuel to
destroy several warehouses." The warehouse stored supplies for the
Pastors for Peace who intended to ship them to Cuba.
In 1993, according to Cuban authorities, Aquit fired a 50 caliber
machine gun at a Cypriot tanker in Cuban waters off the province of
Matanzas. The UN Rapporteur cited this event in his 1994 annual report
on human rights in Cuba.
Aquit proudly claims membership in the anti-Castro Secret Armed Army.
He was tried and convicted and sentenced to five years by a Florida
court. But, according to El Nuevo Herald reporter Cynthia Corzo, the
state office of the public prosecutor let Aquit and his terrorist co-
conspirators off with two years of house arrest (allowing them to go to
work, church or to the market) followed by three years of probation and
an additional 150 hours of community service.
More importantly, Aquit's terrorist actions took on near epic status
for the violent anti-Castroites when the President apparently made a
special exception and contradicted his own rules in the war against
terrorism. Or did Bush omit a paragraph in his speeches that
specifies that the "terrorism" charge applies only to those who have an
Abu or Bin in their names?
Those who have followed the course of Bush's "war against terrorism"
will appreciate the nuance that he has aimed his aggression at violent
Islamic people, not at violent anti-Castro Cubans whose patriotic zeal
impels them to use explosives against targets located in the United
States. By inviting Bosch and placing Aquit on the platform with
him, Bush acknowledged his debt to certain Miami Cubans. What's a long
history of terrorism compared to loyalty to the Bush family?
The Bush family rewards those who help their campaigns and helps them
get asylum and prestige if they are criminals or high level
appointments if they merely represent criminals. Bush appointed the
Cuban-born Otto Reich Interim Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-
American Affairs after the Senate refused to confirm him. He has made
several Cabinet and sub-Cabinet appointments of prominent Cubans as
well like Commerce Secretary Mel Martinez.
He even moved the ubiquitous Reich to a National Security Council job
after a Republican-controlled Senate told him to ditch the ultra
reactionary whose policies aimed at hurting Fidel Castro, not helping
the United States and helped give the Administration a bad name
throughout Latin America. In April of 2002, various newspapers reported
that Reich had collaborated with the unsuccessful Venezuelan
putschists that tried to kidnap and then replace elected President
Hugo Chavez.
In is State of the Union, Bush called Saddam Hussein an imminent threat
because he was arming terrorists. He also had unkind words for the
Iranian regime, part of his infamous Axis of Evil. I wondered if he had
forgotten that his own father had helped send weapons of mass
destruction to an even more radical Islamic government in Iran
during the Iran-Contra affair of the mid 1980s.
I wondered as well if he had forgotten that several of his top level
appointments had gone to men who had participated in the illegal arming
of the Iranian government: John Poindexter, head of TIPS (the ultra
secret snitch operation), Elliot Abrams, now a policy planner,
John Negroponte, the UN Ambassador and of course the omnipresent Reich.
So, count on Bush to reward his old friends no matter what their role
in previous harboring or arming of terrorists and also rely on him give
anti-Castro terrorists get out of jail passes and opportunities to
share his platform as long as they don't have Arab-sounding names.
With this kind of presidential support it is small wonder that no jury
in south Florida convicts anti-Castro Cubans any more. Indeed, the
juries down there award them large settlements in cases that other
juries and judges would laugh at or just throw out of court. In a
default judgment
Fidel Castro didn't show up for the trial because he claimed the court
lacked jurisdiction --in late January, a south Florida jury awarded $40
plus million in damages to Jose Basulto, founder of Brothers to the
Rescue. In February 1996, Cuban MIGs shoot down two planes flown by
Brothers' pilots. Basulto escaped. Like Bosch and Aquit, Basulto has
a long record of violence. He told a Florida court just two years ago,
however that he had converted to pacifism, except for Cuba where
violence was necessary.
In December 2002, a Cuban hijacked a plane and flew it safely through
the Florida radar and landed. He got a hero's welcome and a shifty
lawyer filed suit demanding that the plane, Cuban state property, be
auctioned off and the proceeds given to his "emotionally wounded"
client. What a precedent for skyjacking planes! What a lesson
for prospective terrorists! The violent anti-Castroites, dense as they
are, have noted the different standards Bush has set for them and the
other terrorists.
I told my wife that the scriptwriters for The Sopranos, HBO' s hit
program about the life of a mafia gangster, his family, friends and
world, must have spent time in South Florida courtrooms. In one
episode, a mob guy informs a juror at the trial of Tony Soprano's uncle
that he has a nice family and he hopes they live a long and
prosperous life sufficient to insure that the juror will vote
not guilty in the government's absolutely airtight case against Tony's
uncle.
Is life imitating TV? "The Sopranos" is a well-produced farce. Real
life is not as well scripted.
Saul Landau teaches at Cal Poly Pomona University and is a fellow of
the Institute for Policy Studies. His October 2001 film, IRAQ: VOICES
FROM THE STREETS, is distributed by Cinema Guild, 1-800-723-5522.
Commentaries from Z Magazine are a premium sent to Sustainer
Donors of Z/ZNet and that to learn more folks can consult
ZNet at http://www.zmag.org
Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/200...02/13landau.cfm (http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003-02/13landau.cfm)