The Descent of the US; the Rise of Latin America

Please share this article with others who like to know what's going on
in the world:

http://www.counterpunch.org/agee03142007.html

A Stunning Contrast
The Descent of the US; the Rise of Latin America
By PHILIP AGEE

Havana.

Anyone following the news in recent times cannot be unaware of the
wave of progressive change sweeping Latin America and the Caribbean.
For many lonely years Cuba held high the torch through its exemplary
programs to provide universal health care and education, both gratis,
along with world class cultural, sports and scientific achievements.
Although you won´t find a Cuban today who says things are perfect, far
from it, probably all would agree that compared with pre-revolutionary
Cuba there is a world of improvement. All this they did against every
effort by the United States to isolate them as an unacceptable example
of independence and self-determination, using every dirty method
including infiltration, sabotage, terrorism, assassination, economic
and biological warfare and incessant lies in the cooperating media of
many countries. I know these methods too well, having been a CIA
officer in Latin America in the 1960´s. Altogether nearly 3500 Cubans
have died from terrorist acts, and more than 2000 are permanently
disabled. No country has suffered terrorism as long and consistently
as Cuba.

All through the years, beginning even before taking power in 1959, the
Cuban revolution has needed to have intelligence collection
capabilities in the U.S. for defensive purposes. Such was the fully
justified mission of the Cuban Five, jailed since 1998 with long
sentences after conviction for various crimes in Miami where they had
no chance for a fair trial. Convictions were for conspiracy to commit
espionage to murder. Nevertheless their sights were exclusively set on
criminal terrorist planning in Miami for operations against Cuba,
activities ignored by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. They
neither sought nor received any classified U.S. government
information. Their cases are still on appeal, and will be for years to
come, but their completely biased convictions rank with the legal
lynching in the 1920's of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the
anarchist immigrants, as among the most shameful injustices in U.S.
history. Freedom for the Cuban Five should be the cause of everyone
for whom fairness, human rights and justice are important, both in the
United States and around the world, joining in the activities of the
300 Free the Five solidarity committees in 90 countries.

Current U.S. policy with its means and goals can be found in the
nearly 500-page 2004 report of the Commission for Assistance to a Free
Cuba together with an update published in 2006 that has a secret
annex. A fundamental goal, the same in 2007 as I remember it was in
1959, is isolation of Cuba to keep this bad example from spreading,
and the current policy if successful, would mean no less than Cuban
annexation to the U.S. and complete dependence, in fact if not in law,
as Cubans rightfully claim. Other fundamental goals from 1959 are
still, nearly 50 years later, to foment an internal political
opposition and to cause economic hardship in Cuba leading to
desperation, hunger and despair. It is no exaggeration to call these
goals genocidal.

Yet, U.S. economic warfare of nearly 50 years against Cuba hasn't
worked even though the Cubans who keep book estimate its cost at more
than $80 billion. After the Cuban economy's free fall in the early
1990's, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it began to recover in
1995. By 2005 growth was 11.8% and in 2006 it was 12.5%, the highest
in Latin America. Some sectors have surpassed their development levels
of the late 80's, before the collapse, and others are nearly back.
Cuba's exports of services, nickel, pharmaceutical and other products
are booming, and try as it may, the U.S. has not been able to stop
this.

In the end U.S. efforts to isolate Cuba have also totally failed. In
September 2006 Cuba was elected, for the second time, to lead the Non-
Aligned Movement of 118 countries, and two months later, for the 15th
consecutive year, the United Nations General Assembly voted to condemn
the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba, this time 183 to 4. In 2007 Cuba
has diplomatic or consular relations with 182 countries. Havana
meanwhile is the site of seemingly endless international conferences
on every imaginable theme with thousands of people from around the
world attending. And not least, Cuba in recent years has been hosting
more than 2 million foreign tourists annually at its world-class
resorts. Far from isolating Cuba, the U.S. has isolated itself.

More than 30,000 Cuban doctors and health workers are saving lives and
preventing disease in 69 countries, many in the most remote and
difficult areas where few or no local doctors will go. Meanwhile
30,000 young foreigners from dozens of countries are studying medicine
in Cuba on full scholarships. All were selected from areas lacking
doctors, and all are committed to return to these areas in their home
countries to practice.

In education the Cuban literacy program known as "Yes I can" has been
adopted in nearly 30 countries on five continents where thousands more
Cuban volunteers are teaching. Through this program, in Spanish,
Portuguese, English, Creole, Quechua and Aymara, some 2 million people
have learned to read and write, most of whom continue their education
afterwards through a variety of other programs.

Thanks to these international assistance programs, Cuban prestige and
influence, and international solidarity with Cuba, have never been
greater. It was to defend these worthy programs that the five Cubans,
unjustly convicted, went to Miami in the 1990's.

Then in 1999 came Hugo Chavez, the U.S.'s latest worst nightmare in
the region, admittedly following the Cuban example in Venezuela, with
its enormous income from petroleum, to establish what he calls a
Socialism for the 21st Century with a foreign policy of regional
integration under his innovative Bolivarian Alternative for the
Americas, ALBA, excluding the United States altogether. The program is
already underway through institutions such as Mercosur in trade,
Petrocaribe, Petroandino and Petrosur in the energy sector, the Banco
del Sur in finance, and Telesur in electronic media.

Another program under ALBA is Operación Milagro (Operation Miracle)
for offering free eye surgery to people unable to afford it for
cataracts, glaucoma, diabetes and other vision problems. It began in
2004 as a joint Cuban-Venezuelan effort to bring Venezuelans by air to
Cuba cost free for operations. Within two years 28 countries of Latin
America and the Caribbean were participating, and operations restoring
sight numbered 485,000 of whom 290,000 were Venezuelans. Jet liners
loaded with patients come and go from Havana everyday, but by early
2007 thirteen modern eye clinics were being built in Venezuela, and
several had already performed thousands of operations there. Other
clinics were being established in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala,
Honduras and Haiti, all with Cuban planning and staffing. The ten-year
goal of Operación Milagro is to restore sight to 6 million people of
Latin America and the Caribbean, and the program is expanding to
Africa.

The Cuban example of so many years, and now Venezuela, have also
recently inspired the peoples of Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina,
Uruguay and Nicaragua to elect progressive leaders. Most have rejected
the 1990´s "Washington Consensus" and the neo-liberal model along with
determined U.S. efforts to establish a hemispheric free trade zone.
All are developing grassroots social and economic programs, each in
its own way, aimed at improving the quality of life for all,
especially the long-excluded majorities of their populations where
this injustice prevailed. Although achievements in Cuba continue to
shine, the torch of revolution in the region has effectively passed
from the towering figure of Fidel, ailing at eighty, to Chavez, a
military man and teacher inspired by Simón Bolívar and José Martí.

Reflecting on these new hopes for hundreds of millions in such a vast
region, one cannot avoid recalling the old professor, Próspero,
addressing his class for the last time in Ariel, the classic essay by
José Enrique Rodó, still read by students in Latin America. In
borrowing from The Tempest, and urging his students to follow the
soaring spirit of virtue and good, represented by Ariel, and to reject
the crass materialism of the U.S. personified by Calibán, Próspero
drew a contrast between Latin American idealism and the United States
that is as valid today as in 1900 when the essay first appeared.

While Latin America is fast moving in progressive directions, almost
unimaginable less than ten years ago, in contrast the United States,
at least since the Reagan era, has been moving step by step toward a
Fascism for the 21st Century. And the pace has quickened in the last
six years of Republican government under George W. Bush with passage
of the Patriot Act under emergency circumstances just after the
attacks on the Twin Towers in September 2001, and then adoption in
2006 of the Military Commissions Act, both with substantial support
from Congressional Democrats. Other legislation supports this trend.

The U.S. Federal Government now has legal powers to secretly monitor
one´s communications, whether by telephone, ordinary mail, e-mail, or
fax, plus your bank accounts, credit cards, the web sites you visit,
and the books you buy or read in libraries. Torture, secret prisons,
kidnapping, and jailing indefinitely without trial or recourse to
courts through habeas corpus---all are now legal. So is "extraordinary
rendition" whereby U.S. captives are delivered to other governments
where they will likely be tortured and possibly assassinated.
Investigations by the European Parliament have identified around 1200
secret CIA flights carrying these people through European airports to
secret prisons. To qualify for this treatment, anyone in the world,
U.S. citizens and any others, only need be designated by the
government as an "illegal enemy combatant" whose only definition is
someone who has "purposefully and materially supported hostilities
against the United States." Hostilities or a hostile act can be
interpreted as almost anything that opposes U.S. policies, from a
speech expressing solidarity with Cuba to a picket line protesting the
war in Iraq. If an "enemy combatant" ever gets a trial, it will not be
by a jury of peers but by a U.S. military court that can use hearsay
and evidence obtained under torture.

These powers reminiscent of the Nazi regime are not just a global U.S
Sword of Damocles waiting to fall on perceived enemies. The full range
of repression has been going on since the invasion of Afghanistan in
2001 with plenty of evidence coming from the prisons and concentration
camps of Bagram, Abu Graib and Guantánamo as well as from testimony of
various released innocents swept up in the process. It is an on-going
worldwide application of fascist power in a non-defined, nebulous "war
on terrorism" that has no end or geographical limits. Since September
2001 the Bush government has given one specious reason after another
for what it believes are the motives of Islamic terrorism, never
admitting that it is a reaction and resistance to U.S. imperial
policies, starting with U.S. support for Israel's continued occupation
and colonization of Arab lands and Israel's refusal to return to its
borders before the Six-Day War in 1967.

By 2006 the U.S. had designated some 17,000 people around the world as
"enemy combatants," according to press reports. Combine this
repression with gargantuan contracts to private U.S. firms, as in
Iraqi security and "reconstruction," along with forcing the Iraqi
government, always with eyes on the prize, to contract highly
prejudicial 30-year "production sharing agreements" to American and
British oil majors, excluded from Iraq before the invasion, plus
historic lows in trade union power, and you have the marriage of
government and corporate power that Mussolini, who invented the word
in 1919, described as the essence of fascism. The one bright spot are
the recent indictments of 13 CIA people in Germany and 26 others in
Italy for kidnapping and other violations of their laws. They will
never be brought to trial, of course, but the indictments are
refreshing developments.

Protection of terrorists who serve U.S. interests is still another
feature of American Fascism of the 21st Century. There are many
examples, especially among Cuban exiles, but two stand out from the
others: Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles. Both have long, well-
documented pedigrees as international terrorists, but one of their
joint crimes was historic: the first bombing in flight of a civilian
airliner in the Western Hemisphere. It was Cubana flight 455 that on
October 6th, 1976 exploded just after takeoff from Barbados killing
all 73 people on board.

Bosch and Carriles, both of whose CIA careers began around 1960,
planned the bombing in Caracas and provided the explosives to two
Venezuelans recruited by Posada. These two were discovered, convicted,
and sentenced to long prison terms. Not so with Bosch and Posada who
were protected by then-Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez who
has his own history of working with the CIA. Although they were both
arrested and tried separately in Venezuelan courts as the intellectual
authors of the crime, neither was convicted.

Bosch was found not guilty and released in 1988, returned to Miami but
was arrested for an old parole violation. The Justice Department then
ordered his deportation as an "undesirable" and as "the most dangerous
terrorist" of the Western Hemisphere. But Jeb Bush, son of then-
President Bush, persuaded his father in 1990 to quash Bosch´s
deportation order. Since then Bosch has lived freely in Miami where he
gives television interviews in which he makes every effort to justify
terrorism against Cuba.

For his part Posada´s trial in Venezuela never ended because in 1985
he escaped from prison, fled the country, and soon turned up in El
Salvador working in the CIA´s Contra terrorist operation against
Nicaragua. When this ended he stayed underground in Central America
and from the early 1990´s organized more terrorist operations against
Cuba. In 2005 he was arrested in Miami for illegal entry to the U.S.,
and although he admitted to the New York Times to terrorist bombings
of hotels and other tourist facilities in Cuba, in one of which an
Italian tourist died, he has only been indicted for lying to the FBI
and in his request for naturalization. The Bush administration refuses
to certify him as a terrorist so that he can be tried as such, at the
same time ignoring Venezuela's extradition request as a fugitive from
justice, alleging absurdly that he might be tortured there. His
treatment suggests that he will eventually be pardoned by Bush,
perhaps on Christmas Eve of 2008 just before leaving the White House,
just as his father on Christmas Eve of 1992 pardoned former Defense
Secretary Casper Weinberger and various CIA officers for crimes in the
1980´s Iran-Contra scandal, thus precluding their trials scheduled to
begin the following month.

One need not dwell on the obvious. The conviction of the Miami Cuban
Five for their anti-terrorist efforts, in contrast with the official
protection of terrorists like Bosch and Posada, speaks volumes on the
U.S. as the pre-eminent state sponsor of international terrorism.

The major disguise used to cloak this U.S. program of worldwide
aggression from the 1980´s to the present has been "promotion of
democracy," a hypocritical claim used ad nauseum by Presidents,
Secretaries of State and others that has never fooled anyone. It has
always been clear that the "democracy promotion" programs of the
National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department, the Agency for
International Development and associated foundations and agencies are
nothing more that attempts to foment and strengthen internal political
forces in countries around the world that will be under U.S. control
and will protect and cater to U.S. interests. Their origins are in the
CIA's political operations starting in the 1940´s, and they have
included the overthrow of democratically elected governments and the
institution of unspeakable repression as in Brazil in 1964 and Chile
in 1973 to name only two of many examples.

To be sure there has been, and is, important and worthy resistance in
the U.S. to this developing fascism both within Congress and among
private organizations and individuals. But it has been mostly isolated
attempts of a defensive and rear-guard nature, with little mention in
the corporate media. Bills have been introduced in Congress to ease or
end the economic blockade of Cuba, to amend the worst of the
repressive laws, even to impeach Bush and Cheney, but they seem
unlikely ever to prevail or become law. The two parties, actually
competing branches of a one-party state, have simply adopted ever more
extreme measures to maintain their monopoly of power.

Even the judicial system, once perhaps the last hope for enforcing the
Constitution, has been riddled with neo-conservatives who ignore it.
Take only the appeal of the Miami conviction by the Cuban Five. The
original three appellate judges of Atlanta´s 11th Circuit issued a
compelling 93-page unanimous decision upholding the defense position
that no fair trial of self-admitted Cuban agents was possible in Miami
´s prevailing anti-Cuban atmosphere and that the trial venue should
have been moved. Nevertheless the other 10 judges of the Circuit voted
to hear another appeal en banc and then unanimously overturned the
first decision with only two of the original three judges voting
against (the third had retired). That 10 of the 13 Circuit Court
judges would uphold Miami as a place where Cuban agents could get a
fair trial is a good example of how morally and intellectually corrupt
the federal judiciary has become.

So these are grim days indeed for the United States and by extension
for its allies, starting with its junior partner, the U.K., and
extending through NATO. There have been other periods of shameful
repression in the U.S., like the years following World War I, but
never with a global reach like this.

Predictably U.S. prestige around the world, what there ever was of it,
has disappeared, replaced by contempt and scorn. Testimony to this is
the repudiation of Bush and what he stands for expressed by so many
thousands in the streets protesting his presence as he traveled around
Latin America attempting to lure five countries away from regional
integration. What a contrast with the enlightened, idealistic, and
progressive social and political movements now flowering in Latin
America!

=============================

Philip Agee, 72, was a CIA secret operations officer in Latin American
from 1960 to 1969. He is the author of the best-selling Inside the
Company: CIA Diary (Penguin Books, 1975) plus other books and
articles. Deported in 1977 by the U.K and four other NATO countries,
he has lived since 1978 with his wife in Hamburg, Germany. He travels
frequently to Cuba and South America for solidarity and business
activities, and in 2000 he started an online travel service to Cuba:
www.cubalinda.com.

==============================================
This article can be found at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/agee03142007.html
&
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/200...6/18383417.php

-----------------------

The time for corrupt politicians & their filthy wars has past. Bush,
Cheney, Rice, & Gonzalez must go -
http://www.impeachbush.org

=============

"Man must change or die. There is no other course."
The World Teacher
http://www.Share-International.org


===================
The American people are told that they're free, but that is a filthy
lie. The American people
are NOT free, they are like slaves, who are drowning in a cesspool of
lies and deception. Their (our) nation is not great, it is the
greatest obstacle to world peace and there's nothing great about that!

---------------------------------

Orwell Rolls In His Grave
1 hr 45 min -"Could a media system, controlled by a few global
corporations with the ability to overwhelm all competing ... all »
voices, be able to turn lies into truth?..."
This chilling documentary film examines the relationship between the
media, corporate America, and government. In a country where the "top
1% control 90% of the wealth", the film argues that the media system
is nothing but a "subsidiary of corporate America."

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...14769515892401