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CounterPunch
February
4, 2003
Terrorists Are On the Run
Some Away from
Bush, Others Toward His Nurturing Arms
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 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 eve 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
is the Director of Digital Media and International Outreach Programs
for the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences 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. He can be reached
at: landau@counterpunch.org
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