Talking is One Thing; Doing is Another

Included in the information that invaded the news world this week was the fact that U.S. authorities were persecuting an American cameraman, Kurt Sonnenfeld, who filmed images of the World Trade Center attack in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.

As the cameraman of a federal agency, Kurt had unlimited access to ground zero, which is why he went through the rubble with his camera in hand and shot even the smallest details. Those were the scary scenes that were seen worldwide.

Kurt started to defend the theory that what happened to the Twin Towers when the two airplanes crashed into them was a hoax. American authorities wanted the tape, but the author didn’t want to give it away.

“I have promised to give my footage to the big investigators that are credible and widely known – investigators who will be able to detect anomalies that I or other people without scientific education might miss. With that in mind, I hope that there are many things they can discover that disprove the current official story of what happened,” said Sonnenfeld to the international press.

The cameraman apparently shot compromising images, and this serves as an argument to defend his thesis that the U.S. government officials were aware of the attacks to the Twin Towers in 2001 before they were going to happen. Trying to silence him corresponds to their interests.

Also in the news is the murder of Honduran journalist Israel Zelaya Dias, the tenth to die there so far this year, and an article naming Mexico as the hardest place in Latin America to work as a reporter.

With all of these stories going around, I receive messages that, in the name of freedom of the press, I should interview this person or the other, I should advertise this or that group, to which I reply: why doesn’t the Washington Post do this with the Five Heroes? Why doesn’t the New York Times take declarations from Gerardo to know his experiences from the hole? Why is Cuba missing freedom of the press and America is not?

Which one is the reason to believe in freedom of the American media and the gag in my country? According to an article from Yugoslavian Peter Schenkel: “The Inter American Press Association (IAPA), headquartered in Florida, doesn’t miss a single opportunity to criticize all of the countries of this hemisphere, where there is still ‘the abuse of lack of press freedom.’ It would be very appropriate for this honorable institution to start to sweep the courtyard of its own home.”*

Consider the case of reporter Jim Taricani, who made public a secret FBI video in which it was proven that a local politician accepted a bribe, and since he refused to reveal his source was sentenced to prison; or Judith Miller, reporter for The New York Times and her colleague Matthew Cooper, who faced similar processes for making inquiries about the unmasked CIA agent Valerie Plame.

Journalists Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada from the San Francisco Chronicle faced the same fate for spreading the news that two famous baseball players from the New York Yankees and the San Francisco Giants had been doped with anabolic steroids.

On that occasion Schenkel said, “In the United States, 24 journalists face similar trials.”*

In the interview Ignacio Ramonet did with Fidel Castro, which talked about the subject, the journalist asked: Would free media be considered incompatible with the revolution? Fidel answered, “In that ‘free’ media, who speaks? What do you talk about? Who writes? You speak about what the owners of the newspapers or television stations want. The ones that write are the ones they choose. You know that very well. You talk about ‘Free Speech,’ but in reality what is essentially defended is the right of private ownership of mass media.”

And another question: Could the desire of responsible criticism go as far as the approval of freedom of press that many claim? “If you call freedom of press,” clarifies Fidel, “the right to a counter-revolution and the right for enemies of Cuba to talk and write freely against socialism and against revolution, slander, lie and create conditioned reflexes, I would say that we are not in favor of this ‘freedom.’” While Cuba remains a country blocked by the empire, victim of unjust laws like the Helms-Burton or the Cuban adjustment laws, a country that has been threatened by the president of the United States himself, we cannot give that “freedom” to the allies of our enemies, whose aim is to fight against the rationale of socialism.

*Editor’s note: These quotations, while accurately translated, could not be verified.