Washington: Justice with Paid Journalists

Around September 11, one inevitably remembers the abominable and painful events that occurred on that date. It has been 39 years since the fascist coup against President Salvador Allende and 11 years since the atrocious attack on the Twin Towers in New York. The first, a state act of terrorism by the United States, is documented as having been planned by the CIA, approved by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and ordered by President Richard Nixon. The second was also a terrorist act, and reprehensible from every point of view, although a convincing report about the facts has still not been prepared.

Curiously, the number of fallen people as a consequence of the first and the second rounds out to about 3,000, which is close to, but less than, the number that the terrorist campaign patronized by Washington since 1959 has cost Cuba, including the frustrated Bay of Pigs invasion (3,478 dead and 2,099 wounded, to be exact). The cruel, daily sufferings and deprivations imposed by the redoubled and interminable blockade are immeasurable.

After September 11, 2001, Washington proclaimed itself world champion of the fight against terrorism, but has used a double standard to measure itself. This explains why, in the last nearly 14 years, since before that date, it keeps five Cuban fighters against terrorism, who were arrested in Miami, imprisoned (René González is under supervised liberty and obliged to remain in the United States another three years, starting from October 7, 2011), while it pampers the terrorists that they monitored. The five were condemned to totally disproportionate sentences in a trial plagued with violations of the Constitution and U.S. laws.

In spite of exemplary conduct, they have been placed in solitary confinement on numerous occasions; two of them have been impeded from receiving visits from their wives living in Cuba, because this supposedly constitutes a threat to the empire’s national security. It is not by chance that a federal Court of Appeals ordered the judgment annulled, nor that a U.N. panel declared that this was not guided by the rules of due process. The injustice with the five is so notorious that it caused Gore Vidal to declare it “more evidence that we have a legal crisis, a political crisis and a constitutional crisis.” Meanwhile, Noam Chomsky has affirmed: “The situation of the five is such a scandal that it is difficult to talk of it.” Eleven Nobel Prize winners backed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which did not even consider it.*

But since 2006 it has begun to surface that the U.S. government had paid many journalists acting as secret agents during the trial, with the goal of manipulating public opinion in Miami. Among those used were CBS, the Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, Diario las Américas, Radio y TV Martí and WAQI. In order to stain the trail as a whole they used the accusation of an assassination conspiracy against Gerardo Hernández, invented by the district attorney’s office months after the charges were raised. There exists convincing evidence to the contrary: It was not Gerardo or even Havana. The White House knew very well that on February 24, 1998, aircraft from the counterrevolutionary organization Hermanos al Rescate were going to violate Cuban airspace one more time, as they had been doing habitually. Havana then sent more than 12 diplomatic messages demanding an end to the violations and even appealed to Gabriel García Márquez’s good standing with President Bill Clinton, and warned Washington that if the aircraft continued, they would be shot down, as in fact did happen. Clinton had promised to stop them.

Obviously, a process in which not one of the charges was proven, in which the principal is a blatant invention and in which the government paid journalists from the city where the trial occurred and the hometown of the jury members, fails the minimum requisites to be considered legal. That argument is contained in a new affidavit presented by the lawyer Martin Garbus, who seeks the revocation of the condemnation of Gerardo Hernández based on the government’s massive bad conduct, with its payments of several million dollars to journalists. Washington refuses to open its archives because if it did so the trial would fall apart.

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