Obama Has It Backwards: U.S. Has Been the State Sponsor of Terror Against Cuba!

The news that Obama has an "imminent inclination" to remove Cuba from a State Dept. -based "sponsors of state terror"  list almost makes for sarcastic laughs. It certainly has the media and many political pundits  yapping,  but mostly about the wrong issues.  While hysterics and the historically-challenged believe this to be a seriously bad idea, most of us who aren't brainwashed really want to know how the dopes missed the true issue: Cuba has been the historical victim of U.S. state-sponsored terror but never instigated any against the U.S.

The true fact here? Cuba was the victim of the worst state-terror attack in the western hemisphere before 9/11 and it came from the U.S. This was instigated by the CIA on Oct. 6, 1976 using a Venezuelan- based former CIA asset (Luis Posada)  to blow up Cubana Airlines Flight 455 killing all 73 on board.

Certainly the event is just as emblazoned in Barbadian neurons as the 9-11 attack for those in New York. Maybe worse,  since the scale of Barbados is radically smaller than New York, or the U.S. On a national scale of devastation, that Cubana Airline bombing took out a percentage of people equal to 0.03% of the total populace, while numerically as a %, 9-11 took out roughly 0.0001%. Thus, in purely proportionate numerical terms, Cubana 455 was much deadlier. But sadly, it's not on most citizens' radar - certainly not in the US Of A.

I was at the Paradise Beach on the southwest coast of the island with my five nieces when it occurred. We witnessed the plane come down, and wondered what the hell had happened – then watched in horror barely an hour and a half later as bloody body parts began to wash ashore. Even now, as adult women, they're unable to venture anywhere near that particular beach.

The prevailing thought at the time was some malfunction occurred and the plane just blew up more or less by accident. It was only years later that it was ascertained that the two questioned in Barbados were hired thugs commissioned by anti-Castro extremist Cubans and the CIA . As former federal agents Warren Hinckle and William Turner noted in their excellent book, ‘Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the Assassination of JFK’ (p. 384, Thunders Mouth Press, 1992):

“Two men who had deplaned in Barbados, Freddy Lugo and Hernan Ricardo Lusano, were interrogated after joking about the bombing in a Barbados taxicab. The two were employed by Luis Posada…and confessed that Posada and (Orlando) Bosch had supplied them with two bombs, which they planted on the Cubana aircraft.”

Luis Posada  - state-sponsored  (by the U.S.) Venezuealan terrorist, who was allowed U.S. sanctuary by George Bush Jr. and never extradited for trial in Venezuela.


According to a secret CIA cable dated Oct. 14, 1976, intelligence sources in Venezuela relayed information about the Cubana Airlines bombing that tied in  Alpha 66 terrorist Orlando Bosch, who had been visiting Venezuela, and Posada, who then served as a senior officer in Venezuela’s intelligence agency, DISIP. On his arrival, Bosch was met by a CIA operative and Posada, according to the report. Later, a fundraising dinner was held in Bosch’s honor. “A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, ‘we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,’ and that ‘Orlando has the details,’” the CIA report said.

Meanwhile, those of us living in Barbados at the time had no remote notion of the bloody act to come, nor of the U.S. complicity in it, or that the same right wing Cuban renegades - whose associates conspired in the JFK assassination -  were part of it. The CIA Report went on to read:

“Following the 6 October [1976] Cubana Airline crash off the coast of Barbados, Bosch, Garcia and Posada agreed that it would be best for Bosch to leave Venezuela. Therefore, on 9 October, Posada and Garcia escorted Bosch to the Colombian border, where he crossed into Colombian territory.”

(Note the CIA's  sanitizing of language, the use of "crash" instead of bombing, or what we call "collateral language.)

Meanwhile, Venezuelan police began rounding up suspects. Two right wing Cuban exiles, Hernan Ricardo Lusano and Freddy Lugo, who got off the Cubana plane (Flight 455) in Barbados, confessed that they had planted the bomb and they named Bosch and Posada as the architects of the attack. A search of Posada’s apartment in Venezuela turned up bomb-making instructions, some materials as well as Cubana Airlines timetables and other incriminating documents.

Posada and Bosch were charged in Venezuela for the Cubana Airlines bombing, but the case soon became a political tug-of-war, since the suspects were in possession of sensitive Venezuelan government secrets that could embarrass President Andres Perez. Posada escaped from a Venezuelan prison where he was awaiting trial in 1985. In his autobiography, Posada thanked Miami-based Cuban activist Jorge Mas Canosa for the $25,000 that was used to bribe guards who allowed Posada to walk out of prison. Another Cuban exile who aided Posada was former CIA officer Felix Rodriguez, who was close to then-Vice President Bush.

To make a long story short, Posada became the beneficiary of assistance of not only a somnolent, uninterested media (which expressed more outrage at the Pan Am 103 downing in 1988) and a friendly Bush Junior Administration - but also Miami's Cuban community which provided safe harbor for a number of years while investigations were ongoing.

Years earlier, the U.S. had planned massive terror attacks not only on Cuban soil but in the U.S.  - to blame on Fidel Castro, in order to foment a full scale war and invasion of the island. We have the records that document  the extent of it, e.g.                                                          












































This was none other than Operation Northwoods.  In Operation Northwoods the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. military planned a campaign of terror, to include the sinking of refugee boats (carrying Cuban refugees) on the high seas, as well as the killing of innocent citizens on American cities’ streets, plus random bombings carried out in Washington, DC, Miami and other places. What was the  motivation? Author James Bamford shows (Body Of Secrets, pp. 82-83) it was to incite an invasion and war against Cuba and enable the U.S. to invade and overthrow Fidel Castro.

But the documents to support suspicions of this (failed) conspiracy were only released years later – though many smelled a ‘rat’. When I first heard of Northwoods, I had trouble processing how any U.S. government agency or entity could remotely conceive of such foul deeds, far less carry them out. Then I quickly recalled the blowing up of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 over Barbados, on October 6. 1976 by Luis Posada, Freddie Lugo and other renegades sponsored in the extremist Alpha 66 enclave by the CIA.

Flash forward to Obama's announcement which is more than welcome by the dozens of Latin American nations that already have diplomatic and trade relations with Havana, and who never could understand the U.S. isolationist stance. We do well to applaud this advance but also bear in mind the generosity here is not all on the part of the high and mighty U.S. but also the Cuban people who have been able to forgive the diabolical attack on their own nearly 40 years ago.

See also the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uspkEV_fFzs

ZunZuneo - Another Bald-Faced NeoCon Attempt to Interfere in Another Country

The neocons and their predecessors (mainly embedded in the military and CIA from the era of 'Operation Mongoose' and ZR/Rifle) have had a boner to overthrow Fidel Castro since the 1960s. From trying to use exploding cigars to poisons, these miscreants have never given up and continued to try to knock out Castro - even planning a false flag operation called "Operation Northwoods" that would have instigated terror attacks on U.S. cities and citizens - then blame Castro  - in order to start a war and invade Cuba. See e.g. this FOIA -obtained document below:


























Note the plan also entailed blowing up ammunition inside Cuban air bases, sabotaging aircraft therein, lobbing mortar shells into air bases,  sabotaging ships in harbor and sinking them as well as other criminal deeds. James Bamford, in his book, Body of Secrets (pp. 82-83) also noted the plan included killing Americans using bombing attacks,  on the streets of New York, Miami and D.C.,  in order to foment the tale the Cubans were behind it. All this to trigger a justification for invasion of Cuba and overthrowing the Castro government. (It's always stuck in the craw of the U.S. that it wasn't able to overthrow the lone surviving communist nation in the hemisphere - in the same way it did to Guatemala and Chile).

The plan went dead in 1962 after JFK learned of it, and he handed assorted conspirators their heads- and dumped them into lower grade positions, or harmless ones.  One more point - given such a plan actually existed and was well documented, let no one believe for a minute it couldn't also have metastasized into killing Kennedy!

Anyway, the latest scheme just disclosed, is a Twitter-like  "social communications network" app released in Cuba back in 2010 called "Zun Zuneo" and by which the neocons ensconced at State hoped to get rid of Raul Castro and his government. The 'cons never got their wish, and the idiotic program terminated in 2012.  The topic came up on the CBS Early Show this morning, where the following were noted:

- The network was designed to spark a "political uprising" - emulating e.g. the "Arab Spring" erupting in Egypt, Libya etc.

-  Cuba has condemned it as a "subversive plan to destabilize the country" - which is exactly what it is and again, using symmetrical perception (which too many of our fellow citizens lack) one can understand what OUR gov't would do if a foreign nation had facilitated an analogous scheme here - or tried to.

- The State Dept., however, claimed it was "just a developing program to help the Cuban people". RIIIIIGHT.!...and "there were no neo-Nazi ultra-nationalists"  behind the Maidan uprising in Kiev. It all just kinda happened of its own steam.

- The social network itself could be hidden from the Cuban government (imagine, again by symmetric perception, a hidden terrorist social network  established in the U.S. to entice Americans to terror acts.)

- The program took Sen. Patrick Leahy - who oversees foreign operations funding - by surprise.  Leahy this morning commented and said:

"If I had known, I would have said, are you out of your mind?"

- The program known as ZunZuneo functioned as a "bare bones" Twitter and allowed users to exchange information by text without the government knowing anything. In this way it was hoped mostly young Cubans would use it to organize as protestors - like those involved in the Arab Spring.

- The users didn't know it was run by the U.S. Agency for International Development - a CIA front organization, known since the 1960s (as AID), when as author James Douglass ('JFK and the Unspeakable ) notes,  a David Bell of "AID",  informed JFK that the funds from the Commodity Import Aid Program had “already been cut off”,  essentially assuring a coup would ensue with the Diem government in South Vietnam. The Diems were killed on Nov. 2, 1963, and Kennedy had effectively been omitted from the loop.  Kennedy was evidently livid and directly asked Bell who had told him to do that, to which Bell replied, “No one” (ibid.). The will to power disclosed here indicates the CIA felt it more powerful than Kennedy himself or his decision-making authority. 

- USAID paid contractors to collect users' cell phone data and send them text messages. Those texts were "meant to inspire dissent that would ultimately bring down the Castro government".  (According to documents obtained by the Associated Press)


In the aftermath of the revelations, a State Dept. tool and spokesperson appeared at a brief press conference, and with a big stupid smile on her pasty face, blurted:

"We did not supply political content. We did not drive the political content. We are just soooo perfect here....to open the space so they could supply their own content".

RIIIIIIGHHT! Like the Ukrainians supplied their own fuel for a revolution, with no Nazis or Amerikkan Neocons involved at all.

What the dope doesn't get, or doesn't want us to - is that by supplying a tool whereby Cubans could conduct activities under the radar, in an objective to arouse dissent, they were indeed engaged in subversive activity and the State Dept. was helping them by providing the device- wherewithal to carry it out. Again, if you're having trouble understanding the kerfuffle examine it from a mirrored perspective.

The Associated Press also noted that funding for the program, about $1.2 million was "routed through overseas bank accounts and front companies in order  to keep it under the radar".   Again, IF the program was so innocuous, why the need to go this underhanded route? Clearly the architects of it knew damned well it wasn't legal and instead a device to incite insurrection.

The State Dept. also claimed that Congress was notified, however Sen. Leahy contested that claim, asserting he was not, and called the program "dangerously misguided" adding:

"We've had every administration since Dwight Eisenhower - who said 'If we just try one more thing, we can get rid of those Castros. It hasn't worked for 60 years and it won't work."

Sadly, that money wasted on the stupid  ZunZuneo program could have been more constructively used paying reparations to the victims of Cubana Airlines Flight 455,  blown out of the sky  off Barbados on October 6, 1976. This was at the instigation of the CIA (which deployed two Venuzuelans, Freddy Lugo and Hernan Ricardo) to plant 2 bombs  -   with the plan masterminded by Luis Carriles Posada - a former CIA contract operative.

Will this country ever learn? Likely not until we get rid of every last neocon burrowed like parasites into the fabric of our State Department. Oh, and we cease being such god-damned hypocrites on the world stage - holding other nations to moral and legal standards we don't subscribe to ourselves! As salon.com blogger Patrick Smith has observed, at least Vladimir Putin understands and recalls history, which our clowns.....errrr ...leaders, seem to conveniently forget.

Obama, you reading this? NSA pass it to you? Maybe? Then act! Dump those neocons!

See also: http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/alfredo-lopez/55168/usaid-used-fake-twitter-to-try-and-oust-a-government-the-hummingbird-tweet-an-espionage-tale

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/03/someone_teach_john_kerry_about_history/

Thousands of 4th Amendment Violations? Time to Put a Leash on the NSA!

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” – Samuel Johnson

"The fundamental reason for the conversion of the state into a gigantic spy apparatus is the nature of deeply destructive domestic and foreign policies which the government has so forcefully pursued. The vast expansion of the police state apparatus is not a response to the terror attack of 9/11. The geometrical growth of spies, secret police budgets, and the vast intrusion into all citizen communications coincides with the wars across the globe. The decisions to militarize US global policy requires vast budgetary re-allocation , slashing social spending to fund empire-building. 

Mass spying is designed to identify the citizens who oppose both imperial wars and the destruction of domestic welfare.”       – James Petras, in an article on American loss of liberty

“If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged” –  Cardinal Richelieu

The  news from The Washington Post that the National Security Agency has "broken privacy rules" (transl. the 4th Amendment!)  or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, has civil libertarians hopping mad again. And demanding the cowardly congress get off their keysters for once and put a leash on this super snoop agency which Sen. Frank Church once described as being a path to all out tyranny if not reined in. Why should ANY citizen in the true sense have a difficult time grasping this? Anyone who's ever studied the U.S. Constitution ought to process this and how these transgressions of the 4th amendment are intolerable as well as exposing those politicos who have not upheld their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution!

Yet we still have looney tunes blaming Edward Snowden and calling for his head, when HE was the one that provided the channels to expose this law breaking! The guy should be awarded a fuckin' medal for god's sakes! Also, if Obama has any balls left by the time he leaves office, he ought to issue an executive pardon for Snowden - which will allow his return to the U.S. and free of sanctions! 

Look, let's clear the air here for any stupid hypocrites: two CIA-hire terrorists orchestrated the destruction of  Cubana Airlines Flight  455  off the southwest coast of Barbados on Oct. 6, 1976. (The actual 'mechanics', i.e.  planters of the bombs,  were Freddy Lugo and Hernan Ricardo Lusano who joked about it while deplaning in B'dos).  I was at Paradise Beach with my nieces when it occurred, and they are still as traumatized as when the bloody body parts first washed ashore in the aftermath. The two terrorists, Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch have walked Scott free thanks to the two Bush presidents.  See e.g. http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/042606.html

Excerpt 1:

"Not only did the first Bush administration free Bosch from jail a decade and a half ago, the second Bush administration has now pushed Venezuela’s extradition request for his alleged co-conspirator, Posada, onto the back burner."

Luis Posada Carriles: A Terrorist long before bin Laden!

Excerpt 2:

"Reporter Juan Manuel Cao interviewed Bosch, who had been jailed for illegally entering the United States but was paroled in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush at the behest of his eldest son Jeb, then an aspiring Florida politician.

“Did you down that plane in 1976?” Cao asked Bosch.

“If I tell you that I was involved, I will be inculpating myself,” Bosch answered, “and if I tell you that I did not participate in that action, you would say that I am lying. I am therefore not going to answer one thing or the other.”

But when Cao asked Bosch to comment on the civilians who died when the plane crashed off the coast of Barbados, Bosch responded, “In a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Fidel Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach.”

Tell that to the families of those victims, you degenerate! Tell it to my nieces who still are traumatized and can't sleep as the bloody images of floating heads,  arms, legs and torsos - seep into their brains in the dead of night! Tell it to my wife who worked at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital at the time and had to perform radiographic identification when some bodies were too mangled to allow effective ID.  And when you do make sure you understand WE who were there regard you rat fuckers as every BIT the terrorists that al Qaeda and bin Laden have been, and I don't give a shit what excuses or rationalizations you come up with. And oh, btw, the loss of life as a percentage of national population was vastly greater than that wrought by 9/11 in the U.S. and Barbados didn't go batshit crazy taking away its citizens'  rights!

So hear me out - IF two TERRORISTS can be given relative freedom by the 2 Bush presidents, then Obama can sure as shit pardon Ed Snowden for fulfilling the duty of a real citizen and whistle blowing on government transgressions of the Constitution! See also: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-scheer/51088/restore-honor-and-pardon-edward-snowden

Anyway, the NSA's violations have been exposed as a result of an internal audit and other top secret documents. (Thanks to Snowden, a 4th amendment HERO!)  Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that result in interception of U.S. emails and telephone calls.

The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And then we wonder why congress can't do proper oversight over this most dangerous and threatening agency of them all! Again, bear in mind Sen. Church's words here:

"I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America. And we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.” -


Is anybody paying attention? The capacity to make tyranny total? Every red-blooded real American ought to be on his congress critters to get a regulatory oversight leash - a real one- to deal with these guys. They are out of control!  "National security" is their cover. Asked about this information, the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court told The Washington Post that the court lacks the tools to independently verify how often government surveillance breaks the court's rules that aim to protect the privacy of Americans. Without drastic steps, it also cannot check the veracity of government claims that all the violations its staff reports are unintentional mistakes, the judge said.

But let's be clear about a couple things here:

1) The only reason this is even an issue is because the original (1978) FISA law was trashed and the Bushies illegal mass wiretaps were made legal retroactively! But see, the Bush II lawbreakers didn't want to be slowed up in grabbing warrants. They wanted it done wholesale despite the fact the 4th amendment specifically mandates separate warrants with each manjack identified and the reasons set out. Too much trouble? Tough SHIT! That is the Constitution! And I will damned sure defend the 4th to the hilt as much as the 2nd amendment gun guys defend their right to own Glocks, Bushmaster .223s and AR 15s despite the fact that when the 2nd was written only single load muskets were common arms!

2) If the 4th were followed according to the letter as opposed to being trashed by a bastardized Patriot Act "retread" version - validated by weasels in congress,  there'd be no need to have additional funds or resources. This is because the time trajectory would be too stringent for the technology the NSA uses, i.e. to scoop up personal data. My point? You can't have faithful adherence to the 4th amendment and also the PRISM and XKeyscore technologies to grab data indiscriminately. In other words, the technologies used are precisely what's violating the 4th amendment.


In a response this morning over CBS News, the NSA offered the excuse that they were "only human" and hence could make mistakes.  But this only reinforces my point that they need a strong leash with constitutional oversight instead of the usual pussy footing around it our congress critters have been doing.  Any agency that can make such mistakes, especially in terms of repeatedly exceeding its authority - then lying about it like Clapper did to the Senate back in March  - needs to be brought under a stronger hand, which is what congress is supposed to do. They are not supposed to roll over like beaten whelps.

"Aw me, oh my! I wanna be protected from them bad guys!" At the cost of the Constitution? If so,  you don't deserve to call yourself an American! See e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/07/too-many-americans-dont-deserve-liberty.html

The tragic fact is that the more we let a crew of troglodytes like the NSA break our most fundamental amendment, the more clear it becomes that bin Laden and al Qaeda have won the so called "terror war". They have beaten our butts to a bloody pulp by getting we the citizens to do to ourselves what the robed loonies couldn't do on their own in a million years!

Should anyone need to get their brain adjusted more clearly on this, I suggest reading Ted Koppel's excellent article  ('Nine Years After 9/11 Let's Stop Playing Into Bin Laden's Hands'  ) in The Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/09/AR2010090904735.html 

For more on the Cubana Airlines terrorism, go to:

http://morallowground.com/2012/10/06/on-this-day-1976-the-bombing-of-cubana-airlines-flight-455/   

Why Hugo Chavez Is A Hero To Most Venezuelans (And Why U.S. NeoLiberals Hate Him!)

With the death (yesterday) of Hugo Chavez,  the Amerikkan Reactionaries in the capitalist corporo-media are going overboard in slamming him as a renegade, buffoon, “terrorist” (or friend of such) and other codswallop. But ask the ordinary Venezuelan on the streets of Caracas and you will hear a different take: that without Chavez coming to power they’d have remained ground under the boots of a predatory speculator and business class that tried to garner all the nation’s oil wealth to themselves.


And so it was in the early 1990s I first learned of the degree of suffering of common Venezuelans before Chavez was elected. (Yes, ELECTED….by a majority of the populace!) I learned this from my niece Vanessa, then 28. See her as a 13- year old in the 1976 photo (center), visiting Barbados from her native Trinidad. This was on the day of the Cubana Airlines Flt. 455 bombing off Barbados' southwest coast, a strike instigated by the CIA and Orlando Bosch with the assistance of the then "Washington ally", Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez. According to a secret CIA cable dated Oct. 14, 1976, intelligence sources in Venezuela relayed information about the Cubana Airlines bombing that tied in Bosch, who had been visiting Venezuela, and Posada, who then served as a senior officer in Venezuela’s intelligence agency, DISIP, to the bombing. (Note: The DISIP was mainly used by the rich thieves who governed Venezuela then to track all "enemies of the state" - mainly the most impoverished peasants yearning to breathe free, but also any Castro sympathizers.)

Anyway, on his arrival in Perez' oligarchic state, Bosch was met by Garcia and Posada, according to the CIA report. Later, a fundraising dinner was held in Bosch’s honor.  As the report notes: “A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, ‘we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,’ and that ‘Orlando has the details,’.   None of us in Bim knew the details then, but anyway, this was one reason MANY Bajans were elated when Chavez came to power decades later to oust the Venezuelan Oil-based Plutocrats!


As for Vanessa, after she’d taught classical piano to Venezuelans in the late 80s, she'd seen first hand the degree of depredation and the extent to which the Venezuelan poor were ground under, used and exploited by the governing class elites, plutocrats.

Living on the island of Trinidad, barely 7 miles off the Venezuelan coast, she’d probably always been drawn to at least temporarily live and work in the nearest South American nation.  When I visited Trinidad in 1983, to participate in a CXC Physics Curriculum workshop at the Trinidad Hilton, she confided to me that – after graduating from the University of the West Indies with a degree in Computer Science - she wanted to travel to Venezuela to teach music, piano. She wanted to do this before becoming locked into the regular work-a-day world of computer programming. It was a wise choice, and it broadened her perspectives, apart from allowing her to see and live in another nation. (Her  Spanish skills were excellent, by the way!)


But she wasn’t prepared for the abject poverty, people getting their food from restaurant leftovers tossed into garbage cans and many having to eat rats. She wasn’t ready for the social turmoil and unrest and how the small elite wealthy class lived off the toil of the laborers. She predicted as far back as 1991 that this couldn’t be sustained: the country would either tear itself apart in civil war or revolution, or a new leader would arrive to change the dynamic.

The latter occurred with the election of Hugo Chavez. Chavez unashamedly instituted a policy of wealth redistribution and nationalized foreign oil interests, exploiting the nation’s prime resource. Chavez wanted the bounty from that resource to elevate the quality of life for the poor. In many ways he resembled the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala who sought to nationalize the vast banana plantations of United Fruit – but who was overthrown in a U.S. engineered coup (“Operation Success”) in 1954. See also:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/

Chavez faced no similar threat from the Yanqui up north because he had a powerful military to support him, also control of the 4th largest oil reserves in the world (now exceeding that from Saudi Arabia).

How successful was Chavez in introducing a no-holds barred Socialism to the nation? Very! According to data compiled by the UK Guardian, Chavez’s first decade in office saw Venezuelan GDP more than double and both infant mortality and unemployment almost halved. Add to that data a remarkable graph from the World Bank  that shows that under Chavez’s socialism, poverty in Venezuela plummeted (the Guardian reports that its “extreme poverty” rate fell from 23.4 percent in 1999 to 8.5 percent just a decade later). In all, that left the country with the third lowest poverty rate in Latin America. Additionally, college enrollment more than doubled, while millions of people obtained access to health care for the first time and the number of people eligible for public pensions has quadrupled.


Of course this had to upset the capitalist bastion and its propagandizers to the north, convinced as it was that socialism was a failure everywhere and inequality through Neoliberal capitalism was the answer! Hence the incessant bombardment via rhetoric to assail Chavez as one of the worst scumballs on the planet. (Ok, look, I'm not saying the guy was a saint by any means! But let’s get our heads cleared here! He never initiated a war that killed over 600,000 civilians like in Iraq, nor did he overthrow other leaders – like the U.S. has done in Iran (1953, with Mossadegh), in Guatemala (Arbenz in 1954), Allende in Chile in 1972, nor has he taken out innocent bystanders via ‘collateral damage’ with drone assaults. So, it’s kind of funny to see the pot calling the kettle black in terms of Amerikkan media nabobs and self-righteous howlers branding Chavez as a king of humans rights abuses!


But it’s deliberate! Any successful socialist as a leader, and his nation, simply can’t be tolerated by the Neoliberal Capitalist imps who want the whole world reduced to serfs for their perpetual exploitation. So their stock market shares can soar! On the other hand, if a country goes socialist and craters, the Neoliberal free marketeers laugh it off as a harmless and also forgettable cautionary tale about the perils of "statist"  economics. (Or what JFK called dirigisme: the direction of the national economy by the government to protect public interests against private abuses via the dictator of the marketplace.)

By contrast, if a country goes socialist and its economy does what Venezuela’s did, it's no longer perceived as a laughing matter – and it is not so easy to write off or to ignore. It suddenly looks like a threat to the corporate capitalism, especially when said country has valuable oil resources that global powerhouses like the United States rely on. So why be amazed at the U.S.  media buffoons who would attack Chavez as a "buffoon"? (By the way, Hugo's funniest shtick was his UN appearance in 2006, a day after Bush Jr., noting how the podium still "reeked of sulphur" since the "Devil" had been there. Funny, but spot on true since any Texas yahoo that launches a bogus was that kills 600,000 is a Devil - incarnate - unlike Mikey's fantasy devils)

Let’s face it, those of us who inveigh against the meme of Neoliberal supremacy are not treated kindly in this country. I myself have been called a “communist” more times than I can count. But I don’t give a shit. I see how Neoliberalism is destroying the nation I love and rendering its mainstream citizens as chattel (and often dumbed down sheep from the incessant PR blitz) and I am not prepared to just sit back and hold my tongue or keyboard. I see things like the roaring DOW and see the conquest of Main St. by the Neoliberal fat cat economy- the stock market soaring only because labor is cheap (too many still unemployed) and capital is counterposed against it. Oh, and it’s also fed by cheap money from the Fed. Meanwhile, impecunious seniors can't buy meds because they can't earn interest on safe investments like CDs, or money market accounts.


Other historical antagonists of the Neoliberal creed haven't been treated nicely either! From JFK (when he used the Alliance for Progress to extend low interest loans to Latin America) to Martin Luther King to Michael Moore to Oliver Stone to anyone else who dares question neoliberalism and economic imperialism. We’re all disparaged as commies, “America haters” or worse!


That verbal punishment is all about marginalization – the kind that avoids engaging on substance for fear of allowing the notion of socialism to even enter the conversation in the first place. Instead, the non-conformist is attacked and discredited with vapid invective and caricature, becoming a cartoon villain whose ideas, performance and record are ignored before they can be considered on the merits. He becomes, in other words, the Hugo Chavez we so often saw in  American political ads.


Meanwhile, our own data and predictions show we are right and the Neoliberal vermin wrong. In the United States our  poverty rate is skyrocketing, so we ask: Are there any lessons to be learned from Venezuela’s policies that so rapidly reduced poverty? (Yes! Redistribute wealth  via much higher taxes from those that can afford gold plated toilets to those who can’t afford to buy veggies!)


And in a United States that has become more unequal than many Latin American nations, are there any constructive lessons to be learned from Chavez’s grand experiment with more aggressive redistribution?

Again yes! We must beat the tax cutters and spending cut mongers back! We must demand our Neoliberally compromised politicos fight for the rest of us instead of giving in to the Fascists. We must expose the shameless ploys of the Pete Petersons of the nation and their assorted tricks and covers - like'Fix the Debt' -- only there to fuck us all over. We might hope for a politician with Chavez' balls, but no, you won't find any in D.C. All the balls there were gobbled up by Wall Street, and Banksters' lobbyists long ago.  Meanwhile, every day that  fronts like “Fix the Debt” and other Pete Peterson efforts succeed at destroying Americans' faith in our own government, We The People lose. Maybe it’s time to take some pages from Hugo Chavez’ playbook to socialize this country before we’re all turned into serfs. (To learn more about Peterson and his campaign, and his millionaire CEO buddies, go to www.petersonPyramid.org )


Let me also add here that Chavez’ generosity – by way of a half billion dollars each year for home heating oil - has proven to be a godsend for tens of thousands of older, poorer Americans. For this Citgo and Citizens Energy is to be commended. So is Joe Kennedy for his role in expediting home heating oil distribution for indigent seniors and others, who’d freeze to death if the Neoliberal scum had their way. The scum who can afford to pompasett on their high moral horses when it’s convenient to do so.


But what’s really interesting to me is that American oil companies, with all their tens of billions of dollars in quarterly profits, refused to donate a drop of their oil to such a worthy cause. One of these assholes actually had the nerve (on ’60 Minutes’) to claim he “could never support a program that subsidized the few but undermined fuel prices for all Americans” . Translation: Let the oldsters freeze or starve if it means Hugo’s largesse can’t be appropriated by us and used to extend our manipulation of oil-gas prices even more!

Perhaps the most apropos take appeared in a comment on a New York Times forum:

“Shame on anyone who criticizes providing subsidized energy to the needy in our country. What is worse … the fact that our great, powerful nation can ‘live” with millions of marginalized citizens while  taking a “rebate” from Chavez from funds that were earned by selling oil at a profit to us in the first place. Either no oil from Venezuela, period, OR stop the hypocrisy.”

Well put!

Viva Commandante Chavez! Viva la revolucion! Viva el socialismo bolivriano!!

Questions to Ask John Brennan(I): About Those JFK Files

The arch-terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, harbored in Miami for a number of years. We need to know also his role in the CIA-engineered bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 off Barbados in October, 1976.


As former Assistant CIA Director John Brennan gets set to be grilled in his now (CIA Director) confirmation hearings, some questions need to come front and center. I will deal with several of the main ones in this and a subsequent blog. I believe this is crucial because Brennan was Assistant  CIA Director when the Bushie torturers were running amuck and the stage was being set to create even more terrorists with drone strikes that often took out civilians, women, kids. Never mind Obama’s often saying “we need to put this behind us” – the moral tenor of a genuinely moral nation demands accountability and responsibility.  If we ignore that, or let it pass out of expediency, we're no better than the Third Reich.


So let me begin with question 1: If confirmed, are YOU going to release the remaining JFK assassination files – especially the ones on George Joannides which would show conclusively how Lee Oswald was being played as a patsy?

This is especially germane now, as the news has come forth (Jan. 13, in assorted AP releases to dozens of papers) that two of Robert F. Kennedy’s offspring, Rory and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. related to Charlie Rose in an interview (conducted at the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas) that their dad never bought into the Warren Commission Report. According to Robert Kennedy Jr., his father thought “the Warren Commission which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone was a ‘shoddy piece of craftsmanship” and he added that he too questioned the report.

Well, I mean, seriously – WHO wouldn’t? 200 material witnesses never called to testify, including: the reporter who found the alleged sniper’s nest, the woman who saw Officer J.D. Tippitt shot and by a heavy set short man – not Oswald, a soldier who felt the air percussion of a bullet whiz by as he stood with his camera on the grassy knoll, and at least five witnesses, including an Air Force officer – that observed an Oswald double.

Then we have the added poppycock of a supposed bullet making seven wounds in two men and emerging pristine or nearly so, on a Parkland Hospital stretcher. Then we had the spectacle of a bullet-pocked limo being disassembled and dispatched to Ohio and the brain disappearing between Parkland in Dallas, and Bethesda. Add to that an alleged assassin's rifle (6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano) which had to be substituted for to try to replicate the alleged shots in WC trials, since the purported original had shims out of whack in azimuth - so couldn't hit the broad side of a barn! How many coincidences have to occur before people are given credit for some basic common sense?

So, no, the Warren Commission was never set up as a “government commission” but as LBJ’s creature, to enable his full oversight-control and to provide an expedient political resolution by which assorted covert players and special interests could all wipe their paws clean. The nation, and especially the power brokers, could then  move on without getting into messy conspiracies, made especially easy after Oswald was shot and killed.

In the aftermath, those of us in deep politics also were aware that because Bobby never bought into the Warren hogswill, he sought independent outlets to do their own research. Through contacts assisted by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, he met with French Intelligence who provided their own report that later emerged in 1968 as the book ‘Farewell America’ written under the pseudonym of’ James Hepburn’. Readers can access the book here: http://www.jfk-online.com/farewell00.html


After Bobby was himself assassinated in June 1968, CIA and other black ops sought to tar the book and its basis, as they have done the past 45 odd years with all other rigorous works disclosing conspiracy.

This is why getting hands on the CIA's  Joannides files is so very important, especially in this 50th anniversary year. We’ve waited too long as it is and the American people deserve the truth concerning what was effectively a coup d’etat which saw the takeover of the U..S. and its executive branch by a massive Military Industrial complex and national security state.

Those of us in the research community also know that most of the "Oswald-Castro did it" tricks emerged at the time George Johannides was the Chief of Psychological Warfare branch of the CIA's JM/WAVE station in Miami . Almost all his energy was directed to: a) implicating Oswald in the assassination by a strategy of "sheepdipping" (see John Newman's excellent 'Oswald and the CIA') and b) processing disinformation from pseudo -double agents and deliberate false sources to implicate Castro, the Soviets, Oswald or all three.

The entire effort was to set up assorted straw men to take the eyes off the real culprits, and most of us believe the CIA was a key player – certainly in the subsequent cover up and disinformation campaign. One of the most recent disinfo efforts incarnated in Brian Latell’s book: 'Castro’s Secrets: The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine'. It bears the veneer of some new insider info, but in fact is merely another in a long line of CIA DISINFO, churned out over the years, and supported by CIA assets and networks to try to convince the American people there was no conspiracy in the JFK assassination and Lee Oswald was the lone gunman.

We also know some enclaves of the entertainment industry are part of the disinformation process, as confirmed by the plan to televise a 13 -part HBO series later this year (produced by Tom Hanks) that will attempt to bolster Vince Bugliosi's obsessive hack baloney in his 1600+ page "Rewriting History' that Oswald acted alone. Has Hanks had CIA assistance, (as well as Bugliosi’s) in creating his 13- part bull pockey? We don’t know, but what we DO know is that the CIA had agents seeded in the news media for decades, putatively acting as “journalists” (actually as anti-conspiracy 'gate-keepers'), and documented by Kathryn Olmstead in her book Challenging the Secret Government (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996)

In the midst of all this BS all we ask is that Brennan, if and when he becomes Director, release those files!
Brennan’s answers are also important given the National Archives basically told JFK Assassination researchers to go take a long walk on a short pier, (see e.g. http://www.brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/06/national-archives-to-jfk-file-seekers.htmlafters) seeking specific records mandated for release.

The records were originally requested by the nonprofit Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), will now remain secret until at least 2017, when the 1992 JFK Records Act mandates public release of all assassination files in the government’s possession. Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, writing a book about the impact of JFK’s assassination on American politics, remarked after the National Archives(June, 2012) refusal to release files this year :

“This is a deeply disappointing decision that deprives everyone of a fuller understanding of the JFK assassination The 50th anniversary of that terrible event is the perfect opportunity to shed more light on the violent removal of a president. This adds to the widely held public suspicion that the government may still be hiding some key facts about President Kennedy’s murder.”

Hence, the main question we need at least one spined Senator to put to Brennan.

A second ancillary question is whether Brennan plans to release the files concerning the bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 in October, 1976 off Barbados’ SW coast. All other existing files, including from Venezuelan intelligence, point to CIA involvement and featuring hired anti-Castro thugs from Alpha 66 – a notorious Miami bunch that has worked in league with the CIA for decades . According to a secret CIA cable dated Oct. 14, 1976, intelligence sources in Venezuela relayed information about the Cubana Airlines bombing that tied in Alpha 66 creator Orlando Bosch, who had been visiting Venezuela, and Posada, who then served as a senior officer in Venezuela’s intelligence agency, DISIP.


The Oct. 14 cable said Bosch arrived in Venezuela in late September 1976 under the protection of Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, a close Washington ally who assigned his intelligence adviser Orlando Garcia “to protect and assist Bosch during his stay in Venezuela.”

On his arrival, Bosch was met by Garcia and Posada, according to the report. Later, a fundraising dinner was held in Bosch’s honor. “A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, ‘we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,’ and that ‘Orlando has the details,’” the CIA report said. Meanwhile, those of us living in Barbados had no remote notion of the bloody act to come, nor of the U.S. complicity in it, or that the same Cuban renegades whose associates (from the Bay of Pigs invasion)  conspired in the JFK hit were part of it. The CIA Report went on to read:


“"Following the 6 October [1976] Cubana Airline crash off the coast of Barbados, Bosch, Garcia and Posada agreed that it would be best for Bosch to leave Venezuela. Therefore, on 9 October, Posada and Garcia escorted Bosch to the Colombian border, where he crossed into Colombian territory.”

Note in the preceding the sanitizing of the language, the use of "crash" instead of bombing, or what we call "collateral language". Warren Hinckle and William Turner note in their excellent book, ‘Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the Assassination of JFK’ (p. 384, Thunders Mouth Press, 1992) go on to note that:

“Two men who had deplaned in Barbados, Freddy Lugo and Hernan Ricardo Lusano, were interrogated after joking about the bombing in a Barbados taxicab. The two were employed by Luis Posada…and confessed that Posada and (Orlando) Bosch had supplied them with two bombs, which they planted on the Cubana aircraft.”

The authors added  that “the CIA hand in the terrorist destruction of the Cubana airliner materialized two weeks later” when a CIA double agent named Ignacio Rodriguez-Mena blew the whistle on them, evidently enraged as he might have been on the flight except his wife was late arriving at the departure terminal. Interestingly, Rodriguez -Mena was also the person former CIA spook Latell tried to implicate as sending a hidden signal to off Kennedy, back in 1963.  Kennedy's own words in a Nov. 18, 1963 Miami speech:  "the small band of conspirators" was to be the "green light" for a 'go'. Retrospective vendetta? Who knows?  

But researcher James Douglass has exposed this subterfuge in his book ( JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters , p. 251:

“The CIA, by reversing the meaning of Kennedy's speech to motivate its own hired assassin, created a dogma of disinformation that it would disseminate for decades.....that the Miami speech was meant as an encouragement for murder, not dialogue".

THIS is why we need answers, otherwise we will continue to inhabit a fool's paradise where the elites spout bromides about "freedom" but the national security interests can do whatever....whenever.

For a solid account of the Cubana Airliner bombing (including a video) and why no one should ever believe squat on what the CIA or its lackeys has to say about Castro being involved in the JFK assassination, go to:

http://morallowground.com/2012/10/06/on-this-day-1976-the-bombing-of-cubana-airlines-flight-455/

WHERE were Miami's Cubans When A Terrorist Was Being Harbored There?

Top: Miami's Cubans go ape-shit over remarks Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen made about Castro in TIME magazine. Bottom: The arch-terrorist Luis Posada, harbored in Miami for a number of years. No nasty words or accusations hurled against him!

The problem about being righteous, especially too self-righteous, is that if caught out being selective your righteousness loses its edge and you become one more in a line of hypocrites. Such has been the case with most of Miami's half million Cubans, who are again in an uproar - this time concerning remarks made by Miami Marlins' coach Ozzie Guillen to Time magazine. In that magazine, in an interview, Guillen made the mistake of referring to Fidel Castro in respectful terms thereby earning the rousing fury of Miami's Cubans.

On all the area's Spanish -speaking radio stations, egged on by hosts, Cubans called in to express their ire and outrage on Ozzie, demanding he be fired. Well, the Marlins - clearly wanting to fill the stands of their new stadium in the old Orange Bowl - heeded the calls and at least benched Ozzie for five days. So much for exercising one's First Amendment rights, but at least someone got it right on the Marlins' Facebook page when they wrote:

"Any Cuban who condemns Ozzie Guillen for speaking his mind is just as guilty as Fidel Castro was for killing people who spoke their mind".

Of course, the Cubans would respond that they aren't "killing Ozzie", they just want him fired (though as a new article on http://www.salon.com/ observes, in the old days he'd likely have been offed in a car bomb or at least had his legs busted up. The Miami Cubans don't take kindly to anyone even remotely praising Fidel Castro or criticizing their political leanings - extreme rightist all the way!)

My question is simpler: Where were all these miffed and outraged Cubans when one of the primary terrorists of the Western hemisphere was evidently living amongst them - within earshot of 'Calle Ocho' barely 5 years ago? Actually being harbored there. I am writing, of course, of the CIA-sponsored murderer Luis Carriles Posada, who with Orlando Bosch and Freddy Lugo orchestrated the bombing of a Cubana Airlines Plane (Flight 455) off the coast of Barbados.

The facts were well known, despite the U.S. gov't dragging its ass on doing any prosecutions and only recently punting by trying to prosecute Posada on perjury charges (the case was lost in Texas, in April, 2011 ) . Never mind - we all understand how much clout Florida carries in the general election with its 27 electoral votes, and we knew at least some efforts were made to placate Miami's Cubans. (Why, I have no idea because on The Miami Herald forums to do with Guillen's sanction most refer to Obama as "the Obamunist". Getting the Evangelicals to try and save "Satan" would be easier than getting Miami's Cubans to vote for Obama in November. )

According to a secret CIA cable dated Oct. 14, 1976, intelligence sources in Venezuela relayed information about the Cubana Airlines bombing that tied in Bosch, who had been visiting Venezuela, and Posada, who then served as a senior officer in Venezuela’s intelligence agency, DISIP. On his arrival, Bosch was met by a CIA operative and Posada, according to the report. Later, a fundraising dinner was held in Bosch’s honor. “A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, ‘we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,’ and that ‘Orlando has the details,’” the CIA report said.

Meanwhile, those of us living in Barbados at the time had no remote notion of the bloody act to come, nor of the U.S. complicity in it, or that the same Cuban renegades whose associates conspired in the JFK hit were part of it. The CIA Report went on to read:

“Following the 6 October [1976] Cubana Airline crash off the coast of Barbados, Bosch, Garcia and Posada agreed that it would be best for Bosch to leave Venezuela. Therefore, on 9 October, Posada and Garcia escorted Bosch to the Colombian border, where he crossed into Colombian territory.”

(Note in the preceding the sanitizing of the language, the use of "crash" instead of bombing, or what we call "collateral language.)

Meanwhile, Venezuelan police began rounding up suspects. Two Cuban exiles, Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, who got off the Cubana plane (Flight 455) in Barbados, confessed that they had planted the bomb and they named Bosch and Posada as the architects of the attack. A search of Posada’s apartment in Venezuela turned up bomb-making instructions, some materials as well as Cubana Airlines timetables and other incriminating documents.

Posada and Bosch were charged in Venezuela for the Cubana Airlines bombing, but the case soon became a political tug-of-war, since the suspects were in possession of sensitive Venezuelan government secrets that could embarrass President Andres Perez. Posada escaped from a Venezuelan prison where he was awaiting trial in 1985. In his autobiography, Posada thanked Miami-based Cuban activist Jorge Mas Canosa for the $25,000 that was used to bribe guards who allowed Posada to walk out of prison. Another Cuban exile who aided Posada was former CIA officer Felix Rodriguez, who was close to then-Vice President Bush.

To make a long story short, Posada became the beneficiary of assistance of not only a somnolent, uninterested media (which expressed more outrage at the Pan Am 103 downing in 1988) and a friendly Bush Junior Administration - but also Miami's Cuban community which provided safe harbor for a number of years while investigations were ongoing.

That this vile killer of 73 innocents (the entire Cuban fencing team) isn't once mentioned by Miami's Cubans to any degree of opprobrium (and as I had blogged before, my nieces and I were at Paradise Beach, Barbados when the bloody body parts washed ashore) shows they have a hyper-selective sense of justice. Or maybe no sense. They howl and screech at a single interview remark by a baseball coach, demanding his head, yet not one word against Luis Posada who with the terrorist Orlando Bosch remains one of their heroes.

In this case we can say these anti-Ozzie protests are therefore a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing,.....as in nada! The Marlins, meanwhile, ought to be ashamed for their high-handed actions to cave into these fanatics .....and Ozzie should not give one more word of apology!