Cuba: Detained US contractor was spying

Source: ap

HAVANA – A senior Cuban official accused a detained U.S. government contractor of spying on Wednesday, a month after the man was arrested on suspicion of handing out communications equipment to opposition groups.

Parliament leader Ricardo Alarcon said the man is under investigation but has not yet been charged. Neither governments has identified the man who was arrested on Dec. 4 on suspicion he was handing out communications equipment to opposition groups.

"There is a new institution in the United States which is made up of agents, torturers and spies that are contracted as part of the privatization of war," Alarcon said. "This is a man who was contracted to do work for American intelligence services."
...
The State Department has said that he was working as a subcontractor for the Maryland-based economic development organization Development Alternatives Inc., and the company's president has said he was part of a USAID program intended to "strengthen civil society in support of just and democratic governance in Cuba."

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100106/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/cb_cuba_detained_american

No wonder Gitmo is in Cuba.

Cuba is "light weight" when it comes to holding people without charges. :eyes:

laptops and cellphones to members of opposition groups. It is illegal in the USA to serve as an agent of a foreign power, but it is ok(?) to send spies to Cuba to do just that. Spies should be shot.

Did they also manage to waterboard him 168 times in December? Yeah, I didn't think so.

Then I went back down to my post, which is followed by your post referencing me back to #4. So I did that. I've been going in a loop for awhile now, can I stop? I'm still failing to see how Cuba's government comes anywhere close to the world-wrecking we're engaged in. Anyway, back to my loop--hope you don't mind if I take a lunch break in a couple of hours.

If a country wants to burn down the rainforest or kill off the native population then who are we to judge. Given that, we really should shut down DU. It will save energy resources and money spent on hosting.

I work for a hosting company, so please keep up the typing, for general industry purposes. ;)

I'm trying to point out that the mote in Cuba's eye, although real, doesn't really compare to the beam/plank/log in our eye. As you pointed out, we've been viciously violating human rights and the Geneva Conventions on the island of Cuba for several years now. Maybe I can send a fruutcake to the Xe merc in care of Raul and Fidel, sorry, no hacksaw blade therein.

This guy was arrested for passing out communications equipment. What kind of government restricts communications equipment? A totalitarian state? The kind that removes people with AIDS from the general population?

/oh wait, they have a lot of doctors, never mind.

Unless you happen to be named Richard Bruce Cheney.

dumbass me forgot about Gitmo for a sec...


But Castro and his regieme are still pure evil schmucks.

But what they do pales in comparison with what we , and so I think we have a little bit of a tempest in a teapot, along with a side order of American exceptionalism.

And as far as showing up in a "hostile" country with communications equipment, the Soviets would have thrown his ass in Lubyanka never to see light again, the Chinese and North Koreans would do the same, and we would too, if we thought someone was spying.

And other places too. So that must be an OK thing to do.

Cuba's security departments aren't about to let the self declared enemies of Cuba operate in Cuba illegally, like the Bush admin. Cuba has suffered many decades of terrorist attacks, assassination operations, bombings, car bombs, fire bombings, shooting at tourist beaches from Brothers to the Rescue planes, and on and on. Some of the groups in Cuba that this contractor was delivering "communications equipment" to have connections to various terrorist operators (ex CIA ops) and exile terror groups in Miami, such as Luis Posada and Orlando Bosch, and Alpha 66, Commandos F-4, CANF, etc.

Most of the anti Cuba DU Cuba "experts" here know virtually nothing about these connections. They would do well to study up on some of the intricacies of the Cuban security issues and the US based terrorist groups ("freedom fighters" in Imperialist speak), and how the US government does nothing to reign them in and does nothing to charge any of these groups with violations of the US Neutrality Act.

Cuba has a reason to be on the defense. The self declared enemy state, the USofA w/the most powerful deadly military in the world, is at war http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade#Act_of_war with Cuba (no matter how deep in the sand Americans have their heads buried).

---

Its information is one to two decades old. There are also no footnotes and no documentation. And, quite frankly, as I was reading the section on Cuba's prisons, I felt deja vu, because U.S. prisons are guilty of every one of the abuses listed--poor diet, crowded conditions, sexual abuse and beatings often by other prisoners with guards' complicity, and a few more, that Cuba doesn't seem to suffer, such as racism. The U.S. justice system isn't any better. It commits the same legal injustices but in our case not so much against political opponents as against the poor and the black, who are routinely denied fair trials, adequate representation, and masses of whom are sentenced to long prison terms for minor offenses that the rich almost never to go jail for. Its political aspect here is that poor blacks are removed far from their homes in urban areas to sparsely populated white rural areas, where they are used to pad the census figures to give those areas more representation and tax funds than they should get, while denying these black "bodies" the right to vote.

So, even if all of these allegations against Cuba's prison and justice systems are true, the U.S. is equally bad on domestic prisons, and that is not to mention the atrocities of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and U.S. torture dungeons around the world, and its massively bloody attack on Iraqi civilians (estimate of 100,000 slaughtered in the first week of bombing alone), with more attacks on civilians in Afghanistan, which grossly violate numerous U.S. laws and international treaties and charters.

Also, HRW has been known to follow the U.S. political agenda in its reports. Its recent report on Venezuela was absurdly false and unfair. For all of these reasons--that it is dated, that there is no documentation, that HRW is not always objective, and that the report serves the political interests of the U.S.--the only country left in the world that doesn't recognize and respect the Cuban government--I do not trust this report. I think that it has deliberately exaggerated and overstated certain things (for instance, calling things "torture" that are quite routine in the U.S. prison system).

Finally, in its advice to various parties regarding human rights in Cuba, this HRW advice to the U.S. is quite revealing:

"To the United States Government

· The U.S. government should terminate the economic embargo on Cuba. The embargo is not a calibrated policy intended to produce human rights reforms, but a sledgehammer approach aimed at nothing short of overthrowing the government. While failing at its central objective, the embargo's indiscriminate nature has hurt the population as a whole, and provided the government with a justification for its repressive policies. The embargo's restrictions on the free exchange of ideas through travel violate human rights. Finally, the embargo has made enemies of all of Washington's potential allies, dividing those nations that ought to act in concert to press for change in Cuba. Until such a step is taken, the U.S. should repeal those provisions of the Helms-Burton law that restrict the rights to free expression and the freedom to travel between the U.S. and Cuba, in violation of Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights." --HRW

If even HRW--which sometimes does the CIA's heavy lifting--admits that the U.S. is still trying to overthrow the Cuban government, this gives us some measure of how hostile the gigantic war machine to the north is, to Cuba, and why the Cuban government would be so fearful of CIA infiltrators and destabilization plans. This does not excuse any human rights abuses that the Cuban government may have committed, or may have allowed to occur, but it certainly explains why U.S. efforts, and the efforts of U.S.-backed groups, to "reform" Cuba have failed. They have failed because they are egregiously insincere.

The HRW report fails to connect these dots, and that is another sign of bias. The U.S. government has been trying to overthrow the Cuban revolution for fifty years now, and, if Cuba lets its guard down, those efforts may succeed. How many of Cuba's political prisoners are CIA assets, or funded by the USAID or by the Miami mafia? That is a question that isn't raised in the report and should be. The Cuban government exists in a context of warlike actions by the U.S. (an embargo is an act of war), and cannot defend itself against such actions because it is so tiny and vulnerable. This militates against good, open, democratic change and renewal. Opening up, liberalizing, means overthrow. All they can do is guard their shores and keep things as they are. They don't have the luxury of letting their defenses down. The CIA would be instantly upon them--and the DEA and the failed, corrupt, murderous U.S. "war on drugs," and Blackwater, and assassination squads, and Exxon Mobil (recent big oil find in Cuba), and Monsanto and Bechtel and the World Bank/IMF loan sharks, and our banksters and our organized crime networks, and so on. These forces are constantly at work in liberal democracies like Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Nicaragua and all the rest, trying to sabotage and overthrow leftist governments. Cuba is target no. 1 on the U.S. corpo-fascist hit list.

The recognition of Cuba by most of the other governments in the world, and its new and more open trade and political relations with other Latin American countries, will be far more effective at correcting any wrongs in Cuba than anything the hostile U.S. government could do. And look what just happened: Obama slightly lifts travel restrictions and right off the bat the CIA is there aiding rightwing groups. Is it any wonder that Cuba restricts rightwing and anti-government activity? They don't want Honduras to happen to Cuba!

and in the interests of Cuba's national security.

I'm sure he knows all about the case. He, more than likely, issued the arrest orders.

--$43 million to coup-supporting, rightwing groups in Honduras alone, through John McCain's "International Republican Institute" via USAID, where more than a hundred anti-coup activists have been murdered and many more beaten, tortured, raped, threatened and unjustly imprisoned;

--millions more of our tax dollars to recruit and "train" rightwing students for destabilization campaigns against leftist (majorityist, democratic) governments, and to fund campaigns such as the presidential recall election in Venezuela in 2004 (which Hugo Chavez won, hands down) and the white separatist riots and murders in Bolivia in 2008 (which got the U.S. ambassador and the DEA kicked out of Bolivia);

--$6 billion to the Colombian military which has waged a campaign of thousands of extrajudicial murders of union leaders, teachers, peasant farmers, community organizers, human rights workers, journalists, political leftists and others, and has furthermore displaced 2 to 3 million peasant farmers--one of the worst human displacement crises on earth;

--millions more of our tax dollars to the Peruvian military and police (which used a helicopter gunboat to mow down indigenous who were protesting the rape of the Amazon forest--"free trade for the rich" enforcement dollars);

--millions more in black budget operations to fund psyops such as the "suitcase full of money" caper out of Miami (to slander/embarrass the leftist presidents of Argentina and Venezuela), and the "miracle laptop" in Colombia (alleged to contain "evidence" that the leftist presidents of Ecuador and Venezuela were helping FARC guerillas obtain a "dirty bomb");

--and this does not begin to exhaust the oppressive, fascist, violent purposes to which our tax dollars are being devoted in Latin America alone, often into the pockets of private contractors such as Dyncorp, DAI and Blackwater.

The U.S. is up to no good in Latin America, and nothing has changed under the Obama administration that I can see. In fact, U.S. policy may be getting worse--with the successful rightwing military coup in Honduras, and the secretly negotiated U.S./Colombia military agreement, recently disclosed, for a dramatic escalation of the U.S. military presence in Colombia, adjacent to Venezuela's northern oil region.

This matter of "handing out communications equipment to opposition groups" in Cuba is not an innocent matter--the U.S. just trying to be helpful. It is part of a plan for overthrowing the Cuban government, after the two elderly Castro brothers die, and undoing all of the gains of the Cuban people, including their superior medical care system (free to all), their superior educational system (free to all) and other basic decencies of life for all Cuban, and to rip off these people like U.S. corpo-fascists are doing everywhere else they can get their vulture talons into the government. It is also part of a regional plan, for U.S. dominance of the Central America/Caribbean/northern South America region, including toppling the other leftist governments in Central America adjacent to Honduras--Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala--and gaining control, possibly by war, of Venezuela's oil reserves, facilities and shipping in the Gulf of Venezuela and northern Venezuelan provinces.

It is notable that the U.S.-supported coup government in Honduras, after conducting a so-called election under martial law (which the rightwing 'won') did not wait for that 'elected' government to take power, but--with no legitimacy whatsoever as a government--has already withdrawn Honduras from the ALBA trade group--a regional trade group, organized by Venezuela, to empower the smaller countries of the Central America/Caribbean region with barter trade agreements and collective clout in resisting U.S. economic bullying. They looted the ALBA funds (to which Honduran workers had contributed) and peremptorily withdrew, losing considerable benefits for Honduras' poor (for instance, cheap oil from Venezuela, which permitted the Zelaya government to lower the price of bus tickets for poor workers). The U.S. is supporting these actions--and brutal repression--with multi-millions of our tax dollars.

The U.S. has almost always been on the wrong side of every struggle for democracy and social justice in Latin America, throughout our history. It may be a psychological bar to serious reform of U.S. policy in Latin America--as well as serious reform within the U.S. itself (our own democracy)--to hold the delusion that it has ever been otherwise. I can only think of a couple of exceptions to outright perfidy in U.S./Latin American policy (FDR, JFK and to some extent Carter). It is otherwise a tale of murder, mayhem and gross exploitation, supported by the U.S. government and military, and paid for by us. We, too, have been oppressed, but it has been on the whole less visible (except for the slaughter of so many of our soldiers in Vietnam) until recently, with the Bush Junta. Now it is quite overt. We are being used as "cannon fodder" for corporate resource wars, as our corporate rulers have looted our country and us, leaving most of us with shit jobs or no jobs, and broken and looted infrastructure.

I suppose that it is dreaming to expect the Obama administration to overturn the grossly immoral and anti-democratic U.S. policy in Latin America, in his first year in office, after eight years of a fascist junta here and no doubt entrenchment of Bushwhack moles throughout our agencies and military, and a thick dossier of U.S. evil in Latin America over the last century. He should never have promised a new policy of "peace, respect and cooperation" in Latin America, because either he is powerless to deliver it or he didn't mean it. It fooled a lot of people, here and there. The people there are onto it now; the people here mostly are not. When moderate leftists like Lula da Silva are disgusted with the Obama administration (and believe me, he is), and are actively resisting and defying U.S. dictates, you know, a) that U.S. policy hasn't changed, and b) that it will fail in its ill-intended goals without the use of force. Force is all the U.S. has any more. That is why the SEVEN new U.S. military bases in Colombia and all the rest of this U.S. military buildup in the region. We have nothing good to sell to people. The global corporate predators and war profiteers who rule over us intend to destroy as many Latin American democracies as they can, take their resources and enforce slave labor upon them. Honduras is the prototype. Colombia is the weapon.

I have just learned that two of the seven people killed at the CIA assassination base in Afghanistan were Blackwater mercenaries. The drone plane assassinations have killed some 700 Afghan civilians. Who knows how many innocent civilians, or mere patriots fighting the invasion of their country (not terrorist plotters) the U.S. "paramilitaries" have killed? Afghanistan is suffering a similar U.S. syndrome--that all we have to export is war, mayhem, death and domination. Winning "hearts and minds" is no more possible in Afghanistan than it was in Vietnam, or than it will be in Venezuela, or Cuba, or Bolivia, or Ecuador. All the U.S. seems able to do is kill, terrorize and subdue by force, at the cost to us in vast amounts of money we don't have and "blowback."

It is not reform that we need. Reform, in any case, has been blockaded by Diebold & brethren, and by vast, entrenched and lethal corruption. What we need is a rebirth--as has occurred in most of Latin America--of the very institutions of democracy. Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador have not just established honest and transparent elections and elected leftist governments, they have rewritten their constitutions in an open, participatory process and submitted them to the voters. Those are the most advanced democracies--demonized here as "dictatorships," as big a "Big Lie" as has ever been told. This is what we need--a fundamental re-thinking of our founding principles, especially with regard to our corporate rulers and the military.