13 July 2006

Excerpts from Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage, Joseph E. Persico, 2001.

[Pages 201-205.] - link to original post

On June 19 [1942] the President received an excited call from Francis Biddle, his attorney general. Six days before, Biddle told the President, “at 1:30 A.M. an unarmed Coast Guard patrolman near Amagansett, Montauk Point, Long Island, discovered two men placing material in a hole they had dug; one of them covered the patrolman with a gun, gave him $260 and told him to keep his mouth shut. I shall, of course, keep you informed.” As J. Edgar Hoover’s nominal boss, Biddle later recalled the FBI chief’s demeanor while describing the plan to track down the rest of the saboteurs: “His eyes were bright, his jaw set, excitement flickering around the edge of his nostrils,” Biddle remembered. The question now was how much to tell the public. Hoover wanted no announcement that might alert the men still at large. The President agreed, and the press was, for the moment, frozen out of the story.

FDR’s longstanding preoccupation with sabotage now seemed validated. Biddle admitted, “1 had a bad week trying to sleep as I thought of the possibilities. The saboteurs might have other caches hidden, and at any moment an explosion was possible.” [Saboteur] Dasch had, in fact, revealed that, along with their transportation and industrial targets, the Pastorius mission was supposed to spread terror by placing firebombs in department stores and delayed-action explosives in hotels and in crowded railroad stations.

On June 27, ten days after the Kerling team landed in Florida, the President, then at Hyde Park, took another call from Biddie. Hoover’s G-men had seven of the saboteurs in custody and were about to arrest the last one. Nearly $174,000 of their Abwehr stake had been seized. FDR responded with the habitual geniality that Biddle, a stiff Philadelphia Main Liner, envied. “Not enough, Francis,” Roosevelt said. “Let’s make real money out of them. Sell the rights to Barnum and Bailey for a million and a half — the rights to take them around the country in lion cages at so much a head.” Now the tale could be told, and in the ensuing publicity, Coast Guardsman Cullen became a national hero. Hoover played the capture of the ring as a case solved by the FBI, making no public mention of the fact that Dasch had turned himself in and squealed on his comrades.

Three days after all eight saboteurs were in custody, FDR sent Biddle a memo making clear his expectations. “The two Americans are guilty of treason,” he told the attorney general. “I do not see how they can offer any adequate defense. . . it seems to me that the death penalty is almost obligatory.” As for the six German citizens, “They were apprehended in civilian clothes. This is an absolute parallel of the Case of Major [John] Andre in the Revolution and of Nathan Hale. Both of these men were hanged.” The President hammered home his point once more: “The death penalty is called for by usage and by the extreme gravity of the war aim and the very existence of our American govemment.” Biddle had never quite overcome his awe in dealing with FDR. Still, the nation’s chief law enforcement official was troubled, finding himself trapped between the President’s questionable pressure and his own reverence for the law. The Germans had been apprehended so quickly, Biddle recognized, that “they had not committed any act of sabotage. Probably an indictment for attempted sabotage would not have been sustained in a civil court on the grounds that the preparations and landings were not close enough to the planned acts of sabotage to constitute attempt. If a man buys a pistol, intending murder, that is not an attempt at murder.” In a civilian court the Germans might at best be convicted of conspiracy, which Biddle estimated would carry a maximum sentence of three years. This outcome, he knew, would never satisfy Roosevelt.

FDR essentially took charge of the case. He told Biddle that he wanted the eight agents tried, not in a civilian court, but by a military tribunal, which he himself would appoint. They had forfeited any right to a civilian trial, as Roosevelt put it, because “[t]hese men had penetrated battlelines strung on land along our two coasts and guarded on the sea by our destroyers, and were waging battle within our country.” They fell under the Law of War. A military tribunal would be quick, not subject to the protracted appeals procedures of civilian courts. It would not be hog-tied by the criminal courts’ exacting rules of evidence. It could impose the death sentence, not as the civil courts required, by a unanimous verdict, but by a two-thirds vote. A military tribunal offered the advantages and the assured outcome that the President wanted. A civilian court was out of the question. FDR told Biddle, “I want one thing clearly understood, Francis: I won’t give them up . . . I won’t hand them over to any United States Marshall armed with a writ of habeas corpus. Understand!” Averell Harriman, FDR’s special envoy to Moscow, had once described Roosevelt’s “Dutch jaw — and when that Dutch jaw was set you couldn’t move him.” Biddle practically felt the jaw’s thrust, and dutifully followed the President’s instructions. Conviction should be simple, Biddle promised FDR, since “[t]he major violation of the Law of War is crossing behind the lines of a belligerent to commit hostile acts without being in uniform.”

The British, early in the war, had imposed the traditional penalty on captured spies and saboteurs, execution. Seven arrested German agents were hanged with numerous others awaiting the gallows within months of the war’s outbreak. Then, in 1940, a thirty-year-old Scottish major, energetic, articulate, imaginative Thomas A. “Tar” Robertson, assigned to MIS, proposed a new approach. What use to Britain were German spies moldering in anonymous graves? he asked his superiors. Instead, make an offer to them, turn or die. Thus was born the Double Cross, or XX, operation whereby most captured spies chose turning to dying. Some became double agents and sent false information back to Germany under British control. In other cases, British radiomen mastered “the fist,” the distinctive sending style of these agents, and convincingly transmitted Double Cross fabrications to Germany. Double Cross was a rousing success. Only one German spy is believed to have reached Britain during the war without being caught. The alternative of turning the eight captured Germans never entered FDR’s head. Their deaths were to serve notice to the Nazis of the certain fate of any other spies and saboteurs sent to America.

On July 2 the President announced that the eight accused would stand trial before a military commission composed of seven generals, and they would be charged with violating the eighty-first and eighty-second Articles of War dealing with espionage, sabotage, and conspiracy. Court-appointed lawyers for the defendants made a game effort to move the trial to a civilian court, taking the constitutional issue all the way to the Supreme Court, but the justices backed the legality of a military tribunal. Biddle himself was to prosecute, an unusual move, having a civilian serve as prosecutor in a military proceeding. But FDR was taking no chances. The Army’s Judge Advocate General was rusty and had not tried a case for over twenty years. FDR wanted his own man before the bar.

On June 8 the prisoners, held in the District of Columbia jail, were shaved by prison barbers, lest they put the razor to their own wrists or throats, and hustled into two armored vans guarded by gun-toting military police. Nine Washington motorcycle patrolmen roared alongside, escorting the vans to the Department of Justice. Enterprising vendors soon were doing a thriving business selling ice cream and hot dogs to the crowds that gathered outside the department’s iron gate every day to gawk at the enemy. The trial was held in Assembly Hall # 1 on the fifth floor of the Justice Department, the windows shrouded by black curtains. As the trial opened, Hoover, sitting next to Biddle, fed pages of evidence to the attorney general. During a recess, one of the defendants asked the presiding general for a cigarette. The general responded stuffily that Army regulations made no provision for such a request. A disgusted Hoover took out a pack of cigarettes and handed it to the German.

In twenty-six days it was over. All eight were sentenced to death. The generals sent their verdict to the President. Roosevelt, acting, in effect, as the court of last resort, confirmed six of the death sentences, but commuted Burger’s sentence to life and Dasch’s to thirty years for their willingness to betray their comrades. August 8 was set for the executions, which would take place in the electric chair on the third floor of the District of Columbia jail. Eight weeks had elapsed from the night the first saboteurs had landed on Long Island.

On execution day, FDR was at Shangri-la [now Camp David] , the presidential hideaway in western Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. The President liked to sit in the small screened porch playing solitaire or gazing by the hour out at the Catoctin Valley, lost in his private thoughts. This evening, he gathered his guests around him in the living room — Sam Rosenman and his wife, Dorothy, Daisy Suckley, Grace Tully, poet Archibald MacLeish and his wife, Ada. The First Lady was tied up in New York. The President settled into an easy chair and seemed in unusually fine fettle. He commenced his ceremonial role, mixing the cocktails. He was conceded to make a fine martini and an old-fashioned, though lately he had become enamored of a drink made of gin and grapefruit juice, which most guests found vile. As he mixed, he swapped jests with Rosenman and MacLeish while Daisy snapped photos.

Once more Rosenman was impressed by FDR’s gift for shedding the cares of office after hours, as if flipping a switch somewhere inside himself The President began reminiscing about his days in the governor’s office in Albany where Rosenman had served as his legal counsel, recalling stories of appeals for clemency on the eve of executions. Sam marveled at FDR’s memory, down to dates, places, offenses, and names of the condemned in a dozen New York capital cases. The President then segued into an Alexandre Dumas story about a barber who, during the 1870 siege of Paris, supplied delicious beef while thousands were starving. Gleefully, FDR related how a number of the barber’s clients had turned up missing, and the “veal” was suspected of originating in the barber’s chair.

What prompted FDR’s black humor this evening went unspoken until Dorothy Rosenman raised the subject. The six condemned Nazi saboteurs had been electrocuted beginning at one minute past noon. By 1:04 P.M., the work was completed, an average of ten and a half minutes per man. One witness reported that they had gone to their deaths stunned, as if in a trance. Where, Mrs. Rosenman asked the President, would the bodies be buried? He had not yet decided, FDR answered. His only regret was that they had not been hanged. He then launched into a story about an elderly American woman who died while visiting Moscow and had accidentally been switched in a casket meant for a deceased Russian general who was shipped back to the States. When her family complained, the Russian government cabled back, “Suggest you close the casket and proceed with the funeral. Your grandmother was buried in the Kremlin with full military honors.” The saboteurs were subsequently buried in a potter’s field near Washington.

Was the evening of gallows humor Roosevelt’s true mood or intended to mask the hard decisions he had had to make about six human lives? Mrs. Rosenman’s firsthand account describes nothing but Roosevelt’s humor and relaxed manner, but then, he was a consummate actor. In any case, the country was with him. Telegrams poured into the White House mail room. One read, “It’s high time that we wake up here in this country and show the world we are not a bunch of mush hounds.” It was signed, “Mother who has three loyal sons in the Army.” The Victory Committee of German American Trade Unionists telegraphed the President, “We endorse the imposition of the death penalty on any saboteur or traitor. We know that no loyal German American need have the slightest fear providing he obeys the laws of the country.” On Ellis Island, the execution of the six Germans was observed differently. Adolph G. Schickert and Erich Fittkau, Germans interned there, held a meeting of other internees. They announced the death of their countrymen, called for two minutes of silence, and then led the singing of the rousing Nazi anthem, the “Horst Wessel Lied.”

“… de las 6.6 millones de hectáreas cultivables del país, sólo están en uso unas 3.1 millones de hectáreas. Se podría añadir que de esta cifra sólo unas 500 mil hectáreas están en manos de campesinos o cooperativas privadas y sin embargo son responsables del 60 por ciento de la producción agrícola de la isla.”

Por Pablo Alfonso

Publicado el 09-12-2009

Diario Las Americas - enlace al original

Los políticos y los especialistas en mercadeo tienen mucho de común. Son

gente creativa que ofertan su producto, a veces, más allá de sus propias

posibilidades. Algo semejante sucede con ciertos empresarios que se

lanzan a la conquista de objetivos comerciales.

Políticos, empresarios y cabilderos han hecho gala de una inagotable

imaginación a lo largo de la última década en el tema de las relaciones

Cuba-Estados Unidos. Algunos con lógica inexcusable, otros con sus

intereses a flor de piel y la mayoría con ingenuos argumentos que rozan

el infantilismo.

En materia de comercio no he sido nunca de los que se oponen a que el

diferendo político entre Cuba y Estados Unidos sea un obstáculo para el

negocio. Otra cosa, por supuesto, es el ángulo político del asunto. No

siempre comercio y política van de la mano, aunque sería tonto pensar

que cada uno camina por una senda diferente.

Hecha la anterior aclaración en beneficio de los ríspidos, los impolutos

y los apasionados conversos de cada lado, es tiempo de pasar al tema de

esta columna.

Se trata de una entrevista publicada la pasada semana en el semanario

cubano Opciones, una especie de periódico que pretende ser un órgano de

temas económicos y financieros; tarea difícil en un país donde la

economía y las finanzas, se acuestan en la misma cama de la ideología y

la política.

Opciones entrevistó al empresario Jay Brickman, vicepresidente de la

naviera estadounidense Crowly y algunas de sus afirmaciones fueron

sorprendentes. Confieso que no sabría clasificarlas de infantiles,

interesadas o ingenuas. Dejo esa tarea a los lectores.

“Cuba podría suministrar aguacates, cítricos, café, azúcar y otros

productos a Estados Unidos cuando cese el embargo económico”, afirmó

Brickman, quien añadió que “en un futuro, Cuba puede ofrecer ciertos

productos (…) por ejemplo a la Florida, donde muchas de las tierras

cultivables se están usando para construcciones y ha bajado la producción”.

La cita es textual.

La naviera Crowly transporta productos agropecuarios estadounidenses a

Cuba desde su venta a la isla fue autorizadaa en el 2001. Bueno, uno

puede entender el interés de Brickman de que el comercio no sea en una

sola dirección para que sus barcos no tengan que regresar vacíos a

Estados Unidos.

Pero el argumento utilizado carece de realismo. ¿Qué tan informado está

Brickman de lo que sucede en Cuba?

Si las sanciones económicas a Cuba fueran suspendidas ahora mismo sería

casi menos que imposible que el régimen cubano estuviera en capacidad de

exportar productos agrícolas a Estados Unidos.

¿Dónde están los aguacates, señor Brickman? ¿Y el azúcar, el café y los

cítricos?

Brickman parece ignorar que la agricultura cubana, al igual que la

producción general de bienes en la isla, está en bancarrota.

Habría que recordarle que, según cifras oficiales, de las 6.6 millones

de hectáreas cultivables del país, sólo están en uso unas 3.1 millones

de hectáreas. Se podría añadir que de esta cifra sólo unas 500 mil

hectáreas están en manos de campesinos o cooperativas privadas y sin

embargo son responsables del 60 por ciento de la producción agrícola de

la isla.

Con la ineficiente producción del mayoritario sector estatal es

imposible alimentar a los 12 millones de habitantes del país.

El resultado de esta ecuación es sencillo. Debería estar claro para

todos los Brickman de este mundo que para revertir esa situación, la

dictadura castrista tiene que dejar a un lado el estatismo y liberar a

las fuerzas productivas del país, poniéndolas en manos de los cubanos.

Casi nada. Todo un cambio de sistema. Cuando eso suceda, entonces Cuba

sí estaría en condiciones de vender sus excedentes agrícolas a Estados

Unidos.

Ahora mismo, si no existiera el embargo, el régimen cubano tiene muy

poco que ofrecer al mercado estadounidense. El níquel está comprometido,

al igual que el tabaco y el puñado de azúcar que produce.

Nos queda el sol, el mar y las arenas blancas de nuestras playas. Eso es

algo que no ha podido opacar la revolución castrista.

Diario Las Americas - ¿Dónde están los aguacates? (12 September 2009)

Heil Woodrow!

By DAVID OSHINSKY

Published: December 30, 200

The New York Times Book Review - link to original

Coming of age in the 1960s, I heard the word “fascist” all the time. College presidents were fascists, Vietnam War supporters were fascists, policemen who tangled with protesters were fascists, on and on. To some, the word smacked of Hitler and genocide. To others, it meant the oppression of the masses by the privileged few. But one point was crystal clear: the word belonged to those on the political left. It was their verbal weapon, and they used it every chance they got.

LIBERAL FASCISM

The Secret History of the American Left From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

By Jonah Goldberg.

487 pp. Doubleday. $27.95.

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Forty years have passed and not much has changed, complains Jonah Goldberg, a conservative columnist and contributing editor for National Review. Leftists still drop the “f word” to taint their opponents, be they global warming skeptics or members of the Moral Majority. The sad result, Goldberg says, is that Americans have come to equate fascism with right-wing political movements in the United States when, in fact, the reverse is true. To his mind, it is liberalism, not conservatism, that embraces what he claims is the fascist ideal of perfecting society through a powerful state run by omniscient leaders. And it is liberals, not conservatives, who see government coercion as the key to getting things done.

“Liberal Fascism” is less an exposé of left-wing hypocrisy than a chance to exact political revenge. Yet the title of his book aside, what distinguishes Goldberg from the Sean Hannitys and Michael Savages is a witty intelligence that deals in ideas as well as insults — no mean feat in the nasty world of the culture wars.

According to Goldberg, fascism in America predated the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. He believes that Woodrow Wilson turned the United States into a “fascist country, albeit temporarily” during World War I. Americans in 1917 were reluctant to join the slaughter in Europe. Their nation hadn’t been attacked; there was no defining event — a Fort Sumter or Pearl Harbor — to rally public support. So Wilson formed the country’s first propaganda ministry, the Committee on Public Information, to teach people what they were up against. The devil became German militarism — the merciless Hun — and Americans were encouraged to lash out at those of German ancestry inside the United States. Vigilante groups arose to mete out justice and spy on fellow citizens. Congress passed draconian laws banning “abusive” and “disloyal” language against the government and its officials. The Post Office revoked the mailing privileges of hundreds of antiwar publications, effectively shutting them down. Rarely if ever in American history has dissent been so effectively stifled.

At the same time, Wilson formed numerous boards to regulate everything from the production of artillery pieces to the price of a lamb chop. The result, Goldberg argues, was the birth of a socialist dictatorship that “whipped, cajoled and seduced American industry into the loving embrace of the state.” Though partly dismantled after the war, this model, we are told, became the blueprint for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Goldberg is less convincing here because he can’t get a handle on Roosevelt’s admittedly elusive personality. He treats Wilson as a serious thinker, rigidly focused on his goals, but portrays Roosevelt as a classic dilettante, shallow and detached. For Goldberg, even the president’s greatest skill — his ability to communicate with the masses — was negated by his failure to chart a steady course and stick to it. One is left to ponder how the outlines of America’s modern welfare state emerged from such a lazy, superficial mind.

In attempting to link Roosevelt to the fascism that enveloped Europe in these years, Goldberg highlights examples like the Civilian Conservation Corps, which offered a paycheck and military discipline to unemployed young men from the cities, and the National Recovery Administration, which was intended to spur industrial production through centralized planning. But it’s absurd to view the C.C.C. as the American version of Hitler Youth, and the N.R.A. — heavy on slogans, light on coercion — was so ineffective that Roosevelt heaved a sigh of relief when it was declared unconstitutional in 1935. Oddly, Goldberg has less to say about issues more likely to bolster his case, like the enormous growth of executive power under Roosevelt and his ill-fated attempt to “pack” the United States Supreme Court.

Goldberg acknowledges that Wilson and Roosevelt faced legitimate national emergencies — a world war and an economic collapse. But subsequent presidents have invented false crises to roil the masses, he claims, and John F. Kennedy did it best. “It is not a joyful thing to impugn an American hero and icon with the label fascist,” Goldberg writes, but how else does one explain his popularity? The answer lies not in Kennedy’s record, which Goldberg assures us was slim, but rather in his cold-war brinkmanship, his “adrenaline-soaked” appeals to national service and martial values, and, of course, the Nazi-like cult of personality that he buffed to gleaming perfection.

Is something missing here? Goldberg races from Wilson to Roosevelt to Kennedy and on to Bill Clinton with barely a glance at what happened in between. The reason is simple: for Goldberg, fascism is strictly a Democratic disease. This allows him to dispose of the politics of the 1920s in a single sentence. “After the Great War,” he writes, “the country slowly regained its sanity.” What Goldberg may not know — or is afraid to tell us — is that the 1920s were anything but sane. This was the decade, after all, that contained the largest state-sponsored social experiment in the nation’s history — Prohibition — and it lasted through three Republican administrations before Franklin Roosevelt ended it in 1933. The 1920s also saw the explosive spread of the Ku Klux Klan in the Republican Midwest, a virtual halt to legal immigration under the repressive National Origins Act and an angry grass-roots backlash against the teaching of evolution in public schools.

Goldberg briefly enters the Eisenhower 1950s to tease liberals for whining about the supposedly trivial impact of McCarthyism. “A few Hollywood writers who’d supported Stalin and then lied about it lost their jobs,” he says. What’s the big deal? For the Reagan 1980s there is near-silence — hardly a word. I had entertained the slim hope that Goldberg might consider the “fascist” cult of personality surrounding Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” hokum (“Prouder, Stronger, Better”). But, alas, such scrutiny is reserved only for the Clinton presidential campaign of 1992, with its “Riefenstahlesque film of a teenage Bill Clinton shaking hands with President Kennedy.” Indeed, even George W. Bush’s spectacularly staged landing on an aircraft carrier in full battle regalia to declare “mission accomplished” in Iraq escapes notice here. It doesn’t take a village for Goldberg to play the fascist card; a single Democrat will do.

The final chapters of “Liberal Fascism” are a rant, often deliciously amusing, against America’s numerous liberal-fascist elites. In unexciting times, when there are no calamities to be addressed, liberals push a more robust social agenda, Goldberg claims, using the state and the friendly news media to tar opponents of, say, affirmative action or same-sex marriage as bigots, fanatics and fools. The task facing conservatives, he adds, is to hold liberals accountable for these jackboot tactics. “For at some point,” Goldberg writes, “it is necessary to throw down the gauntlet, to draw a line in the sand, to set a boundary, to cry at long last, ‘Enough is enough.’”

These are familiar words, eerily reminiscent of the “adrelaline-soaked” clichés of John F. Kennedy as he railed against Soviet expansion around the globe. But I dare not call them fascist. That would be unfair.

David Oshinsky, who holds the Jack S. Blanton chair in history at the University of Texas, is the author of “A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy.”

By ALI H. SOUFAN

The New York Times - link to original

September 6, 2009
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

PUBLIC bravado aside, the defenders of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques are fast running out of classified documents to hide behind. The three that were released recently by the C.I.A. — the 2004 report by the inspector general and two memos from 2004 and 2005 on intelligence gained from detainees — fail to show that the techniques stopped even a single imminent threat of terrorism.

The inspector general’s report distinguishes between intelligence gained from regular interrogation and from the harsher methods, which culminate in waterboarding. While the former produces useful intelligence, according to the report, the latter “is a more subjective process and not without concern.” And the information in the two memos reinforces this differentiation.

They show that substantial intelligence was gained from pocket litter (materials found on detainees when they were captured), from playing detainees against one another and from detainees freely giving up information that they assumed their questioners already knew. A computer seized in March 2003 from a Qaeda operative for example, listed names of Qaeda members and money they were to receive.

Soon after Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the 9/11 attacks, was captured in 2003, according to the 2005 memo, he “elaborated on his plan to crash commercial airlines into Heathrow Airport.” The memo speculates that he may have assumed that Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a fellow member of Al Qaeda who had been captured in 2002, had already divulged the plan. The same motivation — the assumption that another detainee had already talked — is offered to explain why Mr. Mohammed provided details about the Hambali-Southeast Asia Qaeda network.

Mr. Mohammed must have likewise assumed that his interrogators already had the details about Al Qaeda’s organizational structure that he gave them. When I testified in the trial of Salim Hamdan, who had been Osama bin Laden’s personal driver, I provided many unclassified details about Al Qaeda’s structure and operations, none of which came from Mr. Mohammed.

Some of the information that is cited in the memos — the revelation that Mr. Mohammed had been the mastermind of 9/11, for example, and the uncovering of Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber — was gained from another terrorism suspect, Abu Zubaydah, by “informed interrogation,” conducted by an F.B.I. colleague and me. The arrest of Walid bin Attash, one of Osama bin Laden’s most trusted messengers, which was also cited in the 2005 C.I.A. memo, was thanks to a quick-witted foreign law enforcement officer, and had nothing to do with harsh interrogation of anyone. The examples go on and on.

A third top suspected terrorist who was subjected to enhanced interrogation, in 2002, was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the man charged with plotting the 2000 bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole. I was the lead agent on a team that worked with the Yemenis to thwart a series of plots by Mr. Nashiri’s operatives in the Arabian Peninsula — including planned attacks on Western embassies. In 2004, we helped prosecute 15 of these operatives in a Yemeni court. Not a single piece of evidence that helped us apprehend or convict them came from Mr. Nashiri.

It is surprising, as the eighth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, that none of Al Qaeda’s top leadership is in our custody. One damaging consequence of the harsh interrogation program was that the expert interrogators whose skills were deemed unnecessary to the new methods were forced out.

Mr. Mohammed knew the location of most, if not all, of the members of Al Qaeda’s leadership council, and possibly of every covert cell around the world. One can only imagine who else we could have captured, or what attacks we might have disrupted, if Mr. Mohammed had been questioned by the experts who knew the most about him.

A lack of knowledge perhaps explains why so many false claims have been made about the program’s alleged successes. Many officials in Washington reading the reports didn’t know enough about Al Qaeda to know what information was already known and whether the detainees were telling all they knew. The inspector general’s report states that many operatives thought their superiors were inaccurately judging that detainees were withholding information. Such assessments, the operatives said, were “not always supported by an objective evaluation” but were “too heavily based, instead, on presumptions.” I can personally testify to this.

Supporters of the enhanced interrogation techniques have jumped from claim to claim about their usefulness. They have asserted, for example, that harsh treatment led Mr. Mohammed to reveal the plot to attack the Library Tower in Los Angeles. But that plot was thwarted in 2002, and Mr. Mohammed was not arrested until 2003. Recently, interviews with unnamed sources led The Washington Post to report that harsh techniques turned Mr. Mohammed into an intelligence “asset.”

This latest claim will come as news to Mr. Mohammed’s prosecutors, to his fellow detainees (whom he instructed, at his arraignment, not to cooperate with the United States) and indeed to Mr. Mohammed himself. He told the International Committee of the Red Cross that “I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear.”

The inspector general’s report was written precisely because many of the C.I.A. operatives complained about what they were being ordered to do. The inspector general then conducted an internal audit of the entire program. In his report, he questions the effectiveness of the harsh techniques that were authorized. And he slams the use of “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented detention and interrogation techniques.” This is probably why the enhanced interrogation program was shelved in 2005.

Meanwhile, the professionals in the field are relieved that an ineffective, unreliable, unnecessary and destructive program — one that may have given Al Qaeda a second wind and damaged our country’s reputation — is finished.

Ali H. Soufan was an F.B.I. special agent from 1997 to 2005.

Despite a rigid embargo that has spanned half a century, the United States is playing a major role in feeding Cuba.

BY MARTHA BRANNIGAN

MBRANNIGAN@MIAMIHERALD.COM

Miami Herald - link to original 

Sept 6, 2009.

When a Havana family sits down for pollo asado, passes pan de ajo across the kitchen table or splurges on some chocolate soy ice cream, chances are the ingredients came from U.S. farms.

Venezuela may boast of its revolutionary friendship with Cuba, and China may send its youth there to study Spanish, but the United States has emerged as the No. 1 exporter of agricultural products to Cuba.

And that’s not all that can be sent to Cuba legally. Try live primates, truffles, azalea bushes, fox furs — even cigars.

When President Obama announced plans in April to ease the embargo by lifting family-travel restrictions to the island and allowing U.S. telecommunications firms wide latitude to do business there, many analysts said the policy changes could significantly expand ties between the estranged neighbors — assuming Havana responds positively to the overture.

But fairly significant commerce has been going on since the Trade Sanctions Reform and Enhancement Act of 2000 opened the door to U.S. food and medicine exports to Cuba — despite the tense relationship between Havana and Washington and a trade embargo that has spanned nearly 50 years.

U.S. agricultural exports to Cuba hit a record $711.5 million in 2008, as prices for commodities soared. That makes the United States Cuba’s fifth-largest trading partner overall.

“We are the natural provider of food and agriculture products to Cuba,” says Kirby Jones, president of Alamar Associates, a consulting firm for U.S. companies aspiring to trade with Cuba. “We’re No. 1 and could be selling a lot more, were it not for the restrictions.”

Over the past nine years, Cuba, which imports 80 percent of its food, has come to rely heavily on its nemesis to the north for wheat, corn, soy goods and scores of other key agricultural products.

American companies provide two-thirds of Cuba’s imported chicken and more than 40 percent of its pork imports. Utility poles, organic fertilizer and chewing gum also make their way in.

Not much medicine has been shipped, however, since Cuba has other options.

CASH FLOWS FROM U.S.

Much has changed since President John F. Kennedy imposed a total economic embargo of Cuba in 1962, making it illegal for Americans to spend any money in Cuba or trade with Havana.

The chinks began when some travel restrictions were lifted in the late 1970s, and through the years there has been a tightening and loosening of the embargo as administrations change in Washington.

In recent years, Cuba has raked in U.S. dollars in a host of other ways, too:

• The Castro government charges a 10 percent fee to exchange greenbacks for convertible pesos, or CUCs, used by Cuban Americans and other visitors, and there’s another 10 percent hit due to the unfavorable exchange rate given by money changers.

• Cuba also gets millions of dollars — perhaps hundreds of millions — in fees from U.S. telecommunications companies that already provide long-distance service to the island through third countries.

• When Cuban Americans make trips to Cuba, they generally travel heavy, lugging an estimated $3,000 to $5,000 in goods for family and friends. If just half of the 200,000 Cuban travelers expected this year carried even the low end, or $3,000 worth, that would amount to $300 million of clothing, electronics and household gadgets winding up in Cuba in 2009 alone. These travelers also are allowed to spend up to $179 per day while in Cuba, according to U.S. regulations.

• Cuba’s airport-related fees levied on U.S. air-charter companies average $120 per passenger, according to charter officials, which would bring in some $12 million for the 100,000 U.S. visitors last year and possibly double that amount this year.

• And money sent by individual Cuban Americans to help family members amounts to an estimated $400 to $800 million a year, according to a 2004 study by the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, which noted some estimates put U.S. remittances as high as $1 billion a year.

Even with all major portions of the embargo still in place, such commercial ties between the United States and Cuba could easily exceed $2 billion a year.

TOUGH BUSINESS

Meanwhile, a series of intentional hurdles reflects the U.S. government’s conflicted attitude toward dealing with the communist regime that has outlived nine U.S. presidents.

The cash-strapped island must pay in advance for U.S. goods, and with no banking ties between two nations, Cuba has to pay through a bank in a third country, typically France.

U.S. exporters need clearance from the Office of Foreign Assets Control and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security. Cargo ships carrying goods from the United States must go directly to Cuba before visiting any other nations, and they are forbidden from picking up anything to haul elsewhere. Cuban food inspectors often can’t get visas to visit U.S. facilities.

And the trade remains a one-way street. Virtually nothing can be imported to the United States from Cuba, with the exception of artwork, printed materials and recordings. Last year, that came to a grand total of $39,126.

That gives Cuba the curious distinction of helping the United States with its chronic balance of trade deficit, albeit in a token fashion.

The obstacles to Cuba trade have tipped the scales in favor of agribusiness Goliaths like Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland and Tyson Foods.

For American businesses, there is only one customer in Cuba: Alimport, the government agency that coordinates purchases from the United States.

Small and mid-sized exporters are often spooked by the maze of regulations and the opaque process of selling to Cuba. More than a few would-be exporters have ventured to Havana trade fairs only to come home empty-handed.

“People [looking to export to Cuba] get discouraged,” says Jay Brickman, vice president of government services at Crowley Maritime Corp. He travels frequently to Cuba for his company, which sends a cargo ship with chicken and other agricultural products to Havana from Port Everglades every week.

“They confuse being nicely received by the Cubans with the idea they’re going to get business. Cuba is limited [in its ability to buy imports], and they’re price-conscious. You almost have to have a certain passion to really want to be there,” he said.

Some U.S. business executives imagine big opportunities in an untapped market. Others are drawn to the forbidden fruit.

Naples businessman John Parke Wright IV shipped beef cattle to Cuba from Port Everglades three years ago and flew to Havana to shepherd his herd from the dock.

Last year, Wright, a member of the Lykes family that owned vast agricultural lands in Cuba before they were seized in the revolution, exported 2,500 straws of Brahman bull semen from the J.D. Hudgins ranch in Hungerford, Texas, to impregnate Cuban heifers.

Now he’s negotiating more cattle deals for Florida and Alabama Brangus cattle and semen. Wright, who has been making frequent visits to Cuba for nearly a decade, sees big potential for agricultural development on the island, in keeping with President Raúl Castro’s recent call to the Cuban people to work the land. “There was and there is another Florida there in the land mass and agricultural potential,” says Wright.

But many others have called it quits after a few sales. Independent Meats shipped some goods about a year and a half ago, but decided its Idaho location is too far west to compete with other U.S. suppliers.

“It just didn’t make a lot of sense for us,” said Independent Chief Executive Patrick Florence.

Cuba, meanwhile, has spread out its purchases among as many U.S. states as it practically can in hopes of drumming up support in Congress for an end to the embargo.

And yet, this year, U.S. exports will likely trail 2008 as Cuba struggles with severe financial problems that limit its ability to pay for foreign goods..

CUBA’S CREDIT WOES

Some experts believe Cuba is facing its biggest challenges since the early 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union left Fidel Castro scrambling for support in a changed world.

Just as poor families do, the Cuban government often makes purchases based on access to credit. That leaves U.S. businesses at a disadvantage, since transactions must be in cash.

U.S.-grown rice, especially the long-grain style favored in many recipes, was a huge hit with Cubans until 2005, when the Bush administration changed the meaning of cash in advance to mean payment before a product leaves U.S. shores — instead of when it arrives in port in Cuba.

Since that tightening of policy — which is expected to be reversed under provisions in the 2009 omnibus appropriations bill — U.S. rice exports to the island have plunged. Cuba has relied more on Vietnam, which is thousands of miles away and sometimes delivers broken rice but provides generous credit.

Some argue, however, that the cash-in-advance rule is a blessing in disguise for American companies, because it ensures that they get paid.

“Cuba generally doesn’t pay on time,” says John Kavulich, senior policy advisor for the nonprofit U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council. “And sometimes it doesn’t pay at all.

Video - LA HABANA EN 1930 - link to original post

martes 1 de septiembre de 2009

Enlace al original

MIAMI (Reuters) - Los cubano estadounidenses están divididos sobre si Estados Unidos debe mantener su embargo comercial de 47 años contra Cuba, según una reciente encuesta, pero el apoyo al mantenimiento de las sanciones parece haber disminuido.

La encuesta, realizada por la firma Bendixen & Associates y publicada el martes por el diario Miami Herald, mostró que un 41 por ciento de los cubano estadounidenses se oponen a mantener el embargo, mientras un 40 por ciento apoyan mantenerlo.

Fernand Amandi, el vicepresidente ejecutivo de Bendixen, una consultora que estudia desde hace tiempo a la comunidad cubano estadounidense de 1,5 millones de personas en Estados Unidos, dijo al Miami Herald que la encuesta reflejaba una “evolución de ideas” entre los exiliados.

“Después de 50 años, algunos cubanos han llegado a la dolorosa conclusión de que el embargo quizás no ha sido la herramienta más efectiva contra el regimen de Castro”, dijo.

La revolución de Fidel Castro en 1959 llevó a un rápido deterioro de las relaciones con Estados Unidos.

Washington rompió relaciones diplomáticas con La Habana en 1961 y al año siguiente impuso su embargo comercial, en respuesta a la nacionalización de empresas estadounidenses en Cuba y por temor a que Castro girara hacia el comunismo.

Amandi, de Bendixen, dijo que el alto respaldo a poner fin al embargo mostrado por la encuesta hubiera sido una “herejía” hace seis o siete años, cuando el apoyo a las sanciones comerciales era mayor entre los exiliados cubanos.

Bendixen realizó la encuesta el 24 de agosto, entrevistando a 400 cubano estadounidenses adultos en todo el país. El sondeo tiene un margen de error de cinco puntos porcentuales.

Desde que asumió el poder en enero, el presidente Barack Obama ha dicho que quiere forjar un “nuevo comienzo” en las relaciones de Estados Unidos con Cuba.

Pero pese a su apertura hacia Cuba, Obama dejó claro que pretende mantener el embargo hasta que el Gobierno cubano se comprometa a excarcelar a sus presos políticos y mejorar los derechos humanos.

El presidente cubano Raúl Castro descartó cualquier tipo de “concesión” o cambios hacia el capitalismo.

Obama suavizó levemente en abril el embargo, al eliminar restricciones para que los cubano estadounidenses viajen a la isla y envíen remesas a sus familiares.

Una encuesta de Bendixen realizada en abril mostró que un 64 por ciento de los cubano estadounidenses apoyaban las medidas de Obama para suavizar el embargo.

Obama también reanudó las conversaciones sobre inmigración con el Gobierno de Raúl Castro, que reemplazó el año pasado a su convaleciente hermano Fidel en la presidencia.

Según diplomáticos, ambos países se disponen a discutir este mes la reactivación del servicio de correo directo, interrumpido décadas atrás.

Los analistas dicen que un cambio generacional tuvo lugar en las últimas décadas en la comunidad de exiliados cubanos, donde los más jóvenes y recién llegados favorecen un incremento de los lazos con Cuba, mientras los “históricos”, más veteranos, siguen firmes en su oposición a Castro y su apoyo al embargo.

La encuesta del 24 de agosto mostró que mientras el 62 por ciento de los cubanos llegados a Estados Unidos en la década de 1960 o antes favorecen el mantenimiento del embargo, la mayoría de los que llegaron a partir de la década de 1980 está a favor del levantamiento.

(Reporte de Pascal Fletcher. Editado por Lucila Sigal)

http://www.juanes.net/

Juanes is sorry about the huge outrage surrounding his upcoming peace concert in Cuba, but says that his intentions are truly genuine.

The Seattle Times - link to original article

August 29, 2009

By MESFIN FEKADU

Associated Press Writer

Juanes is sorry about the huge outrage surrounding his upcoming peace concert in Cuba, but says that his intentions are truly genuine.

“I deeply regret having caused, let’s say, this bad moment,” he said in an interview Friday night.

“I have had the opportunity of talking with several leaders of the community to tell them what this is all about and that’s the only truth that exists. The rest I can’t control. If they say that I am a communist, that Juanes has political intentions … I can only control what’s in my heart, what’s in my mind. We know what we are doing and why we are doing it.”

Despite being accused of political affiliations with Cuba’s communist system and receiving death threats through Twitter, the Colombian singer still plans to hold his “Peace Without Borders” concert at Havana’s Plaza of the Revolution on Sept. 20.

Juanes has been known for his social activism since his first “Peace Without Borders” concert took place in March 2008. That show drew tens of thousands to the border between Venezuela and Colombia when tensions were high over a Colombian commando raid into neighboring Ecuador that killed a leading rebel commander.

The 37-year-old performer says he knew that some controversy would arise after announcing the show in Cuba.

“I mean, we knew that this was going to happen,” he said before his concert at Madison Square Garden on Friday. “I been living in Miami for seven years, and the first time I visited Miami was 10 or more years ago, so I know what happened in Miami with the Cuba issue and with all these things before (we decided) to go to Cuba to do this event.”

Juanes says he hasn’t gotten more threats, and now he’s not as worried about his safety.

“At some point, my family gets scared as well as me, more as a parent, as a father, as a husband,” said Juanes, who’s wife is pregnant with the couple’s third child.

“But Miami’s a very safe city, and our children go to school there and many of our friends are Cuban people, very nice people. And even if they don’t support what we are doing, they respect … and I’m sure that anything like that isn’t going to happen.”

Though he knows the upcoming concert will not cause an overnight change in Cuba’s culture, he feels it’s a step that’s worth taking.

“The thing is that it’s not about this concert, it’s just about a process, and this concert is just a little step in this way to communicate through culture,” he said.

“We just believe that music and culture has a possibility to bring people together to send message of peace, of respect, of tolerance. So we decided to go to Cuba, we hope that everything is going to be OK and fine after the concert.”

—

On the Net:

http://www.juanes.net

The Miami Herald - link to original article

BY JONATHON LYONS

JS-LYONSHOTMAIL.COME-MAIL

Recent public opinion surveys show a majority of Americans see “little” or “nothing” to admire in Islam or the Muslim world. Seventy percent say Islam has nothing in common with their own faith, an increase from 59 percent two years earlier.

Those with the strongest anti-Muslim views rely most on the media — not personal experience, travel or study — for their information about Islam. Nor is the nation’s educational elite any less immune to the power of the predominant media narrative of Islam as irrevocably violent, anti-modern, anti-women and anti-democratic.

This same narrative dominates every aspect of the way we think and speak about Islam. It shapes how we listen to what Muslims say and how we interpret what it is they do. As such, it exercises a corrosive effect on everything from politics and theology to international relations, human rights and national security policies, including today’s “war on terrorism.”

This has left the West intellectually and politically unable to respond successfully to some of the most significant challenges of the early-21st century — the rise of Islamist political power, the more narrow emergence of terrorism in the name of Islam, tensions between Western social values and multicultural rights on the part of growing Muslim immigrant populations.

Often overlooked in discussions of contemporary relations between Islam and the West are the broad historical, intellectual and philosophical ideas that literally dictate how we as Westerners apprehend the world of Islam and the Muslims. If we take just one obscure corner of this vast field — that of the history of medieval science — we may be able to learn much about our views of Islam, and about ourselves as well.

Our starting point is the 11th century, the era of the Crusades. Before that, Christian Europe looked upon the Muslims with indifference; they were a nuisance to shipping and coastal settlements, but they were certainly not seen as an existential threat. All that changed in the run-up to the First Crusade, proclaimed in 1095. Now, a distinct portrait of Islam began to take shape in the medieval Western mind, with the practices and beliefs of the Muslims conceived as mirror-opposites of self-evident Christian virtues.

Where Christianity stands for love, Islam is a religion of violence; where Christ stands for truth, Muhammad and the Quran stand for falsehood; where Christians are chaste, Muslims are sexual deviants. Over time, these notions acquired a number of corollaries: Muslims are backward, and fearful of modernity; the West is rational, Islam is irrational and fanatical. In an observation as apt now as when it was first advanced 900 years ago, one chronicler of the First Crusade acknowledged that it was not important to actually know anything about Islam in order to attack it: “It is safe to speak evil of one whose malignity exceeds whatever ill can be spoken.”

One of the most salient aspects of the medieval history of science is the relationship between sacred and profane knowledge. Under the influence of Augustine and other Church Fathers, the early Christian world saw no reason to explore what the Ancient Greeks had called “the nature of things.”

Yet, things looked quite different to the Muslims. Arab scholars found divine support for science in the Quran, the revealed Word of God. A number of verses refer to the order inherent to God’s universe and to man’s capacity to exploit this order for his own needs, such as keeping time. Elsewhere, the Quran advocates the use of God’s creation for orientation amid the featureless deserts and navigation across the oceans. By one scholar’s count, the Arabic word for “knowledge” (ilm) and related terms comprise almost 1 percent of the Quran’s 78,000 words and are among its most frequently used terms, a feature that highlights just how important the concept was for the first Muslims.

At the same time, many of Islam’s rituals demand a sophisticated understanding of the natural world. Believers could not simply follow the example of Augustine and close their eyes “to the course of the stars.” Rather, Muslims are required to know the proper times of the five daily prayers, the precise direction of Mecca — known as the qibla — and the start of the lunar fasting month of Ramadan.

Nowhere was the interaction of faith and science more important than in the question of the qibla. The earliest Muslims of Central Asia and Spain simply directed their prayers to the south, in imitation of the Prophet Muhammad when he was in Medina, which is to the north of the holy city. As Muslims’ scientific understanding of their universe became more sophisticated, they began to demand greater accuracy in conforming their practice to the sacred geography of Islam.

What is noteworthy here is the way medieval Muslim opinion deferred to the scientists on such an important question of religious ritual. One of the greatest treatises on mathematical geography was a work by Abu Raihan Mohammed Ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, written in the 11th century, to find the direction of Mecca from Afghanistan. His “Determination of the Coordinates of Cities” is the first work in history to determine accurate geographic locales with the techniques of spherical trigonometry.

As early as the 9th century, all six trigonometric functions — sine and cosine, tangent and cotangent, secant and cosecant — were known. Only the sine function was an import, from Hindu astronomy; the other five were Arab discoveries. This allowed the use of calculations in the place of geometric diagrams and paved the way for the development of modern mathematical astronomy.

Urban areas saw the rise of the mosque-based timekeeper. These were professional scientists, who determined local prayer times, built astronomical instruments, wrote treatises on astronomy, and taught students. Their work included the production of meticulous almanacs — from the Arabic “al-manakh” — to list the prayer times for each day of the year in such distant locales as China and Morocco. In medieval Cairo, 200 pages of special tables were available for keeping time by the sun and other celestial markers.

Islamic teachings also went hand in hand with other disciplines. Injunctions in the Quran to heal the sick provided great impetus to the study of medicine. The religious ritual of the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca created a need for cartography and navigation. Speculation among Sufi mystics on the transformation of the soul in union with God helped fuel the alchemists’ search for ways to transform base metals, laying the groundwork for modern chemistry.

Even many of the foods we eat — artichokes, oranges, apricots — and our technical vocabulary — words like algebra, azimuth, zenith, and zero — all come from the Arabs. Most important, there evolved the very idea that man was capable of understanding God’s universe and of interpreting it for his benefit.

I have gone into considerable detail to challenge the notion of Islam’s inherent enmity toward science and innovation because I believe this is a first, crucial step toward restoring the Muslims’ rightful place in the history of Western ideas — and toward transforming the ways in which we think about the Islamic world in general.

When Western ideas of science do allow a role for the Arabs, it is often as caretakers of Greek learning, preserved from loss by Arabic translators until its discovery by Latin scholars, beginning in the 12th century. This notion would have come as a complete shock to medieval Christian thinkers.

The philosopher Roger Bacon, one of the earliest Western proponents of the scientific method, praised the Muslims for their intellectual innovations: “Philosophy is drawn from the Muslims.” A leading translator from the Arabic urged his fellow Latin scholars to follow the Muslim lead in astronomy; another hailed Arabs as the only people to truly understand geometry.

It was only with the later rise of the Renaissance that the West — having feasted on Arab learning for several centuries — set about to erase the Arab contribution from the historical record. Eager to claim direct descent from the likes of Aristotle and Archimedes, Western thinkers marginalized the role of Arab learning. Francesco Petrarch, often called the father of Renaissance humanism, went so far as to decree: “I shall scarcely be persuaded that anything good can come from Arabia.”

Here, then, is the origin of the notion of the Renaissance as the “recovery” of classical learning, which comprised the natural birthright of Christian Europe. Such accounts are colored profoundly by a Western consensus, often invoked to explain the state of the Muslim world today, that Islam is inherently hostile to innovation.

But what if we were to reject this view? Suddenly, a number of possibilities suggest themselves, and miscellaneous facts that have been floating around start to fall into place. The origins of the Western scientific lexicon — from azimuth to zenith, from algebra to zero; the unmistakable strains of Arab philosophy throughout the works of Thomas Aquinas and other seminal Western thinkers; the mark of Arabic poetry on the works of the troubadors; the everyday presence on our dinner tables of such crops as hard wheat, watermelon and spinach — all this starts to take on new meaning.

Suddenly, it becomes possible to reimagine the relationship between Islam and the West as one of internal cultural rivalry, rather than that of unavoidable civilizational conflict. In effect, this would mark a return to the world view captured in one of the most remarkable landmarks in the history of ideas: the world atlas produced by the Muslim scholar Muhammad al-Idrisi in the 12th century by commission of the Christian king of Sicily, which was then multi-faith — Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox.

Jonathan Lyons is the author, most recently, of The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization. He teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

(C)2009 Fredericksburg (Va.) Free Lance-Star

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