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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BY TRUDY RUBIN

TRUBIN@PHILLYNEWS.COM

(C)2009 The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Miami Herald -link to original article

How could anyone release the only man convicted in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103? Does anyone really believe that Scottish officials sent Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi back to Libya for “compassionate” reasons? Yes, the former Libyan intelligence agent is purportedly dying of cancer. But as a London Times columnist asked: Would the same Scots release Robert Black, the Scottish serial killer of young girls, if he were on death’s door?

Clearly something is going on here that has little to do with compassion. Americans, who remember the Lockerbie tragedy with horror, deserve to know the real reason Megrahi was freed.

The most likely possibility falls under the heading “business and blackmail.” The Brits have extensive trade interests in Libya, and Megrahi had become an obstacle to them. (No one believes British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s claim that the decision rested solely with Scottish officials.)

As Saif Gadhafi, a son of Libya’s leader, put it last week, “In all commercial contracts for oil and gas with Britain, Megrahi was always on the negotiating table.” His father, the mercurial Moammar, went out of his way to embarrass Brown, along with Queen Elizabeth and her son Prince Andrew (a regular visitor to Libya on trade missions), by thanking them publicly for their alleged role in Megrahi’s release.

The British had been seeking to unload Megrahi for some time since Gadhafi’s renunciation of terrorism and his scrapping of Libya’s weapons of mass destruction in 2003. Gadhafi made clear that lucrative oil deals depended on Megrahi’s repatriation.

Moreover, Gadhafi has been using his oil and gas wealth to blackmail Europeans into accepting his unorthodox behavior. Over the past year, the Libyan leader waged economic war against the Swiss after his son Hannibal, a reputed playboy, was briefly arrested by police in a Geneva hotel based on complaints that he had been beating his servants.

In response, Gadhafi cut off crucial oil supplies to Switzerland and made two Swiss citizens living in Tripoli virtual hostages. After the Swiss president made a groveling apology, Libya promised to restore normal relations and to let the hostages go.

British expats were threatened with similar reprisals if Megrahi died in prison, according to The London Times. So home he went.

There is a second, but less likely, possible explanation for the Megrahi decision. Some argue the Brits knew that Megrahi wasn’t guilty, and Iran was the true culprit. So why not release him? (Never mind that a neutral Scottish court found him guilty.)

To lay that one to rest, I spoke by phone with Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counterterrorism at the CIA who directed the agency’s Pan Am 103 investigation. Cannistraro told me the evidence at first implicated a Damascus-based Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — General Command (PFLP-GC), which was working on behalf of Iran. Tehran had authorized and funded the bombing, he said, as a reprisal for the accidental U.S. shoot-down of an Iranian civilian airliner over the Persian Gulf in July 1988.

But this operation was foiled in October 1988 by German intelligence, which broke up a PFLP-GC cell in Frankfurt. The Lockerbie bombing happened two months later.

Cannistraro believes the PFLP-GC handed off the operation to the Libyans. The explosive device that destroyed Pan Am 103 was placed in a Toshiba cassette player — just like the bombs found in the Frankfurt bust.

“The methodology of the boom box was very coincidental,” Cannistraro said. “To me, this meant that Libya picked up the technology from the PFLP-GC, which had active members in Tripoli.” He added firmly: “There is no question in my mind that the Libyans carried this operation off.”

Among the other questions is what role, if any, the Obama administration had in it. After all, 180 of 270 passengers on Pan Am 103 were Americans. The British press claims Attorney General Eric Holder was informed in advance.

Once Megrahi was released, it was dumb for the Brits or the Americans to expect Gadhafi to refrain from giving him a big public reception.

Obama’s engagement policy can’t preclude serious consequences for Libya for continuing to glorify Megrahi. “The man who organized the hero’s welcome for Megrahi was the one who ordered the Lockerbie bombing — Moammar Gadhafi,” says Cannistraro. “He stuck his finger in our eye.”

The Miami Herald - link to original article

August 29, 2009

BY CAROL ROSENBERG
CROSENBERG@MIAMIHERALD.COM

The U.S. government on Friday sent two Syrian men from the prison camps at Guantánamo to resettlement in Portugal after years as war on terror captives at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.

The Justice Department in Washington announced the transfer late Friday in tandem with the Portuguese government in Lisbon, which said it granted the two men “humanitarian asylum” at the “specific request” of the U.S. government.

“These citizens, who expressed interest in being hosted by Portugal, are not subject to any charges,” Portugal’s Interior Ministry said in a statement.

It described the Syrians as “free individuals now living in homes provided by the state, which is taking steps to integrate them into Portuguese society.”

Portugal’s Interior Ministry also said that the two men were given visas that allowed them to live in Portugal but required further applications to travel elsewhere in the European Union.

Neither announcement named the men.

A U.S. Justice Department spokesman, Dean Boyd, said the two former captives’ names were not being made public, by request of Portugal, “for security and privacy reasons.”

The U.S. announcement said the release arrangements for both men were arranged under a review established by the Obama administration to downsize the detainee population ahead of the president’s mandate to close the controversial prison camps in Cuba, by Jan. 22, 2010.

“The United States has coordinated with the government of Portugal to ensure the transfers take place under appropriate security measures and will continue to consult with the government of Portugal regarding these detainees,” it added.

The transfer followed by less than one week the repatriation of a young Afghan captive, Mohammed Jawad, whose release was ordered by a judge.

It lowered the unofficial Guantánamo prison camp census to about 226 foreign men.

Portugal said in its statement that the government had long expressed “its willingness to help President Barack Obama and the American administration find solutions to accommodate people who have been detained at Guantánamo.”

Useful literature on school vouchers

August 28, 2009

Washington Post - link to original article

PRESIDENT OBAMA reportedly has a hefty reading list while vacationing this week, but we would like to offer two additions, both hot off the presses. One is an article by the education expert who studied the D.C. voucher program; the second is a study on school safety in the city’s public and private schools. Read together, they might cause the president to rethink his administration’s wrong-headed decision to shut down the voucher program to new students.

He should start with Patrick J. Wolf’s article in the new issue of Education Next. Mr. Wolf, a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, is the principal investigator of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which allows low-income children to attend private schools. He was unequivocal in his findings: “The D.C. voucher program has proven to be the most effective education policy evaluated by the federal government’s official education research arm so far.” Equally adamant was his opinion that vouchers paid off for the students lucky enough to win them: “On average, participating low-income students are performing better in reading because the federal government decided to launch an experimental school choice program in our nation’s capital.”

Mr. Obama, along with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, has repeatedly promised to support “what works,” so we figure he should be interested in Mr. Wolf’s findings. Also instructive is a new report by the Heritage Foundation, in conjunction with the Lexington Institute, on violence and criminal activity in D.C. schools. The report pays particular attention to the plight of the 216 students who had planned to attend private school before the administration rescinded their scholarship offers while Congress debates the future of the program. The study looks at the 70 public schools to which these students have now been assigned and finds there were 2,379 crime-related incidents, including 666 violent incidents (one of which was a homicide), for the 2007-08 school year. No wonder many parents cite school safety when explaining why they want choice in where their child goes to school.

Latasha Bennett, for example, lost a nephew to school violence: “I wonder if he would be sitting here today as a success story, if a scholarship had been available for him to attend private school.” Ms. Bennett, as we have reported before, is scrambling to find a school for her daughter after Mr. Duncan decided to withdraw the scholarship that would have allowed her to attend Naylor Road School, where Ms. Bennett’s son is enrolled by virtue of a voucher.

As we’ve said before, vouchers aren’t the answer to Washington’s school troubles; we enthusiastically support public school reform and quality charter schools, too. But vouchers are an answer for some children whose options otherwise are bleak. In Washington, they also are part of a carefully designed social-science experiment that may provide useful evidence for all schools on helping low-income children learn. Why would a Democratic administration and Congress want to cut such an experiment short?

August 28, 2009

New York Post - link to original article

RELATED STORIES

• REPORT: RANGEL LISTS THOUSANDS IN PREVIOUSLY UNDISCLOSED ASSETS

RELATED TOPICS

• CHARLIE RANGEL

Rep. Charlie Rangel’s multimillion-dol lar “oops” this month raises plenty of good questions, but this may be the best: How can Democrats continue to close their eyes to such sleaze?

And, more to the point, this: Will prose cutors follow up on any of it?

Rangel’s “corrections” to his financial-disclosure statements from 2002 through 2007 are stunning, even by the low standards of this “error”-prone paperwork-filer — who, by the way, happens to be in charge of writing the nation’s tax laws.

The Harlem Dem now admits that he failed to disclose several million dollars in income and business deals during those years — including up to $1 million from the sale of a building on 132nd Street.

How could that happen?

Charlie won’t say.

Even stranger, city records show that Rangel still owns the building.

How can that be, if Rangel sold it, as he now claims? Maybe the records are wrong, but Charlie’s not talking.

There are adjustments — as much as $780,000 — in the value of his assets:

* An “omitted” checking account valued between $250,000 to $500,000.

* Another fund worth up to $100,000.

* Unreported investment portfolios said to be between $15,000 and $50,000.

The unreported business deals total a jaw-dropping $3 million. Huh?

So what explains all this?

Yup: Charlie’s lips are zipped.

Absent anything dispositive, the best that can be assumed is that the nation’s tax-writer-in-chief is sloppy, careless — dare we say, incompetent? — beyond all possible credibility.

That’s bad enough. But given his mile-long record of “lapses” — even before these latest “oversights” — the public is left to wonder: What is Rangel hiding?

Remember, none of this would have come to light at all had the Sunday Post not broken the story, almost exactly a year ago, about his failure to disclose — and pay tax on — some $75,000 in rental income from his Caribbean villa.

Then followed revelations about his:

* Four rent-stabilized apartments.

* Apparent quid pro quo in preserving a tax loophole for an oil company that donated $1 million to a planned “public service” center named for Rangel.

Last May, the Sunday Post disclosed yet another Rangel scandal, involving corporate junkets to the Caribbean.

Yes, the House — which is controlled by fellow Democrats — has begun investigations. But so far it’s failed to act. And there’s scant reason to think it ever will.

Dems may rather tolerate such sleaze than take on the Ways and Means Committee chairman, but they do so only by smearing their own reputations.

But this shouldn’t stop law-enforcement officials from launching their own probe. Rangel’s lengthy, inexplicable “oversights” demand immediate action.

Publicado el viernes 28 de augusto del 2009

El Nuevo Herald - enlace al original

WILFREDO CANCIO ISLA

El gobierno de Raúl Castro impidió la salida del país de una treintena de universitarios cubanos que habían recibido becas para participar este verano en dos programas en instituciones académicas de Estados Unidos.

“Lamentamos la decisión del gobierno cubano de no permitir la participación de sus ciudadanos en estos proyectos, pero continuaremos brindando oportunidades para que los cubanos participen en este tipo de programas educativos, los cuales ofrecemos a estudiantes de todo el mundo”, dijo Sara Mangiaracina, portavoz del Buró de Asuntos Hemisféricos del Departamento de Estado.

La convocatoria para ambos programas — auspiciados por el Buró de Asuntos Educativos y Culturales (BECA, por su nombre en inglés) del Departamento de Estado — fue lanzada a mediados del pasado año a través de la Sección de Intereses de Estados Unidos (USINT) en La Habana y en pocas semanas recibió una avalancha de solicitudes. Es la primera vez que estudiantes cubanos son invitados a participar en este tipo de programas internacionales del gobierno estadounidense.

“El interés de los estudiantes cubanos en estos dos programas fue altamente estusiasta y un número de muy calificados participantes fue seleccionado para ambos programas”, señaló Mangiaracina.

La USINT procesó alrededor de 750 solicitudes para asistir un año a un colegio comunitario en especialidades como ciencias agrícolas, administración empresarial, tecnologías de información, comunicaciones y periodismo, o participar en un curso de verano de liderazgo público en una institución universitaria.

Finalmente, fueron seleccionados 17 para el primer programa y 11 para el segundo, pero las autoridades cubanas rechazaron sus peticiones para viajar a Estados Unidos e iniciaron un proceso de análisis en los centros universitarios.

El Departamento de Estado confirmó a El Nuevo Herald que el gobierno cubano le comunicó recientemente que “no otorgaría los permisos de salida a los estudiantes que solicitaron becas para los programas académicos de este año, pero que no elimina completamente la participación en el futuro”.

La Sección de Intereses de Cuba en Washington no respondió un mensaje de El Nuevo Herald indagando sobre el asunto.

Hace varios meses las autoridades del Ministerio de Educación Superior (MES), cuadros del Partido Comunista (PCC) y dirigentes de la Unión de Jóvenes Comunistas (UJC) abrieron un proceso de análisis como parte de un “reordenamiento del trabajo político-ideológico” en las instituciones universitarias.

El proceso fue iniciado tras la designación en mayo del ingeniero Miguel Díaz Canel, miembro del Buró Político del Comité Central del PCC y ex cuadro de las Fuerzas Armadas, como ministro de Educación Superior. Díaz Canel, de 49 años, es considerado un representante de la llamada ‘‘generación del relevo” muy cercano a Raúl Castro y cobró fama como dirigente partidista de mano dura al frente de las provincias de Villaclara y Holguín desde 1993.

Uno de los focos de atención prioritaria en esas reuniones fue justamente el “combate ideológico valiente” para enfrentar supuestos problemas políticos entre los estudiantes como el hecho de aspirar a becas en Estados Unidos.

“Una muestra de las acciones que realiza la administración norteamericana actual para tratar de penetrar ideológicamente a la juventud universitaria, es el ofrecimiento de becas, a través de la SINA [Sección de Intereses Norteamericana, como se le designa en Cuba a la USINT], para prepararlos en el área de liderazgo. Aspirar a la beca denota, cuando menos, una inconsistencia ideológica inadmisible. Todavía más grave es el caso de aquellos estudiantes seleccionados por la SINA que mantuvieron su decisión aún después de la argumentada discusión política que se sostuvo con ellos”, expresó un documento interno del MES que obtuvo El Nuevo Herald.

El documento — emitido en julio — reconoce que entre estudiantes y profesores se manifiesta un ‘‘afán por obtener beneficios personales por encima de cualquier consideración colectiva, social y patriótica, así como confusión e incomprensión de los pilares básicos en los que se sustenta la ideología de nuestra revolución”.

“Estamos envueltos ante un nuevo proceso de controles y purgas ideológicas que recuerdan los peores momentos de etapas que parecían ya superadas”, relató un profesor de la Universidad de La Habana que habló con El Nuevo Herald bajo condición de no revelar su identidad por temor a represalias.

La fuente consideró que la sustitución del anterior ministro Juan Vela Valdés al frente del MES se debió a estos presuntos problemas detectados en los claustros profesorales y colectivos estudiantiles, aún cuando la nota oficial para su reemplazo reconoció “el esfuerzo realizado en esta labor”.

Al calor del documento del MES, las discusiones políticas con los estudiantes que solicitaron becas para Estados Unidos han derivado en numerosas sanciones contra los que militaban en la UJC, así como expulsiones indefinidas de la enseñanza universitaria.

“Se me ha dicho que estoy separada de la universidad y tengo pendiente el proceso de la UJC, donde me proponen una sanción temporal en consideración a que acepté autocríticamente mi responsabilidad al pedir la beca”, escribió un estudiante seleccionado para cursar el programa de liderazgo en Estados Unidos.

El estudiante — que también pidió anonimato — dijo que en el grupo de los seleccionados reina un profundo sentimiento de frustración.

“El estado de ánimo es el peor, porque nos sentimos desprotegidos. Nadie va a defendernos ni a entrar en un enfrentamiento directo con el gobierno cubano para reclamar nuestros derechos a optar por lo que pueden optar los estudiantes universitarios en todo el mundo”, agregó el joven, que reside en La Habana.

La negativa de las autoridades cubanas se produce en momentos en que la administración de Barack Obama parece decidida a facilitar más intercambios culturales y académicos con la isla, a pesar de la parálisis manifiesta por el gobierno cubano en la esfera política.

Esta semana el gobernador de Nuevo México, Bill Richardson, abogó por la ampliación de los viajes y contactos culturales entre Estados Unidos y Cuba, y evaluó como muy fructíferas sus conversaciones con altos funcionarios cubanos durante su visita a la isla.

“Cuando se lanzó la convocatoria para estas becas [en el 2008], el gobierno cubano consideró nuestro gesto como una intromisión subversiva dirigida a la juventud, pero les respondimos entonces que en Cuba estudian Medicina varios jóvenes norteamericanos bajo un programa gubernamental y nosotros no nos oponemos”, contó un ex diplomático estadounidense que pidió no ser identificado. ‘‘Pero Cuba no parece entender de reciprocidad”.

Unos 90 jóvenes estadounidenses estudian actualmente en la Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina de La Habana con becas ofrecidas por el gobierno cubano. El programa se inició en el 2001 por iniciativa del entonces gobernante Fidel Castro y la primera promoción de ocho médicos se graduó en el 2007.

Cuba is running out of toilet paper

Fareed Zakaria - August 2009

Interrogations were carefully limited, briefed on Capitol Hill, and yielded information that saved innocent lives.

Wall Street Journal - link to original article

August 27, 2009

Whoever advised people to be skeptical of what they read in the papers must have had in mind this week’s coverage of the documents about CIA interrogations. Now that we’ve had a chance to read the reports, it’s clear the real story isn’t the few cases of abuse played up by the media. The news is that the program was thoughtfully developed, carefully circumscribed, briefed to Congress, and yielded information crucial to disrupting al Qaeda.

In other words, it worked—at least until politics got in the way.

That’s the essential judgment offered by former CIA Inspector General John Helgerson in his 2004 report. Some mild criticism aside, the report says the CIA “invested immense time and effort to implement the [program] quickly, effectively, and within the law”; that the agency “generally provided good guidance and support”; and that agency personnel largely “followed guidance and procedures and documented their activities well.” So where’s the scandal?

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Mr. Helgerson describes how the CIA collaborated with the Pentagon, the Justice Department and even outside experts to develop specific guidelines for 10 enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that passed legal muster. The enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) “would be used on ‘an as needed basis’ and all would not necessarily be used. Further, the EITs were expected to be used ‘in some sort of escalating fashion’ . . .” The agency had psychologists evaluate al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, to ensure he would not suffer physical or long-term mental harm.

As the program expanded, the CIA “implemented training programs for interrogators and debriefers.” By early 2003 it had created guidelines on detention and interrogation and required “individuals engaged in or supporting interrogations be made aware of the guidelines and sign an acknowledgment that they have read them.” The guidelines also made “formal the existing . . . practice of requiring the field to obtain specific Headquarters approvals prior to the application of all EITs.” This was hardly a rogue CIA.

Congress also knew about it. The IG report belies House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s claims that she wasn’t told about all this. “In the fall of 2002, the Agency briefed the leadership of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees on the use of both standard techniques and EITs. . . . Representatives . . . continued to brief the leadership of the Intelligence Oversight Committees on the use of EITs and detentions in February and March 2003. The [CIA] General Counsel says that none of the participants expressed any concern about the techniques or the Program . . .” Ditto in September 2003.

As for examples of “unauthorized techniques,” the IG explains that the most “significant”—an accusation that an interrogator threatened a detainee with a gun and a power drill—was the subject of a separate investigation. As for the rest—”the making of threats, blowing cigar smoke, employing certain stress positions, the use of a stiff brush on a detainee, and stepping on a detainee’s ankle shackles”—the IG report says the “allegations were disputed or too ambiguous to reach any authoritative determination” and “did not warrant separate investigations or administrative actions.”

The most revealing portion of the IG report documents the program’s results. The CIA’s “detention and interrogation of terrorists has provided intelligence that has enabled the identification and apprehension of other terrorists and warned of terrorist plots planned for the United States and around the world.” That included the identification of Jose Padilla and Binyam Muhammed, who planned to detonate a dirty bomb, and the arrest of previously unknown members of an al Qaeda cell in Karachi, Pakistan, designated to pilot an aircraft attack in the U.S. The information also made the CIA aware of plots to attack the U.S. consulate in Karachi, hijack aircraft to fly into Heathrow, loosen track spikes to derail a U.S. train, blow up U.S. gas stations, fly an airplane into a California building, and cut the lines of suspension bridges in New York.

While the report doesn’t take a position on the value of enhanced techniques, the facts speak loudly that they caused detainees to yield important information. The report notes that early on Zubaydah provided some information, but that the waterboard resulted in “increased production.” It also notes that since the use of the waterboard, “Zubaydah has appeared to be cooperative.”

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who planned the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, was not waterboarded. “However,” says the report, “following the use of [enhanced techniques], he provided information about his most current operational planning as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of [enhanced techniques].”

Then there’s Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who directed the 9/11 attacks. The report cites him as the “most prolific” provider of information. Yet it later notes that KSM, “an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate, or incomplete.” The report explains that KSM was then waterboarded 183 times, and it redacts the rest of the section. This suggests that what interrogators gleaned was valuable enough that it requires classification even today.

This conclusion is buttressed by two other CIA documents released this week, one from 2004 and another from 2005, that outline interrogation results. One provides details of how interrogations brought down Hambali, mastermind of the 2002 Bali bombings. KSM provided information about al Qaeda operative Majid Khan, who had been tasked with delivering money to an operative named Jubair. Khan, who had been caught, revealed information to capture Jubair, who divulged that he worked for Hambali, and provided information for Hambali’s arrest. KSM then admitted that Hambali’s brother was his likely successor, and that brother in turn provided information to take down an entire terrorist cell in Karachi. Hambali admitted these terrorists were to be trained to fly airplanes into U.S. targets.

The two CIA papers don’t discuss enhanced interrogation, though the IG report suggests that KSM provided little of this information prior to his waterboarding. Some will argue that these details could have been elicited without enhanced techniques. We’ll never know. The question is whether Attorney General Eric Holder and his new special counsel intend to second-guess the decisions of CIA officials who were operating in the shadow of 9/11 and who, we now know, successfully unraveled terror plots and saved lives.

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Which brings us to another salient part of the IG report: CIA officials well understood that they might be second-guessed years later by politicians. “During the course of this review, a number of Agency officers expressed unsolicited concern about the possibility of recrimination or legal action resulting from their participation. . . . officers expressed concern that a human rights group might pursue them for activities . . . they feared that the Agency would not stand behind them.” Another said, “Ten years from now we’re going to be sorry we’re doing this . . . [but] it has to be done.”

The outrage here isn’t that government officials used sometimes rough interrogation methods to break our enemies. The outrage is that, years later, when the political winds have shifted and there hasn’t been another attack, our politicians would punish the men and women who did their best to protect Americans in a time of peril.