KEYSTONE KILLERS
When Coast Guard members boarded a disabled
Miami-registered yacht near Puerto Rico last
October 27, they probably expected to discover
fishing gear, cocktail shakers, and relieved
passengers. Instead, they found four nervous
Cuban-American crew members, two .50-caliber
long-range sniper rifles, ammunition, night vision
equipment, portable radios, a satellite telephone,
and other military supplies. At first, the men
claimed they were on a fishing trip. But as the
agents were mirandizing them, one of the rescued
sailors, Angel Manuel Alfonso, kept interrupting
to affirm his dedication to the cause. According
to US Customs Special Agent Ismael Padilla,
Alfonso blurted out that his only mission in life
was to assassinate Castro. One prosecution
affidavit noted that the ship's navigation
computer had been set for the Venezualan Island of
Margarita where, Alfonso claimed, he was going to
shoot Castro at the Ibero-American Summit. Cuba's
president has escaped dozens of assassination
attempts, plotted by or from the US. According to
FBI records, the paper trail for one of the sniper
rifles led directly to Francisco Hernandez and
implicated the longstanding cabal of Miami
anti-Castro Cubans. Hernandez is president of the
Cuban American National Foundation (canf) - a
position second only to that of the late Jorge Mas
Canosa. The gun was sold to Hernandez in 1994 by
Juan Ramon Lopez de la Cruz, a Bay of Pigs veteran
and retired US Army colonel. The ship, La
Esperanza (hope), belongs to Juan Antonio Llama, a
board member of the Miami-based canf and veteran
of Brigade 2506, an exile unit that participated
in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Neither
Hernandez nor Llama was among the four men
arrested on the yacht. Rather than facing charge
of conspiracy to commit murder, the sailors were
indicted on a Customs violation: failure to report
the guns. Imagine if the conspirators had been
Black Panthers instead of right-wing Cubans.
POLITICAL BULL PEN
Paul Belaga, a Clinton aide who devises
"communications strategies" for the White House,
commented for the Washington Post on the film Wag
the Dog. Set just before a presidential election,
it features an incumbent facing a breaking sex
scandal who enlists a Beltway spin doctor and a
Hollywood producer to create a fictional war to
divert the nation's attention. The propaganda
campaign that follows calls up images of Reagan's
grotesque invasion of Grenada right after the
bombing of the US base in Lebanon. It barely
outdoes Hill (&) Knowlton's promotion of pro-Gulf War
fever. (In 1991, on the eve of the bombing of
Baghdad, the PR firm manufactured an account of
ravaging Iraqi soldiers throwing Kuwaiti infants
out of incubators. The daughter of a Kuwaiti UN
representative was persuaded to give Congress a
fabricated "eyewitness account" of the heinous
baby slaughter.) Reducing the public to its
essential role as consumers of propaganda, Belaga
noted: "It's either 1994, and they_re not buying
our party's bull, or it's 1996, and they are
buying our party's bull."
UNIFIED DEAL THEORY
Gore Vidal, reviewing Seymour Hersh's Dark Side of
Camelot, for the December 1 New Yorker, gave his
own assessment of the unseemly union of news,
propaganda, and entertainment: "Remember back in
the eighties, [they thought]: wouldn_t it be
wonderful if you could own a network and a studio
that made films to show on it as well as magazines
and newspapers to praise them in and a publishing
house for source material and ... ? Well, now we
have the marvelous comedy of Hersh's book having
been published by Little, Brown, which is owned by
Time Warner and reviewed negatively-nervously
nervously-negatively by Time (same ownership);
while Newsweek (owned by the Washington Post
Company and still, perhaps, influenced by
Kennedy's old friend Ben Bradlee) denounces Hersh;
while ABC (owned by Disney) prepares a TV
documentary that is tied in with it. "Many years
ago, there used to be something called conflict of
interest. No longer, I'm afraid. Tday, we all
bathe in the same river. It will be a relief when
Bill Gates finally owns everything and there will
be just one story."
SPIN CYCLE
* White House speech writers have been told to
limit use of the term "fast-track." The
replacement phrase is "renewal of traditional
trading authority." The label, "Nafta expansion"
is to be avoided completely. * The State
Department also has a way with language. It
describes Uganda, where Yoweri Museveni has held
unelected power for 12 years as a "uni-party
democracy," but excoriates Cuba as a "one-party
totalitarian state." * Meanwhile, the Treasury
Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control,
which enforces the embargo against Cuba, now
oversees sanctions against Jonas Savimbi's
CIA/apartheid-backed unita army. It seems the US
now regards the Marxist mpla as the legitimate
government of Angola. Yet, one of the main reasons
the US used for the embargo against Cuba was to
punish Havana for coming to the aid of mpla in the
1970s and 1980s when it was under attack by unita.
Not even Maytag can spin that one.
UNGRATEFUL BASTARDS
Referring to US ascendancy as the world's only
superpower "in an age of unrivaled dominance,"
William Drozdiak of the Washington Post Foreign
Service announced an astonishing new trend: The
rest of the world is not only ungrateful, but
actually annoyed at US dominance. "Over the past
few months," Drozdiak notes, "irritation and
anxiety have begun to overshadow sentiments of
admiration among America's closest allies. Across
Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa,
convictions are growing that the accumulation of
so much political, economic and cultural clout by
the United States is breeding an arrogance that is
unpleasant and possibly dangerous." With the
wide-eyed title "Even Allies Resent US Dominance,"
Drozdiak explains that "Washington's efforts to
compel other nations to embrace its policy of
isolating Cuba, Iran, Iraq and Libya as pariah
states have also provoked annoyance among US
friends. When South African President Nelson
Mandela visited [Qaddafi], he delivered a pointed
rebuff to Washington's attempts to impose its
views." Annoyance barely describes the reaction of
Nelson Mandela after Washington criticized his
visit with Libya's Qaddafi. "How can they have the
arrogance to dictate to us where we should go or
which countries should be our friends' Qaddafi is
my friend. He supported us when we were alone and
when those who tried to prevent my visit here
today were our enemies. They have no morals. We
cannot accept that a state assumes the role of the
world's policeman."
Even Newt Gingrich, whose
sharp intellect and ethical commitment in matters
of foreign policy are renowned among snake
handlers and used car dealers throughout his
district, took note and offered his own modest
solution: "If we do not learn to chane our
leadership style, we will eventually have enormous
resentment across the planet," said the House
speaker in a speech at Georgetown University's
Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. "We are so
large that unless we adopt a more learning and
listening leadership style, we will have a lot of
resentment." Madeleine Albright appeared to have
been listening as this tide of Newtonian wisdom
broke on the shores of the Potomac with a
resounding plop. On her trip to Africa in
December, she took up the call: "I talk less and
listen more," she promised. And, said one member
of her party, "We don't do Mary Robinson,"
referring to the emphasis the UN high commissioner
for human rights put on curbing abuses. The "new"
US policy is a cunning melange of fiction, farce,
and condescension just guaranteed to win hearts
and minds in Africa. As senior aides explained to
the Post, it "means allowing national leaders
whose security forces may seem excessively
vigorous an opportunity to explain the need for
force, rather than lecturing them about their
tactics." [emphasis added] And when the children
act up, Albright recommends engagement without
judgment - as in the Congo. The Post's State
Department source described the US approach as
"recogniz[ing] that Congo is economically and
politically bankrupt and that Kabila and other
members of the new government are political
amateurs who need help not lectures." Picture the
scene: Madeleine, helmet hair quivering slightly
as a small frown marks her brow, approaches
Laurent Kabila, military-backed head of the
Congo's "transition" government: I would really
like to understand, Mr. President, why you felt
the need to massacre all those civilians. I_m not
judging, mind you, I_m just curious and the US
would like to help. More arms perhaps?
WRETCHED IGNORANCE
On December 27, NPR's Susan Stamberg, introduced
an interview about the 45 Zapatista supporters
massacred in Chiapas: "Looking at further foreign
news, just a wretched situation in Mexico, more
than 40 people killed in Chiapas. Unheard of
before this, that sort of violence, in the civil
dispute between Indian guerrillas and armed
militias." Perhaps she wasn_t aware of frequent
and loud denunciations by human rights groups of
four years of military harassment and repeated
attacks by government aligned or sponsored
paramilitary groups against the indigenous
population.
MAD COW UPDATE
On December 12, reacting to the danger of mad cow
disease, Washington placed a ban on imports of not
only beef, but of all lamb from Europe. In 1996,
Americans had bought 375,000 tons of beef and veal
from Europe and 112,000 tons of lamb and mutton.
Eating meat or oher body parts from diseased
animals has been linked to the fatal brain-wasting
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Although the
US has no reports of cow or sheep transmissions to
humans, in Europe, outbreaks of the spongi-form
ence-phalopthies have occurred in England, France,
Portugal, Ireland, Switzerland, and the
Netherlands, while two animals in Belgium and
Luxembourg have been diagnosed with mad cow
disease. And even as the government is banning
imports, a group of cattlemen is suing the Oprah
Winfrey show for disparaging hamburgers and
warning the public of the potential hazard. This
suit is the first constitutional test for the
"food disparagement laws" that the food industry
has introduced and lobbied into law in 13 states.
In a highly unusual move, the judge in the case
has imposed a gag order on all parties until after
the jury verdict.
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