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by Terry Allen |
DISCORDANT CUBA POLICY
First the feds tried to break Manuel Noriega by blasting him out of his sanctuary with rock and heavy metal music. At the six-week-long siege at Waco, Texas, the FBI Top 40 played to drive out the Davidians included the sounds of sirens, sea gulls, off-hook telephones, bagpipes, crying babies, dying rabbits, crowing roosters and dental drills, plus Alice Cooper and, in a particularly vicious touch, Nancy Sinatra's These Boots Are Made for Walking, over and over.Now the US is trying to bring Cuba to its knees with untuned pianos. Despite the trade embargo, California piano tuner Benjamin Treuhaft was granted a special license to ship 126 old pianos and parts to Cuba for distribution to music schools and promising students. Treuhaft became a common sight in Havana, pedaling his bicycle though the streets making house calls to tune and repair local instruments.
But soon, his Send-a- Piana-to-Havana campaign ran afoul of the US government officials who must have been holed up reading Kafka and watching Three Stooges movies during the piano campaign's early stages. They quickly rallied to action.
This April, Treuhaft received a notice from the Treasury Department announcing its intention to slap him with a $10,000 penalty for violating the embargo on trade with Cuba. Tuning with the enemy, said his mother, celebrated pinko writer Jessica Mitford, who was hounded by the McCarthy witch hunts of the '50s, is still punishable by 10 years in prison.
Treuhaft had originally applied to the Commerce Department to export the pianos as humanitarian aid and saw his request rerouted, bizarrely, to the Office of Missile and Nuclear Technology. Apparently, that office failed to recognize the weapons' potential of music and eventually gave him the OK. Had I asked to ship TOW missiles to Iraq, Treuhaft said, they probably would have approved it right away. But pianos took a few extra weeks.
In the official forms Treuhaft filled out, he pledged that the exported items would not be used for the purpose of torture or other human rights abuse. He felt secure in that pledge since None of the pianos will be painted white, have candalabras placed on them, or be played by anyone wearing a sequined jacket. But when Washington bureaucrats questioned whether pianos were indeed humanitarian aid Treuhaft conceded that the fiendish communists just might find a way to use them for military purposes.
Administration officials, on condition of anonymity, speculated that the aim of the policy was actually to protect the pianos since it is a true fact that Cubans torture and abuse their pianos by playing salsa on them which, according to Treuhaft, involves pounding the keys twice as hard as anyone else.
With the fate of the free world in the balance, US officials are standing firm and the mission of musical mercy is currently stalled. Meanwhile, Treuhaft continues to threaten democracy as we know it from the Underwater Piano Shop he runs in San Francisco, so-named because I sometimes tune below C level. On the wall is a photo of Fidel, whom he refers to as a nice old fart.
SOME FBI AGENTS LIKE IT HOT
It looks like FBI agent Thomas W.W. Ward made a killing on pepper gas. In the last issue, CAQ reported that at least 60 people had died in custody after police sprayed them with the debilitatingly painful chemical.After the FBI endorsed the spray, more than 3,000 local law enforcement agencies added it to their arsenals. As a method of restraint, it was touted as more humane than a bullet to the brain; as a form of extrajudicial punishment, it was seen as less likely to create bruises or bad PR than a old-fashioned Rodney King- style beating.
It was also more profitable at least for FBI agent Ward, former director of the FBI's Quantico Firearms Training Unit and the agency's chief expert on pepper spray. This spring, he pled guilty to a single count felony for accepting a $57,000 kickback. The payment was made by Lucky Police Products, the manufacturer of Cap-Stun pepper, the country's second largest manufacturer of OC or pepper gas. Ward, who supervised, approved and guaranteed the quality and safety of the pepper spray, also promoted his product in a widely disseminated official FBI training film, a.k.a. infomercial.
The FBI said it would continue using Cap-Stun since it was unaware of any basis for finding that pepper spray is not ... safe and effective. Although eligible for a $250,000 fine and five years in prison, Ward recieved two months in prison and three years parole.
THE PHOENIX THAT ROSE FROM OTHERS' ASHES
As the Watergate-era war criminals slowly die off, the nauseatingly hagiographic eulogies are emetic enough to give the Statue of Liberty dry heaves. First Richard Nixon, and now former CIA head William Colby of Operation Phoenix infamy.A 60 Minutes feature, aired while Colby was still missing, showed the old spook admitting that he and the agency had knowingly abandoned to certain capture or death hundreds of South Vietnamese spies it dropped into North Vietnam. It turns out that the infiltration program was itself infiltrated from the start by the North and that the US knew it.
But the bureaucracy of death rolled on, fueled by the arrogance of those who thought they could run the program better than the last guy and by the cowardice of those who wouldn't stick their necks out to stop the slaughter. Colby had the distinction of falling into both categories.
After the Vietnam War, negotiations brought the release of US POWs. Meanwhile the fate of these non-white employees was ignored, and they languished in prison for up to 17 years without any attempt by the MIA/POW lobby or the agency to intervene. Now the Pentagon refuses even to give them back pay.
Colby blandly allowed that it was all a shame, but had apparently done nothing to redress the wrong. Not surprising for a man who cut his eye-fangs in a CIA covert op to interfere in the Italian electoral process to keep the Communists from gaining power. He then moved on to Vietnam where he rosily spun Ngo Dinh Diem's victory in the 1961 South Vietnam election (rigged by the CIA) as a source of hope and stability. As director of Operation Phoenix, he oversaw a pacification program in which 20-40,000 suspected Vietnamese Communists were rounded up and executed; some were tortured. He was director of the CIA by 1973, when the agency overthrew Salvador Allende, democratically-elected president of Chile, and set the stage for two decades of brutal military dictatorship. The CIA's Chile operation was, Colby later said, a prototype or laboratory experiment to test techniques of heavy financial investment in an effort to discredit and bring down a government. No wonder he was the liberals' favorite spook.
But when journalist Orianna Fallaci interviewed Colby a few years later in 1976, she recognized a true believer. After a frustrating interview, she told him, Had you been born on the other side of the barricades, you would have made a perfect Stalinist. I reject that statement, Colby replied, but, well ... it might be. No, no, it might not.
But all is forgotten/forgiven now in eulogies that gloss over or omit entirely the list of war crimes in which Colby was complicit. Instead, the media ring with praise for Colby, the man who opened up the CIA and revealed its secrets. In fact, he mostly confirmed to the Congress already compromised or about-to-be compromised operations as he was required to do by law.
If the phrase too little, too late hadn't already been awarded permanent residence on Robert McNamara's well-appointed walls, it would be a nice epitaph for Colby. Rather than revealing and redressing those misadventures that he now admits were a shame, the former DCI cashed in on his status by becoming a security consultant. He recently teamed up with a former KGB chief to market a CD-ROM game about tradecraft. Picture the two over Buds and Stoli comparing notes on the finer points of wetwork. One can hardly wait for Henry Kissinger to die if only to hear the eulogies he will reap.
REHABILITATE THYSELF
Another former CIA head is cashing in on his name and connections. In October 1995, R. James Woolsey joined the board of directors of the Sun Healthcare Group. A $1 billion company based in Albuquerque, Sun is currently under federal investigation for billing fraud at some of its nursing and rehabilitation homes around the country. Sundance Rehabilitation, the unit under investigation, provides therapy at many of Sun's 145 nursing homes and at 565 other facilities in 30 states.
After obtaining a search warrant to find evidence of conspiracy to defraud the government with respect to claims; false claims; and obstruction of proceeding before departments, agencies and committees, the FBI raided a Sun-owned facility in Seattle on July 26, 1995.
In an affidavit obtained by CAQ, Jeffrey A. Stanley, an FBI special agent assigned to the Health Care Task Force, charged that Sun CEO Andrew Turner had issued a verbal policy instructing employees to misrepresent group therapy sessions and, as a Sun worker quoting Turner reported, just bill it as individual therapy. For example, a therapist would simultaneously help five stroke victims relearn how to eat and would charge Medicare for five individual sessions. According to Woolsey, Sun received about 40 percent of its income from Medicare.
Woolsey joined the Sun board after the raid and after two other board members had resigned. The ex-DCI said he was aware of the fraud investigation when he accepted the seat. I made a general inquiry and found that there was no reason not to go on board. Asked if he considered that there was a problem working for a company involved in Medicare fraud, he declined to answer hypothetical questions. He later added that he had no ethical constraints since almost all companies face investigation.
Asked why he wanted to the board seat, Woolsey said it is an interesting industry and I am honored.
In addition to the honor, Woolsey estimated his cash compensation at $35,000 a year plus a generous stock option plan equivalent to more than two years' pay for most of the people who work in nursing homes.
While he admits to very little background in health care, the former spook cites his experience as a corporate lawyer and litigator as the reason he was selected. As the fraud investigation continues, those qualifications will no doubt come in handy.
On the reassuring side, Woolsey is no longer a member of the President's Commission on Federal Ethics Law Reform.
MAKING THE GRADE
Nigel Rodley, UN's special investigator for torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, included the US on the select list of those who commit serious violations against prisoners. It joins company with Iraq, Israel, Pakistan, Turkey, Chile, Colombia, Egypt, India, and others. Rodley's report describes conditions at certain high security prisons in the US as ``inhuman and degrading, and singles out for special mention the Security Housing Unit at California's Pelican Bay. (See CAQ, Summer1993.) In recent litigation, the federal district court concluded the conditions `may press the outer bounds of what most humans can psychologically tolerate,' Rodley noted. A substantial number of prisoners in [the unit] were said to be suffering from mental illness caused or exacerbated by their confinement in the unit. The UN investigation also cited problems at detention facilities in Texas, Oklahoma and Tennessee.
POPE CONDEMNS LOOSE CANNONS, OR STILL WAITING FOR THE POPE TO BEAR ALL
In a story for CAQ, Africa Rights heads Alex de Waal and Rakiya Omar detailed the role of the Roman Catholic Church in laying the ideological groundwork for the genocide in the predominantly Catholic nation of Rwanda.Already linked to complicity with Nazi Germany, the Argentine military junta and other unsavory regimes, the Roman Catholic Church got a tad touchy. Pope John Paul II, in a letter sent to Bishop Thaddee Ntihinyurwa, president of Rwandan Bishops Conference, said the church cannot be held responsible for wrong deeds of its members who violated church teachings. He then recommended that members of the church who sinned should have the courage of bearing the consequences of their deeds against God and their neighbors.
DADDY IS WATCHING
A new computer program is advertised as helping parents limit the time their kids spend on the computer by shutting off the unit after a set limit. But Time's Up! does more than that. It can be little Johnny or Susie's cyber Big Brother. Mommy and Daddy can set up individual dossiers for each family member that will keep track of what programs were used for how long and snitch if the kiddies spent time playing games and surfing the net rather than doing their homework.
THE SOUTH WILL RISE AGAIN
... and when this part of it does, it will still be brain-deep in the toxic sludge of racism. In a speech prepared for a debate over whether to fly the Confederate battle flag over the state capitol, Alabama State Sen. Charles Davidson, he quoted the Bible to justify slavery as part of God's plan. You may acquire male and female slaves from the pagan nations around you (Leviticus 25:40) and the senator then admonished that slaves should regard their own masters as worthy of all honor (Timothy 6:1).The issue was not race, Davidson protested. It's Southern heritage. I'm on a one-man leadership campaign to get the truth out about what our Southern heritage is all about.
Davidson's Old South was bathed in the happy glow of cheerful slaves and gentlehearted masters. The incidence of abuse, rape, broken homes and murder are 100 times greater today in the housing projects, he said, than they ever were in the slave plantations in the Old South. The truth is that nowhere on the face of the earth, in all time, were servants better treated or better loved than they were in the Old South by white, black, Hispanic, and Indian slave owners.
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