The Meaning of Occupation

Dear Steve Nuñez,

I just read the print version of your interview and it is precisely why I am reluctant to grant interviews. I attempted to be candid; however, I forgot that we are living in the age of Fox News which almost makes civil discourse impossible. This is disconcerting because there can be no resolution without people listening to each other.

The first distortion is your obsession with the word “occupied,” which meaning has been totally mangled. I made two points: 1) America refers to two continents. Latin Americans chafe at the United States appropriating the term as if it had ownership of the word. They have called this chauvinistic. I did not call the book in question “Occupied Mexico.” The title of my book is a metaphor for the European occupation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. So, the question is, have Europeans treated the native peoples justly? In the book I am very critical of how the Spaniards and then the Mexicans treated the indigenous people. According to the CIA Fact book online, considerably less than one percent of the population of this country has Native American blood. What does this mean? At the same time, 30 percent of Mexico is indigenous, 60 percent are mix bloods? What does this say? In both countries there is inequality. In both countries equal access to education and amenities such as housing and income is measured by the hue of the person’s skin. In this instance, “occupied” takes on another context. Institutional racism exists and the topic should be explored in a dispassionate way.

My second concern is your audience’s lack of literacy. I read one blog saying that the United States paid for the Southwest as part of the Gadsden Purchase. First of all the reader is not dealing with fact. The Gadsden Purchase deals with southern Arizona and parts of New Mexico. Anyway, books have been written by white scholars that say that the treaty was coerced. I would recommend that the reader go to the library – it is free. My point is how can you have civil discourse with people who do not read? Who don’t understand the meaning of words? This is frustrating and I believe that it is the duty of KGUN to educate people and its duty to correct misstatements or lies.

I must say that there is a qualitative difference between your coverage and that of the print media. On my way back to LA I read the Arizona Daily Star. A front page article was titled “Border is relatively safe, gov’t data show.” According to the reporter, there is a disconnect between FBI data and what xenophobic Arizona politicos and the gaggle of extremists say. Shouldn’t the question be who is telling the truth? Is the FBI data flawed? Or, is it your politicians who are distorting the facts? Maybe, I am asking too much from people who are so full of hate – but the truth matters.

“Occupied” in this instance takes on another semantical context. Occupation becomes a metaphor for inequality. Is everyone equal in this country, and if not how can we achieve this equality? Unfortunately, this discourse is not possible in the Arizona that I just left. The Arizona where my mother’s family lived for 300 years. It is a Bladerunner world where politicos and a gaggle of disafffected people want to hunt down replicants.

Lastly, I resent others defining my patriotism. I resent censorship. To the credit of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League of which Tom Horne was a member, it has disassociated itself from Horne: “ADL regional director Bill Straus concluded, ‘Exploring one’s culture and roots is important to the overall identity that we all carry. We found there were baseless charges made about the program [La Raza Studies] and that it’s not anti-American.’ Strauss added, ‘We also found that it turned dropouts into students and then into high school graduates.’ Committee members also found the ethnic studies program promoted pride and a sense of belonging, impelling Latino youth and attracting them to the classroom.”

I have made an extensive google search of Horne’s involvement during the Vietnam War. I cannot find any record of his service. I volunteered draft during the Korean Conflict. Today, Horne wants to police teachers who have accents. I remember serving with soldiers who had Mexican and Puerto Rican accents. Were they less patriotic than Horne?

Venceremos,

Rodolfo F. Acuña, PhD
California State University Northridge

Cuban Five: The Federal Government Paid Journalists to Sabotage Trial

By LINN WASHINGTON, Jr.

Is it coincidence or conspiracy?

Supporters of five Cuban intelligence agents now serving lengthy sentences in US federal prison following controversial espionage convictions, say federal government documents detailing payments made by a US government-run anti-Castro propaganda operation to prominent Miami-area journalists prove a conspiracy.

Articles by those journalists and others, a federal appeals court once noted, contributed significantly to inflaming “pervasive community prejudice” in Miami which made it impossible for the agents known as the Cuban Five to receive a fair trial.

Others, however, claim it’s just coincidence that the same journalists who were paid $1,125 to $58,600 to appear on anti-Castro programs produced by the U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting before and during the trial for the Cuban Five also published scandalous articles about the Five in an influential Spanish language newspaper owned by the Miami Herald and in other local media.

The National Committee to Free the Cuban Five, during a recent press conference in Washington, released documents listing both the amounts of federal funds paid to the journalists and the articles they published.

“This is a most blatant and outrageous example of government influence destroying the right to a fair trial and the right to appeal,” said Gloria La Riva, Coordinator of the National Committee.

“During the pre-trial period there were hundreds of articles on the Cuban Five and not one was favorable,” La Riva said.

La Riva, in her remarks at the National Press Club in Washington, said the payments to journalists, funneled through Radio and TV Marti, violated federal law banning domestic government propaganda.

The National Committee along with the National Lawyers Guild, the Partnership for Civil Justice and the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition are calling upon U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to take immediate action to correct the unjust convictions of the Cuban Five – two of whom are serving life sentences.

The eight-month long trial for the Cuban Five that ended with their convictions in June 2001 is widely condemned as unfair partly due to the acid nature of the anti-Cuban Five news coverage that saturated Miami, where the trial was held despite repeated defense requests to have the proceeding moved away from a city containing America’s largest anti-Castro Cuban population.

A May 2005 legal analysis of the Cuban Five case conducted by the United Nation’s Human Rights Commission proclaimed the original trial “did not take place in the climate of objectivity and impartiality” required for fair trials. The Commission’s report called for a new trial.

The US federal appeals court panel that ordered a new trial for the Cuban Five in August 2005 concluded that extensive pre-trial publicity and publicity during the trial, coupled with prosecutorial misconduct, created a “perfect storm” of gale-force unfairness against the defendants.

President George W. Bush’s administration demanded a rehearing on that new trial grant and won a reversal in an August 2006 ruling that found insufficient evidence that news articles ‘impaired’ the right to an impartial jury.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal from the Five.

Ironically the same federal prosecutors who claimed “objective” news coverage didn’t rob the Cuban Five of their fair trial rights cited negative coverage in Miami when seeking to relocate the trial of a Hispanic federal agent who filed a race discrimination lawsuit against the federal government.

This astounding flip-flop by federal prosecutors regarding the prejudicial impact of news coverage came exactly one year after the Five’s conviction. Federal appellate judges found no fault with this flip-flop.

The Cuban Five, who were dispatched to the US to monitor the activities of anti-Cuban organizations in the US, enjoy hero status in their Caribbean island nation.

These men have support from governmental leaders of a wide array of nations including Argentina, Belgium, Mali, Panama, Russia and Sweden. These leaders see the Five’s imprisonment as persecution, noting that vindictive federal authorities are even denying wives of two Five members permission to visit their incarderated husbands.

The five are: Antonio Guerrero; Fernando Gonzalez; Gerardo Hernandez; Ramon Labanino and Rene Gonzalez.

U.S. authorities consider the Cuban Five dangerous operatives inserted into the U.S. to undermine opponents of the Cuban government living in the U.S. and to spy on U.S. military installations and U.S. political and law enforcement activities.

The Five, however, say their U.S. mission sought to only prevent violence in Cuba by monitoring violent anti-Castro extremists in south Florida, some of whom were conducting terrorists attacks inside Cuba.

Curiously, the FBI arrested the Five in September 1998, three months after the Cuban government gave the FBI voluminous documentation on anti-Cuban government terrorists operating in south Florida, some of whom were openly engaged in paramilitary training.

“The Cuban government gave the FBI names, addresses, videos and documents. The FBI took the information, said they would get back to them but never did,” said Leonard Weinglass, the attorney handling appeals for the Cuban Five.

Weinglass is preparing to file a new round of appeals for the Cuban Five in mid-June that will include evidence of the government payments to those journalists who later authored negative articles.

“No one knew at the time of the trial about the heavy hand of government interference. The reporting was very prejudicial,” observed Weinglass, who didn’t represent the Five at their original trial.

The National Committee to Free the Cuban Five is engaged in a separate legal battle to pry additional documents from the U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting regarding its payments to journalists. The office is s refusing to release these.

Some see similarities in government payments to journalists like Pablo Alfonso (who received $58,600 during the Five’s detention and trial period, during which time he wrote 16 negative articles), with the much criticized payments the Bush Administration provided journalists to advocate for its No Child Left Behind education program.

One of those Bush-financed “journalists,” conservative media personality Armstrong Williams, received $240,000 in payments…payments that a 2005 GAO report subsequently declared illegal.

Yet a more accurate comparison of government-journalist collusion is the FBI’s secret employment of news media sources to generate negative publicity during its infamous COINTELPRO assaults against African-American and anti-Vietnam War activists during the late 1960s and early 1970s. COINTELPRO actions included interference with court proceedings in an effort to win convictions.

“Much of the Bureau’s propaganda efforts involved giving information or articles to “friendly” media sources,” stated a 1976 U.S. Senate report on the illegal COINTELPRO actions.

The deliberate journalistic sabotage of the Cuban Five trial by paid-off journalists, as detailed in the documents released by the National Committee, apparently is not news considered worthy of reporting by mainstream U.S. media, which has blacked out the story.

A post-press conference examination found no next-day coverage in domestic mainstream media in the news data bases of Google, LEXIS and Yahoo.

“The U.S. news media hasn’t covered the Cuban Five story sufficiently,” says National Committee Coordinator Gloria La Riva.

Linn Washington is a founding member of the new collectively-owned, journalist-run online newspaper ThisCantBeHappening. His work, and that of fellow journalists Dave Lindorff, John Grant and Charles Young, is available at: www.thiscantbehappening.net

Source: CounterPunch