Showing posts with label CIA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CIA. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 04, 2018

George SR.



THE ABSURD TIMES




Illustration:  A popularly elected leader of Chile murdered on 9/11



We have been hearing nothing but maudlin nostalgia for Bush I, and it is only the idiocy and blatant foolery of Donald Trump who twitters things away like a madman that he looks good. It dominates our news and nothing else gets through.  One must look even to the BBC, let alone RT, France24, and other international services to find out what is going on.  Below we have a reporter from Al-Jazerra, a mid-eastern service that Bush I and then Bush II bombed.  Quatar, which hosts the station, is boycotted by Saudi Arabia -- It tried to work in the U.S., but finally had to close up.

Back to Bush I.  The truth is that his perfidry is greatly underestimated.  He started as head of the CIA, his father was head of the OSS (the ancestor of the CIA) and all along he maintained the same underground self-importance and greed of the "old elite" classes, the bulwark of greed and aggression of the U.S.  During the Iran-Contra dealings he claimed he was "out of the loop" when he may very well have been the loop itself.  He was instrumental in setting up the Bay of Pigs fiasco for which the Kennedy administration is still blamed (although Dulles had set it up).  Right after that, JFK fired Alan Dulles, then the CIA director and a year later. Almost to the day, JFK was eliminated.  He was there when Alliende was overthrown by Kissinger and the CIA and much more to overcome the "Vietnam Syndrome", (which is another word for a free press).  He finally managed to pretty much wipe it out with Panama, but his real work was done in Iraq.  The Mideast is still in turmoil as a result.  Others who followed him merely improvised on it, until his son managed to wipe out the entire thing.  Then the fall of Gaddafi in Libya contributed, leading to the immigration crisis in Europe and to the various citizens turning to a populist form of fascism – which is how Hitler started and now Trump has made well known.

There is more evidence than provided below, but here it is for a start:




George H.W. Bush died in Houston on Friday night at the age of 94. Bush was elected the 41st president of the United States in 1988, becoming the first and only former CIA director to lead the country. He served as Ronald Reagan's vice president from 1981 to 1989. Since Bush's death, the media has honored the former president by focusing on his years of service and his call as president for a kinder, gentler America. But the headlines have largely glossed over and ignored other parts of Bush's legacy. We look at the 1991 Gulf War, Bush's pardoning of six Reagan officials involved in the Iran-Contra scandal and how a racist election ad helped him become president. We speak with Intercept columnist Mehdi Hasan. His latest piece is titled "The Ignored Legacy of George H.W. Bush: War Crimes, Racism, and Obstruction of Justice."


Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to look at the life and legacy of George H.W. Bush, the nation's 41st president, the father of the 43rd president. President Bush died in Houston on Friday night at the age of 94. His body will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda from tonight until Wednesday. He'll be buried later this week in Houston. There will be two memorial services: one at the National Cathedral on Wednesday and then one in Houston. Bush was elected president in 1988, becoming the first and only former CIA director to lead the country. From 1981 to 1989, he served as Ronald Reagan's vice president.
Over the weekend, the media honored Bush and his legacy, focusing on Bush's years of service, from his time in the Navy during World War II to his call as president for a kinder, gentler America. But the focus of the media's coverage has largely glossed over, or even ignored, other parts of Bush's legacy, from his expansion of the racist so-called war on drugs to his reluctance to tackle climate change, famously saying, quote, "The American way of life is not up for negotiation," unquote. It was also George H.W. Bush who nominated and continued supporting future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas even after Thomas was accused of sexual harassment by Anita Hill. Internationally, the ramifications of Bush's foreign policy in the Middle East are still being felt. In 1991, Bush launched the Gulf War in Iraq.
PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH: Our objectives are clear: Saddam Hussein's forces will leave Kuwait, will be restored to its rightful place, and Kuwait will once again the free. Iraq will eventually comply with all relevant United Nations resolutions. And then, when peace is restored, it is our hope that Iraq will live as a peaceful and cooperative member of the family of nations, thus enhancing the security and stability of the Gulf. Some may ask, "Why act now? Why not wait?" The answer is clear: The world could wait no longer.
AMY GOODMAN: Over the next 42 days, U.S. forces devastated the Iraqi civilian infrastructure and killed an unknown number of Iraqi civilians. On February 13, 1991, the U.S. bombed an air-raid shelter in the Amiriyah neighborhood of Baghdad. Four hundred eight civilians were killed. Some Iraqi relatives of the dead later sued Bush and his defense secretary, Dick Cheney, for war crimes. While the Gulf War technically ended in February of 1991, the U.S. war on Iraq would continue for decades, first in the form of devastating sanctions, then in the 2003 invasion launched by George H.W. Bush's son, President George W. Bush, the 43rd president. Thousands of U.S. troops and contractors remain in Iraq today.
President Bush's invasion of Iraq came just over a year after he sent tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of aircraft into Panama to execute an arrest warrant against its leader, Manuel Noriega, on charges of drug trafficking. General Noriega was once a close ally to Washington and on the CIA payroll. During the attack, the U.S. unleashed a force of 24,000 troops equipped with highly sophisticated weaponry and aircraft against a country with an army smaller than the New York City Police Department. An estimated 3,000 Panamanians died in the attack. Last month, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights called on Washington to pay reparations to Panama over what was widely seen as an illegal invasion.
In one of his last acts in office, President George H.W. Bush granted pardons to six former Reagan officials who were involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, when the Reagan administration secretly sold arms to Iran to help raise money for the Nicaraguan Contras despite a congressional ban on providing aid to the Contras in Nicaragua. Bush was never held liable for his role in the scandal. The ex-CIA director claimed he was, quote, "out of the loop," even though other participants and a paper trail suggested otherwise.
Bush's time in office coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union. He termed the post-Soviet era the New World Order and was a key architect of neoliberal globalization, setting the stage for, among other things, NAFTA and the WTO.
To talk more about the legacy of George H.W. Bush, we're joined by Mehdi Hasan. He's a columnist for The Intercept, host of their Deconstructed podcast. He's also host of UpFront at Al Jazeera English. His most recent piece for The Intercept, "The Ignored Legacy of George H.W. Bush: War Crimes, Racism, and Obstruction of Justice."
Mehdi, we want to thank you for being with us. Of course, when someone dies, people—and certainly in the media, when it comes to a U.S. leader—they focus on what they feel was the important praiseworthy accomplishments of a person. And it's the instinct of all not to speak ill of the dead. But, Mehdi Hasan, if you can talk about the significance of the presidency of George H.W. Bush?
MEHDI HASAN: I mean, huge significance, Amy. And you're right. You know, not speaking ill of the dead is true, and it's a basic—you know, basic courtesy and decency. But this is not about speaking ill of the dead. This is about evaluating the record of a president of the United States, the 41st president of the United States, and one of the most important human beings of the 20th century, technically.
And, yes, a lot happened on his, you know, 4-year watch. You mentioned a great deal of it in your introduction there. And I think the problem is—I find it astonishing, as a Briton living in Washington, D.C., watching cable news on Saturday and seeing this hagiography masquerading as journalism, just talking about what a great guy he was, what a great president he was, what a civil and decent human being he was, ending the Cold War, and many achievements. You know, he stood up to the NRA. He stood up to AIPAC. He did do some good things. But the idea that you only focus on the positive and you ignore the negatives, especially when the negatives involve the loss of huge amounts of human life—in Iraq, for example, in Panama—I think, is absurd. It's a dereliction of journalistic duty for a president to die and journalists to act as if they're cheerleaders and put, you know, their own, whatever, patriotism or nationalism ahead of their duty to really give a full set of facts to the viewers, you know, a first draft of history, Amy.
A president is dead. We should look back on George Bush Sr. and say, "Hold on." You know, this is a president who is being described now as the anti-Trump, right? And yet he did some things which were similar to Trump. You mentioned in your intro the pardoning of the Iran-Contra perpetrators. He pardoned Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger on the eve of his trial. And the independent special counsel at that time—the independent special counsel at that time said this was misconduct. He said this was helping cover up the crimes. And today we get all worked up when Trump says, "Oh, I might pardon Paul Manafort." I think we should hold him to the same account we hold other people. The fact that, you know, he was nicer than Trump or less aggressive than his son doesn't change the fact that he has a lot to answer for.
AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi Hasan, and then we're going to come back and look at his record, from the Iraq War to the so-called war on drugs, the Willie Horton ad that became so famous, that one of his top aides, Lee Atwater, who really devised the scheme, apologized for on his deathbed. Mehdi Hasan is a columnist for The Intercept. We'll be back with him in a moment.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "Rockin' in the Free World," Neil Young. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. Mehdi Hasan is our guest, a columnist for The Intercept, host of the Deconstructed podcast, also is host of UpFront for Al Jazeera English. You mentioned the Iran-Contra scandal. If you can explain what the Iran-Contra scandal was?
MEHDI HASAN: Yeah. So, in the 1980s, there was congressional ban on the United States government supporting the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, which were trying to bring down a communist government in South America. And you had this issue where the Reagan administration decided to sell weapons to Iran, which was supposedly an enemy country at that time, fighting Iraq, and use the proceeds from that money to fund the Contras, in violation of a congressional ban.
There was a massive investigation. It was a huge scandal—think Russiagate times 10—at the time, in the 1980s. Reagan obviously left office without being punished for it. There was a special counsel, Bob Mueller-style, which was tasked to look into this: Lawrence Walsh, a former deputy attorney general under Eisenhower, I think it was. And when he tried to look into this, he found resistance from Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush. We're now being told what an honest and transparent man he was; he followed the rule of law, unlike Donald Trump today. And yet, at the time, he refused to hand over his diary. He refused to cooperate with the special counsel. He refused to give an interview. Sounds familiar, doesn't it, Amy? And then he pardoned the six top perpetrators—Elliott Abrams, the neocon; Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's defense secretary.
And the special counsel report, which is online—you can go and look at it now—very, very clearly says that Bush helped perpetrate the cover-up. Bush did not cooperate. And he says, I think, it's the first time a president pardoned someone on the eve of a trial that the president would have had to testify in. That's what Bush Sr. did. So when we're told today, "Oh, look at the difference between George Bush Sr. and Donald Trump," well, when it comes to obstruction of justice, when it comes to cover-ups, actually they were more similar than some of the media and some of the journalists would have you believe.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let's turn to the Gulf War. In January of 1991, George H.W. Bush addressed the nation on the invasion of Iraq.
PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH: As I report to you, air attacks are underway against military targets in Iraq. We are determined to knock out Saddam Hussein's nuclear bomb potential. … Some may ask, "Why act now? Why not wait?" The answer is clear: The world could wait no longer.
AMY GOODMAN: That's President George H.W. Bush in January of 1991. Of course, flags were at half-mast in Washington this weekend, as they were in Kuwait. Mehdi Hasan, you remind us of a very important part of the story, the lead-up to what took place and how it was the U.S. responded the way they did to Iraq and Kuwait.
MEHDI HASAN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell that story.
MEHDI HASAN: So, you heard the statement from George Bush Sr. Look, let's be very clear. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait illegally, in violation of international law. It was a brutal occupation of Kuwait. No one is denying any of that. But what Bush Sr. told the country was that this came without any warning, without any provocation, when in actual fact his own ambassador at that time in Iraq, the U.S. ambassador, April Glaspie, had told Saddam, just weeks before the invasion, that we in America have no opinion on your border dispute with Kuwait. It was interpreted as a green light. Historians—many historians have suggested that was a green light to Saddam from the Bush administration to invade. After Saddam invaded, we were also told by Bush Sr. that America had to go in to protect Saudi Arabia, because that was coming next. Saddam was about to invade Saudi, as well. There were Iraqi troops massing on the border. In fact, one reporter—I think her name is Jean Heller, if I remember correctly—went and bought some private commercial satellite data and found there were no Iraqi troops massing on the border to invade Saudi Arabia. It was another lie, like his son told in the run-up to the 2003 invasion. So, it was a war built on half-truths, evasions, lies. No one is denying Saddam invaded. But what George Bush told the nation was not the full truth.
And even after he went to war, as you mentioned in your introduction, how many civilians were killed? The United States government bombed an air-raid shelter in Baghdad, the Amiriyah shelter, killed more than 400 civilians. Human Rights Watch called it a serious violation of the laws of war, because the U.S. knew—the U.S. had been told beforehand—the U.S. intel knew that that was a place where civilians were congregating. They didn't just bomb an air-raid shelter, Amy. They bombed power stations, electricity-generating facilities, food-processing plants, flour mills—the civilian infrastructure of Iraq. And this was not collateral damage. Planners from the United States government told The Washington Post, told Barton Gellman, in 1991, that they were doing this on purpose so that they would have leverage with a postwar Iraq which would be forced to supplicate in the international arena for foreign assistance. And we know what happened next, with the sanctions, with the devastation that came in the '90s and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi kids who died. That all started on George Bush Sr.'s watch.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to go back to the election of George H.W. Bush.
MEHDI HASAN: Oh, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: During his 1988 presidential bid, his campaign released a now-notorious television ad called "Weekend Passes."
NATIONAL SECURITY PAC AD: Bush and Dukakis on crime. Bush supports the death penalty for first-degree murderers. Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first-degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison. One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy in a robbery, stabbing him 19 times. Despite a life sentence, Horton received 10 weekend passes from prison. Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. Weekend prison passes: Dukakis on crime.
AMY GOODMAN: That was the ad that Lee Atwater—Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater, top aides to George Bush at the time—
MEHDI HASAN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —would apologize for on his deathbed. Explain how significant this was.
MEHDI HASAN: Hugely significant, Amy. And even today, in media journalism classes across the country, that ad is taught, that ad is studied. Until Donald Trump came along, until the migrant caravan ad came along, it was considered to be the most racist ad in modern American political history. It was the 1988 election, and George Bush Sr. and his team decided that they were going to tie Michael Dukakis, the Massachusetts liberal, to this black rapist who had been released on a weekend furlough program. I think Atwater—there's a quote from Atwater where he said, "We're going to talk about Willie Horton so much that people are going to think he's Michael Dukakis's running mate." And this was—Bush Sr. approved of this campaign ad. Bush Sr. talked about Willie Horton in press conferences.
And he never apologized. He never—you know, Atwater, on his deathbed, apologized. Bush Sr. never apologized. Roger Stone, Amy, one of the most vile political operatives of our time, close adviser to Donald Trump, former adviser to Richard Nixon, he went up to Atwater and the Bush campaign and said, "You will regret this, because this is a clearly racist ad." When Roger Stone is telling you that you're too racist, you know you've gone too far. And yet, on Saturday, on Sunday, I heard former Bush aides and advisers going on cable news saying, "He was a thoroughly decent man. He believed in civility. He didn't believe in rancor. He wanted, you know, to unify Americans." And I have two words in response to that: "Willie Horton."
AMY GOODMAN: In fact, as you quote, Lee Atwater bragged at the time, "By the time we're finished, they're going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis's running mate."
MEHDI HASAN: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: And he was talking about a policy that was actually a law in a number of states—
MEHDI HASAN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —including California.
MEHDI HASAN: Yes, indeed. I think Reagan had signed off on a similar thing, if I'm not correct. But, you know, it was a deliberate attempt to stoke racial division, to scare white voters into thinking that Michael Dukakis was going to release a bunch of black murderers and rapists who were going to come and kill and rape them. It was vicious. And even recently, Amy, what's so ironic is the same cable news hosts who have been kind of, you know, praising George Bush Sr. to the hilt since Saturday morning, a few weeks ago they were all referring to Willie Horton when they were condemning Donald Trump's migrant caravan ad, you know, the ad that came out during the midterms about the Democrats let in this murderer, cop killer. We were all reminded of Willie Horton back then, but it seems like we won't make the logical collection which says that Willie Horton, that ad, came from the Bush Sr. campaign, this guy who was supposed to be a throwback to an era of civility and decency, yet he had no problem running this racist election campaign. Nor did he have a problem escalating a racist drug war.
AMY GOODMAN: Let's talk about that drug war and what George H.W. Bush did, especially around the issue of crack.
MEHDI HASAN: Yeah. So, he sat in the White House, in the Oval Office, in 1989, and he held up a bag of crack cocaine, which he said, famously, "Well, this was found just outside the White House, in a park across from the White House. That's how bad the drug problem is." It was a great dramatic visual prop. And yet, we discovered, thanks to reporting from The Washington Post, that that drug dealer, the drug seller, had been arrested by federal agents, yes, in Lafayette Square, but he had been "lured" there, to quote The Washington Post, by those federal agents. He was told to come and sell his—by an undercover operative. And he's even heard on tape, I believe, saying, "Well, where is the White House? What's the address? I have no idea how to get there."
This was—I mean, this is pure cynicism, Amy, to use this prop in this fake stunt basically to mislead the nation, from this supposedly honest Republican president, which then led to a $1.5 billion increase in spending, which is what Bush Sr. called for. He called for more prosecutors, more jails, more prison, more courts. And we know how that story ends, Amy: mass incarceration, the imprisonment, disproportionately, of young black men, lives lost, thousands of innocent lives lost in the so-called drug war both at home and abroad. And today you have people like Rand Paul, a Republican senator, who will admit, Republican senators who will admit—Chris Christie—will say this was a failed and racist drug war.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Mehdi Hasan, I want to thank you for being with us, columnist for The Intercept, host of the Deconstructed podcast. Most recent piece for The Intercept, we'll link to, "The Ignored Legacy of George H.W. Bush: War Crimes, Racism, and Obstruction of Justice." Tomorrow we'll look at what happened in Panama, George H.W. Bush's invasion of Panama, and the thousands of people who died there, as this week we continue to honor the dead.
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Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Our Border?



THE ABSURD TIMES


Sometimes there is a need for more than one illustration.  Here is how Trump's visit to the U.K. will be greeted:


And here is how he is prophesized here:




And now, we consider the immigration problem.


These are very strange times and H. P. Lovecraft could never have imagined anything as strange as what we are facing.

Trump's immigration policy has resulted in some very surrealistic images and perhaps that is the only way to really discuss them.  It is true that judges down at the Texas southern border are supposed to conduct trials of undocumented children, so as young as two or three years old.  I tired to imagine what that scene looked like.


The defendant was a three year old child with no attorney since, as a non-resident, he did not qualify for a legal defense, especially or even a Public Defender.  The judge called the court to order and the prosecutor, an employee of the Federal Government stood up and made his opening remarks as to why bail should be denied and then sat down.  The judge turned to the child and asked, apparently with a straight face, "And what is your response?"  The child said "Agua" and that was it.  Yes, these are strange times.  There is no information on what happened next, although any judge in his or her right mind would would immediately dismiss the case.  That does not mean anything, however, as this happened in Texas during Trump.

Later that same day, someone posted a video of a cop down in Texas pointing a pistol at a group of ten year olds who were were protesting his strangling of a 16 year old, all of them shouting "Agua" or something else at him.  The cop is now on desk duty and that story is over for now.

Yes, it is a strange time for the sane and one wonders how we got here.  Of course, it is the age of Trump and intellectually perverted candidates are on a list of SCOTUS nominees.  One has been "chosen," and he is no Justice Garland, although he is the one who has published the most.  Of course, that is of litter interest to Trump and things that are published are written down and then have to be read, but somehow he has decided on him.

So, it has become time to explore how these people wound up at the border and what gangs they are fleeing.  It turns out that unlike the Chicago Cops of the 60s where they came from local high school gangs, these are American Military trained groups sent to fight communism and any other sort of human concerns.  Like Norriaga, who was trained for us at what was then called the "School of the Americas," they are all products of our own device.  The following interview makes that clear:

Across the United States, thousands of migrant children remain detained alone after the Trump administration forcibly separated them from their parents at the border. Yet, despite the news about the United States' human rights abuses of migrants, asylum seekers keep risking the dangerous journey to the United States. Texas-based human rights lawyer Jennifer Harbury has lived in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas for more than 40 years and has long worked with people fleeing violence in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. She also knows intimately the U.S. roots of this conflict. Her husband, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, was a Mayan comandante and guerrilla who was disappeared after he was captured by the U.S.-backed Guatemalan army in the 1980s. After a long campaign, she found there was U.S. involvement in the cover-up of her husband's murder and torture. We speak with Jennifer Harbury in Brownsville, Texas, about this history and this U.S. involvement in today's conflicts in Central America.


Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: I want you to tell that story of Everardo, of Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, your husband, for especially young people who maybe weren't even born at that time. But to understand the roots of the violence today, talk about what happened. Your campaigning for him was, you know, one of the remarkable moments of protest, in your protest and also what you found out.
JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, as you said earlier, he was a Mayan Indian campesino. He had grown up starving. He was involved in the—what I call the Mayan resistance movement, which was part of the URNG resistance forces during the massacre campaign, etc., etc. He was captured alive. He was one of their highest-ranking officials, and he was captured alive on March the 12th, 1992, by the military. And they realized who he was and how much valuable intelligence he had. So, instead of—instead of killing him outright, which is what they did with 99.9 percent of the prisoners of war, they kept him alive, with the help of physicians, while they tortured him long term, with the goal of breaking him for his information. And I'm pretty sure, from the evidence I have in the CIA files, that he survived two-and-a-half to three years of torture at the hands of the military intelligence people. That team of his torturers, including the former president of Guatemala, they were all intelligence paid officials for the military who were also working for the CIA.
And I set out to search for him as soon as he disappeared, because we weren't convinced he'd been killed in combat. The army faked his death to better take advantage of his intelligence. They didn't want Amnesty—Amnesty to be crying out, or the U.N. interfering, or the Inter-American Commission.
AMY GOODMAN: And didn't you even go to a military base, where they said, "This is the coffin that Everardo was in"?
JENNIFER HARBURY: I went to a military base, where they said he might be buried under the base, along with between 500 to 2,000 other people. I'm pretty sure that's not where he is. But they faked his death. They told us he was in an unmarked grave in Retalhuleu. And at the same time, about a week after he disappeared, they sent a memo to both the White House and the State Department saying, "Oh, the army just captured Bámaca alive. He's a very, very important catch. They're going to fake his death, so they can better take advantage of his information and so that they can torture him." That was six days after he was picked up. I ended up on a long series of hunger strikes, three total, one of them for 32 days in front of the palace down there.
AMY GOODMAN: Back with human rights attorney Jennifer Harbury on her husband's death, in 20 seconds.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We return to our conversation with immigration lawyer Jennifer Harbury when I was in Brownsville, Texas, last week, where she represents people seeking political asylum in the U.S. I played for her a clip of the documentary Dirty Secrets: Jennifer, Everardo & the CIA in Guatemala, a film about the murder of her husband, the Mayan guerrilla and comandante Efraín Bámaca Velásquez in the '80s.
JENNIFER HARBURY: I want to save my husband's life. I'm not going to allow him to be tortured for two-and-a-half years in a secret army prison and then shot to death or assassinated as if he was some kind of garbage. I'd rather die. I would literally rather die. And I'm prepared to do so if I have to.
I want people to understand what it means to have someone disappeared in their family. And I want people to understand what that whole system of terror against a civilian population is about.
When you're looking for someone you care about, you know, you don't sleep anymore. You just stop sleeping. You wonder every single minute, you know, "Am I fighting hard enough? Are they shooting him right now? You know, are they burning him right now? Are they pulling his fingernails out right now? You know, maybe I should be trying harder. Maybe I should be fighting harder."
AMY GOODMAN: That's a clip from Dirty Secrets: Jennifer, Everardo & the CIA in Guatemala. This is when you were on hunger strike in Guatemala City outside the U.S. Embassy there?
JENNIFER HARBURY: The very first hunger strike was in front of the Politécnica, close to the U.S. Embassy, but it's their army intelligence building. And it looks like the Wicked Witch of the West castle, with cannons and machine gun turrets. That was seven days. The second one, that appears in this clip, was in front of the National Palace, the government seat, and that was 32 days, water only. And then the very last one was in Washington, because they weren't assisting me. And that lasted 12 days, before the disclosures came out, with Congressman Torricelli, that my husband had indeed been killed by military intelligence officials, who were also working as paid informants of the CIA.
AMY GOODMAN: And link that to what we're seeing today. So, that was the violence of the 1980s, the U.S.-backed death squads in Guatemala. You really helped to expose this through your own personal experience. How does that relate to people coming over the border in the United States?
JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, let's take the example of Julio Roberto Alpirez, the colonel, right? He was witnessed torturing my husband in person. He's also known by the CIA to have helped murder Michael DeVine, a U.S. citizen innkeeper in Guatemala. There are also plenty of CIA files that say he excelled in his task of liquidating not only the guerrillas but all of their sympathizers—in other words, villagers—in the Highlands during the worst of the campaign, and that he was somewhat brutal and not well liked by his fellow military.
So, start with that person as an example. He received $44,000 shortly after he, in person, tortured my husband. He injected him with an unknown substance, out of a cylinder of gas, that made his body swell enormously, so badly that one arm and leg were bandaged because they had hemorrhaged, and he was bending over the torture table. Torricelli named him as one of those people. DEA records show that he's also on the DEA corrupt officer list. He's known to be a drug runner, a cartel leader. What did they do when the disclosures were made by Torricelli? The CIA protected him. He's their asset. They sent him and his whole family to Washington, where he lived happily for 10 years in secret, not far from the CIA. When I found out, so that I would go file a Torture Victims Protection Act case on him, the CIA notified him and immediately sent him back to Guatemala so that he could avoid any consequences. And the DEA is not allowed to take him down, because he's a CIA asset and partner for many, many years, and that's forbidden.
So there are many high-level cartel people who engaged in genocide and daily acts of torture, who now are the heads of cartels. The terrifying Zeta gang, for example, was out of Guatemala and formed by military leaders. It's also composed of many collaborators in the military still and by different police people. So these cartels are fantastically armed and trained to carry out village-by-village massacres, let alone bending people to their will. They're terrifying. I mean, some women from the Río Negro massacre, back in 1980, were not long ago found in the city dump with their teeth pulled out and their breasts and hands amputated. And those kinds of mutilations, we remember. Those are those military people. These are not street gangs. These are not kids. These are not people we have no idea who they are. The head of the Salvatrucha gang was just discovered to be a military leader in Guatemala who had been working in the anti-gang unit hand in glove with U.S. military people. They really didn't know?
AMY GOODMAN: So, that takes us to MS-13, to another country—that's El Salvador—who President Trump says he is protecting us from the gang, the MS-13 gangs in Salvador. How does that relate to what you're talking about in Guatemala?
JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, of course, the MS-13 had a lot of its roots in the United States, and then those people were deported back to Salvador. There's a whole lot of history where actually that—that happened in the United States, just as these military intelligence people that went back down there. Those people are firmly entrenched. And then the U.S. is not so much going after them as they are the victims of those people, the people running up here—the woman with two small children on her back, barefoot; the 15-year-old who's seven months pregnant from a gang rape; the man, the young man, 20 years old, with 17 bullets through his legs, that could show me the scars.
A 20-year-old who fled north after the second time the gangs told him they would kill him and the people close to him if he didn't join, he's cannon fodder at that age. And he said, "No," again, took his wife and baby, and fled north, called his mom to say, "I'm coming back for the rest of you. I'm coming right now." The day after he left, the gangs had bludgeoned his mother and younger brother to death and had gang-raped his 12-year-old sister, who was in a mental hospital, unable to speak. That young man has been sent back to Salvador.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to the Zetas and their connection to Special Forces, to training. The Zetas—a 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable that was published by WikiLeaks shows at least one Zeta, former infantry lieutenant named Rogelio Lopez, trained at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, many people, such as Julio Roberto Alpirez, who I keep mentioning because he's such a template, right? Many of them were trained at the School of the Americas, in torture and kidnapping techniques, and they used them. And then, when the war was over, they kept using them in the same way. And if we would release the files on the human rights violations and massacres committed by all of those people, then the war crimes claims that are—that people are valiantly trying to bring in Central America, something could be done. Those people could be put in prison, and then maybe we would have a lessening of the terror that's being used to drive people north in order to more easily run the drug cartels.
AMY GOODMAN: Where are the Zetas based?
JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, they were up here for quite a while, near Reynosa. They came originally out of Guatemala and southern Mexico. They were up here and owned the riverfront here for quite a while. They were pushed out a few years ago by the Golfo cartel. But in Reynosa now, they captured the—the army had captured the highest-level person, and they've captured or killed several lower-level ones. So that's fractured, and the Zetas are coming back. And they're all fighting each other, and they're fighting the Mexican Army and the Mexican marines. So there's nonstop shootouts.
Anyone that's deported to Reynosa, they're lucky if they can get off the bridge without being immediately grabbed, because they know they'll have someone up north. People struggling north, you know, with their babies and stuff, they're lucky if they don't get trafficked and grabbed. It's completely unsafe in Reynosa.
And the Zetas are clearly trying to come back, because a group of people recently paid off the correct cartel, what's left of the Golfo, got to mid-river and were shot to death, with no explanation. And that's almost for sure the Zetas coming back, saying, "Oh, you paid the wrong guys."
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Jennifer Harbury, the well-known human rights activist and attorney. And she is also well known now all over the country for having gotten the news organization ProPublica the tape of children, babies, infants, toddlers, children of tender age, crying out for their parents, saying, "Mama," "Papi." Let's go to that clip.
CHILD: [crying] Papá! Papá! Papá! Papá! Papá! Papá!
AMY GOODMAN: So, Jennifer Harbury, you're the person who got this audiotape out. Describe how this happened.
JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, the true hero, of course, is the whistleblower. And he was present in the building nearby to these children, who had just been separated from their parents recently and who were just crying desperately and in fear, the way you just heard. That whistleblower brought the tape to me, and we discussed the legal issues and stuff. And the whistleblower authorized me to get it through to the press, which is what we did.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you know—can you tell us what detention center it's from?
JENNIFER HARBURY: I'd best not.
AMY GOODMAN: And how old the children were?
JENNIFER HARBURY: The children that you hear weeping would have been possibly as young as 3, up to 6 or 7. And in the background, not weeping, are some older children that are still minors.
AMY GOODMAN: And one child who keeps on repeating the phone number of her aunt.
JENNIFER HARBURY: Remarkable.
AMY GOODMAN: Has she been reunited with her family?
JENNIFER HARBURY: I don't think she has yet. I may be wrong on that, but I believe she's still trying to get reunited with her family.
AMY GOODMAN: Even though her mother has called up and said that "This is my daughter," and her aunt has confirmed that that is her number?
JENNIFER HARBURY: Even with that. And—
AMY GOODMAN: So a judge in San Diego has just ruled that these children must be reunited with their parents—under 5 in 14 days, all children in 30 days. So, what's going to happen? Is this possible?
JENNIFER HARBURY: It's possible, if they really want to put the time and attention into it that they must. The problem, of course, is that so many people within ICE and Border Patrol feel that these refugees are just kind of trash and should not be coming to our country in the first place, that things can't be that bad back home, even though you can read that they have the highest murder rates in the world. So, I'm not sure how much—how hard they're going to try. There can be spelling mistakes in a name. And, of course, in most of Central America, instead of saying June the 10th, 1984, they're going to say 10th June, 1984, so that can be transposed sometimes, making it harder to find the person. But if they want to find the parents, of course they can. And if they want to release them immediately, of course they can. They always used to.
AMY GOODMAN: So, as we sit here, a major protest about to take place right behind us at the federal courthouse, a courthouse you know well, right here in Brownsville.
JENNIFER HARBURY: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: What message do you have for people across the country?
JENNIFER HARBURY: I think first we have to wake up and understand the basic flaw in the administration's argument that they're protecting us from cartels and terrorists and so forth. The people we are punishing are moms, kids, fathers, young teenagers that don't want to be trafficked, young men that are saying, "No, I won't work with the cartels." They're running for their lives. If the cartels wanted to send people to cross the river, as I said earlier, they can—they can buy the airport. They have bought several police units in Texas already. They can buy real—
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?
JENNIFER HARBURY: Well, a whole elite piece of our—of the police force here, not long ago, was found out to have been working with the cartels. That was very—
AMY GOODMAN: Here in Brownsville.
JENNIFER HARBURY: Not in Brownsville, up towards McAllen, in Hidalgo County. And it's inevitable, with that kind of money. They have no need to send a desperate person who speaks no English, in raggedy clothing, to try to swim the river. They don't need that. They just buy the passports. They buy the visas that are legitimate. And they can do whatever they want. So, we need to understand the difference.
Once we understand the difference, I think it becomes very clear what we have to do: protect the refugees. Protect them. Don't leave them on the bridge to go into heat stroke. Don't leave them to miscarry a child after you've been gang-raped. I mean, what are we thinking that we would declare war and bring down total abuse on people that have just run for their lives?
AMY GOODMAN: In the countries they're mainly running from—Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala—
JENNIFER HARBURY: And much of Mexico.
AMY GOODMAN: And Mexico.
JENNIFER HARBURY: Much of Mexico, and also parts of Africa—not the cartels there, but genocide and anti-gay stuff.
AMY GOODMAN: In places like Honduras, where the U.S.—back to when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, the U.S. supported a coup in Honduras. And then, even the Organization of American States saying the last election was not legitimate, the U.S. continues to support that government. How does that link, what's happening there, to the violence there?
JENNIFER HARBURY: We keep supporting our military allies. It was President Otto Pérez Molina in Guatemala, was one of the intelligence leaders responsible for my husband's three years of torture. And they knew that when he was running for office, and the State Department still covered for him, saying he was a reformist, for example. But what we're doing is we're—through our intelligence agencies, we're still giving massive support and protection to keep these military units in place and in total power over each of these countries, so that they'll do what we want with their countries. And in return, we cast a blind eye. Well, they set up these hideous drug-running cartels that are chasing these people up here and which eventually are going to land right here. And there already are signs of that in Texas. And if we haven't done our part to put those people in prison by releasing our files and halting military support for them, through elections and otherwise, then we're going to get what we deserve.
AMY GOODMAN: Human rights attorney Jennifer Harbury. I spoke to her on the border in Brownsville, Texas, last week. This is Democracy Now!I'm Amy Goodman.
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