Washington Tries to Hit Fidel; Fidel Saves Reagan!
The Confessions of Antonio Veciana
By SAUL LANDAU
CounterPunch
Miami, 2008

Antonio Veciana described three failed assassination plots he directed against Fidel Castro – with the help and encouragement of the CIA. In 1960, Maurice Bishop, aka David Atlee Phillips, had recruited Veciana for CIA dirty trick operations in Havana. Veciana described how the Agency, working with the Catholic Church, forged a Cuban “law” in which the revolutionary government would substitute for parental authority. Using this forged document, CIA agents circulated the story throughout Cuba, and included an offer by the Catholic Church to spirit the propertied classes’ children, ages 8-19, to the United States. Once free of the indoctrinating state, in the land of freedom, the kids and their parents could count on the US government to assure the children’s welfare until the families reunited – presumably after Fidel’s government was overthrown. In 1960, most of the Cubans who fled for Miami or contemplated departures believed US marines would soon clean up the “communists.”

Monsignor Walsh directed the Church role in Operation Peter Pan. Some 14,000 Cuban children got smuggled out of Cuba between 1960-62. Some kids fared well in the hands of foster families; others less so. But Veciana’s CIA supervisors went beyond “psychological warfare” -- like kid theft. Veciana told me that on April 13, 1961, his agents torched El Encanto, Havana’s Macy’s. He also described three of his plots to kill Castro. The first at the Presidential Palace in October 1961 failed when the guys who swore to fire a bazooka at Fidel chickened out.

Ten years later, Bishop-Phillips informed Veciana about a planned Fidel trip to Chile -- wink wink. (Veciana testified on this before the Senate.) He recruited two aspiring assassins in Miami and, thanks to his easy relations with the CIA and Venezuelan intelligence, arranged to train them in Caracas as news cameramen. Landing in Chile a month before Cuba’s leader, the two integrated themselves into the foreign press corps. The weapon to kill Fidel at his opening press conference they hid inside a camera. But Fidel’s late 1971 arrival in the Chilean capital also coincided with the departure of the hitmen’s courage.

Disappointed but unwilling to concede, Veciana went to Plan B. Bishop-Phillips told him Fidel planned a stop in Quito, Ecuador on his return to Cuba. Veciana contacted Luis Posada Carrilles employed by Venezuelan intelligence – and the CIA. A marksman, armed with a sniper rifle with telescopic sight which Veciana acquired, Posada could “put one in Fidel’s forehead” from half a mile away as he descended from the plane, Veciana told me, “if there was a certain get away.” Luckily, for Fidel, Posada, saw no assured escape route, and declined Veciana’s assassination offer.

New York, Saturday, summer 1984.

Nestor Garcia of Cuba’s New York UN Mission received a disturbing cable from Havana. He called Robert Muller, chief of security for the US UN Mission. “I need to talk to you, him immediately.”

Muller told Garcia his son, “a promising southpaw,” was pitching Little League game that morning. “Surely this can wait.”

“No, it can’t,” responded Garcia. The exasperated Muller met Garcia at an Irish pub in Manhattan. “This better be good, Nestor.”

Garcia read the Havana cable detailing a planned assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in three days as Reagan campaigned for reelection in North Carolina, with names of the perspective assassins and other key details.

Within hours, Secret Service investigators confirmed this with Garcia in his NY apartment. Shortly after, Garcia read a news item from a North Carolina paper announcing the arrest of several men on vague charges. Muller relayed to Garcia White House thanks. (Nestor Garcia, Diplomacia Sin Sombra, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2007)

The FBI did not, however, arrest those who planned assassinations against Castro. Indeed, in October 1976, Luis Posada, who chickened out of the Ecuador plan, hired two others to bomb a Cuban passenger plane as it ascended from Barbados. 73 passengers and crew died.

In the 1990s, Posada hired other lackeys to bomb Havana tourist sites, killing one tourist. In 1999, Panamanian police arrested him and three other hitmen. They had explosives in their rented car to be used to blow up Castro who was scheduled to speak at a Panamanian University. In 1994, the would-be assassins received a pardon from outgoing President Moscoso and now live in the United States.

Cuba remains on the State Department’s terrorist list. Washington has not claimed instances of Havana-backed plots against US Presidents; on the contrary, Cuba helped save Reagan from a possible attempt. The CIA, says Cuba, has backed some 600 documented attempts against Castro. Should Cuba put Washington on its terrorist list? Or should Secretary Clinton acknowledge Cuba doesn’t belong on its list? Long Live Reciprocity!

Saul Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow whose films are available through roundworldproductions@gmail.com. His book, A BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD, was published by CounterPunch.

The Silent Violence of Gaza's Suffering

That Candidates and Congress Ignore
By Ralph Nader
08/03/08

The world’s largest prison—Gaza prison with 1.5 million inmates, many of them starving, sick and penniless—is receiving more sympathy and protest by Israeli citizens, of widely impressive backgrounds, than is reported in the U.S. press.

In contrast, the humanitarian crisis brought about by Israeli government blockades that prevent food, medicine, fuel and other necessities from coming into this tiny enclave through international relief organizations is received with predictable silence or callousness by members of Congress, including John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The contrast invites more public attention and discussion.

Israel has militarily occupied Gaza for forty years. It pulled out its colonials in 2005 but maintained an iron grip on the area controlling all access, including its airspace and territorial waters. Its F-16s and helicopter gunships regularly shred more and more of the areas—public works, its neighborhoods and inflict collective punishment on civilians in violation of Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. As the International Red Cross declares, citing treaties establishing international humanitarian law, “Neither the civilian population as a whole nor individual civilians may be attacked.”

According to The Nation magazine, the great Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, reports that the primitive rockets from Gaza, have taken thirteen Israeli lives in the past four years, while Israeli forces have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the occupied territories in the past two years alone. Almost half of them were civilians, including some 200 children.

The Israeli government is barring most of the trucks from entering Gaza to feed the nearly one million Palestinians depending on international relief, from groups such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The loss of life from crumbling health care facilities, disastrous electricity cutoffs, gross malnutrition and contaminated drinking water from broken public water systems does not get totaled. These are the children and their civilian adult relatives who expire in a silent violence of suffering that 98 percent of Congress avoids mentioning while extending billions of taxpayer dollars to Israel annually. UNRWA says “we are seeing evidence of the stunting of children, their growth is slowing.” Cancer patients are deprived of their chemotherapy, kidney patients are cut off from dialysis treatments and premature babies cannot receive blood-clotting medications.

The misery, mortality and morbidity worsens day by day. Here is how the commissioner-general of UNRWA sums it up, “Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and-some would say-encouragement of the international community.”

Amidst the swirl of hard-liners on both sides and in both Democratic and Republican parties, consider the latest poll (February 27, 2008) of Israelis in the highly respected newspaper—Haaretz: “Sixty-four percent of Israelis say the government must hold direct talks with the Hamas government in Gaza toward a cease-fire and the release of captive soldier Gilad Shalit. Less that one-third (28 percent) still opposes such talks. An increasing number of public figures, including senior officers in the Israeli Defense Forces’ reserves have expressed similar positions on talks with Hamas.”

Hamas, which was created with the support of Israel and the U.S. government years ago to counter the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), has repeatedly offered cease-fire proposals. The Israeli prime minister rejected them, notwithstanding “a growing number of politicians and security offices who are calling for Israel to accept a cease-fire,” according to Middle East specialist, professor Steve Niva.

There is a similar contrast between the hardline Bush regime, the comparably hardline Democrats in Congress, and a recent survey by the American Jewish Committee (itself often hawkish on Israeli actions toward the Palestinians) of American Jewry.

If Democrats and Republicans were serious about peace in the Middle East, they would showcase the broad joint Israeli and Palestinian peace movements. These efforts now include the over 500 courageous Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost a loved one to the conflict and who have joined forces to form the Parents Circle - Bereaved Families Forum. Together, these families are expanding a non-violent initiative to push for a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Even though some of the families have visited the United States, their efforts are almost unknown even to U.S. observers of that area’s turmoil.

A new DVD documentary titled Encounter Point (see www.encounterpoint.com) recounts the activities and passion of these Palestinian and Israeli families steeped in the peace philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.

Do you think members of Congress will give them a public hearing? A meeting? It would be worth asking your members of Congress to do so.

Ralph Nader is running for the White House as an independent candidate.