Cuban 5's Newest Friend: Colin Powell Flunky Col. Larry Wilkerson Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 20:50:04 -0500 (CDT) Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit The Cuban 5's Newest Friend: Colin Powell's Flunky Col. Larry Wilkerson NY Transfer News [To Malerich's comments below we will only add that in our view Wilkerson is a skilled disengenuous ideological whore who's recently taken a junket to Cuba and came back advocating the end of the criminal US blockade (about the same time that Barack Obama made his opportunistic speech: Is his boss Colin Powell now one of Obama's backers?). All this was duly reported on Sept 3, 2007 by Steve Clemons in guest column for The Daily Dish, a blog at the Atlantic Monthly. See: Sept 3, 2007 "Clinton and Obama in Tussle over Cuba Policy" http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20070903/067682.html Wilkerson, who's being portrayed by the mainstream nominally liberal press as some kind of rebel these days, has been doing lots of public interviews polishing Powell's tarnished image and playing up the story of Powell as victim of big bad Cheney's "deceptions" to explain his patently absurd claims at the UN (without any credible evidence whatever) of Iraq's dangerous weapons of mass destruction. Wilkerson is quoted by Clemons in the September 3 piece as saying he should have resigned long before he did (instead of following Powell around at State to the bitter end, which he is still doing) and cheerfully admitting all his past "mistakes." Then, after his ONE trip to Cuba he's an instant expert and -- without any embarrassment at all -- makes the same kind of arrogant pronouncements now as he was doing right along, during his loyal service to Powell throughout the latter's utterly cowardly and dishonest term of office. Puhhleeze. It's amazing how these guys all wait to have their epiphanies until their pensions are secure or they've been jettisoned and have tell-all books to sell. You really have to admire the gall of someone who can tell you in the same conversation how naive a boy scout he was, how badly he was fooled and (aw shucks) had the wool pulled over his eyes -- and with the next breath tell you how you should believe his every word because he's a real insider and he knows all about the secret inner workings of government. Powell himself, you will recall, testified at his OWN confirmation hearings as Secy of State nominee that he thought "sanctions" (i.e., the blockade) were worthless and counterproductive. Yet he did NOTHING as Secy of State to undo any of them, least of all the Cuba blockade and, in fact he lay down and let Cheney/Bush do worse with Iraq, Iran, and the other members of their self-defined "Axis of Evil." This is just more of the same sort of eye-wash regarding Cuba, the blockade and now the Cuban 5. As Malerich notes, Wilkerson's revelation, his interview with Clemons, this article, and the Havana Note blog itself, are all pretty incestuously connected. Both Clemons and Wilkerson are identified as contributors to the Havana Note, which is actually a project of the "21st Century US-Cuba Policy Initiative" based at the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program,B whose Director is... Steve Clemons. In other words, it's an all-in-the-family lobbying and PR effort, and once again we see the cold dead hands of Amerikan elites and biznezz leaders trying to claw their way into a marketing position, access to potential profits, and Cuba's good graces by lobbying for freer trade and travel. The last 15 years has seen dozens of these US entrepreneurial projects promoting a more "open" US policy to Cuba. This is just the latest -- though given its cast of characters, it might be one of the more duplicitous and sinister. The Cubans will smile, romance them, give them some lovely Havana Club rum, and politely accept any political help and investment offered -- just as they have with US governors hungry for business and mega-corporations like Archer Daniels Midland. But they won't be fooled for a second. As always, real friends of Cuba in the US should follow Havana's lead and act likewise. Gail Reed did, when she used the Havana Note's blog space to blast ABC TV's "20/20" TV smear against Cuba's health-care system last week. See: "Gail Reed: We Deserve Better than ABC's '20/20' on Cuban Health Care" http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20070910/068467.html published on Sep 13, 2007 -NYTransfer] *** sent by Joan Malerich - Sep 21, 2007 Cuban 5 Supported by Col. Lawrence Wilkerson [The important part in the article below in which Col. Wilkerson supports the Cuban Five is NOT that Wilkerson is such a good guy, but that even this entrenched Colin Powell supporter and military man sees the truth and reality of the innocence of the Cuban Five. Wilkerson notes that he was "stunned at what Weinglass (lead attorney for the Five) revealed." The question is: Are these military people so brainwashed that when someone reveals the obvious truth about US terrorism and Cuba's nonviolent response via the Cuban Five that they feel as if a stun gun has shot them in the head? Appears so! Wilkerson notes the Cuban government handing over information that the Five obtained re the Miami Mafia's planned terrorism against Cuba. This is true, but what Wilkerson leaves out is: The US government pretended it wanted to share intelligence information with Cuba and baited Cuba by providing some accurate information about planned terrorism by the Miami Mafia. So, Cuba invited top FBI members to Cuba and gave them over 1000 pages of documents and tapes. Not one of these documents was classified information--all could be obtained publicly. The FBI already knew much of what the documents stated, but they had not seen it all compiled. At no time did Cuba divulge the names of the Five. However, the FBI knew about the Five long before they went to Cuba.) Wilkerson states at the end: "even though it (Cuban Five case) began in the second Clinton administration, really so unbelievable when cast against the characters of the current administration?" Wilkerson refuses to see the reality of the Clinton administration. Clinton massacred thousands of people in his 78 days of bombing of the former Yugoslavia. He killed over one million people, half children, via his aggressive protection of the sanctions against Iraq. Hopefully, Wilkerson will some day wake up all the way and see that the Dems are no different than the Repubs. -JM] *** Wilkerson is a Colonel, US Army (Retired), very close to Colin Powell, first as his special assistant in the Army and later as his Chief of Staff at the State Department. The Havana Note is a group blog covering various corners of the cultural, political, military and economic dimensions of US-Cuba relations and Wilkerson is one of its contributors. It's a project of the "21st Century US-Cuba Policy Initiative" based at the New America Foundation's "American Strategy Program" (See: http://newamerica.net and http://newamerica.net/programs/american_strategy ), whose Director is Steve Clemons, publisher of the popular political blog "The Washington Note" at http://www.thewashingtonnote.com . Both Wilkerson and Clemons favor a change of U.S. policy toward Cuba. (See the Havana Note's "About us" page at http://thehavananote.com/about.htm ) Without further ado, here's Wilkerson's account of his "stunned" astonishment as the scales fell from his eyes about the Cuban 5 after hearing Leonard Weinglass's briefing. -NYTr The Havana Note - Sept 19, 2007 http://thehavananote.com/lawrencewilkerson.html I attended a briefing by Leonard Weinglass (he of the Daniel Ellsberg/Pentagon Papers fame, of the Amy Carter tribulations, and other famous efforts to achieve justice against at times huge odds) at Howard University's Law School on Wednesday, 12 September. I was stunned by what counselor Weinglass revealed. As a military officer for 31 years, I occasionally encountered Cuba. In exercises, I recall vividly that when we wargamed "the Cuba scenario" what happened was that the U.S. Navy, the FBI, the Florida State Police, the Coast Guard, and a host of other folks got involved not in invading Cuba, but in preventing a group of Cuban-Americans in Florida from doing so. I might add that such actions violated U.S. law and so, in the exercisesbwhich were in my view very realisticbwe spent our time attempting to stop several hundred small boats, loaded with automatic weapons, explosives, and lots of Cuban-Americans, from getting to Cuba. So, I was acquainted with some of the vagaries of U.S. Cuba policy. At Howard University last week, I learned the truth about yet another vagaryb"The Cuban Five." Here's a quick backgrounder. Because the Cuban government had come to much the same conclusion as the U.S. military and did not want to be invaded by a bunch of Cuban-Americans from Florida, it decided to send five Cubans to Florida to spy on this "invasion group". (And what I haven't mentioned is that this group of Floridians is considered to be a group of terrorists by Cuban authorities. Why? Because over the past few years this group has allegedly carried out terrorist acts in Cuba and killed by some counts over 3,000 Cubans. One of these acts was to bring down a Cuban airliner with 76 souls on board, all of whom perished.) When these five Cubans began reporting back to Havana about what they were discovering in Florida, the picture became very clear. In short, Cuban authorities were convinced that their country did indeed have much to worry about. So, in Havana the thought was, let's give this evidence our five "spies" have gathered to the U.S. FBI. Surely, the FBI will then understand what the U.S. military already understands, i.e., the threat to peace in the Straits of Florida is in Florida not in Cuba. And so Havana did just that. It gave to the FBI the evidence its five men had gathered in southern Florida. What did the FBI do? Well, here is the crux of the matter. The FBI turned the evidence over to the U.S. Government and it, in turn, used the evidence not to investigate and, if necessary, arrest and prosecute the law-breaking Cuban-Americans and their supporters in southern Florida, but to arrest and eventually imprison for life the five men who "spied" on these fine, loyal Floridians. When the case came to trial, a change of venue was warranted and asked for because no Miami court was going to give the Cuban Five a fair trial, since the city is largely in the hands of some of the very Cuban-Americans and their supporters who've allegedly perpetrated these atrocities on the Cuban people and are prepared to invade the island. But the change of venue motion was denied. And of course the five were convicted. But on appeal, in a decision by three of the judges of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, the trial's results were thrown outbas of course they should have been on the denial of the change of venue motion alone. The Five returned to Cuba and their families, right? No, because in a full meeting of the 11th Circuit Court with all 12 members present, the ruling of the three members was reversed and The Five went back to jail, where they have been now for nine years. The case is being reviewed yet again even as I write. That is one of the reasons that Leonard Weinglass gave the briefing at Howard University that I attended. He wanted to inform us of this apparently egregious miscarriage of justice and solicit our support in getting the decision reversed. If the facts are as counselor Weinglass reported, it is hard to believe that this case ever happened in the first placebunless, of course, one contemplates the real power of this group of Cuban-Americans in Florida and the hold they exercise over the U.S. Government. But this case sort of takes the cake: to punish with life sentences men who came here to determine how and when their country was going to be attacked by people breaking U.S. law. These men were unarmed, not intent on any physical damage to the United States, and were motivated to protect their fellow citizens from invasion and repeated attacks by Cuban-Americans living in Florida. And we have to ask also, just how is it that we have become a safe haven for alleged terrorists? How is it that webthe United States of Americabmay rate a place on our own list of states that sponsor terrorism? If the facts are as counselor Weinglass reported, this case is truly the bottom of the pit. I had great trouble believing it, but I had nothing with which to refute Mr. Weinglass' superbly delivered presentation. But more than that was my four years inside the Bush Administration. You see, I know the depths to which our government is capable of sinking. Torture. Lies. False intelligence. Tyranny. Is the continued failure to resolve fairly this case against the Cuban Five, even though it began in the second Clinton administration, really so unbelievable when cast against the characters of the current administration? Talk to your congressman or woman, please. This is a travesty. And, by the way, if you can disprove any of what Mr. Weinglass contends, fire away. America has many disastrous actions chalked up to its discredit at the moment, so to be disabused of one of such heavy import would be a gift from the gods. -Lawrence Wilkerson * ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us Our main website: http://www.blythe.org List Archives: http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ Subscribe: http://blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================= The important part in the article below in which that Col. Wilkerson supports the Cuban Five is NOT that Wilkerson is such a good guy but that even this entrenched Colin Powell supporter and military man sees the truth and reality of the innocence of the Cuban Five. Wilkerson notes that he was "stunned at what Weinglass (lead attorney for the Five) revealed." The question and/or problem is: Are these military people so brainwashed that when someone reveals the obvious truth about US terrorism and Cuba's nonviolent response via the Cuban Five that they feel as if a stun gun has shot them in the head? Appears so! Wilkerson notes the Cuban government handing over information that the Five obtained re the Miami Mafia's planned terrorism against Cuba. This is true, but what Wilkerson leaves out is: The US government pretended it wanted to share intelligence information with Cuba and baited Cuba by providing some accurate information about planned terrorism by the Miami Mafia. So, Cuba invited top FBI members to Cuba and gave them over 1000 pages of documents and tapes. Not one of these documents was classified information--all could be obtained publicly. The FBI already knew much of what the documents stated, but they had not seen it all compiled. At no time did Cuba divulge the names of the Five. However, the FBI knew about the Five long before they went to Cuba.) Wilkerson states at the end: "even though it (Cuban Five case) began in the second Clinton administration, really so unbelievable when cast against the characters of the current administration?" Wilkerson refuses to see the reality of the Clinton administration. Clinton massacred thousands of people in his 78 days of bombing of the former Yugoslavia. He killed over one million people, half children, via his aggressive protection of the sanctions against Iraq. Hopefully, Wilkerson will some day wake up all the way and see that the Dems are no different than the Repubs. Socialism or Nothing!---Joan ==================================================== Wilkerson is a Colonel, US Army (Retired), very close to Colin Powell, first as his special assistant in the Army and later as his Chief of Staff at the State Department. The Havana Note is a group blog covering various corners of the cultural, political, military and economic dimensions of US-Cuba relations and Wilkerson is one of its contributors. It's a project of the "21st Century US-Cuba Policy Initiative" based at the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program, whose Director is Steve Clemons, publisher of the popular political blog The Washington Note. Both Wilkerson and Clemons favor a change of U.S. policy toward Cuba. THE HAVANA NOTE (BLOG) http://thehavananote.com/about.html20/9/2007 THE CUBAN FIVEBy Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff (2002-05). I attended a briefing by Leonard Weinglass (he of the Daniel Ellsberg/Pentagon Papers fame, of the Amy Carter tribulations, and other famous efforts to achieve justice against at times huge odds) at Howard University's Law School on Wednesday, 12 September. I was stunned by what counselor Weinglass revealed. As a military officer for 31 years, I occasionally encountered Cuba. In exercises, I recall vividly that when we wargamed "the Cuba scenario" what happened was that the U.S. Navy, the FBI, the Florida State Police, the Coast Guard, and a host of other folks got involved not in invading Cuba, but in preventing a group of Cuban-Americans in Florida from doing so. I might add that such actions violated U.S. law and so, in the exerciseswhich were in my view very realisticwe spent our time attempting to stop several hundred small boats, loaded with automatic weapons, explosives, and lots of Cuban-Americans, from getting to Cuba. So, I was acquainted with some of the vagaries of U.S. Cuba policy. At Howard University last week, I learned the truth about yet another vagary"The Cuban Five." Here's a quick backgrounder. Because the Cuban government had come to much the same conclusion as the U.S. military and did not want to be invaded by a bunch of Cuban-Americans from Florida, it decided to send five Cubans to Florida to spy on this "invasion group". (And what I haven't mentioned is that this group of Floridians is considered to be a group of terrorists by Cuban authorities. Why? Because over the past few years this group has allegedly carried out terrorist acts in Cuba and killed by some counts over 3,000 Cubans. One of these acts was to bring down a Cuban airliner with 76 souls on board, all of whom perished.) When these five Cubans began reporting back to Havana about what they were discovering in Florida, the picture became very clear. In short, Cuban authorities were convinced that their country did indeed have much to worry about. So, in Havana the thought was, let's give this evidence our five "spies" have gathered to the U.S. FBI. Surely, the FBI will then understand what the U.S. military already understands, i.e., the threat to peace in the Straits of Florida is in Florida not in Cuba. And so Havana did just that. It gave to the FBI the evidence its five men had gathered in southern Florida. (Comment by Joan: Was not quite this simple. The US government pretended it wanted to share intelligence information with Cuba and baited Cuba by providing some accurate information about planned terrorism by the Miami Mafia. So, Cuba invited top FBI members to Cuba and gave them over 1000 pages of documents and tapes. Not one of these documents was classified information--all could be obtained publicly. The FBI already knew much of what the documents stated, but they had not seen it all compiled. At no time did Cuba divulge the names of the Five. However, the FBI knew about the Five long before they went to Cuba.) What did the FBI do? Well, here is the crux of the matter. The FBI turned the evidence over to the U.S. Government and it, in turn, used the evidence not to investigate and, if necessary, arrest and prosecute the law-breaking Cuban-Americans and their supporters in southern Florida, but to arrest and eventually imprison for life the five men who "spied" on these fine, loyal Floridians. When the case came to trial, a change of venue was warranted and asked for because no Miami court was going to give the Cuban Five a fair trial, since the city is largely in the hands of some of the very Cuban-Americans and their supporters who've allegedly perpetrated these atrocities on the Cuban people and are prepared to invade the island. But the change of venue motion was denied. And of course the five were convicted. But on appeal, in a decision by three of the judges of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, the trial's results were thrown outas of course they should have been on the denial of the change of venue motion alone. The Five returned to Cuba and their families, right? No, because in a full meeting of the 11th Circuit Court with all 12 members present, the ruling of the three members was reversed and The Five went back to jail, where they have been now for nine years. The case is being reviewed yet again even as I write. That is one of the reasons that Leonard Weinglass gave the briefing at Howard University that I attended. He wanted to inform us of this apparently egregious miscarriage of justice and solicit our support in getting the decision reversed. If the facts are as counselor Weinglass reported, it is hard to believe that this case ever happened in the first placeunless, of course, one contemplates the real power of this group of Cuban-Americans in Florida and the hold they exercise over the U.S. Government. But this case sort of takes the cake: to punish with life sentences men who came here to determine how and when their country was going to be attacked by people breaking U.S. law. These men were unarmed, not intent on any physical damage to the United States, and were motivated to protect their fellow citizens from invasion and repeated attacks by Cuban-Americans living in Florida. And we have to ask also, just how is it that we have become a safe haven for alleged terrorists? How is it that wethe United States of Americamay rate a place on our own list of states that sponsor terrorism? If the facts are as counselor Weinglass reported, this case is truly the bottom of the pit. I had great trouble believing it, but I had nothing with which to refute Mr. Weinglass' superbly delivered presentation. But more than that was my four years inside the Bush Administration. You see, I know the depths to which our government is capable of sinking. Torture. Lies. False intelligence. Tyranny. Is the continued failure to resolve fairly this case against the Cuban Five, even though it began in the second Clinton administration, really so unbelievable when cast against the characters of the current administration? Talk to your congressman or woman, please. This is a travesty. And, by the way, if you can disprove any of what Mr. Weinglass contends, fire away. America has many disastrous actions chalked up to its discredit at the moment, so to be disabused of one of such heavy import would be a gift from the gods. --Lawrence Wilkerson Colonel, US Army (Retired)Lawrence Wilkerson is the Visiting Pamela C. Harriman Professor of Government at the College of William Mary, as well as Professorial Lecturer in the Honors Program at the George Washington University. His last positions in government were as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff (2002-05), Associate Director of the State Department's Policy Planning staff under the directorship of Ambassador Richard N. Haass, and member of that staff responsible for East Asia and the Pacific, political-military and legislative affairs (2001-02). Before serving at the State Department, Wilkerson served 31 years in the U.S. Army, including as Deputy Executive Officer to then-General Colin Powell when he commanded the U.S. Army Forces Command (1989), Special Assistant to General Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-93), and as Director and Deputy Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia (1993-97). Wilkerson retired from active service in 1997 and then worked as an advisor to General Powell.