Latest US Threat to Cuba: 'Terror Tests' off Florida keys Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - "Jose G. Perez" LATEST US THREAT TO CUBA: "TERROR TESTS" OFF FLORIDA KEYS by Jose G. Perez I think Miami Herald article about "anti-terrorism" exercises in the Florida Straights calls for a little bit of translation: | Miami Herald - April 12, 2002 | | "Antiterror" [sic] tests planned off Keys | by Jennifer Babason | | KEY WEST - Using a crop-duster as a potential terrorist weapon, a | team of U.S. Army researchers will release mock biological and | chemical agents next week just off Key West in a test that may | determine whether radars such as those used by the National Weather | Service could soon become the cornerstone of a new national warning | system. | | "What we hope to gain from this is to basically provide the country | with a chemical and biological detection umbrella across the U.S. It | will provide early warning not only for the military but for civilian | sectors across the country," said Maj. Vince Johnston, deputy | product manager for the Army's Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical | Point Detection Systems. | | It will be the first time the Pentagon has tested a civilian Doppler | radar for possible use in detecting biological and chemical attacks. | | Engineers want to know if the long-range radars that are used all the | time to compile weather forecasts can distinguish between a cloud | toting raindrops and a cloud carrying something more sinister. | | The $400,000 test is being conducted in consultation with a host of | federal, state, and local agencies, including the Environmental | Protection Agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Fish | and Wildlife Service and the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. | | Beginning Monday, a crop-duster flown by an EPA pilot will fly 400 to | 900 feet above the Gulf of Mexico, between six and 13 miles off Key | West. | | The four-day experiment is expected to include 43 hours of flying | time. It will gauge the capabilities of four different radars, | including a National Weather Service Doppler controlled from Key | West, and an Aerostat Radar System operated by the U.S. Air Force and | mounted in blimps that hover off Cudjoe Key. | | SAFETY FACTOR | | The compounds that will be released were selected because of their | safety and similarity in size and volatility to weapons-grade | versions of deadly agents, the Army said. They include: 1,812 pounds | of clay dust; 756 pounds of egg white powder; 40 pounds of irradiated | and neutralized Bacillus Subtilis, a vegetable spore; and 1,812 | pounds of a water-polyethylene glycol solution, whose thick chemical | composition mimics a nerve agent. | | Why Key West? | | "It's one potential threat where somebody could fly a plane off in | international waters and try to disseminate this stuff," Johnston | says. ``This gives us a chance to find out what happens over water." What the U.S. is doing is not testing anti-terrorist measures, but weapons of terrorism. Consciouly, calculatedly, with malice aforethought. Key is the choice of a locale: just off Key West. This test is meant to test the dispersal of chemical and biological weapons in the general climatic conditions that prevail in that region, and specifically in Cuba, only a few dozen miles away. That's why the Miami Herald singles out the story. Some 99.9% of their readers don't give a shit whether it rains, snows or shines in Key West. But the counterrevolutionary gusano mafia has its hand stuck up the Herald's ass so far the paper's pitch is always that of a soprano. This sort of article is the unsufferable barnyard owl screeching of the soprano in the climatctic scene of some meaningless bourgeois opera. Cuba has on several occassions in the past denounced strange plagues and epidemics that arose on the island without seeming explanation. These came at moments of heightened tension within the United States. For its part, the United States could well have disarmed the Cuban government, and dealt its old adversary a devastating propaganda blow, by not just routinely dismissing the charges in not-for-attribution statements by the state department's mouthpiece d'jour. Instead, it could have given the Cuban people a practical demonstration of the difference between caring, Christian, humanist capitalism ... er, I mean, "democracy" ... and Godless Communism. It would have done so by offering Cuba help in combatting and eradicating the very plagues and epidemics that Cuba suspected --and said so publicly, to the (anonymous) State Dep't Mouthpiece's outrage-- had been caused by Uncle Sam. What more convincing proof --"contundente", we say in Spanish-- that the U.S. was NOT behind these misfortunes than to have brigades of American health workers and agricultural technicians, armed with the latest weapons from U.S. pharmacuetical labs, boarding planes for Havana, ready to do battle against the very evils Cuba was accusing the US of provoking? The Cuban patriot José Martí said the best way to say something is to DO it. You'd think that the American Imperialists, in addition to stealing his name for their anti-Cuba propaganda radio and TV, could have triangulated a profitable angle from also stealing one of his most famous sayings. Especially, if the ever-anonymous press cloaca from which US Government statements issue are to be believed about the snow-white purity and innocence of the American Imperialists and their government in these strange afflictions. If the aid had been refused, it would, of course, have exposed the cynical way the "Castro Communist dictatorship" was "manipulating" the Cuban people and playing upon their suffering; if the "Castroites" felt compelled to accept the aid, it would have been a green light to show the Cuban people that America's government and its agents are generous and self-sacrificing, veritable saints who share the pain of those less fortunate, and recognize their obligation to help them, with no thought of profit or material recompense, simply because it is the right thing to do. It would give the lie to the image of greedy, rapacious capitalists that the Cuban "Castro-communist" media seeks to impose on the American empire. But it just so happens that the United States didn't do that. Not in the slightest. Not one little bit. And I mean not one microscopically insgnificant little bit. Not even using an electron microscope. And no only that, but the US government went around persecuting and prosecuting people who did try to help Cuba, as if it had been the U.S. government all along that had planted the plagues and wanted them to have maximum effect. Which goes to show, that while it is true that sometimes appearances can be deceptive, it is ALSO true that at other times there's no point in belaboring the obvious. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it IS a duck. It's not only common sense, but also enshrined in the scientific principle known as Occam's razor. The weird thing is, if you look into these things, it turns out that it is Cuba --a tiny and poor country of 11 million souls, besieged and blockaded by the mightiest economic, political, and military Power ever seen on the face of the earth-- it is THAT Cuba that sends out doctors and medicine by the planeload to other lands beset by catastrophes, or just plain short of doctors of its own. Atheist "Castro Communism" turns out to be a better follower of the teachings of the rebel of Nazareth than the Christian capitalists to the North. Moreover, Cuba does this irrespective of the dominant political philosophy in the country whose people are being helped. If you didn't know better cause CNN and the New York Times told you what a bloodthirsty dictator he was, you'd think Fidel Castro was some sort of overaged boy scout who idealistically believed RIGHT makes MIGHT, and not the other way around. What is Cuba doing? Fidel has explained it many times, and it is a good thing to remember when so much nonsense is being written about Cuba's debts and credit rating. "Internationalism," says Fidel, "is paying our debts to humanity." No, not to the banks, not to the Former Soviet Union, not to the now extinct East Germany, and West Germany, having "united" with East Germany the way a hungry man "unites" with a piece of bread, by swallowing it, wants to present Cuba a bill, claiming commitments undertaken to one kind of Germany are unquestionable obligations to a Germany that is altogether different. And Cuba certainly does not feel any obligation to the modern money changers in the temple, the IMF, the World Bank, the Bretton Woods institutions and system. Cuba would feel not the slightest moral obligation to pay its debts to THEM, these debts have been paid in treasure and toil and blood a thousand times over, by Cubans, by people all over the third world, and even by working people within the imperialist countries. Now, Cuba may, as a practical, tactical question, choose to make payments on some or all of this paper, but that is an entirely different matter. Nor should the capitalists remonstrate against Cuba for this "opportunistic" attitude: it is the SAME approach they themselves take, they've even legalized welching on debts through the bankrtuptcy code in their own countries, not to mention the swindles like Enron, 401K plans, and employee stock options. The debt Cuba seeks to pay is of an entirely different order. It is the debt owed to the descendants of the Africans that remained in their lands after the English and Dutch and Portuguese and Spanish finished raiding them for slaves to bring to the new world -- as welll as to the descendants of those that were taken. And it IS a debt, a debt of honor, because those kidnapped Africans and sons of kidnapped Africans were the ones who fought the Spanish and battled for Cuba's independence, inspired by the legend of Indian Chief Hatuey, who spit at the Spanish as they were tying him to the stake and refused the blessings of the priests of the Roman Pope, saying he wanted no part of the heaven of the God of the Spanish colonialists. And when that 500-year-long Indian rebellion and slave uprising finally triumphed in 1959, this new nation forged of the common struggle over the centuries against subjugation and exploitation of natgive peoples, mestizos, Africans and whites did not forget her roots. For the most important thing to understand about today's Cuba is that it is NOT the product of old-style colonialism and modern imperialism, but of the struggle against them. Even when that struggle was hopeless and anti-historical and --some "Marxists" would say-- reactionary, as it was in Hatuey's time. Cuba, as it turns out, has more doctors helping in more countries than the imperialist's World Health Organization, which is part of their UN system. That's today, 2002, here and now. No "Soviet imperialism." No "KGB subsidies." No "paying with blood for Moscow Gold." None of the bullshit they told us in 1975, when Cuban workers went into Angola, and now, a quarter century later, the New York Times finally tells us, Kissinger, Nixon and Ford lied and Fidel told us the truth. And if the Palestinians have doctors today, it is because GENERATIONS of Palestinian doctors have been trained in Cuba. No, Cuba did not train all of them, not nearly. But even when Cuba was still reeling from the imperialists looting away half the medical professionals on the island, there was still room in Cuban med schools for Palestinians. And thanks to Cuba's example, others who had more resources were shamed, yes, SHAMED is the only word for it, into inviting Palestinians into their own med schools. And if the victims of the genocidal, nazi campaign by the Zionist entity are able to get to a hospital, they have medical care due to a decades long policy --no, not policy-- PRIORITY, of a revolutionary health care system. And Cuba had soldiers to send to Africa to turn back the CIA-Apartheid plot to frustrate Angolan independence when the rotten-to-the-core empire of imperialist had-been Portugal collapsed in the mid-1970s. Well, not soldiers, not exactly, but workers. Workers with guns. And --especially- BLACK workers with guns. These were workers who had completed their military service as required by law and were part of the reserves. And the revolutionary government offered to those who might be interested the opportunity to kick Apartheid's ass. And thousands, tens of thousands, of rank-and-file workers, construction workers and factory workers and office workers and toilers from every field accepted the Revolution's invitation. And they kicked Apartheid's ass, they kicked it all the way into the dustbin of history. It took a decade and a half, and if the cost in Cuban lives has ever been revealed, I am unaware of it, but without Cuba, without a government of the slaves, by the slaves, and for the slaves, it would never have happened. We'd be hearing sanctimonious speeches from Colon Powell about how of COURSE the U.S. is against Apartheid, even as he was receiving credentials from the racist regime designating him as an "honorary white person" so that he could talk to its leaders on behalf of his imperialist masters. And Cuba understood in the 1960s, in a way that no other country did, that what was at stake in Vietnam was not the fate of a country --important as that might be-- but of the human race, and did not flinch from the logical conclusion: "for Vietnam, even our own blood." And the revolution proved this was no empty slogan. It did so in Che's campaign to create "two, three ... many Vietnams." And Che fell wounded in that struggle, and was murdered at the hands of the CIA. And since that day there has been no phrase guaranteed to turn to ice the blood of the imperialists, or to fill with hope the hearts of the downtrodden the world over, than a promise taken from Fidel's eulogy for his most beloved comrade, and which is now the pledge of the Cuban children, the pioneers: "We will be like Che." And in Africa a decade later, and throughout the world today, tens of thousands of those pioneers grown into women and men have proved and prove every day that they have been true to that pledge. And the imperialists trumpet every defection, now one technician in Venezuela, now two doctors in Zimbabwe, now a diplomat in Panama, now a turmpet player or a pitcher at a PanAmerican games. And millions of Cubans, inside and outside the island, mourn for these comrades broken by the pressures of the enemy or seduced by its promises, and battle their own demons, for they are human, every last one of them. And they wage that battle with the pledge they made to themselves in childhood, I shall be like Che. And that is why American imperialism schedules terrorism exercises in the Florida Straits. It is their way of saying to the heroic people of Cuba, "You want to be like Che? We will make it so. We will kill you mercilessly, cowardly, treacherously, just like we did Che." So when American Imperialism carries out "anti-terrorism" exercises a few miles from liberty's shores, no one should doubt what is really at stake, what is really going on. These tests aren't there to fine-tune a new use for the "doppler radar" used to sell geritol, AOL accounts and dog food on the evening news. It is a direct and explicit threat to wipe off the map the REAL land of the free and home of the brave -- Cuba. THESE are the times that try men's souls, an American patriot wrote in the 1770's, and he speaks to us today. Despite the Bay of Pigs, despite the missile crisis, despite the blockade, despite the terrorist attacks, despite the assassination of Che and so many others, Cuba lives, and suffers, and fights. She must not fight alone. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytenv-04.14.02-15:49:57-5839