US Media Silences support of Cuba and the Cuban Five

[magbana]

"US Media Silences Support of Cuba and the Cuban Five

HAVANA, Cuba, March 28 (acn) An unprecedented event in the history of the United States, a gesture of solidarity with Cuba and the Cuban Five, has been silenced by the US media, reported Granma newspaper.

Cuban News Agency

In a commentary entitled “Ten Nobel Laureates Address the US Supreme Court" Granma states that on March 6, twelve amicus curiae briefs were presented to the US Supreme Court in support of a January 30 petition presented by Cuban Five defense lawyers to re-examine the case.

The petition represents the largest number of amicus ever presented before the US Supreme Court for the revision of a trial, and is signed by 10 Nobel Prize winners: José Ramos Horta, President of East Timor; Adolfo Pérez Esquivel; Rigoberta Menchú; José Saramago; Wole Soyinka; Zhores Alferov; Nadine Gordimer; Günter Grass; Darío Fo; and Máiread Corrigan Maguire.

It also includes the support of the entire Mexican Senate; the Panamanian National Assembly; Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland (1992-97); and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997-2002), who signed the amicus presented to the US Court. Joining them were hundreds of legislators from around the world, as well as organizations of lawyers and legislators.

Granma highlights that this event would have made headlines in newspapers and radio and television newscasts in the United States and in any other part of the planet, if it weren’t related to an irrefutable and also unprecedented act: the support of Cuba and the Cuban Five, unjustly imprisoned in the US for fighting terrorism against their country and in the world.

The publication points out that the self-proclaimed champions of freedom of speech, the United States, has surrounded the case in a veil of silence.
"
http://www.cubanews.ain.cu/2009/0328loscinco.htm

[EFerrari]

1. I just did a search and nada. Maybe sending this to Amy

will help a little: mail @ democracynow.org

[Judi Lynn]

2. Here's something, finally, from New Zealand:

It’s about justice, says Cuban Five lawyer
Tuesday, 17 March 2009, 11:33 am
Column: Julie Webb-Pullman


It’s about justice, not about the change of U.S. government, says Cuban Five lawyer.
by Julie Webb-Pullman



The fundamental issue in the case of the Cuban Five is the administration of United States justice in accordance with Constitutional guarantees, Nuris Piñero Sierra said in Havana last week.

One of a team of lawyers acting for the families of the five Cuban anti-terrorists held in United States jails for the past ten years, Nuris Piñero was responding to questions about the record number of amicus curiae briefs filed on 6 March 2009 with the United States Supreme Court in support of reviewing the case of Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, René González, and Fernando González<1>.

Referring to the extraordinary level of international concern reflected in the briefs lodged by jurists and civil rights groups <2>, 10 Nobel laureates<3>, academics<4>, politicians including several ex-presidents<5>, and human rights defenders<6>, Señora Piñero emphasised that what is most important to the defendants, to the United States, and internationally is the failure in this case of the U.S. justice system to meet its constitutional obligations, particularly in relation to procedural issues such as venue, civil rights issues such as racial discrimination in the selection of jurors, and the unprecedented conviction of an individual, Gerardo Hernández, for a sovereign act of State<7>.

“Really, I think that the Supreme Court will have to review the case, considering the strength of the technical and juridical arguments, and of justice itself, put forward in these twelve Amicus briefs, and by the defence,” she said.

Given the separation of powers that is designed to guarantee the independence of the judiciary and protect the administration of justice from political interference, which president is in office in either country is not, should not have been, and never should be, a factor in the determination of guilt of defendants, or in their sentencing. Commenting on the political context of the case, she declared:

“The United Nations Committee on Arbitrary Detention for the first time in history censured a North American Government for its treatment regarding an active case, when on 27 May 2004 the Committee issued their decision that the detention of these Five Cubans was arbitrary, and illegal.”

Although they should not interfere in judicial proceedings, governments do have a responsibility to ensure that their judicial systems are administered in accordance with human rights norms and constitutional guarantees. Sra Piñero stressed that the decision of the Committee on Arbitrary Detention criticised the U.S. government for its failures in relation to this case and recommended it take measures to address the failures, which it has so far failed to do. She considers the change in president is not the most important issue, rather it is the implementation within the U.S. justice system of the Committee’s recommendations, and the juridical principles underlying them. The president’s responsibility in this sense is to ensure the overall integrity of the system, while that of the Supreme Court is to apply the legal principles.

Some commentators, such as former Chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana Dr Wayne Smith, have called for a presidential pardon for the Cuban Five, considering their trials to be grossly unfair and a black mark on the U.S. justice system<8>. While the defendants will seek recourse to other options should the current application fail, the legal team is hopeful that the Supreme Court will take this opportunity to demonstrate that the US justice system does indeed have integrity, and review the case based on its important juridical principles, not least because of its wider implications than for the Cuban Five alone.

“It is a very technical and complex case...with international repercussions because of its impurities, so if North America is going reaffirm its respect for constitutional rights that have no other remedy, the Supreme Court will admit it,” Nuris Piñero concluded.

The United States Government is expected to file a Brief in Opposition by April 6, and the Court traditionally notifies which cases it has accepted for review – usually only around 1% of applicants - prior to the summer break in July.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0903/S00199.htm

[Judi Lynn]

3. Massive Legal Mobilization in Support of the Cuban Five

Massive Legal Mobilization in Support of the Cuban Five
Sumud | 03/10/2009 - 05:37» Sumoud Newsfeed, US Political Prisoners
OUTPOURING OF SUPPORT WORLDWIDE URGING THE U.S. SUPREME COURT TO REVIEW THE CONVICTIONS OF THE “CUBAN FIVE”

In a previously unheard of twelve separate briefs, array of supporters worldwide – including ten Nobel Prize winners who have championed human rights (including East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta and Irish peacemaker Máiread Corrigan Maguire); the Mexican Senate; and Mary Robinson, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and former President of Ireland – today filed amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs imploring the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Miami convictions of five Cuban government agents, the so-called “Cuban Five.” Those participants in the briefs were joined by hundreds of parliamentarians from the European Parliament and other parliaments around the world, including two former Presidents and three current Vice-Presidents of the European Parliament, as well as numerous U.S. and foreign bar associations and human rights organizations.

This is the largest number of amicus briefs ever to have urged Supreme Court to review a criminal conviction.

This extraordinary support for the Cuban Five’s case arises from widespread concern in the United States and around the world that their trial was conducted in an atmosphere tainted by prejudice against agents of the Cuban government and fear of retaliation, which amici say prevented the jury from fairly evaluating the charges against the Five. Among others,the United Nations Human Rights Commission has condemned the Miami trial of the Cuban agents, marking the first and only time in history that that body has condemned a U.S. judicial proceeding. Citing a “climate of bias and prejudice” in Miami, the Commission’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions concluded that the “trial did not take place in the climate of objectivity and impartiality that is required to conform to the standards of a fair trial.”

The amicus briefs filed today ask the Supreme Court to review the fairness of trying the Cuban agents to a Miami jury. “The trial and conviction of the Cuban 5 is a national embarrassment,” explained Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented the Nobelists in filing their amicus brief. “Our clients, ten Nobel Prize winners, acclaimed for their efforts to advance human rights, believe the trial was an international embarrassment as well. This was a trial that should have never occurred in Miami. There was no way a jury from that Miami, with is history of violence and intimidation against the Cuban government, could have reached a verdict free from retaliation by the anti-Castro community.”

Several of the amicus briefs filed by U.S. organizations also ask the Supreme Court to review the prosecution’s striking African-Americans from the jury. The prosecutor used seven of nine “peremptory challenges” (where no explanation need be given to strike a juror) to strike black jurors. The Court of Appeals ruled that no inquiry need be made into the prosecutor’s motives because three other black jurors, a minority on the 12-person jury, were seated. Amici maintain that this is allows prosecutors to mask their manipulation of the racial make-up of a jury.

The U.S. government’s brief in opposition is presently due April 6. The Court is likely to decide whether to grant review before its summer recess in June.

The amicus briefs, along with a complete list of the amici, will be posted on SCOTUSblog (www.scotusblog.com) as electronic copies become available today.

Additional background on the case:

The United States indicted the five Cubans in Miami in 1998. The indictment focused on the charge that they were unregistered Cuban agents and had infiltrated various anti-Castro organizations in South Florida.

One of the Five, Gerardo Hernandez, was also charged with conspiracy to commit murder for providing information to Havana on flights in which the anti-Castro group Brothers to the Rescue would routinely invade Cuba airspace. On February 24, 1996, two BTTR planes were destroyed after both Cuban and American officials had repeatedly warned the Miami-based group to cease its illegal incursions into Cuban territory. Cuba maintains that it shot the planes down in its territory; the U.S. has maintained that the shootdown occurred a few miles into international airspace, after the planes entered and exited Cuban airspace.

The Cuban Five requested that the trial judge move the trial out of Miami, which is home to a massive Cuban-American exile community that, beyond its ordinary hostility towards the Castro regime, had been whipped into a frenzy of anti-Castro sentiment by the Elian Gonzales debacle that took place just as the Cuban Five’s trial got underway. Judge Lenard refused that request to move the trial to a new venue some thirty miles away, and a Miami jury convicted Hernandez and the others of all charges. Judge Lenard imposed the maximum available sentences on the Five, including life imprisonment for Hernandez.

On appeal, a three-judge panel of the federal Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed the convictions and ordered a new trial because, the court held, a “perfect storm” of community prejudice and pre-trial publicity, exacerbated by the federal prosecutor’s inflammatory statements to the jury, deprived Hernandez and the other Cubans of a fair trial.

The entire Court of Appeals, however, vacated the panel’s decision, finding no error in the government trying the case to a Miami jury. It returned the case to a panel to evaluate the remaining issues in the appeal.

In another key ruling, two of the three judges on the panel refused to reverse the Miami jury’s conviction of Hernandez. Judge Kravitch dissented, finding that there was no evidence at all that Hernandez knew there would be a shootdown, let alone an unlawful shootdown in international airspace.

http://sumoud.tao.ca/?q=node/view/1233

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
HOW THE HELL COULD OUR OWN MEDIA IGNORE THE U.N. CONDEMNATION OF THIS U.S. COURT PROCEDURE?

[Mika]

4. The same way that US media ignored our guilt re: terrorism against Nicaragua

http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq13.html

[Judi Lynn]

5. Starting to look through your link, I spotted something I want to know more about.

From the article:

~snip~
In the ensuing analysis we shall be referring frequently to the disclosures of former CIA official John Stockwell. Stockwell was the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the CIA and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA’s secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he eventually resigned. As a a former U.S. Marine Corps major who was then promoted to the CIA’s Chief of Station and National Security Council coordinator – making him a 13 year CIA veteran - Stockwell is a leading authority on the CIA and the clandestine workings of U.S. foreign policy, whose revelations must therefore be taken very seriously indeed. Stockwell confirms that the millions of dollars invested by the United States in Central America were, in fact, siphoned to the rich rather than the general population of the countries involved, and consequently culminated in destabilising the region to a tremendous degree. For example, the CIA and the United States recruited, trained and funded the police units that were to become the death squads in El Salvador - and continued to support them when that became the case. Under the ‘Alliance for Progress’ in the early 1960s, the CIA developed the treasury police who, as John Stockwell relates, used to “haul people out at night... and run trucks over their heads”, and who “have killed something over 50,000 civilians in the last 5 years ”, as reported by the Catholic Church. According to testimony before the U.S. Congress leaders of the treasury police were still on the CIA payroll as late as 1982.<17>

Another example of the results of the United States investment is also discussed by John Stockwell: the ‘public safety program’ which had operated throughout Central and Latin America for 26 years. This consisted of “teaching police units to break up popular subversion by interrogating people”, including “instruction in torture techniques”. According to Stockwell, Dan Metrione, “the famous exponent of these things”, “did 7 years in Brazil and 3 in Uruguay, teaching interrogation, teaching torture. He was supposed to be the master of the business, how to apply the right amount of pain, at just the right times, in order to get the response you want from the individual”. Stockwell remarks that this operation was so conspicuously brutal, that Amnesty International complained and published reports. This was followed by United Nations hearings and eventually - under international pressure - even a U.S. Congress investigation, to investigate the inaccurately titled ‘public safety program’.<18>

This is important.

I only stopped in for a quick look, so I'll have to read the material closely later. I want to make sure I get it all, and file it, and do research on this also.

There's SO MUCH we haven't been told.

One thing I wanted to mention in response to your comment is that Cuban "exile" Reagan appointee to his State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy, Otto Reich is the one who rode herd on our media, bullying, intimidating, going to their offices, actually initiating dirty rumors about them, publicly accusing them of consorting with straight and gay prostitutes in Central America while covering the Iran/Contra story, and he basically beat them down but good. Maybe some of them were scared into writing the truth, but then, they should have gotten into other fields, as the public has every right to be informed on what its own government is doing.

So Otto Reich was beating down the press, and other Cuban "exiles" like Luis Posada Carriles, and his confederates were working IN Iran/Contra operations at all levels. Nice bunch, eh?

Thank you for this new name to study which will lead to new information.

[Mika]

6. Judi, a point of note.

As you know, the Cuban Revolution kicked the bastards out. The people's revolutionary government kept the Cuban people safe from the usual dirty work of US henchmen (aside from the occasional excursion by Posada, and an Alpha 66 mission or two). All the while the US economic hitmen as well as the assassins and paid "contras" were busily at work against many other Latin American and Caribbean nations who's governments and people were not working in solidarity as the Cuban government and people were. Cuba kept the murderers at bay. Kept the people safe from the all too familiar US coordinated death squad politics of imperialism.

It is on so many levels that Cuba led (and continues to lead) the way. This is why the former Cuban Head of State, and the current one, as representatives of the Cuban people's solidarity, are so popular among the struggling peoples of the Latin Americas, Caribbean and Africa.

Viva the Cuban Five Heroes!
www.freethefive.org

Viva Cuba!
Viva Venezuela!

[EFerrari]

7. Otto Reich is the second presenter in the video I posted today

about that right wing hit book about Chavez.