lettre d’octobre au président Obama

Mister President Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W.

Washington DC 20500

Mr President,

For the tenth anniversary of the appalling terrorist attack of September 11th 2001, your country gave a moving homage to the victims. To the 3,034 persons killed that day, one must add the numerous members of the rescue squads that died later from inhaling poisonous substances during the rescue operations.

Almost at the same time, for the thirteenth anniversary of the arrest of the five Cubans Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, Ramón Labañino and René González, Cuba paid homage to the victims of the terrorist attacks organized by your country against their small island.

If the entire world knows of and deplores the monstrosity of the September 11th terrorist attacks, how many of your fellow citizens, Mr President, are aware that terrorist attacks against Cuba have cost the lives of 3,478 Cubans and disabled for life 2,099 others? Most of these aggressions had been prepared in Florida by extreme right-wingers of Cuban origin and financed by the C.I.A.

The five Cubans who were arrested in September of 1998, therefore three years almost to the day before the tragedy in New York, were part of the “Avispa” group, for which the mission was precisely to prevent such attacks against their country.

As the years go by, we ask ourselves more and more what is the sense of the arrests of the members of this group. Several months before being arrested, they had found out that bombs were going to be placed in Cuban airlines planes flying to Cuba from Latin American countries. These planes were going to be blown out of the sky during their flight. Fidel Castro, through an interview with Garcia Marquez, made this diabolical plot known to President Bill Clinton. In affect, on May 6th 1998, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was received at the White House.

The F.B.I.’s Southern Florida Unit must have done their job perfectly because no planes exploded in flight during this time… They maybe did their job too well, because in September of that same year, the head agent was replaced by Hector Pesquera. This man, just a few days after having been appointed, had the members of the Avispa organization arrested. His son gave the order to shred the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles case-file in August of 2003, as revealed in 2006 the journalist Ann Louise Bardach in The Washington Post.

What are the real reasons behind the arrests of the Cubans?

They were not spies – the leading personages of different U.S. intelligence agencies such as Colonel George Bucker, Admiral Eugene Carroll, Generals Edward Atkeson and Charles Wilhelm, declared that they had not the slightest access to any kind of strategic information.

The real spies, by the way, had no qualms about such things; some of them that were caught with important documents were let off lightly when they weren’t simply let out on bail. This is the case, for example, for Leandro ARAGONCILLO, an ex-Marine in the U.S. Army, who spied while working successively for Al Gore and Dick Cheney. 733 secret documents coming from the White House, the Pentagon and the Defense Department were in his possession. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. Another case is that of Khaled Abdel-Latif Dumeisi, who was part of Saddam Hussein’s secret services. He infiltrated exiled Iraqis in the United States and was sentenced to ten years and ten months of prison. There is also the case of agent Lawrence A. Franklin, who spied for Israel and who handed over an impressive amount of information to Israeli agents Steve Rosen, Keith Weissman and Naor Gilon. The first two passed themselves off as working for the “American Israel Political Committee”, the biggest Israeli lobby in Washington. Lawrence A. Franklin was sentenced to one year in prison in 2006 before being let out on bail. The same thing happened to agents Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman. We could go on and on!

So why was this anti-terrorist network arrested and given such heavy prison sentences?

Were these men disturbing someone? Were they put out of the way because they brought to light the field of aviation when terorists of Al-Qaida such as Zacarias Moussaoui, Mohamed Atta, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Nawaf Al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Midhar, Hani Hanjour and Ziad Samir Jarrah and a dozen others were preparing their September 11th terrorist attacks? These terrorists came and went without the slightest problem of visas; some of them signed up for flight training without having been investigated in the least.

Could it be that the United States government is an accomplice to these New York terrorist attacks? That would be monstrous, but one cannot help but thinking thusly and History has taught us to be cautious.

In the Machiavellian “Operation Northwoods”, organized by the Pentagon against Cuba, one can read:

“The implementation of the said actions would actually cost the lives of many American citizens, civilians and military men, which was actually the key element for their manipulative functions. “

Luckily, J.F. Kennedy, the young president and McNamara, his Secretary of Defense, opposed this plan at the last moment.

One day, and this is sure, the truth will shine forth on the subject of the members of the “Avispa” group and their arrest, just as one day we will know what exactly happened on September 11th 2001.

While waiting for that day, the unrelenting persecution of the five Cubans continues. Latest example to date: september 16, Judge Joan Lenard accepted the demand of Prosecutor Caroline Heck Miller to reject the request of the defense to allow René Gonzalez to return to Cuba upon his release on 7 October 2011. Caroline Heck Miller had distinguished herself by refusing to prosecute Luis Posada Carriles as a criminal. It was also she who had caused a clause to be added to Rene Gonzalez’s sentence whereby, once freed, the accused would be forbidden to « associate with or visit specific places where individuals or groups such as terrorists, members of organizations advocating violence, organized crime figures are known to be or fréquent »
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The reason for René Gonzalez being obliged to spend three years in United States before being allowed to return to Cuba would make us smile if the consequences were not so dreadful for him and his family : « The court wants to ensure that the conduct of the convicted once released does not threaten the United States » !!!

Mr President Obama, we ask you one more time to show that you are capable of doing justice, to give, at last, the five Cubans, Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, Ramón Labañino, and René González, back their liberty that they never should have been deprived of.

Please receive, Mr President, the expression of my most sincere humanitarian sentiments.

Jacqueline Roussie

Copies sent to: Mrs. Michelle Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Janet Napolitano; to Mr. Harry Reid, Eric Holder, John F. Kerry, Pete Rouse, Donald Werrilli, and Charles Rivkin, United States Ambassador in France.

Translated by William Peterson