Guantanamo For All

When Barack Obama landed in Cuba in order to bury the hatchet with regards to the prolonged Cuban Cold War footing, I began to wonder about how the administration can with a smile forgive the atrocities and violation of human rights that Cuba has been known for.

As I was pondering the visit, I noticed on websites pictures of Barack Obama standing in Revolution Square with members of the American delegation to Cuba in front of an image of notorious Cuban revolutionary, Che Guevara.

Growing up, I didn’t know much about Guevara until I lived in Argentina where I knew an ex-Communist revolutionary named Blas Reyes, who told me about how Guevara was efficient in the art of mass murder and torture when he was the lieutenant of Fidel Castro.

Guevara was Fidel’s chief executioner, who helped erect a tyrannical military state to enslave his own people.

An hour before Air Force One landed, women demanding free speech and democracy in Cuba were dragged kicking and screaming from a protest march. More than 50 anti-government protesters were arrested at the Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White) demonstration as the Castro regime cracked down on dissidents ahead of the President’s visit.

The protest group holds a weekly rally outside a cathedral in an up market neighborhood of the Cuban capital, with hundreds of women and their male supporters calling for an end to political imprisonment in the Communist state.

Since the visit, I was hard pressed to come to a grim conclusion that there is an ominous hypocrisy and conspiracy happening where President Obama is seeking to establish covert programs in Cuba used to detain those who the government determines to be our enemies of the state and place them in secret “black sites.”

I have been reading about critics who are saying that Obama’s move to visit Cuba is an effort to legitimize the repressive regime there. The deal is that we look the other way when it comes to their brutal human rights violations and form an unholy alliance that would guarantee a place to send our dissidents and so-called enemy combatants to unofficial gulags.

Before you stop and tell me this is an outrageous conspiracy theory, you have to realize this is nothing new.

Even before the 1959 Cuban Revolution, before Che Guevara urged revolutionaries to begin their brutal crusade, Washington had already set about establishing two, three, many centralized intelligence agencies in Latin America.

CIA agents and other U.S. officials set to work “professionalizing” the security forces of individual countries like Guatemala, Colombia, and Uruguay. This meant they came in and took corrupt local police agencies and turned them into efficient militarized agencies. They set up an extensive security and surveillance apparatus capable of gathering information, analyzing it, and storing it.

They were able to coordinate and train the police, military, and paramilitary squads — to act on gathered surveillance information, lethally.

This was the rise of the death squads.

The U.S. greatly expanded the power of these new efficient and effective agencies, and made them the vanguard of a global war for “freedom” and of an anti-communist reign of terror in the hemisphere.

These efficient death squads and the training exercises spread with the aid of the CIA to places like Montevideo, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Asunción, La Paz, Lima, Quito, San Salvador, Guatemala City, and Managua.

The result was state terror on a nearly continent-wide scale. In the 1970s and 1980s, Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet’s Operation Condor, which linked together the intelligence services of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Chile, was the most infamous of Latin America’s tran-snational terror associations.

This was simply a brutal government experiment in South America. Their objective was to create a common enemy or ideology, then round up dissidents, protesters and insurgents and then place them in internment camps where they were either tortured or killed.

The interesting thing about this government experiment is that prominent figures in both the George W. Bush Administration and the Obama Administration were involved with this experiment. There is a compelling argument these men are still calling the shots and pulling the strings in a similar experiment being carried out in the United States.

Henry Kissinger had a crucial role in the “Condor Experiment” and has already been the subject of an extradition order from a Chilean court. He remains a prominent figure in the affairs of the US ruling establishment and is protected by the United States Government. He is believed to be part of the shadow government in the United States; an architect of the New World Order and advisor to Barack Obama.

In 2002, the Bush Administration attempted unsuccessfully to name this war criminal as the head of the “independent” panel investigating the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

Henry Kissinger was President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor at the time of Condor and today is considered a war criminal in many countries.

George H.W. Bush has also been called a war criminal for the role the CIA played under his direction in fostering and covering up for the assassination squads that roamed Latin America.

Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are likewise implicated. Cheney was the White House Chief of Staff during the Condor Operation, while Rumsfeld was defense secretary, supervising US ties to the Latin American military.

The operation consisted of intelligence agencies creating a manufactured terrorism scare and then using that as a reason to fight it with terrorism.

Under Operation Condor, the intelligence agencies used unlawful spying and wiretapping along with citizen informants to round up thousands of people who were suspected of involvement with insurgent or extremist groups.

By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans had been tortured, killed, disappeared, or imprisoned without trial, thanks in significant part to U.S. organizational skills and support. Latin America was, by then, Washington’s backyard gulag.

Using the threat of a Communist takeover, the military and police agencies, with the support of United States interests in South America, rounded up and arrested those whom they considered extremists. The military would imprison them in camps or secret detention centers. Those that were captured were tortured, interrogated, then executed and secretly buried.

The first to go were journalists, whistleblowers, and artists. There were also religious figures that were either blackmailed or exposed with manufactured stories of corruption. This caused hysteria and many unfortunate victims became known as the disappeared. Those who escaped their own dictatorship’s security services were often captured and tortured in other Condor countries and eventually returned from where they fled to be executed. Some of the Latin Americans tortured were taken to facilities known as “black sites.”

There they were tortured, beaten, and eventually died.

The United States had created more CIA black sites after the attacks of September 11th, 2001. The September 11th attacks have been compared to what happened with Operation Condor, as Latin America’s terrorist attacks and the subsequent militarization of the police and brutal killings took place on September 11th, 1973.

The first black site established by the CIA following 9/11 was located in Thailand. Its first detainee was a top al-Qaeda operative, Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in a shoot-out in Pakistan. Zubuydah suffered a gunshot wound and was treated for his injury. Following his recovery, he was subjected to interrogation methods considered torture under U.S. and international law (such as beatings, long periods of standing and water boarding.

But accusations that the United States was illegally detaining terror suspects at secret prisons in Thailand caused the Thai government to close the CIA-run facility in 2003.

The following year, another black site at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba was opened.

The prevailing idea for most Americans is that these black sites are justified as these accused terrorist deserve to be tortured without a trial. What most Americans do not know is there is a black site on American soil that does not process terrorists.

It processes average Americans.

The Guardian newspaper reported that Chicago Police are operating a secret detention facility that mirrors the CIA’s “black sites.” The Black sites or secret torture facilities gave a black eye to public relations during the Iraq and Afghan wars as human rights groups pointed the finger at Americans that were carrying out torture which was changed to the Orwellian Newspeak of “Enhanced Interrogations.”

Now, it is terrifying to hear there is a facility being operated in the United States for use on American citizens. From violations of due process to torture, the revelations raise serious concerns about the deteriorating state of freedom and justice in the United States.

The so-called “Black Site” has been located in Chicago, IL in an area known as Homan Square.

According to the Guardian News paper, suspects are interrogated without lawyers present and in fact, lawyers are often refused entry. Those who have gained access to clients claim that police still withhold information about the suspects.

The detainees are not read Miranda Rights or offered due process.

Just like CIA black sites, there have been multiple instances of violence during interrogations. In one case in February of 2013, 44-year-old John Hubbard was pronounced dead after authorities at Homan Square said he was found “unresponsive” in an interview cell.

The Cook County Medical Examiner told the Guardian it could not locate records on Hubbard’s cause of death. There is no record of why he was there in the first place.

Though these practices are eerily similar to torture sites run by the CIA, Homan’s victims are not all linked to terrorism.

James Trainum, a former Washington D.C. detective believes Homan is the only facility of its kind in the United States. Considering the high level of secrecy, it is plausible that others exist but remain undiscovered.

Though not mentioned in the report, these actions carried out in the black site resemble those made possible by the “Belligerent Act” language passed in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). These provisions essentially remove due process and allow the government to indefinitely detain Americans without charge or trial, and are still in effect today.

Of course, it is quite interesting that Chicago happens to be the city where this site exists. Barack Obama who is from Chicago was aware of this site during his first term and there has not been any effort to shut it down even though it violates fourth and 5th amendment rights and the right to due process.

Chances are these black sites are trial run sites for what most so-called fringe groups call, FEMA camps. Camps designed to detain or jail American citizenry during a citizen’s revolt or national emergency where citizens will be taken by force to these camps for interrogation or worse.

History is now repeating itself as the same players that planned and executed Operation Condor are planning a similar experiment to jail, torture, and kill American citizens that are involved in civil upheaval or insurrection.

Now Obama is in Cuba, arguably the birth place of the brutal plan for executing Latin Americans. Is he there to hedge his bets and asking for black sites to be set up again so that he can close Guantanamo?

No one knows for sure but it has been reported the Obama Administration is set to declassify military and intelligence records related to Argentina’s seven-year “Dirty War,” potentially shedding light on the US role in creating the brutality that branched out from Operation Condor.

Argentina’s government estimates that at least 13,000 people were killed or kidnapped by the regime, including babies taken from parents. Activists believe the figure is more than double that, as high as 30,000 people.

In 2002, the US government declassified more than 4,000 State Department cables and other documents related to human rights abuses during the “Dirty War.”
However, those documents failed to pierce the shroud of secrecy surrounding that period, including US involvement in Argentina’s military regime crackdown on dissidents.

In a separate release, in response to a freedom of information request by the National Security Archive, the scale of American officials’ awareness of tactics used by the Latin country’s regime against its own people was unveiled.

One of the released documents comprised of notes from a 1976 meeting between Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Argentina’s foreign minister César Augusto Guzzetti. It appeared to show Kissinger imploring his colleague to crush the protesters that were labeled as “terrorists,” by any means necessary. Jorge Mario Bergoglio supported the bloody “Dirty War” and the military regime that seized power of the Argentina in 1976.

You may know Bergoglio by his new name – Pope Francis.

The Catholic Church was complicit in the war crimes in Argentina and it appears that Bergoglio was complicit in crimes which include the abduction and murder of two Jesuit priests.

The extent of the church’s complicity in the disappearance and murder of those who rebelled was reported by Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina’s most notable journalists, in his book El Silencio (Silence). He recounts how the Argentine navy with the help of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, the newly-elected pope and formerly the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship’s political prisoners and known murderous henchmen.

Bergoglio was hiding them in his holiday home on an island called, El Silencio, located near the River Plate.

In 2014, a rosary blessed by Pope Francis was personally handed to President Barack Obama on the President’s first state visit to the Vatican. Obama rejected the gift and gave it to Nancy Pelosi.

Pope Francis of course has been very active politically in government matters and has been outspoken against capitalism. He has also been accused by many of his critics as molding the church into compliance with the New World Order.

This has been an accusation that even made against him when he was archbishop of Argentina.

I find it ironic that President Barack Obama is scheduled to visit Argentina next week during the 40th anniversary of the 1976 coup especially when his advisor Kissinger would be arrested if he were ever to step foot there.

Here in the United States, we know that divisive strategies of tension are creating a climate of anger. Our police have been militarized; many of our police agencies have been federalized and have been given military gear to be prepared for terrorism. Donald Trump has said that he will condone torture if he becomes President, which he believes should include the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, like electric shocks, the use of dogs, nudity, hypothermia, mock executions and more. All of those techniques are specifically banned by the US Army Field Manual.

Ted Cruz believes that we need to use our police forces to patrol Muslim neighborhoods in New York. Both the Mayor and the police chief denounced this calling it “demagoguery.”

However, there have been war game plans carried out by the military, and special police activities that are meant to specifically deal with protests, riots and even violent confrontations. There are also provisions and protocols on how to deal with people who are detained during possible uprisings.

The solutions proposed include the division of the county into 10 sections and with each section a regional detainment black site or internment camp.

These camps are NOT FEMA camps but highly secured centers similar to Guantanamo and Chicago that are near railroads and major highways that can deploy vast numbers of people by truck or rail car.

I want to again assure you that our government is preparing for situation critical in the United States. The reports and the documentation cannot be ignored and should not be reduced to alarmist paranoia or conspiracy theory.

Why close Guantanamo when we can have Guantanamo for all.

Text – Check out Ground Zero Radio with Clyde Lewis Live Nightly @ http://www.groundzeromedia.org