Political Report # 1385 George HW Bush thought the world belonged to his family. How wrong he was

By Ariel Dorfman The Guardian

As the world says goodbye to George HW Bush, I am tempted to add my own personal memories to the mix, and illuminate perhaps his legacy by recounting the two intense nights that my wife and I spent in close proximity to the former president at the end of October 2001. It was at the Park Hyatt hotel in Sydney, where I had been invited to deliver the Centennial Lecture celebrating the Federation of Australia. The day after our arrival, the hotel manager - a corpulent, affable man of Spanish extraction - asked us if we wouldn’t mind exchanging our suite, only for the next two days, he said, for another one, just as nice, he promised, elsewhere on the premises. Having already unpacked, and enjoying the most spectacular view of the bay and the Opera House, it wasn’t hard to respond that we had no intention of moving. Was there any reason for such an unexpected request? The manager could not elaborate further, “due to reasons of security”. Though he would honor our wishes, he regretted that our dinner reservation for that evening had been cancelled, as the dining room would be closed for a restricted event. On our way back to the hotel, Angélica and I could not contain our insane glee at depriving Bush of our room. For once, we chortled, we had bested one of the big fish who are used to seeing their every wish granted. Our antipathy towards this particular big fish ran deep: those deplorable years as Reagan’s vice-president, his racist campaign against Michael Dukakis, his invasion of Panama, his appointment of Clarence Thomas to the supreme court, his sabotage of global initiatives to reverse catastrophic climate change, the disastrous Nafta treaty, the vetoing of civil rights legislation, the presidential pardon of the neo-con Elliott Abrams, and, of course, Bush’s mawkish “thousand points of light”.

Political Report # 1242 Resurrecting the Unholy Trinity: Torture, Rendition and Indefinite Detention Under Trump

By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch

When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney launched their forever wars -- under the banner of a "Global War on Terror" -- they unleashed an unholy trinity of tactics. Torture, rendition, and indefinite detention became the order of the day. After a partial suspension of these policies in the Obama years, they now appear poised for resurrection. For eight years under President Obama, this country's forever wars continued, although his administration retired the expression "war on terror," preferring to describe its war-making more vaguely as an effort to "degrade and destroy" violent jihadists like ISIS. Nevertheless, he made major efforts to suspend Bush-era violations of U.S. and international law, signing executive orders to that effect on the day he took office in 2009.  Executive Order 13491, "Ensuring Lawful Interrogations," closed the CIA's secret torture centers -- the "black sites" -- and ended permission for the Agency to use what had euphemistically become known as "enhanced interrogation techniques." On that same day in 2009, Obama issued Executive Order 13492, designed -- unsuccessfully, as it turned out -- to close the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, the site of apparently endless detention without charges or trials. In 2015, Congress reinforced Obama's first order in a clause for the next year's National Defense Authorization Act that limited permissible interrogation techniques to those described in the U.S. Army Field Manual section on "human intelligence collector operations."

Political Report #1218 13 Million Pages of Declassified CIA Documents Were Just Posted Online

Political Report # 1218 These four computers were previously the only place to access CREST.  Image: Michael Best 13 Million Pages of Declassified CIA Documents Were Just Posted Online By Jason Koebler, Motherboard

A nonprofit organization, a persistent rabble-rouser, and their pro-bono attorney have succeeded in getting the Central Intelligence Agency to post the full contents of its declassified records database online, meaning it's now possible to access roughly 13 million pages of CIA documents dating back to the beginnings of the Cold War.

Political Report # 1204 El Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro renace en la inmortalidad

By Francisco López Segrera

La noticia de la muerte de Fidel nos llena de tristeza. Pero nos reponemos. Jamás morirá, solo ha pasado a la inmortalidad desde la que renace. Sin duda es el fin de una era, ahora debemos ser dignos de sus enseñanzas cumpliendo con su legado. Su ejemplo de audacia, genialidad política, sensibilidad, austeridad, solidaridad y valores revolucionarios, lo mantendrán vivo siempre. Fue la culminación de las luchas de Cuba por la independencia e hizo realidad el legado de Martí.  Puso a Cuba en el mapa del mundo. La convirtió en un país con dignidad, independencia y soberanía. En la primera década de la revolución se cumplió el programa de “La Historia me Absolverá” y en las décadas posteriores superó con creces lo prometido en dicho programa. En diversas áreas, como reconocen las principales agencias de ONU, Cuba se convirtió en modelo para los países del tercer mundo. Se logró reducir a niveles mínimos la pobreza y la desigualdad social. Garantizó una seguridad social universal en lo que se refiere a salud, educación y pensiones. Orientó una campaña de alfabetización - reconocida por UNESCO  como modelo - que dejó a Cuba libre de analfabetos. Apoyó el desarrollo cultural en su más amplia dimensión al igual que la educación y la educación superior. La literatura, la música y demás expresiones culturales cubanas alcanzaron con su política cultural dimensión universal. Fomentó los mejores valores humanos y convirtió a Cuba en un ejemplo de solidaridad para los demás pueblos.

Political Report # 1187 CIA: "Pinochet personally ordered" Letelier bombing

Letelier-Moffitt Memorial, Sheridan Circle, Washington, D.C.  (Photo credit: Peter Kornbluh) By Peter Kornbluh, National Security Archive

Washington D.C., September 23, 2016 - A CIA special intelligence assessment in 1987 concluded that Chilean General Augusto Pinochet ordered an "act of state terrorism" on the streets of Washington, D.C., that took the lives of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier, and his 25-year-old colleague, Ronni Moffitt, forty years ago this week. "A review of our files on the Letelier assassination," the CIA reported, "has provided what we regard as convincing evidence that President Pinochet personally ordered his intelligence chief to carry out the murder."  The assessment added that Pinochet later "decided to stonewall on the case to hide his involvement and, ultimately, to protect his hold on the presidency." The CIA report, along with other documents, were handed over to Chilean President Michelle Bachelet by Deputy Secretary of State Heather Higginbottom during a somber 40th anniversary commemoration today at Sheridan Circle - site of the car bomb assassinations in 1976 - and are being posted here by the National Security Archive. Two top U.S officials shared the CIA's assessment with President Ronald Reagan as part of an effort to lobby him to terminate support for the Pinochet regime. Among the formerly secret records revealed today was a previously unknown October 1987 White House briefing paper for Reagan prepared by his NSC adviser, Frank Carlucci, in which Carlucci advises the president: "The situation in regard to Chile is as complicated as we face anywhere."

Political Report # 1128 The Rockefeller Commission, the White House and CIA Assassination Plots

President Ford formally receives the Rockefeller Commission report, June 6, 1975. (Courtesy Gerald R. Ford Library) By John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi,  National Security Archive

Washington, DC, February 29, 2016 - The Gerald Ford White House significantly altered the final report of the supposedly independent 1975 Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA domestic activities, over the objections of senior Commission staff, according to internal White House and Commission documents posted today by the National Security Archive at The George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org). The changes included removal of an entire 86-page section on CIA assassination plots and numerous edits to the report by then-deputy White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney.

Political Report # 1113 Despite Pledge, US Still Not Letting Gitmo Detainees Tell Their Stories By Jenna McLaughlin, The Intercept

Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay prison camp. (photo: NBC)                               By Jenna McLaughlin, The Intercept

Despite promises to allow Guantanamo prisoners to speak more freely about their experiences there, the U.S. government is still blocking the release of over 100 pages of notes and diaries from torture victim Abu Zubaydah. The U.S. had for many years taken the position that the prisoners could not describe their own experiences of torture and confinement because those activities were classified. But in January, after the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report, the government changed its classification rules. In a brief filed in a military commission case, the government wrote that “general allegations of torture” minus specific details about the CIA agents involved or the location, were now unclassified. The brief specifically lists 119 names of prisoners who could now discuss details about their treatment-and, according to Joe Margulies, a law professor at Cornell and lead defense attorney for Zubaydah, his client’s name is the first one the list. Zubaydah, who the Bush administration incorrectly alleged was a key Al Qaeda operative and who has never been charged with a crime, has sent his lawyers hand-written letters, declarations, and other materials describing his torture and confinement in CIA black sites and Guantanamo Bay. Amy Jacobsen, Margulies’s co-counsel, laid out the specific steps the team took in submitting the Zubaydah material for review by the government’s Privilege Review Team in an e-mail to the Intercept. “The bulk of the material I submitted was taken from letters that [our client] had written to us, in which he described his torture, but there were also some notes from meetings with him, and some written declarations that he had made to us,” she wrote. “Sometimes these included physical descriptions of his torturers and indications of where in the world he was imprisoned, but I removed any such identifying information, leaving ellipses, such as this [ . . .] in their place,” she explained. “If he said what they were asking him about in the interrogation, I also removed that. The only information that I submitted for review was information regarding his torture, treatment, and conditions of confinement and transfer.”

Political Report #1097, CIA Asked to Release Documents Related to Massacre in El Salvador By Carmen Rodriguez, Americas Program

Colonel Perez Ochoa and Col. Domingo Monterrosa. Monterrosa ordered the slaughter of El Mozote. Photo courtesy of Giovanni Palazzo, Italian photographer who covered the armed conflict in El Salvador. By Carmen Rodriguez, Americas Program

The wounds of war have still not healed in El Salvador. Twenty-three years after the peace treaty, victims of the armed conflict are still waiting for justice and looking for their missing loved ones.

Political Report # 1054 Robert Kennedy Jr.'s 25 Truths on the Secret Negotiations between Fidel Castro and President Kennedy By Salim Lamrani, Global Research

VRAEM, a region heavy with terrorism and poverty                                               (Photo: Andina/Cortesía)

More than half a century ago, Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy conducted secret negotiations aimed at normalizing relations between the United States and Cuba. Robert Kennedy Jr., nephew of the assassinated President, recounts these events and praises Obama's policy of rapprochement, which is making his uncle's "dream" a "reality(1)".[1] 1. After the October 1962 missile crisis, a conflict that almost lead to a nuclear disaster, and its resolution that included the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba and US missiles from Turkey, President John F. Kennedy decided to undertake a process of normalization of relations with Cuba. 2. During his trip to the Soviet Union in 1962, Fidel Castro spoke at length with Nikita Khrushchev about Kennedy. According to the former president's nephew, "Castro returned to Cuba determined to find a path to reconciliation" with the United States.