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Authorities in New Jersey have said they hope a historic warming of ties between the United States and Cuba will help them capture and imprison Black Panther Assata Shakur. "We view any changes in relations with Cuba as an opportunity to bring her back to the United States to finish her sentence for the murder of a New Jersey State Trooper in 1973," said State Police Superintendent Colonel Rick Fuentes. The encounter left both the officer and a fellow Black Panther, Zayd Malik Shakur, dead. Shakur has said she was shot by police with both arms in the air, and then again from the back. She was sentenced to life in prison but managed to escape and flee to Cuba, where she has lived since 1984. What will happen to Shakur now? We put the question to two attorneys: Michael Ratner and Martin Garbus.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, I wanted to switch gears before the end of the show and go back to Cuba—massive news this week about the beginning of normalization of relations. And I wanted to ask you about the issue of Assata Shakur. Authorities in New Jersey have said they hope a historic warming of ties between the U.S. and Cuba will help them capture and imprison Black Panther Assata Shakur. In a statement, State Police Superintendent Colonel Rick Fuentes said, "We view any changes in relations with Cuba as an opportunity to bring her back to the United States to finish her sentence for the murder of a New Jersey State Trooper in 1973."
The encounter left both the officer and a fellow Black Panther, Zayd Malik Shakur, dead. Assata Shakur has said she was shot by police with both arms in the air, and then again from the back. She was sentenced to life in prison, managed to escape, fled to Cuba, where she has lived since 1984. I got to see her there a few years later. In 1998, Democracy Now! aired Assata Shakur reading an open letter to Pope John Paul II during his trip to Cuba. She wrote the message after New Jersey state troopers sent the pope a letter asking him to call for her extradition.
ASSATA SHAKUR: I later joined the Black Panther Party, an organization that was targeted by the COINTELPRO program, a program that was set up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to eliminate all political opposition to the U.S. government’s policies, to destroy the Black Liberation Movement in the United States, to discredit activists and to eliminate potential leaders.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Assata Shakur reading an open letter to, at the time, Pope John Paul II. Martin Garbus, what will happen to Assata Shakur?
MARTIN GARBUS: She will not be returned. Fidel Castro, when she came there, said that she would be allowed to stay in Cuba indefinitely. I had a meeting about a month ago with five congresspeople, including Representative Barbara Lee, and they were also absolutely clear that they would oppose any attempts on the United States to succeed that would get Assata Shakur back. So, to me, it’s absolutely clear she’s not coming back.
AMY GOODMAN: Black Panther Sundiata Acoli has been ordered released on parole, a state New Jersey—appeals court in New Jersey, after more than four decades in prison, but New Jersey has appealed, so he’s remaining in prison. The significance of this, Michael Ratner?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, New Jersey has been outrageous about these cases. I mean, think about Assata’s case. And think about driving while black in New Jersey. Think about what’s happened from Ferguson to Garner in New York. And I ask you, "What do we think about what happened to Assata?" And I agree with Marty: There is a 100 percent chance that she will not be forced out of Cuba. A hundred percent. I don’t even question it. But, of course, you see New Jersey. They’ve raised the reward on her to $10 million. The FBI put her on their most wanted list, etc. So they’re clearly after her. But I’m completely confident, as Marty is, that the Cubans will not have her extradited to the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: We will—
MARTIN GARBUS: If Menendez is indicted, that will be helpful.
MICHAEL RATNER: What? I’m sorry.
AMY GOODMAN: And we’ll link to our pieces—what did you say?
MARTIN GARBUS: If Menendez is indicted, that will be helpful.
AMY GOODMAN: We’ll link to our pieces on Assata Shakur at democracynow.org. That does it for our show. Michael Ratner, thanks so much for joining us, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and chair of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. As well, Martin Garbus, thanks so much for being with us, a leading attorney in this country.
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Should Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld & CIA Officials Be Tried for Torture? War Crimes Case Filed in Germany
A human rights group in Berlin, Germany, has filed a criminal complaint against the architects of the George W. Bush administration’s torture program. The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights has accused former Bush administration officials, including CIA Director George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, of war crimes, and called for an immediate investigation by a German prosecutor. The move follows the release of a Senate report on CIA torture which includes the case of a German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, who was captured by CIA agents in 2004 due to mistaken identity and tortured at a secret prison in Afghanistan. So far, no one involved in the CIA torture program has been charged with a crime — except the whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed it. We speak to Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and chairman of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, and longtime defense attorney Martin Garbus.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A human rights group in Berlin, Germany, has filed a criminal complaint against the architects of the George W. Bush administration’s torture program. The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights has accused former Bush administration officials, including CIA Director George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, of war crimes, and called for an immediate investigation by a German prosecutor. The move follows the release of a Senate report on CIA torture, which includes the case of a German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, who was captured by CIA agents in 2004 due to mistaken identity and tortured at a secret prison in Afghanistan. So far, no one involved in the CIA torture program has been charged with a crime—except the whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed it.
AMY GOODMAN: In a statement earlier this week, Wolfgang Kaleck, general secretary of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, said, "By investigating members of the Bush administration, Germany can help to ensure that those responsible for abduction, abuse and illegal detention do not go unpunished," unquote.
Meanwhile, President Obama is standing by his long-standing refusal to investigate or prosecute Bush administration officials for the torture program. In a statement, he called on the nation not to, quote, "refight old arguments." As Obama continues to reject a criminal probe of Bush-era torture, former Vice President Dick Cheney has said he would do it all again. Cheney spoke to NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday.
DICK CHENEY: With respect to trying to define that as torture, I come back to the proposition torture was what the al-Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11. There is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogation. ... It worked. It worked now. For 13 years we’ve avoided another mass casualty attack against the United States. We did capture bin Laden. We did capture an awful lot of the senior guys of al-Qaeda who were responsible for that attack on 9/11. I’d do it again in a minute.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Cheney’s claim that he would approve torture again highlights a key question: Are top officials above the law, and will the impunity of today lead to more abuses in the future? The question spans a wide chain of command from Cheney, President Bush and other White House officials, who kickstarted the torture program after 9/11; to the lawyers in the Justice Department, who drafted the memos providing legal cover; to the CIA officials, who implemented the abuses and misled Congress and the public; and to the military psychologists, who helped devise the techniques inflicted on prisoners at U.S. military prisons and secret black sites across the globe.
AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about this, we’re joined now by two guests. Michael Ratner is back with us, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, chair of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. CCR has been working with the European Center to file criminal complaints against Bush administration officials complicit in the use of torture. He’s also the author of The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book.
Martin Garbus is also back with us, one of the leading attorneys in the U.S. Time magazine calls him "one of the best trial lawyers in the country." National Law Journal has named him one of the country’s top 10 litigators.
We welcome you both back to Democracy Now! Yesterday we were talking to you both about Cuba; today we’re talking about all the news that has come out. Martin Garbus, should President Bush, should George Tenet, should Donald Rumsfeld, should Dick Cheney be put on trial for torture?
MARTIN GARBUS: They should be. The bad thing about it is they all have a defense they can rely on: They have the defense of the lawyers’ opinions that were given to them—the opinions of Gonzales, Bybee and John Yoo. And unless you can pierce those decisions, you have a very tough time. It seems to me a prosecution that ends badly—and I think it would end badly in the United States—might not be one that will be brought. But what should happen is with respect to those lawyers. When Jay Bybee was elected to the court of appeals in 2002—was nominated and then voted upon by the Senate—and John Yoo presently teaches at Berkeley university. At the—
AMY GOODMAN: At University of California, Berkeley, law school.
MARTIN GARBUS: California. At the time that Yoo was appointed to Berkeley, there was a mass demonstration of students against him. At the time that Bybee was nominated for the judgeship by Bush, he was criticized, but you did not yet have all this information. What Senator Leahy has said, that if you had all this information, Jay Bybee never would have passed. Clearly, if you had all this information that you have now, John Yoo wouldn’t be appointed. What should happen is there should be complaints filed in the bar associations. They should be suspended and disbarred. Then, perhaps, if you have a prosecution, you already have established the faultiness, the horrific faultiness, of the legal opinions. So it seems to me, at least in this country, a condition precedent, as we lawyers say, before you can have a prosecution, has to be the invalidation of the legal opinions.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And—
MICHAEL RATNER: I want to just say, I’m not here to debate Marty on this. And he’s a defense lawyer. But I strongly disagree that Bush, Cheney, et al., would have a defense. This wasn’t like these memos just appeared independently from the Justice Department. These memos were facilitated by the very people—Cheney, etc.—who we believe should be indicted. This was part of a conspiracy so they could get away with torture. But that’s not the subject here now. I just want to—so, that is clear to me.
Secondly, whatever we think of those memos, they’re of uselessness in Europe. Europe doesn’t accept this, quote, "golden shield" of a legal defense. Either it’s torture or it’s not. Either you did it or you didn’t. And that’s one of the reasons, among others, why we’re going to Europe and why we went to Europe to bring these cases through the European Center.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But I wanted to ask you about that, because—as the clip we played of President Obama saying it’s no use refighting old arguments, but you are in essence refighting arguments in Europe that the United States refuses to deal with.
MICHAEL RATNER: But, of course, you know, Cheney just showed us exactly why you have to—have to prosecute torture. Because if you don’t prosecute it, the next guy down the line is going to torture again. And that’s what Cheney said: "I would do it again."
And now, the European case is really interesting. We did try this in 2004—you covered it here. We tried it in 2006—you covered it here. But now, because of the Senate report, we have a much stronger case in Germany than we ever had, particularly with regard to a German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, who was taken off the streets of Macedonia, sent to the Salt Pit, which is known as Cobalt in the Senate report.
AMY GOODMAN: Wait, explain, though.
MICHAEL RATNER: Yeah, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us that story. It’s a remarkable story. He was on a bus?
MICHAEL RATNER: He was on a bus to take a vacation in Skopje in Macedonia, and he gets pulled off by agents of our government, gets taken off the bus, gets, you know, sodomized, essentially, with a drug, and then gets taken from there to the Salt Pit in Afghanistan, which is a CIA black site torture center, known as Cobalt in the report. He’s there for four months. Everybody knows by—at some point along, this is a mistake. There was another guy with a similar name. It wasn’t this guy. Even after they’re told that it’s a mistake, they leave him in there, and they leave him to be tortured. They finally, at the end of this, just take him out of there, and they drop him off somewhere—
AMY GOODMAN: Condoleezza Rice was involved with this, right?
MICHAEL RATNER: Condoleezza Rice, and so was this woman—
AMY GOODMAN: They held him further because they realized they had been torturing the wrong man.
MICHAEL RATNER: That’s correct. And the European Court of Human Rights actually weighed in on this case. And what they did is they held Macedonia liable for allowing that kidnapping on their streets, and fined them. And they found that what happened to him on the streets of Macedonia was torture. So—
AMY GOODMAN: Who else was involved?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we—I want to go to Khalid El-Masri in his own words, describing his time inside a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan.
KHALID EL-MASRI: [translated] I was the only one in this prison in Kabul who was actually treated slightly better than the other inmates. But it was known among the prisoners that other prisoners were constantly tortured with blasts of loud music, exposed to constant onslaughts of loud music. And they were—for up to five days, they were just sort of left hanging from the ceiling, completely naked in ice-cold conditions. The man from Tanzania, whom I mentioned before, had his arm broken in three places. He had injuries, trauma to the head, and his teeth had been damaged. They also locked him up in a suitcase for long periods of time, foul-smelling suitcase that made him vomit all the time. Other people experienced forms of torture whereby their heads were being pushed down and held under water.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Khalid El-Masri describing his torture in a CIA black site. Michael?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, yes, and they knew he was innocent. And there’s a woman who was just identified—who has been identified for a long time, who works for the CIA. Her name is Bikowsky, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, who apparently was one of the people who insisted, even though there was people in the agency saying that "We’ve got the wrong guy," who insisted on having him picked up and taken there. She’s also, apparently, one of the models for the woman in Zero Dark Thirty. And Jane Mayer recently wrote an article about her; it’s, I think, called "The Queen of Torture" or something like that ["The Unidentified Queen of Torture"]—didn’t identify her by name. But she is one of the defendants in the lawsuit in Germany.
And let me just say, Germany—whatever happened before, between the NSA spying on Germany and the fact that their citizen has now been revealed to have been kept in a torture place, when it was known that he was innocent, I’m pretty sure that Germany is going to take this very seriously.
And I just spoke to a person you’ve had on here before, Scott Horton, who’s the columnist for Harper’s, as well as an expert on national security, and Scott tells me that because of these cases we have filed in Europe, that over a hundred CIA agents have been given advice that they should not leave the United States. Let me just say, what we’re going to win here in the end, I can’t say, but that already to me is a major victory.
MARTIN GARBUS: A major victory would be to prosecute the lawyers themselves—
AMY GOODMAN: Martin Garbus.
MARTIN GARBUS: —because otherwise what’s going to happen in the future is you’re going to have activities, like Cheney or whomever, you’ll have people in the CIA and the NSA relying on faulty legal opinion. So I think a strong emphasis in the United States has to be stop future lawyers from doing the same thing as was done here.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And your point is that these memos, they consciously knew that they were violating torture statutes.
MARTIN GARBUS: They consciously knew. And I think Michael is right, of course, that they were doing it under the chain of command—Cheney and the other people. But I think that’s very difficult to prove, and I think you should go after the lawyers immediately now.
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, since that time, John Yoo is an eminent professor at University of California, Berkeley, law school, and Bybee—
MARTIN GARBUS: Jay Bybee is a respected federal judge. "Respected."
AMY GOODMAN: —was elevated to a judgeship.
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New York has become the first state in the nation with major natural gas deposits to ban the oil and gas extraction process of hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, citing potential risks to public health. Fracking involves blasting sand, water and toxic chemicals deep into shale rock to release oil and gas, a process which can poison water supplies and pollute the air. Following a two-year study, New York Acting Health Commissioner Howard Zucker said fracking was too risky. We speak to biologist, activist and author Sandra Steingraber, co-founder of New Yorkers Against Fracking. Also joining us is Cornell University professor Tony Ingraffea, president of Physicians, Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy.
Image Credit: flickr.com/NYAgainstFracking
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: New York has become the first state in the nation with major natural gas deposits to ban the oil and gas drilling process known as fracking, citing potential risks to public health. Fracking involves blasting sand, water and toxic chemicals deep into shale rock to release oil and gas, a process which can poison water supplies and pollute the air. Following a two-year study, acting New York Health Commissioner Howard Zucker said fracking was too risky.
HOWARD ZUCKER: The potential risks are too great. In fact, they are not even fully known. Relying upon the limited data that is presently available to answer the public health risks would be negligent on my part. I have identified significant public health risks in the current data. And until the public health red flags are answered by valid evidence through longitudinal long-term studies, prospective analysis, patient surveys with large population pools showing that the risk for impact on public health are avoidable or sufficiently low, I cannot support high-volume hydraulic fracturing in the great state of New York.
AMY GOODMAN: The decision to ban fracking was announced by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
GOV. ANDREW CUOMO: This is an emotional debate, and I think this is a very factual presentation and persuasive on the facts. Do I believe the facts will trump all emotion? No. So I’m sure the people who disagree with this will continue to disagree with it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Anti-fracking activists welcomed the ban with celebrations across the state. Environmentalists have waged a fierce campaign to ban fracking in New York. The actor and longtime anti-fracking activist Mark Ruffalo posted a short video online after the ban was announced.
MARK RUFFALO: New York state just passed a moratorium on hydrofracking. Thank you, Governor Cuomo, Joe Martens and Commissioner Zucker. And thanks to all the beautiful, dedicated people in the anti-fracking movement, who used science, their guts, their brains and their hearts to make this day a reality. Love you!
AMY GOODMAN: Activists note infrastructure related to fracking remains in place upstate New York. On Tuesday, 41 people were arrested for blocking the gates of a gas storage facility as part of a campaign against the Texas-based company Crestwood Midstream. The group, We Are Seneca Lake, has seen more than 130 arrests in a series of actions against the company’s plans to expand methane gas storage at a lake which provides drinking water to 100,000 people.
Among those at the protest was the biologist, the activist, the author, Sandra Steingraber. She joins us now from Ithaca, New York. She co-founded both New Yorkers Against Fracking and Concerned Health Professionals of New York. Her books include Living Downstream and, her latest, Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis.
Also joining us from Cornell University is Cornell professor Tony Ingraffea. He’s also the president of Physicians, Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! This is a major decision. New York has major gas deposits. Sandra Steingraber, can you talk about how this actually happened? Sure, the governor announced it, but what was the pressure brought on the governor?
SANDRA STEINGRABER: Well, that’s a tale that could be told as an opera, I think. So, we had the good fortune to have a moratorium in place by our previous governor, and I’ll let Tony tell some of the details of how that came to be. But because we had pushed the pause button, that gave those of us in the scientific community a chance to begin to really look at the data and the research and what it showed.
And we started off with only a handful of studies. There were only six studies on the health effects of fracking and the environmental impacts in 2008, for example, when we had the first moratorium declared. Now there are 414 studies and counting. And so, it was like we had pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and when you only have a couple of pieces and you try to see what the picture is, it’s hard to see. But we saw troubling signs, but it was a little bit like trying to read the tea leaves. And then, as more data came in and more studies were done, and we talked to more scientists and we knew what the data looked like that was in the pipeline that was coming up to be published, we began to put more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. And now we have 414 pieces assembled.
And even though there are still parts of the picture we can’t see very well, what’s obvious to us now is that fracking is not only harmful to our water supply and poisons our air and is beginning to actually show signs of and indicators of making people sick, but also that the problems associated with fracking are inherent to the engineering itself and cannot be mitigated in any regulatory framework. So we couldn’t see any signs that fracking had been done in a certain way, under certain rules that could govern the safety of it such that people wouldn’t be harmed.
And so, we—Tony and I, together—as well as a whole bunch of other scientists, we didn’t just take that information to our regulatory agencies—although we did that, too—because they actually seem sort of deaf to the science. We started early on taking it directly to the citizenry. So, this idea that sort of science and politics exist in two separate boxes, I don’t think so. I mean, objectivity is one thing, and we’re really objective as scientists, but science is not neutral, and it’s not a monk that should be sequestered away in a monastery. Science is like a gladiator that should be in the public arena. And so, we took—we spent, I don’t know, a couple years, every Friday night in a church basement somewhere, in a Rotary Club, in a public library, in a junior high school gymnasium, giving PowerPoint presentations with whatever data we had to groups of citizens in small towns all across the state. And so, that began then citizen organization. Local ban movements sprang up. And then, of course, at some point in 2011, 2012, we had so many different anti-fracking groups, that we united them then under the umbrella, my organization, New Yorkers Against Fracking. And then, Concerned Health Professionals of New York was the sort of science branch of that movement.
And at the same time, Tony’s shop, Physicians, Scientists and Engineers, a completely separate organization, we began to look at the same data sets—PSE from a statistical point of view, we did the qualitative analysis. We not only brought that out to the people in our compendiums and reports, we sent it to our Department of Health commissioners, first Dr. Shah, now Dr. Zucker. We sent it to the DEC. We sent it to the governor. So we were constantly bringing data forward to inform the political process.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Sandra—
SANDRA STEINGRABER: So that was a big—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Sandra—
SANDRA STEINGRABER: That was a big part of it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —on that whole issue—
SANDRA STEINGRABER: And then, of course, musicians and filmmakers all played their own role in captivating the citizenry and uniting us and making us feel like we were on a winning team.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Sandra, on this whole issue of your outreach to citizen groups, I remember talking to Governor Cuomo a few weeks ago when he was at the Daily News Editorial Board and asking him specifically about the fracking issue, and it was clear that he was feeling enormous pressure. Clearly, the primary vote, where Zephyr Teachout won huge numbers of vote in the region targeted for fracking, he was aware that there was a major upsurge in the population of New York state that was opposed to fracking. And I have to think that that had some kind of impact on this final decision of his health commissioner. Clearly, the local municipalities were banning fracking in their own area. There were protests constantly where the governor went. So this was a—meanwhile, the rest of the country was increasingly turning to fracking, other states. So this is a really unusual situation, what’s happened here in New York state.
SANDRA STEINGRABER: It is. And I really just want to be really clear and thank the governor for listening to the science, because the part of the pressure he was feeling was the pressure of science, because we equipped the citizenry to bring the science, as citizens, to their government. And Governor Cuomo then, in the end, said he would let science make the decision. And he sure did. So, from my perspective as a scientist in the public interest, as somebody who’s spent a lot of years in public health, where I see decision makers and political leaders and elected officials not interested and turning away from the science, here’s a governor who embraced it and said no and stood up to the gas industry. So, all my gratitude to you today, Governor Cuomo.
ANTHONY INGRAFFEA: Amen.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to a clip from Josh Fox’s 2013 documentary, Gasland Part II. In this clip, Lisa Parr of Wise County, Texas, explains how her family’s health deteriorated after natural gas drilling began around their home.
LISA PARR: My daughter looks up. Her rash is all over her face. She has a nosebleed. Bob has a nosebleed, burning throat, burning eyes. I had a rash. It covered my scalp. It went through my entire body, literally to the bottoms of my feet. My throat would start swelling. I started gasping for air. I started stuttering. I started stumbling. My face drew up on my left side like I had Bell palsy.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s a clip from Gasland Part II by Josh Fox. I bumped into Josh Fox, interestingly, in Lima, Peru, at the major People’s Climate March last week in the midst of the U.N. climate summit. And he is going to—he’s interviewing people right now in the Amazon as he links oil politics and gas politics around the world. But I wanted to turn to Tony Ingraffea, professor emeritus and Weiss Presidential Teaching Fellow at Cornell University, also president of Physicians, Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy, Inc. Not a lot of people around the country are having this kind of success in getting a ban on fracking. Professor Ingraffea, talk about the science you presented and what you were most concerned about. I mean, this ban is based on health concerns.
ANTHONY INGRAFFEA: Yes, but before I answer that question directly, I want to expand a little bit on what Dr. Steingraber said about how this whole process occurred. It’s a perfect example of democracy now. In 2008, where all the other states lying over shale deposits opened the barn doors and let dozens of operators in, absent the science, New York had a special law on the books—an Environmental Quality Review Act. And it took the effort of an individual citizen, Dr. Stan Scobie, to write a brief to Governor Paterson pointing out that that law had to come into effect if shale gas was to be exploited in New York state. That’s a perfect example of an individual citizen informing a governor.
Governor Paterson wisely took heed and said, "OK, let that law go out, go forward," and that led to something called an environmental review, an environmental impact statement. That led to hundreds of thousands of individual comments, written by citizens all over New York state, that turned back two—not one, not—actually three at this point, three versions of that environmental impact statement. And as of today, we still do not have a viable, valid environmental impact statement for shale gas in New York state. That’s one of the reasons for Governor Cuomo’s decision this week. So there’s another example of democracy at work.
And as Dr. Steingraber just pointed out, while that was happening, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers saying, "No, your science doesn’t look good to us," the scientists were at work, going from those six papers in 2008 to over 400 today. And the second wise governor took office in 2010, Governor Cuomo, and realizing that the science was not yet ready, concluded obviously that you don’t establish an important energy policy absent good science, especially science having to do with human health. So he waited, wisely, for the science to catch up. And it almost has. The puzzle is almost complete. We now see what the impacts are, and Dr. Zucker pointed them out in his comments earlier this week.
So, the science that had to be done—now, to answer your question directly—was obvious. What effects, through air, through water, through ground movements, through climate change, through leaking wells, through sociological effects on communities, economic effects on communities, ecological effects on communities? What science do we know when shale gas comes to town? And we knew very little in 2008.
So, some of those studies pointed out that shale gas, unlike previous conventional gas developments, is extremely intense. We have to have many, many wells per square mile—eight, nine, 10 wells per square mile. That means entire regions would have to see tens of thousands of wells. The prospective was that upstate New York was going to be patterned, checkerboard pattern, a pad every mile in one direction, every two miles in another direction, as far as the eye could see. And that means that we increase the risk of all the bad things that can happen when you drill a hole in the ground and when you try to extract enormous amounts of natural gas. There can be leaks. There can be failures. There can be transportation problems. There can be pipeline problems, compressor station problems, processor unit problems, storage problems. All of these lead to potential contamination of water supplies, underground drinking water supplies for people in private water wells, which is quite prevalent in upstate New York, and air contamination.
We all breathe the same air. We’re all downstream, as Dr. Steingraber’s book points out. You can’t isolate shale gas from the people. It makes the people be part of the shale gas-industrial operation. And the people of New York state, using their democratic powers, informed the governors of New York state that they wanted the science to declare whether a policy allowing shale gas development in New York was appropriate—19.8 million people in the state—on the one hand, their health; on the other hand, the potential, and now unrealizable, wealth of a few hundred people and a few foreign corporations. I think the decision became very clear for Governor Cuomo this week.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Professor Ingraffea, why do you think that this kind of a democratic process has not taken place in other parts of the United States? And, of course, the shale gas industry has expanded worldwide now, seeking to drill in—all over the planet.
ANTHONY INGRAFFEA: That’s an excellent question, and it goes back to one of the things I said. It was a bit of luck and a bit of wisdom on the part of a former governor. The luck was that Cornell had a law on its books that other states, most other states, don’t. And that law very simply says, if a new industrial process seeks to establish itself in the state of New York and it hasn’t been here before, it has to show—it has to show that it does not have deleterious effects on the environment and human health.
And shale gas development, despite what the president of the American petroleum association says—American Petroleum Institute says, is a new process. Developing shale gas is not your grandmother’s and grandfather’s oil and gas well in Texas. It’s an entirely new process. It’s orders of magnitude large in scale. The number of wells, the time it takes to drill wells, the amount of fracking fluid that’s used to stimulate the wells, the amount of waste that’s produced, the amount of ancillary infrastructure, pipelines, compressor station, processing units—all of that makes it different.
So why is it that Colorado or Texas or Oklahoma or Arkansas or Illinois, North Carolina and Maryland, which have negligible shale gas resources, why are they going forward? Two reasons: They didn’t have that law on the books, or that law wasn’t enforced, and, two, they didn’t have the time to generate the kind of citizen impact and citizen input that we luckily had because of that wise decision in 2008 in New York state. But those states are going to catch up. New York state, this is a landmark. This is the wellspring. This is where it all begins for those other states to say, "Yeah, it looks like it’s going to happen in places like Illinois, North Carolina and Maryland, but it hasn’t happened yet, and we can still stop it." And in places like Colorado and Texas and Oklahoma and Arkansas, where the deleterious effects that you’ve already discussed, we’ve already discussed here, are now becoming more and more apparent every day, the citizens are being involved. They are getting motivated. And what we did in New York state is going to be a tremendous impetus for them.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And do you think—what do you think about the plummeting price of oil on the world market? Is this having some kind of an impact on the full-court press that the oil and gas industry has been doing now for several years in terms of shale gas extraction?
ANTHONY INGRAFFEA: Absolutely. We’re talking about a very complex, global-scale industry. What does happen in Russia does affect what happens in Pennsylvania. So, the dropping prices for hydrocarbons, oil and natural gas, are having huge effects on the industry itself. We’re seeing a pullback in the number of wells being drilled. We’re seeing a pullback in capital flowing from Wall Street into the coffers of the oil and gas industry so that they can drill their wells and build their infrastructure.
But more importantly, I think, here, it gives the lie to the promise, the empty promise, that the industry gave to most other states, and tried to give to New York state, which is, "We’re going to—there will be gold-paved streets for you. Everybody is going to get rich." It doesn’t work that way in extractive industries. It’s boom-bust. And guess what. It’s now bust.
It didn’t take long. The industry oversupplied. Too many companies trying to get in very, very quickly to make a quick profit, when prices for oil and gas were high. They’ve driven down prices because of oversupply. They’ve made this attempt to address that problem by proposing to build liquefied natural gas exporting facilities on all coasts of the United States—and Canada—to try to get "American-made" natural gas, our resource, exported into foreign markets.
So, the people of New York state and the people of other states are now trying—are beginning to realize that that was all a charade. It was all a big lie. It’s corporate profit making underneath an American flag.
AMY GOODMAN: Before we wrap up—
ANTHONY INGRAFFEA: So, is it our gas and our oil? No. Are we really decreasing the cost of energy for Americans? No. For gas right now, gasoline for your car right now, sure. But now what we’re doing is causing a decrease in the most important secondary aspect of this effort, which is to rapidly increase renewable energy supplies.
So, I’m trying to point out that this is a very complex issue involving geopolitics, involving the fight between traditional energy sources, renewable energy sources, different states’ approaches, the people’s common pocketbook—how much they’re paying for energy now versus how much they’re going to be paying for energy in the future, and are they going to go out and buy a Prius tomorrow, or are they going to go out and buy a Hummer?
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Professor Tony Ingraffea, professor emeritus at Cornell University, president of Physicians, Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy, Inc., and Sandra Steingraber. Dr. Steingraber is an activist, biologist, author, co-founded both New Yorkers Against Fracking and Concerned Health Professionals of New York. She has quite a remarkable résumé. She has been named Woman of the Year by Ms. magazine, one of "25 visionaries who are changing the world" by Utne Reader, among many other things.
And end with the quote of Rebecca Solnit, who said, "The governor did it because he was pushed hard by activists. Look at the weather vanes, but respect the wind."
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’ll be joined by two leading attorneys to talk about the CIA Senate intelligence report and to talk about the latest complaint that’s been filed in Europe to try to try Bush administration officials for torture. Stay with us.
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Democracy Now! co-host Juan González discusses his exclusive year-end interview with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. "The list of his accomplishments in just one year has shocked even me — a total skeptic after more 35 years of covering urban politics in this country," writes González in his latest column. "And it’s not just the big issues like education, affordable housing, reform of police-community relations, or new contracts and pay raises for city workers. It’s also a host of less publicized but important measures affecting ordinary New Yorkers. Things like paid sick leave and a living wage for low-income workers. Like the lowest rent increase in memory for 800,000."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Juan, before we begin our first story, you had the exclusive year-end interview with New York Mayor de Blasio. You got the first interview of any reporter this year in this first year of his administration for the New York Daily News.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, I have a big article in today’s paper on—a series of articles, including my column.
And basically what the mayor told me in a half-hour interview earlier this week was that he saw his major accomplishments of his first rookie year as mayor being the achievement of the universal pre-K program that he rolled out, his—the beginning of an affordable housing program that he expects will produce 200,000 units of affordable housing in the city over the next 10 years, and a series of reforms he’s had on the—related to police-community relations.
Now, obviously, that almost seems like a contradiction, given all the protests over the Eric Garner case and Akai Gurley killings that have occurred over the last few months. And I asked him about that. But de Blasio basically said, "Look, we had instituted a series of reforms, had put in a new inspector general for the police department. We’d sharply reduced stop-and-frisk arrests by the police. We had ordered a sharp reduction in marijuana—low-level marijuana arrests in the city." And then the Garner case occurred and the Akai Gurley case occurred, and he said it was—the people were—people of New York saw a man killed before their very eyes, and that has created—
AMY GOODMAN: That videotape.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —an enormous pain among the residents of the city.
But he believes that the reforms that he’s instituted, including what’s going to happen next year, which is the massive retraining of all police officers, aimed at reducing violent incidents in everyday interaction between the police and citizens, that he believes that the long-term effects of this will be a change in the culture and in the relations of the police department. It remains to be seen if that’s going to happen, but he did seem to be optimistic, despite what has happened with Eric Garner and Akai Gurley and the continuing protests that have occurred. And then he also voiced support for the ability of people to continue to protest and express their viewpoints on these issues.
But the other thing is, he had pretty strong words on some other issues, especially on charter schools, which I’ve reported about quite a bit. He blasted the charter school advocates for several times in the past year closing down their schools in the middle of school days and taking all their students and their teachers on protests to Albany, New York. He said they were using children as political pawns and that he was willing to work with charter school advocates, but that they had to follow rules, like making sure that they were educating the same number of English-language learners and special ed kids as the normal public schools, and that his main commitment was to public education, to the public schools, where most of the children of New York City are educated.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you sense a changed man from the man who was elected a year ago?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in my column, because I write in the news story about the interview, but then in my column, the point I think I try to raise is that—I’ve been covering urban politics now for 35 years, more than 35 years. And the real shock of de Blasio is that this is a politician who actually, in his first year, has begun to implement many of the promises he made, and that’s unusual in and of itself, and that he’s actually moved forward on his program. And he’s created quite a bit of a ruckus, especially among the wealthy and the invisible government of New York City. But he hasn’t backed down on most of his major issues. So, I think that that’s a pretty unusual situation for a politician.
AMY GOODMAN: I just want to turn for one minute to a clip of Mayor de Blasio talking about his son Dante. You know, the protests around lack of police accountability in the Eric Garner case, New York City Mayor de Blasio said he and his wife Chirlane, who is African-American, fear for their teenage son Dante.
MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO: Chirlane and I have had to talk to Dante for years about the dangers he may face. Good young man, law-abiding young man, who never would think to do anything wrong, and yet, because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face, we’ve had to literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him. And that painful sense of contradiction that our young people see first, that our police are here to protect us and we honor that, and the same time, there’s a history we have to overcome because for so many of our young people there’s a fear, and for so many of our families there’s a fear.
AMY GOODMAN: Dante, de Blasio’s son, became famous to all New Yorkers when he did that ad. A young African American with an afro is talking about supporting de Blasio for mayor, and a lot of people thought it was just a kid on the street that they were doing—using for a campaign ad, and at the end he said, "I support him, and it’s not just because he’s my dad."
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Right. And one of the things in the interview also I got the mayor to do was make a New Year’s resolution, because he’s become almost now infamous for his lateness to all events, public events, press conferences, his chronic lateness. And he told me that he would make a New Year’s resolution to be more on time in 2015. So we’ll see if he holds to that.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’ll certainly continue to cover a person who’s been called one of the most progressive mayors of a major American city. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, a major decision by the governor of New York banning fracking. Then we will look more at the CIA intelligence report and about a new complaint that could lead—could it lead to a trial for Bush administration officials? Stay with us.
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U.S. General: Turning Point Against ISIS Will Take At Least 3 Years
The top U.S. general in charge of forces fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has said it will take a minimum of three years to reach a turning point against the group. Speaking to reporters Thursday, Lt. Gen. James Terry refused to give a more specific timeline.
Lt. Gen. James Terry: "The first strikes were, what, 8 August? And so, this is December. What’s that? Four months. I think we’ve made significant progress in halting that offensive that I talked about, the ability for them to continue to expand, you know, in terms of terrain and geography out there. I think what we must do, especially inside of Iraq, is continue to build those capabilities. I think you’re at least talking a minimum of three years."
This week the Obama administration approved orders for hundreds of U.S. troops to deploy to Iraq as part of a mission to train and advise Iraqi troops.
Iraq: Kurdish Forces Break Siege of Yazidis on Mount Sinjar
Kurdish forces say they have recaptured territory near Mount Sinjar in western Iraq from the Islamic State, freeing hundreds of Yazidi minorities who have been trapped there. The offensive involved thousands of Kurdish peshmerga forces backed by U.S. airstrikes.
Syria: 230 Islamic State Victims Found in Mass Grave
In Syria, the bodies of more than 230 people killed by the Islamic State have been found in a mass grave. The London-based opposition group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the dead are members of a tribe that resisted the Islamic State in the province of Deir al-Zor.
ISIS Leaders Killed as WikiLeaks Publishes Docs on CIA Doubts About "High-Value" Assassinations
U.S. military leaders say three top figures from the Islamic State have been killed by U.S. airstrikes, including a military chief and a deputy of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The news comes as the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has published an internal CIA document which reveals the agency’s doubts about the effectiveness of such killings. The document, which is from 2009, describes both the positive and negative impacts of assassinating so-called high-value targets. It warns that such operations can "[increase] the level of insurgent support," "[strengthen] an armed group’s bond with the population," "[radicalize] an insurgent group’s remaining leaders." WikiLeaks notes, "After the report was prepared, U.S. drone strike killings rose to an all-time high."
Nigeria: Boko Haram Kills 30, Kidnaps 200 in Village of Gumsuri
In Nigeria, militants believed to be from the Islamist group Boko Haram have killed more than 30 people and kidnapped about 200 in an attack on a northeastern village. The village of Gumsuri is near Chibok, where Boko Haram seized more than 200 schoolgirls in April.
Report: Attorney Sought to Free U.S. Hostage in FBI-Backed Bid
A new report finds the FBI backed an attempt by a New York attorney to free the U.S. hostage Peter "Abdul-Rahman" Kassig from the Islamic State. Documents obtained by The Guardian reveal a plan by attorney Stanley Cohen — who represented Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law and is due to serve an 18-month prison term over tax offenses — to negotiate for Kassig’s release using his jihadi contacts. But the plan fell apart when Jordan arrested a leading cleric who played a key role in the negotiations. The Islamic State announced Kassig’s execution last month.
Pakistan Kills 67 Militants, Revives Death Penalty After School Massacre
Pakistani jets and ground forces have killed 67 accused militants in a northwestern area near Peshawar, where the Taliban killed 148 people, most of them children, in a school attack this week. Pakistan has also revived the death penalty for terrorism-related cases following the massacre, ending a six-year moratorium. Thousands of convicted terrorists now face execution, some of them within days.
New Jersey Hopes Cuba Thaw Will Bring Capture of Black Panther Assata Shakur
Authorities in New Jersey have said they hope a historic warming of ties between the United States and Cuba will help them capture and imprison Black Panther Assata Shakur. In a statement, State Police Superintendent Col. Rick Fuentes said, "We view any changes in relations with Cuba as an opportunity to bring her back to the United States to finish her sentence for the murder of a New Jersey State Trooper in 1973." Shakur was convicted of killing Trooper Werner Foerster after being pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike. The encounter left both the officer and a fellow Black Panther, Zayd Malik Shakur, dead. Assata Shakur has said she was shot by police with both arms in the air, and then again from the back. She was sentenced to life in prison but managed to escape and flee to Cuba, where she has lived since 1984.
U.S. Prosecutors Sue New York City over Abuse of Teens at Rikers Jail
Federal prosecutors are suing New York City over the treatment of teenagers jailed at Rikers Island. The move follows a scathing Justice Department report which found a "deep-seated culture of violence" against young prisoners and recommended over 10 pages’ worth of reforms. Earlier this week Mayor Bill de Blasio delivered a news conference at Rikers announcing the end of solitary confinement for 16- and 17-year-olds. But federal officials say the reforms are not coming fast enough, noting that 18-year-olds still face prolonged periods in solitary.
Colombia Rejects Terms of FARC Ceasefire Offer
The Colombian government has rejected the terms of a ceasefire offered by FARC rebels. The FARC offered to lay down their weapons indefinitely as long as the military did not attack them first. But Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos rejected conditions including international verification of the truce.
President Juan Manuel Santos: "These men from the other side are not angels. They are very difficult people that just sent us a Christmas gift — a unilateral and indefinite ceasefire — that we received as a good gift. What we received is like a flower, but when we open the gift there is a stem full of thorns. So what we’re going to do is remove the thorns from this stem, and we will be left with just the rose."
The FARC has declared temporary ceasefires around the holidays in the past, but it is the first time in decades the group has offered to indefinitely lay down arms.
Obama Signs Sanctions Bills on Venezuela, Russia
President Obama has signed a new measure allowing him to impose sanctions on Venezuelan officials involved in a crackdown on anti-government protesters. The law lets Obama deny visas and freeze assets of those accused in the violence earlier this year, which left dozens of people dead from both sides of Venezuela’s political divide. Obama has also signed a measure allowing new sanctions against Russia, but says he does not plan to impose them yet.
U.S. Strengthens Protections for Transgender Workers
The Obama administration has announced a new interpretation of federal law that protects transgender workers from discrimination. The shift expands protections in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, allowing the Justice Department to sue state and local governments if they violate the rights of transgender employees.
Obama Signs Measure Ending Social Security Payments to Nazis
President Obama has signed a new measure blocking taxpayer-funded Social Security payments to suspected Nazi war criminals. The measure passed rapidly through Congress following an Associated Press investigation which found the United States has spent millions of dollars on benefits for suspected Nazis. The payments had continued under a legal loophole through which Nazis were persuaded to leave the United States in return for keeping their benefits.
U.S. Would Veto Resolution to End Occupation of Palestinian Territories
The Obama administration has confirmed it will veto a U.N. Security Council resolution to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories by 2017. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said the U.S. would oppose the measure if it comes up for a vote.
Jen Psaki: "We have seen the draft. It is not something we would support, and we think others feel the same and are calling for further consultations. The Palestinians understand that — you may have also seen President Abbas speak to this earlier today — and have said they support continued consultations and are not pushing for a vote on this now."
Chevron Halts Plans to Drill for Oil in the Arctic
The oil company Chevron has halted plans to drill for oil in the Arctic. In a letter to regulators, the company said it would suspend oil exploration "indefinitely," citing "uncertainty in the industry." The environmental group Greenpeace says the move is "further proof that technical challenges of drilling in icy waters, where a spill is all but inevitable, push costs far too high to be viable, especially with volatile oil prices."
Peru: Environmental Defender Wins Court Victory Against U.S. Mining Firm
An environmental defender in the Andean region of Cajamarca, Peru, has defeated the U.S. multinational Newmont Mining Corporation in court as part of a years-long battle to keep her land. Newmont sought to evict Maxima Acuña as part of a massive, open-pit gold mine project. She and her relatives were initially sentenced to nearly three years in prison after the company accused them of illegally occupying the land, but an appeals court has cleared her of the charges.
ACLU Sues Ferguson-Florissant School District over Biased Elections
In Missouri, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a federal lawsuit against the school district in an area made famous by the police shooting of African-American teenager Michael Brown. The lawsuit accuses the Ferguson-Florissant School District of using an election process that dilutes the African-American vote. While more than three-quarters of the district’s students are African-American, there is just one black person on the seven-member school board. The suit seeks a change that would let voters choose school board members who reside in their district.
Nebraska, Oklahoma Sue Colorado over Pot Legalization
Two U.S. states have sued Colorado in the Supreme Court over its legalization of marijuana. Earlier this year, Colorado became the first state to allow recreational marijuana. Nebraska and Oklahoma claim the opening of marijuana shops has led to an influx of the drug in neighboring states.
Australia: 8 Children Dead, Woman Injured in Mass Stabbing
In Australia, eight children have been found dead and a woman injured in an apparent mass stabbing. The bodies were found at a home in Manoora, a suburb of Cairns.
Report: Gap Between Rich and Poor Hits New High
The gap between rich and poor in the United States has reached a new high. A new report by the Pew Research Center finds the gulf between rich families and middle- and low-income families is the largest it has been in 30 years of data collection. Pew found that while affluent families became wealthier from 2010 to 2013, middle-income families stayed the same, while poor families got poorer.
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"Obama and the Beginning of the End of the Cuban Embargo" by Amy Goodman
The failed United States policy against Cuba, which has for more than half a century stifled relations between these neighboring countries and inflicted generations of harm upon the Cuban people, may finally be collapsing. On Wednesday morning, we learned that Alan Gross, a U.S. government contractor convicted in Cuba for spying, had been released after five years in prison. Another person, an unnamed Cuban imprisoned in Cuba for 20 years for spying for the U.S., was also released. This has made global headlines. Less well explained in the U.S. media are the three Cubans released from U.S. prisons. They are the three remaining jailed members of the Cuban Five. The Cuban Five were arrested in the late 1990s on espionage charges. But they were not spying on the United States government. They were in Miami, infiltrating Cuban-American paramilitary groups based there that were dedicated to the violent overthrow of the Cuban government.By noon Wednesday, President Barack Obama made it official—this was not just a simple prisoner exchange: “Today, the United States of America is changing its relationship with the people of Cuba. ... I’ve instructed Secretary [of State John] Kerry to immediately begin discussions with Cuba to re-establish diplomatic relations that have been severed since January of 1961.”
It was President Dwight Eisenhower who severed relations with Cuba, on Jan. 3, 1961, two years after Fidel Castro took power. President John F. Kennedy then expanded the embargo. Months after Kennedy took office, the CIA invasion of the Bay of Pigs, intending to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro, went awry. It is universally considered one of the greatest military fiascos of the modern era. Scores were killed, and Cuba imprisoned more than 1,200 CIA mercenaries.
Cuba became a flash point, most notably as the Soviet Union attempted to place short-range nuclear missiles on the island, precipitating the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. This episode is widely considered the closest that nations have come to all-out nuclear war. The U.S. also tried to assassinate Castro. While the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee identified eight such attempts, Fabian Escalante, the former head of Cuban counterintelligence, uncovered at least 638 assassination attempts.
The Cuban revolution has its critics, but the transformation of daily life there can’t be denied. Throughout the 1950s, under dictator Fulgencio Batista, most Cubans suffered in dire poverty, with scant access to education, health care or decent-paying jobs. The Batista regime was brutal, engaging in arbitrary arrests, torture and executions. Batista allied himself with the U.S. Mafia, personally profiting from widespread corruption, especially from the opulent hotels and casinos in Havana. Today, Cubans enjoy the same life expectancy as their neighbors in the U.S. and experience less infant mortality. Cuba has among the highest literacy rates in the world, surpassed only by Finland, Denmark, New Zealand and Australia, according to the United Nations Development Program, which ranks the U.S. as 21st globally, two notches above Kazakhstan.
Cuba, often battered by hurricanes, has developed one of the best disaster-response medical systems in the world. They recently deployed 250 doctors to West Africa to combat Ebola. Then-President Fidel Castro offered to send 1,500 doctors to the U.S. in 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The administration of George W. Bush did not respond.
The embargo has long been central to national electoral politics, as the Cuban community in Miami, many of whom have long been staunchly anti-Castro, has been considered crucial to winning Florida in a presidential election. Miami also has served as the haven for anti-Castro terrorist groups. One of the Cuban Five, Rene Gonzalez, was released in 2011 after 13 years in prison. I spoke to him from Cuba in 2013. He told me, “It was part of our development or common experience to have seen people coming from Miami raiding our shores, shooting at hotels, killing people here in Cuba, blowing up airplanes.”
In 1976, an Air Cubana flight was blown up by terrorists. It exploded in midair, killing all 73 people on board. In 1997, hotels across Havana were bombed, with one Italian tourist killed. Former CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles took responsibility for the hotel bombings, and evidence strongly links him to the bombing of the airliner. The Cuban Five were guilty of investigating the terrorist activities of these men, and the nonprofit front groups that supported them, like the Cuban American National Foundation and Brothers to the Rescue. Posada Carriles currently lives in Florida, a free man.
The Cold War is over. Cuba’s government is communist, but so are the governments of China and Vietnam, both of which have deep ties to the U.S. The 11 million people of Cuba, as well as all of us here, deserve an open connection as neighbors, based on equality, grounded in peace.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.
© 2014 Amy Goodman
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
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