[Marxism] The "Rogue Nation" contest: good work (this time) by Alexander Cockburn

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This was in the subscription-only category on the Nation website. So thanks
to CubaNews for digging it out.

THE NATION
The "Rogue Nation" Contest
Beat the Devil
By Alexander Cockburn

Was there ever a failed state as barbaric as North Korea? Not only is 
this "rogue nation" endangering the security of the planet in its 
efforts to elbow its way into the exclusive club of nuclear powers but 
it has now dispatched two Asian-American journalists for twelve-year 
prison terms in one of its labor camps, notorious for their brutality 
and appalling conditions. The women, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, work for a 
TV channel owned by former Vice President Al Gore. According to their 
friends, the two crossed North Korea's border with China, intent on 
investigating the alleged trafficking of women.

Leaving aside the obvious fact that the fates and harsh sentences faced 
by Ling and Lee are tied up with the evolution of relations between 
North Korea and the new Obama government, let's try to achieve some 
sense of balance on the charge of barbarism. Let's suppose a country has 
endured a half-century of continuous attack by assailants based in the 
United States, suffering nearly 3,500 dead and 2,000 wounded. Let's 
further suppose that this country faces sabotage of its budding tourism 
industry, including the bombing of hotels and murder of tourists. Now 
let us suppose that this country sends investigators to infiltrate the 
assailants and hands the results of the probe to the FBI. The 
investigators I'm talking about are the Cuban Five--courageous men who 
went to southern Florida and penetrated the Miami-based gangs, 
specifically Alpha 66, the F4 Commandos, the Cuban American National 
Foundation and Brothers to the Rescue.

In 1998, after Fidel Castro had dispatched Gabriel García Márquez as an 
emissary to the Clinton White House, the United States sent an FBI team 
to Havana to discuss the gangs' attacks. Cuba handed over sixty-four 
files on thirty-one terrorist acts and plans against Cuba in the 1990s.

Cuba expected the FBI to start arresting the terrorists. Instead, on 
September 12, 1998, the FBI arrested the very investigators who had come 
to Miami to probe the activities of the Miami terrorists. Gerardo 
Hernández received a double life sentence, and Antonio Guerrero and 
Ramón Labañino received life sentences. The remaining two, Fernando 
González and René González, received nineteen and fifteen years, 
respectively.

It's true that the Cuban Five weren't sent to a labor camp akin to those 
in the North Korean gulag. Where they were sent, however, was described 
by Hernández earlier this year at CounterPunch, in an interview with 
filmmaker Saul Landau, who is making a documentary about the men:

GH: "They took us to the prison, the Center of Federal Detention in 
Miami, and put us in 'the hole.'"

SL: "For how long?"

GH: "Seventeen months.... You're in the cell twenty-three hours a day 
and [get] one hour a day of recreation, where they take you to another 
place. In Miami it was...a bit bigger and with this grid, through which 
you could see a little piece of the sky. You could tell if it was day or 
night.... There we were twenty-three, sometimes twenty-four hours a day 
inside those four small walls, with nothing to do. It's very difficult, 
from a humane point of view. And many people couldn't take it. You could 
see them start to lose their minds, start screaming."

Having set North Korea's barbarity in a larger perspective, let us turn 
to the dangers its testing program and intermittent detonations pose to 
world security. On May 25 North Korea conducted its second underground 
nuclear test, two and a half years after the first. Obama promptly 
denounced it as "a grave threat to the peace and stability of the 
world." He added that North Korea's actions had "flown in the face of 
United Nations resolutions" and were inviting deeper international 
isolation.

Almost four months earlier, Obama had nothing to say when, on February 3 
or 4, two nuclear-powered submarines--one British, one French, each 
carrying nuclear missiles--collided in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. 
Unlike the North Koreans, who immediately reported their test to the 
world, neither Britain nor France said anything. Nor did the United 
States. On February 16 the British, Murdoch-owned Sun was the first 
paper to disclose the crash. Then, and only then, an anonymous British 
official said the sub Vanguard's "deterrent capability has remained 
unaffected and there has been no compromise to nuclear safety." The 
question of what either sub was supposed to be deterring was not addressed.

France's Defense Ministry said in a brief statement on February 6 that 
the sub Le Triomphant struck "a submerged object (probably a container)" 
during a return from a patrol, damaging its front sonar dome. The 
ministry did not confirm the date of the collision and didn't mention 
the British sub. The Vanguard limped back to home port, considerably 
dented, according to observers. Le Triomphant was escorted by a frigate 
back to its base on France's west coast. There is no reason to believe a 
single word of either the British or French government's account of the 
crash.

Sarkozy's first speech on "defense" after he became president came with 
the dedication of Le Triomphant's sister sub, Le Terrible, and a threat 
to nuke Iran. Blair closed out his decade as prime minister by 
announcing a new series of nuclear subs to carry Trident nukes. 
He singled out North Korea for specific mention. "No single nation should 
pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons," Obama declared 
piously in Cairo--even as he told Iran that "when it comes to nuclear 
weapons, we have reached a decisive point," and as his secretary of 
state, Hillary Clinton, went on ABC to talk murkily about "consequences 
and costs" if Iran develops nuclear weapons and then stumbled through a 
hypothesis about a US attack, even "a first strike."

And they call North Korea a rogue nation?

=========================================
WALTER LIPPMANN
Los Angeles, California
Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/



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