Terrorists "Made in Miami, USA" by Nil Nikandrov

Miami, a coastal city in southeastern Florida, US, is known worldwide for its sandy beaches, high-class tourism and entertainment.

Well-off people from Latin America are striving to buy houses in Miami and join the clubs which are popular among American 'high society'.

Miami is a kind of Latin American bridgehead in the US territories. There you may see diverse people from countries located to the south of the Rio Grande: retired businessmen, politicians who worked for the State Department (harmfully to the national interests of their countries), popular actors, singers and also drug dealers and other criminals.

In the western media, Miami is rarely mentioned as a stronghold of terror organizations. And it is clear why. There are terrorists whom FBI, CIA and other services have long cooperated with, so the authorities and the partisan media do not view them as a threat to US national security.

The permanent anti-terror campaign launched after the 9/11 attacks in no way disturbs the terrorists in Miami. It seems that US ultra-right circles still believe those hirelings could help them in their fight against "alien" regimes in Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, Nicaragua and Salvador.

Secret camps for training terrorists in Miami appeared in the very first years of the CIA's existence. Their major goal was to suppress Communist-like regimes in Latin America and the countries of the Caribbean. They successfully worked in Guatemala at the time of Jacobo Arbenz`s rule (1951-1954). In late 1940s there was a wave of attacks on Soviet diplomatic missions in Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Cuba. Soviet diplomats were threatened also in Uruguay and Argentina. Those were the first years of the Cold War, and the demand was quite clear: “Soviets, get away from Latin America!” Thus Moscow had to close half of its embassies in the region.

The 'renaissance' of terror organizations in Miami happened after Fidel Castro`s triumphant guerrilla campaign. Dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba, followed by hundreds of war criminals and police agents involved in bloody repressions. And they were hired into terrorist groups by the CIA to later again be sent to Cuba and serve the US there. Miami militants are responsible for hundreds of killings and assassinations in Havana and other cities. Since Fidel Castro was their major enemy, the CIA used everything - from an exploding cigar to a scuba tank with toxic gas.

The number of terrorists among Cuban immigrants grew so fast that they felt they could interfere in US domestic policies. A prominent American documentarist Michael Moore used to say that each serious incident in the US in the past few decades had Cuban trace: John Kennedy's murder, the Watergate scandal, the Iran-Contra affairs, etc.

Ramon Medina worked as the key CIA agent in the Iran-Contra case in 1985-1987. Medina (his real name is Luis Posada Carriles) was born in Cuba in 1928. Before the revolution he worked as chemist at a sugar factory. He was opposed to the regime of the Castro brothers and in February 1961 fled the country to escape detention. He decided to continue his fight...from abroad.

Posada was trained in Fort Benning (US) and soon was hired by the CIA. He is known as a very experienced militant.

In 1964 he led the training of rebels ofe so-called Revolutionary Junta.

In the 1960s he helped the CIA to develop its branches: Alpha 66, Comandos L, Movimiento de 30 Noviembre and others.

In 1967 he was sent to Venezuela to run a department of the DISIP secret police force. He pursued members of leftist parties and guerrilla brigades. An explosion on board a flight from Caracas to Havana, which took the lives of 73 passengers and all the crew, became the climax of his terror activity. Posada was arrested and jailed in Venezuela, where he stayed until 1985. He did not serve the whole term. His patrons in the CIA helped him to escape, gave him a new passport and sent him to Salvador to control the delivery of arms to the 'contras' in Nicaragua.

In 2000 Posada and three of his allies prepared an assassination on Fidel Castro in Panama .

The Cuban leader was taking part in the 10th Ibero-American summit, when his intelligence service told him about the plotted assassination attempt.

Castro disclosed the information during a press conference. The police found enough evidence, including 30 kilograms of explosives, and Posada and his team were arrested.

And again he was released by his US friends. Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived in Panama and settled the issue. His argumentation was that Panamian politician Martin Torrijos, who was one of Chavez's supporters, was about to take office as president and that he would certainly demand Posada`s extradition to try him on the Cuban plane blast.

Posada`s name has again attracted attention recently when it was made public that his agents in Central America had plotted an assassination on Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and his Bolivian counterpart Evo Morales but luckily the two presidents were warned beforehand and escaped the danger.

The world media calls Posada “the No.1 terrorist in Western hemisphere” but the US prefers to ignore the obvious facts and accuses Posada only of 'violating migration laws'.

After the failed coup d'etat attempt and an unsuccessful oil sabotage in Venezuela in April 2002 and in early 2003, Miami terrorist organizations thought about recruiting new members. CIA agents who had given themselves away tried to escape, while migrants from Venezuela settled in Miami close to the Cuban community and aimed to solve “the problem with Chavez” by means of force. The US asked the Cuban militants to train their Venezuelan colleagues. Now it is difficult to say exactly how fruitful their joint work is, but still some facts are available already.

In the second half of 2002 the sides, represented by the Cuban Comandos F-4 led by Rodolfo Frometa and the Venezuela Patriotic Union under Luis Garcia Morales, reached an agreement on joint terror activity. Under the deal, the two groups have to share information and carry out joint operations in times which can be described as 'critical' either for Cuba or Venezuela. After being defeated by Chavez supporters, members of the Venezuelan resistance movement do not feel like coming back home 'to put an end to the dictatorship'. They prefer to hire militants from Colombia or Argentine and offer huge sums to lure them in.

The group of Venezuelan militants in Miami already have their 'heroes': several fugitive officers, who had organized attacks on Spanish and Colombian embassies in Caracas in order to demonize Bolivia. Another group of Venezuelan militants were accused of killing Danilo Anderson, a Venezuelan environmental state prosecutor, who investigated the 2002 failed coup d'etat attempt. The organizers of the oil sabotage, which almost put Venezuela on the brink of an ecological catastrophe, also live in Miami as if they had not committed any crimes. Each time Venezuela asks the US to extradite them, Washington gives vague answers or does not reply at all.

Special forces of the countries which in the western media are called 'populist' are aware of the main channels through which terrorists are being transported from Miami to the south. Many of the militants are tasked with long-term missions: to legally settle in a country and wait for the X-day. On their way the terrorists usually stay in some port cities in Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, in the capital of Costa Rica - San Jose - and in the Colombian city of Cucuta, bordered to the east by Venezuela. Recently, Mexican territories have been actively used for such kinds of operations for under President Calderon the country's special forces have practically fallen under US control. The main Carribean states, especially those bordering Venezuela, are also involved in the campaign against 'alien regimes'.

Concerned over the remaining terror threats coming from Miami, the progressive governments of Latin America are trying to get authentic information about the plotted conspiracies. In Havana they did not ever doubt that Washington helped those criminals who organized terror attacks in hotels and restaurants in Cuba or mass poisoning of humans and animals and provocations on marine and air borders.

Agents were planted into the anti-Cuban terror organization to report about the plotted operations beforehand. Gerardo Hernandez, Antonio Guerrero, Ramon Labanino, Fernando Gonzalez, and Rene Gonzalez were among the volunteers. They managed to prevent more than 170 terror attacks. Cuba sent to Washington all data these five agents had collected in the hotbed of terrorists in Miami. But Washington used the information in fighting against those who opposed the idea of terror.

In 1998 the five Cubans were arrested and tried. The whole process turned into an infamous show. The judges were intimidated by the mafia. The process was highly politicized and lacked solid evidence. In spite of this, the detainees were sentenced to prison for crimes they did not commit, like 'espionage' against the Miami-based Southern Command of the U.S Armed forces. It is worth mentioning that some retired generals of the US army attended the hearings of this case (which lasted for seven months) and testified that the five agents had not attempted to get intelligence information.

Now the release of the five agents is a matter of honor for Cuba. In many countries, including the US, people take to the streets to voice their protest over illegal imprisonment of the heroes. Some 300 committees have been operating worldwide where people can express their sympathy with the detained. The UN Human Rights Commission's working group urged the US government to undertake adequate steps to settle the issue, otherwise Washington's 'war on terror' was nothing but a fraud.

Terror organizations in Miami are posing a danger not only to the Latin American countries and its leaders. Everyone who knows the truth about the life in Miami understand that there are no 'accidental' deaths: if a person dares to think and talk differently and defend his views, he is doomed to be killed.

The long list of victims features those who wanted better relations with Havana, who welcomed Bolivarian reforms in Venezuela or supported socialists in Nicaragua and Ecuador. For example, the staff of La Replica magazine were intimidated several times for their dialog with Cuba. Most Americans cannot even imagine what cruelty and extremism are hidden under the mask of luxury and resort entertainment.

It was exactly in Miami where the cream of the CIA, the FBI, the State Department and the Cuban mafia plotted John Kennedy's assassination. The incumbent US President Barack Obama has been more than once criticized by the Miami extremists for not implementing a hard-line policy towards Cuba. So, who could guarantee security to Mr. Obama then?

Iran: fear of foreign plotters may be justified

by Simon Tisdall

Long-term instability in Iran is an alarming prospect for western countries keen to resolve disputes over the country’s nuclear programme and other contentious issues. But continuing political weakness in Tehran is also likely to produce the opposite effect — increased regime concern about external attempts to interfere, destabilise, and exploit its vulnerabilities. This paranoid trend threatens unpredictable, even dangerous consequences - but may be justified.

Pinning blame for Iran’s post-election turmoil on malign foreign enemies is already under way among so-called principalist, conservative factions. The pro-Ahmadinejad Keyhan newspaper on Tuesday denounced plots by “politically bankrupt dictators” to thwart the popular will. “The hopes of the imperialist triangle (America, U.K. and the Zionist regime) for a crawling coup d’etat in the Middle East and revival of the dead Middle East plan have been dashed,” it declared.

Javan newspaper was similarly acerbic. “Today democracy slogans have become a lever to provoke, interfere and overthrow,” it said. “By announcing results in the presidential elections that did not benefit their favourite candidate ... some foreign media such as BBC Persian [service], al-Arabiya, Fox News, CNN and some French media have started a new wave to create social and political division and cause riots.”

In largely cautious responses to Friday’s polls, Barack Obama’s administration has been careful not to feed the fires of xenophobic resentment. “It’s up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be. We respect Iran’s sovereignty and want to avoid the U.S. being the issue inside of Iran,” Mr. Obama said. But Iranian officials say U.S. protestations of non-interference would be more credible if the White House cancelled a $400m Bush era covert programme, authorised in 2007, which they say was intended to destabilise Iran, with the ultimate aim of regime change.

According to the journalist Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker last year, covert operations by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command were used to support the PJAK Kurdish dissident group in northern Iran, the disaffected ethnic Arab minority in Khuzestan in the south-west, and militant Baluchi Sunni Muslim separatists in the south-east, bordering Pakistan.

While not officially acknowledged or disavowed in the U.S., the covert programme has been repeatedly linked by Iran to ongoing violence, bomb attacks and assassinations in all three areas, as well as to the main external opposition group, the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, which is allegedly funded and armed by the U.S. Iran also occasionally claims to have evidence of involvement by Israel’s Mossad spy agency and British intelligence.

Although the problem can be overstated, Iranian leaders of all political complexions have reason to worry about the so-called minorities question in a country comprising multiple ethno-linguistic groups, namely Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, Baluchis, Turkmen, Armenians, Assyrians, Jews and Georgians. Recent reports from Iranian Kurdistan, for example, speak of 100 or more checkpoints being erected by Revolutionary Guards and the shelling of PJAK positions inside northern Iraq.

Iranian officials have linked the recent suicide bombing of a Shia mosque in Zahedan, in Sistan-Baluchistan, to U.S., British and Israeli support for the Jundullah Sunni Muslim separatist group. A failed attempt last month to blow up a domestic airliner in Ahvaz, in Arab Khuzestan, brought similar claims.

Iran said on Tuesday that members of a foreign-backed “anti-revolutionary group” responsible for fomenting unrest and armed with bomb-making materials had been arrested. Intelligence minister Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei said the group “wanted to achieve its goal through explosions and terror and in this connection 50 people were arrested ... They were supported from outside the country.” Given the current uproar in Tehran, the temptation for the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and President Ahmadinejad to deflect attention by hitting out at real or imagined foreign enemies, for instance by indirectly re-targeting U.S. forces in Iraq or causing problems for NATO forces in Afghanistan, is growing dangerously. But even such extreme measures may not work.

The moderate Seda-ye Edalat newspaper wasn’t swallowing the regime’s line about external threats on Tuesday. “Why does the government not let the people protest peacefully?” it asked. “Why do we always want to call Iranian protesters a group of hooligans bribed by foreigners to sabotage everything?”