No to Bush Terrorism and Double Standards
Charge or Extradite Posada Carriles
for Acts of Terrorism
The U.S. government has now dismissed all charges against Luis Posada Carriles, a known terrorist of the CIA and FBI. Government documents, as well as facts and information from Venezuela and elsewhere, fully reveal that Pasada should be charged with terrorist acts and forced to stand trial, either here or in Venezuela. Nicaragua is also now asking for extradition for crimes committed by Posada in that country, crimes organized and funded by the U.S.
The evidence against Posada Carriles is far more overwhelming than any related to people the U.S. has charged with terrorism, using charges like “conspiracy to commit terrorism” or “providing material support for terrorism.” Those charged and jailed by the government, like the Lackawanna Six, from Buffalo, New York, are guilty of no acts of terrorism or even violence. Posada Carriles has been directly involved in blowing up a Cuban plane, killing 73 people on board, blowing up hotels, killing one, assassination attempts and more. Posada himself admits to having been involved in such acts, and evidence, including from the CIA and FBI, confirming his role is abundant. But the U.S. government refuses to charge him and refuses to extradite him to Venezuela to stand trial there. Both acts are directly contrary to international and U.S. law and serve to protect a known terrorist.
The government of George W. Bush refuses to extradite or charge Posada Carriles, as he is a partner in crime with U.S. state terrorism against Cuba, Nicaragua, and all of Latin America. To try Posada would be to try the government for its terrorism.
The government not only refused to charge Posada Carriles with terrorism. They have now dismissed seven immigration charges, including entering the country illegally. This charge commonly results in deportation, certainly for most of the individuals detained by the government for illegal entry. But not for Posada Carriles. He is free in Miami. He is allowed to go free while communities and factories are being raided military-style, tens of thousands of people are being arbitrarily rounded up and deported, all in the name of “security,” and preventing “illegal” entry. In the one situation thousands are guilty of no crime but are jailed and deported, in another the evidence of terrorist acts is abundant, and the individual is freed, without a trial of any kind.
These actions further show the double standards of the U.S. “war on terrorism,” both abroad and at home. Indeed they make clear that it is a government war of terrorism against the peoples, using the state terrorism of aggressive wars and bombings of civilians, that of paid assassins and mercenaries like Posada Carriles, and government raids like those of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Posada Carriles should be arrested and charged with acts of terrorism or extradited to face trial in Venezuela or Nicaragua. As the world’s #1 terrorist and organizer of assassins like Posada Carriles, President George W. Bush, along with Vice-President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and current Secretary Robert Gates, all should be charged with state terrorism for the crimes committed against the peoples in Iraq, Afghanistan, those against Cuba, Venezuela and other countries. Both international and U.S. law demand such charges. Congress refuses to take such action, just as they have refused to act in relation to Posada Carriles.
Putting Posada Carriles on trial would put the U.S. and its terrorism against Cuba on trial. And to put Bush and Cheney on trial would be to put the entire U.S. war of terrorism on trial, something the ruling circles and their parties, Democrats and Republicans alike, refuse to do.
The situation makes clear that for justice to prevail, the people themselves must become the government and act on the basis of their anti-war, anti-terrorism principles. Double standards have no place. On May 11, in many cities across the country and worldwide, actions demanded that Posada be charged or extradited. They also targeted Bush and the U.S. government as the main organizer of terrorism on a worldscale. In their rejection of double standards, protesters are also calling for the release of the Cuban 5, five men unjustly imprisoned by the U.S. for exposing plans for terrorism against Cuba.
Here and worldwide the call is the same: Charge or Extradite Posada Carriles! No to Bush Terrorism and Double Standards!
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CIA Trained and Funded Posada Carriles
U.S. Government Covers-Up Its Role
In the days before the May 11 trial date of U.S. terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, the U.S. government filed a motion in federal court seeking to bar Posada from testifying to his role as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), also affirming that his links with the CIA ended in 1976 before the explosion of the Cuban airliner in Barbados. However, the reply made by Posada Carriles, and published worldwide, was conclusive by sustaining that information was false because he served with the CIA for 25 years, beginning in 1961 with the U.S.-invasion of the Bay of Pigs. This has been corroborated by declassified U.S. documents. Bill Van Auken writing for Global Research elaborated:
“The nine-page motion submitted to the federal court in El Paso, Texas, argued that the relationship between Posada Carriles and the CIA ended 30 years ago and therefore is irrelevant.
“Declassified documents have established that Carriles was recruited as an agent of the CIA in 1961, was sent into the U.S. Army for a year of training in demolition and terrorist tactics and remained directly on the CIA payroll at least until 1967. From 1969 to 1974, he served as a senior officer in the Venezuelan secret police, DISIP, charged with capturing, torturing and killing left-wing opponents of the government. During that period he remained an informant and ‘asset’ of the CIA in Latin America.
Terrorist file of Posada Carriles
“In 1976, he planned the airline bombing, leaving its execution to two employees of his private detective agency that he set up in Caracas after a change of government forced him out of the secret police. Just two weeks before the October 1976 airline bombing, he was involved in another terrorist attack, this one in the center of Washington. A car bomb killed the exiled former foreign minister of Chile, Orlando Letelier, and an American aide, Ronni Moffitt.
“After his escape from prison in Venezuela, Posada Carriles made his way to El Salvador, where he became a key operative in the illegal terror war against Nicaragua financed by the CIA and directed by the network established by the Reagan administration under the direction of Lt. Col. Oliver North of the National Security Council. He went on to Guatemala, becoming a government intelligence officer during a brutal counterinsurgency campaign that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
“In the 1990s, by his own admission, Posada Carriles directed a series of terrorist bombings against hotels and tourist spots in Cuba, killing an Italian tourist.
“And, in November 2000, he was involved in an aborted attempt to blow up a conference hall in Panama, where Cuban President Fidel Castro was scheduled to speak to hundreds of people. He was arrested and jailed for the plot, but then pardoned by outgoing Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso in 2004, reportedly as the result of either U.S. pressure or bribes from anti-Castro Cuban exile groups.
“In response to the government attempt to quash any public testimony about Posada Carriles’s ties to the CIA, the terrorist’s defense lawyers filed a counter-motion, insisting that it was impossible to discuss the ‘context’ of the case without dealing with their client’s relation with the agency. Moreover, the document claimed, this relationship ‘lasted for 25 years.’
“ ‘The government’s statement that his service to the United States ended in 1976 is incorrect,’ the document said.
“On April 25, Venezuela’s ambassador to the Organization of American States, Nelson Pine da, charged the U.S. with harboring a ‘convicted and confessed terrorist’ and demanded that Washington comply with its bilateral extradition treaty with Venezuela. Pine da read out a statement from the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry that stated:
“ ‘The freeing of the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is the final result of the maneuver that the government of George W. Bush put in motion to protect him and with this act it promotes impunity and disgracefully mocks the memory of the victims of the bombing of the Cubana plane that took place in 1976.
“ ‘This act of complicity, committed by the sinister American president, seeks to buy the silence of Posada Carriles, who has for many years been an agent of the CIA and a pawn of the Bush clan, as the declassified documents of the U.S. demonstrate and therefore has valuable information about the criminal activities carried out against the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean.’
“Responding to these charges, the U.S. alternate representative to the OAS, Margarita Triage, ignored Venezuela’s extradition request, baldly stating, ‘The United States is not harboring Luis Posada Carriles.’ She continued, ‘The United States is proceeding with its own national prosecution in an area where Mr. Posada Carriles has broken U.S. law.’
“Such claims are absurd on their face. The charges of murder and terrorism, substantiated by Washington’s own declassified documents, clearly take precedence over the minor immigration infractions that are being used as a pretence for ignoring the demand for extradition and providing a cover for what is in reality the harboring and protection of Posada Carriles.”
The declassified documents were recently released by the National Security Archive, a non-governmental investigations center headquartered at George Washington University. They revealed that Posada Carriles had a list of Cuba-related terrorist targets in the Caribbean in his Caracas office. They consist of bomb targets for the summer of 1976 that included the Cub ana flight 455 in October of that year. The declassified reports show that a Venezuelan employee of Posada Carriles was in charge of checking out the targets. They also reveal that at least four were identified as damaged by explosions, including Embassies in Guyana and Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago and that the Cuban Embassy in Bogota, Colombia was raked by machine-gun fire in July 1976.
The declassified reports show how the plastic explosives were used, introduced in a tube of toothpaste to sabotage a Cuban civilian plane.
In the opinion of Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuban Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, these documents are clear legal proof to level charges against Posada Carriles. They are also a critical part of the registered documents that reveal the long career of Posada Carriles as one of the most prolific international terrorists, he added. He is a terrorist trained and funded by the U.S. and now protected and essentially pardoned by the government.[TOP]
Terror and the Counter-Terrorists
On November 17, 2000, shortly after arriving in Panama City for a summit of Iberian leaders, Fidel Castro held a press conference to announce that the legendary Cuban exile terrorist Luis Posada Carriles had also come to Panama — on an assassination mission. The Cuban authorities subsequently supplied a video of Posada and three co-conspirators meeting in front of their hotel. Within forty-eight hours Panamanian officials located a gym bag containing thirty-three pounds of C4 explosives that Posada apparently had planned to use to blow up the auditorium where Castro was scheduled to speak.
How did the Castro government know of Posada’s plot? Cuban intelligence, known as the DGI, had a high-level mole in one of the exile groups reporting on the assassination operation as it evolved. The Cuban spy program potentially saved dozens of lives and averted an act of international terrorism.
Perhaps more than any other nation over the past fifty years, Cuba has consistently faced both threatened and real assassination attempts, sabotage efforts, armed attacks and bombings, infamous among them the midair destruction of a Cub ana passenger plane in 1976. (CIA and FBI documents implicate Posada, who was once paid by the agency as a demolitions trainer, as the mastermind of that attack.) Long after the CIA abandoned its direct efforts to overthrow the Castro regime and terminate its leadership, militant anti-Castro groups continued their campaign of violence. After viewing a 1977 CBS special titled “The CIA’s Secret Army,” on violent Cuban exile operations in Florida, President Jimmy Carter was, according to a recently declassified White House memorandum, “appalled at the idea that people could use U.S. territory as a base for terrorist actions.”
Yet even in the post-9/11 world, U.S. soil continues to be used for such purposes. As recently as November 2005, Posada’s leading financial benefactor in Miami, Santiago Alvarez, was caught with a military-grade arsenal of machine guns, grenades, silencers, explosives and thousands of rounds of ammunition — leading to speculation that violent exiles were planning another major operation against Cuba.
Just as the CIA escalated its efforts to penetrate Al Qaeda after 9/11, the DGI has devoted considerable resources to infiltrating hard-line anti-Castro organizations in Miami and monitoring the activities of Alvarez and other exile leaders with a track record of violence. In the mid-1990s Cuba sent more than a dozen operatives to Florida to establish a spy ring code-named the Red de Avispas, the Wasp Network. Most of the agents were assigned to penetrate groups such as the Cuban American National Foundation, Brothers to the Rescue and Alpha 66; one, Antonio Guerrero, was hired on as a sheet metal worker at the Boca Chica air base, where he took notes on the types of military aircraft landing and taking off and monitored the level of activity on the base.
In September 1998, the FBI moved in. Five agents, Guerrero, Fernando González, Gerardo Hernández, René González and Ramon Labañino, now known as the Cuban Five, were detained, thrown into solitary confinement for seventeen months, prosecuted for conspiracy to commit espionage (as there was no evidence they had gathered any classified U.S. information) and given maximum sentences ranging from fifteen years to double life in prison. When a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals threw out their convictions in August 2005, issuing a unanimous decision that the Five had not received a fair trial, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s office immediately appealed to the full Circuit Court to revisit the ruling.
Gonzales’s concerted effort to keep the five Cuban spies in prison stands in sharp contrast to his inaction on keeping Posada behind bars. After being pardoned in Panama in August 2004, Posada snuck into the United States in March 2005 and requested political asylum; he was detained only after publicity on his terrorist background, much of it generated by declassified CIA and FBI documents posted on the website of my organization, the National Security Archive, threatened to undermine the Bush Administration’s credibility in the “war on terror.” But Gonzales has refused to certify Posada as a terrorist under the provisions of the Patriot Act, certification that would allow the government to detain him indefinitely. Instead, the Justice Department has treated Posada as just another illegal immigrant, charging him only with lying about how he arrived in the country.
With Posada indicted only on immigration fraud, his lawyers have, not surprisingly, convinced three different courts that he should be released. On April 19, he posted $350,000 in bail and returned to Miami. The man that the same Justice Department has described in court filings as “an unrepentant criminal and admitted mastermind of terrorist plots” will now live comfortably under house arrest until his trial, scheduled for May 11.
In Cuba, freeing the Five and keeping Posada in prison have become cause célèbres. The first thing travelers see upon arrival at José Martí International Airport outside Havana is a huge placard featuring photographs of the “heroes of the Republic of Cuba” and demanding “Freedom for the Cuban Five,” similar signs line the corridors of major hotels. Huge public rallies have been held to call for justice for Posada’s many victims and to denounce U.S. hypocrisy for releasing him to his wife’s Miami home. Fidel Castro emerged from his convalescence to accuse the Bush Administration of freeing “a monster.” The Five are frequently referred to as presos politicos, political prisoners.
In fact, the Five are better understood as counter-terrorism agents whose goal was to protect Cubans and other innocent victims from the violence of committed terrorists like Luis Posada. The Bush Administration’s handling of these two historically inseparable cases is a reminder that, when it comes to Cuba, U.S. policy-makers refuse to recognize the difference between those who commit acts of terror and those seeking to counter them.
Peter Kornbluh directs the Cuba Documentation Project and the Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org), a public interest research center located at George Washington University (Washington, DC). He is co-author of The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History (New Press) and author of a new book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability[TOP]
The Secrets that Posada Carriles Knows Will
Come to Light Sooner or Later
Our people have learned with indignation that on the afternoon of May 8, Judge Kathleen Cardone ordered the definitive release of terrorist Luis Posada Carriles and dismissed all of the charges that the United States government had brought against him last January 11 for fraud and for lying in interviews with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities in order to obtain his naturalization in that country.
At this time, Cuba reaffirms, even more strongly, our people’s condemnation of this maneuver, which, as the April 19, 2007 statement by our revolutionary government said, “is an insult to the Cuban people and to the peoples that lost 73 of their sons and daughters when a Cubana de Aviación passenger plane was brought down off the coast of Barbados.”
In a statement issued on January 15, our Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that it hoped that “these charges brought against terrorist Posada Carriles for minor immigration crimes would not become a smokescreen for granting impunity to him for the serious crime of terrorism, in a pretext to continue ignoring the application presented on June 15, 2005 by the government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, for Posada Carriles’ extradition for his responsibility in the bombing of the Cubana de Aviación airliner, and to which no response has yet been made.”
The series of events from the moment Posada Carriles entered U.S. territory aboard the boat Santrina as our President opportunely denounced -- shows clearly that every action taken by the U.S. government from that moment responded to a plan approved by President Bush and designed to create, precisely, a “smokescreen” that would prevent the prosecution of Luis Posada Carriles for what he actually is: a terrorist.
It would have sufficed for the U.S. government to apply its own Patriot Act, and acknowledge that the release of the terrorist “threatens the national security of the United States or the security of the community or of any person” to prevent his release. It would have sufficed for its Immigration and Customs authorities to decree that the release of Posada Carriles would constitute a threat to the community and create the risk that he would flee, as was clearly stated by our revolutionary government this past April 19.
The U.S. government possesses all of the evidence deriving from its longstanding relationship with the terrorist, along with that provided by Cuba in 1998 and more recently.
The manipulation that has led to this outcome, the protection that the terrorist received as soon as he entered U.S. territory, the charges for minor crimes brought against him, the back-and-forth of the terrorist’s custody from one federal agency to another and from one court to another, and finally, the ruling by Judge Cardone on May 8, demonstrate that Washington’s plan was, precisely, to prevent him from speaking about the destructive actions he committed against the Cuban and Venezuelan people and against other nations of Our America, acting under the orders of the CIA and, particularly, of the father of the current president of the United States, who headed that U.S. government agency of espionage and subversion in 1975 and 1976, the period when terrorist actions against Cuba were at their most violent and ruthless, as well as when he was vice president of the United States in the 1980s, the period in which a dirty war was waged against the Nicaraguan people.
However, perhaps the fact that most illustrates how that plan was being implemented was the petition to the court by the U.S. government this past April 27 to disallow any evidence, testimony or other proof linking Posada Carriles to the Central Intelligence Agency, and the terrorist’s response, arguing that he had acted under CIA orders for more than 25 years, which is confirmed by the role he played as a CIA agent in U.S. government actions against Nicaragua during the 1980s.
With its decision to not classify Posada Carriles as a terrorist, the U.S. government has not only violated its own laws and its alleged commitment to its self-proclaimed “war on terrorism;” it has also violated its international obligations.
The U.S. government has maliciously violated not only Resolution No. 1373 (2001) of the United Nations Security Council, a resolution promoted by itself, but also treaties on terrorism to which it is a signatory, most especially the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings, which became effective on May 23, 2001, and the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Civil Aviation, which went into effect on January 26, 1973.
In accordance with these instruments, the U.S. government should have tried Posada Carriles for terrorism, or agreed to the extradition application formulated with due correctness by the government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and which, almost two years after being submitted, has yet to receive a response.
Independently of any value judgment that we might make regarding the ruling issued on May 8 by Judge Cardone, the same judge who, in her previous ruling on April 6 granted release on bond to the terrorist while at the same time acknowledging that he was accused of “having been involved in, or associated with some of the most infamous events of [the] twentieth century... Some of these events include the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Iran-Contra Affair, the 1976 bombing of Cubana Flight 455, the tourist bombings of 1997 in Havana, and even — according to some conspiracy theorists — the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.” Total responsibility for the release of Posada Carriles and total responsibility for what could derive from it, fall on the United States government.
In fact, Judge Cardone, in her May 8 ruling, said that “the realm of this case is not, as some have suggested, terrorism. It is immigration fraud. Terrorism, and the determination of whether or not to classify an individual as a terrorist, lies within the sound discretion of the executive branch,” adding that she was not disposed to provide a solution for what she called a “hot potato” for the U.S. government.
Likewise, the same ruling by Judge Cardone, in another section, makes clear how absurd it was that, if he had been prosecuted for fraud and for lying in a naturalization process — charges for which he should have been tried on May 11 — the maximum sentence the terrorist would have received was from six to 12 months in prison, which he would not even have completed.
The conduct of the U.S. government and this outcome are part of the ongoing commitment of the current White House resident to the Cuban-American terrorist mafia of Miami, and it has a suspicious parallel with the release of the terrorist Orlando Bosch during the mandate of Bush Sr. as U.S. president.
This most recent shameful act is consistent with the actions of a government that, at a given moment, refused to deport Posada Carriles to Cuba or Venezuela because in our countries, according to them, he “would be tortured,” while at the same time, it maintains its prison on illegally-occupied Cuban territory in Guantánamo, and throughout the entire world, it maintains secret prisons where the most aberrant and inhuman actions are committed.
For the Cuban people, it is unacceptable that the most notorious and bloodthirsty terrorist to ever exist in this hemisphere is now free, while five Cuban men remain cruelly and unjustly imprisoned for the sole crime of fighting terrorism.
We cannot forget that, in reflections published on May 8, our President warned once again that impunity encourages terrorism, and said that “the unusual release of the notorious terrorist was enough for death to once again be visited upon our homes.”
Time is running out for President Bush. He lost his opportunity to show even an iota of dignity, sense of shame or ethics. The clamor of the peoples against this decision will be unstoppable. The secrets that Posada Carriles knows will come to light sooner or later, and the U.S. government will have to respond for its double standard and its lack of political will to seriously fight against terrorism.
It remains to be seen now what the White House will do; it still has the option, in compliance with its international obligations, to stop Luis Posada Carriles and extradite him to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to respond for his crimes.[TOP]
Posada Case Proves the Innocence of the Five
The strongest evidence of the innocence of our five compatriots unjustly imprisoned in U.S. jails goes by the name of Luis Posada Carriles, whose release scandalously violates the very precepts laid down by the empire in its alleged fight against terrorism.
Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, member of the Political Bureau and president of the National Assembly of People’s Power emphasized that point while speaking in the International Solidarity Conference that brought together representatives from a large number of trade union, social and political organizations from 70-plus countries yesterday in the International Conference Center.
The president of the Cuban Parliament was referring to the document presented by Posada Carriles on April 30 via his legal team, in which the notorious terrorist confirms that he worked for the CIA for more than 25 years (since 1961).
That statement, he stressed, ratifies what Cuba has always affirmed: Posada was a CIA agent at the time of the sabotage of the Cuban passenger plane off the coast of Barbados in 1976, when he was involved in Operation Condor in the dirty war against Nicaragua and was chief of the Venezuelan political police and tortured and killed many people in that sister nation.
After arguing how that statement was sufficient to create a huge scandal in U.S. public opinion, Alarcón called for increased efforts from the international movement for the release of the Five, as this year could be decisive bearing in mind that a federal Appeals Court in Atlanta should issue a ruling after an August 20 hearing.
“Only the solidarity of the peoples will make it possible for you and us to attain justice; all of us who feel part of this noble effort to create another world and combat terrorism, have an obligation to keep up our vigilance on the future of that cause,” he affirmed.
Participants in the meeting reiterated their support for the Cuban Revolution, called for the liberation of the five heroes, and condemned the release of Posada Carriles.[TOP]
Justice After Katrina
Human Rights Organizations Demand UN Condemn U.S. Crimes Against Katrina Survivors
The U.S. Human Rights Network, including the New Orleans-based Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, are pressing the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) to declare that the U.S. violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights during and after Katrina and Rita. When HUD and other officials claim that people who have been displaced by the floods have no right to come back to their homes, they are not only being racist and mean spirited, they are also violating worldwide human rights and international law.
In 1948, the United Nations established the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Years later, CERD was formed to look into situations where massive mistreatment of people based on race is happening. Last year an international panel reviewed information submitted by the U.S. Human Rights Network and required a report, by the government, on compliance or lack thereof with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
The [demands of the rights groups] focus on “rendition” — relocating people by force — and torture. The Human Rights Network also accused the U.S. of violating its duty to protect life and to provide services without discrimination. Last summer, the US government denied the charges.
The Human Rights Network, including the Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, would not let the matter drop. They ended a 12-page rebuttal by saying: “The residents of New Orleans should not have died because they did not own vehicles or because they were African American, nor should they have died because their government failed to deliver appropriate emergency provisions and medical aid.” The US government will formally respond in July.
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Restitution and Justice for Hurricane Survivors
Atlanta Tribunal Hearing
Eight Katrina Survivors and several expert witnesses shared their testimony to a panel of esteemed Judges about the numerous crimes committed against Survivors by the U.S. federal governmental agencies during and after Hurricane Katrina and the Great Flood of New Orleans. The findings of the hearing will be presented at the US Social Forum in Atlanta, Georgia June 27th – July 1st, 2007. The findings will also form a core body of evidence to be submitted at the International Tribunal on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in New Orleans August 29th – September 2nd, 2007.
The first hearing of the International Tribunal (a People’s Court) on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was held Saturday, April 14th, 2007 in Atlanta, Georgia at Clark Atlanta University. More than fifty, mainly New Orleans Survivors or Internally Displaced Persons (IDP’s) were present at the hearing. The Atlanta hearing was the first of several preliminary Tribunal hearings being organized in several cities throughout the US with substantial IDP populations. The Atlanta Tribunal hearing represents the first step in a long fight to expose the crimes committed by the U.S. federal government and a hard struggle to attain restitution for the Survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita through the application of international law.
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Defending the Right to Education
(Excerpted from Breaking Ground, newspaper of Common Ground Collective, commongroundrelief.org)
I just recently started working on my house. I am going to use a house as a description of the things I am going to talk about. First, I am going to describe the house, the school district house. And there are actually four of them, but they have no sides. Just a front and a back. Just picture that. We used to have a big house here before the storm, and it was leaning to one side. We talked about how dysfunctional the school board was, we had superintendents every other year, there was a lot of confusion. One thing we did have on the employees’ side was a union, United Teachers of New Orleans, UTNO, who spoke to a lot of what was going on here — because a lot of what is going on here is silencing the voices of people, to privatize this community, to make this a model [of that silencing and privatizing].
I want to share with you tonight that President George W. Bush has had something to do with dismantling the United Teachers of New Orleans. They had discussions in Washington, DC about our union. Do you hear what I am saying? And do you know where that emanated from? Where that comes from? It comes partly from the fact that if you want to win a state wide race in Louisiana, you have got to get New Orleans and we played a role in elections. Our goal was to get out the vote massive in New Orleans. We helped keep Governor Katherine Blanco who screwed us. We helped keep Mayor Nagin who did likewise, partly by making sure that there was $20.6 million appropriated for charter schools.
There was a lie told in this district, that the only way schools could open would be if there were charter schools because they were still getting $16 million a month from the state. But, the house that I described [earlier], now there are four houses. We have the New Orleans Public Schools regular under the school board, we have the New Orleans Charter, we have the state regular under the [Louisiana Recovery School District, RSD], and the state charter.
We do not have a local board for the majority of our schools. We have 53 schools, five under the New Orleans Public Schools that are under that board, but the majority of our schools are under the RSD and there is nobody locally that is accountable.
Those houses are collapsing and they do not repair the buildings to allow the children in to use them. You have seen the news and you have heard the stories. Maybe you have not heard this, transportation is a problem. Children stand on bus corners at 9:00 in the morning trying to get to school, and some of them are dropped off as late as 9:00 at night. That is ridiculous. Can you imagine being a parent and not knowing where your child is?
UTNO has gone into a partnership with ACORN [a housing and community rights organization] that we have worked with many times before. But it takes all of the communities, takes all of us, tens of thousands of people to get the job done.
The week of August 21, we had 63 people in here from around the country. We knocked on 2,900–plus doors of our members and let them know that we are alive and well. Our union has been around since 1973. We were a union that was formed because, at one time in this city, black teachers and white teachers made different wages. And there was also a black teachers’ organization and a white teachers’ organization. So we put all that aside, and became the United Teachers of New Orleans, and have been moving and stronger ever since.
What you may not know is that the district fired everybody [in February 2006], never communicated with them once before they were fired. Never. They have cheated them out of money, they have not ever given them a check stub. All of this is in grievance or in lawsuits.
So we have been on the job trying to get things won. I have personally contacted more than 1,500 of our members that are in the south. But when the school district fired the employees, the 6,800 we represent, they lost their health care coverage. They were forced into retirement. And when they forced them into retirement, their hospitalization premium went up 300%, from $200 and some per month, to $610.50 a month for hospitalization. Out of pocket. We have folks who have to make a choice now between healthcare and rent and food. But it should not be that way.
Many people could not afford the hospitalization and dropped it. And we went to the [state] Legislature with the help of our State Federation, the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, to get the Legislature to change its mind. [Senator] Cravens summoned the Governor down to the Senate Education Committee, and we had packed it with retired teachers who were facing astronomical increases, and they were able to make the Governor change her mind.
We need to have some sort of system in this city that is going to work best for all parents no matter who they are. We need to make sure that no matter where you are, where you live, what you want for your child, [we have a system that provides for them]. This is a golden opportunity for us to fight for such a system. [But there is already] a conspiracy, which became a plan to disenfranchise everybody [and impose a system of four collapsing houses]. Our union and many other forces are going to fight this plan and fight for our voices to be heard.
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New Orleans Schools
New Superintendent Appointed to Escalate Antisocial Offensive
Over the past two weeks, much fanfare has surrounded the announcement of the appointment of Paul Vallas as the next superintendent of the New Orleans Recovery School District (RSD). Numerous state and federal officials, including Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, the new state Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek, and U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, joined Vallas at a May 4 press conference in New Orleans to announce that the former “Chief Executive Officer” of the Philadelphia Schools and Chicago Schools will be appointed the next superintendent of the RSD. Many corporations have expressed support for the appointment of Vallas.
Vallas headed the Chicago public school system, the third largest in the country with 430,000 students, from 1995-2001, and has headed the 179,000-student Philadelphia school system since July 2002. He joined the Chicago school system at the same time control of the system was seized by the Mayor’s office. Similarly, he joined the Philadelphia school system at the same time control of that school system was seized by the state. Both moves significantly concentrated power in executive bodies and reduced the space and role for public input. The takeovers were also used as a basis for targeting public opinion, including the demand of the public for top quality public schools, and imposing the notion that, like for corporations, “experts” in “restructuring” were needed for the schools.
Philadelphia and Chicago have been major testing grounds for the anti-social offensive in education, a main feature of which is the destruction of the very concept of a society that is responsible to its members, including responsibility for public institutions like schools. Vallas was brought into both cities to consolidate, further implement, and expedite this offensive. In both cities this has meant less government responsibility for education, narrowing of the scope of education, mass layoffs of thousands of teachers and school staff and lowering the working and living standards of those that remain, eliminating collective organizations like unions, and eliminating publicly elected officials and bodies like schools boards and/or greatly reducing their powers. There has also been a dramatic increase in the number of students pushed out of schools, and the funneling of tens of millions of dollars in public funds to the private sector.
Vallas will officially assume control of the RSD around July 1. It is already clear that a main feature of the anti-social offensive in New Orleans will be the consolidation of the large number of charter schools already in existence and the creation of many more. Charter schools and similar school arrangements expanded significantly in Chicago and Philadelphia over the last 10 years. Recently Vallas said, “This [New Orleans] will be the greatest experiment in choice, in charters, and in creating not only a school system, but also a system of schools.” He added, “I think the majority of the schools in this district will be charters.”
It is clear that a main aim is to eliminate the public school system and its governing arrangements, such as public input and elected school boards with decision-making powers. This is to be replaced with a separate and unequal “system of schools,” dominated by charters that do not have to meet the same standards of education and teacher qualification and are not responsible to the public, whether it is teachers and their unions, parents or the youth. Vallas will very likely be vested with significant authority to carry out this wrecking of the existing system while sanctioning those schools, mainly charters, that will operate outside a common public school system. Experience with many charters also already indicates that they are serving to further lower the level of education and block teachers, youth and parents from having a say in their schools.
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Anti-social offensive in Chicago Public Schools, 1995-2001
Paul Vallas — Hired Gun for Government
Wrecking of Education
Various organizations active in opposing the wrecking of public education in Chicago while Paul Vallas was CEO have identified numerous forms the anti-social offensive took at that time. One of the main ones was developing the notion that schools should be run like corporations, with CEO’s and that these CEO’s must have the authority to fire, hire, eliminate as they please. Below are some of the examples.
Eliminating Unions: Vallas implemented the policy of eliminating unions by contracting out and privatizing many union jobs, like custodians, lunchroom workers, tradesmen, etc. More than 1,000 board employees were fired. The wages and benefits of the private companies’ employees were cut for doing the same job as the former board employees, even where union workers were still used. Companies like Ashley’s Cleaning Service, Kinko’s printing and Kaplan Test Prep, among many others, reaped lucrative contracts.
More public funds for the rich: Another policy implemented was putting schools on probation, for not meeting arbitrary test scores, and then using this to justify paying large fees to “external partners,” for these schools. These included millions of dollars in contracts to various corporations and individuals. The money spent on these patronage programs came out of the same funds that could have been used to lower class size, raise teacher pay, improve early childhood education and so forth.
Imposing grade retention and blaming teachers for government failure: A main role Vallas played was to create an atmosphere of teacher-bashing, blaming public school teachers for the problems of the schools. In addition there was student-bashing, as large numbers of students were held back a grade, or essentially warehoused in what were called “transition centers,” and then “academic preparatory centers. 50,000 Chicago students were retained a grade, with many then not graduating. One study showed that Chicago high schools had 10,000 fewer students by 2000 than would have happened had the retention policies not created a generation of junior high dropouts. Chicago now has children dropping out of school between 6th, 7th and 8th grade because of this attack on their rights and this brutal effort to shame them and force them out of school. Thus a main feature of the attack on schools was to blame teachers and students, force both out in large numbers, while diverting from government failure to guarantee the conditions needed for learning and teaching.
Eliminating Principals: Using corporate language like “re-engineering,” more than ten principals were removed or forced to retire, mainly because they insisted on working with the youth most in need. Most were African American. In addition, by simply renaming schools as “academic magnet schools,” or “career academies,” or “military academies,” other principals, hand-picked by Villas, were given authority to fire teachers at will, including those who were tenured veterans.
Employee “Discipline” Code: Another policy instituted was a “discipline code” for school board employees that gave the board the power to suspend, without pay, teachers and other employees for the most trivial reasons. Vallas and other administrators used the code to suppress dissent and to harass veteran teachers who opposed the various arbitrary measures of administrators.
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New Orleans Schools: Brief Background
Before the natural and government-organized disaster in New Orleans nearly two years ago, 60,000 students, mostly poor and African American, were enrolled in more then 120 public schools staffed by more than 4,000 teachers. Tens of thousands of evacuees remain scattered around the country based on government refusal to take up its legal obligation to provide the funding and resources necessary to return and rebuild, including operating schools and hospitals.
Today, less than half of all students have been able to return and enroll in school and less than half the schools are even open. Far from making schools and hospitals a priority, governments at all levels have systematically used the government-organized disaster after Katrina to further wreck both education and healthcare.
For the schools one of government’s first actions was the mass firing of all the New Orleans public school teachers and staff of 7500 and the refusal since to negotiate a contract with them and their union, the United Teachers of New Orleans. This was done in the name of being unable to open the schools at that time, but its main result has been to eliminate the teacher’s union and make it difficult for former teachers to return. Thus a “shortage” of teachers has been created by the government and used to justify government failure to open the schools.
Before Katrina, the New Orleans Recovery School District (RSD), which is operated by the Louisiana Department of Education, took over a handful of public schools the state had branded as “academically unacceptable.” The takeover accelerated — and the RSD’s role increased — after the government-organized Katrina disaster. The RSD is now taking advantage of the situation created by the government refusal to quickly guarantee the return of residents and re-open schools, to essentially eliminate the public school system, as expressed in a single school district. It is dividing up the district, with some schools the responsibility of the local, Orleans Parish School Board, some that of the stae RSD and some fending for themselves as individual charter schools, under local or state authorization. Union contracts have been completely eliminated and the overall quality of education greatly undermined.
The dividing up of the schools also serves to create the concept that public schools are no longer a responsibility of government. Instead, in the name of “competition,” schools, and education more broadly, are to be left up to individual charter schools, corporations that run them, and “districts” controlled not by the community but by government executives, like governors and mayors, and their front-men, like powerful superintendents. It is no accident then that New Orleans is now going to have a notorious for-hire wrecker of education, Paul Vallas as superintendent.
It is also no accident that New Orleans is now the charter school capital of the U.S. All the public schools on the side of the Mississippi that did not flood were turned into charters within weeks of Katrina with virtually no public discussion or involvement. The charter schools have little connection to each other or to state or local supervision.
Of the 58 public schools now open in the city, 22 are directly operated by the RSD. Another 17 are run as charter schools that were authorized by the RSD, while two are charter schools authorized by the state before the recovery district was created. Twelve more charter schools are operating under charters granted by the local school board, which also runs five magnet schools directly. Altogether, an estimated 27,000 students are enrolled.
Security officers and police officers are present in many of the schools, often outnumbering teachers in a building. The numbers of teachers and principals are still far lower than needed. Food, textbooks, and many other basic materials also remain in short supply at most schools. Many school facilities are still in shambles. It took two federal civil rights actions in January 2007 to force the state to abolish a waiting list for entry into public school that had forced hundreds of youth out of school for weeks.
Taking their stand to defend the right to education, New Orleans public school teachers and employees are organizing a rally at the May 22 Orleans Parish School Board meeting and calling on all concerned to attend this important meeting. Represented by the United Teachers of New Orleans, they are calling on the school board to immediately begin negotiations on a contract.
For their part, high school students from some of the city’s poorest schools have formed the Fyre Youth Squad to fight for an education commensurate with their needs. Among other things, they are organizing press conferences, meeting twice a week, and involving parents in united actions to advance their interests. For one school, it was only as a result of efforts by the community that the school was re-opened.
New Orleans has a poverty rate double the national average and a black infant mortality rate roughly equal to that of Sri Lanka. On the very day the levees broke, the Census Bureau released a report on poverty in the nation, finding that Orleans Parish had a poverty rate of 23.2 percent, seventh highest among 290 large U.S. counties.
Although African-American residents made up 67 percent of the city’s total population, they made up 84 percent of its population below the poverty line. And these impoverished African-American households were highly concentrated in 47 neighborhoods of extreme poverty — that is, neighborhoods where the poverty rate topped 40 percent. This government crime was then compounded by the government refusal to provide for the safety and well-being of all during Katrina and its continued refusal to meet its legal and social obligations to guarantee the right to return and rebuild for all those displaced.
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