WHILE Marwan Al’Shehhi and the head of the Al Qaeda commando, his cousin Mohammed Atta, as well as 12 of their accomplices, were infiltrating southern Florida and beginning their training for the fatal September 11 events, a few kilometers away, in his office on Second Avenue and 163rd Street in Miami, special agent Héctor Pesquera was concentrating on abusing five Cubans locked up in punishment cages and threatening their families.

The book Miami-Washington: la conexión terrorista del FBI (Miami-Washington: the FBI’s terrorist connection) by Canadian journalist Jean-Guy Allard, explains how Pesquera and his counterintelligence experts did not pay the slightest attention to the activities of the terrorists who destroyed the Twin Towers because they were concentrating on satisfying the demands of the leaders of extremist right-wing Miami groups. The book is about to be launched in Paris.

The investigation shows that while the FBI and several U.S. security agencies are spending billions of dollars to monitor terrorists threatening the United States, the FBI in southern Florida fraternizes with those trained by the CIA to attack Cuba.

Héctor Pesquera, who has been seen in public with individuals filed as terrorists by his own agency, completely neutralized all interference by his people in those criminal activities for years.

In her book Cuba Confidential, published in 2003 (Vintage Books), U.S. journalist Ann Louise Bardach told how Pesquera, a Puerto Rican, arrived in Miami in 1998 as the new special agent in charge of the FBI in southern Florida.

"The hopes of the agents and police officers were quickly extinguished. Pesquera, they said, began to fraternize with key members of the exile leadership, such as Alberto Hernández (formerly of the CANF); Ileana Ros-Lehtinen; Domingo Otero (another former CANF hardliner) and Roberto Martín Pérez (...) Pesquera, according to an agent in his office, quickly made a brusque turn toward the right, and all investigations related to terrorism were abandoned."

To that list provided by a California reporter who obtained the famous interview in 1998 with Posada in which the terrorist confesses his crimes, the author of Miami-Washington: la conexión terrorista del FBI adds several names of individuals whose terrorist past is well-documented, including Héctor García, Luis Zúñiga Rey and José Basulto.

Logically, attorneys for the five Cuban so-called "spies" – Gerardo Hernández, René González, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero and Fernando González ‘’ – arrested with much fanfare by Pesquera, asked for their trial venue to be changed because of Miami’s characteristics and the fanatical quality of the anti-Cuban mafia.

But the court, guided by prosecutors and the FBI, rejected that request. In violation of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, they were denied something that defendants are granted every day, the book notes.

The trial of the five Cuban anti-terrorist fighters began on November 22, 2000, in the midst of the kingdom of the terrorist fauna, fanatically hostile to the defendants.

However, it was not convenient for the judge, prosecutors, Pesquera, or the country’s highest authorities to demonstrate the complete tolerance of anti-Cuban terrorism in southern Florida, a tolerance that justified the activity of the five Cubans on trial.

From the very start of the trial and in order to protect the FBI and Bush Administration itself, the prosecutors systematically tried to stifle any element in the proceedings that confirmed that the only goal of the five defendants was to penetrate the Miami groups dedicated to carrying out terrorist acts against Cuba.

In order to break the morale of the five Cubans arrested for having infiltrated terrorist groups in Miami and to get them to betray their country, Pesquera’s FBI and the Department of Justice, guided by the White House, resorted to an infernal series of threatening and pressuring acts in violation of all penal system regulations and the international convention on torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

René González, Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino and Fernando González, kept by the FBI in solitary confinement for 17 months beginning in September, 1998, are still imprisoned today, out of pure cruelty, in five different prisons spread out across the immense territory of the United States with little or no contact with their families.

Since the very day of their arrest, when special agent Héctor Pesquera ran to give the news of the arrest of the "spies" to Cuban-American congress members Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Díaz-Balart, the five Cubans have been the object of treatment aimed at breaking them, with every method of U.S. police paraphernalia and using immigration obstacles imposed on their families by the U.S. State Department.

Pesquera’s obsession with satisfying the administration and his Mafioso associates with media-pleasing feats led him to commit many excesses that are listed in the book.

In early 2000, Pesquera personally directed – even though he had hundreds of agents for such tasks – an "investigation" that ended in the spectacular arrest of Cuban "spy" Mariano Faget on February 17, 2000.

With every intention, Pesquera arrested him while the attention of the U.S. media was directed toward the case of the kidnapping of young Elián González, whose return to Cuba was demanded by his father, to the fury of the mafia.

In an attempt to manipulate U.S. public opinion against the island, the FBI official then expanded his provocative statements.

It turned out that Faget is the son of one of the most notorious officials responsible for anti-communist repression under the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. The "scandal" of "spy" Faget ended miserably, with Pesquera filing it away in his box of deceptions.

FALSE LEADS, DISINFORMATION, MANIPULATION

After the Twin Towers and Pentagon disaster, Pesquera, desperate to save his own skin, carried out another bizarre investigation, this time on anthrax, which occupied the front pages of the U.S. press for weeks.

False leads, disinformation, manipulation – Pesquera increased the number of statements and fed into a general panic, linking the supposed anthrax case to the September 11 events.

Until there was nothing left but to conclude that it was the isolated act of a mentally unbalanced individual.

At a press conference several days after the arrest of the five Cuban anti-terrorists, Pesquera admitted that the case "never would have made it to the courts" if he had not "directly" appealed to Louis Freeh, head of the FBI at the time.

During a later radio program, he would admit that the five Cubans, over the years that he followed them, had not even remotely approached any state secret.

Incredible but true, since April 2004, Pesquera has been directing security services for Miami ports and airports under the Department of Homeland Security.

When international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles entered U.S. territory aboard the Santrina shrimping boat with several terrorist and drug-trafficking accomplices, it was Pesquera who was controlling the access and security of all Miami ports.