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The Five had no access whatsoever to
classified information
BY JEAN-GUY
ALLARD—Special for Granma International—
 ALMOST
seven years later and after setting up a rigged
trial, inflicting a lengthy succession of cruel and
degrading treatment, and promoting a misinformation
campaign within the media, the former chief of the
Miami branch of the FBI has confessed that the Five
did not have access to any intelligence information.
And he did so publicly during a conversation with
none other than terrorist capos Luis Zúñiga Rey and
Horacio García, on the airwaves of the misnamed
Radio Marti.
That
disclosure by Héctor Pesquera, former FBI chief in
south Florida and centrally responsible for the
arrest of the five Cuban anti-terrorist fighters,
was made in a disarmingly candid manner during the
third of a series of five interviews entitled “It
has had to be in silence,” produced by Tele Marti.
Although the producers of that television station
were the only viewers, the program’s soundtrack was
broadcast by Radio Marti on January 15 at 8:00 p.m.
That
incredible declaration from a man who obsessively
pursued those Cubans he viciously described as
“spies” gave the following answer to Zuñiga’s
question:
“Do
you believe that the security of the United States
was in danger at any point, or did they have access
to any intelligence information that could be
valuable to the enemies of the United States?”
And
Pesquera answered, verbatim:
“No,” and explained, “For example, in the case of
(Antonio) Guerrero, there was a retrospective study
of the information he had obtained and the
investigation did not indicate that it could have
been so.”
Evidently not – as the rest of the interview
demonstrates.
Pesquera was speaking in an environment of total
confidence. In addition to Zúñiga, long known to the
service he headed, he was also with Horacio García,
whom he described as a friend and FBI informant in
another interview given to Miami television some
months previously. In fact, García was one of the
organizers of a party held in Miami after the Five
were sentenced and attended by the police agent.
For years, along with Roberto Martin Pérez, Alberto
Hernández and Feliciano Foyo, García was one of the
capos of the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF)
paramilitary committee, founded by Luis Zúñiga Rey
and international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles,
and was publicly designated its principal support at
both financial and logistical level. García and a
whole gang of “dissident” elements abandoned the
FNCA to join Zúñiga Rey’s hard-core current a few
days before September 11.
For his part, Zúñiga ended up being designated by
Bush as ¼a member of the US delegation to the annual
meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission, in spite
of a report by Enrique Bernales Ballesteros, a UN
special raconteur, which revealed that the Miami
extremist was directly involved in the terrorist
campaign executed in Cuba in 1997, which involved
mercenaries hired by Luis Posada Carriles.
“I HAD A VERY HARD TIME CONVINCING THEM”
The series of interviews contains other interesting
statements by Pesquera, whom Zúñiga still servilely
calls “chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigations
Office” although the former had to leave that post
in December 2003.
Last January 22, in the context of the same series
of interviews with Garcia and Zúñiga broadcast by
Radio Martí, Pesquera made another confession
confirming how he had arrived from Puerto Rico with
orders to proceed at whatever cost against a group
of Cubans who had infiltrated Miami’s terrorist
organizations.
“I arrived here in May of that same year, 98. They
gave me an update on what had been going on. So we
began to stress that this investigation should not
be confined to intelligence. And that it should
change direction and move toward a criminal
investigation” Pesquera stated then on radio.
And afterwards, the architect of the case against
the Five commented:
“I had a very hard time trying to convince them and
push it with the Justice Department.”
That statement reconfirms what he stated a few days
before his retirement in 2003, during an interview
he gave to reporter Larry Lebowitz from The Miami
Herald. He explained then that he had to
“persuade” Janet Reno, the attorney general, to
arrest the five Cubans and recalled how “other
people in the Justice Department didn’t want to
touch this,” adding: “Everything was on the
demarcation line.”
It should be recalled that on October 27, 1997, the
US Coast Guard had discovered an arsenal of weapons
and various suspects on the Esperanza yacht –
seized in Puerto Rico – all linked in one way or
another to CANF in Miami. In spite of the
spontaneous confession of one of the crew members,
who stated at the moment of his arrest that they
were on their way to the Venezuelan island of
Margarita to assassinate the Cuban president,
Pesquera’s investigation led to all the accused
being released. Pesquera also participated in the
celebrations organized by the CANF.
On September 12, 1998, barely fourth months after
his arrival in Miami, Pesquera sent his men out to
arrest the “spies", as he would call them in his
first contact with the press. The operation against
the Five, which has no legal precedent, is worthy of
Hollywood. The suspects were thrown to the ground by
heavily armed officers, brought to FBI headquarters,
isolated in prison cells, and photographed after two
days of exhausting interrogation without having had
an opportunity to bathe or shave. The press, having
already sold out to the mafia, went all out to
exploit those photos in which they look like
criminals.
17 MONTHS OF CRUEL, INHUMANE AND DEGRADING TREATMENT
Pesquera and his accomplices at the prosecutor’s
office kept the Five locked up for 17 consecutive
months in violation of all penal regulations and
international treaties against torture and cruel,
inhuman and degrading treatment.
René González, Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero,
Ramón Labañino and Fernando González are still
inhumanely incarcerated today in five different
prisons located throughout the vast territory of the
United States, with severely restricted contact with
their families in some cases and none in others.
It is always worth recalling that while devoting
himself to pursuing the Cuban patriots, Pesquera
failed to detect the presence of 15 of the 19 Al-Qaeda
men who planned the terrorist attack on the Twin
Towers, who were training a few kilometers from his
office. |
