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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; hunger strike</title>
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		<title>Christian Convert Illegally Imprisoned and Tortured, Begins Hunger Strike</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/christian-convert-illegally-imprisoned-and-tortured-begins-hunger-strike/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=christian-convert-illegally-imprisoned-and-tortured-begins-hunger-strike</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 03 Dec 2014 05:18:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bishoy Armia Boulous]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Convert]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[egypt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hunger strike]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246556</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Victim of religious persecution vows to starve himself to death. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/egypt-bishoy.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246557" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/egypt-bishoy.jpg" alt="egypt-bishoy" width="319" height="255" /></a>According to attorney Karam Ghobrial (“Gabriel”), his client, Bishoy Armia Boulous, a Muslim convert to Christianity, <a href="http://www.coptstoday.com/Copts-News/Detail.php?Id=91625"><span style="color: #0433ff;">remains</span></a> illegally incarcerated and has “vowed to starve himself to death.”</p>
<p>Bishoy, more notoriously known as Mohammed Hegazy, is the first Egyptian ever to try legally to change his religious identity from Muslim to Christian on his official ID, prompting much shock and outrage in Muslim-majority Egypt.</p>
<p>Ghobrial further cited that Bishoy’s detention—in the execution room no less—is illegal, prompted solely by malicious charges against him, all of which stem from his original attempt to formally change his religious identity.</p>
<p>In the words of his lawyer: “Bishoy is imprisoned in the execution room in violation of the law.  Trumped up charges against him have not been proven and he is being treated even worse.  He has not seen the light [of day] since being released from Minya’s misdemeanor court.”</p>
<p>Bishoy was arrested in July 2014.  Then, the judge in Minya cited “disturbing the peace by broadcasting false information” as the reason for sentencing the apostate, who in the weeks before was documenting political unrest in Egypt brought on by numerous Islamic attacks on Christians.   He was eventually released, but then immediately scooped up again by State Security acting on behalf of Cairo, now under the charge of insulting the Islamic faith.</p>
<p>Bishoy’s lawyer further said that “the [current] judge is behaving in a prejudiced manner in this case because Bishoy had public announced his conversion to Christianity.”  He stressed the “need for attention to this case, and escalating it, so everyone knows what this convert is being exposed to.”</p>
<p>Bishoy has been imprisoned for nearly six months, without any action being done in his case.  He is being held on charges of “contempt to the Islamic religion” and reportedly spreading “false news” about the existence of State Security “torture chambers” where Muslim converts to Christianity are detained and tortured.  Bishoy apparently refuses to recant this claim (quite possibly because he himself is now experiencing it first hand).</p>
<p>As lawyer Karam Ghobrial maintains, it is clear that the real reason his client is being tortured in prison—where he is being held illegally under ever morphing charges—has to do with what made Bishoy Armia, formerly Mohammed Hegazy, notorious in Egypt in the first place: his audacity not only to convert to Christianity, but to try formally to change his religious identity from Muslim to Christian on his ID card, prompting much enmity for him in Egypt.</p>
<p>In short, Bishoy is just another prisoner of conscience, just another born Muslim who wishes to be Christian—but whose actions have been deemed offensive to the state.  His story occurs with great frequency all around the Islamic world.  In nearby Iran, for example, Iranian-American Christian pastor Saeed Abedini—also seen as an apostate agitator—continues to rot in prison.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Rats Are Still Comrades</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/lloyd-billingsley/rats-are-still-comrades-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rats-are-still-comrades-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 14 Aug 2013 04:35:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Angela Davis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[California]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hunger strike]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jail]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prisoner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[solitary confinement]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=200356</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Angela Davis masquerades as a human rights activist.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/davis.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-200401" alt="davis" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/davis-233x350.jpg" width="233" height="350" /></a>“The California prisoners’ hunger strike is a courageous call for the California prison system to come out of the shadows and join a world in which the rights and dignity of every person is respected.”</p>
<p>That’s the closer of an <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/12/5642307/indefinite-solitary-confinement.html">oped piece by Angela Davis</a>, “professor emeritus of history of consciousness and feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.” There’s a lot more to professor Davis, and her latest cause could also stand some scrutiny.</p>
<p>Peter Coyote, Susan Sarandon and other Hollywood celebrities have signed a letter of support for prisoners engaged in a hunger strike over conditions in the security housing unit at Pelican Bay State Prison. Professor Davis claims such solitary confinement constitutes “torture.”  But according to the liberal editorial board of the <i>Sacramento Bee</i>, which has been critical of Pelican Bay in the past, <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/12/5642310/editorial-why-are-celebrities.html">the stars “ought to save their outrage.”</a></p>
<p>The inmates fomenting the hunger strike, who claim their human rights are being violated, “include killers and leaders of the most brutal gangs in the prison system. They are from the Aryan Brotherhood, Black Guerrilla Family, Mexican Mafia and Nuestra Familia.” Prison officials say the hunger strike “has nothing to do with conditions and everything to do with gang leaders wanting to get into the general population so they can more readily conduct their gang business.”  The <i>Bee</i> agrees, and adds some detail.</p>
<p>The security housing units are stark, “but it’s not as if they are rat-infested, medieval holes. Many inmates have cellmates and can talk through the locked doors to their neighbors. Pelican Bay inmates have televisions, with 23 channels, including the four broadcast networks, PBS, BET and ESPN, plus educational and self-help channels and Bible channels in English and Spanish.” Inmates have to “work”  to get in such units. That is, they commit acts of violence. “For the safety of other inmates,” the <i>Bee</i> said, “that’s where some of them should remain.”</p>
<p>These are “gang leaders who masquerade as human rights advocates”  and the celebrities “diminish their credibility” by embracing their cause. As readers of <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1303">this profile</a> will understand, it’s a bit different for Angela Davis, who does have some knowledge of violent prisoners such as Black Panther George Jackson, responsible for killing a guard at Soledad Prison.</p>
<p>As <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/hollywoods-undying-love-for-communist-angela-davis/">this article</a> described it, Davis brought the “arsenal of weapons” to spring Jackson. On August 7, 1970, “George Jackson’s 17-year-old brother, Jonathan, charged into a Marin County courtroom and took several people hostage, including Judge Harold Haley, the prosecuting assistant DA, and two jurors. The assailants taped a sawed-off shotgun (owned by Davis) to Haley’s chin. In the ensuing escape attempt, a shootout took place during which Haley’s head was blown off, and Jonathan Jackson was killed.”</p>
<p>Davis fled but was arrested in New York. At her 1972 trial more than 20 witnesses implicated her in the plot to free Jackson, but she was acquitted. That made her a national figure and helped launch her political career.</p>
<p>In 1979, she won the International Lenin Peace Prize, awarded by East Germany, a totalitarian state that shot people for the crime of attempting to leave the country, a practice Davis never criticized. The Lenin Peace Prize helped her rise in the Communist Party USA, a creation of the Soviet Union, whose vast Gulag prison system never bothered Angela Davis, a faithful soldier in totalitarianism’s alibi armory.</p>
<p>In 1980 and 1984 Davis was CPUSA vice-presidential candidate, on the bottom of the ticket under white Stalinist Gus Hall. She and Hall lost, but that defeat, her advocacy for totalitarian dictatorships, and her involvement in Soledad case, could not prevent Davis from becoming professor of history of consciousness and feminist studies at UC Santa Cruz. As such, Angela Davis is a highly paid and pensioned member of California’s ruling class. She is also, like the Pelican Bay hunger strikers, masquerading as human rights activist. But on another level, her activism makes perfect sense.</p>
<p>In George Orwell’s <i>Animal Farm</i>, the question arises about the place in the revolution of wild, non-domesticated creatures. The revolutionary leaders decide that, yes, rats are comrades. Likewise, in the view from the Hollywood and academic Left, violent criminals like the Pelican Bay gang bosses are simply more victims of capitalist injustice. That’s why Hollywood stars and Angela Davis support them.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Jihad Theater: Gitmo Swindlers Strike Again</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/michellemalkin/jihad-theater-gitmo-swindlers-strike-again/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jihad-theater-gitmo-swindlers-strike-again</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Jul 2013 04:00:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michelle Malkin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[detainees]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[force feed]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gitmo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Guantanamo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hunger strike]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mos def]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=196395</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The truth about the media-hyped "hunger strike." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/detainees_3.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-196396" alt="detainees_3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/detainees_3-416x350.jpg" width="291" height="245" /></a>World Crisis Alert: Guantanamo Bay detainees don&#8217;t want to eat. Muslim rapper Yasiin &#8220;Mos Def&#8221; Bey is so worked up about their appetite plight that he videotaped himself being force-fed to build support for closing Gitmo. Cry me a river.</p>
<p>This latest round of hunger strikes isn&#8217;t an international human rights tragedy. It&#8217;s another manipulative act of Jihad Theater.</p>
<p>Have you forgotten? Calculated Gitmo fabulism goes back to 2005, when Newsweek fell for false rumors that U.S. soldiers &#8220;flushed&#8221; the Koran down a toilet at the military detention facility in Cuba. Gullible media reports of &#8220;desecration&#8221; provided a handy pretext for anti-American riots across the Muslim world that resulted in nearly a dozen deaths. Detainees later &#8216;fessed up that the conflagration stemmed from one of their own dropping the Koran in prison and blaming a guard.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, it was Gitmo residents themselves who were purposefully tearing up Korans. One guard reported in May 2003: &#8220;Detainee residing in cell (redacted) block tore his Quran into small pieces.&#8221; Another prisoner &#8220;did intentionally destroy his Quran and throw (it) out of his cell,&#8221; according to a separate government report.</p>
<p>Al-Qaida explicitly instructs its operatives to lie. A central jihad tenet, taqiyya, encourages Islamists to use deceit and victim politics to wage war. And while soft-on-terror sympathizers cast our military personnel as ruthless war criminals, Gitmo detainees have violently attacked them with everything from makeshift weapons and radios to disgusting cocktails of blood, vomit, feces, urine and sperm.</p>
<p>To date, there are no reports of detainees attacking our guards with the dozens of Sony PlayStations, Nintendo DS consoles, art supplies and DVDs that detainees have been given over the years. The toys and crafts are off limits!</p>
<p>Have you forgotten? The Gitmo stuntmen coordinated suicide threats to drum up global outrage over America&#8217;s decision to hold and try them in our military system, instead of in our civilian court system. These sabotage strikes were clear acts of asymmetric warfare by cold-blooded terror operatives versed in exploitation of Western sensibilities and civil liberties. Detainees considered suicides at the facility acts of martyrdom and &#8220;a continuance of their jihad against the U.S.,&#8221; according to leaked documents. Military commanders discovered that detainees were abusing confidential attorney-client privileges by hiding notes and plots in special envelopes protected from the guards&#8217; reach.</p>
<p>Sound familiar? The same kind of subversive techniques were used by convicted jihad legal helper Lynne Stewart, who smuggled coded messages of Islamic violence on behalf of her client — jailed terrorist Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, mastermind of the 1993 WTC bombing and spiritual instigator of the 1997 massacre of Western tourists in Luxor, Egypt, and the 9/11 attacks.</p>
<p>Also forgotten in all the knee-jerk hoopla over the Gitmo food fight: just how much American officials have bent over backward to accommodate militant detainees&#8217; demands.</p>
<p>In his 2005 tell-all book condemning Gitmo, turncoat army sergeant Erik Saar inadvertently exposed our suicidal restraint and indulgence.</p>
<p>Each detainee&#8217;s cell has a sink installed low to the ground for feet-washing before prayer, Saar reported. Detainees get &#8220;two hot halal, or religiously correct, meals&#8221; a day in addition to an MRE (meal ready to eat). Loudspeakers broadcast the Muslims&#8217; call to prayer throughout the day. Every detainee gets a prayer mat, cap and Koran. Every cell has a stenciled arrow pointing toward Mecca. And Gitmo&#8217;s library — yes, library — is stocked with jihadi books. &#8220;I was surprised that we&#8217;d be making that concession to the religious zealotry of the terrorists,&#8221; Saar admitted.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s no surprise that President Overseas Contingency Operation is bowing to the cunning grievance-mongers. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy explains: &#8220;The hunger strike is on because the jihadists figure Obama is ripe for the taking.&#8221; Faraway drones are A-OK, &#8220;but he is petrified by the prospect of performance-art jihad: the languishing martyrdom of self-starving death cultists, whose rapt audience of Obama favorites — Brotherhood front groups and the Lawyer Left — remind the administration every long day that he promised to shut this theater down almost five years ago.&#8221;</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t be distracted by Cirque du Jihad. Remember: The Close Gitmo mob, led by the left-wing Center for Constitutional Rights, lobbied for the release of Libyan Gitmo detainee Abu Sufian bin Qumu — now a fugitive terrorist suspected of plotting the bloody Benghazi attack.</p>
<p>Remember: Obama&#8217;s terror-coddling lawyers have dragged their feet on prosecuting suspected U.S.S. Cole bombing suspect and former Persian Gulf Operations Chief for al-Qaida Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Gitmo detainee since 2006.</p>
<p>Remember: As Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder spearhead renewed efforts to close Gitmo, intelligence officials report that 27.9 percent of the 599 former detainees released from Guantanamo were either confirmed or suspected of later engaging in jihadist attacks. That&#8217;s a 2.9 percent rise over the 25 percent aggregate recidivism rate reported in 2010.</p>
<p>Remember, as Fort Hood jihadist Nidal Hasan warned his military superiors: The soldiers of Allah &#8220;love death more (than) you love life.&#8221;</p>
<p>The enemy combatants at Gitmo are playing bleeding-heart Westerners for fools. Their eternal goal is the destruction and subjugation of infidels. Why do we continue to enable them? Let them starve.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Renewed War on Guantanamo</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/alan-w-dowd/obamas-renewed-war-on-guantanamo/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-renewed-war-on-guantanamo</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Jun 2013 04:45:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alan W. Dowd]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al Qaeda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[close]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[detention]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[drone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Guantanamo Bay]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hunger strike]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorist]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=192389</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Drone strikes and hunger strikes weigh in the balance.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/guan.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-192433" alt="guan" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/guan.jpg" width="299" height="168" /></a>President Barack Obama, quite out of the blue, has renewed his long-dormant effort to close the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. “I continue to believe that we&#8217;ve got to close Guantanamo,” he <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/04/30/news-conference-president">said</a> in April. “Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing…It needs to be closed.” Just a few days ago, he <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/23/remarks-president-national-defense-university">added</a>, “GTMO has become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law.”</p>
<p>If that’s the case, then the president can count himself among the guilty. After all, the president has had four years and five months to close the terrorist penal colony at Guantanamo. Indeed, two days into his presidency, he directed the Pentagon to shutter the detention facilities “no later than one year from the date of this order,” vowing to return America to the &#8220;moral high ground.”</p>
<p>Suffice it to say that when Obama and his lieutenants want to do something, they do it, as they have proven with scores of questionable executive actions. (See the administration’s extra-constitutional appointments, regulations flouting the letter and spirit of federal statutes, intervention in Libya, use of HHS to shake down the healthcare industry, and the many examples of abuse of power: Solyndra, bugging the AP, using the IRS to micro-target Tea Party groups and “<a href="http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2010/11/obama-i-shouldnt-have-used-the-word-enemies/1#.Ua9fuUBlmPw">punish</a> our enemies,” purposely misleading and airbrushing facts out of Benghazi to preserve the 2012 campaign’s fatuous “tide of war is receding” narrative.) When the president wants a cause, on the other hand, he pretends his hands are tied, as in the case of Guantanamo.</p>
<p>Reasonable people can and do disagree about the terrorist detention facility. One group says the prison is “contrary to who we are” and “contrary to our interests,” as the president puts it. The other group contends it’s an imperfect solution to a very difficult problem—the least bad option in this post-9/11 world. Count me among the latter group.</p>
<p>It’s the least bad option because the other alternatives—sending detainees back to their home countries or transferring them into the United States—are not viable.</p>
<p>Sending detainees back to their countries of origin is, quite simply, self-defeating. A 2012 <a href="http://tinyurl.com/8l3dt96">report</a> produced by the intelligence community concluded that almost 16 percent of the 602 detainees that have cycled through Guantanamo returned to terrorism, and another 12 percent are suspected of doing so. That’s a recidivism rate of about 28 percent—uncomfortably high when it comes to people willing to turn themselves into guided missiles.</p>
<p>Moreover, concerns about host-country security make transfer a risky proposition. In 2010, for instance, the president ordered a full-stop on transfers to Yemen after it was discovered that al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch (AQAP) was planning to blow up a U.S.-bound flight. However, last month, he lifted that ban.</p>
<p>The Yemeni government is building a “rehabilitation” facility expressly for the 56 Yemenis held at Guantanamo. But given that AQAP orchestrated prison breaks in 2003, 2006 and 2011, Yemen’s capacity to hold Guantanamo parolees is very much in doubt, as is the efficacy of terrorist-rehab programs. A Saudi <a href="http://tinyurl.com/38eexhd">program</a>—with far more lavish spending and incentives than Yemen could ever provide—dubiously claims a reintegration rate of 80 percent.</p>
<p>As to transferring the detainees to stateside prisons, bipartisan majorities in Congress have repeatedly made clear—most recently in the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act—that Guantanamo detainees may not be transferred into the United States. A <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/06/03/rejecting-obama-plea-house-gop-defense-bill-keeps-guantanamo-open-restricts/">bill</a> currently being marked up would block the administration from transferring remaining detainees to the U.S. or to undependable foreign governments like Yemen.</p>
<p>A hundred Guantanamo detainees are currently on a hunger strike, protesting alleged mishandling of their Korans, which the U.S. military denies. It’s important to note that such tactics and claims are standard operating procedure for al Qaeda and its partners. An al-Qaeda training manual offers jihadists clear <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/network/alqaeda/manual.html">guidelines</a> for using our justice system—premised on the twin notions that the accused is innocent until proven guilty and that the state’s power should be checked—against us. Among the instructions:</p>
<p>• “Resort to a hunger strike.”</p>
<p>• “Insist on proving that torture was inflicted.”</p>
<p>• “Complain of mistreatment while in prison.”</p>
<p>• “Take advantage of visits to communicate with brothers outside prison.”</p>
<p>• “Create an Islamic program for [brothers] inside the prison.”</p>
<p>That last piece of advice helps explain why Guantanamo detainees shouldn’t be transferred to stateside prisons. The president points to “a whole bunch of individuals who have been tried who are currently in maximum security prisons around the country…the individual who attempted to bomb Times Square…the individual who tried to bomb a plane in Detroit…a Somali who was part of Al-Shabaab” as proof that Guantanamo’s jihadists can be moved stateside without risk. But that’s not what worries opponents of stateside transfer. What’s worrisome is that once mainstreamed into the U.S. prison system, Guantanamo’s lifers would recruit other inmates to their jihadist cause and radicalize individuals who might one day be released—something they cannot do from inside the Guantanamo penal colony.</p>
<p>Even Janet Napolitano’s<b> </b>Department of Homeland Security—the people who replaced “terrorism” with the Orwellian term “man-caused disasters”—recognizes radicalization as a real problem, <a href="http://homeland.house.gov/sites/homeland.house.gov/files/King%20opening%20statement%2006-15-11.pdf">announcing in 2011</a> a federal-state effort “to develop a mitigation strategy for terrorist use of prisons for radicalization and recruitment.” <a href="http://homeland.house.gov/sites/homeland.house.gov/files/Testimony%20Downing.pdf">Testimony</a> before House and Senate committees reveals that<b> </b>“up to three dozen Americans who converted to Islam in prison have travelled to Yemen to train with al-Qaeda.” High-profile terrorists like Jose Padilla, Richard Reid and Michael Finton converted to jihadism in prison.</p>
<p>Media mantras notwithstanding, the Bush administration—just like the Obama administration—<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5102528.stm">wanted to close</a> the prison facility at Guantanamo. But the Bush administration concluded that the alternatives—letting sworn enemies of the United States loose or summarily executing them on the battlefield or shipping them back to untrustworthy regimes—were worse.</p>
<p>The Obama administration has found a way around this conundrum: an unrelenting barrage of drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and other fronts in what used to be called the “global war on terror.” The results are not for the squeamish.</p>
<p>• The <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Programs/foreign%20policy/afghanistan%20index/index20130426.pdf">Brookings Institution</a> estimates that, along with the 3,300-plus militants killed by drones in Pakistan, nearly 600 non-militants may have been killed.</p>
<p>• The Washington Post reports that a <a href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-06-02/world/35459487_1_al-awlaki-yemen-affiliate-qaeda">growing number of drone strikes</a> in Yemen target individuals merely “suspected” of having links to terrorism.</p>
<p>• According to a New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all">portrait</a> of the inner workings of the drone war, the White House has embraced a controversial method for determining civilian casualties that “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants…unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” The report describes the president as “at the helm of a top-secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical.” He studies “mug shots and brief biographies” of possible targets, approves “every new name on an expanding ‘kill list,’” “signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan,” and often decides “personally whether to go ahead” with a drone strike.</p>
<p>If that sounds like a commander-in-chief fulfilling his primary responsibility of protecting the nation from its enemies, then so does the Bush administration’s decision to open a makeshift detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. President George W. Bush’s motives in shipping enemy combatants to Guantanamo was to protect the country. Of course, motives mean nothing to Bush’s critics.</p>
<p>Bush’s successor is learning that motives don’t matter to critics of the drone war, either, which means Nobel Peace Prize holder Barack Obama finds himself on the wrong side of global opinion—exactly where Bush spent his presidency. According to a <a href="http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/06/13/global-opinion-of-obama-slips-international-policies-faulted/">Pew survey</a>, the drone war feeds “a widespread perception that the U.S. acts unilaterally and does not consider the interests of other countries.” Indeed, what looks like a successful counterterrorism campaign to Americans, looks very different to international observers. “In 17 of 20 countries,” Pew found, “more than half disapprove of U.S. drone attacks targeting extremist leaders and groups in nations such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.” Moreover, the UN has formed “an investigation unit” within the Human Rights Council to “inquire into individual drone attacks…in which it has been alleged that civilian casualties have been inflicted.”</p>
<p>“Reliance on drone strikes allows our opponents to cast our country as a distant, high-tech, amoral purveyor of death,” argues Kurt Volker, former U.S. ambassador to NATO. “It builds resentment, facilitates terrorist recruitment and alienates those we should seek to inspire.”</p>
<p>To borrow a phrase, it seems the drone war hurts our international standing.</p>
<p>This is not an argument in defense of international watchdogs tying America down. The UN secretariat may refuse to recognize America’s special role, but by turning to Washington whenever civil war breaks out, nuclear weapons sprout up, terrorists strike, sea lanes are threatened, natural disasters wreak havoc, or genocide is let loose, it is tacitly conceding that the United States is, well, special. Washington has every right to kill those who are trying to kill Americans. However, the international backlash against the drone war reminds us there is virtually always a downside to U.S. national-security decisions.</p>
<p>When placed side by side, the Guantanamo hunger strikes and the president’s drone strikes leave us with a hard question amidst a hard war: Which is more effective, more humane, more ethical, less damaging to our international standing—to imprison known and suspected enemies of the United States without parole, or to execute known and suspected enemies of the United States without trial?</p>
<p>The moral high ground is a very tiny patch of territory.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>My Dinner with Mustafa and Marwan</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jack-l-schwartzwald/my-dinner-with-mustafa-and-marwan/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=my-dinner-with-mustafa-and-marwan</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 29 Feb 2012 04:14:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack L. Schwartzwald]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[When Palestinian leaders feast -- while imploring their people to starve.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/marwan-barghouti.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-123783" title="marwan-barghouti" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/marwan-barghouti.jpg" alt="" width="309" height="205" /></a></p>
<p>As reported in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/world/middleeast/palestinian-on-hunger-strike-to-be-freed-without-court-ruling.html">NY Times</a> on February 21, the Israel Ministry of Justice has announced that in the absence of further specific evidence against him, Islamic Jihad “spokesperson,” Khader Adnan, will be released from administrative detention on April 17, 2012.  In return, Mr. Adnan agreed to terminate a 66-day hunger strike (in protest of his detention) that had left him close to death.</p>
<p>Extolling Mr. Adnan’s fortitude in going more than nine weeks without food, Palestinian Parliament Member Mustafa Bargouthi lamented in a NY Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/opinion/peaceful-protest-can-free-palestine.html?_r=2">op-ed</a> that,</p>
<blockquote><p>“Palestinians have tried armed struggle; we have tried negotiations; and we have tried peace conferences.  Yet all we have seen is more Israeli settlements, more loss of lives…and the emergence of a horrifying system of segregation.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Decrying Israel’s “security barrier,” which “pens us into what are best described as Bantustans,” Bargouthi proclaimed that, “others must now show similar courage” to that displayed by Adnan.  Were they to do so, he argues, “the last surviving apartheid system in the world” could be brought down, Israelis could be made to cease “being part of the last colonial-settler system of our time,” and “Palestine” could be made free.</p>
<p>Of course, Bargouthi has some of his “facts” wrong.  Israeli Jews, for example, are not “colonial settlers,” but rather <em>a people</em> with a valid claim to secure self-determination in at least part of their ancestral homeland (a claim that Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinan Authority, together with most of the Arab world, consistently <a href="http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=433">deny</a>).  Likewise, Israel is not an “apartheid” state.  Israel’s Arab citizens have full and equal rights not enjoyed by women, gays or ethno-religious minorities <a href="../2010/03/05/let%E2%80%99s-have-a-real-apartheid-education-week-2/">anywhere in the Arab world</a> (including the PA-controlled <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=10088">West Bank</a>).  And Israel’s security barrier – the putative symbol of Israeli “segregation” policy – was not brazenly erected despite Palestinian participation in “negotiations” and “peace conferences,” but because certain Palestinian “spokespersons” kept blowing themselves up in Israeli <a href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/2000_2009/2002/3/Passover+suicide+bombing+at+Park+Hotel+in+Netanya.htm">hotels</a>, <a href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/2000_2009/2004/1/Suicide+bombing+of+Egged+bus+no+19+in+Jerusalem+-.htm">buses</a>, and <a href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/2000_2009/2000/10/Suicide%20bombing%20at%20the%20Sbarro%20pizzeria%20in%20Jerusale">restaurants</a>.  (The <a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/fence.html">results</a> of the security barrier speak for themselves:  In 2002, prior to its construction, 457 Israelis were murdered in such attacks.  In 2009, after its construction, the murder toll was eight.)</p>
<p>Factually deficient or no, Bargouthi’s piece made for such stirring reading that on the evening of its publication hundreds of jailed Palestinians <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/world/middleeast/palestinian-on-hunger-strike-to-be-freed-without-court-ruling.html?_r=2">refused their meals</a> in a show of solidarity.  Sadly, the momentum of this “group fast” was derailed by the discovery that, while the participants went hungry, Bargouthi’s famous cousin, Marwan (the jailed Fatah leader) was eating dinner in his cell in front of a prison <a href="http://honestreporting.com/barghouti_chows/">surveillance camera</a>.</p>
<p>Although both Bargouthis have been roundly chastised for their seeming hypocrisy, the overture they were trying to make will be self-evident to any master of subtlety:  By feasting as they implored others to starve, Marwan and Mustafa were cleverly signaling their endorsement of the <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/09/06/obama-doctrine-can-anyone-really-lead-from-behind/">Obama Doctrine</a> of “leading from behind” (which our president employed to such stunning effect in Libya last year, thereby setting that country on the road from secular dictatorship to <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/26/world/africa/libya-sharia/index.html">Sharia-style</a> utopian theocracy).</p>
<p>The Bargouthis’ signal likely comprised an attempt to enlist the American president in their campaign against Israel’s policy of “administrative detention.”  But even though President Obama has some small experience at leaving others to go hungry <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100031523/barack-obama%E2%80%99s-humiliation-of-israel-is-a-disgrace/">while <em>he</em> eats</a>, an embrace of the Bargouthis’ anti-administrative detention strategy could prove politically risky &#8212; especially when one considers that Obama’s own <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obamas-new-gitmo-policy-is-a-lot-like-bushs-old-policy/2011/03/07/AB7FsyO_story.html">Gitmo policy</a> (which <a href="http://www.hsaj.org/?fullarticle=4.3.1">holds much in common</a> with Israel’s “administrative detention”) commands <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/02/drones-gitmo-and-drawdown-give-obama-foreign-policy-cred/">overwhelming support</a> among American voters.</p>
<p>When Adnan is finally released, he will have spent four months in detention.  A long stretch &#8212; not “Gilad Shalit” long, but long.  Israel utilizes its policy of detaining suspects without charge only if they are deemed an imminent security threat <em>and</em> publication of the charges against them would <a href="http://www.dailyalert.org/archive/2012-02/2012-02-22.html">endanger</a> Israel’s intelligence network.  Hence, the charges against Adnan remain unknown (although in his role as “spokesperson” for Islamic Jihad &#8212; a terrorist organization <a href="http://www.dailyalert.org/archive/2012-02/2012-02-21.html">responsible</a> for 118 Israeli deaths and 759 casualties &#8212; he has at least once been caught on <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/153024#.T0jvKVGhBFJ">video</a> exhorting others to become suicide bombers.).  Of note, Israel has employed “administrative detention” not only against Palestinians, but also against Israeli Jews.  For example, in a story that somehow escaped the media, a number of underage Jewish females from Gush Katif were held without charge for weeks during the 2005 Gaza disengagement.</p>
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		<title>Che Guevara’s Regime Still Murdering the Young and the Defenseless</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/humberto-fontova/che-guevara%e2%80%99s-regime-still-murdering-the-young-and-the-defenseless/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=che-guevara%25e2%2580%2599s-regime-still-murdering-the-young-and-the-defenseless</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:15:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Wilman Villar]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Freedom fighter Wilman Villar becomes the latest victim of the leftist-beloved killing machine. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Wilmar-Villar_2115874b.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-121173" title="Wilmar-Villar_2115874b" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Wilmar-Villar_2115874b.gif" alt="" width="375" height="252" /></a></p>
<p>Last week the regime co-founded by Che Guevara (worldwide icon of youthful rebellion) murdered a young defenseless political prisoner named <a href="http://cubaarchive.org/home/index.php?option=com_content&amp;task=blogcategory&amp;id=21&amp;Itemid=95">Wilman Villar</a> for the crime of “disrespect to authorities.”</p>
<p>So 53 years into Cuban Stalinism we’re at about <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/castro/victims.html">100,000 Cuban deaths at the hands of the regime and counting.  </a>(All of this 90 miles from U.S. shores, while Havana swarms with mainstream media press bureaus and Hollywood producers, by the way.)</p>
<p>&#8220;The Cuban regime is a callous band of murderers that once again has blood on its hands,” said Senator Marco Rubio in a <a href="http://www.capitolhillcubans.com/2012/01/senate-resolution-honors-wilman-villar.html">bi-partisan Senate Resolution</a> passed on Jan. 26 in Villar’s honor. &#8220;Once again, we are reminded of the unintended but negative consequences of this administration&#8217;s loosened travel and remittance policies [to Cuba]. They help deliver more hard currency to the Castro regime, making it easier for them to brutalize and even murder the Cuban people.&#8221;</p>
<p>Last November 30-year-old Wilman Villar was peacefully protesting Cuban Stalinism near his home in Eastern Cuba in a sort of “Occupy Santiago de Cuba.” But this protest was more peaceful, less messy and completely devoid of Che Guevara iconography. You’ll notice that this last peculiarity is a historic trademark of people cursed by fate to have actually experienced the handiwork of Che Guevara.</p>
<p>Within minutes of the protest’s commencement the KGB- and STASI-trained police that props up the regime co-founded by Che Guevara swarmed in with billy-clubs and arrested all protestors. None of this newsworthy drama was captured by the mainstream media folks, by the way.  And I repeat: Cuba teems with mainstream press bureaus that report every bruise or hangnail among the prisoners in Guantanamo.</p>
<p>In a New York Times article on the 30<sup>th</sup> anniversary of Che’s death, Christopher Hitchens rationalized his (not-so) youthful romance with the Stalinist war-monger and mass-murderer (who became an icon of anti-war and anti-death-penalty groups) by claiming that, &#8220;Che was no hypocrite.&#8221;  In fact, Che’s monumental hypocrisy—from stealing Cuba&#8217;s most luxurious mansion, to whimpering to the New York Times in 1959 that he felt “pained” to be wrongly branded a “Communist”—has been <a href="http://www.hfontova.com/che.html">amply documented.</a> But in this case, at least, the late Hitchens has a point:</p>
<p>“Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates!” raved Che Guevara in a famous speech in 1961. “The very spirit of rebellion is reprehensible!” commanded this icon of flower children. “Instead the young must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service.”</p>
<p>Youth, wrote Guevara, “should learn to think and act as a mass.” Those who “chose their own path” (as in growing long hair and listening to Yankee-imperialist rock &amp; roll) were denounced as worthless “delinquents,” and herded into forced labor camps at Soviet bayonet-point.  In a famous speech Che Guevara even vowed, “to make individualism disappear from Cuba!  It is criminal to think of individuals!” he raved.</p>
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		<title>Murder in Cuba</title>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:04:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A black civil rights activist is killed by the Castro regime, but where is the international community’s outrage?
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/zapataorlando..jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-52628" title="zapataorlando." src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/zapataorlando..jpg" alt="" width="450" height="338" /></a></p>
<p>On Feb 23, black human rights activist <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00688/CUBA_PIXEL_SIZE_185_688960a.JPG">Orlando Zapata-Tamayo</a> died after an 83-day hunger strike and a series of savage beatings by his Cuban jailers.</p>
<p>Some background is in order. Shortly after Jimmy Carter visited Fidel Castro in 2002, <a href="http://www.opednews.com/populum/uploaded/fidel-castro_jimmy-carter-20532-20090804-35.jpg">played baseball</a> with him, and returned home proclaiming Castro “a committed egalitarian who despises any system in which one class or group of people lives much better than another,” Zapata-Tamayo was beaten and arrested by Castro’s police for the crime of “disobedience.”</p>
<p>In their twisted way, Castro’s secret police had a point: Tamayo, a humble rural plumber and bricklayer, had studied the (smuggled) works of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi and had attempted some “civil disobedience” to protest the Stalinism imposed on Cuba by the Castro brothers, Che Guevara and their Soviet puppeteers. So Cuba&#8217;s Stalinist rulerspounced. Samizdats <a href="http://cruzarlasalambradaseng.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/seven-steps-to-kill-orlando-zapata-tamayo/">smuggled</a> out of Cuba by eye-witnesses report that while gleefully kicking and bludgeoning Tamayo, his Communist jailers yelled: “Worthless Ni*ger! Worthless peasant.”</p>
<p>Tamayo’s “disobedience” continued in proportion to his beatings and tortures. Tamayo remained, literally, “bloodied but unbowed.”  Even Amnesty International recognized his plight and designated him an official “Prisoner of Conscience.” His exasperating defiance simply prompted the regime to more merciless beatings and to bump-up his sentence to 36 years in Castro’s dungeons.</p>
<p>A little perspective: After conviction for planting bombs in public places (by a judiciary process declared scrupulously fair by the attending international press and human rights organizations) Nelson Mandela got a lighter sentence than did Tamayo for a peaceful protest.  Needless to add, the regime that jailed Mandela was universally embargoed  and condemned&#8211; and with particular virulence by the <em>precise </em>parties who hail Castro (who forbids any and all international  human rights groups/observers from so much as setting foot in his fiefdom). That goes for Nelson<em> </em>Mandela himself. In 1991, he gushed, &#8220;There&#8217;s one place where Fidel Castro stands out head and shoulders above the rest. That is in his love for human rights and liberty!&#8221;</p>
<p>One might think that the Congressional Black Caucus would take an interest in the abuse of a black dissident. Not so. The CBC visited with Raul Castro last year and returned hailing him as “one of the most amazing human beings we’ve ever met. Castro is a very engaging, down-to-earth and kind man.”  After Raul Castro received that compliment from the Congressional Black Caucus, Tamayo was beaten comatose by his jailers and left with a life-threatening fractured skull.</p>
<p>Eighty three days ago, already injured perhaps beyond recovery (certainly with Cuba’s medical facilities), and hoping his death might alert a two-faced “international community” to the plight of Castro’s subjects, Zapata-Tamayo declared a hunger strike. In his weakened condition, he finally succumbed to the regime&#8217;s tortures last week.</p>
<p>“They finally murdered my son,” wept Reina Luisa Tamayo this Feb. 24 upon news of her son’s death. She continued:</p>
<blockquote><p>“They finally got what they wanted.  They ended the life of a fighter for human rights.  My son was tortured.  But he didn&#8217;t die on his knees. He died bravely. My son&#8217;s death gives me much strength, valor, I want the world to demand the release of all the other prisoners of conscience, that this not happen again. And no&#8211;I don’t accept Raul Castro’s apology. He’s an assassin.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Her son’s body was delivered to her by Castro’s secret police, who demanded that he be buried quickly and without fanfare.  Castro’s police have also blanketed Tamayo’s rural home town to further “emphasize” this last directive. All press agencies that have earned a Havana bureau were very slow in reporting Tamayo’s death (though a skinned knee or sprained toe in Guantanamo would have buzzed through all news wires within seconds).</p>
<p>These agencies were very prompt, however, in reporting “President” Raul Castro’s official reaction.  “We are really sorry about his death, a lamentable accident,” said Raul Castro. He further insisted:</p>
<blockquote><p>“In half a century in Cuba there have been no extrajudicial killings. We haven’t killed a single person. Here, there is no torture. Killings and torture only happen in Guantanamo.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Amazingly, and despite Tamayo&#8217;s death, many in the press believe the regime&#8217;s spin. In 2006, one of the Castro-approved “reporters,” Anthony Boadle of Reuters, claimed that “There are no credible reports of disappearances, extrajudicial killings and torture in Cuba since the early 1960s, according to human rights groups.&#8221;  The late Orlando Zapata-Tamaya would probably disagree.</p>
<p>For those willing to see through the regime&#8217;s propaganda, Castro&#8217;s murder tally is not difficult to dig up.  Simply open <em>The Black Book of Communism</em>, written by French scholars and published in English by Harvard University Press, neither an outpost of the vast right-wing conspiracy. Here you&#8217;ll find a tally of 14,000 Castroite murders by firing- squad. &#8220;The facts and figures are irrefutable. No one will any longer be able to claim ignorance or uncertainty about the criminal nature of Communism.&#8221; So wrote the <em>New York Times</em> (no less!) about the book.</p>
<p>The Cuba Archive project headed by scholars Maria Werlau and the late Armando Lago estimates the death toll from Castro&#8217;s regime, including firing squads,  prison beatings and deaths at sea while attempting escape, at slightly over 100,000.  This project has been lauded by everyone from The Miami Herald to the Boston Globe (no right-wing outposts) to the Wall Street Journal.</p>
<p>Castro&#8217;s chief hangman, Che Guevara, had laid down the rules very succinctly: &#8220;Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution. We execute from revolutionary conviction.&#8221;</p>
<p>Fast forward to that period Boadle assures us is untainted by any &#8220;extra-judicial killings.&#8221; A 17-year-old named <a href="http://www.cubanet.org/ref/dis/05210401.htm">Orlando Travieso</a> was armed with only a homemade paddle when he was machine-gunned to death in March 1991. His “crime,” as spelled out perfectly judicially in Cuba’s legal code, was trying to flee Cuba on a tiny raft. Loamis Gonzalez was 15 when he was machine gunned to death for the same “crime.” The “criminal” Owen Delgado was 15 when Castro’s police dragged him out of the Ecuadorian Embassy where he sought asylum and clubbed him to death with rifle butts.</p>
<p>Boadle will be pleased that these boys and thousands upon thousands of others who perished in similar fashion well after the early 1960s were all deemed &#8220;criminals” by Castro’s judicial system.</p>
<p>Angel Abreu and Jose Nicol were 3, Gisele Borges and Caridad Leyva were 4 and Cindy and Yolindis Rodriguez were 2 on July  17, 1994, when their mothers held them in a tight embrace on the deck of a tugboat. Castro’s coast guard rammed the tugboat and water-cannoned them from their screaming mothers arms and into a turbulent sea to drown. Boadle will be pleased that Castro’s regime ruled this—quite judicially— an &#8220;accident,&#8221; exactly as they rule Tamayo’s death.</p>
<p>May Orlando Zapata-Tamayo rest in peace, may his family accept our condolences, and may his murderers eventually face justice.</p>
<p><em><strong> </strong></em></p>
<p><em><strong>Humberto Fontova is the author of four books including Fidel: </strong></em><em><strong>Hollywood</strong></em><em><strong>&#8216;s Favorite Tyrant and Exposing the Real Che Guevara. Visit </strong></em><em><a href="http://hfontova.com/"><em><strong>hfontova.com</strong></em></a>. </em></p>
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