Spies go free, antiterrorists go to prison
By
Jean-Guy Allard Read Spanish Version
Taken
from Granma, Aug. 21, 2007
It
sounds like a fiction story. The archives of the Empire contain the
recent story of a CIA agent who, violating all existing rules and
laws, put at the disposal of a foreign government the record amount
of 3,659 secret documents. However, he was never accused of espionage
or conspiracy to spy and was sentenced to only one year’s
imprisonment and a fine.
The man
was Donald W. Keyser, an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency,
who on Dec. 12, 2005, confessed to Judge T. S. Ellis 3rd, in
Washington, that he had stolen 28 documents classified TOP SECRET,
1,976 classified SECRET and 1,655 designated CONFIDENTIAL, either
printed or in electronic form, and delivered them to Isabelle Cheng,
an agent of the Taiwanese intelligence service with whom Keyser
maintained a longtime liaison.
Keyser
also admitted formally to the court that he had lied repeatedly to
State Department investigators about his relationship with agent
Cheng.
And he
admitted that he failed to mention (in a deceitful manner) on a
Customs declaration in September 2003 that Taiwan had been in his
travel itinerary, even though he had just visited that island.
Despite
all this, thanks to a complacency that can only be explained by the
level of the acquaintances Keyser had at the White House, he was
freed on $500,000 bail (in reality, a mortgage guarantee) and ordered
to surrender his passport and wear an electronic bracelet for
monitoring purposes.
On Jan.
22, 2007, Keyser was quietly sentenced to 12 months and one day in
prison, to pay a $25,000 fine, and to spend three years under
monitoring, for having performed "an illegal extraction of
classified material" from the Department of State, and for
making false statements.
That’s
not all. It was not the first time that Keyser had been in hot water!
In 2000, the Asia specialist (he speaks Mandarin fluently) was
reprimanded, along with several colleagues, after the disappearance
of a laptop computer and its contents from the office of
then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
It seems
incredible, but Keyser must have had a "godfather"
somewhere, because he was reassigned to the Office of Director
General for Foreign Service.
Before
his arrest, this licensed spy had occupied posts at the U.S. Embassy
in Beijing (1976-78, 1983-89 and 1989-92) and in Tokyo (1979-81 and
1985-88). In addition, he participated — with the rank of ambassador
— in negotiations relative to Nagorno-Karabakh and other former
Soviet republics.
The
absurdities of Bushie justice
Among
the instances of authentic and proven "espionage" under the
administration of George W. Bush, we find an associate of the Israeli
lobby, Lawrence A. Franklin.
For
years, Franklin delivered to two Israeli agents, Steve Rosen and
Keith Weissman, who operated under the cover of the American Israel
Political Committee (AIPAC), the most important lobby in Washington,
and to another Israeli spy, Naor Gilon, then-political adviser at the
Tel Aviv Embassy in Washington, huge amounts of Pentagon information
about Iran.
Franklin,
an expert Pentagon analyst who personally counseled Donald Rumsfeld,
was sentenced in 2006 to 12 years in prison. He was freed on bail
shortly thereafter, until the trial of Rosen and Weissman could be
completed.
Some
months ago, The Wall Street Journal revealed that Franklin, the most
dangerous spy in recent U.S. history, was working as a parking
attendant at the Charles Town Races & Slots, West Virginia, a
private race track and casino specializing in video-lottery.
Arrested
by the FBI as they performed espionage activities, Rosen and Weissman
are also free on bail.
Their
shrewd laywers say that, by accusing their clients of espionage, the
Attorney General’s Office violates the First Amendment to the
Constitution, and that sentencing them would result in the levying of
charges against numerous activists and journalists.
Their
espionage activities lasted from April 1999 to Aug. 27, 2004, a
period during which the FBI observed them engaging in numerous
meetings, with the precautions typical of spies.
Some
days ago, the president of Cuba’s National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcón,
pointed to another case of flagrant complacency, saying that The
New York Times had just
published statements from the Department of Justice about Leandro
Arangoncillo, an American of Filipino extraction who was sentenced to
only 10 years for espionage.
A former
U.S. Marine, Aragoncillo conducted espionage activities in the White
House while working successively for Vice Presidents Albert Gore and
Richard Cheney.
Even
more scandalous, when Arangoncillo joined the FBI in New Jersey, as
an intelligence analyst, he continued to engage in espionage and
stole MOST SECRET documents about terrorist threats against U.S.
interests in the Philippines.
The
Five stole not a single document
The
complacency of Bush’s justice with Donald W. Keyser, Lawrence A.
Franklin, Leando Aragoncillo and other confirmed spies working in the
highest circles of the U.S. government contrasts sharply with the
brutality of the treatment reserved for The Five, who at no time got
even close to a classified document belonging to the U.S. government.
Let us
remember that, violating all prison norms and international
agreements on torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, the
chief of the FBI’s Miami office, Héctor Pesquera, and his
accomplices at the State Attorney General’s office, kept The Five in
solitary confinement for 17 consecutive months after their arrest.
And how
five top military officers delivered testimony to the effect that
none of The Five had gotten near information of any strategic value.
Their names: Gen. James R. Clapper, former chief of the Defense
Department’s Intelligence Agency; Gen. Charles Wilhelm, former
Commander in Chief of the U.S. Southern Command; Gen. Edward Atkeson,
the Army’s former Deputy Chief of Staff in charge of Intelligence;
Adm. Eugene Carroll, former Deputy Chief of Naval Operations; and
Col. George Buckner, former Commanding Officer of the U.S. Air
Defense System.
After a
trumped-up trial in a city dominated by the Cuban-American terrorist
Mafia, The Five were given four life sentences plus 75 additional
years in prison — for watching the terrorist networks that sponsored
Luis Posada Carriles and his gang, who, from Miami and often in
cahoots with the CIA, the FBI, the State Department and the White
House itself, engaged in conspiring against Cuba.
