Condolences for dead prosecutor who accused Argentine president should be sent to the White House

There is a tremendous press campaign against the government of Argentina over the violent death of a prosecutor who was filing charges against the country's president.

But an important fact  missing from the press coverage is that the Wikileaks cables from four years ago show that Alberto Nisman, the prosecutor in the investigation of the 1994 terrorist bombing of AMIA, the Argentine-Israel Mutual Association, in fact reported to and took instructions from the U.S. embassy. And the way the U.S. press is covering this should tell any seasoned reporter that the United States is still very much involved in what is happening.

Ten days ago, in the middle of Argentina's month-long January judicial recess, prosecutor Nisman tweeted that he was breaking off a vacation in Europe, and dashing back to Buenos Aires, and the very next morning after landing submitted a 289-page writ calling for an investigation of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and her foreign minister for masterminding a conspiracy to cover up the alleged participation of several Iranian officials in the AMIA bombing.

Nisman went on cable channels and radio shows making all sorts of charges and claiming he could not make his written complaint public because it contained the names and other details of two members of the Argentine intelligence service who played central roles in the alleged back-channel negotiations with Iran.

But the essence of the case is that an Iran-Argentina agreement providing a mechanism for Iranians accused in the bombing to be questioned under oath was part of a deal under which Argentina would withdraw the international arrest warrants against the Iranians, and in exchange Iran would accept Argentine wheat in payment for oil.

Then on Sunday night, hours before he was to testify before Congress, Nisman was found dead, a .22 caliber pistol and shell casing by his side. The police and coroner's initial conclusion of suicide was met with universal skepticism, including in an Internet post by the president on Monday.

Quickly it became clear that the idea that two members of Argentine Intelligence were go-betweens in back channel negotiations was not true because neither one was now or had ever been in the intelligence service. In fact one of them was the target of an influence-peddling criminal inquiry for falsely claiming to be an intelligence operative.

Thus, with the supposed security issues cleared away, on Tuesday night, 48 hours after Nisman had been found dead, the Supreme Court published Nisman's writ on its web site. The English-language Buenos Aires Herald, which is generally quite cool to the current administration, proclaimed on its Wednesday front page: "Nothing New: Nisman's Report fails to fan the flames of conspiracy."

Eugenio Zaffaroni, one of the most renowned experts on criminal law in Latin America, author of three dozen books, hundreds of articles and recipient of more than 30 honorary degrees, who just retired from the Argentine Supreme Court, said that, even taking as true everything Nisman had claimed, the prosecutor failed to allege a crime punishable by law.

Nisman's central claim is that the government tried (but failed) to get Interpol to drop its "Red Notices" (similar to an arrest warrant) for the indicted Iranians. Zaffaroni says even if true this is simply not a crime, and added that he believed that Nisman was one more victim of the AMIA case, and had been fed false information to mislead him.

(A couple of years ago, Nisman had explained to a journalist reporting on the Wikileaks cables that the a top intelligence officer --who had been dismissed days before Nisman made public his accusations against the president--, had been a central source in his investigations and was the conduit of information from the CIA and the Israeli Mossad.)

Also, even if requesting the withdrawal of the Red Notices had been a crime, it never happened. After Nisman went public with his claim, the head of the Interpol for fifteen years until last November, Ronald Noble, responded with an email to the Argentine foreign minister. Noble insisted that precisely the opposite had been the case. The Argentine government argued that the Red Notices be kept in effect despite the agreement between Argentina and Iran for a mechanism to take statements from the accused Iranians in their country. The Argentine foreign minister told Interpol that the Argentine judge in the case, under whose authority Nisman himself had prepared the original Red Notice requests, would be the one to ask for the notices to be lifted, should that become appropriate.

It would seem Nisman never checked with the head of Interpol about the supposed effort to dismiss the Notices ... which is strange, given that Nisman had had extensive dealings with Interpol on those very notices.

From the Wikileaks cables [my comments in brackets]:

1. (C/NF) [Confidential/No Foreign] LEGATT [Legal Attaché] and the Department of Justice's Office of International Affairs (OIA) have reviewed the GOA's [Goverment of Argentina's] revised application for Interpol arrest warrants ("Red Notices"), which AMIA Special Prosecutor Alberto Nisman gave to LEGATT on January 17. LEGATT advises that the 9-page application is much improved over the original 2-page application submitted on November 15, 2006. On January 19, USDOJ/OIA advised that three of the nine needed improvement, including the warrants for former Iranian Ambassador to Argentina Hadi Soleimanpour, former Iranian diplomat Ahmad Reza Aghari or Mohsen Randjbaran, and Hezbollah leader Imad Fayez Moughnieh. OIA also indicated that most of the explanations for the nine indicted suspects contained statements that were presumptuous conclusions of guilt. OIA recommends that these statements should be modified to indicate that they are attributed to witnesses, records, surveillances, or other types of evidence uncovered in the investigation.
2. (C/NF) LEGATT relayed OIA's observations and recommendations to Nisman, who was appreciative of Embassy and Washington's support. Nisman stated that he would edit the application to incorporate OIA's comments by expanding on some of the information that would further clarify the evidence the GOA has to support the allegations. Nisman, two of his deputies, and Ambassador Gonzales depart for France on January 19 at 11pm. Alejandro DiNizo, Chief of Argentina's Interpol office departs on January 20 at 2pm. WAYNE [Emphasis added]

Increasingly, suspicion is focusing on the spy, Antonio Stiusso. But I think Stiusso, if involved, was still only one piece of a larger operation.

Experienced U.S.-based journalists who follow Latin America know that even huge news events in our closest neighbors rarely get the attention they deserve. Such is the case of the Ayotzinapa massacre in Mexico, the police ambush of busloads of students from that teacher's college last September 26 in Iguala, a small city 130 miles north from Acapulco. Six people died in the attack; 25 were wounded and 43 kidnapped by police and not seen since.

This mass forced disappearance was the straw that broke the Camel's back. There has been wave after wave of protests, and a collapse in confidence not just in the current administration, but the country's politicians and political institutions in general. It is, as we in the news biz say, a great story: but it has been largely ignored in the U.S. English language press.

But the Argentina story isn't being ignored. And I can explain that very easily. Generally what the U.S. media covers is very much influenced by cues from the State Department and U.S. embassies abroad. No, the journalists don't take "orders," not usually, but they travel in the same circles as government officials, depend on them and are influenced by them. The same is true of their editors back home, especially the top ones.

In the Argentine case, there is a glaring blooper you will find in most of the U.S. coverage that is very easy to verify. It is the claim that President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner initially said Nisman's death was a suicide, and then reversed herself. Except it isn't true: she initially questioned whether it was really a suicide, that despite the investigators initiaslly saying suicide is what it looked like. Anyone who can read Spanish can readily verify it for themselves

How does a mistake like that not just get started, but get repeated in post after article after TV report? It comes from someone at the U.S. embassy, who may have picked it up from a local pro-American politician. And it isn't even necessarily a conscious fabrication, they just see what they want to see because a lot of these state department guys don't even speak the host country language very well, making it easier for them to misinterpret what they read. Ditto for the reporters.

I saw this time and again up close in the years I spent covering the civil wars in Central America in the 1980s and then from afar in two decades at CNN. But American diplomats don't just randomly focus on some story to highlight to reporters. Their job is to promote U.S. interests and foreign policy objectives.

Which tells me the United States government has been very much involved in these events. Just exactly how or why we can't be sure, but --from the tone and emphasis in the stories-- we can be certain it wasn't on the side of the Argentine president.

Scientists expose government lies about the missing Mexican students

A study by Mexican scientists shows the government is lying about the kidnapping and presumed murder of 43 students.

On September 26, a large group of students from the Ayotzinapa teachers college were attacked by police in the town of Iguala, state of Guerrero. Six people were killed by the police in the attack; 25 were wounded and 43 others were taken and have not been seen again.

After delaying 10 days after the events before taking over the investigation, Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam held a show-and-tell press conference November 7 claiming the crime had been solved.

He presented videotaped testimony from three hitmen from the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel. They claimed the students had been killed and cremated in the municipal dump of the neighboring town of Cocula. A central claim in the presentation was that the bodies had been so thoroughly cremated in a funeral pyre that burned from midnight until the middle of the next afternoon that only one small bone fragment had been found that showed any hope of being identifiable. A week ago, a European lab reported that DNA analysis showed the bone fragment belonged to Alexander Mora, one of the students.

Pictures of the site released by the government are enough to raise questions about the official story. According to Murillo Karam, the fire burned for at least 15 hours at temperatures of up to 1600°C (2900°F). Yet a few weeks later the surrounding vegetation showed no scars from the hellish heat. Adding to the skepticism was the statement a a team of forensic anthropologists from Argentina, that --at the insistence of the parents of the missing students-- the government grudgingly allowed to access much of the investigation. These experts said they had not been allowed to observe the initial search of the Cocula site and could not vouch for the government's claim that the bone fragment identified as belonging to one of the students had been found there.

And now, the report by Mexican scientists shows the official story is simply absurd.

According to the government, wood, tires, plastic, diesel fuel and gasoline were all used to feed the fire.

But the academic study shows that at least 33 tons of firewood would have been needed for the funeral pyre, if only wood had been used. If it had been made solely out of tires, at least 995 would have been needed, and two-and-a-half tons of steel would have been left behind as well as rubber deposits that seeped into the ground. And if gasoline, diesel or fuel oil had been used, hundreds of gallons would have been needed.

Whatever the proportion or mix between the various fuels, they could not have been delivered to and suitably arranged into a funeral pyre in the hour or two between when the students were captured and when, according to the government account, the cremation started. Especially not around midnight at the end of a dirt road that ends in a ravine at the bottom of which the cremation supposedly took place.

Nor are tons of firewood, hundreds of tires or gallons of fuel readily available in rural areas in Mexico on Friday nights, even if they could somehow have been magically delivered and arranged into a funeral pyre for 43 students at the bottom of the ravine.

And even if there was such a cremation, there would have been many more bone fragments, especially from the skulls and hips, than were found.

This adds new dimensions to a central unanswered question about the massacre at Iguala: why?

Why were the students attacked? Why were they forcible disappeared? And why is the central government lying about what actually happened if it is true, as it claims, that this was simply a crime carried out by local authorities affiliated with a (supposedly) left-wing opposition party and the drug cartels?

Guerrero: don't forgive, don't forget

That's the "Palacio de Gobierno," the seat of the government in the State of Guerrero, Mexico, in flames late Monday afternoon. Behind these were flames that sear, not the flesh, but the soul.On September 26, cops from the city of Iguala massacred students from a nearby heavily-indigenous rural teacher's college. Six people were killed, dozens wounded, and 43 students were arrested and vanished ... "disappeared."

Also vanished are Iguala's mayor, who told radio interviewers shortly before going on the lam that he knew nothing of the events until reading about it in the newspapers, since he had been at a dance that night; the mayor's wife, honoree at the festivities and sister to four former capos of the Beltrán Leyva cartel and founding leaders of its successor, Guerreros Unidos. Also not to be found were the owners of the main movie theater, the supermarket, the shopping mall, the jewelry store and many other Iguala businesses.

But that is not so surprising once you realize that one name appears time and again on title deeds and incorporation papers: namely and to wit, the name of hizzoner the mayor.

The chief of police is also gone, albeit he is not the same person as the mayor, only an accomplice. Also an accomplice is the governor of the state of Guerrero, who not only is not a fugitive, but refuses to resign his position. The picture above captures the reaction of a broad section of the population to his demural.

The Iguala massacre will go down in history with the Tlatelolco massacre of hundreds of students in 1968 as one of the greatest crimes of Mexico's rulers.

And the country's political class has followed its usual pattern of pretending nothing has happened: President Enrique Peña Nieto said it was a local matter and it took him nine days, until Monday October 6, before he could bring himself to take even a smidgen of responsibility, and that only after mass graves with the charred remains of 28 persons were found. He spoke again on  Friday the 10th, two weeks after the massacre and after more clandestine graves were found. “En un Estado de Derecho no cabe la impunidad," he thundered, which means, "under the rule of law, there is no place for impunity."

He did not, however, explain what such idyllic clichés have to do with Mexico, as the mayor of Iguala --his whereabouts still unknown-- nevertheless managed to get a judge to issue an injunction against the mayor being arrested or questioned.

From my perch as co-host of an Atlanta Spanish-language talk radio show with a mostly Mexican audience, watching these events unfold over the past two-and-a-half weeks, has been like watching a train wreck in slow motion. President Peña Nieto seems to think the whole thing can still be papered over with a few phrases promising to punish those responsible, now that his explanations of the division of responsibility between federal and state authorities has failed to satisfy.

But watching the TV news videos of the burning "Government Palace" only keeps pushing through my mind the ending of a song I first heard sometime in high school, nearly a half century ago.

Down on our knees we're begging you please,
We're sorry for the way you were driven.
There's no need to taunt just take what you want,
and we'll make amends, if we're living.
But away from the grounds the flames told the town
that only the dead are forgiven.
As they crumbled inside the ringing of revolution.

Lies, damn lies, and TV election polls

So Atlanta's Channel 11 came out with a new poll in the Georgia gubernatorial and Senate races with a big surprise. According to the detailed "cross-tabs," Georgia Latinos are going for our ultra-corrupt Republican governor and his "pants on fire" lying running mate in the race for U.S. Senator by a 4-to-3 margin.

I've gotta ask: dudes, what have you been smoking?

Because even more surprising than our supposed support for these two anti-Latino bigots is the poll's projection that Latinos, who are less than 1.8% of the registered voters in the state, will be 7% of those that go to the polls in November. Assuming every last Latino voter actually showed up, that would mean an overall turnout of 1.3 million, less than one in five adult residents of the state, impossibly low, even for Georgia.

And that brings us to the poll's surprising Latino results. The total sample was said to be 550, which gives us a theoretical "margin of error" of 4.3%, which in reality means 4.8%, since you have to add a rounding error of up to 0.5%.

But --assuming that the projection of a 7% Latino turnout was based on the number of Latinos the poll encountered-- that would be around 38 persons. So the question isn't what is the margin of error for a poll of 550 but what is the margin of error for a poll of those 38 Latinos. Using the standard formula, that would be around 15%, meaning the supposed Republican advantage is not statistically significant. It might be real. It might not.

Except that statistical science says, when samples get that small, the "margin of error" formula doesn't apply. The results are meaningless -- overwhelmed by statistical noise and the practical difficulties involved in public opinion surveys.

That's why at CNN, where my work included reporting precisely these sorts of numbers through 11 successive election cycles (1990-2010), we had a hard rule not to report cross-tab (subgroup) results of a poll where we had less than 100 interviews for that group. And even then, results had to be very dramatic, with big differences in the numbers, for us to rely on small samples.

Think of it this way. If the WXIA pollsters talked to 38 Latinos, Governor Deal's 40% would be about 15 people, Democrat challenger Jason Carter's 29% would have been 11, and 12 were undecided (reported as 31%). If you were calling 1,000 people, who were the first 20 who answered when you called, and agreed to be interviewed, isn't than significant. But if that is the majority of who you talk to, you have skewed the poll tremendously.

That's especially true when dealing with Latinos. Who was available to answer the phone? What languages are they comfortable with? The overwhelming majority of adult Georgia Latinos are immigrants, whose first language is not English.Was the survey conducted bilingually? Almost certainly not, because otherwise WXIA would have bragged about it. Pollsters rely on mechanisms like asking for the oldest or youngest adult to "randomize" a sample. In Latino households, that won't work.

And the Latino community in Georgia has been the most heavily hit of any state in the nation by Obama's "secure communities" deportation dragnet. It is a community that has been profoundly traumatized. Based on the information the government was forced to hand over thanks to a lawsuit by the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights --with the support of the Georgia ACLU, NDLON and the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University School of Law-- I estimate that ICE, the immigration cops, have made some 100,000 arrests in Georgia since Obama was elected, overwhelmingly of Latinos, in a state that officially has less than one million Latinos.

 I do not think it is possible under such conditions to do an accurate public opinion survey of this community. There is simply too much fear.

But leaving that aside, I am sure WXIA's figures are, in essence, bogus. The Latino vote would need to be ten times its current size to be even measurable by a poll of the size done on behalf of WXIA. As a news organization, WXIA does not have the competence in polling nor the knowledge of our community to be making claims about how we're likely to vote.

Are none of us spics 'fit to print' in the NY Times?

Today I was at Plaza Fiesta in Atlanta, for the Mexican and Central American Independence Day celebration, when someone approached me about comments I had made a couple of days ago as the co-host (sidekick) on the "Hablemos con Teodoro" radio show on Radio Información 1310 AM.

I had quoted an editorial in the New York Times blasting Obama for his latest betrayal of the Latino community. After dismissing Obama's specious explanation, the Times says, "The real reason ... is that the midterm elections are upon us, and Mr. Obama ... didn’t want to jeopardize Democratic control of the Senate. As for the immigrants ... they were once again seen as safely expendable.

"A political emergency collided with a human one, and the humans lost."

That last line had a really nice ring to it and I had said on air this was especially welcome coming from such a notoriously anti-Latino newspaper as the New York Times. The listener who came up to me wanted to know why I had said the Times was notoriously anti-Latino. The editorial sounded pretty good to her.

Well, first, because while it is true that I may be getting fat and old, the flip side of that coin is that an elephant never forgets. In the 1970s and early 80s, when I lived in New York and read that newspaper religiously, I remember the Times railing time and again against bilingual and bicultural education, such as in a 1975 editorial with the poetic, symbolic headline "Divisive Languages." (Don't bother following the link unless you're already a subscriber: they'll try to hit you for $4 for an editorial that's not worth 4 cents. The title says it all: if you let people keep on speaking languages other than English, slit your wrists. You're heading straight to disaster. Just like Canada. Canada, I tell you!!!)

But, of course, then there's today. The Times's Editorial Board has 18 people on it. There is not a single Latino among them, or if there is, they are completely undercover. Then there are the regular columnists. They have 12; none of us there either. Finally the top editors listed on the Masthead. There are 10 people listed as responsible for the presentation of the news.

That's a total of 40 people. There's not a single Latino that I could find, not even your token Mexican self-hater or right-wing Cuban. Add the 16 corporate/business bigwigs on the masthead, and its still zilch city. Or if there is some Mr. Smith or Mrs. Jones on there who is Latino, why are they and the Times hiding their background?

That is astonishing: New York City is 27.5% Latino, the metro area 24.2%, one out of four. The New York Times doesn't even have one out of 40. Or 56.

You cannot get a result like that without a culture that is profoundly racist, chauvinist and exclusionary. Where people are holding hands thinking they are singing kumbaya without realizing that with the burning crosses, to someone like me it looks just like a Klan meeting.

And it is not just the Times.

About this blog and Hatuey

Hatuey was a cacique, a leader of the Taínos in the island the Spanish called "Hispaniola" around the time when that clueless adventurer Christopher Columbus stumbled onto Caribbean lands imagining he was all the way to India. But Columbus and those that followed were more interested in raping and looting these lands than in geographic precision.

There were others who resisted, but Hatuey is the one that history remembers. He fled to Cuba, where he warned his tribesmen against the depravity of the invaders. "Here is the God the Spaniards worship," he told them, holding up a basket of gold and jewels. "For these they fight and kill; for these they persecute us and that is why we have to throw them into the sea....

"They tell us, these tyrants, that they adore a God of peace and equality, and yet they usurp our land and make us their slaves. They speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, and yet they rob our belongings, seduce our women, violate our daughters. Incapable of matching us in valor, these cowards cover themselves with iron that our weapons cannot break."

Hatuey was captured and burned at the stake in Yara on February 2, 1512. His attitude on that day, described by Spanish Friar Bartolomé de las Casas, is why he is remembered as "The First Rebel of the Americas" and the first Cuban.

It is said that Hatuey's ashes led to the character of the Cuban people. Cuba's national day is not independence day, or revolution day, or constitution day but is called, "Día de la Rebeldía Nacional," the Day of National Rebelliousness.

This is the blog of a rebel, someone born on that island that, having spent a lifetime away from it, has not succeeded in purging Hatuey's ashes from his soul.