Letter to Obama: Alan Gross not a "hostage"
Courtesy: Tracey Eaton – Along the Malecon
Below
is the text of an open letter from Canadian journalist Steven Kimber to
President Barack Obama. He is writing a book called, "What Lies Across
the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five."
Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States of America
The White House
Washington DC 20500
Dear President Obama,
This
is my first ever letter to an American president. That’s not just
because I’m not an American citizen. I’m also a journalist, and
journalists are not in the habit of writing letters to heads of
governments.
But having spent the past three years researching the case of the Cuban Five, I believe I have an obligation to write to you.
The
fact is American journalism hasn’t done a very good job of explaining
to the American public the case of the five Cuban intelligence agents
who have been incarcerated in the U.S. since 1998. As a result, your
administration has mostly managed to avoid dealing with the issue at all
or, when forced to comment, responding with the tired, rote rhetoric of
the Cold War era.
But
the case of the Cuban Five has recently been brought back into the
public spotlight because of Alan Gross, the USAID subcontractor
currently serving a 15-year jail term in Cuba for bringing satellite
communication equipment into that country.
The
media reporting of his case has been equally problematic, mostly
parroting your own State Department line that Gross is a “humanitarian”
who was arrested while trying to help Havana’s tiny Jewish community
communicate with the outside world, and is now being held “hostage” by
Havana.
You
know that’s not true. So, of course, should the media. After all, it
was Desmond Butler, a foreign affairs reporter for the Associated
Press—a news agency subscribed to by most American media and unlikely
ever to be mistaken for a tool of the Cuban regime—who documented the
facts of the case.
Alan
Gross was “paid a half-million dollars” by USAID, your government’s
“democracy promoting” agency, to smuggle sophisticated communications
equipment into Cuba. That technology included Internet satellite phones
capable of avoiding detection and spy-quality SIM cards “most
frequently” used by the Defense Department and the CIA.
The
goal of all of this was not to assist Cuba’s Jewish community
communicate, as your government has insisted (the Jewish community
already had Internet connectivity) but to promote regime change—to
overthrow the government of Cuba.
Gross’s
own reports make clear he knew he was engaged in “very risky business”
and that discovery of what he was up to “will be catastrophic.”
That said, Alan Gross’s family and friends, not surprisingly, want him freed.
Just as the Cubans want the Five—who are considered national heroes in their homeland—freed.
Your
government’s unblinking response has been that there is simply “no
equivalence.” The Cubans were trained intelligence agents convicted of
trying to steal military secrets and conspiracy to murder four innocent
civilians killed in the shootdown of two unarmed Brothers to the Rescue
aircraft in 1996. By contrast, the American argument goes, Alan Gross
was just a humanitarian do-gooder.
We now know Alan Gross was much more than that.
Story continues here: http://alongthemalecon.
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