This may be a little off my normal, strictly media-only territory. But, if the writer is properly reporting the truth (and the evidence suggests he is), then there is a media point because he is claiming that American newspapers and broadcasters have refused to come clean about US government sympathy for at least one group of terrorists. According to a lengthy and detailed article posted today by Frank Joyce on the Alternet site, Cuban exiles based in Florida have carried out many attacks against civilians.
Joyce claims that Cuban-American terrorists were responsible for blowing up a Cuban civilian airliner on October 6 1976, killing all 73 people on board, including the teenage members of the Cuban fencing team. He writes: "This tacitly US-supported terrorist crime never appears on the 'history' list of incidents involving civilian airliners, at least not in the US media." He identifies the man he alleges planned the crime, claiming that he is living freely in Miami "where he gives gloating TV interviews about his role in blowing up the plane."
Joyce goes on to list other acts of terrorism against Cuba, comparing the exiled Cuban gangs to al Qaida, before taking up the case of "the Cuban Five". These men are in US jails because they were arrested by the FBI in 1998 while trying to infiltrate the Cuban terrorist gangs. A six-month trial in 2001, which received "zero media coverage outside of Miami", found them guilty of several so-called spying charges, including conspiracy to transmit information related to the national defence of the US. Three were given life sentences and the other two were jailed for 15 and 19 years.
According to Joyce, they have spent much of their time in jail in solitary confinement. Last year their convictions were overturned on the grounds that their trial had been unfairly held in Miami. But that was overturned on appeal. There's much more on the case here.
In calling for greater publicity to be given to the injustice, Joyce asks a series of questions: "As a nation, are we truly against terrorism, or is it just a term we use to demonise those whose goals we oppose?... As long as the US government supports the terrorists in Florida, by what moral authority does the United States tell Iran and Syria they have no right to support Hezbollah?... If Israel has the right to defend itself from terrorist attack, why doesn't Cuba?"
And, most pertinently, he also asks: "Why doesn't the media ever raise these questions?" Perhaps my American journalist readers would care to explain.
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