America’s Astounding Human Rights Hypocrisy in Cuba

[Judi Lynn]

America’s Astounding Human Rights Hypocrisy in Cuba

Posted on Mar 25, 2016
By Harvey Wasserman


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America has more people incarcerated (2.2 million) than any other country. (Bart Everson / CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Our American president’s long-overdue visit to Cuba was a great thing for many reasons. But maybe our elected officials should cease their hypocritical yapping about the human rights situation in Cuba until they come clean about what’s happening here in the United States.

To be sure, there is much to say about how this authoritarian regime has handled dissent. The details abound in the corporate media. But the idea of the United States lecturing Cuba or any other country on this planet about human rights comes down somewhere between embarrassing and nauseating. Consider:


•The U.S. right now has the world’s largest prison population by far. There are 2.2 million citizens in prison here for offenses that include smoking pot and failing to pay off certain debts. At its peak, there were 2.5 million in Stalin’s Soviet Gulag.

•The U.S. prison population is hugely overfilled with African-Americans and Hispanics.

•The racial bias of the prison population is directly related to a deliberate Jim Crow strategy of disenfranchisement aimed at keeping people of color from voting.

•There are more citizens in U.S. prisons than there are prisoners in China, another authoritarian country. China’s population is 4 to 5 times as large as that of the U.S. They do not have an alleged Bill of Rights.

More:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/americas_astounding_human_rights_hypocrisy_in_cuba_20160325

[Jackie Wilson Said]

1. Every single prisoner in an American prison or jail for a non violent drug offense, who is black or

is a hippie, is also a political prisoner.

[guillaumeb]

2. Recommended, and also...

would any US President lecture Israel about its gross violations of human rights regarding the Palestinians and Israel's Arab and Christian citizens?

Or would any US President lecture Saudi Arabia, or China, about human rights in those countries?

The hypocrisy is astounding.

[Judi Lynn]

4. If there had ever been any Cuban human rights abuse the US would have used it as a pretext for war.

Remember the information author James Bamford published after years of requests to the government under F.O.I.A. FINALLY obtained the records of a fiendish plot devised by the Chiefs of Staff under President John F. Kennedy:

U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba

By DAVID RUPPE
·N E W Y O R K, May 1, 2001

In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.

The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.

America's top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," and, "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."

Details of the plans are described in Body of Secrets (Doubleday), a new book by investigative reporter James Bamford about the history of America's largest spy agency, the National Security Agency. However, the plans were not connected to the agency, he notes.

The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years.

"These were Joint Chiefs of Staff documents. The reason these were held secret for so long is the Joint Chiefs never wanted to give these up because they were so embarrassing," Bamford told ABCNEWS.com.

"The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will, and here this is the complete reverse, the military trying to trick the American people into a war that they want but that nobody else wants."

Gunning for War

The documents show "the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government," writes Bamford.

The Joint Chiefs even proposed using the potential death of astronaut John Glenn during the first attempt to put an American into orbit as a false pretext for war with Cuba, the documents show.

Should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, they wrote, "the objective is to provide irrevocable proof … that the fault lies with the Communists et all Cuba (sic)."

More:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92662&page=1

[Wilms]

3. !