Political Prisoners and Dirty War

The executive order to remove the pictures of the Basque political prisoners from the squares and streets of Euskal Herria is just the one more absurd and useless tactic, since it does not solve any single kind of issue.

During the last few years whe have seen how several youngsters have been incarcerated without them ever having committed a single act outside the law, we are also witness to how a number of individuals are in jail without ever even touching a fire arm. Despite this they get sentenced over "terrorist acts" and "collaborating with an armed band" charges, without incontestable and solid evidence.

The whole thing is an entire process of ill-intentioned repressive tactics. The media outlets in the Spanish state, including radio stations and tv channels broadcast news and phony debates year long, using comments with no intellectual nor political or historical value regarding the situation in the Basque Country. They freely hand out labels like "etarras", "violent bunch", "dangerous people", "the must wanted", "the masterminds" and just about any epithet that they may find suitable. And then the arrests start, really young people with their entire lives ahead of them. The arrests are loud, humiliating, brutal, and in must cases they involve torture, physical abuse, threats, humiliation and incommunicado regime.

Then they are subjected to Kafkian trial where all the main witnesses are police officers that often contradict themselves or that even commit perjury to sustain their accusations, with no evidence which is not actually the worst part, there is not even logical arguments to justify the arrest, which in turn is irrelevant too. The trial are a circus show, absurd theater plays and then the conviction comes, even more absurd, out of proportion and with no legal coherence. They are thrown into inhumane jails, taking special care in dispersing them all over the geography of the Spanish and French state. The worst jails, the worst conditions, without access to doctors or psychologists, without any humane consideration, they even endure being kept from the right to get an education and all kinds of obstacles are put up to make impossible to communicate with their relatives, friends and life partners. They receive the worst treatment a prisoner can get.

The great majority of Basque political prisoners serve unfair sentences over makeshift crimes. They serve lengthy sentences over minor crimes and are forced to serve the length of their sentences despite experiencing health problems, and many of them, with terminal illnesses are still in jail years after having completed their time.

Eternal trials and sentences, and on top, with all kinds of trickery serving time at inhumane detention center in the worst condition, and in the eventuality of regaining their freedom then there is plenty of more opportunities to continue to punish them: confiscate their homes or property, harassment, put them in jail for writting a book or an article at a newspaper, for clapping their hands, for drinking a beer at an herriko or maybe for speaking Euskera or breathing pro-independence air. And if all of this does not work, dirty war will do the job, like having them going missing, abduct them, execute them... no problem at all, because in the end, in the Spanish state this atrocities are never published, nor commented, let alone punished.

Victoria Mendoza/Gara

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Making Goebbels Proud

The United States is considered around the world as the top human rights violator. Aware of its military power it has unleashed a number of conflicts causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people from dozens of countries. As these paragraphs are being written, hundreds of human lives are in danger due to the wars for oil in Afghanistan and Iraq, wars that were started upon the campaign of lies designed by a genocidal maniac by the name of George W. Bush. As it happens, those wars are not enough, no, Washington has also resorted to state sponsored terrorism to violently suppress the right to self determination of several nations, especially in Latin America.

So you can imagine our surprise when we ran into this article published at The Washington Post:

Accuser With a Checkered Past

A lawyer whose complaint prompted a Spanish criminal probe into whether the Bush administration approved the torture of terrorism suspects was once convicted of terrorist activity.

Gonzalo Boye served eight years in prison for his involvement in the 1988 kidnapping of Emiliano Revilla, a Spanish industrialist, who was held for ransom for eight months by ETA, a Basque separatist group classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and Spanish governments.

Boye was one of four Chilean members of a Marxist group, the Revolutionary Leftist Movement, or MIR, who were convicted of aiding ETA in the kidnapping. He received his law degree while behind bars and has since emerged as an advocate for European and Palestinian human rights causes.

Representing a group called the Association for the Rights of Prisoners, Boye and other lawyers filed a complaint with the Spanish National Court against six senior officials from the Bush administration, including former attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales. The complaint alleges that the officials sanctioned the torture of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The other officials named in the complaint are Jay S. Bybee and John C. Yoo, former Justice Department officials; former Defense Department officials Douglas J. Feith and William J. Haynes II; and David S. Addington, who was legal counsel to Vice President Richard B. Cheney.

In an interview, Boye acknowledged his conviction but minimized his involvement in the crime, saying he had only lent an ID card to the kidnappers. He said he voluntarily traveled from London to Madrid in 1992 to answer investigators' questions about the case and was taken aback when he was arrested.

"I'm still convinced it was a very unfair trial," he said. "That was a very dark period in Spanish democratic history."

When asked if he thought the six Bush administration officials could expect to receive a fair trial in Spain, Boye said he had no doubts they would -- despite his experience.

The Spanish judge overseeing the investigation, Eloy Velasco, has said in court papers that he may not proceed if U.S. prosecutors decide to open their own criminal case against the "Bush Six," as Boye calls them.

Like we said, the editorial staff at The Washington Post are making Joseph Goebbels proud. Knowing that their country is guilty as charged of woeful human rights violations in Guantanamo Bay which is a Nazi style concentration camp, they resort to something called "character assassination". How dare Gonzalo Boye put the US on the spotlight when he himself was in jail accused of terrorism?

Nothing, absolutely nothing that Gonzalo Boye could have done in the past is enough to sponge Bush regime's rap sheet. What is taking place in Guantanamo Bay as gruesome as it is pales in comparison with what the USA is doing in places like Iraq, Pakistan and Palestine. The US based main stream media can set in place a "character assassination" campaign against every single activist around the world that exposes their crimes to the international community, but the fact remains, Bush and many other presidents of the USA are war criminals, as simply as that.

And by the way, Gonzalo Boye was in jail during Jose Maria Aznar's extreme right rule in Spain, shall we remind our readers who was a staunch supporter of George W. Bush's war against Iraq?

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The Bad Guys

Seems like a book written expressly to be made into a script for a Hollywood movie. Riding the wave created by "The Da Vinci Code", the victim seems to be the Catholic Pope. The bad guys, you guessed it, two Basques... and an Irish.

Hit by the aftermath of the brutal crusade against the Muslims thinly disguised as a "war on terrorism", authors are resorting to "politically correct" bad guys. In the end, who is going to defend the Basques and the Irish after the brutal propaganda campaign set against those two nationalities by the main stream media?

How well does the propaganda campaign has worked that the author uses citizens of two of the nations more widely identified as "firmly Catholic" on this thriller were the target seems to be the highest representative of the Catholic church.

Here you have preview of the book published by The Philadelphia Enquirer:

A complex thriller converging on Rome

The Death of a Pope

Piers Paul Read |Ignatius Press. 215 pp. $21.95

Reviewed by Frank Wilson

Piers Paul Read's new novel opens with three men - one Irish, two Basque - on trial in London, charged with "conspiring to cause an explosion with the intent to take human life."

Two of the defendants have connections to terrorist organizations. Fergal O'Brien was a member of the Provisional IRA and continues to associate with the Real IRA. Asier Etchevarren was a member of ETA, the Basque separatist group.

The third defendant has quite a different background. A laicized Jesuit priest, Jose Uriarte is a senior aid worker for Misericordia International, a Catholic refugee service. For the last four years, he has been working in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Uriarte is, in fact, the central figure in the trial. He does not deny approaching Etchevarren, a childhood friend, about getting some Sarin gas. He denies intending to use it "to take human life." He says he wanted to use it on the livestock of the Arab militias in Darfur. This, he says, would prevent them from continuing their brutal raids.

He proves a formidable witness. When the prosecutor tells him his story "beggars belief," Uriarte calmly explains that "the Arab militias value their horses and camels more than their women and children. They are hard men, as hard as the rock in the desert from which they come. Their horses and camels and cattle mean mobility and the means of survival."

All three are acquitted.

Kate Ramsey, one of the journalists covering the trial, is much taken with Uriarte and asks him for an interview. Uriarte, however, shifts attention from himself to his work and invites her to accompany him to Uganda and see what Misericordia International is all about.

Kate is a lapsed Catholic whose favorite uncle, Luke Scott, is a priest with a distinctly traditional bent. When Kate tells Father Luke that Uriarte is "really kind of charismatic," the priest remembers the meaning of the Greek word charisma - "a gift from the gods."

"As so often is the case with gifts from God," he reminds himself, it may be "purloined and misused by the devil."

In Africa, Kate sees poverty and suffering she had never imagined. She falls ill herself and Uriarte makes sure she is well cared for. They do not exactly become lovers. More precisely, they make love and she falls for him.

He takes her with him to Cairo and introduces her to some Copts, one of whom is a chemist. Uriarte tells her he is going to help the Copts - much persecuted in Islamic Egypt and, he tells her, desperately in need of money - by smuggling out of the country a valuable scroll. She insists on carrying the scroll herself, since she is less likely than he to be subject to undue scrutiny. He reluctantly agrees.

The narrative threads all converge in Rome after the death of Pope John Paul II. Father Luke is there because he has been alarmed by a visit from David Kotovski, a British security agent who had come to know Kate when he posed as a fellow journalist during Uriarte's trial. Kate is in Rome because she is covering the conclave to elect a new pope. Uriarte is there and has paid a visit to a cardinal who long ago had made a pass at Father Luke when both were seminarians. That cardinal's assistant, Monsignor Perez, pays a visit to Father Luke and asks him to hear his confession.

Read's book is short but concentrated. The foregoing actually only hints at how subtly complex the plot is. But what really makes the book work is its ambiguity.

Kate is right: Uriarte is charismatic. He is both persuasive and forceful. He genuinely cares for the refugees he works with. And they love him. Just as Thomas Aquinas presents the best arguments he can think of for the positions he is disputing, so the arguments Read has Uriarte put forth on behalf of his social gospel sound eminently reasonable and are emotionally resonant - exactly what good temptations ought to be. The evil must appear to be good. And the advocates for good must appear timorous and old-fashioned.

Indeed, the day is not saved by any heroics on the part of the good people. The heroics are reserved for the likes of Uriarte. The only thing the good people have going for them is simplicity and decency.

Miraculously, that proves enough.

We still remember the one book called "Rainbow Six" by state sponsored terrorism supporter Tom Clancy in which the masterminds behind the threat were a group of "eco-terrorists" that had hired, besides a former KGB agent you guessed it... a group of idiotic and murderous Basques.

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