by EDWARD S. HERMAN
“Luis Posada Carriles, one of the world’s worst terrorists, is now living in Florida under US diplomatic protection.” SOURCE/Z Communications
Assassination is as American as apple pie. The record-breaking case of assassination-targeting is Fidel Castro. The 1976 Church Committee report on “Alleged Assassination Plots on Foreign Leaders” listed “at least” seven attempts to kill Castro, but the book by Fabian Escalante, the Cuban former official in charge of protecting Castro, claimed that the number of tries ran into the hundreds. Duncan Campbell pointed out that Luis Posada Carriles was still living in Florida after his failed effort to murder Castro (among his other terrorist actions) and Campbell noted sardonically that Florida is “a place where many of the unsuccessful would-be assassins have made their home” (see “638 tries to kill Castro,” Guardian, August 3, 2006). It would be a mistake, however, to think that Florida is the terror center of the world—that honor falls to Washington, DC and its environs. Florida is just one branch of the center, just as Guantanamo is one branch of a DC-centered torture network.
Aggression Rights
It is, of course, well established that the United States has aggression rights and that international law applies only to others, although clients like Israel also have such exemptions by virtue of the power of their protector (see Herman, “Aggression Rights,” Z Magazine, February, 2004). U.S. aggression rights were made perfectly clear with the U.S. attack, invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, which was as clear a violation of the UN Charter as Saddam’s 1990 invasion/occupation of Kuwait. In the latter instance, the UN rushed to condemn Saddam on the same day his tanks and troops rolled into Kuwait, and that great law-enforcer, the United States, rushed to oust him by massive force.
On the other hand, when Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006, this was seen as merely a case of tolerable “birth-pangs of a new Middle East” (Condo- leezza Rice). When the UN came into the picture, it was more to protect poor little Israel from future pea-shoots from Lebanon than to protect Lebanon from current and future attacks and invasions by a state that had already aggressed against it twice.
Even more interesting was the invasion of Rwanda by elements of the Uganda army in October 1990, two months after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. Here, as in Lebanon, the invading forces were supported by the U.S., so the UN imposed no impediment or penalty and, in various other ways, aided the invading party and facilitated a genocidal process in the 1990s (which extended into the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
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