Jorge Capelan, Tortilla con Sal.Translated by: Leandro E. Silva and toni solo
What's behind the Jason Puracal campaign?
World
champions in arbitrary detention, the United States and the European
Union, are now behind a campaign to free a person convicted for drug
trafficking in Nicaragua. The US is notorious for its prisons at
Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and for its global network of secret detention
centers. Its overseas accomplice, the EU, is also notorious, for having
collaborated in setting up that network as well as for its own
detention centers wherein tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants
languish. Their support for the Puracal campaign is just one more
political ploy, another clear example of the US-EU tandem at work to
co-opt and corrupt the entire international human rights system.
"Midnight Express" in Central America
On
August 2011, U.S. citizen Jason Zachary Puracal was convicted in a
Nicaraguan Court of Justice to 22 years in prison for narcotics
trafficking and money laundering along with 10 Nicaraguans, also
sentenced to long prison terms.
Nine
months earlier, Puracal’s home and office had been raided by Nicaraguan
authorities without a warrant, an extraordinary procedure permitted in
the country's criminal code for serious cases in which there is
suspicion that the investigation risks having evidence destroyed or
concealed. Using the latest technology (provided, incidentally, by the
United States) traces of narcotics were found in Puracal’s vehicle along
with extensive documentation supporting the investigation, which the
Nicaraguan judicial authorities argue justifies the charges against him
and the other members of the network in which he participated.
As a U.S. national, Puracal has appealed the sentence and hearings begin this week in the district appeals court in Granada.
Jason
Puracal is a former Peace Corps volunteer for the United States in
Nicaragua. After having met and married a Nicaraguan, he decided to stay
in the country, buying a real estate franchise after his volunteer
service tour ended. His arrest has led to an unprecedented international
campaign in the form of a petition organized in favour of his release
which has gathered more than 90 thousand signatures on the internet.
The
sentiment is understandable given the ease with which the situation can
be turned into a parallel of the famous film Midnight Express (1978),
by Alan Parker, from the screenplay by Oliver Stone. In the film, an
American drugs trafficker is sentenced to 30 years in a Turkish prison.
Over the decades the film, based on a true story, has become a classic
of Islamophobia with all the clichés that portray countries of the
non-Western "periphery" as lawless places where whites are exposed to
all kinds of torture, including sexual abuse, at the hands of corrupt,
ruthless and unpredictable locals. After years of enduring inhumane
conditions and abandoning all hope of support from the U.S. government,
Billy Hayes, the film’s protagonist, decides to escape from prison on
his own.
Puracal's
case has been supported by groups in U.S. such as the Innocence Project
and has received support from such influential persons as the former
director of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) Tom Cash (who helped
prosecute Colombian narcotics kingpin Pablo Escobar) and Irwin Cotler,
former Canadian justice minister and Attorney General. Cotler wrote an
inflammatory letter to Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega referring to
the Puracal case as one of "arbitrary detention" and "a serious abuse of
justice”, according to Nicaragua Dispatch. Even the supposedly prestigious UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions recommends the "immediate release" of Jason Puracal.
According
to the version of events put forward by the defenders of Puracal,
Puracal's rights were violated by Nicaraguan authorities in their
failure to produce a search warrant when entering his home and business
office. They also argue that he was denied the right to a proper defense
and that his prison sentence is longer than Nicaraguan law allows.
Finally they allege that he has been forced to live with seven other
prisoners in the same cell, and that at one point he suffered burns from
a water kettle used in the prison.
All of these allegations have been rejected outright by the President of the Court of Appeal, Dr. Norman Miranda Castillo, who in turn accused the U.S. Embassy in Managua of interfering in the course of Nicaraguan justice.
"Responsibility to Protect" the Narcos
This past May 24, the Secretary for the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions, Miguel De la Lama, sent a letter
in response to a request by Jared Genser, on behalf of the “non-profit
organization" Perseus Strategies LLC. In the letter, Lama informs Genser
that the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in its sixty-third
session issued a "text of opinion", number 10/2012 on Puracal.
The
Working Group on Arbitrary Detention was established by Resolution
1991/42 of the now superseded UN Commission on Human Rights, among other
things to investigate cases of arbitrary detention inconsistent with
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a task that according to the
United Nations should be carried out "with discretion, objectivity and
independence."
The "text of opinion",
sent by the UN Group to the Government of Nicaragua, clarifies that the
human rights body cannot comment on the charges against Puracal, nor
about the evidence presented against him by the State of Nicaragua.
However, given that the Nicaraguan government did not respond to the
allegations made by the group within the stipulated period of two
months, the Council recommended Puracal's immediate release, and for a
new trial to be conducted if deemed necessary, along with with an
indemnity to Puracal for alleged damage to his person. Clearly, this
letter from the UN body immediately became a powerful media weapon.
The Working Group’s members
are Malick El Hadji Sow from Senegal, Shaheen Sardar Ali from Pakistan,
Roberto Garreton of Chile, Mads Andenas from Norway and Vladimir
Tochilovsky, from the Ukraine. It is not difficult to discern the
influence of the European Union and NATO prevalent in this UN Working
Group.
The
Working Group chairman Malick Sow, is a Supreme Court judge in Senegal,
a strong regional ally of France and a country lauded as a "strong and
stable democracy" by the European Union. Senegal ranks 155th of the 169 countries that make up the Human Development Index, and is heavily reliant on EU aid, which exceeds 10% of the national budget.
Meanwhile, the Working Group's Pakistani vice-president is actually a
law professor at the University of Warwick in England and at the
University of Oslo, in Norway. It is hardly possible to expect actions
deviating from the official line by a Chilean representative who,
although a recognized human rights defender during the Pinochet era,
today represents a state that practices arbitrary detention of
indigenous Mapuche of all ages, as if it were a sport. Nor can one expect independent action from a Ukrainian trial lawyer involved in the first stages of organizing the International Criminal Court, widely criticized for its bias against any head of State identified by Washington as an enemy, and for its reluctance to investigate the crimes by allies of the White House.
Lastly, the Norwegian, Andenas
is, like the Pakistani Shaheen Ali, a professor at the University of
Oslo’s Law Faculty, but he has also been a member of the board of a very
exclusive organization, the Association of Human Rights Institutes (AHRI) of the European Union. This group, funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST)
organization, brings together some 41 universities in Europe to conduct
research in the area of human rights. In December 2010, with funding
from COST, AHRI conducted the seminar "International Criminal Court and the Responsibility to Protect - Synergies and Tensions."
One of the seminar themes was the suggestive name of "The Way Ahead", a
"discussion of the ways in which the "international community could
coordinate their future actions" to implement the doctrine known as R2P.
The Responsibility to Protect,
or R2P, is an idea that NATO countries have been promoting for several
years within the United Nations. The basic concept of R2P is that when a
state fails to protect its population, either deliberately or through
being unable to, it is the responsibility of the "entire international
community" to intervene, even when this is in contradiction with one of
fundamental principles of the United Nations: non-interference in the
internal affairs of other States. At the UN World Summit in September
2005, a majority of member states, under pressure from NATO countries
accepted the idea of R2P in principle, but recommended a more extensive
discussion of the topic. Little more than five years later, that
doctrine would be put into practice by NATO forces through a war of
aggression against the Libyan people.
Within
the stretch of a few days in March 2011, Soliman Bouchuiguir of the
Libyan League for Human Rights (LLHR) released a statement to an
assembly of more than 70 NGOs for the 15th Special Session of the UN’s
Human Rights Council beginning February 25, 2011. The session for the
first time in its history decided to expel a member state, Libya, for
alleged bombings against its civilian population. A few weeks later
would mark the beginning of a NATO slaughter against the North African
country.
"To
be honest, it’s was not a very difficult undertaking because all these
NGOs are known to each other (...) and finally, the session of the UN
Human Rights made it all come together in Geneva, and so the statement
was launched, signed by all members,” said Bouchuiguir interviewed for
the documentary film "The Humanitarian War”, directed by Julien Teil.
The
figures that Bouchuiguir convinced the other members of the Council of
were shocking: March 17, 2011, reported 6,000 dead, 12,000 wounded, 500
missing, 700 rapes and 75,000 refugees. Just two weeks later,
Bouchuiguir spoke of 18,000 dead, 46,000 wounded, 28,000 missing, 1600
sexual assaults. It was these figures that were used to justify the "no
fly zone" and NATO bombing that resulted in a veritable slaughter. All
these figures were invented.
Remember that on March 2,
the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S., Mike Mullen, testified before
Congress: "we could not confirm that Libyan planes had opened fire on
their own population." Around the same time,
the Russian Joint Chief of Staff reported that satellite monitoring
over Libyan territory since the crisis’ beginning in mid-February,
failed to detect any kind of bombing.
"There
is no way to do it", replied Bouchuiguir to Teil’s question about how
to check whether the figures he had given the UN were true. "The Libyan
government never, ever, gives information on human rights (...) so you
have to do an estimate," he said. "... his information (on the number of
civilian casualties in Libya) I did not receive from just anyone. I
received it from The Libyan Prime Minister - on the other side," added
Bouchuiguir referring to the National Transitional Council (NTC)
sponsored by the so-called "rebels" in turn supported by NATO.
"It
was Mr. Mahmoud…of the tribe Warfallah. It was he who gave me these
figures. I used them, though with some caution," he adds. Bouchuiguir
was referring to Mahmoud Jibril, the "Prime Minister" of the "Libyan
rebels" designated by NATO and the CIA.
Ali
Zeidan, introduced in early March as the LLHR spokesman, would also
become spokesman for the NTC. Later, when pressed by Teil, Bouchuiguir
recognized that several members of the NTC were also members of the
above mentioned "human rights" organization. "You know, these people in
the government (the NTC), we are all part of the same group! They are
members of the Libyan League for Human Rights! The Minister of
Information, for example, the Education Minister, the Minister for Oil,
the Finance Minister, all are members of our league! ... None occupy
positions of responsibility, but are members of our league," he
explains.
The
true scale of the slaughter committed against the Libyan people may
some day be known. For now, though, through some heavily embellished
figures from NATO itself, detailing the use of 7,700 missiles and bombs on some more than 10,000 flights, one can get an idea, one that would very probably pale against the horror of the true facts. As long as those in charge of the task of counting the bodies on the ground
continue to show the same unethical behaviour as individuals such as
Bouchuiguir Soliman and the officials of the 70 "human rights" NGOs -
who without even thinking voted so that others would execute their
"responsibility to bomb" the Libyan people - the truth may never be
known, simply because there are interests to ensure it never does.
All
this begs the question: If these kinds of humanitarian bureaucrats have
no qualms about inventing a genocide so as to sanction their own
genocide in accordance with the interests of Western powers, why would
they refrain from demanding the release of a convicted drug dealer like
Jason Puracal?
What
are the chances that the UN Working Group will deal seriously with
these issues? None whatsoever, because its members are totally
supportive of countries that are known human rights violators. Israel,
arguably the closest ally of the United States, and it’s largest
recipient of military aid, is also a de facto member of the European
Union under generous trade and other agreements of cooperation and
association.
Rising stars
Nothing
happens spontaneously in the corrupt world of institutional "human
rights", controlled by NATO. As an example, one should ask, who is the
person charged with requesting the UN Working Group to investigate the
case of Jason Puracal?
Jared Genser, named by the National Law Journal as one of the "40 rising stars under 40 in Washington", is the manager of Perseus Strategies, LLC and founder of Freedom Now,
an "independent", "non-profit " organization devoted to defending
alleged prisoners of conscience worldwide. Genser worked for the law
firm DLA Piper LLP and the famous consulting firm McKinsey & Company,
among whose clients are several multinational companies and governments
along with their militaries. One detail in this bright star’s career:
In 2006-2007 he was a visiting professor at the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED),
one of whose founders, Allen Weinstein, said back in 1991, "much of
what we do today is what the CIA was doing covertly 25 years ago."
Another detail: amongst his official clients are former Czech president
Vaclav Havel, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, the Chinese Nobel prize winner
Liu Xiaobo, South African Bishop Desmond Tutu, and the Hungarian-Jewish
Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel. Genser is a graduate from prestigious
universities such as Cornell, Harvard and Michigan. Nor should one omit
from his curriculum a year spent as Raoul Wallenberg Scholar at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Genser
is also the author of "Review and Practical Guide" for the UN Working
Group on Arbitrary Detention (to be published in 2013) and co-editor of
another work on the R2P doctrine: "The Responsibility to Protect: The Promise of Stopping Mass Atrocities in Our Times "(Oxford
University Press, 2012). Who was the editor of that book? None other
than the former Canadian justice minister who sent the inflammatory
letter to President Daniel Ortega demanding the immediate release of
drug trafficker Jason Puracal in the first place: Irwin Cotler. With
such a backdrop, it’s not surprising that the Nicaraguan Government has
not paid much attention to the Puracal campaign, nor replied to the
letter from the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. When a group of
influential allies with close contacts within the most powerful circles
of the empire begin a campaign of letters and statements to the media,
this is not a social movement, but a conspiracy.
One of Genser's partners in Perseus Strategies, LLC, is Chris Fletcher,
more a CIA agent than an idealistic lawyer. Fletcher is an expert on
human rights and corporate social responsibility with office experience
within the UN, he participated in the trials of the Khmer Rouge in
Cambodia and worked for the NGO Oxfam in the United States among other organizations. Furthermore, Fletcher has been involved in “Tibet Forum, Governance and Practice”, at the University of Virginia. This university is a well-known CIA recruiting ground with professors active in national security and intelligence circles for decades, such as Frederick P . Hitz,
at the university's law school. Other temporary appointments of Chris
Fletcher have been at the State Department and the World Bank.
Perseus Strategies, LLC, is a company dedicated to providing legal consulting services
to large NGOs, multinational corporations and governments in the field
of human rights, corporate social responsibility and the implementation
of R2P. Their activities often include the promotion of U.S. interests
in various countries, and the preparation of various documents to
justify the application of imperialist aggression under the guise of R2P
against target, as in the case of North Korea.
These
cases are of little or no interest or concern for the UN Working Group,
for Genser, or for Fletcher and other individuals like them. They are
only interested in cases that promote US government interests: for now,
these include Chinese dissidents, Iranian "activists", perhaps some
journalists in some dark nether region of the Third World, or convicted
U.S. drug traffickers in countries like Nicaragua, or some other nation
being targeted by White House smear campaigns.
Genser is just one member of the Freedom Now board.
Another, the president of Freedom Now, is the lawyer Jeremy Zucker, a
former law clerk at the International Criminal Court and a member of the
influential Council on Foreign Relations, where the elite of American
power, both Democrats and Republicans, decide United States and allied
foreign policy. In Norway, the Cuban-American Teresita Alvarez-Bjelland,
works as a specialist "non-profit" consultant with the directors of the
Norwegian-American Association, positioned to exert pressure on the UN
Working Group through their strong Norwegian influence there. Peter
Magyar, the attorney in charge of expanding the activity of Freedom Now
in Europe, is an influential lawyer in the fields of privatization and
international capital markets.
Freedom Now does not defend just anybody.
Their work is designed "strategically" so as to promote political
changes in the countries where they have selected defendants. Nor is
their work limited to the courts, but is also devoted to developing
public relations and propaganda campaigns with a broad range of agents
and actors.
Freedom
Now say they only defend prisoners of conscience. But in the case of
Jason Puracal, convicted for drug trafficking, it is difficult if not
impossible, to use that argument. In short, their activity is merely one
more way, under the guise of human rights campaigns, to intervene with
political motives in countries targeted by the United States.
Innocence? What innocence?
One of the most influential organizations sponsoring the campaign for Puracal is the group called the Innocence Project,
whose mission is to protect the rights of American citizens unjustly
imprisoned inside and outside the United States. In addition to media
support, the organization has given Puracal legal support through its
network of lawyers in the United States. This organization in 2011 received a grant of $ 400,000
for two years for overheads as part of US financial magnate George
Soros’ "Open Society Foundations", belonging to his Open Society
Institute.
According to U.S. investigator Eva Golinger,
the Open Society Institute has been involved in the destabilization of
governments that have withstood the post-Soviet colour revolution
offensive. The Open Society Institute was active in Yugoslavia, Ukraine
and Georgia, working closely with both Freedom House and the Albert
Einstein Institution (AEI) to overthrow governments by financing media
and opposition groups. While the area of most interest for the Open
Society Institute is Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, it is also very
active in Africa and Latin America.
According to Barry C. Scheck in the New York Times
late last year, the new director of Soros’ "philanthropic empire",
Christopher Stone, "has a passion to change things and a great vision
and understanding of how to build institutions and reengineer them to
endure". Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project, is notorious as
O. J. Simpson’s lawyer in the highly publicized 1995 case.
Scheck's
organization is just another in the dozens of NGOs and other groups
that Soros has co-opted throughout the world to follow the empire’s
agenda with his millions, last year alone, some 860 of them. An expert
in breaking central banks around the world via speculative attacks on
vulnerable national currencies, Soros criticizes the excesses of the
financial system and advocates regulation, yet, he says, "not excessive
regulation. Regulators are human beings who are fallible and are also
bureaucrats who make decisions slowly and are subject to political
influence."
Soros's
speech about open societies, free markets and his criticisms of Bush
have made him popular among Democrats, but he is by no means
progressive. With respect to the strategy of empire, Soros is a leading
player among the global power elite. He is a member of the Council on
Foreign Relations, Bilderberg, the International Crisis Group and Human
Rights Watch, all organizations working to achieve U.S. geopolitical
goals, often using "human rights" as a pretext for US and NATO
interventions.
The white rags of the DEA
The
"recommendation" by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention turned
out to be political engineering at the highest levels of the U.S.
government’s self-interested, politicized, corrupt “human rights”
network. The former Canadian Justice Minister who so severely criticized
Commandante Daniel Ortega, turns out to be an old friend of Jared Genser, the network's orchestrator. On the other hand, Soros provides far-from-innocent
funding to the international human rights “Innocence” organization doing the campaigning for Puracal.
Likewise,
there is more than meets the eye to former DEA chief Tom Cash as
regards his support for Puracal. Thomas V. Cash is one of the men who
helped prosecute Pablo Escobar. When he left the DEA, Cash went to work
at the information and intelligence consulting company Kroll Inc.,
becoming head of it’s Miami office. Among its services Kroll offers
advice to governments of various tax haven countries on how to improve
their image and get themselves removed from the anti-money laundering
lists of the Organization fro Economic Cooperation and Development.
Kroll hires former intelligence officers when they leave public office to go into the private sector. Kroll assigned Cash to whitewash the tax haven of Antigua
by giving it a financial facelift and creating the loopholes through
which contemporary Pablo Escobars can continue flushing drug revenues.
What made Tom Cash fall from grace, however, was a different matter.
Last June, the fraudster R. Allen Stanford was sentenced to 110 years in prison. An investigation into his Ponzi scheme
found that over a period of 20 years he stole $7 billion from 30,000
depositors, promising fabulous interest rates on their deposits at the
Stanford International Bank in Antigua. The case first burst open three
years ago, in 2009, when federal authorities raided the offices of the
Stanford Group to investigate fraud.
In late July of that year, Cash left his position at Kroll.
The reason? As a consultant working for Kroll, Cash gave investors the
green light to invest in Stanford, but never bothered to report that his
company had once been "hired and paid" as a consultant for Stanford. An
electricians' organization which lost more than $6 million in the Ponzi
scheme then denounced Cash. Cash never told the electricians that
Stanford had been penalized by the Financial Industry Regulatory
Authority. Nor did he inform them that a former Stanford employee had
sued the company charging that the scheme was all a scam.
Among
Cash's credentials, according to the New York Post, he has served as
chairman of the Fraud Prevention International Bankers Association of
Florida. The newspaper adds that the connections amongst the circles
between Cash and state police were so large that a judge assigned to the
electricians' demand against Kroll, had to give up the case because he
had been a personal friend of Cash for many years.
Blatant interference
On
August 16th the appeal hearing begins in Nicaragua in the case of Jason
Puracal. The Granada district appeal court will decide whether or not
there are enough elements to declare a mistrial in the original trial
that ended with his prison sentence of 22 years based on the procedures
in Nicaragua's Constitution and Penal Code. Even so, via their networks
of political interference, false US human rights groups are using
Puracal's case for blatant anti-Nicaraguan propaganda. That in its turn
does very little to help Puracal's defense.
The
campaign to free Jason Puracal, a convicted narcotics dealer, perfectly
illustrates, yet again, the extent of the corrupt manipulation of human
rights by the United States and its allies around the world.
