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Reporter's Notebook: Al Giordano

Next: Bolivian Blood on Eduardo Gamarra's Hands?

Posted by Al Giordano - March 8, 2005 at 3:58 pm
A curious and disturbing quotation appeared in this morning’s New York Times under the byline (of course) of Juan Forero, regarding the crisis in Bolivia and the proposed resignation of President Carlos Mesa:

"Mesa has to understand that governments have the right, the legitimate right, to use force," said Eduardo Gamarra, the Bolivian-born director of the Latin America and Caribbean Center at Florida International University in Miami. "You can't just burn down a building or take over a government building because you don't like government policy."

There you have it. Gamarra wants blood: not his own, cowardly, geek-positive plasma, but that which flows through the veins of people who can’t afford an “education” at his gringo university… the blood of the poor, of the farmer, of the indigenous, of those uppity citizens who believe in that radical ideal that a government should be of, by, and for the people.

Gamarra's call to “use force,” in the context of Bolivian history, is an open call – on the pages of the New York Times – for a massacre of epic proportions… For the people in diverse (and conflicting) sectors in Bolivia, there are serious issues on the table: how to meet human needs for water and gas, autonomy and what it might mean for different regions of the country, an overdue Constituent Assembly to remake a government to be closer to the people…

But for Gamarra the big issue on the table is “force,” as in violence, as in his apparent disgust that the current government has not sent tanks into the streets or shot bullets into crowds as it did when his pal (and South Florida neighbor), the disgraced ex-president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, caused the blood to flow through the streets in October 2003.

Note the careless ease with which Gamarra confuses a “take over” of a government building with, in the same sentence, to “burn down a building.”

To date, no buildings have been burned down in this crisis. He’s pulling incendiary images out of his ass to deceive and distort the reality. His statement could have just as easily came out of the mouths of those that urged the British empire to “use force” against Mahatma Gandhi and the independence movement… Or against those building occupiers who marched with Martin Luther King for Civil Rights…

Forero, too, lobbing his grenades from Bogota into Bolivia, seems equally nostalgic for the bad old days when public assemblies would be put down by bullet:

Antigovernment leaders retain solid backing and have been emboldened by Mr. Mesa's repeated assurances that he will never use deadly force to control protests, as had Mr. Sánchez de Lozada.

But it was Gamarra he got to issue the battle call to "use force" against unarmed civilian movements.

Gamarra: We understand exactly what you mean, and what you are trying to provoke: a war crime against humanity.

Gamarra tossed his verbal Molotov from the safety of behind his desk in Florida.

Meanwhile, we’ve got more than ten reporters with their feet on the ground in Bolivia, reporting and investigating the true story… Journalists who – if Gamarra gets his way – could be caught in the line of fire…

Eduardo Gamarra (we know you read us, so I'll address this directly to you): Your statement is now archived. If anything happens to anyone – not just our journalists, but anyone – as a result of your call to "use force," the world will know, for years to come, that the blood shall be on on your hands.

And there will not be a faucet or detergent in Miami, nor a Timesman in Bogota, that will be able to wash it off.

About Al Giordano

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Comments

Forero's Image-Laundering for Gamarra

Submitted March 12, 2005 - 10:34 pm by Al Giordano
This is too funny.

After NY Timesman Juanito Forero dredges up Eduardo Gamarra from some slimepit in South Florida to instruct Bolivia's president to "use force" in the current crisis, Narco News shines this insect's words out in the sunlight, and the Bolivian president wins a temporary battle without having to fire a shot.

So then, like herpes, Gamarra flares up again in Forero's next report in the New York Times, backpedaling:

"Mesa's talking tough and feels invigorated by what's happened, in that he's won this particular battle," said Eduardo Gamarra, the Bolivian-born director of Latin American studies at Florida International University in Miami. "The question is whether he's won the war. The results so far appear to have made Evo not only more radical but pushed him into a corner, and the history of relations with Evo, going back a couple of years, is, he doesn't give up."

...Professor Gamarra, who in the past has spoken at length with Mr. Mesa and Mr. Morales, says the president's position has set him apart from predecessors, whose reliance on security forces led to dozens of deaths and only worsened protests. "I think the president is correct in that the violence was always a first resort in the past," Mr. Gamarra said. "I think that's commendable."

Wait a second!

The is the same aspiring war criminal who said, in Forero's previous Bolivian report:

"Mesa has to understand that governments have the right, the legitimate right, to use force," said Eduardo Gamarra, the Bolivian-born director of the Latin America and Caribbean Center at Florida International University in Miami. "You can't just burn down a building or take over a government building because you don't like government policy."

Hello? Is anybody home? Could one of those clowns - Gamarra or Forero - please reconcile those two contradictory statements?

Or is Narco News once again, truth in hand, dragging the NY Times around by the earring?

(Never mind the only photos the Times could get from a photographer who could get close enough - see the above link - to Evo Morales by some guy named Noah Friedman-Rudovsky!)

Gamarra said that Bolivian President Carlos Mesa "has to understand... to use force" on one day. Then on a next day, he says "Mesa's talking tough." Hello again? It seems to me that Gamarra was talking tough, then sunlight got splashed on his moldy petri dish of oligarch policy-speak, and he backed down.

Well, I did call him "cowardly" in my first note, above.

But I ask this: Who the fuck is Eduardo Gamarra to get quoted two days in a row in the New York Times? Who does he represent? How many people? Does what he say turn out to be true? Or, if (as I argue) it more often turns out to be false, why does Forero go to him twice in a week? What's the point?

There are nine million people in Bolivia dying to be heard internationally. Forero is wasting column inches on this pondscum, instead of reporting the story.

Not that we're surprised. But, still, it's our duty to point it out.

More Gamarra quotes; his university and the CIA

Submitted March 13, 2005 - 1:53 am by Andrew Grice (not verified)

I can't verify which ones went into the hard copy New York Times, but a quick search reveals four Juan Forero stories in a row quoting Eduardo Gamarra.  
March 7
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/07/international/am
ericas/07cnd-bolivia.html
March 8  (to be fair, a quote from the 7th is recycled in this one)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/08/international/am
ericas/08bolivia.html
March 9
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/09/business/worldbu
siness/09trade.html?pagewanted=2
March 10
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/10/international/am
ericas/10bolivia.html
Plus Forero quoted him in his story on China's interest in Venezuelan oil earlier this month.  I'd have to pay to read that story on the NYT.com site, so here's a version off Taipai Times.
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2005
/03/06/2003225714
Marcela Sanchez also quotes him in her March 10 Washington Post column.  (online only?)  
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A249
29-2005Mar10.html
Quite a popular fellow to quote these days, huh?  But wait, there's more!  
Hal Weitzman in Financial Times.
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/b00c511c-90d3-11d9-9980-0
0000e2511c8.html
And that's just the recent easily found quotations.  If we go back further, we'll find him saying all sorts of little gems such as this from a Reuters piece on Colombia Feb 18.  
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N11543507
.htm
"The average Colombian appears to have told President Uribe they want him to deal with the issue of security first," Gamarra said. "Trying to fight poverty has been postponed."
But hey, that's not just any south Florida slime pit he hails from.  That's Florida International University.  And what kind of institution is Florida International University?  Let's see if FIU themselves offer us a hint with their press release from just a few days ago:
http://news.fiu.edu/releases/2005/03-09_ia.htm
MIAMI, Fla. (March 9, 2005) - A consortium of intelligence gathering agencies in Washington, D.C., has selected Florida International University to lead in the development of academic programs that will produce well trained and more diverse intelligence analysts.
The grant that the U.S. Intelligence Community awarded to the Jack D. Gordon Institute for Policy and Citizenship Studies at FIU's Center for Transnational and Comparative Studies (TCS), is part of an initiative seeking to diversify the ranks of its different agencies. The U.S. Intelligence Community is a consortium of agencies 14 agencies such as the U.S. Department of Energy; the U.S. Coast Guard; CIA; Department of Treasury; FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security, among others.
"What we proposed is not very different from classes already offered here and at every university," said Ralph Clem, TCS's director and a professor of international relations. "It's subjects and skills such as political science, geography, statistical analysis and foreign languages. The program would coordinate all these subjects and add others to produce graduates who are competitive for jobs in Washington, D.C."
The grant gives FIU $750,000 for the 18-month pilot program, which could then be renewed over four years for a total of up to $3 million.
FIU was one of only four universities selected for the pilot phase of the U.S. Intelligence Community Centers of Academic Excellence program. The others were: Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and Clark-Atlanta University, which are participating as a consortium; Tennessee State University, and Trinity College in Washington, D.C.
Readers wanting to know more about the CIA and "intelligence community"s latest programs on U.S. campuses would do well to read David Price's new article on CounterPunch.  "Exposing the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program: The CIA's Campus Spies".  From that article:
In a decade and a half of Freedom  of Information Act research I have read too many FBI reports  of students detailing the deviant political views of their professors  (These range from the hilarious: As anthropologist Norman Humphrey  was reported to have called President Eisenhower a "duckbilled  nincompoop"; to the Dadaist: Wherein former Miss America,  Marilyn van Derbur, reported that sociologist Howard Higman mocked  J. Edgar Hoover in class; to the chilling: As when the FBI arranged  for a graduate student to guide topics of "informal"  conversation with anthropologist Gene Weltfish that were later  the focus an inquiry by Joseph McCarthy) to not mention the certainty  that these PRSIP students are also secretly compiling dossiers  on their professors and fellow students. Of course I would be  remiss to not mention that students are the only ones sneaking  the CIA onto our campuses. There are also unknown thousands of university professors who periodically work with and for the  CIA--in 1988 CIA spokeswoman Sharon Foster bragged that the CIA then secretly employed enough university professors "to  staff a large university." Most experts estimate that  this presence has grown since 2001.
Read the whole thing at:
http://counterpunch.org/price03122005.html

All the news that's paid to be printed

Submitted March 13, 2005 - 12:14 pm by Bill Conroy
The relationship between the mainstream media and U.S. intelligence agencies is long and incestuous -- and always clandestine in nature. I recently became aware of one example, though, in which that covert media/intelligence gathering relationship -- which is often dysfunctional at its core -- nearly cost the life of an intelligence operative.

That this relationship exists I expect is of little surprise to readers of Narco News. However, the following account of how it works, at least in one case example, is useful in getting at what might motivate a journalist to play that game – and also go a long way in explaining why some play it so badly.

Andrew Grice writes the following concerning the relationship between Juan Forero of the New York Times and Eduardo Gamarra, the director of Latin American Studies at Florida International University in Miami:

I can't verify which ones went into the hard copy New York Times, but a quick search reveals four Juan Forero stories in a row quoting Eduardo Gamarra.  

... And what kind of institution is Florida International University?  Let's see if FIU themselves offer us a hint with their press release from just a few days ago:

http://news.fiu.edu/releases/2005/03-09_ia.htm

MIAMI, Fla. (March 9, 2005) - A consortium of intelligence gathering agencies in Washington, D.C., has selected Florida International University to lead in the development of academic programs that will produce well trained and more diverse intelligence analysts.

In October 2003, I wrote a column for Commondreams.org that began as follows:

Evidence has surfaced recently that the FBI has been spying on foreign nations for years.
The revelation is so sensitive that in the wake of the secret surfacing, the FBI has embarked on a mad scramble to cover up the evidence. The Bureau has gone as far as to pressure a federal judge into sealing previously public court records that open a window on the FBI's overseas spying mission.

In addition, with the help of the U.S. Attorney's Office (John Ashcroft's Justice Department) the FBI also sought, through a proposed court order, to seize any computer anywhere that the Bureau suspected might have contained the sensitive court pleadings.

The controversy stems from a civil rights case filed in federal court in Sacramento, Calif., by former FBI agent Lok Thye Lau. In his case, Lau filed a Declaration in late September that detailed his FBI career and the fact that he was engaged as a spy in a dangerous undercover assignment that required him to "work against hostile and aggressive foreign powers for years."

Although he is precluded from discussing specifics about that assignment due to national security concerns, the public record available on his case indicates that the likely target country was China.

Following is an excerpt from Lau’s Declaration:

I Made In Roads In My UC Assignment
  1. In July of 1986 , the subjects of my deep undercover assignment began to trust and task me with missions of such proportions that these actions were both puzzling and gratifying to the FBI senior management. Indeed, there were great tensions between the leadership in the FBI Field Division in Chicago and FBI Headquarters as to how best to take advantage of the sudden or quick penetration into the camp of the subjects by me.
  2. In October of 1986, I was unexpectedly provided with a chance of a lifetime to accomplish something for the bureau and my country -- it was an invitation to go overseas. This was the ultimate goal of the undercover assignment. Management advised me that I was a few years ahead of schedule. However, the Assistant Directors at headquarters were skeptical of the opportunity at hand. I was surprised by the lack of courage to take chances by the decision-makers at the FBIHQ. After all, it would be my life at stake should anything was to go wrong. Strangely enough, there were suggestions at the top that I be polygraphed to ascertain the truth of my reporting. Management was afraid that I might set them up for 'an international incident! I was devastated. Finally, it was decided that I be polygraph upon my return on my overseas trip….
  3. In November of 1987, on the eve of historic overseas trip, FBI management advised me that one of FBI's highly placed assets had betrayed me to the subjects concerning my true identity as a FBI agent. I did not cancel my trip for it would confirm asset's allegation. During this trip, stress and fear were constant companions.
  4. During November of 1987, the historic trip turned out to be very stressful with subjects giving me enhanced scrutiny during the visit, personnel armed with machine-guns were a constant reminder to me of my fate if something went wrong, and there were frequent roadblocks on my route of travel. I anticipated death on several occasions, but I somehow survived it all.
  5. In December of 1987, I completed my trip. The success of my historic overseas trip and my accomplishments had exceeded all expectations. The skeptics made me undergo an extensive polygraph test to ascertain my loyalty and accomplishments. When the electrode- examination was over, the skeptics were shamed, and I wondered if I had won more friends than foes at FBI Headquarters.
Lau alleges that a “highly placed” FBI asset – or informant – betrayed him prior to his spying trip to China. Recently, I was made aware that the person who sold out Lau to the Chinese was in fact a reporter on the payroll of the FBI.

Lau confirmed the information as well.

“Some people are bought and paid for,” Lau says. “The source that compromised me, he was a reporter for a foreign newspaper and he worked for the Bureau. This journalist worked for a big paper that also publishes in the United States, and he was well-known. That’s why nothing was done. He was being paid by the FBI as an informant.”

Lau contends that his mission represented a threat to the FBI’s man inside the media, and the reporter didn’t want to give up his spying gig for the Bureau.

“When I came into the picture, I represented competition, and he (the journalist) didn’t want his sources not to go to him because of me,” Lau says. “Wouldn’t it be good if that competition got torpedoed, and I was his competition (in the spying game). He didn’t want to lose his informant’s pay.”

Lau adds: “That’s one of the reasons it’s often hard to break into the open with a big story, because the FBI does have journalists on its payroll. I’m amazed that no one in the media picks up on that. Money talks, and they (the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies) pay off (or in other ways seduce) journalists.”

I’m sure the CIA and FBI would deny Lau’s claims and write him off as a flaked-out former agent. But the only way to know for sure is to demand that our political leaders come clean on this subject. In the mean time, we will have to continue to read stories in the "papers of record" with an eye toward the possibility that the journalist might have other covert objectives -- and that is a major credibility buster for the mainstream media.

gamarra in post

Submitted March 13, 2005 - 1:52 am by Amy Casada-Alaniz
Marcela Sanchez quoted Gamarra in Friday's Washington Post:
"do we want to keep (Morales) within the system or are we going to help him bring the system down?''

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A249 29-2005Mar10.html

thats a pretty politic theyre paintin; YUCK!

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