ON occasions direct news coming from the United States prompts indignation and sometimes repugnance.
Of course, a large volume of recent reports have referred to problems associated with the grave international economic crisis and its consequences in the heart of the empire. Naturally, they are not the only ones in reference to that powerful country. Any page of the bulky volume of news proceeding from any continent, region or country of the world is generally related to the policy of the United States. There is no point on the planet where the domineering presence of the empire is not experienced.
Logically, for close to 10 years, news of its brutal wars has occupied significant press space and even more so when a presidential election was in the equation.
However, nobody could have imagined the appearance, in the midst of the drama of the wars of conquest, of news on secret prisons and torture centers, a shameful and well-guarded secret of the government of the United States.
The author of the grotesque policy which led to that point had usurped the presidency in the elections of November 2000, by means of electoral fraud in the southern state of Florida where the battle was decided.
After usurping power, W. Bush not only dragged the country into a politics of war, but failed to sign the Kyoto Protocol, thus denying the world, during 10 years of struggle for the environment, the support of the nation that consumes 25% of fossil fuels, which could inflict irreparable damage on the human species. Climate change is already present in the increase of global warming that the pilots of executive aircraft can observe via tornados of growing strength forming in the early hours of the afternoon along their tropical routes and which could be a potential danger for their modern jets. The causes of the accident of Air France passenger plane, which disintegrated in full flight, are still unknown.
Nothing would be comparable with the consequences of the melting of the enormous accumulated volume of water over the Antarctic continent, combined with that melting over Greenland. I maintained my point of view on the responsibility that falls on Bush in a recent meeting with the U.S. film director Oliver Stone, commenting on his movie "W," referring to the penultimate president of the United States.
I will confine myself to noting that after the political errors and horrors of George W. Bush, former Vice President Cheney, who was his advisor, is brandishing the idea that the acts of torture ordered by the CIA to obtain information were justified in terms of saving U.S. lives, thanks to information obtained in that way.
Of course that did not save the lives of the thousands of Americans who died in Iraq, nor those of close to one million Iraqis, nor those dying in Afghanistan in increasing numbers. Nor do we know what will be the consequences of the hatred accumulated by the genocides that are being committed or could be committed in those ways.
Let us be clear, it is an elemental problem of political ethics: "the end does not justify the means." Torture does not justify torture; crime does not justify crime.
That principle was debated and maintained for centuries. In virtue of it humanity has condemned all wars of conquest and all the crimes committed. It is extremely grave that the most powerful empire and the most colossal superpower ever to have existed should proclaim such a politics. Of even more concern is the fact that not only the vice president and the principal inspirer of such a perfidious politics, is overtly proclaiming it, but that an elevated number of citizens of that country, possibly more than half, support it. In that case, it would be evidence of the moral abyss to which developed capitalism, consumerism and imperialism can lead. If that is the case, it should be openly proclaimed and the rest of the world should be asked its opinion.
However, I think that the most aware citizens of the United States will be capable of waging and winning that moral battle as they comprehend the painful truth. No honest person in the world would wish for them, or for any other country, the death of innocent people, victims of any form of terror, wherever it may come from.

Fidel Castro Ruz
September 2, 2009
7:34 p.m.