U.S. secret Twitter plan aimed to create ‘flash mobs’ in Cuba

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A startling but perhaps, in these repressive times, rou­ tine April 3 Associated Press (AP) story entitled, “U.S. secretly created ‘Cuban Twitter’ to stir unrest” was based on 1000 pages of USAID (United States Agency for International Development) documents obtained by AP. To date AP has not revealed how it obtained these documents. Neither has the U.S. government moved to compel AP to do so. Indeed, if AP follows the “norm” established in these matters, there is little doubt that its article was subject to prior government “approval” for “national security” reasons.

As with the voluminous Edward Snowden revelations, the validity of the material has not been challenged by any government official. Indeed, after a few days of eva­ sions regarding the legality of its operations, including USAID official statements that its highly secret program was “approved” by unnamed officials, President Obama ended the speculation in a press conference where he verified and justified the illegal operation. In today’s increasingly Orwellian political environment, what was “illegal” yesterday, including mass surveillance on virtually all e-mail and cell-phone communications of all Americans, is made government policy the next—by presidential decree or via “approval” by judges operating secret courts immune from public scrutiny. Few secrets in U.S. society today can be kept hidden from government spies. This is evidenced by the revela­ tions in early January 2014 by U.S. Senator Diane Fein­ stein, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee and was the National Security Agency’s most avid defender until she discovered that the confidential 10,000-page re­ port her committee was preparing on NSA surveillance operations had been surreptitiously entered and altered by the NSA itself!

The AP documents detail a massive program aimed at triggering mass protests—a “Cuban Spring” that would supposedly provide the basis for “civil society” challeng­ ing the policies of the Cuban government. The AP independently “verified the project’s scope and details in the documents—such as federal contract numbers and names of job candidates—through publicly available databases, government sources, and interviews with those directly involved...” “In a play on Twitter,” AP reports, the secret operation that began in 2009 and purportedly ended some two and a half years later “was called ZunZuneo—slang for a Cu­ ban hummingbird’s tweet.”

USAID has been financed to the tune of billions by the U.S. government for decades. Its stated purpose of pro­ viding “humanitarian” aid to “democratic” forces around the world is belied by its record of funding right-wing trade unions and other organizations aimed at installing and defending a broad range of military dictatorships and/or bringing down governments whose policies were deemed contrary to U.S. interests. U.S.-instigated “flash mob” mobilizations are but another weapon in imperial­ ist hands today along with mass surveillance, drone war­ fare, systematic torture, and overt intervention and war. AP reports that the ZunZuneo operation was overseen Transition Initiatives (OTI), a division that was created after the fall of the Soviet Union to promote U.S. inter­ ests in quickly changing political environments—with­ out the usual red tape.” AP’s documents, like Snowden’s, repeatedly reveal USAID’s efforts to maintain absolute secrecy due to their central concern that the messages to be tweeted could be linked to the U.S. To this end they sought the assistance of a broad range of experts in the field of organizing social networks, including a co-found­ er of Twitter and officials in the Spanish government. “Their mission,” AP states, “was to launch a messaging network that could reach hundreds of thousands of Cu­ bans. To hide the network from the Cuban government, they would set up a byzantine system of front companies using a Cayman Islands bank account, and recruit unsus­ pecting executives who would not be told of the com­ pany’s ties to the U.S. government.” USAID reports that funds for the program were claimed to be expended for unspecified projects in Pakistan.

Camouflaging ZunZuneo included intricate operations and agents based in several Central America nations, Spain, and England, as well as across the U.S. and else­ where. An unnamed Cuban engineer at Cubacel, Cuba’s cell-phone agency, is said to have provided a Cuban asso­ ciate in Spain with 500,000 Cuban cell-phone numbers. AP does not indicate whether this “engineer” or his Cu­ ban accomplice based in Spain were U.S. agents, or for that matter, whether the cell-phone numbers were actu­ ally obtained in the same manner that U.S. NSA secret surveillance operations steal information from computer systems everywhere.

The ZunZuneo social network began with providing non-political information—including jokes, reports on sports events, hurricane warnings and entertainment. The aim was to organize what appeared as an innocuous and extremely low-cost social network, aimed mostly at Cu­ ban youth, that eventually signed up some 40,000 Cu­ bans. Initially, USAID, through its front groups, secretly financed the extremely low cost of Cubans’ joining the network. The costs to Cubans were paid directly for each tweet to Cubacel.

AP documents how similar text messaging had been used to “mobilize smart mobs and political uprisings in Moldova and the Philippines,” among other unspecified places. “In Iran,” AP reports, “the USAID noted social media’s role following the disputed election of then Pres­ ident Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2009—and saw it as an important foreign policy tool.”

AP’s documents reveal that “USAID divided Cuban society into five segments depending on loyalty to the government. On one side sat the ‘democratic movement,’ called ‘still (largely) irrelevant,’ and at the other end were the ‘hard-core system supporters,’ dubbed ‘Talibanes’ in a derogatory comparison to Afghan and Pakistani ex­ tremists.” It is not possible to discern whether the paren­ thetical “largely” above was inserted by AP or was in the original USAID texts, or perhaps inserted by an embar­ rassed U.S. government “censor” who worried that the AP exposé from its own sources gave proof to the fact that that the so-called democratic opposition, minus a few U.S. operatives, did not exist.

... Crimea secedes (continued from page 7: “Protesters in southern”)

forces are available.

In Ukraine, today’s U.S. allies include neo-fas­ cists and their ilk, along with more compliant and pro-U.S. and EU oligarchs and politicians, em­ ployed to reset the status quo to the advantage of a new Ukrainian ruling capitalist elite. The new U.S.-backed, if not U.S.-installed, prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenuk, pledged in late March to fully implement the Greek-like massive austerity mea­ sures demanded by the terms of the new bailout agreement he had signed, while stating bluntly that the pain inflicted was necessary to resolve Ukraine’s economic crisis.

Meanwhile, the U.S. sound and fury and repeated warnings against “a Russian invasion” of eastern and southern Ukraine have been accompanied by diplomatic exchanges between Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergeo Lavrov. Ironically, both appear to agree that “constitutional changes” are an urgent and immediate necessity in Ukraine today. These include the direct election, as opposed to the pres­ ent appointment, of regional governors, at least in places where Russians are in the great majority.

From the vantage point of Russia’s capitalist elite, increasing the influence and power of its allies in these regions is aimed at maintaining as much as possible Russia’s prior financial and geo-political interests. No doubt, Russia’s elite are far more con­ cerned with maintaining their economic power than with any notion of the democratic rule of the people.

Obama and Kerry, bluster aside, are more than While AP reports that USAID, out of concern for being discovered and discredited by the Cuban government, at­ tempted to sever any connection to ZunZuneo, it is not clear how this could be accomplished, on the one hand, and simultaneously be utilized for its stated purpose, on the other. Perhaps establishing it formally as a private, for profit operation, as opposed to a U.S. government opera­ tion, was sufficient in the minds of USAID officials to grant the U.S. “plausible denial.”

In the end, the program was dropped, according to AP, with no clear reason other than that the “privatized” Zun­ Zuneo was now operating at a financial loss. However, given the untold billions expended on U.S. spy, surveil­ lance, and related operations, it appears doubtful that the “Cuban Twitter” project was put to pasture due to lack of funds!

Within days of the AP release, ZunZuneo was widely discussed in the Cuban media, including full coverage during Cuba’s nightly two-hour Round Table television program. As with other U.S. destabilization programs, Cuban officials, always in measured tones, denounced the U.S. operation as “cyberwar,” along with similar ag­ gression against Cuba’s sovereignty. n content with the overall result of the U.S.-aided far-right and fascist Kiev coup, which in its essence turned over one of Europe’s largest nations, minus Crimea, to the grasping hands of Western bankers. What is now to be negotiated, as always behind the backs of the Ukrainian people, is precisely whose interests will prevail given the changed relation­ ship of forces.

That Crimea has joined Russia is no longer in dispute, U.S. hyperbole aside. Russia’s leverage in the east and south will undoubtedly be employed to advance its ruling-class interests as opposed to those of the working masses there or anywhere else. The same is the case with the U.S. and EU, whose economic power dwarfs Russia’s and who can only be expected, over time, to use it to further marginalize Russian capitalism and subordinate it to its will.

Tragically, in Ukraine and virtually everywhere else in the world today, the working-class majori­ ties, victims of a world capitalist order in its deep­ est crisis in decades and longer, have yet to find a voice in the form of powerful and independent mass political and economic formations that rep­ resent their interests.

Only when the undeniable worldwide anger and resentment of capitalist austerity, repression, and war are matched with a deeply rooted revolution­ ary socialist leadership, will the present series of terrible defeats be reversed, and a new social or­ der brought into being. The present capitalist sys­ tem will then become little more than a footnote in human history. And socialism, a system free from all the monstrous deformations of the previous era, will ring in societies whose central purpose is peace, equality, and the fullest development of hu­ man potential. n SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 2014 9

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News and views from SA Canada website: http://socialistaction.ca Stalinists during the 10-year Soviet occupation, failed to win over many Afghan hearts and minds, much less establish a liberal capitalist democracy. In fact, it only retarded Afghan political progress, and fueled religious fanatics waging jihad against the West.

So what is the “success” that Harper and the business media are touting? Decades of conflict driven by for­ eign powers have left Afghanistan one of the poorest