Abstract

Why are we bombarded by fact-checks and “anti-disinformation” efforts in our timeline scrolls? When one reads news, further, they often find that “experts” are common sources behind whatever claim media professionals make, no matter how outlandish or disconnected from reality such claims may be. Through his concept and exploration of spectacle, a totalizing, negating force over our lives that results in unlife, French Philosopher Guy Debord’s famous Society of the Spectacle (1967) and his follow-up booklet, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), provide insights to these and other interconnected phenomena. When it comes to “fact-checks” and “experts”, Debord is clear: in a society subjugated by the economy, where “everything that was once directly lived has faded into representation,” such professionals do not exist to provide us the truth — they exist to serve the state and media through lies and distortions spun into what appears as true. If the “experts” lose influence, it will be because the public has learned and can articulate that their job is to systematically lie.

“Disinformation” appears as one of the biggest bogeymen in today’s increasingly online world. Governments warn of the dangers the phenomenon apparently poses to society and democracy, and mainstream media organizations in turn direct resources to counter-disinformation and fact-checking efforts. In the name of “being informed,” people often cannot go online without being bombarded by fact-checks or warnings to watch what content they consume and share with their social and professional networks.

While anti-disinformation efforts proliferate, what’s missing from the conversation is a discussion about power. Of course, the powerful have reasons for wanting to combat what they consider to be “disinformation” — they want their version of the truth to become ours. Many commentators observe as such, noting that so-called disinformation researchers, fact-checkers, and experts are often partisan in nature, and themselves frequently disseminate things that are not true.

This is one of the most basic and important insights if you want to how understand how the modern media functions.

Basically, anyone calling themselves a "misinformation expert" or "disinformation reporter" is a partisan fraud, trying to make their activism seem scientific: https://t.co/5gbDf2WJoD

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 21, 2022

But a larger force is at work within the rise of fact-checking and other counter-disinformation efforts. That force is our society’s current arrangement of appearances, the totality of social relations mediated by images, or spectacle. Spectacle, as elucidated in Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, is a concept that can help us to understand seemingly unconnected, yet deeply intertwined phenomena that have come to fruition as the economy has subjugated society to its needs (as opposed to the other way around), and thus recover our ability to experience life directly.

As its dominance over our everyday lives grows complete, the spectacle has become powerful enough to turn our understanding of what is true upside down. Because spectacle replaces real life with a mere mediated representation of life that cannot be experienced directly, it provides a framework where mass deceptions and lies can consistently and convincingly appear as true. Thus, spectacle is perhaps one of the most effective tools we have to explain how elite deceptions, including fabrications and lies about imperialist wars like those in Iraq and Syria, can consistently go unpunished and even unnoticed. As such, it follows that spectacle can help us understand how modern fact-checks and counter-disinformation initiatives can consistently do the opposite of what they claim, as many have observed.

In this article, I examine the spectacle’s current “lines of advance” as they appear in our news cycles, feeds and timelines, where “fact-checks” and claims from “experts” are almost impossible to avoid.

Critically, the argument in this article cannot be understood solely as a critique of media systems and instead must involve spectacle as a whole, which as a concept (as Debord’s book title, The Society of the Spectacle, suggests) pertains to all of society. Aspects of modern life are “not accidentally or superficially spectacular,” or otherwise excessive: rather, society is “fundamentally spectaclist.” Within a fundamentally spectaclist society, the rise of power-serving fact-checkers or an adjacent force must be understood as inevitable.

What is Spectacle?

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”

-Guy Debord

In French philosopher Guy Debord’s 1967 Society of the Spectacle and its shorter follow-up booklet, the 1988 _Comments on the Society of the Spectacle_, he posits that modern life is mediated through images, or representations of life, in a state —a spectacle— that has become nothing less than objective and material reality. Our current reality, a society of the spectacle, is one where the world has been turned “upside down” because life can no longer be lived directly, but instead only through mere representations of life. Such an organization of appearances facilitates a backwards unreality where truth, when it makes a rare appearance, does so as “a moment of the false.”

The spectacle, which “presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned,” exists to advance itself infinitely; as Debord says, its sole message is “What appears is good; what is good appears.” Its manifestation in the world is a “visible negation of life — a negation that has taken on a visible form” which “keeps people in a state of unconsciousness as they pass through practical changes in their conditions of existence.”

The world this spectacle emerges in is one where the economy has subjugated society to its own needs. Having no use for anything but itself, and for advancing itself, the spectacle ignores the reality of practical and natural processes, like ageing and rest, and tramples over humans’ need to connect in lieu of its own advancement. A master of separation, it has recreated our society without community, and it has obstructed the ability to communicate in general. Such processes and their ramifications ultimately mean people cannot truly experience life for themselves: they have become spectators, bound to an impoverished state of unlife.

The Society of the Spectacle and The Fact-Checking World

As the spectacle advances its control, message and ultimately “unlife” over daily life, an obvious tool it can use to perpetuate its cause is mass and social media, which take up growing portions of the average person’s waking hours outside work. Further blurring reality, as Debord claims in Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, the spectacle’s undermining and destruction of history means “contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.”

A corporatized media is a perfect medium for such a “fabulous” realm, where truth and reality alike are obscured beyond recognition. Amongst this backdrop of confusion, spectacle increasingly deprives people of physical reality, common historical reference points and community necessary to discuss or debate important political happenings and events. As a consequence, elite narratives permeate from their respective channels unchallenged, especially as dissenting voices find themselves shut out of corporatized, elite- and tech-dominated public discourse.

Debord comments on this phenomenon in his writings on spectacle, explaining that the spectaclist world is characterized by one way, top-down communication, rather than meaningful dialogue. He writes that “the passive acceptance [the spectacle] demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply.”

As they command increasing control over today’s mass media, those in power are interested in legitimizing their banter — thus reinforcing the spectacle that has awarded them their status — and aim to maintain “whatever is established.” They have an abundance of tools to do this, one of them being a class of “experts,” which Debord warns of in Comments, that superficially appear to provide genuine information to inform the public sphere, but in fact perpetuate elite perspectives to advance their careers and maintain income. In a world “truly turned upside down,” these apparent experts do the exact opposite of what they claim.

Within the context of an expert class, “fact checkers” and the growing phenomenon of so-called disinformation reporters and researchers are a kind of “expert” that act to guard the spectacle’s version of truth. Lay readers and television viewers, likely tired by the demands of their own lives, may look to such professionals to best understand reality and current events; in practice, such fact-checking operations silence emerging news narratives that go against the grain, such as the once untouchable but now-proven likely Hunter Biden laptop story, in droves.

How did such backwards circumstances become reality? In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord explains that the economy subjugating society first presented itself as an “obvious degradation of being into having,” where human fulfilment was no longer attained through what one was, but instead only through what one had. As society’s capitulation to the economy accelerated, the decline from being into having shifted “from having into appearing.” With respect to knowledge, therefore, experts no longer have to be experts or have expertise, they only need to take on the appearance of expertise.

In other words, the “experts say” phrase that crawls unabated through news headlines and fact-checks can be rubber stamped onto just about anything to boost legitimacy because the appearance of legitimacy always trumps content.

As Debord writes in Comments on the Society of the Spectacle:

“All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode of organisation. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie.”

As Debord shows us here, experts only become experts according to the elite’s terms. And Debord’s observation that “former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil,” rings especially true in today’s world of corporate media, where journalists frequently face precarious work arrangements, mass lay-offs, and low wages in an oversaturated career field. Increasingly, to stray from mainstream media narratives is to end up blacklisted from the field all together, leaving many unable or unwilling to rock the boat.

The conditions ultimately crystalize Debord’s “expert” class, which comprises a variety of persons whose societal roles ultimately exist to defend and perpetuate spectacle. Despite constant distortions and lies, their appearance of legitimacy gives the spectacle cover when anyone publicly questions the state of current events.

Because their role is not about legitimate fact-checking, but instead about advancing spectacle, fact-checkers and adjacent media professionals’ work on current events manifests in almost comical ways, including hyper-specific references and the ridicule of potential circumstances later proven to be true.

In 2018, for example, NowThis adorned with circus music a clip of German officials laughing at President Donald Trump over what it called “exaggerated” and “outrageous” claims made at the UN about Germany’s dependence on Russian oil. Yet only four years later, President Trump’s concerns became reality when Russia cut off major oil pipeline Nord Stream 1’s access to Europe.

Further, while mainstream outlets long hailed the COVID-19 “lab-leak theory” as conspiracy theory or as “disinformation,” thus legitimizing the mass ridiculing and deplatforming of those finding the theory plausible, mainstream media outlets Vanity Fair and ProPublica have finally considered the theory’s possible validity almost three years after the initial crisis began.

In these and countless other examples, fact-checkers worked, and continue to work, tirelessly to ridicule legitimate developments and smear them as false, further blurring reality for and gaslighting an atomized population already reduced to living life indirectly.

How Fact-Checkers and Disinformation “Experts” Crush Dissent

Often, fact-checkers are hailed as “independent,” presenting themselves as neutral and principled analysts of current events. In reality, their roles are often created and maintained by wealthy or otherwise-compromised individuals, organizations and governments.

After all, fact-checking and related efforts are often considered vital to stopping “disinformation,” a recently-popularized term that Debord believes primarily serves spectacle. Yet here lies another contradiction that exists openly in a spectaclist society: the entities most concerned with the so-called disinformation problem (i.e. governments, intelligence agencies, and mainstream media professionals) are the most likely to spread falsehoods themselves.

Debord outlines his understanding of the term “disinformation” in Comments, writing that disinformation “is openly employed by particular powers, or, consequently, by people who hold fragments of economic or political authority, in order to maintain what is established; and always in a counter-offensive role.” Of course, “fact-checks” often come out after controversial or power-incriminating news stories do, further fulfilling the counter-offensive role Debord insinuates they play to bury challenges to power.

And many prominent fact-checking media organizations and institutions have partnered with or been funded in some capacity by the US government, suggesting their partial or full utility as proxy intelligence instruments. So-called “trust rating” system NewsGuard Technologies, for example, partners directly with organizations including Microsoft, the US Departments of Defense and State, and is even advised by former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden and former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogg Rasmussen.

Further, as Alan MacLeod reported in MintPress news, organizations including VoxCheck, the Poynter Institute and StopFake have received funding through the U.S. Embassy or the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US government-backed organization explicitly established during the Reagan era as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) front group. Former NED acting president Allen Weinstein even admitted in a 1991 interview that “A lot of what [the NED does] today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA. The biggest difference is that when such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection.”

Perhaps to cover for their dubious funding sources and affiliations, fact-checking and equivalent operations often take on elaborate appearances, frequently employing “experts” who effectively act to bolster mainstream narratives. Examples include documented proxy British intelligence operation Bellingcat, an initially one-man-organization that, with heavy publicity, became one of journalism’s biggest names overnight. Through apparently sophisticated “open source investigations,” the organization has ultimately worked to protect mainstream news narratives about the wars in Syria and Ukraine, including labelling research critical of the western-backed and terrorist-turned-humanitarian White Helmets in Syria as, predictably, “disinformation.”

Similarly, government- and Gates Foundation-funded Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) frequently smears reporters countering mainstream media narratives through their work, jeopardizing their targets’ careers. In its work to “revers[e] the rising tide of polarisation, extremism and disinformation worldwide,” the ISD calls for nebulous actions to regulate or otherwise disrupt the spread of “disinformation” that in fact leads to the censorship of dissenting voices and stifling public debate. In its “About” page, the ISD even brags about the number of social media accounts it has helped to ban.

But just as Debord’s spectacle allows for no real response to its actions —“its manner of appearing without allowing any reply”— the ISD often does not respond when asked for comment, debate, or proof that their claims of “disinformation” hold water. Indeed, the ISD even changed its complaint policy to not “engage with complaints made by bad faith actors, or amplify disinformation, extremism or hate” after reporter Aaron Maté challenged their baseless smear attempt, in collaboration with The Guardian, against him. The ISD doesn’t have to provide proof or respond to rebuttals when they make claims about others: in a spectaclist society, their accusations alone can kill careers.

Debord writes on the phenomenon, applicable to anyone who skirts mainstream narratives, in Comments: “A person’s past can be entirely rewritten, radically altered, recreated in the manner of the Moscow trials – and without even having to bother with anything as clumsy as a trial. Killing comes cheaper these days.”

Further crystallizing the spectacle’s refusal of reply and the “killings” it facilitates, fact-checking and corporate-facilitated mass bans and delegitimizations of journalist social media accounts occur en masse, and are especially common for individuals and organizations providing information and content swimming against the current. By late May of 2022, for example, YouTube had removed over 9,000 channels producing materials related to the war in Ukraine.

And Twitter and Facebook continue labeling non-western accounts, often anti-imperialist networks and associated journalists as “state-affiliated” or “state-controlled”, in attempts to discredit them. Smears, demonetizations and deplatforming with respect to journalists and outlets that stray from mainstream narratives, including hit pieces on Kim Iversen and Eva Bartlett as well as PayPal and twitter deplatforming of organizations like Mint Press News and Russia Today, are increasingly common. In many cases, such decisions about bans and deplatforming are based on conclusions made by “independent” fact-checkers who decide particular claims or research conclusions are incorrect or otherwise “harmful,” a nebulous term that can easily be used against dissenters because such an accusation requires no real evidence or proof.

While independent, adversarial sources are left to try to produce work within increasingly prohibitive restraints, mainstream media channels and fact-checkers consistently parrot distorted or false narratives without consequence.

Much of the media coverage of the conflict in Ukraine, for example, obscures basic facts, including the nature and reality of the Ukrainian military’s neo-Nazi elements, and especially the Azov Battalion, widely associated with neo-Nazism before the current conflict. This has led to controversy in places like Greece, where Ukrainian Prime Minister Zelensky’s decision to allow an Azov Battalion member to speak during his virtual address to the country’s Parliament in April 2022 resulted in widespread outrage.

And many mainstream news sources posited the recent missile strike in Poland was Russian in origin with little evidence, bringing international tensions to the brink. As news emerged that the missile was likely Ukrainian, updates were published and articles were rescinded — but not until after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called to further escalate the conflict. While the Associated Press (AP) journalist who broke the story after receiving false information from US intel was fired, an event remarkable enough to make international news headlines, dozens of prominent outlets still uncritically repeated AP’s initial claims that the missile was Russian.

Clearly, disingenuous media portrayals of current events are common. But the current arrangement, where mainstream media spreads disinformation unabated while those telling the truth face reprimanding, is not an accident. Rather, many mainstream journalists and fact-checkers have their jobs because their words serve the state and spectacle alike.

And such a toxic media environment, of course, is self-reinforcing: any “fact checker” or “expert” who strays from their work advancing the spectacle knows they risk the very smears they now spout. In today’s world, likewise, everyone is subconsciously aware of this reality because they too could be “canceled” online or in real life with little chance at defense. And considering the Ukrainian government’s kill list against journalists such as Eva Bartlett and prominent figures including musician Roger Waters, one could say Debord’s “killing” has taken on a literal form, though of course fact checkers find such claims misleading.

Conclusion

At the time of writing, the relative ability of spectacular media narratives to sway or otherwise confuse public opinion, as current and recent events including the war in Syria, the Ukraine conflict, and the coronavirus crisis demonstrate, is unprecedented.

Many are increasingly able to grasp, however, that some kind of deception or misdirection is often ongoing. Namely, the public is learning to understand the deceptive nature of the “experts” adorning their screens, as the flop and subsequent shutting of CNN+, a 100 million USD streaming service that only received about 10,000 subscriptions, shows. And trust in the media is reaching record lows in the US and internationally: a July 2022 Gallup poll revealed only 16% of U.S. adults had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the reporting quality of newspapers and 11% in television-based news respectively.

“The current thing” meme surfacing and gaining traction over the past year, furthermore, articulates a collective sense that many news events, or their impacts, are somehow manufactured or sensationalized in ways that aren’t organic.

Many people have come to realize that there's something very strange and unnatural about big corporations all walking lockstep to push the "latest thing."

Real life just doesn't work that way.

There must be some kind of leverage used to create this unnatural situation.

— Ron Paul (@RonPaul) August 27, 2022

This collective, if un-articulated knowledge that the media available for consumption is somehow wrong or misleading coincides with Debord’s claim in Comments that people subconsciously understand that, as the spectacle continues its upending of social relations, something fundamental has changed about life itself.

As Debord writes in Comments:

“The vague feeling that there has been a rapid invasion which has forced people to lead their lives in an entirely different way is now widespread; but this is experienced rather like some inexplicable change in the climate, or in some other natural equilibrium, a change faced with which ignorance knows only that it has nothing to say.”

The spectacle’s totality of domination over our lives is an amazing yet shocking feat that forces those recognizing the phenomenon to reckon with the “un-lives” we live. Thus, while “ignorance knows… it has nothing to say,” overriding and dismantling the spectacle requires finding something to say: as Debord writes, a “practical force must be set in motion.”

This “practical force” needs the meaningful dialogue that spectacle’s creep into our lives has largely eliminated, if not wholly erased, via phenomena including today’s fact-checking and anti-disinformation crazes. And that dialogue and communication cannot be initiated by atomized individuals or by lonely crowds susceptible to spectacle’s influence, but by people who share community and a meaningful connection to what Debord describes as “universal history,” “ where dialogue arms itself to make its own conditions victorious.”

As Debord put it, “We can truly understand this society only by negating it.” If the “experts” lose influence, it will be because the public has rejected them outright, and can articulate that their societal role is to deceive on behalf of the powerful.

Selected References

Debord, Guy. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Malcolm Imrie. London and New York: Verso Books, 1990. https://monoskop.org/images/3/3b/Debord_Guy_Comments_on_the_Society_of_the_Spectacle_1990.pdf.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Ken Knabb. Berkeley, California: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014. https://files.libcom.org/files/The Society of the Spectacle Annotated Edition.pdf.

On January 8, 2023 the US has to release a federal prisoner who is known as one its most notable opponents of treatment of Cuba since its revolution. She is Ana Belén Montes, and she will be freed after over 21 years in a federal military prison.

She was a top official on Latin America in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) who, solely out of moral conviction, gave Cuba information on top secret US military plans and operations. Unrepentant in her trial, she defended herself saying, “I obeyed my conscience rather than the law. … I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it.”

Ana Belén is one of the many Americans who have taken a moral stance in opposition to the actions of their government, and who were subsequently hunted as traitors or spies. Edward Snowden was another such figure, having exposed how the National Security Agency’s spying on the US population and leaders of other countries. Rather than spend much of his life in a federal prison, Snowden has opted to live in exile in Russia.

While the US movement in defense of Cuba did not champion the case of Ana Belén as with the very similar situation of the Cuban Five, she is recognized as a hero in Cuba. In 2016, the famed Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodriguez dedicated a song to her, explaining, “The prisoner I mentioned yesterday… is Ana Belén Montes and she was a high official of the US secret services. When she knew that they were going to do something bad to Cuba, she would pass on the information to us. That is why she is serving a sentence of decades…Much evil did not happen to us because of her. Freedom for her.”

Silvio Rodríguez le dedicó esta canción a la presa política del imperialismo Ana Belén Montes, quien saldrá libre este fin de semana después de pasar 20 años de prisión en aislamiento total #FreeAnaBelen #FreeLeonardPeltier #FreeJulianAssange #FreeAlexSaab pic.twitter.com/4OphzkUXVp

— Roi Lopez Rivas (@RoiLopezRivas) January 4, 2023

Ana Belén did not receive any money from Cuba for her 16 years of work. Knowing the dire risks she faced, she acted out of a belief in justice and solidarity with Cuba. For over 60 years, the country has suffered under a US blockade – repeatedly condemned by the United Nations – imposed in retaliation for choosing national sovereignty over continued neocolonial status. US supported terrorism against Cuba has killed 3,478 and caused 2,099 disabling injuries over the years.

One of the charges brought against Ana Belén was having helped assure Bill Clinton and George W. Bush that Cuba represented no military threat to the US, and therefore contributed to avoiding another US regime change war that would have meant the death of countless Cubans. She also acknowledged having revealed the identities of four American undercover intelligence officers working in Cuba.

“The Queen of Cuba” hailed from a family of feds

Born in West Germany on February 28, 1957, a Puerto Rican citizen of the United States, and a high official in the Defense Intelligence Agency, Ana Belén was convicted as a spy for alerting Cuba to the interventionist plans that were being prepared against the Cuban people.

In 1984 while working as a clerk in the Department of Justice, Ana Belén initiated her relationship with Cuban security. She then applied for a job at the DIA, the agency responsible for foreign military intelligence to the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The DIA employed her in 1985 until her arrest at work 16 years later. She became a specialist in Latin American military affairs, was the DIA’s principal analyst on El Salvador and Nicaragua, and later Cuba.

Because of her abilities, Ana Belén became known in US intelligence circles as “the Queen of Cuba”. Her work and contributions were so valued that she earned ten special recognitions, including Certificate of Distinction, the third highest national-level intelligence award. CIA Director George Tenet himself presented it to her in 1997.

“She gained access to hundreds of thousands of classified documents, typically taking lunch at her desk absorbed in quiet memorization of page after page of the latest briefings,” which she would later write down at home and convey to Cuba.

Avoiding capture through discretion, until the intercept came

On February 23, 1996, the Cuban Ministry of Defense asked visiting American Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll to warn off Miami Brothers to the Rescue planes that planned to again fly over Havana. Carroll immediately informed the State Department.

Instead of ending the provocations, the US let the planes fly, and two “Brothers to the Rescue” planes were shot down over Cuba the next day. The US exploited the flare-up to sabotage the growing campaign to moderate the US blockade of the island. The US official who arranged Admiral Carroll’s meeting was Ana Belén. Her explanation that the date was chosen only because it was a free date on the Admiral’s schedule was accepted.

Nevertheless, a DIA colleague reported to a security official that he felt Ana Belén might be under the influence of Cuban intelligence. He interviewed her, but she admitted nothing. She passed a polygraph test.

Ana Belén had access to practically everything the intelligence community collected on Cuba, and helped write final reports. Due to her rank, she was a member of the super-secret “inter-agency working group on Cuba”, which brings together the main analysts of federal agencies, such as the CIA, the Department of State, and the White House itself.

The Washington Post reported, “She was now briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council and even the president of Nicaragua about Cuban military capabilities. She helped draft a controversial Pentagon report stating that Cuba had a ‘limited capacity’ to harm the United States and could pose a danger to U.S. citizens only ‘under some circumstances.'”

Rolando Sarraff Trujillo, a US agent in Cuba’s Ministry of Interior that Cuba had uncovered and imprisoned, was released and traded for three of the Cuban 5 in 2014. He had “provided critical information that led to the arrests of those known as the “Cuban Five;” of former State Department official Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers; and of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuba analyst, Ana Belén Montes.”

In 1999 the National Security Agency intercepted a Cuban communication. It revealed a spy high in the hierarchy, who was associated with the DIA’s SAFE computer system. It meant the spy was likely on staff of the DIA. The suspect had also traveled to Guantánamo Bay in July 1996. Coincidentally, Ana Belén worked in the DIA and had traveled to the Bay on DIA business. The spy was using a Toshiba laptop, and it was discovered she had one. A decision was taken to break into her flat and copy the hard drive.

Since the case being put together indicated she was providing information to Cuba, she was arrested by FBI agents on September 21, 2001 while in her DIA office. She was charged with conspiracy to commit espionage for Cuba. “She told investigators after her arrest that a week earlier she had learned that she was under surveillance. She could have decided then to flee to Cuba, and probably would have made it there safely.” But her political commitment made her feel “she couldn’t give up on the people (she) was helping.”

Nigerian commentator Owei Lakemfa presented ten reasons he thought Ana Belén Montes avoided detection during her 16 years in the DIA. Among the most important was that she was extremely discreet and kept to herself. She lived alone in a simple apartment north of the US capital, and memorized documents, never taking any home. And she never received unexplainable funds.

Ironically, her brother was an FBI special agent, and her sister an FBI analyst who “played an important role in exposing the so-called Wasp Network of Cuban agents [the Cuban 5 and 7 others] operating in Florida.”

Ana Belén avoided the death penalty for high treason, highly likely in the post September 11 atmosphere, by pleading guilty before the US federal court handling her case. Since she acknowledged her conduct, and told the court how she worked, she was sentenced to “only” twenty-five years. However, she was imprisoned in conditions designed to destroy her, as the case with Julian Assange today. She was sent to special unit of a federal prison for violent offenders with psychiatric problems.

“I obeyed my conscience rather than the law”

In her October 16, 2002 trial statement, she declared that she obeyed her conscience:

“There is an Italian proverb that is perhaps the one that best describes what I believe: The whole world is one country. In that ‘world country’, the principle of loving your neighbor as much as you love yourself, is an essential guide for harmonious relations between all our ‘nation-neighborhoods’.

This principle implies tolerance and understanding for the different ways of others. It mandates that we treat other nations the way we wish to be treated – with respect and compassion. It is a principle that, unfortunately, I believe we have never applied to Cuba.

Your Honor, I got involved in the activity that has brought me before you because I obeyed my conscience rather than the law. Our government’s policy towards Cuba is cruel and unfair, deeply unfriendly; I feel morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values ​​and our political system on it.

We have displayed intolerance and contempt for Cuba for four decades. We have never respected Cuba’s right to make its own journey towards its own ideals of equality and justice. I do not understand how we continue to try to dictate how Cuba should select its leaders, who its leaders cannot be, and what laws are the most appropriate for that nation. Why don’t we let Cuba pursue its own internal journey, as the United States has been doing for more than two centuries?

My way of responding to our Cuba policy may have been morally wrong. Perhaps Cuba’s right to exist free of political and economic coercion did not justify giving the island classified information to help it defend itself. I can only say that I did what I thought right to counter a grave injustice.

My greatest wish would be to see a friendly relationship emerge between the United States and Cuba. I hope that my case in some way will encourage our government to abandon its hostility toward Cuba and work together with Havana in a spirit of tolerance, mutual respect and understanding.

Today we see more clearly than ever that intolerance and hatred – by individuals or governments – only spreads pain and suffering. I hope that the United States develops a policy with Cuba based on love of neighbor, a policy that recognizes that Cuba, like any other nation, wants to be treated with dignity and not with contempt.

Such a policy would bring our government back in harmony with the compassion and generosity of the American people. It would allow Cubans and Americans to learn from and share with each other. It would enable Cuba to drop its defensive measures and experiment more easily with changes. And it would permit the two neighbors to work together and with other nations to promote tolerance and cooperation in our one ‘world-country,’ in our only world-homeland.”

Brutal prison conditions aimed to destroy Ana Belén

Jürgen Heiser of the German solidarity Netzwerk-Cuba reported that “Ana Belén has been isolated in conditions that the UN and international human rights organizations describe as ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’ and torture. Her prison conditions were further exacerbated after her trial, when she was placed in the Federal Medical Center (FMC) in Carswell, outside of Fort Worth, Texas. The FMC is located on a US marine compound and previously served as a military hospital… It includes a high security unit set aside for women of “special management concerns” that can hold up to twenty prisoners. A risk of “violence and/or escape” are specified as grounds for incarceration in the unit. This is where the “spy” Ana Belén is being held in isolation, in a single-person cell.”

Her cell neighbors have included one who strangled a pregnant woman to get her baby, a longtime nurse who killed four patients with massive injections of adrenaline, and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, the Charles Manson follower who tried to assassinate President Ford.

The Fort Worth Star Telegram has regularly covered the abuses against the women inmates at Fort Carswell Carswell prison, which has also housed two other political prisoners Reality Winner and Aafia Siddiqui. Detainees have suffered gross violations of their human rights, including documented cases of police abuse, suspicious deaths where the investigations into them have been blatantly obstructed, deaths due to the denial of basic medical attention, rape of prisoners by guards, and exposure to toxic substances. In July 2020, 500 of the 1400 prisoners had Covid. The Star Telegram reported “the facility showed a systemic history of covering misconduct up and creating an atmosphere of secrecy and retaliation…”

Ana Belén wrote, “Prison is one of the last places I would have ever chosen to be in, but some things in life are worth going to prison for, or worth doing and then killing yourself before you have to spend too much time in prison.”

She has been subjected to extreme conditions in that prison, akin to those imposed on Assange. The Federal Bureau of Prisons has reported that:

She can only have contact with her closest relatives, since her conviction is for espionage.

No one can inquire about her health or know why she is in a center for people with mental problems, when she does not suffer from them.

She cannot receive packages. When her defenders sent her a letter, it has been returned by certified mail.

Only people on a list (no more than 20 who have known her before her incarceration and have been approved by the FBI) ​​can correspond, send books, and visit Ana. Few people have visited her besides her brother and niece.

She cannot interact with other detainees in jail, and was always alone in her cell.

She is not allowed to talk on the phone, except to her mother once a week for 15-20 minutes.

She could not receive newspapers, magazines or watch television. After a dozen years in prison, the restrictions were slightly relaxed.

Karen Lee Wald noted in 2012, “If she is taken out of her cell in the isolation unit for any reason, all other prisoners are locked in their cells so they cannot speak to her. Basically, she has been buried alive.”

David Kovics, the renowned leftist songwriter, was moved to pay tribute to her in song. Oscar Lopez Rivera, who was jailed by the US during his fight for Puerto Rican independence, said, “I think that every Puerto Rican who loves justice and freedom should be proud of Ana Belén. What she did was more than heroic. She did what every person who believes in peace, justice and freedom and in the right of every nation to govern itself in the best possible way and without the intervention or threat of anyone, would have done.”

The Monastiraki Kitchen wanted to present the best Christmas dinner ever (until next Christmas) for our clients. The Big Feast. A meal for Kings and Queens. Partly because of our Automatic Earth readers’ donations, I think we got quite a ways there. Even if the dinner happened yesterday, December 31, instead of Christmas.

The Automatic Earth readers were responsible for buying €450 worth of steaks, meaning a good sized steak for 450 people (sometimes we make good deals). And we also bought tons of cookies, and charcoal, etc. Ask Filothei, she knows the details. I decided I’ll let the photos tell the story this time, not me. Here we go:

Apart from the usual food, and this time the steaks, Christmas at Monastiraki is always a time for gift bags. Hundreds of them. They contain lots of sweets, but also soaps, shampoo, warm socks and gloves etc. Very popular. We are so grateful to all those who contribute.

Really, lots of gift bags.

A crazy amount of sweets. Carloads.

And the steaks. Ever tried to prepare 450 of them?

It’s a lot.

Did I mention there were sweets? The bakers who donate these are saints. We are dealing with homeless people, for whom steaks and cakes and good chocolate are dreams. Well, Christmas is the time to make dreams come true.

And all this is dragged to the square by the crew.

Who then do the last preparations.

Yeah, Monastiraki Square is a bit magical at times.

And it’s also busy…

Before the food arrives. Gift bags! We have gift bags!

Yes. Popular.

The girl crew.

Did I mention we have sweets?

Thank you all soo much for making this possible. It counts. It makes a real difference. It’s a community effort. Even if you’re in Tennessee, you are part of that community.

I’ll end with the usual play:

Most of you will know the drill of this by now: any Paypal donations ending in $0.99 or $0.37 go straight to the Monastiraki kitchen, while other donations go to the Automatic Earth -which also badly needs them. (Note: a lot of Automatic Earth donations also end up at the kitchen).

I dislike few things more than asking people for money, even though the Automatic Earth now runs primarily on donations, and there’s some sweet justice in that as well, in depending on people’s appreciation of what we do, instead of ad revenues.

But I cannot do this on my own right now. The Monastiraki kitchen will realistically need about €1,500 per month (not all from my readers). I don’t have that to spare. So I’m calling on you. Unashamedly, because I know there is no reason to be ashamed of the cause.

I love all you people, and I’m sorry I can’t thank you all individually who have supported -and still do- the Monastiraki kitchen and the Automatic Earth all this time, and I ask you to keep on doing just that. The details for donations on Paypal and Patreon, for both causes, are in the top of the two sidebars of this site. Could not be much easier. If you’d rather send a check, go to our Store and Donations page. Bitcoin: 1HYLLUR2JFs24X1zTS4XbNJidGo2XNHiTT.

Love you. Thank you. This kitchen would not exist without you, these people would not get fed.