Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch is suing the Defense Department to obtain documents about any American prisoners of war who may have been tortured by Cuban authorities.
“The fact that we had to sue the Obama administration to get simple answers as to whether Cuba held and tortured American POWs strongly suggests that a cover-up is underway,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
Pentagon officials told the group that they have no such documents, but the question of Cuban involvement in the torture of American POWs is a long-standing controversy. POW advocates faulted the FBI and other government agencies in 1999 for stonewalling their attempts to determine if Americans were taken to Cuba and tortured, and also whether Cuban officials tortured Americans in Vietnam, during the war. The lawsuit comes as President Obama is making a historic visit to the island regime.
“I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas,” Obama said during a speech at the Gran Teatro in Havana on Tuesday.
But activists want to know if that “remnant” includes American service members buried in the island. American POWs have testified that they were abused in Vietnam by a trio of torturers nicknamed “Fidel,” “Chico,” “Pancho,” as part of a “Cuba Program” — allegedly an English language instruction program — hosted by the North Vietnamese from 1967 to 1968.
“[Fidel] used torture to break us initially, and to control us and keep us right under his thumb so we would do what he wanted done,” retired Air Force colonel Jack Bomar told a House committee in 1999. He described a series of abuses, including a “rope trick” that “almost severed” the hands of a service-member who died in prison. “His brutal torture of [a pair of POWs] was due mostly to his frustration and his inability to force his will on others.”
At the time, “Fidel” was reputed to be Major Fernando Vecino Alegret, who went on to lead the Cuban Ministry of Education, but Cuban dictator Fidel Castro denied that Alegret ever went to Vietnam.
FBI officials stymied a POW historian who tried to investigate whether Americans were taken to Cuba. “I have also uncovered evidence of the possibility that American POW’s from the Vietnam War have been held in Los Maristas, a secret Cuban prison run by Castro’s G-2 intelligence service,” Mike Benge, who was himself a POW, told the House panel in 1999. “The Cubans who claimed to have seen them later escaped, made it to the U.S. and were debriefed by the FBI. At the FBI, when I requested documents to be released, I got an answer of ‘Give me their birthdays.'”
Fitton doubts that the federal government’s appetite for leads in such an investigation has grown over time. “I have a feeling that President Obama won’t be raising this issue with the Cuban regime this week,” he said.
