VHeadline's Washington DC-based commentarist Chris Herz writes: It's no secret that the Cuban government have been for years engaged in a serious effort to procure the release from US imprisonment of five of their agents. Ricardo Alarcon de Quesada, one of their senior officials leads in this effort with the aid of none less than former President Fidel Castro Ruz.

Their work accompanied with meticulous documentation shows how Cuban-American FBI officials attached a greater importance in the days immediately prior to 9/11 to the arrest and conviction of the Cuban agents who had infiltrated the terroristic Cuban-American National Foundation in Miami than to the investigation of Arab terrorists then taking aircraft flight training right there in Florida.

This documentation, involving none less than Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the wonderful Columbian writer as intermediary, shows the administration of former President Bill Clinton had engaged with Cuba in an effort to work on issues of terrorism involving civil aviation. This led President Castro into a false belief that the US should be given some of the information relayed to Habana from the five agents. What Castro failed to realize, as does many another world leader to this day, is that the civil government in Washington, especially if controlled by anyone other than a staunch Republican conservative, really has little control over its own police, security or especially military bureaucracies.

Rather than to use the information to arrest Posada Carilles or any other terrorist associated with the CANF or other reactionary terrorist cells, the FBI back-trailed and arrested the Cuban infiltrators who now serve life sentences in some of our cruellest prisons. This was as well as a slap at the Cuban government a transparent effort by these bureaucracies in what might laughably be called law-enforcement to weaken and paralyze a government in Washington which the various FBI, prosecutorial and other officials regarded as liberal and thus treasonous.

These professional bureaucracies within the US security apparatus are not wrong in establishing this priority, in terms of imperial politics. While the al-Qaeda terrorists could indeed threaten and even cost the lives of thousands of ordinary US citizens, the revolution launched by Dr Castro, his brother Raul, Che Guevara and others threatens actual loss of territory and resources to the empire. And nothing has changed in these modern times.

We are a nation of 300 millions with armament piled up literally beyond the sky. We can easily afford to lose 3 000 of our citizens in a terrorist attack if that incident enables us to establish a military presence in the heartland of the world's oil and gas reserves. Not only is that a positive outcome but we can use the matter to submerge and suppress internally what are seen as fatuously moralistic at best, and at worst even subversive objections to the military's expansion into the rest of the world, including and especially your own northern tier countries in South America. This is the thinking, if you can call it that, of all of our professional foreign policy and security and military bureaucrats. What is especially devastating is that this political attitude is embraced by a sufficiency of ordinary citizens to maintain at least a pretense of a national political legitimacy.

This divorce between civil and military governance in the USA is of course unparalleled in the world within a major power since the mutinous behavior of the Imperial Japanese Army prior to World