Lawfare: Trump Administration Subpoenas Hasan Piker And Medea Benjamin For Bringing Aid To Cuba.

The popular streamer Hasan Piker and Anti War Activist Madea Benjamin Are Facing A Lawfare Campaign For Bringing Aid To Cuba.

Fox News has reported that the Trump administration has issued administrative subpoenas through the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control against the popular streamer Hasan Piker, longtime anti-war activist Medea Benjamin and over 100 other public figures for helping bring aid to Cubans suffering under the U.S’s barbaric blockade.

For context, the Trump administration is currently cutting Cuba off from its oil supply, the likely pretext for a regime change invasion.

Documenting the effects of the Oil blockade , economist Mark Weisbrot noted that, “More than 90% of Cuba’s electricity is normally dependent on oil-based fuel, and hospitals have been hit especially hard as blackouts have worsened. The New York Times interviewed doctors there and reported last week that ‘rapidly deteriorating conditions at hospitals and clinics across Cuba were causing deaths that would otherwise be preventable.’ Fuel shortages are keeping doctors and nurses away from work and hospitals are canceling surgeries and delaying vaccines for children and life-saving treatments such as kidney dialysis and radiation therapy” adding, “An article in a British pediatric journal earlier this year describes how the tightening of sanctions on Cuba since 2017 has led to more than a doubling of infant mortality over the last decade. The sanctions have caused shortages of medicines, equipment, fuel, food and electricity as well as outbreaks of diseases that were previously prevented”.

Weisbrot added:

the Trump administration is inflicting collective punishment on some of the dozens of countries that rely on Cuba’s international medical missions. For decades, Havana has been sending doctors and other health professionals to other countries to provide medical care and training. In 2016, the program had more than 50,000 health professionals in 67 countries. There are many articles in medical and academic publications that have praised this program’s success, for example in bringing healthcare to “unserved and underserved communities” and to places “where local doctors will not work” including remote rural areas.

Now Trump has been threatening these countries to force them to withdraw from the Cuban programs, thus leaving many thousands or more people without healthcare. It is a strikingly callous disregard for their lives, and all just to punish Cuba, a nation that poses no security threat to the United States.

This embargo, he noted, “constitutes a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention” because of the Trump administration’s use of military force to maintain the blockade.

As he explained:

But these acts of collective punishment cannot generally be prosecuted as war crimes under the Geneva Conventions, because the conventions apply only when there is armed conflict. U.N. experts have argued for many years that something designated as a crime when soldiers are shooting and bombing should also be a crime when they are not.

This is where the blockade of Cuba comes in. It is armed conflict, because the United States has been using military force to maintain the blockade. That means the current collective punishment of Cuban civilians legally constitutes a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

In March, a group of activists, including Piker and Benjamin, went to Cuba to bring aid as an act of protest against the brutal blockade, bringing in “urgently needed medicines and medical supplies, including neonatal equipment, analgesics, catheters, and other critical hospital materials for Cuban clinics and hospitals struggling with severe shortages.”

Other aid brought by the activists included :

FOOD:
- Grains and dry foodstuffs (e.g. rice, lentils and pasta)
- Canned and preserved food (e.g. canned soup and vegetables)
- Long-life sealed products (e.g. powdered milk and packaged cereals)
- Baby food (e.g. baby formula)
MEDICINES:
- Painkillers (e.g. paracetamol or ibuprofen)
- Antihistamines (e.g. loratadine or cetirizine)
- First aid materials (e.g. sterile gauze or elastic bandages)
- Over-the-counter ointments and creams (e.g. for mild irritations, minor burns, or superficial wounds)
ENERGY:
- Handheld flashlights
- Head torches
- AA, AAA, C, D batteries
- Solar-powered chargers and lamps

For daring to bring aid to Cubans suffering under the U.S. blockade, Piker, Benjamin, as well as 145 U.S. nonprofits and activist groups face a lawfare investigation from officials at Treasury, State and Justice departments.

Others caught up in the lawfare investigation- according to the Fox News article- include Isra Hirsi, the daughter of U.S. Democratic representative Ilhan Omar, and Olivia DiNucci, the DC Coordinator for the anti-war organization Code Pink.

The lawfare campaign reportedly is part of a larger campaign supposedly to “curb malign foreign influence operations inside the United States, particularly activities tied to support for political violence, extremist movements or acts the U.S. government classifies as terrorism.”

Journalist Ken Klippenstien recently reported that the Trump White House’s newly released National Counterterrorism Strategy “declared war on the American people today, labeling its political opponents as terrorists” including by introducing a strategy that “identifies the ‘left-wing,’ ‘anti-Fascists,’ ‘Anarchists’ and ‘radically pro-transgender’ ideologies as threats equivalent to jihadi groups like al Qaeda and ISIS, or narco-traffickers.”

He also noted that, “The Strategy also hints at a crackdown on pro-Palestinian groups. In a section laying out ‘five functional aspects of the current CT environment’ beyond the previously named three categories, it warns of ‘New and deepening alliances between the far-left and Islamists, i.e., the ‘Red-Green’ alliance’ — a phrase borrowed from conservative discourse to suggest a conspiratorial alignment between the American left and radical Islam.”

He added that “The Strategy proposes employing the same tactics used to map out jihadi networks like al Qaeda against Americans here at home, promising ‘rapid identification and neutralization’ of the supposed threat.”

This lawfare campaign, Klippenstien later reported, “targets anyone who isn’t in line with the broader MAGA agenda,” including on the right, with him noting that “Two right-wing figures — Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes — have been named by the White House as possible domestic terrorists, according to the Trump administration’s top counterterrorism official”, Sebastian Gorka.

The Trump administration is baselessly accusing the activists who brought aid to Cuba of “attempting to shape American political discourse, mobilize activists, sow discord and normalize rhetoric that could encourage violence or undermine U.S. national security interests” at the behest of “foreign actors and aligned organizations” as well as being “part of a wider influence campaign by Cuba’s communist regime and other foreign actors”.

In other words, a rebranded version of the Neo-McCarthyite Russiagate hysteria that targeted Trump, now targeting critics of the Trump administration’s foreign policy.

The accusations against the activists boil down to the accusation that the “delegation members stayed at a hotel the U.S. State Department has put on a ‘Cuba Restricted List’"

According to the Fox News report:

the subpoenas could determine whether prosecutors pursue a criminal case under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, known as IEEPA, or whether the matter remains a civil enforcement issue handled by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which administers U.S. sanctions programs.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control can impose civil penalties under a “strict liability” standard, meaning the government does not have to prove intent. The Justice Department, by contrast, generally must show that a defendant willfully violated the law in a criminal case, often through evidence of concealment, evasion or knowing participation in prohibited transactions.

This lawfare campaign, no doubt, will be just the beginning of a larger Neo-McCarthyite campaign from the Trump administration, to label its domestic critics across the spectrum as terrorists and foreign agents.

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