When America is as barbaric as North Korea

Was there ever a failed state as barbaric as North Korea? Not only is this 'rogue nation' endangering the security of the planet in its efforts to elbow its way into the exclusive club of nuclear powers, it has now dispatched two Chinese-American journalists for 12-year prison terms in one of its labour camps, notorious for their brutality and appalling conditions.

The women, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, work for a TV channel owned by former Vice-President Al Gore. According to their friends, the two crossed North Korea's border with China, intent on investigating the alleged trafficking of North Korean women as sex slaves in the People's Republic.

Leaving aside the obvious fact that the fates and harsh sentences faced by Ling and Lee are tied up in the evolution of relations between North Korea and the new Obama government, let's try to achieve some sense of balance on the charge of barbarism.

Many people couldn’t take it. You could see them start to lose their minds

Let's turn to a country that has endured half a century of continuous attack by terrorists based in the United States, suffering nearly 4,000 dead and 2,000 wounded - namely Cuba.

Facing the sabotage of its budding tourist industry, including the bombing of hotels and the murder of tourists, Cuba sent investigators to the US to infiltrate the terrorists, and then handed the results of their probe to the FBI.

The investigators I'm talking about are the Cuban Five - courageous men who travelled from Havana to southern Florida in order to penetrate the Miami-based gangs, specifically Alpha 66, the F4 Commandos, the Cuban American National Foundation and Brothers to the Rescue.

In 1998, after Fidel Castro dispatched Gabriel Garcia Marquez as an emissary to the Clinton White House, the United States sent an FBI team to Havana to discuss the attacks. Cuba handed over to the FBI their investigators' 64 files on 31 different terrorist acts and plans against the island in the decade of the 1990s.

Cuba expected the FBI to start arresting the terrorists. Instead, on September 12, 1998, the Bureau arrested the very investigators who had come to Miami to probe the activities of the Miami terrorists. Gerardo Hernandez received a double life sentence and Antonio Guerrero and Ramon Labanino received life sentences. The remaining two, Fernando Gonzalez and Rene Gonzalez, received 19 and 15 years respectively.

It's true that the Five weren't sent to a labour camp akin to those in the North Korean gulag. Where they were sent was described earlier this year on the CounterPunch site by Hernandez in an interview with the film-maker Saul Landau, who is making a documentary about the Cuban 5.

Hernandez: "They took us to the prison, the Center of Federal Detention in Miami and put us in 'the hole'."

Landau: "For how long?"

Hernandez: "Seveteen months. You're in the cell 23 hours a day. And one hour a day of recreation