Riding America's Crazy Train--> Teacher's reason for controversial Cuba trip: I'm a communist

[Mika]

Ludicrous story involving ludicrous US policy and US jackboot interference.

Teacher's reason for controversial Cuba trip: I'm a communist
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/teacher_reason_for_controversial_GzUuz7dAKxjv5sfVutlP2H#ixzz0uGWR9g6g

A Manhattan high school history teacher, who resigned under fire after taking students on a spring-break "Club Red" field trip to Cuba three years ago, is a self-proclaimed Communist who tried justifying the jaunt by telling Education officials he needed to see Fidel Castro one more time before the dictator died.

READ THE REPORT (PDF)

The shocking revelations are highlighted in a report released today by the city’s special investigator for schools. It recommends that Nathan Turner — who organized the April 2007 trip for himself and five students of the selective Beacon School on the Upper East Side — never be allowed to work in city schools again.

Turner, whose class walls were adorned with posters of Castro and Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, resigned in 2008. Besides placing full blame on Turner, 39, for violating federal restrictions for traveling to Cuba, the report also fully exonerates the school’s principal, Ruth Lacey.

"I don’t think could have done anything more to stop the trip except stand at the border with a gun in her hands," Richard Condon, the special commissioner who headed the three-year investigation, told The Post.

Lacey, the report says, told Turner before he left for Cuba that he couldn’t take students on the 10-day trip and that he had to stop holding meetings about the excursion at the school. Turner responded by saying he had "to go to Cuba to see Castro one more time before he died."

"You know, Ms. Lacey. I’m a Communist," Turner told her, the report says.

Turner declined comment.

Turner opted to organize the excursion through a nonprofit group, Pastors For Peace, and told parents of 30 interested students it was not an official city Department of Education trip.

Condon, however, said Turner still used his job and influence as teacher to convince the students to take the trip. Turner and the students were briefly detained on their return by American customs officials in the Bahamas and could face up to $65,000 apiece in fines for violating travel restrictions.

Condon said the students detention was a key reason why he recommended Turner remain illegible to work in city schools.

A US Treasury Department spokeswoman said none of the individuals who traveled to Cuba had been fined but declined to comment on whether any future enforcement action is pending.

Beacon students had previously gone to Cuba with the DOE’s blessing in 2003 and 2005. DOE now admits those trips should not have been approved.

The Post in 2007 first reported that then-Lt. Gov. David Paterson’s step daughter went on the 2005 trip under Turner’s supervision and that Paterson contacted DOE in 2007 urging officials to approve that trip as well.

Paterson’s step daughter, Ashley Dennis, was a freshman at Ithaca College in 2007 when she said she was contacted by a fellow Beacon alumnus who said DOE refused to authorize the Cuba trip and asked if Paterson could intervene. Paterson also wrote a letter of reference in 2007 for Turner and students to use if they ran into trouble while traveling.

Paterson later said the 2007 trip was misrepresented to him and that he feared the students violated federal travel regulations. However, he said he believed that educational trips to the communist country should be allowed.

That'll teach the kids about freedom - fine them for exercising their constitutional right to unfettered travel to a small peaceful Caribbean island nation. :eyes:

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[Peace Patriot]

1. So much for "freedom of speech" (let alone "freedom of thought") in the USA!

We really need to look at the often "velvet glove" of official & corporate censorship in the U.S., which sometimes bares its teeth and gets out its whips and waterboards to teach us all a lesson. Dare to say you are a communist (if he did), dare to try to open your students' minds to other perspectives, that our people are forbidden, by censorship and other means, to even consider--to even investigate, to even look at for ourselves and make up our own minds about--and you will become an EXAMPLE to the rest of us of the consequences of truly free speech.

The U.S. recently banned a famous journalist from Colombia--who has exposed rightwing death squad activity by the U.S. supported government and military in Colombia--from accepting a fellowship at Harvard. Other such people--who have important things to tell us--have been banned from travel in the U.S.

Can it be any clearer both who is truly ruling our country--multinational corporations and war profiteers--and what the U.S. government's true position is, on freedom of speech, democracy and human and civil rights, than incidents like these?

So when the U.S. government blathers about human rights and democracy--in Cuba or anywhere else--all you can do, really, is laugh. It is so absurd.

:rofl:

[Judi Lynn]

2. The outright treacherous hypocrisy just knocks ya flat. Such two-faced deceit from a freedom-loving

country.

It takes a complete fool to buy it.

Thanks to "patriot" Ruth Lacey and company, Nathan Turner can never work in a New York City school again.

People STILL need to push against these sociopaths. Make it hard for them to run roughshod over the truth, over people.

The human race is going to win, in the end, not the aberrant, murderously greedy lunatics.