USA Today: Swap 'Cuban Five' for U.S. contractor

[flamingdem]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2011-09-05/Column-Swap-Cuban-Five-for-US-contractor/50265232/1

Opinion:

When the FBI arrested 10 Russian spies last year, this country quickly traded them for four ailing men held by Russia and accused of being espionage agents for the United States and Britain.

It took just more than a week for the U.S. government to cut the deal that sent the Russian agents, who had been in this country for more than a decade, to Moscow. After a brief appearance in a federal courtroom to plead guilty to a single charge of conspiring "to act as an agent of a foreign country" the Russian spooks were whisked from the country.

Of the four men who were released to the U.S. — all of them Russians — in return for this grand gesture, two were taken to Britain; the others landed in Washington and then disappeared in a caravan of black SUVs.

The U.S. government should do the same for Alan Gross. Seven months before the U.S.-Russia spy swap, Gross was arrested in Cuba and charged with committing "acts against the independence and territorial integrity" of that communist nation. Gross worked for Development Alternatives, Inc., a U.S. State Department contractor. The charge against him stems from his efforts to provide satellite phones and unrestricted Internet access to some people in Cuba, whose government the United States has tried for more than half a century to topple. MORE AT LINK