Posted on 05/17/2002 3:44:24 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
The United States government believes that Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba is developing mass destruction weapons in collaboration with rogues states, terrorists and communist insurgents (like the FARC in Colombia). According to State Department arms control undersecretary John R. Bolton, the U.S. government considers Cuba to be a state sponsor of terrorism and an exporter of mass destruction technology.
For those who have followed communist machinations in Cuba and elsewhere, Bolton’s “news” is anything but new. In 1987 Joseph D. Douglass, Jr. and Neil C. Livingstone wrote a book titled “America the Vulnerable: The Threat of Chemical/Biological Warfare.” The book discusses Cuba’s biological and chemical warfare preparations under Russian tutelage. According to Douglass and Livingstone, “Fidel Castro has repeatedly sought to explain Cuban sugarcane and other crop failures by accusing the United States of ‘germ warfare.’” The purpose of such accusations is to justify Cuban programs that aim at the devastation of U.S. water supplies and other vital targets. According to reports from Cuban defectors, émigrés and soldiers captured in Africa: Cuban chemical/biological facilities have been identified at Kimonor, in the province of Matanzas, where the Cubans were trained in mass destruction technique by Russian experts; and the other is at Jardín de Orquilles near the town of Soroa.
Cuba’s Kimonor plant was built by the Russians in 1981 and has been associated with the production of “yellow rain,” a chemical weapon used by Vietnamese and Russian troops against hill tribes in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan. The Jardín de Orquilles facility is described by Douglass and Livingstone as “engaged in [the] experimental development of germ warfare products and toxins.” These toxins are intended for use against U.S. water supplies. Douglass and Livingstone tell us that, “Soviet instructors at the chemical warfare school of the Cuban Revolutionary Army have claimed that toxins strategically placed in the Mississippi ‘could contaminate a third of the United States.’ To lend credence to the concepts, water supplies in both Kampuchea and Afghanistan have been poisoned with toxins.”
Cuban officials deny having a program to develop chemical or biological weapons, and strongly disapproved the statements of Mr. Bolton who spoke before the Heritage Foundation on May 6. As if to reinforce the veracity of Bolton’s statements, Washington Post staff writer Peter Slevin says that administration insiders are whispering behind closed doors about “incontrovertible” evidence of a Cuban biological weapons program. Cuba’s longstanding links with Arafat’s PLO along with Castro’s support for Syria, Iraq and Iran spell double trouble for the United States.
It is well known that Cuba has been supportive of the Middle East rogue states, and Cuba’s role in the Western Hemisphere is not much different. The Cubans are a threat not only because of their close ties to the PLO, Iran and Syria, but because of Cuba’s close geographical proximity to the United States and Castro’s support for communist rebels in Latin America. The strategic importance of Cuba as a base for attack and subversion is now being acknowledged. During the 1990s American policy-makers ignored Cuba’s war preparations. In 1998 the Clinton administration officially concluded that Cuba was not “a significant military threat.” No doubt contributing to this analysis was a Cuban agent imbedded in the Defense Intelligence Agency. Ana Belen Montes, 44, was the agency’s senior analyst for matters involving Cuba. She was arrested for espionage last Sept. 21. In this regard, those who do not understand the extent of foreign penetrations of our intelligence community will never fully comprehend the extent to which our security has been compromised.
There is also the negative role of the U.S. media.
Last September Agustin Blazquez wrote an article about Cuba with the title, “Castro, Bioterrorist in Our Backyard.” He referred to “a deliberate effort by the U.S. media not to report negative information about Cuba.” Blazquez stated that, “Among the U.S. media there are many Castro sympathizers,” and these sympathizers have whitewashed “Castro’s long term involvement with bacteriological and chemical weapons.” While attending a 1997 Capitol Hill discussion of Cuban mass destruction programs, Blazquez noted the lack of public and press interest. He was also dismayed by Prof. Manuel Cereijo’s paper, titled, “Castro: A Threat to the Security of the United States.” According to Cereijo, Cuba runs several biological and chemical warfare research centers: “Many Cuban engineers and scientists have been trained by former East Germany, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam and China.”
Here we have a short list of the “former” communist bloc and its Third World associates. These same countries are fueling troubles in various hotspots today – in the Balkans, Middle East, Taiwan Straits, Korea, Colombia, Afghanistan and Nepal. In this context, Cuba is a beachhead for anti-American forces now planted in the Western Hemisphere. Blazquez wrote: “Among other shocking information I learned … was that the bacteriological and chemical warfare capabilities of Castro are now known by the U.S. government. And that there are about 12 centers producing bacteriological agents strategically located around Havana.”
Since 1987 Cuba’s war preparations, aimed at the United States, have accelerated. These preparations include the development of “binary” chemical weapons that can be disguised as agricultural chemicals. They also include the manufacture of high quality anthrax. Is the United States prepared to withstand a powerful biological and chemical assault from Cuba?
In 1998 Insight Magazine featured an article by Martin Arostegui who questioned the failure of U.S. policy to address the Cuban threat. (To be sure, U.S. policy never addressed the biological threat from Russia either.) Arostegui asked why President Clinton ignored the Cuban military preparations. Answer: because U.S. authorities are focused on avoiding conflict and confrontation. The business of America is business, and this is what has shielded the rogue states and hostile powers from counter-measures while they prepare for the next world war. America does not want to upset the global applecart. Then again, there is the DIA’s Ana Belen Montes, the FBI’s Robert Hanssen and the CIA’s Aldrich Ames. If you add these players into the mix, you can see that U.S. policy is not only driven by a “get along and go along” attitude, but that this attitude is rubber-stamped by old-fashioned subversives working from deep inside the national security system. One should ask how such a system, poisoned at the level of its own security staff, expects to prevent the poisoning of its water or food supplies?
On Jan. 28, 1997 Fidel Castro made the following statement about his regime to the United States: “This lamb cannot ever be devoured, not with planes, nor with smart bombs, because this lamb has more intelligence than you and in its blood there is and always will be poison for you!”
On May 9, 2001 Castro made the following statement to the Iranians: "Today there is a king in the world a thousand times stronger than the shah you overthrew, and this imperialist king lives next to my homeland. But this imperialist king will finally fall, just as your shah was overthrown."
Castro is working toward the overthrow of the United States, and he is not working alone. He is part of a loosely aligned gang of international criminals, and the most powerful members of this gang are to be found in Moscow and Beijing. As a small country, dependent on outside support, Cuba coordinates with other communist and former-communist powers. Cuba is not alone in its policy. It has been repeatedly said by U.S. officials that Russia and China are the primary suppliers of weapons of mass destruction to rogue states. Under Secretary of State Bolton, in his May 6 address to the Heritage Foundation, underlined Russia and China’s role behind the terrorist bloc. Asked during a question-and-answer session why he did not come down harder on Russia and China’s role in supporting terrorism, he replied, “I only had a half an hour to give the speech.” Bolton also expressed the State Department’s growing frustration with Russian nuclear assistance to Iran when he said, “I’d just like to hear from a single Russian who can say how a nuclear-equipped ballistic missile-capable Iran is in Russia’s national interest.”
But according to Bolton, “there isn’t any answer” as to why Russia equips countries like Iran with mass destruction weapons. According to the State Department, it is something that happens by chance, without forethought. “And that’s why we hope we can persuade the government of Russia to cease and desist,” explained Bolton.
Bolton’s comment denies the existence of long-term strategic intentions on the Russian side. Like so many in government, Mr. Bolton refuses to see the strategic intentions behind the Cuban chemical and biological buildup. He refuses to see the strategic intentions behind the Russian-Chinese friendship treaty. He denies there is strategic purposefulness behind Russian military assistance for Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Syria, Libya, North Korea and China. Resistance within official U.S. circles to the notion that Russia is engaged in a long-range policy is here made manifest. The folks in Washington can see the facts. They can trace the lines of supply and assistance. But just when you think they are bound to “get it,” their collective psyche goes blank and they refuse to understand what all these moves signify.
When Mr. Bolton says, "The United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort," he forgets to say that Russian experts gave the Cubans the tools and knowledge to proceed. When he says that Cuba is a threat, he forgets to say that this threat exists in combination and coordination with other Russian or Chinese-sponsored threats.
In 1967 James Burnham wrote a book titled, “The War We Are In.” It is as relevant today as it was 35 years ago. “The goal,” wrote Burnham, “is a monopoly of power over the whole world.” The method, he added, “[is] to struggle by all and every means until the goal is achieved.”
Whenever two opposing forces have faced off in history, whether the two forces are the Allies versus the Axis, Christianity versus Islam, Rome versus Carthage or Athens versus Sparta, there is always an outcome decisively in favor of one side or the other. Here is something worthy of contemplation. What would the world be like if Castro, Saddam Hussein, the Iranian mullahs, the Chinese communists and the Kremlin managed to get their way?
Now ask yourself: what other purpose could Cuba’s mass destruction weapons serve?
This is a really, really bad war we are in.
Bush is evidently set to give a speech on Cuba, Monday May 20. Determining whether we sink or swim?
We wouldn't be around to see it, but the three of them would start fighting with each other.
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