Posted on 01/08/2023 1:31:05 PM PST by Right Wing Vegan
Edited on 01/08/2023 4:18:29 PM PST by Jim Robinson. [history]
Ana Belen Montes, a former high-ranking Cuba analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, was released from prison Friday after more than 20 years behind bars at a federal prison in Texas.
Montes, 65, was released early after pleading guilty to conspiring to commit espionage as part of a plea deal in 2002.
(Excerpt) Read more at wfin.com ...
This was a quiet criminal I never heard of.
After getting settled back into Cuba, she might find herself wishing she was back under American lock and key.
I hear there is a severe economic crisis going on in Cuba at this time. Only 3% growth forecasted for year 2023.
Why? Mostly due to Covid stopping all tourism for a long time.
Montes, 65, was released early BECAUSE???
Personally, I believe that I would have released her hanging from a noose . . . but that just me.
I remember this individual, while wondering how a Cuban woman could risk lives of U.S. officials
Why do we keep putting people with questionable loyalties into high positions within the intelligence community? Something like this should have been a massive red flag that kept her out of the DIA when discovered on a TS/SCI clearance investigation. It boggles the mind why someone with this background would be allowed in the intelligence community. It's the same with clowns like John Brennan who voted for communist candidates in the 1970's. How does someone like that become CIA director? It's lunacy.
Montes, I believe, is not a Cuban. Her father is a Puerto Rican who was a career US Army officer and retired as a Colonel, in spite of being a PR nationalist who openly agitated for Puerto Rican independence (I suppose he saw himself as a Puerto Rican general officer).
You mean like those terrorists that shot up The Capitol in 1954, and were subsequently pardoned by Jimmy Carter?
Second sentence in the excerpt
This sentence, as written, is confusing. A plea deal entered in 2002 cannot be the reason for an early release in 2022 unless the deal specified 20 years in prison. My understanding is that the plea deal took the death penalty off the table.
my question stands... WHY???
She was arrested in 2001 and could have been sentenced to death if found guilty at trial.
It appears that the prosecutors didn't think they could get a guily verdict for the death penalty, so they settled for her pleading guilty to a twenty year sentence charge.
It appears that the prosecutors didn’t think they could get a guily verdict for the death penalty, so they settled for her pleading guilty to a twenty year sentence charge.
that was not in the excerpt, thank you
No, her father was associated with the legal PR Nationalist Party that controls about a quarter of the seats in the PR legislature.
She was released early. The plea deal in 2002 was for a 25-year sentence so she served only 20 years of the 25-year sentence. Outrageous.
She isn’t going to be settled into Cuba, she is just getting released...and a few years early at that. She was supposed to serve 25 years.
Correct...She is a US citizen of Puerto Ricandescent, and one parent was US military.
She worked to minimize the estimates of Cuban threats to national security, etc., in a 1998 report on Cuba by the defense establishment. At the time, in 1998, there was a lot of concern about reports from Cuban escapees of an advanced bioweapons program using animal feed facilities as cover... I recall the pro-Palestinian Jimmy Carter making a big show of a trip to Cuba to speak outside an animal feed facility to “prove” how harmless it was. For those who don’t know, Palestinian terrorist groups were trained in Cuba and at least one Palestinian group even hijacked airliners with the help of Nicaraguan Sandinista communists. Jimmy Carter’s library, meanwhile, received donations from Samir Vincent and (Khafaji, IIRC), both of whom were recipients of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s oil vouchers.
Montes was arrested on Sept 21, 200110 days after the 9/11 attacks.
Currently, the Russians have military personnel in Nicaragua helping to prop up the same Sandinista leade who cozied up to John Kerry in the 1980s, the incestuous Daniel Ortega. Democrats then, like Biden, passed the Boland amendment to obstruct our ability to prevent the USSR from using Nicaragua as a Naval base and bomber base. It should be no surprise that the Russians are back in this hemisphere, just as Biden is in the White House. And as China has an interest in obtaining oil in the Caribbean, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Biden’s Cuba policy also aides China.
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