Posted on 11/07/2001 1:08:01 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Harvard scholar and former New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts. Not a bad concept to keep in mind now that Cuban government officials claim that the reason for including Cuba on the list of terrorist nations is total nonsense; that the inclusion of Castro's Cuba among Iraq, Libya, Iran and other unsavory characters is motivated by U.S. domestic politics.
Sixteen anti-embargo activists, including Princeton professor Alejandro Portes and John Hopkins University visiting professor Wayne Smith agreed, charging that Castro is on the terrorist list due to the unwillingness of the United States to offend elements of the Cuban-American community.
Is Castro's Cuba a terrorist state?
Biological weapons are of no minor concern for Americans today. Castro's bankrupt regime has spent more than $1 billion to set up a scientific infrastructure that, former Secretary of Defense William Cohen said in 1998, could support an offensive biological-warfare program. In 1995 the U.S. Office of Technological Assessment included Cuba among 17 countries believed to possess biological weapons.
Last year Ken Alibeck, former deputy director of Biopreparat, the Soviet Union's biological-weapons program, revealed that a few years after Castro's visit to the Soviet Union in 1981, Cuba had one of the most sophisticated genetic-engineering labs in the world.
A few days ago the University of Miami School of International Studies released a report, Castro and Terrorism: A Chronology. It says that:
Castro refused to join the other Ibero-American heads of state in condemning ETA terrorism at the 2000 Ibero-American Summit in Panama and slammed Mexico for its support of the summit's statement against terrorism.
This summer Colombian officials arrested IRA members Niall Connolly, Martin McCauley and James Monaghan and accused them of training the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Connolly had been living in Cuba as the representative of the IRA for Latin America.
Argentine-born Cuban intelligence agent Jorge Massetti helped funnel Cuban funds to finance Puerto Rican terrorists belonging to the Machetero group. The Macheteros hijacked a Wells Fargo truck in Connecticut in September 1983 and stole $7.2 million.
Illich Ramírez Sánchez, known as Carlos the Jackal and responsible for numerous terrorist acts in Europe in the 1960s and '70s trained in Cuba.
Black Panther leaders in the 1960s received weapons training in Havana.
Does any of that have anything to do with the influence of Cuban Americans? Were exiles responsible for the expulsion of Castro's diplomats from Paris and London who were linked to Carlos the Jackal? Do exiles explain why Castro supported Puerto Rico's Macheteros, charged with terrorist acts there and on the mainland? Were exiles responsible for his training of the Faribundo Marti Front, El Salvador's terrorist group, or for Uruguay's Tupamaros, known for targeting Americans?
One day the archives of Cuba's intelligence service will be opened just like the KGB's and East Germany's Stasi's. Then details will be known, as well as the names and activities of Castro's ``agents of influence'' in the United States. But if history is any indication, they will say they fell for the romance of the revolution, that they could not have imagined such a regime and such a tyrant. They will go on with their lives, just like the old Stalinists who saw no difference between Stalin's Russia and Great Britain and who claimed, while it mattered, that Stalin's terror was simply an invention of the Russian exiles in Paris.
Frank Calzón is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba in Washington, D.C.
Castro: "Iran and Cuba, in cooperation can bring America to its knees.”(my title)
Nothing better to educate the American people about the true nature of the Democrats who love totalitarian governments. And what that bodes for Americans.
Robert Mugabe
Despite labouring under one of the most unwieldy political labels in history - he is a self-avowed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist - Mugabe, Zimbabwean leader since 1980, shows few outward signs of cracking under the weight of international outrage over violent state-backed farm seizures. Western condemnation has hardly been consistent: when he took over from Rhodesian leader Ian Smith upon independence in 1980 he was hailed by many as a generous leader who would show an even hand with blacks and whites. But the Matabeleland massacres - when his forces murdered countless backers of his nationalist opponent Joshua Nkomo - initiated a slow souring of international opinion; even the ever-patient Nelson Mandela is reported to have been moved to irritation in talks with Mugabe. Smith and others mutter darkly of Mugabe's apparent increasing mental instability; the president's recent outburst against Tony Blair and his government of "gay gangsters" was hardly the best-judged of responses.
Mahathir Mohamed
Any high points Mahathir Mohamed may have experienced in his 43-year career as Malaysia's prime minister have been overshadowed in recent years by the increasingly surreal events surrounding the government-initiated campaign against his former deputy, the reformer Anwar Ibrahim, which has seen Anwar repeatedly tried and subsequently jailed on charges of sodomy. But the sometimes farcical trials have had one crucial result for Mahatir: they have distracted attention from the country's economic crises.
Fidel Castro From the earliest days of the Cuban revolution, when he would regale long-suffering crowds with nine-hour speeches, Havana's Maximum Chief has shown a marked inability to realise when he's outstaying his welcome. Reducing the CIA to a laughing-stock with his defeat of Operation Mongoose - featuring the legendary exploding cigar plan - Castro has staved off internal opposition too with a combination of strongarm government, popular affection and a knack for milking the US trade embargo for maximum political gain. As the 74-year-old prepares to welcome his 10th US president, only the certainty of human mortality seems capable of stopping him. And even that is beginning to look doubtful.
Muammar Gadafy
More than three decades after the coup in which he generously nominated himself leader of Libya's Revolutionary Command Council, the world's most glamorous pariah shows no signs of succumbing to international pressure that has encompassed economic sanctions, counter-intelligence operations and bombing raids. Gadafy seized power in 1969 and has ever since vigorously pursued his passion for Beethoven, blondes and state-sponsored terrorism. The latter has included support for "liberation movements" from Northern Ireland to Palestine; alleged involvement in the Lockerbie bombing and the killing of a policewoman outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984. A flamboyant streak has led him to arrive at summits accompanied by troupes of gun-toting beauties. Now the Lockerbie suspects have been handed over, sanctions have been eased; the 59-year-old's promise to "liquidate" the "running-dogs" of capitalism is looking shaky, but the running-dogs are slavering less these days too.
A CRACK unit of Libyan intelligence officers is in the country to beef up President Robert Mugabe's security and intelligence system as the nation lurches towards the 2002 presidential election, now only five months away, the Zimbabwe Independent has learnt.
Intelligence sources told the Independent this week that over 20 Libyan nationals were booked at a local hotel and could be seen driving around in government vehicles. They are understood to be re-training intelligence personnel and President Mugabe's close security unit.
As the presidential poll draws near, Mugabe is wary over his security in the event of losing the do-or-die election that pits his 38-year-old Zanu PF party against the two-year-old opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
The Libyans' role in the election has been unclear, though suspicions abound that they could play a crucial role in perpetuating the reign of Muammar Gaddafi's closest ally in the southern African region if the vote went against him.
"As far as I know, they are just involved with monitoring and improving the security of Mugabe who envies Gaddafi's intelligence network," a source said.
The team will be in the country up to the time of the presidential election next year.
"There are strong fears that something terrible could befall Mugabe if he loses. There is need to ensure his maximum security," the source said.
A British paper this week said "hundreds of Libyan troops", part of Gaddafi's elite forces, "known for their terror tactics, were being housed in secret locations scattered across the country".
The Daily Telegraph, quoting intelligence sources, said there was a growing number of intelligence officers turning against Mugabe, forcing him to turn elsewhere for protection.
The Libyans were to be issued with Zimbabwean passports by the Registrar-General's office to help Mugabe's presidential election campaign, the paper said.
Other press reports from South Africa suggest that Pagad, a Libyan-funded vigilante group which campaigns against drug lords on the Cape Flats, would be unleashed on the white commercial farmers in a terror campaign.
The development takes place at a time when the country has mortgaged itself to Libyans after it sought a US$340 million loan to purchase fuel.
The Independent reported recently that the Libyans were going to acquire major stakes in the country's two financial institutions and a major hotel group in addition to receiving 8 000ha of land for industrial and farming purposes.
Time reveals all!!
We are paying for Clinton's appeasement policies towards Castro, policies that bordered in treason. The former president's address at Georgetown Jesuit University blaming the U.S. past sins for the terrorist attack of September 11 denotes his Jesusit formation.
President Bush must take the strongest measures to stop the free movement of Castro’s agents in the U.S. As the recent terrorist actions against the U.s. have proven, there are sleeping cells of terrorists already in the country waiting the orders of Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein or Fidel Castro to strike again. Cuba has been involved in biological and chemical warfare research for many years, and Castro close relationship with Iraq and Iran’s terrorist organizations represents a mortal danger for the U.S.
Many Americans are vacationing in Cuba under the pretense of being in academic programs and other loopholes in the law. It is outrageous that in spite of the state of war and the menace to our country of more acts of brutal terrorist acts; there are many organizations in the U.S. sponsoring trips to Cuba, a terrorist state whose leader has pledged to destroy our country.
Some, such as the Jesuits of Spring Hill College of Mobile, Alabama, seem to be moved by ideological considerations. They are planning to take their students to a terrorist country in "a program, which would immerse college students in Cuba to study justice issues." (http://camellia.shc.edu/cuba/) Cuban justice not less! They might learn of the justice of summary executions and long prison sentences, torture and isolation confinement, just for the crime of dissenting with Castro’s oppressive policies. The fact that we are in war and that the school might imperil the lives of the American students have had not bearings in the Jesuit College’s determination in pursuing their devious Marxist indoctrination trip.
Some, such as the “International Diagnostic Congress in Havana, Cuba,” (http://209.19.3.10/trendsetterstours/cuba/) organized by the University of New Jersey or the trips to Cuba organized by the Texas Foreign Languages Association might not be moved by ideological considerations, but while our men and women in uniform risk their lives in defense of our freedoms and way of live, it is insensitive, to say the least, that American citizens cavalierly go to Cuba aiding and abating Castro’s terrorist state.
Other groups are involved in an even more sinister agenda i.e. the Pastors for Peace, and the World Council of Churches, that are front communist organizations at the service of the Cuban dictator.
Castro’s close relationship with international terrorism is well recognized and documented by the U.S. State Department and the Western intelligence agencies. We are at war and those organizations that collaborate with the Cuban regime are also imperiling the lives of American citizens. The Bush administration should cancel all the permits for those trips as well as visas to and from terrorist countries.
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