“Democratic federal lawmakers from Massachusetts are calling on President Biden to remove Cuba from the State Sponsor of Terrorism (SSOT) list as quickly as possible,” reports Fox News this week.
“In a letter addressed to the President, and signed by Reps. Ayanna Pressley, James P. McGovern, Seth Moulton, Lori Trahan and Stephen F. Lynch, as well as Senators Elizabeth Warren and Edward J. Markey, the lawmakers advised Biden that Cuba was removed from the SSOT list in 2015 by him and then President Obama after determining the designation was 'without merit.' The Trump administration placed Cuba back on the list in January 2021, which according to the Democratic lawmakers, was 'a vindictive action' as he was leaving office.”
In fact, the executive order that was scandalously without merit was Obama’s (with presumably CIA director John Brennan’s sign-off) removal of Castroite Cuba from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. Equally scandalous is that no one in the media (or government thus far) is daring to challenge this outrageously erroneous Democrat-drafted letter with cold hard facts documenting Cuba’s blatant and repeated terror-sponsorship in our very backyard--and worse still, the back-stage, deep-state, machinations that covered them up.
This leaves us here at Townhall. So here goes:
In August 2015, "an unmarked U.S. government plane landed at an airstrip in Havana, carrying the last person in the world the Castros might be expected to welcome: John Brennan, the director of the C.I.A. Brennan was there to meet with Alejandro Castro [Raul Castro’s son, the KGB-trained head of Cuba’s counterintelligence service, who authored a book titled “U.S.-Empire of Terror”] and discuss increasing intelligence coöperation between the two countries," reported The New Yorker. "Brennan considered Cuba’s spy agencies the most capable in Latin America, and hoped to work with them against drug cartels and terrorist networks.”
Brennan definitely had a point. Thanks to the CIA’s historic penchant for hiring and promoting people like John Brennan, Castro’s DGI and DI has historically run rings around the CIA, while guffawing.
But it gets even “better":
“Brennan’s talks with Alejandro Castro took place at a discreet government guesthouse, where a day of formal negotiations was followed by a banquet featuring a spit-roasted pig. U.S. officials said that, during the talks, Cuban leaders made it clear that they respected the C.I.A.,” The New Yorker article continued.
I bet! But “respect” probably isn’t the proper word—unless The Pink Panther “respects” Inspector Clouseau and The Roadrunner “respects” Wile E. Coyote. The word “appreciate” fits much better. Perhaps these (thoroughly-documented) historic items will help us understand this unbounded appreciation:
In 1987, Cuban intelligence officer Florentino Aspillaga defected in Prague and revealed that every single Cuban agent (four dozen of them) the CIA had recruited to spy on the Castro regime since 1962 was a double agent controlled personally by Fidel Castro. Now backtracking a few years:
“We’ve infiltrated Castro’s guerrilla group in the Sierra Mountains. The Castro brothers and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara have no affiliations with any Communists whatsoever," claimed Havana CIA station Chief Jim Noel, sneering in typical CIA, Ivy league blueblood manner at tacky warnings from Cuban “McCarthyite deplorables” in Nov. 1958.
(In fact, all of three of these hardcore Stalinists poised to take over Cuba had a KGB-handler named Nikolai Leonov since 1954!)
“Fidel Castro is not only NOT a communist – he’s a strong ANTI-Communist fighter! He’s ready to help us in the hemisphere’s anti-communist fight and we should share our intelligence with him, said “CIA Cuba expert” Frank Bender in April 1959.
Now let’s fast forward to April 2015, just a few weeks prior to Brennan’s ultra-secret trip to Havana:
“Cuba is not a threat to the United States…They don’t implicate our national security in any way…The government of Cuba has not provided any support for international terrorism during the preceding six-month period; and the government of Cuba has provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future," President Obama said after meeting with Raul Castro in Panama and recommending that Stalinist Cuba be removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on April 14, 2015.
Presumably the head of the CIA at the time, John Brennan, who had been a close national security advisor to Barack Obama since his 2008 campaign, signed-off on (and maybe even encouraged) Obama’s decision to whitewash and legitimize the Castro-Family-Crime-Syndicate. Never mind that this whitewash required taking one of modern history’s most infamous liars at his word.
But in fact, only a few weeks before Obama’s (and presumably Brennan’s) giddy acceptance of Castro’s promise (“cross my heart and hope to die!”), Castro got caught red-handed supplying Chinese-made arms to the Western hemisphere’s oldest, biggest and most murderous terror-group: Colombia’s FARC. The terror-death toll from these Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) exceeds 200,000, and includes more U.S. citizens than were murdered by ISIS.
So maybe it was a mere coincidence that the very week Obama (with presumably Brennan’s support) planned to remove Cuba as a terror-sponsor the mainstream media (especially CNN) blacked-out any mention of this blatant terror-sponsorship by Cuba in our own backyard?
You see, amigos: In February 2015, Colombian authorities found 99 missile heads, 100 tons of gunpowder, 2.6 million detonators, and over 3,000 artillery shells hidden under rice sacks in a ship bound from Red China to Cuba that docked in the port of Cartagena Colombia.
Most Cuba-watchers immediately guessed what was up. And crackerjack Colombian (NOT CNN or New York Times, heaven forbid!) reporters quickly investigated and exposed the Castro-regime’s terror-sponsoring scheme. In brief:
*The arms were from a Chinese manufacturer named Norinco and the recipient was a Cuban company named Tecnoimport.
*But the ship stopped in the Colombian ports of Cartagena and Baranquilla (where the FARC is based.)
*Colombia’s crackerjack newspaper El Espectador also reported that many Norinco-manufactured arms had already been captured from FARC guerrillas over the past ten years. This proliferation of Cuba-smuggled Chinese arms to the terrorist FARC got so bad that in 2007-08 the Colombian authorities sent a diplomatic protest note to the Chinese.
This awkward information at such an awkward time, needless to say, might have hampered Obama’s plan (with presumably Brennan’s support) to cleanse the Castro regime from any taint of terror-sponsorship—at least for people with half-a-brain.
But shouldn’t the head of (probably) the world’s largest and most lavishly–funded intelligence agency (the CIA) have been aware of this Cuban terror-sponsorship on our very doorstep? So how could he possibly sign-off on Obama’s howler that “the government of Cuba has not provided any support for international terrorism during the preceding six-month period?”
Two years earlier (with John Brennan the recently appointed CIA director by Obama) Panamanian authorities discovered unregistered Russian missile parts and actual MiG jets hidden in a North Korean ship that had just left terror-sponsoring Cuba and was bound for terror-sponsoring North Korea through the Panama Canal. All the Russian made contraband was hidden under sacks of Cuban sugar. An investigation by a U.N. panel (no less!) concluded that the Cuban smuggling was a blatant violation of international sanctions.)
Shouldn’t a CIA director have been aware of this illegal, blatant and repeated smuggling of arms from one terror-sponsor to another in our own backyard?
Of course. But looking the other way was very convenient for de-classifying the blatantly guilty party from the list of terror-sponsors - a condition Castro demanded before he would deign to allow Obama to legitimize and enrich his regime. The Castros, you see, knew full well how Obama desperately craved the “opening to Cuba” for his “legacy.”
So they had a ball! They played him like a fiddle, humiliating his “negotiators" (mostly Pajama-Boy Ben Rhodes) at every turn and absolutely mercilessly, while snickering.
Apparently Brennan’s Cuba trip had results. To wit:
“Cuba and the United States signed an agreement to cooperate in the fight against terrorism and drug trafficking…A delegation of Cuban government national security officials recently toured the Pentagon’s counter-drug center in Key West [in May 2016]— a first, signaling a nascent effort in U.S.-Cuban security cooperation. They got a briefing on the work that has been described as Southcom’s command center in the war on drugs.”
Result of this Brennan-encouraged “cooperation?”
“Panamanian authorities (NOT, U.S. authorities!) on Saturday (May, 18, 2019) intercepted 46 suitcases containing an estimated $90 million in illegal drugs on a cargo ship that arrived from a Cuban port and was en route to Istanbul, Turkey. The suitcases contained 1,517 packages of drugs hidden in a container declared as containing charcoal.
Needless to add: no mainstream U.S. media portal (not even Fox) bothered reporting on this blockbuster embarrassment to the Obama/Brennan “national security” team.
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