Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Cuba: What Castro knew about Oswald

Mary O’Grady reports on Brian Latell’s book, Castro’s Secrets: Cuban Intelligence, the CIA, and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
What Castro Knew About Lee Harvey Oswald
The official narrative skips tantalizing signs of a Cuban connection.

The agency [CIA] recruited Rolando Cubela, a revolutionary insider, to do the job.

But Cubela was a double agent. And on Sept. 7, just after Cubela agreed to help the Americans, Castro gave an interview to an AP reporter in which he put the U.S. on notice that “aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders” would mean that “they themselves will not be safe.”

Castro didn’t need to look far for a willing partner to back up those words. It is “known with near certainty,” writes Mr. Latell, that Cuba had “opened a dossier” on Oswald in 1959, while he was stationed at the Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, in Southern California. Oswald was enamored of the Cuban Revolution, and he had made contact with the Cuban consulate in Los Angeles.

On Sept. 27, 1963, Oswald checked into the Hotel Comercio in Mexico City for a five-night stay. He tried to get a visa from the Cuban embassy to travel to Havana. He had a fling with an embassy employee and probably spent time with others who were intelligence agents. When his visa was not forthcoming, witnesses said he went on a rant at the embassy, slammed the door and stormed off.

According to Mr. Latell, during his Mexico City stay Oswald twice visited the Soviet consulate where he met with “an officer of the notorious Department 13, responsible for assassination and sabotage operations.” The KGB was training Cuban intelligence at the time, and “it seems certain that [Oswald’s] intelligence file in Havana was thickening.”

Castro’s claim about Oswald—in a speech 30 hours after Kennedy was shot—that “we never in our life heard of him” was a lie. Indeed, in a 1964 conversation with Jack Childs —an American communist who had secretly been working for the FBI—Castro let it slip that he knew of Oswald’s outburst while at the embassy in Mexico City and said that the ex-Marine had threatened to kill the U.S. president.

Castro’s Secrets is also available on Kindle.

Related:
Prose poetry from (who else!) Carlos Eire, Dispatch From the Balcony of Time Travel

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Obama authorized secret support to Libya rebels, gets award

Reuters reports that Obama authorized secret help for Libya rebels “two or three weeks” ago,

President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing covert U.S. government support for rebel forces seeking to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, government officials told Reuters on Wednesday.

Obama signed the order, known as a presidential “finding”, within the last two or three weeks, according to government sources familiar with the matter.

Such findings are a principal form of presidential directive used to authorize secret operations by the Central Intelligence Agency. This is a necessary legal step before such action can take place but does not mean that it will.

Well, it did: already C.I.A. Agents in Libya Aid Airstrikes and Meet Rebels (emphasis added)

While President Obama has insisted that no American military ground troops participate in the Libyan campaign, small groups of C.I.A. operatives have been working in Libya for several weeks as part of a shadow force of Westerners that the Obama administration hopes can help bleed Colonel Qaddafi’s military, the officials said.

They are there in a rush to gather intelligence on the identities and capabilities of rebel forces opposed to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi.

When Jake Tapper asked, “What is going on behind closed doors?” White House press secretary Jay Carney asked back

“Who said anything was going on behind closed doors?”

What, indeed.

Andrew Sullivan simply cannot believe that president Obama has already ordered covert action in Libya on one side in a civil war, but he can believe that Sarah Palin didn’t give birth to her own child.

Yeah.

But fret not, Andrew. Obama got an award for “transparency”, which he accepted in a closed, undisclosed meeting at the White House on Monday. Since the meeting was not disclosed in Obama’s public schedule, and neither reporters nor photographers were allowed, it was awarded on hope for potential transparency

“And in that sense, one could say it resembles the award at the Nobel Peace Prize,” Aftergood said. “It’s not because Obama brought peace to anyone but because people hoped he would be a force for good in the world, and maybe that’s the way to understand this award.”

Perfect award, and meeting all the daily irony requirements.

Next thing you know he’ll get an award for “popular communication“.

UPDATE
Instapundit:

Prof. Stephen Clark writes: “By all means, rub their whole faces in the facts of this latest intervention. To be clear: if the left and Democrats generally do not savage this President in much the same manner they savaged Bush, if they are not out in the streets protesting, if they are not opposing his reelection, if they are not demanding his impeachment and trial, if they are not hoping for his very death, then they will have shown themselves to be every bit the craven hypocrites that many have long claimed.”

Rub it in!

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“I want you to demolish my school”, and other roundup items VIDEO

ShrinkWrapped on the Stupidification of America

Do We Now Have A “Slick” Barack?

Obama’s Approval Now Underwater Amid Gulf Oil Spill

Here it is The HELEN THOMAS INTERVIEW-Part II

Should Jews Apologize to Turkey or Go Back to Poland and Germany?

Joel Mowbray reports: Rise of the Jewish Republicans?

Health law could ban low-cost plans

CBS Reporter: Thin-Skinned White House Won’t Tolerate Reports Elena Kagan Is Liberal

In CIA’s drone mission, who will protect the CIA?

My friend Rick Moran meets The Finger of God

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The Dems vs the CIA

Andy McCarthy reports that While You Are Distracted by the Summit, Obama Democrats Are Targeting the CIA

While the country and the Congress have their eyes on today’s dog-and-pony show on socialized medicine, House Democrats last night stashed a new provision in the intelligence bill which is to be voted on today. It is an attack on the CIA: the enactment of a criminal statute that would ban “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” (See here, scoll to p. 32.)

The provision is impossibly vague — who knows what “degrading” means? Proponents will say that they have itemized conduct that would trigger the statute (I’ll get to that in a second), but it is not true. The proposal says the conduct reached by the statute “includes but is not limited to” the itemized conduct. (My italics.) That means any interrogation tactic that a prosecutor subjectively believes is “degrading” (e.g., subjecting a Muslim detainee to interrogation by a female CIA officer) could be the basis for indicting a CIA interrogator.

The act goes on to make it a crime to use tactics that have been shown to be effective in obtaining life saving information and that are far removed from torture.

The bill would prohibit, under penalty of 15 yrs in prison,

– “Exploiting the phobias of the individual”

– Stress positions and the threatened use of force to maintain stress positions

– “Depriving the individual of necessary food, water, sleep, or medical care”

– Forced nudity

– Using military working dogs (i.e., any use of them — not having them attack or menace the individual; just the mere presence of the dog if it might unnerve the detainee and, of course, “exploit his phobias”)

– Coercing the individual to blaspheme or violate his religious beliefs (I wonder if Democrats understand the breadth of seemingly innocuous matters that jihadists take to be violations of their religious beliefs)

– Exposure to “excessive” cold, heat or “cramped confinement” (excessive and cramped are not defined)

– “Prolonged isolation”

– “Placing hoods or sacks over the head of the individual”

Naturally, all of these tactics are interspersed with such acts as forcing the performance of sexual acts, beatings, electric shock, burns, inducing hypothermia or heat injury — as if all these acts were functionally equivalent.

Ah, moral equivalence…

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Obama’s speech: The war on al Qaeda?

As you already know, I was a panelist on today’s CNN bloggers’ roundtable. The subject was Pres. Obama’s speech on national security, a speech which raises more questions than it answers.

090521_obama_security_ap_297There are a number of interesting items in the speech:

First, the Obama administration had previously changed the term “war on terror” to “overseas contingency operations”. In today’s speech Obama asserted that

  • “We are indeed at war with al Qaeda and its affiliates.”
  • “We are building new partnerships around the world to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates.”
  • “Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States,and those that we capture — like other prisoners of war — must be prevented from attacking us again.”
  • “And I do know with certainty that we can defeat al Qaeda.”

So, does this mean the “war on terror” should be called “the war on al Qaeda”?

And the specific statement, “like other prisoners of war”, raises the issue whether the Obama administration is considering changing the detainees’ status to that of POWs.

Obama categorically asserts that that enhanced interrogation techniques

“did not advance our war and counterterrorism efforts– they undermined them, and that is why I ended them once and for all.”

A statement that is also accompanied with his apparent eagerness for

“declassifying more information and embracing more oversight of our actions, and we’re narrowing our use of the state secrets privilege”

Yet at the same time, the Obama administration will not declassify or release any CIA memos explaining the effectiveness of the very interrogation techniques that Obama categorically asserts are totally ineffective.

Another interesting point came up when Obama talked about five categories of Guantanamo detainees; specifically talking about prosecuting terrorists who have violated American criminal laws in federal courts. What is particularly interesting is that both terrorists he named, Ramzi Yousef and Zacarias Moussaoui, were never in Guantanamo: Youself was captured in Pakistan and sent to New York, and Mussaoui was captured in Minnesota.

Closing Gitmo? Where’s the plan?
Supermax prisons taking Gitmo detainees? Which ones?
“New legal regime to detain terrorists”? Where’s the plan?

While Obama predictably managed to work in as much blame on “the prior eight years” as possible, my question is, does that mean he is saying that his own party, which has controlled Congress for the past two years, is derelict?

And one final touch of irony,
From the text of the speech, it appears that the President prefers to believe that Gitmo, enhanced interrogations and the such are what makes the terrorists hate us. Gitmo didn’t exist on September 11, 2001. Terrorists, including al Qaeda, are motivated by an ideology that despises everything we believe in: women’s rights, the rule of law, freedom of speech, religion and sexual orientation, and Israel’s right to exist – anti-Semitism being one of the motives of the four homegrown jihadists arrested in New York this morning.

Obama says that fearmongering is good for “30-second commercials”, on the same day that the FBI thwarted a terrorist attack.

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Why Nancy’s lies?

After all the lying, here comes the predictable bottom line:

pelosiPelosi tries to backpedal on CIA criticism

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has backed down slightly in her fight with the CIA, saying that she really meant only to criticize the Bush administration rather than career officials.

“My criticism of the manner in which the Bush Administration did not appropriately inform Congress is separate from my respect for those in the intelligence community who work to keep our country safe,” Pelosi said in a statement.

Your handy-dandy Democrat excuse for everything under the sun.

Dan was right.

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Today’s a busy day here at casa de Fausta. I’ll blog later if time allows. Have a lovely Sunday!

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Pelosi accuses CIA of lying?

Pelosi accuses CIA of misleading her on use of waterboarding

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused CIA officials Thursday of misleading her in 2002 about the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding, which simulates drowning and has been described by critics as torture.

This is Nancy’s third version, is it?

First she said

she was briefed on such techniques only once — in September 2002 — and that she was told at the time that the techniques were not being used.

Then there’s that letter Pelosi’s top aide Jane Harman wrote

Pelosi herself acknowledged in a December 2007 statement that she was aware that Harman had learned of the waterboarding and had objected in a letter to the CIA’s top counsel.

Now it’s everybody else, including the CIA, who is lying – according to Nancy.

Pfffft.

Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion was listening to Nancy’s press conference, and added his own comments.

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