The Madness of the Obama Administration: Sharing law enforcement information with an outlaw regime

A counterproductive agreement

The Office of the Spokesperson at the U.S. Department of State issued a statement that "On January 16, the United States and Cuba signed a bilateral Law Enforcement Memorandum of Understanding to deepen law enforcement cooperation and information sharing." Let that sink in for a moment. The United States is sharing law enforcement information with an outlaw regime that in the span of the past four years has been exposed: smuggling tons of heavy weapons to North Korea and Colombia in violation of international sanctions; acquiring a U.S. hellfire missile then refusing to return it to the U.S. for over a year; linked to drug smuggling in Venezuela and a shipment of cocaine intercepted at the Panama Canal;  and was only taken off the list of state terror sponsors in 2015 because of the Obama Administration's normalization drive.

Cocaine shipment on Cuban ship camouflaged among tanks of molasses 

Despite all this the Obama Administration has agreed that "under this memorandum, the United States and Cuba will continue the Law Enforcement Dialogue process, which includes technical exchanges on specific law enforcement issues of mutual concern such as counternarcotics, money laundering, fraud and human smuggling, and counterterrorism."

Sadly, human trafficking experts have called out the Obama Administration and the State Department for watering down its human trafficking report for political reasons in order to give Cuba a better score than it actually warrants.

To say that sharing law enforcement information is counterproductive at best is an understatement. January 20th can't come fast enough.

Politifact recognizes Castro regime's shady weapons smuggling

It is interesting than in debate over Senator Perdue's discussion of the Castro regime's shady dealings there is no mention of the discovery of the Cuban dictatorship smuggling of tons of weapons again from China through Colombia with final destination being Cuba earlier this year claiming that what was being shipped was grain.

Perdue mostly right on shady weapons deal

By Nancy Badertscher on Friday, April 24th, 2015 at 12:00 a.m. 

The White House announced last week that President Barack Obama would be eliminating a major obstacle to the restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba by removing it from America’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Since 1982, Cuba has been on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation it has shared with Syria, Sudan and Iran and that triggers sanctions limiting U.S. aid, defense exports and certain financial transactions.

Supporters say this is a necessary step if Obama is going to turn the page on the Cold War-era dispute that has snarled diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba for more than five decades.
Some Republicans, including freshman U.S. Sen. David Perdue of Georgia, object to taking Cuba off the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

"The Castro regime, time and again, has violated international norms,’ Perdue, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement issued the day after the White House announcement.

"I am deeply concerned that President Obama continues to embolden our enemies and empower dictators from Russia to Iran, and now Cuba. Cuba must prove it is willing to change its destructive and oppressive behavior before the United States removes it as a state sponsor of terrorism.

He cited several examples of Cubas destructive and oppressive behavior, including an incident in 2013 when, he said, Cuba secretly shipped 240 metric tons of weapons to North Korea, violating a U.N.embargo.

PolitiFact Georgia decided to fact-check Perdue’s statement about the weapons shipment.
We reached out to Mark Bednar, a Perdue spokesman, who sent us several news accounts of the incident where aging Cuban weapons were found aboard a North Korean-flagged ship.

In July 2013, Fox News reported that Panamanian officials stopped the ship Chong Chon Gang ferrying undeclared weapons and armaments, including two Soviet-era MiG fighters and surface-to-air missile system, from Cuba, in apparent violation of U.N. sanctions. The weapons were hidden under 200,000 bags of sugar.

The report said the Cuban government acknowledged about a day later that the cargo included 240 metric tons of "obsolete defensive weapons." Government officials claimed the equipment was meant to be repaired in North Korea and returned to Cuba.

Three members of the ship’s crew were arrested on arms trafficking charges. The ship was allowed to return to Cuba in 2014 after a $700,000 fine was paid, the BBC reported.

A State Department spokesperson told us this week that the administration considers the weapons shipment to North Korea in 2013 an "egregious violation of U.N. sanctions."

The administration, the spokesperson said, has worked to ensure that those responsible "pay a price for their wrongdoing."

"The administration also worked to maximize the diplomatic cost to Cuba for its role in the incident, including repeatedly condemning Cuba’s role in the violation in meetings of the UN Security Council," she said. "While Cuba’s actions were a clear violation of international law, they do not constitute support for acts of international terrorism and do not constitute a bar to rescission of their (state sponsor of terrorism) designation."

Cuban was placed on the list in 1982 because of its efforts to promote revolution in the Western Hemisphere. North Korea spent 20 years on the list but was removed in 2008 by President George W. Bush. North Korea was placed on the list in 1988 for planting a bomb on a passenger plane headed from Baghdad to Seoul. The plane exploded south of Burma, and all on board were killed.

In the current review of Cuba’s standing, the administration focused on ‘the narrow question of whether Cuba provided any support for international terrorism during the previous six months and whether Cuba has provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future, consistent with the statutory standard for rescission," the State Department spokeswoman said..

A senior administration official told reporters earlier this month that Cuban leaders, including Fidel and Raul Castro, have repeatedly and publicly decried terrorist acts.

Congress has 45 days from receiving the president’s report to pass a joint resolution prohibiting the rescission. If that would occur, the president would have veto power and Congress the power of the veto override.

Our conclusion

Georgia Sen. David Perdue said he objects to plans to take Cuba off the list of state sponsors of terrorism, a move that was announced last week by the White House. He said that the Castro regime in Cuba has violated international norms.

Among the specific examples he cited was Cuba "secretly shipping 240 metric tons of weapons to North Korea in 2013 in violation of a U.N. embargo." News reports and statements from the administration back up Perdue’s claim about the incident.

The administration said it narrowly focused on whether Cuban provided any support for international terrorism in the prior six months and whether the Cuban government had provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future, That is context the reader needs.

For that reason, we rate Perdue's statement Mostly True.

http://www.politifact.com/georgia/statements/2015/apr/24/david-perdue/Perdue-mostly-right-on-shady-weapons-deal/

Castro's Narco-Terror network gets a free pass

"Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees." ... "The U.S. regime is very weak, and we are witnessing this weakness from close up." - Fidel Castro, University of Tehran, May 10, 2001 quoted in the Agence France Presse

On  March 24, 2015 the government of the United States "removed 45 Cuban companies, individuals and vessels from a sanction list of entities suspected of supporting terrorism or drug-trafficking," reported the Latin American Herald Tribune. Cuba is a totalitarian regime and all those companies, vessels and individuals are agents of the dictatorship. Not mentioned by EFE or the Associated Press but reported by Reuters was that the majority of the entities removed were:

"most of them dead people, defunct companies or sunken ships. Among them was Amado Padron, a Cuban executed by a firing squad 26 years ago along with Arnaldo Ochoa, a decorated army general who was sentenced to death by Cuba’s communist government after he was found to be connected to international drug trafficking. The U.S. Treasury Department said the delisting was aimed at clearing “out-of-date” names from its list of Specially Designated Nationals."

At the same time EFE reported, in seeming contradiction to what Reuters reported above that:

More than 30 of the 45 companies, individuals and vessels are currently based in Panama despite having originated in Cuba, while one ship, the Alegria de Pio, is registered in Spain and one company, Travel Services Inc., has its headquarters in the United States.

This action ignores a pattern that stretches back decades linking the Castro regime with terrorism, drug-trafficking and rogue behavior that continues to the present day. Furthermore, it appears that the sanctions list has not been kept up to date which leads to the question: have new entities been added to the list suspected of links to terrorism and drug trafficking? Consider the following:

On March 2, 2015 the government of Colombia had seized a shipment of ammunition bound for Cuba on a China-flagged ship that was not properly documented. The BBC reported that "Officials said about 100 tons of gunpowder, almost three million detonators and some 3,000 cannon shells were found on board. The ship's records said it was carrying grain products." First with North Korea in 2013 and now again with China in 2015 the Castro regime has been linked to scandals involving arms smuggling. Blogging by Boz reached a reasonable conclusion: "Two big shipments of weapons seized in 20 months means that this is probably a regular occurrence."

On January 27, 2015 the Spanish newspaper ABC reported that the Castro regime, in collaboration with Venezuela, was providing protection for drug traffickers traveling between Venezuela and the United States. According to news accounts the son of the Cuban ambassador to Venezuela, Germán Sánchez Otero, was using PDVSA planes to smuggle drugs with the United States as the final destination.

In 2012 there were reports in the media of Cuban, Iranian and Venezuelan officials meeting in Mexico to discuss cyber attacks on U.S. soil allegedly seeking information about nuclear power plants in the United States. Supposedly the FBI had opened an investigation into the matter, but there is no mention of this in subsequent U.S. State Department reports.

This pattern of conduct by the Castro regime stretches back more than 33 years, but following the Carter administration's loosening of sanctions between 1977 and 1980, and the opening of interests sections in Havana and Washington DC the behavior of the Castro regime did not improve. It appears to have perceived these actions as signs of weakness that led to more aggressive behavior in Latin America and Africa.

The U.S. State Department on March 1, 1982 declared Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism whose government was using a narcotics ring to funnel both arms and cash to the Colombian M19 terrorist group then battling to overthrow Colombia’s democratic government. In 2001 at Georgetown University when I questioned General Barry McCaffrey, who at the time was advocating sharing intelligence on drug trafficking with the Castro regime, about this relationship between Cuba and Colombia's drug trafficking guerrillas he recognized it and expressed his concerns.  During General Manuel Noriega's 1992 trial information emerged publicly implicating the Castro regime that Sun Sentinel reported at the time:

"Federal prosecutors say Noriega traveled to Havana to ask [Fidel] Castro to mediate a potentially deadly dispute with top members of Colombia`s Medellin cocaine cartel. They say the cartel chiefs were upset because a major drug lab had been seized in Panama despite payment of millions of dollars in protection money to Noriega. According to the Noriega indictment, Castro negotiated a peace accord between the cartel and Noriega at the 1984 meeting. The allegation forms a cornerstone of the racketeering and drug trafficking charges against Noriega."

At the same time convicted cartel leader Carlos Lehder directly implicated Raul Castro and U.S. fugitive Robert Vesco "to route cocaine flights through Cuba." Capitol Hill Cubans blogged how two years later, a federal indictment listed General Raul Castro as part of a conspiracy that smuggled seven and a half tons of cocaine into the United States over a 10-year period but the Clinton administration overruled prosecutors. One of the names taken off the list on March 24, 2015 was Amado Padron, a Cuban intelligence agent executed by a firing squad 26 years ago along with Arnaldo Ochoa, a decorated army general who was sentenced to death by the Castro regime after he was found to be connected to international drug trafficking in an effort to limit the exposure of the Castro regime to prosecution.

Unfortunately, U.S. officials have declared that this action is in line with President Obama's new policy on Cuba that was unveiled on December 17, 2014 when he commuted the sentences of three Cuban spies, one of which, Gerardo Hernandez, was serving a double life sentence. One of the life sentences was for conspiracy to murder, in which four humanitarians were extrajudicially executed in an act of state terrorism on February 24, 1996. During the trial in 2000 of five Cuban spies it was also revealed that in addition to storing weapons and explosives in locations on U.S. soil that they also planned to terrorize and murder via a mail bomb an individual that they had identified as a CIA agent living in the United States.

Hopefully, the Obama Administration will learn from a mistake of the George W. Bush administration in its North Korea foreign policy and not repeat it in Cuba. In October of 2008, the Bush Administration took North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terrorism in the hopes that it would “salvage a fragile nuclear deal” with the totalitarian regime.  Seven years after taking Kim Jong Un’s regime off the list of terror sponsors, North Korea has tested nuclear weapons, threatens to attack the United States with its new nukes, and has engaged in a cyber attack on a private company in the United States.

The negative lessons from the Bush administration’s cozying up to the North Korean tyrant and the Carter administration's cozying up to the Cuban one should give any reasonable person second thoughts about pursuing a similar path again with Cuba under the Castro regime.

"Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong–these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.”- Winston Churchill, May 2, 1935

Castro regime linked to weapons smuggling again.

This time with a Chinese twist

Chinese cargo ship Da Dan Xia allegedly smuggling ammunition to Cuba held in Colombia

 The latest weapons smuggling incident involving the Castro regime, this time in Colombia sheds new light on international realities.

On March 2, 2015 the news broke that the government of Colombia had seized a shipment of ammunition bound for Cuba on a China-flagged ship due to a lack of proper documentation.

The BBC today reported that "Officials said about 100 tons of gunpowder, almost three million detonators and some 3,000 cannon shells were found on board. The ship's records said it was carrying grain products."

Container with boxes of weapons seized by Colombian authorities. Photo: Prosecutor's Office/EPA

 The Guardian reported: "The captain of a Hong Kong-flagged cargo ship has been arrested in the Colombian port city of Cartagena, charged with arms trafficking for transporting undocumented large-caliber munitions, reportedly bound for Cuba."

According to The Guardian the final destination is a front company for the Cuban military and the ammunition was supplied by a Chinese manufacturer:

Photos of the crates containing the gunpowder, published by the Cartagena newspaper El Universal, showed they were destined for a company called TecnoImport in Cuba, which according to several blogs is a procurement branch of the Cuban armed forces.
The company officially lists itself as an importer of machinery and industrial products. The supplier is listed on the crates as Norico, a Chinese manufacturer of machinery and chemical products, as well high-tech defense products.

What goes unmentioned in the reporting is that the ship with COSCO markings, although presented as a commercial entity, is apparently an arm of the Chinese military establishment. COSCO ships have also been involved in smuggling weapons into the United States.

Now that Communist China has eclipsed the United States as the largest economy in the world this kind of thing will probably be occuring more often and the consequences to American lives and property should be of concern.

At the same time it is interesting to note that in 2013 with North Korea and now again with China in 2015 the Castro regime has been linked to scandals involving arms smuggling. Blogging by Boz reaches a reasonable conclusion: "Two big shipments of weapons seized in 20 months means that this is probably a regular occurrence."