Next, they’ll be checking for homing pigeons.

Actually, they should check for homing pigeons.

EXCLUSIVE: Cuban spies’ shortwave radios go undetected

MIAMI | A retired State Department officer and his wife who are accused of spying for Cuba appear to have avoided capture for 30 years because their communications with the Caribbean island were too low-tech to be detected by sophisticated U.S. monitors.

[snip]

U.S. intelligence spends little time combing the shortwave bands for secret, nefarious transmissions, said James Lewis, director and senior fellow for the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“I’m not surprised [the U.S. intelligence community] missed this,” Mr. Lewis said. “We don’t put an emphasis on monitoring this kind of activity.”

Which is one reason why the Cubans use this technique. The other reason, of course, is because their ruling regime is shackled to a inferior and discredited economic/political philosophy whose only successes have been in turning large numbers of live peasants into dead ones.

At any rate, check the pigeon fanciers in southern Florida.  Just in case.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Retired State Department analyst arrested for spying for Cuba.

[You can guess the subtitle that was here at first.]

The words ‘treason,’ ‘traitor,’ or ‘betrayal’ do not appear anywhere in this narration of the career of a spy for regime which is an avowed enemy of the United States of America. BDS, on the other hand? First paragraph. I’m almost convinced that this was deliberate self-parody on the WaPo’s part, except that I know other people who are equally this dead to irony.

A Slow Burn Becomes a Raging Fire
Disdain for U.S. Policies May Have Led to Alleged Spying for Cuba

He was a courtly State Department intelligence analyst from a prominent family who loved to sail and peruse the London Review of Books. Occasionally, he would voice frustration with U.S. policies, but to his liberal neighbors in Northwest D.C. it was nothing out of the ordinary. “We were all appalled by the Bush years,” one said.

Given that the traitor Myers started his career in 1978, we can only be grateful that he did not reveal the secrets of time travel to the Castro regime.

See also the Weekly Standard, Transterrestrial Musings, and American Thinker; the latter walks through the history of the two traitors for the last thirty years, and is probably the best bet for people wanting to familiarize themselves with events.  For my own part, two observations:

  • If you go by the MICE acronym – Money, Ideology, Conscience, Ego – The Myers’s treason seems rooted mostly in Ego, with the Ideology sort of accumulating on over the years, like grime on an unwashed stoop.  People do like to think that their acts are justified, particularly when they know that they’re not.
  • I think that people should be taking a harder look at the wife, actually.  The traitress Gwendolyn Trebilcock Myers was a staffer for former Senator James Abourezk, who is of course a notorious anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist (‘Zionist lobby rules the US Congress’ edition).  I see no particular reason why I should pretend that folks who write for Counterpunch and who check under their bed at night for Jews are also plausible suspects for being up to their eyeballs in supporting other Hard Left cause celebres – like, say, Castro.  Why did you serve only one term again, Senator?  It certainly wasn’t because you grew tired of ‘boring speeches,’ given your hobbies since then.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Now *there’s* the willfully-obnoxious Cuba regime we’ve grown accustomed to!

(Via NTCNews) It’s so nice to see that some people keep up with the old traditions…

Cuba rejects OAS membership, official says

HAVANA, Cuba (CNN) — Cuba will not rejoin the Organization of American States, even though the multinational organization has lifted the 47-year-old suspension of the country’s membership, a Cuban official said Thursday.

Ricardo Alarcon, president of the National Assembly, made the announcement to reporters. Former Cuban President Fidel Castro had said earlier this week that Cuba had no interest in rejoining the 35-nation group.

…the tradition in this case being the charming Let’s humiliate the President of the United States that Castro has turned into an art form.  This particular version was pretty good, for a given value of ‘good:’ the White House traded any restrictions on future readmission* and recognition, a certain amount of backpedalling in front of the rest of the OAS, and quite possibly the state of Florida in the 2012 elections for… well, nothing at all.  Continue reading Now *there’s* the willfully-obnoxious Cuba regime we’ve grown accustomed to!

Shiving Raul.

Apparently Fidel Castro doesn’t quite understand that the best thing that he could do for Cuba right now is, well, die:

Fidel Castro: Obama ‘misinterpreted’ Raul’s words

HAVANA – Fidel Castro says President Barack Obama “misinterpreted” his brother Raul’s remarks regarding the United States and bristled at the suggestion that Cuba should free political prisoners or cut taxes on dollars people send to the island.

Either that, or he just doesn’t care. It’s probably ‘just doesn’t care’: as has been noted before, Fidel Castro has been a skilled player in the game of embarrassing American administrations for decades now. It’s apparently now President Obama’s turn, and he can hopefully take some comfort in knowing that it’s just business, nothing personal. Except, of course, that to Fidel Castro it’s one and the same…

Moe Lane

PS: The traditional phrase to mutter in these circumstances is “That [expletive deleted] can’t live forever,” Mr. President. Although one hears stories

Crossposted to RedState.

Today’s Podcast: Tea Parties, the Bush Six, and International Affairs.

I did my twice-monthly radio podcast with Fausta today – we discussed Tea Parties, Cuba, the “Bush Six,” pirates of Somalia, the Vatican’s rejection/non-rejection of pro-choice ambassadors, the DHS rightwing extremist issue, and even a quick mention of IL-05.  And, oh yeah, I sneered at the pro-torture Left.  Just because I felt like it.  Podcast and the various links mentioned after the fold.

I would like to note that the stories “The Bush Six to Be Indicted” and “The Practice Of Law Is Under Indictment — Where Is The ABA?” are of particular importance.  To recap: the Daily Beast is reporting that six members of the Bush administration are going to be indicted in a Spanish court for offering legal advice.  I was, shall we say, rather vehement in my commentary, which can boil down to “If the Obama administration does not make it clear that this is intolerable, the current people in government had best hope that the Democrats stay in power for the rest of eternity.”  With a lot more angry stammering, but then this topic annoys.

Not to mention makes me worry more about the future of our democratic system more than anything else going on right now.

Moe Lane

Continue reading Today’s Podcast: Tea Parties, the Bush Six, and International Affairs.

End of the Cuba Embargo?

Very possibly. From Fausta:

Cuba: U.S. Embargo to End?

The Fifth Summit of the Americas is coming up next week, on April 17-19 in Trinidad-Tobago. The Summit’s theme is “Securing Our Citizens’ Future by Promoting Human Prosperity, Energy Security and Environmental Sustainability.” It will be interesting to watch what the Obama administration has planned for the Summit regarding Cuba.

As readers may recall, last February the Lugar Report concluded that “progress could be attained by replacing conditionality with sequenced engagement, beginning with narrow areas of consensus that develop trust,” and recommended changing US policy towards Cuba. Following the report, in March the omnibus spending bill changed travel restrictions on American citizens with family in Cuba to once a year, and last week the Wall Street Journal reported that President Obama plans to lift U.S. restrictions on Cuba, allowing Cuban-Americans to visit families there as often as they like and to send them unlimited funds.

Continue reading End of the Cuba Embargo?

The Cuban situation about to get depressingly worse?

It can always get worse.

If you saw the CBC members’ visit to the Castro regime and winced (I’m sorry, but I can’t describe what happened there without using the word ‘slobbering’), I’m afraid that I have bad news for you: there may be more provocations to follow. Via Kausfiles, a reminder about how this regime operates:

…whenever it looked as if Cuba was on the path to rejoining the world, Mr. Castro has done something to derail its progress. Recall that he relentlessly battled Mikhail Gorbachev over perestroika and glasnost. Mr. Castro warned that these changes would be the Soviet Union’s downfall — evidently missing the point. In a new, flattering documentary about Cuba’s leader by Oliver Stone, ”Comandante,” Mr. Castro dismisses Mr. Gorbachev as a man ”who destroyed his country.”

Or consider what happened in 1996, after the Clinton administration and Cuba had settled on migration and drug interdiction accords. Mr. Castro (after months of warnings) shot down two planes operated by the exile group Brothers to the Rescue, killing four people. The result was the signing of the Helms-Burton Act, which tightened the embargo. Did Mr. Castro know that Congress would react this way? Of course he did.

Continue reading The Cuban situation about to get depressingly worse?

Senator Menendez (D, NJ) being recalcitrant over spending bill.

He doesn’t approve of the spending bill’s change in Cuba policy (Via Dan Riehl):

:The Menendez rebellion was a jolt of political reality for Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Obama, signaling that the solidarity of the stimulus debate is fading as Democratic lawmakers are starting to read the fine print of the bills they will wrestle with in the coming weeks and months, and not always liking what they see.

[snip]

Menendez knew that his hard-line approach to Cuba was a minority view within his party, and that it was at odds with Obama’s approach. But he did not expect to discover a significant policy change embedded in the text on an appropriations bill. His policy aides came across the language when the legislation was posted on a congressional Web site.

“The process by which these changes have been forced upon this body is so deeply offensive to me, and so deeply undemocratic, that it puts the omnibus appropriations package in jeopardy, in spite of all the other tremendously important funding that this bill would provide,” the enraged son of Cuban immigrants said last week on the Senate floor. Menendez even slapped a hold on a pair of Obama nominees to draw attention to the issue.

If you’re wondering why a spending bill has in it a provision that would quietly change our Cuba policy, it’s really very simple: the Democrats want to change our Cuba policy, they control Congress, and they can thus put anything in the appropriations bill that they blessed well feel like putting in. “Appropriate” or “inappropriate” doesn’t really enter into it; what’s important is that they can do something, they desire to do something, and so they will do something.

The article also mentions Democratic efforts to keep subsidizing private student loan companies and farmers (at least, the ones in Nebraska and North Dakota). But that’s just ordinary pork from Ben Nelson and Kent Conrad; what makes the Menendez balk interesting is because it’s supposedly based on a moral objection. Continue reading Senator Menendez (D, NJ) being recalcitrant over spending bill.