Matthew Yglesias » Clarke: Cuba’s No State Sponsor of Terrorism

Sep 18th, 2008 at 1:11 pm

Clarke: Cuba’s No State Sponsor of Terrorism

One obstacle to the adoption of a more humane and sensible Cuba policy is that the country has found itself on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. It’s pretty clear to anyone who thinks about it that this is a politically motivated move, designed to bolster status quo policies rather than an actual reason for adopting them. But it’s good to have Richard Clarke on record about this — he’s spent his career dealing with international terrorism and says Cuba has nothing to do with that problem, it’s all just domestic politics.

Comments
21

21 Responses to “Clarke: Cuba’s No State Sponsor of Terrorism”

anon Says:
September 18th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
“affordable housing fueled the housing bubble and current financial crisis” – http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDRiYzJiNzJlMWNlZjBhYzExYjE0NWJjYjc2ZTBmMmY=

please respond to this lunacy
Brent Says:
September 18th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
What do you mean! There are all kinds of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay!
El Cid Says:
September 18th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
National Review has spoken. The mortgage / banking crisis has nothing to do with Republican deregulation and anti-regulation leadership, but Democrats and their concerns for poor and colored folk. I say Republicans should run with that.
fostert Says:
September 18th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Umm, didn’t Cuba support the Shining Path in Peru? I think that would be terrorism. Not that we haven’t also supported terrorist groups in South America, of course. Maybe we should add our name to the list. That might cause problem with our military contractors selling weapons to our government, however.
anon Says:
September 18th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
what’s really frustrating about the nro argument is how perverse it is – basically they’re saying the democrats created all these very attractive risky assets. Assets that, despite their incredible risk, were so attractive ibanks could not resist investing in them. So to cure the problem we just need to eliminate one class of risky assets. That would restore order to the world and ensure that risk management is carried out in a careful and responsible manner.
El Cid Says:
September 18th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Clarke did not (and of course would not) say that Cuba has never supported any group which were or could have been labeled terrorist:

Cuba is not a state sponsor of terrorism and hasn’t been at least since the Clinton Administration conducted a formal review of the list in the late 1990s.

He’s clearly talking about the present.
flo Says:
September 18th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
But Richard Clarke doesn’t set our Cuba policy, the cubanos in Miami do.
fostert Says:
September 18th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
“But Richard Clarke doesn’t set our Cuba policy, the cubanos in Miami do.”

This is my favorite argument against the Electoral College. Their 100,000 votes can swing Florida, so every presidential candidate has to kiss their asses. Without the Electoral College, nobody would listen to them. We might, instead, base our Cuban policy on what’s good for the other 300 million Americans.
Hector Says:
September 18th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Fostert,

Cuba supported the MRTA in Peru, which was a smaller and less violent Marxist guerrilla group than the Shining Path. I’m pretty sure that the Shining Path were ultra-left Maoists who opposed Cuba and the Soviet Union as ‘revisionists’. I don’t know if they got any foreign aid at all….perhaps from Albania?

That aside, of course, neither the MRTA nor the Shining Path have been particularly active for some time.

Cuba has _ideologically_ supported violent revolutionary movements in LA region in recent years, like the Humala brothers in Peru, or Tupac Katari in Bolivia, but as far as I know those movements weren’t considered terrorist and didn’t receive actual money or arms from Cuba.
rupert Says:
September 18th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
re. #1 & 3 Larry Kudlow also jumped on that this morning, suggesting that the CRA bears blame for the mortgage mess; guess it’ll be in the talking points as a way to blame “community organizers;” it’s pathetic; the guvment never told banks to make bad loans, tho’ a lot of commissioned mortgage brokers sure did.
Maynard Handley Says:
September 18th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
You know another country that didn’t have anything to do with terrorism? IRAQ.

How well did hoping for sane policy work out in that case?
cuban sec Says:
December 7th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
WASHINGTON — Federal regulators on Monday charged Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban with insider trading for allegedly using confidential information on a stock sale to avoid more than $750,000 in losses. Cuban disputed the
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Matt Yglesias

Clarke: Cuba’s No State Sponsor of Terrorism

21 Responses to “Clarke: Cuba’s No State Sponsor of Terrorism”

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