Inside track: Take Cuba off the terrorist list

By
Wayne S. Smith

Inside
Track is published regularly in The
National Interest Online. The
following piece appeared on August 8, 2007.

Cuba
was placed on the list of terrorist nations in March of 1982 with
little in the way of explanation. Twenty-five years later, the State
Department’s reasons for keeping it there are totally unconvincing.
It is not involved in any terrorist activities that the State
Department can point to. It does not endorse terrorism, as the State
Department says it does. On the contrary, it has condemned it in all
its manifestations, has signed all twelve UN anti-terrorist
resolutions and offered to sign agreements with the United States to
cooperate in combating terrorism, an offer the Bush Administration
ignores.

There
are American fugitives in Cuba, yes, but even under our own
legislation, this does not constitute grounds for declaring Cuba to
be a terrorist state. And if Cuba does not regularly extradite those
fleeing from American justice, the United States has not in more than
47 years extradited a single Cuban’s including infamous terrorists
such as Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles.

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 By
Wayne S. Smith                                                                Read Spanish Version  

Inside
Track is published regularly in The
National Interest Online. The
following piece appeared on August 8, 2007.

 

Cuba
was placed on the list of terrorist nations in March of 1982 with
little in the way of explanation. Twenty-five years later, the State
Department’s reasons for keeping it there are totally unconvincing.
It is not involved in any terrorist activities that the State
Department can point to. It does not endorse terrorism, as the State
Department says it does. On the contrary, it has condemned it in all
its manifestations, has signed all twelve UN anti-terrorist
resolutions and offered to sign agreements with the United States to
cooperate in combating terrorism, an offer the Bush Administration
ignores.

There
are American fugitives in Cuba, yes, but even under our own
legislation, this does not constitute grounds for declaring Cuba to
be a terrorist state. And if Cuba does not regularly extradite those
fleeing from American justice, the United States has not in more than
47 years extradited a single Cuban’s including infamous terrorists
such as Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles.

In
sum, there is simply no credible evidence that Cuba is a state
sponsor of terrorism. The central question we should be asking is how
can U.S. interests possibly be served by putting forward these
spurious allegations and insisting that it is a terrorist state when
it obviously is not, and by rebuffing its offers to cooperate in the
struggle against terrorism? Does this not undermine our own
credibility and cast doubt on our seriousness of purpose? Surely it
is time to put an end to this dishonest and counterproductive policy.
Congress should take the first step by holding hearings to examine
the rationale and evidence, if any exists, behind this policy and to
call for a new, more constructive approach.

Alleged
reasons for placing Cuba on the list in the first place

A
Congressional Research Service (CRS) memorandum dated November 7,
2003, a copy of which Center for International Policy (CIP) has
obtained, indicates that no explanation was given for Cuba’s
inclusion on the list in 1982. According to the CRS memo, however, a
State Department paper from a month before Cuba was placed on the
list asserted that Cuba was encouraging terrorism and was especially
active in El Salvador and Guatemala. Clearly, this must have been
part of the rationale for placing it on the list. And yet, if Cuba’s
support for guerrillas trying to overthrow an established government,
in El Salvador or Guatemala, was enough to label it “a terrorist
state”, then the United States would have qualified as a terrorist
state also, given that it was in the midst of supporting the Contras
in their efforts to overthrow the Nicaraguan government.

Further,
as I reported in my book, The
Closest of Enemies,
on April 19, a month after Cuba was placed on the list, the Reagan
administration re-imposed restrictions on travel to the island (in
the form of currency controls) and imposed various other sanctions
against Cuba. The reasons it gave for these actions were 1) because
“Cuba . . . is increasing its support for violence in the
hemisphere” and 2) because Cuba refused to negotiate our foreign
policy disagreements.

But
as I pointed out in the book, in December of 1981, I had been
informed by a high-ranking Cuban official that Cuba had suspended all
arms shipments to Central America and that it hoped this major
concession on its part would improve the atmosphere for negotiations,
not only in Central America but between our two countries. This was
almost certainly meant to be a response to a statement by Secretary
of State Al Haig, who in a conversation with Cuban Vice President
Carlos Rafael Rodriguez in Mexico the month before, had stated, in
response to the Cubans’ indications of an interest in dialogue,
that the United States wanted not words but changes in Cuban
policies. Here was a major change.

I
reported this December conversation to the Department of State,
asking if we had any hard evidence to the contrary, for example, that
Cuba was continuing to ship arms to Central America. If not, I
recommended that the United States begin a dialogue.

I
had to follow up with a number of cables, insisting on an answer. I
finally got one in March, acknowledging that the United States did
not have hard evidence of continuing Cuban arms shipments to Central
America, but that it did not matter. In other words, the United
States was not interested in dialogue. Where, then, was the evidence
of “increasing support for violence”?

Cuba
that was seeking negotiations or dialogue, and the United States was
rebuffing those overtures, not the other way around, as the State
Department suggested. This outright misrepresentation of the facts to
the American people was one of the factors which caused me to leave
the Foreign Service shortly thereafter.

Bogus
reasons for keeping Cuba on the list

After
25 years, Cuba remains on the State Department’s annual list of
state sponsors of terrorism for reasons that do not withstand the
most perfunctory examination. There is, for example, the oft-repeated
charge that Cuba endorses terrorism as a tactic. Former
Undersecretary of State John Bolton, for one, claimed in March of
2004 that Fidel Castro “continues to view terror as a legitimate
tactic to further revolutionary objectives.”

The
charge is simply not true, and neither Bolton nor anyone else has
been able to point to a single statement of Castro’s endorsing
terrorism. On the contrary, there are myriad Cuban statements
condemning it. Within hours of the 9/11 attack, for example, the
Cuban government issued a statement condemning the attacks and ruing
the loss of life. Late in September, Castro categorically condemned
all forms of terrorism as an “ethically indefensible phenomenon
which must be eradicated.” He vowed that, “the territory of Cuba
will never be used for terrorist actions against the American
people.”

Bogus
charges that Cuba is a biological warfare threat

Back
in 2004, Bolton said that the Bush administration was “concerned
that Cuba is developing a limited biological weapons effort . . . and
believes Cuba remains a terrorist and biological warfare threat to
the United States.”

Bolton’s
charges caused a stir. Over the past three years, however, they have
widely come to be seen as politically motivated and groundless.
Certainly neither he nor anyone else has been able to put forward any
evidence to support the charges. The Department of State no longer
even makes them.

Further,
the Center for Defense Information (CDI) sent several delegations to
Cuba to investigate and in one case was accompanied by CIP. They were
allowed to go anywhere they wished and see anything requested. Their
conclusions were perhaps best summed up by retired General Charles
Wilhelm, the former commander of SOUTHCOM, who accompanied one of the
delegations. “While Cuba certainly has the capability to develop
and produce chemical and biological weapons, nothing we saw or heard
led us to the conclusion that they were proceeding on this path.”

Wilhelm’s
conclusions were practically echoed by a National Intelligence
Estimate conducted in the summer of 2004 and reported in The
New York Times
on September 18, 2004. It said that “the Intelligence Community
continues to believe that Cuba has the technical capability
[emphasis added] to pursue some aspects of an offensive biological
weapons program.”

It
made no claim, however, that Cuba was pursuing such a program.

In
sum, unless accompanied by new evidence, any charges that Cuba poses
a biological warfare threat to the United States must be seen as
baseless.

Further,
it should be noted that sending delegations to Cuba to investigate
and discuss the matter with the Cubans showed that scientific
exchanges, on a regular and ongoing basis, are clearly the best way
to create transparency and build confidence in one another’s
positions. We need more such exchanges, not fewer, and yet the Bush
Administration has taken counterproductive steps to impede them.

The
case of the annual reports

One
may have a twinge of sympathy for the analysts who craft the list of
state sponsors of terrorism. Their instructions are to write and
publish a report every year saying that Cuba is such a sponsor. But
what about evidence?

In
years past, the analysts seemed to handle that dilemma by using
unverified and highly questionable reports. As monitoring efforts
have increased over the past few years and the specious conclusions
pointed out, the analysts seem to have turned to a new tactic,
non-sequiturs that do not prove that Cuba sponsors terrorism. This
year’s report, for example, complained that “Cuba did not attempt
to track, block, or seize terrorist assets, although the authority to
do so is contained in Cuba’s Law 93 against acts of terrorism, as
well as Instruction 19 of the Superintendent of the Cuban Central
Bank.”

But
any decent lawyer would respond to that by asking “what assets?”
There is no evidence at all that Al-Qaeda or any other terrorist
organization has any assets in Cuba. And so, there is nothing to
seize. The only thing the statement makes clear is that Cuba does
have laws on the books against acts of terrorism. How, one might ask,
does that square with the report’s assertion that it is a terrorist
state?

 

And
as it does every year, last year’s report mentions the presence in
Cuba of members of the Basque ETA guerrilla organization, and the
Colombian FARC and ELN. In past years, the State Department tried to
suggest that they were in Cuba against the wishes of their respective
governments and had sinister objectives. But that suggestion was shot
down year after year by representatives of the Spanish and Colombian
governments. This year, no such allegations are made. It is
acknowledged that they are living in Cuba legally. Further, the
report states that: “There is no information concerning terrorist
activities of these or other organizations on Cuban territory. . . .
The United States is not aware of specific terrorist enclaves in the
country.”

If
they are there legally and are not involved in terrorist activities,
then how does their presence in any way lead to the conclusion that
Cuba sponsors terrorism?

This
year’s report repeats its annual complaint that Cuba permits
American fugitives to live in Cuba and is not responsive to U.S.
extradition requests.

True,
there are American fugitives in Cuba. Most are hijackers who came in
the 1970s and have lived in Cuba since then. There are a few others,
probably seven or eight, wanted for crimes committed in the United
States. It is also true that Cuba has not responded positively to
U.S. extradition requests. But two things must be noted about that.
First, for all practical purposes, the 1904 extradition treaty is
simply no longer operative, principally because the United States has
not honored a single Cuba request for extradition since 1959. Second,
most of the “crimes” committed in the U.S. were of a political
nature, and Article VI of the treaty excludes the extradition of
those whose crimes were of a “political character.”

Furthermore,
as Robert Muse, an international lawyer, noted in a 2004 report, none
of the U.S. fugitives in Cuba provides a basis for declaring Cuba to
be a "state sponsor of terrorism." Legal authority to make
such a designation is found in Section 6(j) of the 1979 Export
Administration Act, which says that it must be demonstrated that the
fugitives have committed "terrorist" acts and that those
acts were “international” in character. Muse states that he has
been unable to identify a single U.S. fugitive in Cuba who meets
those twofold criteria. Thus, they are extraneous to the definition
of Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism.”

In
sum, as CIP has noted in its responses over the past few years, the
annual reports present not a shred of evidence to confirm that Cuba
is in fact a terrorist state.

A
policy that undercuts our efforts against terrorism

And
it is not only that we have no evidence that Cuba is a terrorist
state. Our Cuba policy actually obstructs our own efforts against
terrorism. As President Bush has said over and over again, anyone who
shelters terrorists is a terrorist. But the fact is that we are
sheltering a whole series of outright terrorists in Miami. The most
recent arrival is the notorious Luis Posada Carriles, accused of
being one of the masterminds of the bombing of a Cubana airliner in
1976 that killed 73 innocent people, including the Cuban junior
fencing team. He was in a Venezuelan prison awaiting trial on that
charge when he escaped in 1985. He went to Central America, where for
a time he worked for Oliver North in the Contra operation against
Nicaragua.

Subsequently,
in a 1998 interview with The
New York Times,
he bragged of ordering the bombing of a number of tourist hotels in
Havana, which led to the death of an Italian tourist and the wounding
of several other people.

And
then in 2000, he was arrested in Panama and later convicted of
"endangering public safety" because of his involvement in a
plot to assassinate Fidel Castro by blowing up a public auditorium
where Castro was to speak before an audience of some 1,500. In 2004,

Congresswoman
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) and her two congressional colleagues,
Lincoln (R-FL) and Mario Diaz Balart (R-FL), appealed to
then-President Mireya Moscoso to pardon him, along with three others
involved in the plot: Guillermo Novo, convicted of the 1976 murder in
Washington of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier (though his
conviction was later overturned); Gaspar Jimenez, who spent six years
in prison in Mexico for trying to kidnap a Cuban diplomat and killing
his bodyguard in the processⁱ;
and Pedro Remon, who had pleaded guilty in 1986 of trying to blow up
the Cuban Mission to the United Nations.

In
August of 2004, in one of her last acts as President of Panama,
Moscoso pardoned them all. Jimenez, Remon and Novo, who were all
American citizens, immediately flew back to Miami and received a
hero’s welcome. Posada, who has Venezuelan citizenship, decided to
bide his time in Honduras for a few months, but then, as we shall see
below, quietly entered the U.S. in March.

Nor
was this the first time Ros-Lehtinen had acted to free terrorists.
Orlando Bosch, another mastermind of the 1976 bombing of the Cubana
airliner, was released from Venezuelan prison under mysterious
circumstances in 1987 and returned to Miami without a visa in 1988.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service began proceedings to
deport him, and as the associate attorney general argued at the time:
“The security of this nation is affected by its ability to urge
credibly other nations to refuse aid and shelter to terrorists. We
could not shelter Dr. Bosch and maintain that credibility.”

But
shelter him we did. Urged on by Ros-Lehtinen and Jeb Bush, then
managing her election campaign, George H.W. Bush pardoned Bosch, who
has lived freely ever since in Miami.

Posada
returned to Miami in March. Everyone knew he was there, but the
federal government made no effort to apprehend him, or even to
acknowledge his presence, until May, when he gave a press conference
and forced their hand.

He
was then arrested, but rather than charging him with acts of
terrorism, he was simply charged with illegal entry and sent off to
El Paso for an administrative immigration hearing, a complete farce.
He was ordered deported, but, as the U.S. authorities already knew,
there were no countries willing to take him except Venezuela, which
had already requested his extradition for the 1976 bombing of the
Cubana airliner. The federal judge, on nothing more than the opinion
of a long-time associate of Posada’s, ruled that he could not be
extradited to Venezuela for fear that he would be tortured there.
Never mind that the Venezuelan government had given assurances that
he would be held under the most transparent circumstances.

To
hold him longer, but to avoid any charge of terrorism, the government
then came up with a charge of giving false statements on his
application of entry. Another sham, which finally ended on May 8,
2007, when Judge Kathleen Cardone, seeing clearly that skullduggery
was afoot, charged the government with bad faith and "engaging
in fraud, deceit and trickery." (That’s the Bush
administration she’s talking about!)

That
being the case, she said, “this court is left with no choice but to
dismiss the indictment.”

Posada
was then freed and returned to Miami.

Some
three months have now passed and the Bush Administration has given no
indication that it intends to take any further action against Posada.
What it should do is clear. Venezuela has asked for his extradition.
We have an extradition treaty with Venezuela. Under that treaty, and
others, we must either extradite him to Venezuela or we must indict
him for acts of terrorism and try him in the United States. If we do
not, we will be in blatant violation of international treaties and
will be seen as openly sheltering another terrorist. Unfortunately,
at the moment it seems that is exactly what the Bush Administration
intends to do. If so, it will seriously undermine the credibility of
our own stance against terrorism, taking us back to the idea that
"one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter!” That
is no way to win the war against terrorism.

The
author was a U.S. diplomat and specialist in Cuban affairs for
roughly 25 years, leaving the Foreign Service in 1982, when he was
Chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, because of his
disagreements over Cuba policy. He has been an adjunct professor at
Johns Hopkins University since 1984 and a Senior Fellow at the Center
for International Policy in Washington, DC since 1992.