Snowdon is a dummy

Brandon9000 wrote:

I don't like the fact that China and Vietnam are Communist dictatorships either. With Cuba, the combination of being a Communist dictatorship, being an accessory to the pointing of nuclear missiles at us right off our shores, executing political prisoners, etc. makes them a government I don't like. I'm also not thrilled that a government I dislike a lot is very close. It is sufficient for me to approve of an embargo. Are there other governments I dislike as much that we don't embargo? Sure, but I don't face the choice of embargoing every country in the world I dislike or none. Embargoing several but not all is fine with me.

You are sadly out of date. Cuba has instituted some new legislation that allows more for its countrymen than it did before. It's collecting taxes now, allowing private enterprise, etc. Read about it and you'll learn if you have your eyes open. This embargo is nothing short of stupid. I was there last year and spoke with many Cubans - there is US investment there and has been for a long time. What about that???

The missiles were 50 years ago for God's sake! How long is your grudge? They agreed within 2 or 3 days to direct them at Russia and then dismantle them, and it wasn't about Cuba, it was about Russia! You really need to do some reading, bubba.

Methinks your middle name is McCarthy.

...Brandon, I take exception to your statement that the US government serves at the peoples' will. That may have been the case in days past, but the power of the incumbency, party politics, gerrrymandered districts, and (to me) the clear corruption of all three branches of our government has caused me to stand up and take notice of a new (current) reality.

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With Cuba, the combination of being a Communist dictatorship, being an accessory to the pointing of nuclear missiles at us right off our shores, executing political prisoners, etc. makes them a government I don't like.

You've ignored your hypocrisy. And added more. The US doesn't own "off our shores", though many of you think you do. What of all the missiles right off Russia's borders that are, to this day, still there?

"executing political prisoners", you say? Right in this thread I provide a source that described how the CIA, with substantial and direct help from US embassies and US presidents provided to the Indonesians kill lists of "political prisoners". That same thing has happened in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador, Panama, Ecuador, Angola, whichever country the US has invaded.

In this same thread I provided a source that Mame commented on reading that discussed numerous examples of how often the US has engaged in this practice. It really is not a stretch to say that the US modernized it and made it more ruthless and vicious.

Would you like to read more on this, Brandon?

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I'm also not thrilled that a government I dislike a lot is very close

Imagine then, if you will, empathetic fellow that you are, how some 400 to ??? million Latin and South American people, the ones still alive anyway after a century of US brutality, must feel.

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It is sufficient for me to approve of an embargo. Are there other governments I dislike as much that we don't embargo? Sure, but I don't face the choice of embargoing every country in the world I dislike or none. Embargoing several but not all is fine with me.

You can, of course, see how your personal likes and dislikes shouldn't be translated into allowing your government, or any government, to rape, torture and murder people and steal their wealth by either direct occupation or by supporting a US compliant dictator.

Why would you be so concerned about the dictatorship in Cuba when the US has had dictators in all Latin and South American countries? The US supported dictators didn't supply free education, free medical care, a caring loving society, all the things that the Castro dictatorship has supplied at great personal risk to himself.

How could anyone in their right mind [excuse me,Mame] find it surprising that Castro and the Cuban people have had to maintain strict controls on their political system when the very country that had long subjugated them, brutalized them, stole from them, stood right at their doorstep, clamoring to do the same thing to them again.

Really, no, I really mean it - really think about it. The US and people like you, Brandon, talk a good game about freedom and all that crap, but yet the US and people like you, Brandon, have never given this precious gift to any people or country.

The US, with its might, by allowing this embargo to continue for the number of years it has, by trying to force, and actually forcing other countries to follow suit, has committed one of its most egregious war crimes. Now if it was just an embargo, evil as it is, that would be one thing. But the actions against Cuba, by the US, over the last 50 years are precisely the terrorist actions that the US decries.

And for what reason? US national security. Yup, the US has advanced that facetious notion umpteen thousand times.

"President Kennedy warned the Mexican ambassador that Cuba was very dangerous and a threat to security during the Cuban Missile Crisis era. The Mexican ambassador's told President Kennedy that "If we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing".

But how many millions of Americans have bought this outlandish notion in order to punish a tiny little neighbor of the US?

joefromchicago wrote:

I imagine the European press would be better served by turning its attention to their own governments' domestic espionage programs, as Le Monde did in France, than to fixate on American misdeeds.

We Europeans are outrage multitaskers. We can, and will, do both.

And what has Cuba done to anyone? They have suffered to maintain their independence. I've always admired anyone, any country that told the US to F.O. And Fidel did that, and survived. I've always supported his agenda. Yes, his ppl suffered, but they might have endured worse under US 'rule'.

I agree, but at least we elect them democratically, which is basically what I meant. And, yes, I was born in 1953.

[...]
Last month, a former National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden, leaked a classified order from the FISA court, which authorized the collection of all phone-tracing data from Verizon business customers. But the court’s still-secret decisions go far beyond any single surveillance order, the officials said.

“We’ve seen a growing body of law from the court,” a former intelligence official said. “What you have is a common law that develops where the court is issuing orders involving particular types of surveillance, particular types of targets.”

In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special needs” doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.

The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government’s need to combat an overriding public danger. Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the N.S.A.’s collection and examination of Americans’ communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said.

That legal interpretation is significant, several outside legal experts said, because it uses a relatively narrow area of the law — used to justify airport screenings, for instance, or drunken-driving checkpoints — and applies it much more broadly, in secret, to the wholesale collection of communications in pursuit of terrorism suspects. “It seems like a legal stretch,” William C. Banks, a national security law expert at Syracuse University, said in response to a description of the decision. “It’s another way of tilting the scales toward the government in its access to all this data.”
[...]The court’s use of that language has allowed intelligence officials to get wider access to data and communications that they believe may be linked to nuclear proliferation, the officials said. They added that other secret findings had eased access to data on espionage, cyberattacks and other possible threats connected to foreign intelligence.

“The definition of ‘foreign intelligence’ is very broad,” another former intelligence official said in an interview. “An espionage target, a nuclear proliferation target, that all falls within FISA, and the court has signed off on that.”

The official, like a half-dozen other current and former national security officials, discussed the court’s rulings and the general trends they have established on the condition of anonymity because they are classified. Judges on the FISA court refused to comment on the scope and volume of their decisions.

Unlike the Supreme Court, the FISA court hears from only one side in the case — the government — and its findings are almost never made public. ...

While the US of A was doing this in South America the Russians were doing it in Eastern Europe, and the British were doing it in the Middle East. So your rant seems to me to be very partisan. All the powers were showing their asses.

I ask whoever will care to consider this;

Whose propaganda is it that you have you been subjected to for your whole lives? Is it Russian propaganda? Cuban, Brazilian, Vietnamese, Korean perhaps?

By what means have you received any and all information about countries other than your own?

In the past, that probably would have required a court warrant because the suspicious e-mail involved American communications. In this case, however, a little-noticed provision in a 2008 law, expanding the definition of “foreign intelligence” to include “weapons of mass destruction,” was used to justify access to the message.

a single judge signs most surveillance orders, which totaled nearly 1,800 last year. None of the requests from the intelligence agencies was denied, according to the court.

The Cuban government has joint ventures with almost all countries except the US. Obama now lets Americans participate in tours to Cuba - but only in tour groups. The tour companies must first get a license before they are approved for travel to Cuba, and calls it "People to people trips." It's anything but; with groups going from venue to venue as a group, lectured to or visiting churches, schools, or art venues, then moving on to the next place. The hosts at these places only meet group visitors - probably hundreds every week. There is no "connection" between peoples. It's hello and goodbye. The license is to restrict the spending of US dollars in Cuba, but how do you think Americans pay for their tours? It sure ain't the ruble.

Do they allow free elections? Has anyone been punished for the execution of political prisoners? Why has a single family been in charge all of this time? No, between what they did in the past and what they're doing now, I feel no great urge to lift the embargo. In truth, I don't feel very strongly about it either way, but they are a communist dictatorship right off our shores, so I feel no particular urge to give them a break unless they show a real willingness to improve. Don't bother telling me that we cooperate with other countries just as bad (albeit not adjacent to us).