Cuban Bio-Weps a Threat to US?

[Ryan Ruck]

Cuban Bio-Weps a Threat to US?

The Miami Herald reported Wednesday that a Cuban defector who was a Cuban army colonel in charge of their military medical services for ten years has now publicly stated the Cuban government is involved in developing and stockpiling biological weapons. The defector, Roberto Ortega, claims he has now gone public because he believes the US government has not acted sufficiently on the information he previously provided in confidence. According to Ortega, Cuban personnel originally collected samples of the germ warfare material in Africa and Cuban scientists successfully reproduced the deadly agents at a secret underground facility southwest of Havana.

While the official US Government position on Cuba's bio-weapons appears undeterminative, some officials have indicated in the past their belief the Cubans do possess such weapons to some extent. If Ortega's claims are correct, this may pose a serious potential terror threat to the US.

Apart from the obvious possible military application of such weapons, biological weapons that are expertly designed and produced by a state military and turned over to terrorist operatives present a particularly nightmarish scenario. Potential destabilization exists for the Cuban government in the near future with Castro being old and in questionable health. If Fidel sees his end of days approaching, might he allow under-the-radar access to his bio-weapons to an "enemy of my enemy" via one of his close friends, as in Venezuelan strongman Hugo "Bush is the Devil" Chavez? And we know who Chavez is chums with nowadays...Brother Mahmoud "World Without America" Ahmadinejad. And how difficult might it be for well trained Iranian intelligence or Hezbollah operatives, perhaps posing as Spanish-speaking Latin Americans, to enter the US along the south Florida coastline via established maritime smuggling routes utilized daily by organized criminal groups thriving in the Florida straights?

Admittedly, these are speculative concepts; but concepts based on reasonable potentialities if certain facts are true. The revelations presented by Roberto Ortega present serious concerns and will hopefully be factored into our ongoing counter-terrorism defenses.

[Sean Osborne]

"Cuban Bio-Weps a Threat to US?"

Communist dictatorship researching and developing weapons of mass destruction of the chemical and biological kind - how could such a thing not be seen as a direct threat to the United States?

Now, the question which remains, and Roberto Ortega did not specify, but what kind of biological organism would Cuban bio-scientists harvest from Africa to weaponize? Whaddyathink?

Think hemorrhagic viruses. Think Marburg. Think Ebola.

Consider also that the Cuban military had used Chemical Warfare against South African military forces during fighting in Angola and against and the U.S.-backed forces of Jonas Savimbi's UNITA.

The U.S. government knows damn well that chemical and biological weapons are a big part of Cuba's offensive and defensive military capabilities, and they developed this capability under Russian/Soviet program seeding, supervision and direction. The Cuban's are known to have genetically engineered a variant of E coli. Their capabilities in this type of warfare are as advanced as those of the United States. The Cuban's are among the elite in the world when it comes to these kinds of WMD.