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robertpaulsen Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 11:58 AM
Original message
Man with cache of weapons claims to be part of anti-Castro group
Man with cache of weapons claims to be part of anti-Castro group
Associated Press

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. - A Cuban exile arrested for allegedly stashing more than 1,000 guns in his home said he is a member of a militant group that wants to overthrow Fidel Castro.

Robert Ferro, 61, was arrested after authorities raided his Upland home on Friday and found dozens of assault weapons, machine guns and handguns. Authorities believe Ferro may have been running a black-market gun ring out of the home.

But Ferro told federal investigators that he was a member of Alpha 66, "a militant group who collectively desire to overthrow Fidel Castro and liberate the country of Cuba," according to an affidavit filed in federal court by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Ferro said the organization paid for the guns and had other caches of weapons, according to the court document.

more...

http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/breaking_news/14387948.htm


Wow, Alpha 66. Still crazy after all these years!
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MadHound Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 12:03 PM
Response to Original message
1. Sounds like somebody forgot to tell this guy
Edited on Thu Apr-20-06 12:03 PM by MadHound
That the covert CIA war against Castro ended decades ago.
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ret5hd Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 12:26 PM
Response to Reply #1
4. Really? When?
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MadHound Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 12:30 PM
Response to Reply #4
5. Oh, I think that the CIA called it all off after Nixon left office
Now I think that all they're doing is trying to fuck with Cuba economically, and if worse comes to worse, just wait the old guy out.
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KansDem Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Apr-21-06 11:42 AM
Response to Reply #5
25. "...and if worse comes to worse, just wait the old guy out."
Really!

Castro has survived US Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and still there are fanatics who want him overthrown? It should be evident by now that Castro's there to stay.

And I don't think Mr. Ferro and his ilk will change that.

I really get angry when US Corporations, the primary force behind US wars, fell all over themselves to get into communist Vietnam, a place were we lost over 56,000 Americans, to establish factories, junk-food places, and the like, and yet we still maintain this ridiculous economic blockade of Cuba...:crazy:

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Media_Lies_Daily Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 12:56 PM
Response to Reply #1
11. Actually, it never ended. It has been ongoing with greater or....
...lesser degrees of intensity since 1958-1959 depending on who was in the White House.

Ike started off the hostilities soon after Castro took power (with CIA assistance), with Nixon being one of the major planners of the Bay of Pigs.

JFK got involved, whether he wanted to or not, with the Bay of Pigs invasion and Cuban Missile Crises. Following the fiasco with the Bay of Pigs, JFK fired CIA Director Allen Dulles (also a major shareholder in United Fruit), CIA Deputy Director Richard Bissell (ran the U-2 program and was in charge of the Bay of Pigs operation), and CIA Deputy Director General Charles P. Cabell (his brother was the Mayor of Dallas on November 22, 1963). JFK was actually in the process of trying to normalize relations with Castro at the time he was assassinated.

LBJ, with the backing of major corporate interests, the CIA, and the military, had bigger fish to fry in Southeast Asia...Cuba was put on the back burner.

When Nixon took office, pressure on Castro resumed, falling off in intensity with Ford and Carter.

The Reagan arrived in 1980 along with Poppy Bush, and pressure was once again resumed on Castro for the next 12 years.

Clinton allowed the Cuba issue to simmer in the background until 2000 when Herr Busch, with the able assistance of the U. S. Supreme Court, took control of the U. S. Government. You guessed it...pressure has once again been brought to bear on Castro.
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madeline_con Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 12:04 PM
Response to Original message
2. When is Castro expected to arrive in San Bernadino? n/t
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geomon666 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 12:16 PM
Response to Reply #2
3. lol exactly.
The militants in Florida have been doing the same thing. As far as I know, they've been training in the Everglades for 40 years and haven't yet gotten past Key West.
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DoYouEverWonder Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 12:45 PM
Response to Reply #3
9. Didn't you hear
they moved up in the world?

Santiago Alverez got caught last fall with a huge weapons stash including C-4 explosives in his Broward County condo complex that he owned.

The judge said there was enough explosives and weapons to cause a major bloodbath.

Alverez is also the fellow who brought Luis Posada back to Miami on his yacht a couple of years ago.

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pinniped Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 12:38 PM
Response to Original message
6. I saw some of the collection on the LA Times site and that dude....
Edited on Thu Apr-20-06 12:41 PM by pinniped
had a huge stockpile.

He had some costly stuff, notably:

- USAS 12
- HK MP5s

I did a name search on this guy on the Upland address listed and it appears he had a previous address in FL. I think there's a good chance he is an operative of some sort.

He had like nine cars including a Rolls Royce.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-guns19apr19,1,2267258.story

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-guns20apr20,1,6728291.story
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robertpaulsen Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 12:48 PM
Response to Reply #6
10. Good find! I'm sure there's some Florida connection.
Wonder if he has any ties to this terrorist:

US Groups Want Posada in Venezuela

Washington, Apr 20 (Prensa Latina) Non-governmental organizations in the United States are demanding Thursday that President George W. Bush´s administration deport to Venezuela Cuban-born terrorist Luis Posada Carriles.

Civil groups, led by the ANSWER coalition, will also present today a peaceful protest in front of the US Immigration Court in the southern state of Texas, community sources told Prensa Latina.

US Immigration and Customs authorities meet criminal Posada Carriles today to consider the US citizenship´s request presented by his lawyers.

snip

Posada Carriles, 78, was member of the Central Intelligence Agency and is mastermind behind the bombing of a Cuban civil airliner off the coast of Barbados that killed 73 people in 1976.

http://www.plenglish.com/article.asp?ID=%7B05E9CBC2-F25E-41BB-849F-6A94FF7C640E%7D)&language=EN
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Media_Lies_Daily Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 01:07 PM
Response to Reply #10
12. Alpha 66 websites....
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robertpaulsen Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 01:34 PM
Response to Reply #12
13. Thanks! Did Alpha 66 have anything to do with MK ULTRA?
Just wondering because I found the spartacus site interesting, and I've read some material on World Vision and their link to Alpha 66. I believe Jim Jones had a World Vision affiliation and of course his cult was all about mind control.
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Media_Lies_Daily Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 03:02 PM
Response to Reply #13
15. Hinkley's father was also a World Vision official....
...and Hinkley's brother was about to have lunch with Neil Bish when the Reagan shooting took place.

The relationship between the Hinkley and Bush families goes all the way back to Midland, Texas, and the oil business.
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robertpaulsen Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 04:00 PM
Response to Reply #15
18. Oh yeah! There's some really mindblowing stuff there.
I was looking into the Jim Jones connection and found a whole lot of related material:


One of the strangest CIA connections to Jonestown was the previously mentioned World Vision, an evangelical order which often fronts for the CIA. They performed espionage work for the CIA in Southeast Asia while Operation Phoenix (the murderous project that left 40,000 people dead) was in full effect. In Honduras, they maintained a presence at CIA contra recruiting camps in the war against the Sandinistas. In Lebanon, the fascist Phalange butchered Palestinians at World Vision's camp. In Cuba, their refugee camps hosted numerous members of the anti-Castro terrorist group Alpha 66 of Bay of Pigs fame. After the Guyana massacre, World Vision developed a scheme to repopulate Jonestown with CIA-linked mercenaries from Laos. Laos, of course, was where the CIA was running it's "secret war" during Vietnam, which for the most part was a smokescreen for a widespread opium trafficking operation. One particularly important World Vision official was John Hinckley, Sr., an oil man, reputed CIA officer, and friend of George Bush. You may have heard of his son. Less than four months before Hinckley Jr. became known as Jodie Foster's biggest fan, another member of the World Vision order, Mark Chapman, gunned down John Lennon in what may have been a practice run for the bigger hit on President Reagan. One of the policeman who found him was convinced that he was a mind-controlled assassin. Chapman was clutching a copy of the novel Catcher in the Rye, which was also owned by John Hinckley Jr. (The book was written by J.D. Salinger, who worked in military intelligence with Henry Kissinger during World War II.) Before going to trial, Chapman plead guilty after a voice in his head (which he attributed it to God) commanded him to do so.

Considering the history of World Vision and what went on previously in Guyana, it is possible that the real purpose behind repopulating Jonestown was to create another breeding ground for brainwashed zombies like Chapman and Hinckley. Nearby Jonestown there was a place called Hilltown, a compound of 8,000 blacks that followed cult leader Rabbi David Hill, who held his flock with an iron fist. Hill had so much power that he was referred to as the "vice prime minister" of Guyana. There was also another place in Guyana called "Johnstown," as well as similar operations in the Phillipines and Chile. It appears that Jonestown (and World Vision's later attempt) is hardly the exception to the rule of using obscure locations in Third World nations as laboratories for covert cult operations. The Jonestown site in Guyana was originally a Union Carbide mine, and was loaded with an abundance of precious natural resources. It is very likely that the site was chosen to exploit these resources with cheap labor -- and cheap labor was plentiful.

Members of Jim Jones' "church" were bound and gagged immediately after landing in Guyana and taken to the compound. They were pumped with drugs, which were available in vast amounts at Jonestown -- enough to drug 200,000 people for more than a year. Among the drugs found there: Quaaludes, Valium, morphine, Demerol, Thorazine (a dangerous tranquilizer), sodium pentathol (a truth serum), chloral hydrate (a hypnotic chemical agent), thallium (which confuses thinking), and, of course, cyanide. Jonestown residents lived in cramped quarters and ate meager rations of often spoiled food. They were then forced to give 16 to 18 hours of slave labor per day. When they weren't working, they were required to stay up day and night listening to Jim Jones lecture. Among the charming punishments the flock endured were forced druggings, sensory deprivation in an underground box, physical torture, and public sexual rape and humiliation, not to mention your average ordinary beatings and verbal abuse. All of the drugs and environmental conditions forced upon Jonestown residents were also employed in the CIA's notorious MKULTRA program, which was implemented to test and implement brainwashing and mind control techniques. A 1974 government report admitted that certain "target populations" were used, namely blacks, women, prisoners, the elderly, children, and inmates of psychiatric wards. The Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence, using the research of Strangelovian doctors Jose Delgado and Louis "Jolly" West, drew guinea pigs from the "target populations" to test drugs, implants, and psychosurgery techniques at an isolated military missile base in California. The dead at Jonestown were 90% women, 80% black, and included 276 children.

WHEN THE BODIES WERE SHIPPED BACK TO AMERICA, THERE WERE NO AUTOPSIES DONE, THEY WERE BURIED, AND THE FAMILIES WERE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE THEM
Which leads us back to Auschwitz and the ultimate deja vu. Auschwitz, after all, was not just a death camp: It was also a slave labor camp for Nazi military-industrial monolith I.G. Farben. There, the outcasts and refuse of society who no one cared about faced similar abuses, while an elite few profited from their misery. The brains behind the Final Solution became the brains behind MKULTRA. The MK is often said to stand for "Mind Kontrol" -- representing the Germanic origins of the project. Going the full ten yards, however, it is possible that MK merely stands for "Mein Kampf".Congressman Ryan probably suspected that Jonestown was a front for sinister covert activity. In 1980, Ryan aide Joseph Holsinger received a paper entitled "The Penal Colony," which explained that CIA MKULTRA operations did not terminate in 1973, as officially proclaimed, but instead continued in public hospitals, prisons, and religious cults which were used as fronts. Holsinger later stated at a San Francisco psychology forum on Jonestown that he believed the CIA worked with Jones to perform medical and mind control experiments at People's Temple. If Congressman Ryan had not been killed -- a big if -- many skeletons in the CIA's closet may have been exposed.


http://www.geocities.com/northstarzone/JONESTOWN.html
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psychopomp Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Apr-21-06 09:47 AM
Response to Reply #18
22. A fascinating and chilling post
Thanks for the deep history, there.
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walkon Donating Member (919 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 12:38 PM
Response to Original message
7. The anti-castros
have been very, very useful to the shadow government. Some have poppy Bush working with them in the 60's. I'm sure this bust is a big mistake. Alpha 66 has their own website.
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endarkenment Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 12:42 PM
Response to Original message
8. Oh that is ok he is a 'good terrorist'.
Were he muslim he would be facing the death penalty.
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Commie Pinko Dirtbag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 02:09 PM
Response to Original message
14. Some wild speculation entered my mind uninvited.
What if this guy is just a sleazy arms-dealing crook (which may, incidentally, have sold weapons to real anti-Castro groups, but that's irrelevant) and is now saying he's a "freedom fighter" to garner sympathy from the historically RW law enforcement establishment?

OK, maybe that is a load of BS. Or not. Discuss.
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rman Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Apr-21-06 08:46 AM
Response to Reply #14
21. It would fit the pattern
of CIA created and -financed "Anti-Cuba movement" - which in reality is a pro-Mafia and pro-RW dictatorship movement. See JFK, Bay of Bigs, Nixon.
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warrens Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 03:17 PM
Response to Original message
16. Send him to Gitmo
You know, help him get closer to Fidel. Fucking terrorists...why even bother charging him, just lock him up for life without a hearing or a trial.
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Media_Lies_Daily Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Apr-21-06 10:37 AM
Response to Reply #16
24. That won't happen to "our" terrorists. Have you noticed that....
...Osama, another one of "our" terrorists, is still on the loose?
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formercia Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Apr-20-06 03:39 PM
Response to Original message
17. Since when does Alpha 66 have a permit for automatic weapons?
another bullspit media story. Let's see if it makes the Evening News tonight.........
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pinniped Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Apr-21-06 03:34 AM
Response to Original message
19. Check this:
Edited on Fri Apr-21-06 03:35 AM by pinniped
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-guns21apr21,1,7187045.story

Group Denies Tie to Weapons
Cuban exiles say Robert Ferro, jailed after hundreds of guns were found at his Upland home, wasn't a member of their organization.


<--
Rozenberg said outside court that Ferro possessed government-issued weapons and said that how he acquired them "may come to light as this case develops."

Rozenberg said the U.S. government had supported the overthrow of Castro in the past. Ferro "simply continued that endeavor. The government is complicit, hoping he succeeds, and maybe even helping to succeed."-->

I hope this guy doesn't suffer a fatal fall of some sort. I want to hear him sing. I bet his contact was Raoul.
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Hekate Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Apr-21-06 04:26 AM
Response to Original message
20. Someone needs to tell the guy that Upland, CA is a bit far from Cuba...
...but you can drive up Mt Baldy for the skiing.

I saw the pic in the LA Times, too. He had enough weaponry to supply a small nation someplace.

Hekate

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Media_Lies_Daily Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Apr-21-06 10:11 AM
Response to Reply #20
23. If you were tasked with buying weapons and...
...you knew that you were being watched pretty closely in Florida, where would you go to buy those weapons? Alpha 66 has been around for quite some time and, with the help of their CIA contacts, they have become quite good at buying/shipping weapons from anywhere in the country,

During the early days of the CIA-run Cuban Task Force, the headquarters of that effort was located in Miami, Florida, but arms and supplies were being run out of virtually every port on the Gulf of Mexico, as well as virtually every port on the Atlantic coast of Florida.
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