TIL: A bit of forgotten American history; Kash Patel; Cuba; Latin America

This is a clip, a little over 14 minutes, from a longer video that I have not watched and features Katie Halper, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson and Mexican journalist Jose Luis Granados Ceja.

First, the forgotten American history from Wilkerson, always a great source for anecdotes you don't hear elsewhere:

The Marquis de Lafayette visited Simon Bolivar, I think it was in Caracas, to deliver a letter from George Washington. Bolivar said, "I am greatly honored because I am in receipt of a letter from a man who is the greatest hero the world has ever had in terms of liberty and freedom, delivered by his aide who is equally famous for that." It was a colossal moment and I used to cite it to my students because it proved how much at that particular time Washington was revered not just in North America but everywhere in the world because he'd refused to assume ultimate power; instead he put down his sword, so to speak, and entered the civilian world to become president through the [Constitutional] methodology that was developed.

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Kash Patel

Halper: Kash Patel is making the lives of Cubans unnecessarily hard and in some cases actually killing people and yet (photos) he enjoys going there or has enjoyed going there in the past.

Wilkerson: you might as well talk about Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano and Fulgencio Batista and all the rest of them who were the same types. Kash Patel is officially a thug and a gangster.

Ceja: Patel got to that position because he wrote a children's book that basically portrayed Donald Trump as like the best thing since sliced bread and then he became the head of the FBI.

Halper: Let's just take a look at this opus by Kash Patel. "The Plot Against the King." It's actually a trilogy with the third one titled "The Return of the King." [cringe]

Wilkerson: What you're looking at there really is the Sith Lord and Pete Hegseth is Darth Vader.

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Cuba

Wilkerson: I think the greatest thing that's happened in the last 48 to 96 hours is that the Russian tanker has landed. I would say Putin and Trump probably talked about this ahead of time but we've already seen the complete negation of the so-called Monroe Doctrine/Trump doctrine. When Kirov [I think this refers to a class of ship rather than its name] landed in Havana along with a nuclear attack submarine, Kirov was poo-pooed by the American military as "oh that's not much of a warship to be calling in Cuba." It showed how ignorant the American military is about these hypersonic missiles because Kirov carries enough missiles to sink an American carrier in a second.

The one thing that troubled me and worried me was that Putin seemed to back off when we did Venezuela. He could have made a difference there, he could have come in and escorted some of those tankers because we're not going to challenge Russia. They have what we have and they have a lot more of what we have in some very important categories. But Putin is very careful to be prudent and circumspect about what he does. Sometimes I wish he'd violate that a little bit. But he wants better relations with Washington because we still play a pretty heavy game in the world. He's a smart man; he and Xi Jinping and Sergey Lavrov and Wang Yi are probably the four smartest men in the world.

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Latin America

Ceja: Biden's legacy in Latin America as senator and vice president was very negative. When he was running [for president] he told the NYT, "That was me. I was Plan Colombia." Plan Columbia promised to address the root causes of the armed conflict but turned into a massive dump of money for the armed forces which then committed human rights abuses and slaughtered campesinos. There was essentially a bounty for every guerrilla that you killed so they would dress up the people they murdered as guerrillas in order to claim the bounty and rise in the ranks within the Colombian forces. The US was told this but the money continued to flow. The same thing essentially happened here in Mexico with the Mérida Initiative. It was Plan Colombia but for Mexico: same promises, same results, human rights violations and no actual progress.

What's happened to the Gulf countries should be a lesson for Latin America, for the Mileis, the Bukeles, the Naboas of this region who think that the path to salvation is aligning themselves with and basically kissing up to US imperialism because when push comes to shove, the US will not be there for them. It's those smaller states that don't have energy and food sovereignty that will pay the price if there's a global recession or depression. Is the US going to come and bail them out? Absolutely not. The winning strategy is regional integration so if these leaders want to play lap dog to the empire, at least they should get out of the way for the rest of us who actually want to do better for the populations that are living in this part of the world.