By Kenn Thomas

After Fidel Castro stepped down as Cuban dictator, CNN’s post on the fanciful US assassination plots against him included the following:

Project Amlash-Rolando Cubela. Cubela, whose code name was Amlash, was a member of Castro’s inner circle from the beginning. He had become disenchanted and made contact with the CIA as early as 1961. Nestor Sanchez, his CIA case officer, was meeting with Cubela in Paris when President Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963. Sanchez provided Cubela that day — at Cubela’s request — a poison pen-syringe to be used either on Castro or on himself, in case of a failed attempt. Nothing happened. As CIA covert operations against Castro began winding down, the Agency put Cubela in touch with Manuel Artime, the exiled chief of a 300-member, CIA-funded exile guerrilla army operating for Central America. The joint Artime- Cubela plan was for Cubela to assassinate Castro when he gave his annual July 26, 1965, speech at Varadero, a beach resort on Cuba’s north coast. The assassination would coincide with a seaborne invasion by Artime’s forces with the presumed support of several Cuban army officers in the area. The operation was canceled in late June 1965 after it became compromised.

Here’s what I have to say about Rolando Cubela in my latest book, Conspiracy Files (Murdoch Books, Australia): Read more »

Kenn Thomas Interviewed by Kali of Karmapolis.

1 - FEMA detention camps have been subjected to a lot of writing and speculation during these last years in United States. Videos, images and detailed descriptions of these camps are available on the net. It is difficult to source the origin of these descriptions. Do they really exist? What are their final purpose?

Activists in parapolitical studies - let’s call them “conspiranistas” - come up with these identifications to underscore the idea that America still has disaster areas that suffer from federal emergency mismanagement. As Randy Newman sings, “free to live in a cage in East St. Louis and the south side of Chicago,” with the obvious most recent example being post-Katrina New Orleans. The kind of detailed thing you refer to, with video images and all, rarely reaches a level above rumor. The conspiracy-denial world sees it as benign neglect; the conspiranistas would call it a deliberate, planned effort to corral the poor and dispossessed for future execution. I would characterize it more as malevolent neglect. Certainly when George Bush patted former FEMA management head Michael Brown on the back and said “Good job!”, he was rubbing it in, and announcing that he really didn’t give a damn about taking responsibility for the Katrina aftermath. Brown previously had been professionally wrapped up in cosmetic surgery for horses. On the other hand, someone like Lt. General Russell Honoré, who led the relief convoy into New Orleans, is certainly not anyone people would expect to round up and execute civilians. He was a real hero, in fact, heading the largest military deployment in the American south since the Civil War in order to rescue people. But whether or not the concentration camps you describe exist, no one doubts the existence of large lots of empty, unused FEMA trailers while people displaced from disasters supposedly managed by FEMA remain homeless.

2 - Are these camps the same ones that were used for Japanese and German civilians during World War II?

No. Different thing entirely. The equivalent of the old internment camps for the Japanese would be something like having a camp for people of Middle eastern ethnic origin. The Japanese camps, for instance, were in very specific places in Arkansas, California, Utah and Wyoming and were closed by official order in December 1945. These are not the places where the current FEMA camps are rumored. Read more »