Did Obama send Missing Hellfire Missile to Castro’s Cuba
Rlgrimes 01/07/2016
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http://universalfreepress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/missing-hellfire.jpg It isn’t clear how an inert Hellfire missile wound up in Cuba during Obama’s negotiations with the Communist nation. Above, a Hellfire missile in 2009. PHOTO:
For the last year and a half, while Obama has been trying to figure out ways to steal American citizens guns and making it harder for law abiding citizens to purchase weapons, His military-industrial complex has been giving one of our most advanced weapons to Cuba. That’s right, in the spring of 2014 in the middle of negotiations with Cuba on normalizing relations, Castro got a special delivery package via Air France, an inert U.S. Hellfire missile.
Sources say that the missile was originally sent to Spain to be used in a NATO exercise, and then was to be returned to Lockheed-Martin. Instead, after the exercise was complete, the missile was repacked and sent to Cuba. People familiar with the loss of such sensitive military technology say that the loss ranks among the worst-known incidents of its kind.
The supposed unintended delivery of the missile to Cuba has confounded investigators and experts who work in a regulatory system designed to prevent precisely such equipment from falling into the wrong hands, said those familiar with the matter. For more than a year, amid a historic thawing of relations between the U.S. and Cuba, American authorities have tried to get the Cuban government to return the missile, said people familiar with the matter. At the same time, federal investigators have been tracing the paper trail of the wayward Hellfire to determine if its arrival in Cuba was the work of criminals or spies, or the result of a series of blunders.
Hellfires are probably the most used air-to-ground missile in the U.S. arsenal. They are often fired from helicopters and are the primary weapon used on predator drones. They were first designed as antitank weapons decades ago, but have been modernized to become an important part of the U.S. government’s antiterrorism arsenal, often fired from Predator drones.
This particular missile didn’t contain explosives, but U.S. officials worry that Cuba could share the sensors and targeting technology inside it with nations like China, North Korea or Russia. Officials don’t think Cuba is likely to try to take apart the missile on its own to develop similar weapons technology, but they could sell the technology to third parties. It is unclear if a U.S. adversary has ever obtained such knowledge of a Hellfire.
U.S. officials said the case of the missing missile, while highly unusual, points to long-standing concerns about the security of international commercial shipping and the difficulty of keeping close tabs on important items. “Did someone take a bribe to send it somewhere else? Was it an intelligence operation, or just a series of mistakes? That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out,” said one U.S. official. Or was it all just a payoff to an unfriendly government that a narcissistic president was trying to entice into resuming relations with to enhance his legacy?
The government response to the missing missile has been two-pronged. First, it has tried to get the missile back. Second, officials want to determine who, if anyone, intentionally sent it off course. That effort has gone slowly, the people familiar with the probe said, in large part because the most important clues are in Europe, where evidence-gathering is subject to transnational diplomatic requests that can take years to complete. Long after a President has left office and public furor has subsided.
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http://universalfreepress.com/2016/did-obama-send-missing-hellfire-missile-to-castros-cuba/
