Comment Re:$1.1 Trillion over 54 years... (Score 1) 540
I think the core of our disagreement rests on your conception that it is legal for countries to ban hostile agents. This is not the case.
And there you go again, denying Cuba's sovereignty. You may not like it, but it is Cuba's law. If you are a foreign agent acting in Cuba with the purpose of overthrowing the government, you can be convicted in Cuba. Even if the US, and even if no other country, has a law prohibiting crimes against the state (which I doubt!), Cuba can still have that law. It is not "my conception". Cuba has that law. You don't like it? You deal with Cuba, rather than just cover your ears and shout "lalala I can't hear you you have no such law".
Has it ever occurred to you that it's possible Cuban Law is simply wrong on this point? It's not like the Cubans have earned a reputation as a country that religiously complies with international norms. We actually do a lot better then Cuba on that point (in part because we wrote the norms back in '48) and I can name one example of US Law being blatantly (and needlessly) wrong in terms of international law.
To an extent they have the right to be wrong, because they are sovereign, but that doesn't mean the rest of us can;t call them on it. It just means that (again, lacking a Starfleet) we can't do much more then call them on it.
We require foreign agents of all powers, even Canada, to register with the authorities, so they can be charged for not registering
So, in practice, your law bans covert agents like Gross. You convict them for failing to register, the Cubans convict them for being covert agents.
Since you're talking about practice the actual letter of the law is irrelevant. What matters is convictions. Name one whose been convicted.
Seriously. Name a single person convicted of being an unregistered foreign agent who was not a citizen of the US.
But if we banned agents of a "hostile power" we'd be de facto banning other countries from being hostile powers, which even we acknowledge can't be done.
That is nonsensical. Banning hostile agents in your territory has no influence whatsoever over anyone who is not in your territory. And, as you said earlier, you already outlaw being a covert agent of a foreign country.
You realize you;re talking about thought crimes. He didn't have to do anything, but those thought he thought while he was in Washington DC were anti-Cuban, so he can be charged with thinking them while he was in Havana.
The logical extension of this is you can't convict foreign agents to multi-year jail terms simply for being part of a plan to oppose your government.
Again, it was not only for planning. It was for acting on those plans. If he had taken violent action (say, murder or bombings), would you agree with the attacked's sovereignty to convict him? If so, what's so different with a non-violent, but also illegal action, with respect to the attacked's sovereignty?
What are you actually saying in this paragraph?
Under my argument, if he'd killed somebody Cuba could charge him with murder.
If he was merely planning to kill somebody the Cubans could arrest him, and then detain him while they negotiated with the US.
The remedy for such plans in international law isn't that the agent gets nabbed, it's that the attacked country gets lots of sympathy for it's retaliation against the attacker's government.
Cuba retaliating against the US. That's rich. The closest thing Cuba can do in retaliation to the US is... arrest the agent.
Nobody said the international system was fair. It's specifically designed to be unfair to anyone who wasn't in the Big Five in '48. It's not America's fault that the other 190-odd nations seem to prefer being minnows in a five-power-sea to giving up their autonomy to a new nation that includes those assholes next door.
That said, even Cuba would have plenty of avenues. You get the Russians and Chinese on-side it's gonna inconvenience Obama in the Security Council. The OAS is a thing that Obama has to pay attention to. You start throwing around the phrase "war crimes" and multiple Spanish and Italian jurists will start criminal proceedings against American officials.
Then they blow a plane out of the sky
...during their 26th attempt to violate Cuba's airspace. I do not condone shooting down the plane in international waters, but you are again being disingenous. They didn't "shot down the plane because they like the embargo". They (over)reacted to a long string of provocations, crafted precisely to increase tensions. "The
group saw its defiance of Cuban law and Cuban airspace as an
example of civil disobedience for Cubans on the island. (...) Several times during the past year, including on Jan. 9
and again on Jan. 13, Hermanos flew over Havana dropping
leaflets (...) Many observes believe that Basulto and other hard-line
exiles, unhappy with the relatively light sanctions by
Washington, are determined to raise tensions between Havana
and the US even further to provoke more stringent reprisals
from the Clinton administration. (...)"
Did you read this? This is exactly the behavior I'm talking about.
In international relations when something pisses you off you don't bitch about in press releases for 25 flights, and then go straight for the jugular. You escalate gradually. Your Migs buzz the invaders. The next time you fire warning shots. Then you can claim that you were acting rationally. You do this to demonstrate that a) you really had no choice, and b) you really didn't want to kill those guys.
Heck, the first paragraph is a Cuban attempt to shift blame for destroying the thaw in their relationship with the US to the exiles. No fucking shit the exiles were trying to destroy the thaw, that's what they do. If you're Cuba, and you want the thaw to continue, your job is let them get away with most of it and demonstrate you aren't trying to piss the US off in the rare occasions you do respond.
or sentence one of your guys to 15 years hard labor, or whatever.
(Hard labor? "our" guys? I do not know what are you talking about. I don't know who "your" refers to.)
Same "your" as the "you" in the preceding sentence: the US. Gross is the guy sentenced to 15 years.
And he's much less likely to try because ending the embargo doesn't actually help the US, and the Cubans have a history of being very passive and easy to get along with until you ease up on the embargo.
This is obviously a "might makes right" situation. US provokes, provokes, provokes again, and when the Cubans finally react, you say that "the cubans are easy to get along with until you ease up on the embargo". The collorary is that, in your view, the Cubans should ignore all hostilities and just let themselves be invaded.
Don't be ridiculous. Might has nothing to do with it.
Ireland is much less powerful then the UK, yet when the Irish were trying to get a final peace deal in Northern Ireland several of their dissident groups increased attacks on Brits. Note that a) Ireland has 1/3 the population of London, b) Ireland is poorer per capita then the Brits, and c) a bombing that actually kills dozens of people is a hell of a lot more provocative then anything any American has done to Cuba for four decades. But the right thing for the UK to do was not retaliate. Retaliation was precisely what the bombers wanted.
Note that both the exiles in the planes, and the Congressmen who insisted Gross be sent on his mission; wanted Cuba to over-react. It was their plan.
Either the Cubans are too stupid to see that, or Cuba's plan is to continue the embargo indefinitely.
and then it's applied to US Citizens or to foreign agents who get freed as a deal before trial. You will note the latter is exactly what I was expecting Cuba to do for Gross.
(Sorry for changing the order. I wanted to address this the last, because any discussion on this is irrelevant if Gross is not actually guilty).
Let's be honest now. The moment Cuba proposed an exchange, it would have backed up Obama into a corner, as it would have appeared that they took an "innocent hostage" to extract some concession. As evidence of that, you are still claiming Gross' innocence. I do not know if or how Cuba reached out privately before the trial, but publicly demanding anything would have guaranteed condemnation. Unfortunately for everyone, Obama let himself get backed into a corner anyway. Rather than acknowledging that Gross was an agent (which would have allowed him to negotiate), he opted for "evil cubans taking innocent hostage, must release him unconditionally." By not demanding concessions up-front, the Cubans gave Obama the opportunity to negotiate without appearing to sacrifice his integrity, and he turned it down.
Arresting Gross would always have resulted in drama. That's a given. You don't get a press release saying "we got a spy," followed by a week of secret negotiations, and a secret deal.
If they wanted to avoid drama they actually should have let him through. A spy you know about is a minimal risk, and can actually be an asset, which is a major reason there are so few cases of spies being arrested.
Nearly offtopic:
As for our attempt to impose the DMCA on Russians, you will note it failed miserably. And we actually had a somewhat decent chance of success, given that some Americans were using the tool in a way that was arguably illegal. You'll also note that we got our asses handed to us in Court.
To my recollection (I don't real legalese, unfortunately), the american courts never recognized a lack of jurisdiction, just that the charges were bogus. If that's true, that means that the court did believe that they had the right to convict the programmer and his employer for actions done entirely outside the US.
If the charges are bogus then jurisdiction doesn;t really matter.
If Obama tried to ban Passover Seders, and then arrested some guy in a skull cap getting off the New York-Jerusalem flight the Courts probably would not bother with the question of jurisdiction.
