• Submitted by: admin
• International
• North America
• Politics and Government
• 09 / 13 / 2007

The essay that appears yesterday in the Communist party newspaper Granma, appeared to be Castro's first public description of the matter.

Castro wrote that a Cuban security official stationed at the United Nations told U.S. mission security chief Robert Muller about an extreme right-wing group that was planning to assassinate Reagan during a planned trip to North Carolina in 1984.

"The information was complete: the names of those implicated in the plan; day, time and hour where the assassination could occur; the type of weapon the terrorists had and where they kept their arms; and along with all that, the meeting place of those elements planning the action as well as a brief summary of what had occurred in said meeting," Castro wrote.

Castro wrote that Cuban authorities learned later that the FBI had arrested several people in North Carolina. Several days after that, Muller expressed America's thanks to the Cuban official over lunch in a UN dining room.

The Cuban leader also wrote that when Reagan survived an assassination attempt in 1981, Havana formally condemned the act during a meeting with the head of the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba.

Castro also accused the U.S. government of misleading the public about the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington six years ago.

"It is now known there was deliberate disinformation" about the attacks, the Cuban leader wrote. "We were tricked like everybody else on the planet."

Conspiracy theorists have suggested New York's World Trade Center was brought down with explosives after hijacked airplanes crashed into them in 2001 and that the Pentagon in Washington was struck by a missile, not a jetliner.

Source: The Canadian Press