House Intelligence Committee chairman slams Obama’s Cuba visit

House Intelligence Committee chairman slams Obama's Cuba visit
By Janell Ross March 27 at 1:18 PM

In politics, optics — the look of something and the press it generates —
sometimes, no, often matter more than policy. And on Sunday, House
Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) described
the optics of Obama's decision to continue planned state visits to Cuba
and Argentina after Tuesday's terrorist attacks in Brussels as pretty
darn bad.

On "Fox News Sunday," Nunes described Obama's time in Cuba as "hanging
out...with a known financier of terrorism." Nunes implied that the
president's time might have been better spent last week focused on
rooting out terrorist cells around the world. He also described
these cells in language typically reserved for the coordinated efforts
of nation states to create empires. Nunes said the cells have
effectively established "colonies" for terrorist organizations such as
the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, and al-Qaeda in Africa,
Asia and Europe.

Here's the key part of what Nunes said from a show transcript.

So what needs to happen here is that the Obama administration submitted
their strategy to the United States Congress which was a seven page
strategy on defeating what they call extremism.

First of all, you have to define the problem. And so, look, I think it's
fair whether people say, what is your strategy? Well, look, the
president of the United States should not be hanging out in Cuba with a
known financier of terrorism.

What the president of the United States should be doing is calling
together all our allies in a coalition of the willing, including those
in the Middle East that want to sit down together as leaders at a
neutral location, put all the intelligence on the table so that we can
find out where all the pockets of ISIS and al Qaeda are. Because
remember, we have colonies now that have spread from Western Africa, all
the way to Southeast Asia and now it looks like they have a command and
control structure in parts of Europe.

So, what the president should be doing is sitting down with these
leaders, identifying the problem, and then coming up with a plan and
asking all the countries to participate more than they ever have in what
is really going to be a long war, a generational war against radical
Islamic extremism.

In 1982, Cuba earned a slot on the shortlist of nations the United
States officially considers as having financed terrorist activity. Cuba
helped to finance leftist political movements — some of them militarized
and violent — in Latin America during the 1980s.

[U.S. takes Cuba off list of state sponsors of terrorism]

In May, the Obama administration removed Cuba from the list, one step in
a larger effort to normalize relations between the United States and the
island nation. Only three countries remain on the current U.S. list of
state sponsors of terrorism: Iran, placed on the list in 1984; Sudan,
placed on the list in 1993; and Syria, which has been included since 1979.

Obama's state visit to Cuba was planned long before the Brussels terror
attacks. He described his decision to continue the visits to Cuba and
Argentina as an effort to show no capitulation to terrorist
organizations. However, Nunes connected the uninterrupted state visits
with what he described Sunday as an overall absence of a meaningful
strategy to address terrorism and the chaos of Syria.

Well, look, there's never really been a plan. So when you look at what
needs to be done in Iraq and Syria, that is a containment strategy. That
is not a strategy ultimately to defeat ISIS, because ISIS has spread
over to North Africa. So, a lot of the fighters and weapons and money,
et cetera, have been coming from North Africa into Syria and Iraq.

So, it's a containment strategy that's not working. We know it's not
working because the threat that was identified by the intelligence
community several years ago was that worst thing that could happen is
allowing people to go from the West into Iraq and Syria and then back
out. So, there's just a failed strategy here that's getting worse. You
have the secretary of state just on Friday saying that we're winning
against Syria — against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

This seems to me to be just delusional, while at the same time, you've
got the president of the United States dancing down in Argentina when he
should be meeting with the leaders of Europe and other allies to try to
take the fight to the enemy.

[Obama, in Argentina, rejects calls for change in strategy against
Islamic State]

Nunes, who is in his early 40s, is the youngest member of Congress to
serve as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence. As such, Nunes was born after the United States'
55-year-old Cuban embargo began. However, Nunes's comments Sunday
indicate that he is not part of the growing contingent of Americans who
view Cuba favorably or the nearly 60 percent who support normalizing
relations with Cuba, according to a pair of Gallup polls conducted this
and last year.
Janell Ross is a reporter for The Fix who writes about race, gender,
immigration and inequality.

Source: House Intelligence Committee chairman slams Obama's Cuba visit -
The Washington Post -
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/03/27/house-intelligence-committee-chairman-slams-obamas-cuba-visit/