Former Cuba president Fidel Castro says al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is a bought-and-paid-for CIA agent who always popped up when former US president George W. Bush needed to scare the world, arguing that documents recently posted on the Internet prove it.
“Any time Bush would stir up fear and make a big speech, bin Laden would appear threatening people with a story about what he was going to do,” Castro told state media during a meeting with a Lithuanian-born writer known for advancing conspiracy theories about world domination. “Bush never lacked for bin Laden’s support. He was a subordinate.”
Castro said documents posted on WikiLeaks.org — a Web site that recently released thousands of pages of classified documents from the Afghan war — “effectively proved he was a CIA agent.”
He did not elaborate.
The comments, published in the Communist Party daily Granma on Friday, were the latest in a series of provocative statements by the 84-year-old revolutionary, who has emerged from seclusion to warn that the planet is on the brink of nuclear war.
Castro even predicted global conflict would mean the cancellation of the final rounds of the soccer World Cup last month in South Africa. He later apologized for jumping the gun. Last week, he began highlighting the work of Daniel Estulin, who wrote a trilogy of books highlighting the Bilderberg Club, whose prominent members meet once a year behind closed doors.
The secretive nature of the meetings and prominence of some members — including former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, senior US and European officials, and major international business and media executives — have led some to speculate that it operates as a kind of global government, controlling not only international politics and economics, but even culture.
During the meeting, Estulin told Castro that the real voice of bin Laden was last heard in late 2001, not long after the Sept. 11 attacks. He said the person heard making warnings about terror attacks after that was a “bad actor.”
Castro stepped down because of ill health in 2006 — first temporarily, then permanently — and handed power over to his younger brother, Raul. He has remained head of the Cuban Communist party, but stayed out of view for four years before returning to the spotlight last month.
Castro did take exception to one of Estulin’s major theses: that the human race must move to another habitable planet or face extinction.
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