“Black Friday," the day after Thanksgiving, is traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year as Christmas shoppers pack malls and department stores to suffocation.

Intrepid terrorists could get maximum bang for their buck on “Black Friday.” A few well-placed bombs and the carnage would easily exceed 9/11's.

Macy's, for instance, usually serves a minimum of 50,000 shoppers on that one day. If nothing else, the terrorist theme would make for a hair-raising Hollywood drama or disaster blockbuster.

Credibility might be a problem, however. After all, even the most bloodthirsty and psychopathic terrorists seek government or semi-military targets: The Pentagon, The U.S.S. Cole, Marine barracks in Lebanon, embassies in Kenya, Saudi Arabia, etc. Typecasting one who craved massive civilian carnage for the malicious sake of massive civilian carnage might edge the movie over into Austin Powers comedy genre.

Yet the movie could be based on a terrorist living today who planned this very type of civilian carnage barely 46 years ago. He's not holed up in some Pakistani cave either. This terrorist is feted by visiting dignitaries ranging Kofi Annan to Steven Spielberg, from Jimmy Carter to Charles Rangel, from Arlen Specter to Gregory Craig, from Barbara Walters to Jesse Jackson, and from Andrea Mitchell to, most recently, Hu Jintao.

He occasionally grants interviews to star-struck luminaries of the Beltway media. Dan Rather and Barbara Walters count themselves among The Chosen. Ted Turner refers to his terrorist friend, Fidel Castro, as "one helluva guy!" Andrea Mitchell, commenting on the unexpected honor of interviewing Castro, referred to him as "an absolutely fascinating figure!"

Mitchell might find what Fidel Castro planned for Manhattan on the Friday after Thanksgiving 1962, equally fascinating. On Nov. 17, 1962, J. Edgar Hoovers' FBI cracked a terrorist plot (though the term "terrorist" was not used at the time) by Castro-Cuban agents that targeted Macy's, Gimbel's, Bloomindales and Manhattan's Grand Central Station with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set to go off the following week, the day after Thanksgiving.

A little perspective: for their March 2004 Madrid subway blasts -- all 10 of them -- that killed and maimed almost 2,000 people, al Qaeda used a grand total of 100 kilos of TNT. Fidel Castro's agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in the three biggest department stores on earth, all packed to suffocation and pulsing with holiday cheer on the year's biggest shopping day. Thousands of New Yorkers, including women and children -- actually, given the date and targets, probably mostly women and children -- were to be incinerated and entombed.

This godfather of terrorism still lives 90 miles from our shores in tropical splendor for all to see. Yearly he makes Forbes' list of the world's wealthiest. But forget any Hollywood movie about him -- at least as a villain. That role is reserved for such as Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover.

Indeed Castro reigns as a veritable icon for many of Hollywood's best and brightest. Oliver Stone refers to Castro as "a very moral, very humane man." Jack Nicholson gushes about his frequent Cuban host as "a genius!" and his island gulag as "a paradise!” Francis Ford Coppola penned a love letter to him. "Fidel I love you," it starts, "we both have the same initials and both use our power for good."

Castro planned his Manhattan holocaust short weeks after Nikita Khrushchev foiled his plans for an even bigger one. "Say hello to my little friends!" Castro dreamt of yelling at the hated Yankees in October 1962, right before the mushroom clouds. But for the prudence of the Butcher of Budapest (Nikita Khrushchev), Castro might have pulled it off. "If the missiles had remained," Fidel's sidekick Che Guevara confided to the London Daily Worker in November 1962 regarding the Cuban missile crisis, "We would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York."

Khrushchev himself admitted that Fidel and Che's genocidal fantasy was a bigger factor in his decision to yank the missiles than Kennedy's bogus bluster and "blockade."

Castro's Manhattan bomb plot was far from "irrational." He's no suicide bomber -- not by a long shot. Castro wanted to blast Manhattan to heat things up again, to rekindle all those thrills he’d experienced the previous weeks during the Missile Crisis. Given the temper of the times, he knew his Soviet sugar daddies would be implicated too. Then the U.S. might retaliate. Then Castro would have exactly what he'd dreamed about and tried to provoke a few weeks earlier: an intercontinental nuclear exchange.

Millions dead in the United States. Millions dead in the Soviet Union. And almost certainly, millions dead in his own Cuba.But Castro himself would be nowhere near harms way.

Soviet ambassador to Cuba during the missile crisis, Alexander Alexeyev, reports a fascinating -- if unsurprising -- datum about those days. While Castro was begging, threatening, even trying to trick Khrushchev into launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the U.S. -- while he was ranting and yelling and waving his arms about grabbing his Czech machine gun and "fighting the Yankee invaders to the last man!" -- while frantically involved in all this, a "fearful" (Alexeyev's term) Castro was also making reservations with Alexeyev for a first-class seat in the Soviet Embassy's bomb shelter. Thus he'd emerge into the smoldering rubble and millions of incinerated bodies and realize his lifelong dream: his name stamped in history as the gallant David against the yankee Goliath.

Castro's agents for his Manhattan Thanksgiving bomb plot were members of the Cuban mission to the United Nations working in concert with members of the Fair Play For Cuba Committee, an outfit that became much better known a year later when member Lee Harvey Oswald really racked up some headlines.

Incidentally, at the time of the Manhattan terror plot, the Fair Play For Cuba Committee also included among it's members, CBS correspondent Robert Taber (an early version of Dan Rather, who conducted Castro's first network television soft-soaping on Aug. 30, 1957), along with The Nation magazine co-owner Alan Sagner. In 1996 President Clinton appointed the obviously unbiased Alan Sagner head of the scrupulously even-handed Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Oddly, given Alan Sanger's impeccable Clintonite and Castroite credentials, he remains unrecruited by Obama? But it's still early. Give him time.

In November 1995 Castro was on triumphant visit to Manhattan. He was the star speaker and main attraction at the United Nation's 50th anniversary bash -- the guest of honor. "The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan!" read a Newsweek story that week, referring to the social swirl that engulfed him. After his whooping, hollering, foot-stomping ovation in the General Assembly, Castro was feted by the New York's best and brightest, hob-nobbing with dozens of Manhattan's glitterati, pundits and power brokers.

First, there was dinner at the Council of Foreign Relations. After holding court there for a rapt David Rockefeller along with Robert McNamara, Dwayne Andreas and Random House's Harold Evans, Castro flashed over to Mort Zuckerman 5th Avenue pad, where a throng of Beltway glitterati, including a breathless Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Tina Brown, Bernard Shaw and Barbara Walters all jostled for brief tryst, cooing and gurgling to Castro’s every comment. All clamored for autographs and photo-ops. Diane Sawyer was so overcome in the mass-killer's presence that she rushed up, broke into that toothy smile of hers, wrapped her arms around Castro and smooched him warmly on the cheek.

"You people are the cream of the crop!" beamed "El Lider Maximo" (translates almost perfectly to Führer in German) to the smiling throng that surrounded him.

"Hear-hear!" chirped the delighted guests while tinkling their wine glasses in appreciation and glee.

And the mass-murderer and terrorist had barely scratched the surface of his fan club. According to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, on that visit, Castro received 250 dinner invitations from Manhattan celebrities and power-brokers many a millionaire. That November of 1995, Time magazine, referring to the adulation and acclaim by Manhattanites for the man who twice tried to incinerate Manhattan, hailed Castro as "The Toast of Manhattan!"

On Thanksgiving week of 1962 Fidel Castro and Che Guevara planned on "toasting" Manhattan alright.

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Floyd Martin said:

	COMPLAINT I don't like the new website. I can't even figger how to forward anything to anybody. That's NOT good
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December 05, 2008
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Editor said:

Operations Manager Floyd, Please accept my apologies for your trouble in getting used to the new site. If you look right above your comment, and just below the last bit of text of the article, you'll see a hyperlinked phrase next to an icon of an envelope that says "Email This." At the top of the article, where the article starts, you'll see another hyperlinked phrase that says "Share This." If you pass your cursor over it, a drop down menu will appear where you can post this article on a number of news sites, such as Digg, and so forth. Call HQ if you have anymore questions and we'll be glad to help.

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December 05, 2008
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danwhitehead1 said:

	... There is one good thing I can say about the filthy,loathsome, craven, squealing swine who make up the media: anything and anyone they approve MUST be bad.
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December 05, 2008
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Bliss Tew said:

... Thank goodness for Humberto Fontova and his reminder about the supreme terrorist living 90-miles south of our Florida coast-- Fidel Castro. Besides the plots to destroy manhattan with TNT or nuclear weapons, Fidel Castro once held a global terrorist meeting in Havana in the 1960s to provide a forum for networking among the terrorists of the world. Yet, Fidel is invited to the CFR to speak and allowed into our country like some honored guest.

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December 06, 2008
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msfreeh said:

	FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE To view a partial list of over 1500 pages of crimes committed by FBI agents see http://www.campusactivism.org/....php?f=29 and http://www.globalresearch.ca/
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December 06, 2008 | url
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Umve said:

	communism I know a coworker at sears that not only praises FDR even though he was a communist. this coworker also hates the free market because its full of "greedy rich people." true some are greedy but not all are. anyone who would speak about fidel castro being a good man even though he took everything from every one and redistributed the wealth is nothing but a socialist drone.
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December 06, 2008
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Charles_Byrd said:

	Wow Just think how differently history would have turned out if the 1962 plot succeeded.
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December 06, 2008
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Peter Steele said:

My late father and his warnings My late father saw what was going to happen in 1955. Acting on a tip, he went to Washington from St. Louis to warn President Eisenhower about Castro being a communist. It was this tip he tried to help our government and the American people. Dad was a National Association of Manufacturers twice winner and a Valley Forge Freedoms Foundation award winner and friend of Barry M. Goldwater, Sr. Dad witnessed Operation Keelhaul while in Bremenhaven, Germany after WWII. He knew that America was going to get into a lot of trouble. I caught Sweden's Olaf Palme down in Cuba with Castro and he was killed for that. I sent the article to a Karin Wahlstrom of Stockholm, Sweden as she knew my family. The NYT called Castro the George Washington of Cuba and Carter did not deserve his Nobel Peace Prize for shaking Castro's hand and the film "The Day After" as well as ghostrwiting for Yasser Arafat. This is a disgrace to our Founding Father George Washington!! Peter F. Steele

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December 08, 2008
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jmarsh said:

Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals (Savages) Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals (Savages) In order that more people become aware of the strategy used by leftist against people like Sarah Palin, I offer the following: Hollywood leftist radicals and media leftist radicals are well trained in the art of destroying the reputation of good people and they will pull no punches. Palin was a real threat to Obama’s bid for the presidency. She had to be smeared, even annihilated. She was slandered, and ridiculed mercilessly by Hollywood leftist and the leftist media. The method the leftist use is called Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. These rules found at the following web address: http://www.geocities.com/WallS...linsky.htm There are 12 rules and I suggest everyone familiarize themselves with these 12 rules. It’s said there is no defense against these 12 brutal principles. In the media where a person cannot strike back immediately there may be no defense, but in a situation where one can respond quickly and repeatedly the radicals become helpless, if the right method is used.—attack, attack, attack!

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December 08, 2008 | url
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