Cuban Terrorists Bush's Freedom Fighters?

Cuban Terrorist Tests Bush Administration's Convictions (Politics)

By Drog
Fri May 13th, 2005 at 06:28:08 PM EST

On May 5, the New York Times reported that Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles, who has spent the last 45 years in a violent struggle to overthrow Fidel Castro, may have snuck into Florida in an attempt to seek political asylum for having served as a cold war soldier on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1960's. Posada has long been a symbol for the armed anti-Castro movement in the U.S.

But he is also, by virtually any definition, a terrorist.



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Posada was accused in November 2000 of plotting to assasinate Fidel Castro during a visit to Panama, and was arrested along with three colleagues and 33 pounds of C-4 plastic explosives. He received an 8-year sentence in April 2004 for endangering public safety, but was pardoned eight months ago by Panama's President Mireya Moscoso during her last week in office, citing humanitarian reasons. Ms. Moscoso, incidentally, has long had a home in Key Biscayne, Florida and has strong social ties to Cuban conservatives there.
Posada has boasted to plotting numerous attacks that damaged tourist spots in Havana and killed an Italian visitor there in 1997.

On Sept. 21, 1976, a car bomb killed Orlando Letelier, a former foreign minister of Chile, and his American aide Ronni Moffitt, in Washington D.C. Fifteen days later, a Cubana Airlines flight was blown out of the sky off the coast of Barbados, killing all 73 people onboard. Posada has always denied any involvment in the bombing. But Mr. Cornick, the FBI counterterrorism specialist who worked on the Letelier case, says that both bombings were planned at a June 1976 meeting in Santo Domingo, attended by Mr. Posada. A November 1976 [FBI] report, obtained from government files by the private research group National Security Archive, places Mr. Posada at two meetings where the Cubana bombing was plotted. It quotes their Cuban-American informer as saying, "If Posada Carriles talks, the Venezuelan government will 'go down the tube."

"The information was so strong that they locked up Posada as a preventative measure - to prevent him from talking or being killed. They knew that he had been involved," said Mr. Cornick, referring to the Venezuelan authorities. "There was no doubt in anyone's mind, including mine, that he was up to his eyeballs" in the Cubana bombing.

Posada was detained by the Venezuelan government for almost nine years, never formally convicted or acquitted of the bombing, until he escaped his minimum-security confines in 1985.

Now, Venezuela wants him back. According to Reuters, Venezuela is demanding Posada's extradition from the U.S. where his lawyer says he is indeed seeking asylum.

Prensa Latina reports that President Fidel Castro has stated that Luis Posada Carriles should be judged in Venezuela, stressing that Cuba has renounced its claim on him in order to facilitate justice. "There is not the least chance that Posada Carriles ends being judged in Havana," Castro said. "What we are interested in is that Posada Carriles does not escape and he is brought to court. We are not led by mean-spirited vengeance." Castro said that Venezuela is the country with the most legal rights to judge Posada Carriles and there is no reason to be suspicious of that nation. He pointed out that Venezuela does not have the death penalty, so there is no argument for those opposed to his extradition, who now allege he might be tortured there. They are grasping at straws to maintain impunity for Posada Carriles and his accomplices, including Orlando Bosch, who was given refuge by president George Bush Sr. and now boasts about his crimes in Miami, he said.

Indeed, although the current Bush Administration has said that no nation should harbor suspected terrorists, the first Bush Administration seems to have done just that. In 1989, the U.S. Justice Department moved to deport Orlando Bosch, a longtime ally of Posada's, despite resistance from Miami's Cuban-Americans. Joe D. Whitley, an associate U.S. attorney general at the time (now General Counsel of the Department of Homeland Security), called Bosch "a terrorist, unfettered by laws or human decency, threatening and inflicting violence without regard to the identity of his victims." Mr. Whitley added: "The United States cannot tolerate the inherent inhumanity of terrorism as a way of settling disputes. Appeasement of those who would use force will only breed more terrorists. We must look on terrorism as a universal evil, even if it is directed toward those with whom we have no political sympathy."

But the Bush administration overruled the deportation in 1990, and Bosch has remained in Florida ever since.

Now, the current Bush administration faces the same test of their convictions. Do they grant Posada asylum, thus compromising their principle that those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as terrorists themselves? Do they extradite him, thus handing a victory to President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Castro's closest ally in Latin America and no friend to President Bush? Or do they jail him themselves, thus handing a victory to Castro, who has railed against Posada in recent speeches, calling him the worst terrorist in the Western Hemisphere?

Time will tell.