The Terrorist
George Bush
Wants To Protect
By Alan Maass
22 May, 2005
Socialist
Worker
Any
nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded
by the United States as a hostile regime, George Bush told Congress
after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Unless, that is, the regime
in question is the U.S. government itself.
The U.S. is currently
harboring one of the worlds most deadly terrorists--anti-Castro
Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles. And the Bush administration shows
no signs of bringing him to justice.
Posada is the chief
suspect in the 1976 mid-air bombing of a Cuban commercial airliner that
killed 73 people. But that is only one in a long list of Posadas
terrorist atrocities--many of them carried out in operations supported
by the U.S. government.
After being pardoned
last year in Panama for his part in a plot to assassinate Cuban leader
Fidel Castro, Posada snuck into the U.S. in March, and his lawyer has
since been appealing for political asylum.
Last week, Venezuelas
Supreme Court demanded that U.S. authorities arrest Posada and extradite
him to stand trial for the Air Cubana bombing. The Bush administration
is faced with three choices, according to a New York Times report: granting
him asylum; jailing him for illegal entry; or granting Venezuelas
request for extradition.
Administration officials
are trying to avoid the controversy, but Posada poses, as journalist
Jim Lobe wrote, a particularly delicate problem for a president
whose family has long courted anti-Castro militants in the Cuban-American
community, but who himself has sworn that neither terrorists nor the
governments that harbor them should escape punishment.
Posadas involvement
in violence and murder stretches back four decades--and across a dozen
countries throughout Latin America.
Declassified documents
confirm that Posada was on the CIA payroll for much of the 1960s and
early 1970s, following the failure of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion
to overthrow Castro. In the late 1960s, Posada relocated to Venezuela,
where he was a senior officer for the countrys fanatically anti-communist
spy agency, known by the initials DISIP.
Through his ongoing
connections to DISIP, Posada was involved in the shadowy network of
terrorists and thugs that carried out the notorious Operation Condor--a
CIA-approved assassination spree against left-wing figures throughout
the Western Hemisphere.
Posada was present
at the June 1976 meeting in the Dominican Republic where two of Condors
most notorious killings were planned--the Air Cubana bombing and the
murder of Chiles former foreign minister Orlando Letelier. Letelier
was a leading figure in the left-wing government overthrown in a 1973
military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, with the cooperation of
the Nixon White House. Letelier was blown up along with his American
aide, Ronnie Moffit, in a car bombing in Washington, D.C. in September
1976.
DISIPs involvement
in the bombing of the Cuban airliner two weeks later became an embarrassment
for the Venezuelan government, which locked up Posada for nearly a decade
as a preventative measure--to prevent him from talking or being
killed, says retired FBI counterterrorism specialist Carter Cornick.
They knew that he had been involved.
Posada eventually
escaped prison in Venezuela, and turned up in El Salvador, running part
of the secret supply network used by the Reagan administration to funnel
arms and money to the right-wing contra army fighting to overthrow the
Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
When that operation
was exposed, he moved on to Guatemala, where he worked for a time as
an intelligence officer for the death-squad government. During the 1990s,
he organized a series of bombings of Havana tourist spots, including
one that killed an Italian visitor.
In 2000, Posada
traveled to Panama with three other men--one of whom was convicted in
the 1976 Letelier bombing--to assassinate Castro at an international
conference. The four were arrested, convicted and sentenced to eight
years in jail, but former President Mireya Moscoso pardoned them, on
humanitarian grounds.
If Posada is granted
asylum and allowed to stay in the U.S., it wont be the first time
that a Bush administration has shown its high regard for terrorists--as
long as their violence is aimed at Castro.
In 1990, George
Bush Sr. pardoned Orlando Bosch--a long-time conspirator with Posada
in anti-Castro terrorism, including the Air Cubana bombing. Bosch was
held in a Florida prison after illegally entering the U.S. in 1988,
but Bush Sr. signed his walking papers.
Many people believe
Bosch has his well-connected lobbyist to thank for the pardon--an ambitious
Florida politician named Jeb Bush. Today, Bosch lives well in a fancy
mansion in Miami--and is busy organizing support for his friend, Posada.
These killers are
the men the U.S. government relies on to fight its dirty wars in Latin
America.