[Marxism] Accused Terrorist May Yet Face Justice

[Walter Lippmann]

Accused Terrorist May Yet Face Justice
Ali Gharib

WASHINGTON, Nov 17 (IPS) - Since April, an accused terrorist
mastermind has walked free in the streets of Miami, Florida while
U.S. officials have refused to allow his extradition to Venezuela.
That is, until the subject was finally broached this week on Capitol
Hill. Thursday's hearing on suspected terrorist Luis Posada Carriles
-- an extremist anti-Casto Cuban exile -- marks the first
congressional foray into a drama where the Justice Department has
severely bungled attempts to hold and prosecute a man described by
the committee chairman as having "a reputation as a notorious
terrorist" with "a well-documented history of violence."

"What was significant about this hearing is that is signals the
exercise of congressional oversight of the scandalous situation that
the Bush administration has created with Luis Posada," Peter
Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive's Cuba programme,
told IPS.

The hearing examined the story of a man with a 40-year record of
violence across the Americas that sounds like it comes from the pages
of a political spy thriller rather than photocopies of declassified
Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency
documents dug up by Kornbluh's organisation, which works to
declassify such evidence and provide it to the public.

The most notorious crime for which Posada is believed responsible was
the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed all 73 people
aboard, most of them Caribbean nationals.

Posada was also implicated in a series of terrorist bombings in Cuba
in 1997 in which one person was killed and 11 wounded, as well as an
alleged assassination plot against Cuban President Fidel Castro, for
which he was ultimately pardoned by Panama's U.S.-friendly President
Mireya Moscoso, at the behest of Cuban-American members of Congress.
Posada entered the U.S. illegally in 2004, and later applied for
asylum here.

When his whereabouts became known, Posada was arrested by Homeland
Security authorities and charged with immigration fraud. But these
charges were dismissed in 2007 when the judge in the case cited
misconduct in his naturalisation interview.

However, then attorney-general Alberto Gonzalez could have kept
Posada indefinitely detained under the USA Patriot Act had he simply
classified him as a terrorist.

"The U.S. government has three options to show it's serious about
fighting terrorism," said Kornbluh.

One way is certification under the Patriot act. Another is
"extradition to Venezuela -- a country which has filed a legitimate
petition for him to be returned because he is a fugitive from justice
there and a naturalised Venezuelan citizen and [an airliner bombing]
was planned and organized in Venezuela. The third option they have is
to indict him for terrorism crimes."

Venezuela has had an extradition treaty with the U.S. since 1922 that
requires that fugitives are either returned or charged locally with
the same crimes.

The slowly unfolding incident hints at a double standard in
Washington's stance toward terrorism, a battle that often requires
the assistance of foreign governments.

Suspects with alleged ties to Islamic extremists are often detained
indefinitely and subject to harsh treatment such as in the cases of
"rendition" to countries known to practice torture. Simultaneously, a
man with a like-minded foreign policy goal as the administration --
namely regime change in Cuba -- and accused of masterminding numerous
attacks on civilian targets roams within U.S. borders unimpeded by
authorities.

"We must demonstrate that we apply our laws fully and equally without
regard to political ideology if we want to ensure international
cooperation on terrorism," said the chairman of the subcommittee,
Representative Bill Delahunt, in his opening remarks. "This will be
the first of a number of hearings to achieve that goal."

In hours of testimony well into the evening from journalists who had
interviewed Posada, Kornbluh, Posada's defence attorney and a family
member of a victim of one of the alleged attacks, the House oversight
subcommittee focused on the bombing of the civilian Cubana Airlines
flight 455 in 1976.

Though Posada has consistently denied charges of involvement in the
first mid-air commercial bombing in the Western hemisphere, documents
presented by Kornbluh, implicate Posada in the planning of act.

A cable from the FBI attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Caracas,
Venezuela, said within a day of the bombing that a source had "all
but admitted that Posada and Bosch had engineered the bombing of the
airline."

Orlando Bosch is another extremist Cuban exile and longtime
collaborator and associate of Posada who has lived freely in Florida
since a 1990 administrative pardon from President George H.W. Bush
after Bosch's detention as an "excludable alien."

It was under Bosch's leadership that the Coordination of the United
Revolutionary Organizations (CORU) was formed in a 1976 summit in the
mountains of the Dominican Republic by several extremist anti-Castro
groups when they sensed that the U.S. government's efforts to
overthrow Cuban President Fidel Castro were slowing down in the
mid-1970's.

According to documents released by the NSA, CORU has been labeled as
"an anti-Castro terrorist umbrella organisation."

CORU launched what Kornbluh called "the summer of anti-Castro
terrorist violence" in 1976. The six major operations culminated in
the downing of Cubana flight 455 for which CORU took responsibility
in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

Asked by journalist Ann Louise Bardach in 2006 if he was responsible
for the plane crash, Bosch replied coyly that, "I have to tell you
no."

The story of Posada painted by the panels at the hearing was a broad
picture of a man accused of -- and in a few instances convicted of --
everything from night-club and hotel bombings in Cuba in 1997,
several plots to assassinate Castro, and involvement in the
Iran-Contra Affair in the mid-1980s.

The attacks in 1997 targeting tourist destinations in Havana -- acts
reminiscent of Palestinian suicide bombers who attempted to slow
Israeli nightlife during the second Intifada -- are much easier to
tie to Posada than the airplane bombing. Posada called a meeting with
Bardach in 1998 to bring publicity to the incidents, which had been
effectively swept under the rug by Cuba.

"He does not admit the bombs in the hotels but he does not deny
either," read a note Posada gave Bardach on the last day of their
interviews.

It is these terrorist acts that are the subject of a grand jury
investigation where members of the Northern New Jersey Cuban exile
community are being investigated for bankrolling the operations.

This could lead to an eventual indictment of Posada despite
questionable destruction of some of the evidence by the FBI in 2003
in what was described as making space in the evidence room. It is
here that Kornbluh's third option comes into play.

"An indictment in this case would totally change the landscape of the
Bush administration's handling of the Posada case," said Kornbluh,
"and the landscape of U.S. policy towards Cuba."

The hypocrisy of the U.S. government -- with Bush having declared
that any country harbouring terrorists is "just as guilty as the
terrorist" -- was not lost on any of the attendees at the hearing.

"The United States finds itself in the frankly inexplicable position
of having not one, but both men who our own intelligence agencies
identified as responsible for bringing down a civilian airliner
living free and unfettered lives in Florida," said Kornbluh before
the subcommittee. "In the midst of a war on terrorism, this has
significant repercussion for the United States."

(END/2007)