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US government moves to gag terrorist
on CIA ties
Bill Van Auken
WSWS.org
Monday May 07, 2007
With his trial on immigration charges set for May 11, the US government
has filed a motion in federal court seeking to bar the international
terrorist Luis Posada Carriles from testifying on his role as an
agent of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Venezuela has demanded that Posada Carriles be extradited to face
charges there related to his masterminding of a 1976 bombing of
a Cuban civilian passenger jet that killed 73 people. He evaded
punishment for the crime—at the time the worst single act
of terrorism in the Western Hemisphere—by escaping a Venezuelan
prison in 1985.
Violating international and bilateral treaties, Washington has
rebuffed Venezuela’s request, charging Posada Carriles instead
with minor violations of US immigration law for entering the US
without a visa and lying to immigration officials. Last month, the
terrorist, who had been in federal custody since May 2005, was set
free on bail and returned to Miami.
The release has provoked international protests and exposed the
hypocrisy of the so-called “global war on terrorism”
proclaimed by a government that has sponsored and continues to harbor
and protect a wanted terrorist.
The nine-page motion submitted to the federal court in El Paso,
Texas, argues that the relationship between Posada Carriles and
the CIA ended 30 years ago and therefore is irrelevant.
Declassified documents have established that Carriles was recruited
as an agent of the CIA in 1961, was sent into the US Army for a
year of training in demolition and terrorist tactics and remained
directly on the CIA payroll at least until 1967. From 1969 to 1974,
he served as a senior officer in the Venezuelan secret police, DISIP,
charged with capturing, torturing and killing left-wing opponents
of the government. During that period he remained an informant and
“asset” of the CIA in Latin America.
In 1976, he planned the airline bombing, leaving its execution
to two employees of his private detective agency that he set up
in Caracas after a change of government forced him out of the secret
police. Just two weeks before the October 1976 airline bombing,
he was involved in another terrorist attack, this one in the center
of Washington. A car bomb killed the exiled former foreign minister
of Chile, Orlando Letelier, and an American aide, Ronni Moffitt.
After his escape from prison in Venezuela, Posada Carriles made
his way to El Salvador, where he became a key operative in the illegal
terror war against Nicaragua financed by the CIA and directed by
the network established by the Reagan administration under the direction
of Lt. Col. Oliver North of the National Security Council. He went
on to Guatemala, becoming a government intelligence officer during
a brutal counterinsurgency campaign that claimed hundreds of thousands
of lives.
In the 1990s, by his own admission, Posada Carriles directed a
series of terrorist bombings against hotels and tourist spots in
Cuba, killing an Italian tourist.
And, in November 2000, he was involved in an aborted attempt to
blow up a conference hall in Panama, where Cuban President Fidel
Castro was scheduled to speak to hundreds of people. He was arrested
and jailed for the plot, but then pardoned by outgoing Panamanian
President Mireya Moscoso in 2004, reportedly as the result of either
US pressure or bribes from anti-Castro Cuban exile groups.
In response to the government attempt to quash any public testimony
about Posada Carriles’s ties to the CIA, the terrorist’s
defense lawyers filed a countermotion this week, insisting that
it was impossible to discuss the “context” of the case
without dealing with their client’s relation with the agency.
Moreover, the document claimed, this relationship “lasted
for 25 years.”
“The government’s statement that his service to the
United States ended in 1976 is incorrect,” the document said.
The implications of the motion are clear. Posada Carriles was working
for the CIA when he planned and executed the terrorist bombing that
murdered 73 people aboard the Cuban plane as well as the car-bomb
assassination in Washington. Moreover, he remained an agent or “asset”
of the US intelligence agency while continuing to carry out acts
of terrorist and repressive violence in Cuba, Central America and
elsewhere for at least another decade. Both of the 1976 terrorist
acts took place when George H.W. Bush, the current US president’s
father, was director of the CIA.
Declassified documents obtained by the National Security Archive
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB153/index.htm in 2005
establish that the CIA had advance intelligence on the planned airline
bombing and that the FBI’s attaché in Caracas had repeated
contacts with one of the operatives who placed the bomb on the plane
and, just days before the bombing, obtained a visa for him to travel
to the US.
The US government’s attempt to gag Posada Carriles about
his CIA ties and the countermotion alleging that these connections
spanned at least 25 years expose the real reason that the Bush administration
refuses to abide by international law and extradite him to Venezuela
to face trial.
While the administration has offered the incredible justification
that Posada Carriles could face torture in Venezuela—this
from a government that has not only tortured its own detainees at
Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, but also deliberately
sent them to other countries to be tortured—the real reason
is that such a prosecution would expose Washington’s role
in decades of terrorism and repression in Latin America.
On April 25, Venezuela’s ambassador to the Organization of
American States, Nelson Pineda, charged the US with harboring a
“convicted and confessed terrorist” and demanded that
Washington comply with its bilateral extradition treaty with Venezuela.
Pineda read out a statement from the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry
that stated:
“The freeing of the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is the
final result of the maneuver that the government of George W. Bush
put in motion to protect him and with this act it promotes impunity
and disgracefully mocks the memory of the victims of the bombing
of the Cubana de Aviación plane that took place in 1976.
“This act of complicity, committed by the sinister American
president, seeks to buy the silence of Posada Carriles, who has
for many years been an agent of the CIA and a pawn of the Bush clan,
as the declassified documents of the US demonstrate and therefore
has valuable information about the criminal activities carried out
against the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean.”
Responding to these charges, the US alternate representative to
the OAS, Margarita Riva-Geoghegan, ignored Venezuela’s extradition
request, baldly stating, “The United States is not harboring
Luis Posada Carriles.” She continued, “The United States
is proceeding with its own national prosecution in an area where
Mr. Posada Carriles has broken US law.”
Such claims are absurd on their face. The charges of murder and
terrorism, substantiated by Washington’s own declassified
documents, clearly take precedence over the minor immigration infractions
that are being used as a pretense for ignoring the demand for extradition
and providing a cover for what is in reality the harboring and protection
of Posada Carriles.
In Cuba, meanwhile, the annual May Day demonstration in Havana
was dominated by signs and slogans demanding the extradition of
Posada Carriles as well as the freeing of the “Cuban Five,”
five Cuban nationals who have been jailed in the US since 1998.
Framed up on conspiracy and espionage-related charges for monitoring
anti-Castro terrorist exile groups based in Miami, the five were
convicted in 2001 and sentenced to jail terms ranging from 15 years
to life.
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