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Banned
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Originally Posted by Lebell
I would also appreciate some background.
This is not a story I am actively following.
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Lebell, I could have simply and quickly supplied you with a quick synopsis on Posada: <a href="http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/042405.html">The Bush Family's Favorite Terrorist</a>
I elected not to do that because I endeavor to include in all of my posts the links to publications and other sources that are least likely to be impeachable, are MSM, or are of a noncontroversial, humanitarian nature, such as the source for the last quote box in this post:
http://www.nlg.org/about/aboutus.htm
The information that I am presenting here influenced my overall perception of GHW Bush and his sons. I've been aware of this story through the 90's and the "pardon" of Bosch, by GHW via Jeb's influence born out of political expediency at the time it took place, certainly it helped to make me a skeptic regarding the 2000 Florida vote and heightens my view of GWB's hypocrisy as related to his "war on terror" policies, especially domestic policy.
Quote:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/...in639051.shtml
Panama Pardons Spur Cuban Outrage
HAVANA, Aug. 27, 2004
(CBS) By CBS News Producer Portia Siegelbaum
...............Just a few hours earlier, Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso was pardoning four Cuban exiles, one of whom collaborated with Pinochet’s secret police.
Guillermo Novo, along with three other Cuban exiles, were arrested in Panama in November 2000 on information provided by Cuban intelligence.
Fidel Castro’s personal security detail had swept the Panamanian capital in advance of the Cuban president’s arrival for an Ibero-American Summit. They provided Panamanian authorities with a surveillance video of four known anti-Castro extremists believed to be plotting to assassinate Castro. The plan, said Cuban security, was to plant explosives at a scheduled meeting between Castro and university students.
Panamanian courts, however, determined there was not enough evidence to sentence the men for attempted murder and instead sentenced Novo and Pedro Remón to seven years each for endangering public safety and Luis Posada Carriles and Gaspar Jiménez to eight years for endangering public safety and falsifying documents.
Cuba protested the court ruling, charging the men had gotten off too easy. Posada Carriles, the most notorious of the four, topped Cuba’s most wanted list..........................
.......................The Cuban government broke relations with Panama just eight hours after the president pardoned “the Hemisphere’s top terrorist”, Posada Carriles, and the other three.
All day Thursday and into Friday morning, Cuba’s state run media broadcast a lengthy government declaration detailing what it called Posada Carriles “terrorist” record in dossiers it has kept over the past four decades.
The declaration accused Moscoso of violating “international treaties against terrorism signed by Panama” and of becoming an “accomplice of terrorism”.
Moscoso told the press that one reason for pardoning the men, just a week before leaving office, was to prevent their being extradited in the future. The President hands over power next Wednesday to Martin Torrijos, son of the late Omar Torrijos, a populist military general, who, like his father, is friendly with Castro.
Havana requested the extradition of the four men. Posada Carriles also faces criminal charges in Venezuela for a possible connection to the 1976 terrorist bombing of a Cuban commercial airliner off Barbados. All 73 persons on board were killed. The flight originated in Venezuela. Posada Carriles, who escaped from a Venezuelan jail while facing charges of planning that bombing, denies involvement.
Havana also charges that he paid a mercenary to bomb a series of Havana hotels and restaurants in 1997, in which an Italian businessman was killed.
In a 1997 interview with the New York Times, Posada Carriles took credit for the hotel explosions. He later retracted the claim, although the newspaper said it had his admission on tape.
The U.S. denies charges in the Cuban and Panamanian media that it brought pressure on Moscoso to grant the pardons.
"This was a decision made by the government of Panama. We never lobbied the Panamanian government to pardon anyone involved in this case," spokesman
Adam Ereli told reporters at a State Department briefing.
President Bush’s new get-tough Cuba policy and the outgoing Panamanian President’s close relations with the White House have fanned the rumors.
Three of the men, Pedro Remón, Guillermo Novo and Gaspar Jiménez were flown to Miami on a private plane Thursday morning, shortly after being released. They were greeted by family and well-wishers.
A second plane flew Posada Carriles, who is not a U.S. citizen, to an undisclosed location. There are unconfirmed reports that the plane made a stop in San Pedro Sula, Honduras and that immigration officials there are searching for Posada Carriles.
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2005Apr16.html
Our Man's in Miami. Patriot or Terrorist?
By Ann Louise Bardach
Sunday, April 17, 2005; Page B03
In 1988, the late, great Cuban exile director Nestor Almendros released his critically acclaimed film about political prisoners in his homeland -- a documentary that shattered whatever was left of the utopian view of Cuba. It was called "Nobody Listened." The title would work well for a sequel, this time set in Miami to shatter any lingering illusions about the nature of Cuban exile politics.
The anti-hero could be Luis Posada Carriles, the fugitive militant, would-be assassin of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and prison escapee who is wanted by Venezuela for the 1976 shootdown of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 civilians. Late last month, a South Florida television station offered a startling exclusive: Posada, last seen in Honduras, had slipped into Miami. Then last Tuesday, Posada's newly retained attorney had the temerity to request asylum for him.
Posada must have thought nobody would be listening. How was it possible that a self-described "warrior" and "militante" -- long a fixture on the U.S. immigration authorities' watch list -- had crossed into the United States with a bogus passport and visa? And is it remotely conceivable that the Bush administration, notwithstanding its purported commitment to the war on terrorism (Rule 1 of U.S. counterterrorism policy: "make no concessions to terrorists and strike no deals"), would consider residency for a notorious paramilitary commando? He has even boasted of orchestrating numerous attacks on both civilian and military targets (including the 1997 bombings of Cuban tourist facilities that killed an Italian vacationer and wounded 11 others) during his 50-year war to topple Castro.
In any other American city, Posada, who is now 77, might have been met by a SWAT team, arrested and deported. But in the peculiar ecosystem of Miami, where hardline anti-Castro politicians control both the radio stations and the ballot boxes, the definition of terrorism is a pliable one: One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. His lawyer made the tortured argument that those who planted bombs in Havana could not be held responsible for innocent victims unless it could be proven that those victims were, in fact, targets. Other supporters have underscored that Posada was once a CIA asset who fought in its ill-fated excursion at the Bay of Pigs, and who played a crucial role in the Iran-contra operations during the Reagan-Bush years.
It is a story of keen interest to me as Posada had granted me an exclusive interview in June 1998. At a safe house and other locations in Aruba, I spent three days tape-recording him for a series of articles that ran in the New York Times. The urbane and chatty Posada said that he had decided to speak with me in order to generate publicity for his bombing campaign of Cuba's tourist industry -- and frighten away tourists. "Castro will never change, never," Posada said. "Our job is to provide inspiration and explosives to the Cuban people."
Instead of undermining Castro, such comments have enabled the Cuban leader to argue that his foes are lawless at best and killers at worst. And so Castro remains in power, and Posada is looking for a new home.
Posada and his Miami strategists are hoping that he can follow in the footsteps of his fellow conspirator, one-time cellmate and convicted terrorist, Orlando Bosch. In 1976, Bosch, Posada and two Venezuelans, were charged and imprisoned for the bombing of the Cuban civilian airliner -- the first act of airline terrorism in the hemisphere -- killing all aboard, including the members of Cuba's national fencing team, many of them teenagers.
The powerful exile leadership in Miami financed a legal crusade to free the two, challenging the trial process in Caracas, where bribery is widespread. Bosch would serve 11 years and Posada nine before their lawyers won acquittals. But both remained jailed pending prosecutors' appeals and new trials, in accordance with Venezuela's labyrinthine judicial system.
Their indictment was the result of the collective data and wisdom of three intelligence organizations: American, Venezuelan and Cuban. "Bosch and Posada were the primary suspects," a retired high-level CIA official familiar with the case confirmed in an interview, adding "there were no other suspects." A close confidante of the two militants told me, "It was a screw-up. It was supposed to be an empty plane." Others contend that the men believed the airliner to be a military craft, though neither man has ever expressed remorse for the civilian death toll. An unrepentant Bosch still calls the plane "a legitimate target," recently telling a Miami reporter, "there were no innocents on that plane."
Posada "escaped" from prison in 1985 after his Miami cohorts paid a $28,000 bribe to the warden. Three weeks later, he was in El Salvador, where Felix Rodriguez, a comrade from his early CIA days, was waiting for him with a very special job offer: to be his deputy in the covert Contra resupply operation directed by Lt. Col. Oliver L. North. In our conversations, Posada blamed a fellow commando (conveniently dead) for the airline bombing and cited political influence-peddling in the Venezuelan justice system for his and Bosch's long prison stints. Their critics argue the opposite: that Venezuela's endemic corruption enabled Posada and Bosch's supporters to buy them superb accommodations in prison and, ultimately, Posada's escape.
Bosch was allowed to leave Venezuela not long after then-U.S. ambassador Otto Reich voiced concerns about his safety in a series of cables to the State Department. He flew to Miami in December 1987 without a visa and was promptly arrested. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh described Bosch as an "unreformed terrorist," who should be deported. But Bosch had a powerful advocate in Jeb Bush, who at that time was managing the campaign of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the first Cuban exile to win a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. <h4>In an unusual presidential intercession on behalf of a convicted terrorist, President George H.W. Bush overruled the FBI and the Justice Department and in 1990 approved the release of Bosch, who won U.S. residency two years later.
Posada is gambling that he will have Bosch's luck and is banking on the same supporters. But Bosch's presence in Miami has often proved to be an embarrassment to the Bush family. When Bill Clinton was questioned by a Newsweek reporter about his pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich, he snapped, "I swore I wouldn't answer questions about Marc Rich until Bush answered about Orlando Bosch." Few Republicans raised the issue again.</h4>
In November 2000, Posada was arrested again, along with three other anti-Castro militants for plotting to assassinate Castro during the Ibero-American summit in Panama. All of the arrested men had impressive rap sheets and had been charter members of the terrorist groups CORU or Omega 7. In April 2004, Panama's Supreme Court sentenced Posada and his associates to up to eight years in prison, but in August the quartet was sprung by a surprise pardon from departing Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso, who maintains good relations with Miami's political leadership. Her pardon outraged U.S and Latin American law enforcement officials.
Three of the men were flown to Miami and met by their jubilant supporters just days before the 2004 presidential election. But Posada disappeared -- until his emergence here last month.
The quartet are not the only unsavory characters to be given the red carpet in Miami. Reps. Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ros-Lehtinen, with the backing of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, wrote letters on behalf of several exile militants held in U.S. prisons for acts of political violence. Some were released in 2001, including Jose Dionisio Suarez Esquivel and Virgilio Paz Romero, both convicted for the notorious 1976 car bomb-murder of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his American assistant Ronnie Moffitt, in Washington. Once released, instead of being deported like other non-citizen criminals, they have been allowed to settle into the good life in Miami.
South Florida's politicians have also tried, unsuccessfully so far, to convince the Justice Department to release Cuban-born Valentin Hernandez, who gunned down fellow exile Luciano Nieves in 1975. Nieves' crime was speaking out in support of negotiations with the Cuban government. Nieves was ambushed in a Miami hospital parking lot after visiting his 11-year-old son. A year later, Hernandez and an accomplice murdered a former president of the Bay of Pigs Association in an internecine power struggle. Hernandez was finally captured in July 1977 and sentenced to life in prison for the Nieves murder. Exile hardliners, though, continue to refer to him as a freedom fighter.
Polls show that Miami's political leadership and its radio no longer speak for most exiles. The majority of Cuban exiles, like other Americans, abhor terrorism, whether in Cuba or Miami, left or right. But as one convicted killer after another is allowed to resettle in Miami, the political climate there has chilled and few dare to speak out. And when they do, it seems that nobody is listening.
Since 9/11, the administration's double standard on terrorism, with its Cuban exception, is even more glaring. Just before the Justice Department announced a post-9/11 sweep of those "suspected" of terrorism, it had quietly released men who had been convicted of terrorism. Last Thursday, the administration congratulated itself on a sweep that netted 10,000 fugitive criminals, yet somehow Posada eluded it.
I remember Posada's sly smile when he told me that he had at least four different passports from different countries in bogus names, including an American one. When I asked when he last visited the United States, he chortled with amusement. "Officially or unofficially? I have a lot of passports," Posada said. "If I want to go to Miami, I have different ways to go. No problem." Evidently not.
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Quote:
http://www.nlg.org/cuba/newsOct2001.htm
25 years after CIA-trained agents bombed Cuban airliner, Miami protests
terrorists at large
I. As we continue to mourn the many victims of Sept. 11th in the US, we
should reflect that Saturday, October 6th is the 25th anniversary of the
terrorist bombing of the Cuban airliner after take off from Barbados. All
73 lives on board were lost -- among them the Cuban fencing team, returning
from a tournament abroad -- when a bomb exploded on board. A number of
Cuban-American groups and others will hold a demonstration in Miami on
Saturday afternoon, to protest the fact that the alleged mastermind of the
operation, Orlando Bosch, continues to operate in freedom in Miami.
Bosch had been jailed on these charges in Venezuela, but was not convicted
after a series of military trials, and left prison after the prosecution
failed to keep the case alive there, reportedly as a result of the
intervention of the US ambassador, Otto Reich, now a nominee to become Asst.
Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere. <h4>Bosch then entered FL.
illegally in 1988. He was detained based on his violation of U.S. parole,
after he had been released from serving four years of a 10 year prison
sentence (from 1968-72, for staging a bazooka attack on a Polish freighter
docked in Miami and for sending death threats to the heads of state of three
Western European nations, all because they traded with Cuba). His was
remanded to INS custody, while the US refused Cuba's extradition requests.
Some 30 other countries had refused to accept him based on his long record
of terrorist acts. He filed an application for asylum in the U.S.
According to the U.S. Justice Dept., the Cuban airline bombing was "under
the direction of Bosch. ... We could not shelter Dr. Bosch and maintain our
credibility in this respect." In January 1989 the acting attorney general
wrote: "For 30 years Bosch has been resolute and unwavering in his advocacy
of terrorist violence. . . . He has repeatedly expressed and demonstrated a
willingness to cause indiscriminate injury and death.'" Former Attorney
General Dick Thornburgh described Bosch as an "unreformed terrorist." The
U.S. district court found that organizations under his leadership had been
responsible for "numerous terrorist operations," including planting bombs at
embassies and blowing up an airline office, and the CIA documents also
linked him to air attacks on Cuba in the 1960's.
Nonetheless, against the recommendations of the district director of the INS
and the Department of Justice, and after a federal court upheld his
deportation, he was freed without deportation in July 1990, due to the
intervention of former Pres. Bush in response to pressure from Florida's
rising political star Jeb Bush, the Cuban American National Foundation
(CANF) & others in the Cuban American exile community.</h4>
Orlando Bosch now walks the streets of Miami a free man. While being held in
Venezuela on the airline bombing charge in 1983, the Miami City Commission
declared an "Orlando Bosch Day" in his honor.
The Cuban government has frequently protested that Washington houses
terrorists such as Bosch, while the US government maintains Cuba on its list
of terrorist nations for reasons that are described as based on politics
rather than facts. (See Wayne Smith's analysis,
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/sun_sent...NST+TERRORISTS
http://web.archive.org/web/200303260...lkonterror.htm
--------------"U.S. actions undercut tough talk against terrorists
By Wayne S. Smith
Posted November 12 2001
As President Bush has made clear, we are now involved not simply in an all-out campaign to bring to justice Osama bin Laden and all others responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but in a campaign to end terrorism as an international threat. If we are to lead that campaign effectively, it is vital that our own rejection of terrorism be unequivocal -- and unquestionable.......
............. One of the most infamous was Orlando Bosch. In prison from 1968 until 1972 for terrorist activities, he was then paroled, but only two years later he violated his parole and fled to Latin America, ending up in Venezuela, where in 1976 he was imprisoned for masterminding the bombing of a Cuban airliner, with the loss of 73 lives.
Released from Venezuelan prison under strange circumstances in late 1987, Bosch returned surreptitiously to Miami in 1988, where he was almost immediately arrested for illegal entry. The Immigration and Naturalization Service began proceedings to deport him.
That caused an uproar among hard-line exiles in Miami, but despite their demands that he be freed, the acting associate attorney general in 1989 denied Bosch's petition to remain in the U.S. "The security of this nation," he explained, "is affected by its ability to urge credibly other nations to refuse aid and shelter to terrorists … We could not shelter Dr. Bosch and maintain our credibility in this respect."
One can only say "amen" and wish that that had been the end of it. But it was not. Lobbied unrelentingly by Sen. Connie Mack of Florida, by U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, her then-campaign manager Jeb Bush and by various other Miami politicians, the first Bush administration overrode the Justice Department and in 1990 allowed Bosch to remain in the United States.
Worse, in 1992, the Bush administration granted Bosch an administrative pardon. Since then, he has lived freely in Miami. "-----------------
article, 07/23/01; and the official state dept. rationale
http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt...cfm?docid=2441 )
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Last edited by host; 05-24-2005 at 10:22 PM..
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