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Article from
http://www.socialistworker.org/2007-1/629/629_01_Posada.shtml

The terrorist that the U.S. let walk
By Nicole Colson | April 27, 2007 | Page 11

SOME TERRORISTS apparently aren’t so bad in the eyes of the U.S. “justice” system.

Last week, at the direction of a federal court, Luis Posada Carriles, an anti-Castro Cuban exile suspected of masterminding a string of terrorist bombings over several decades, was allowed to walk out of a U.S. prison on bail.

Posada is notorious for his participation in right-wing plots since the 1960s, and declassified documents confirm that he was on the CIA payroll for much of the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1998, he bragged to the New York Times that he paid a Salvadoran mercenary to place a bomb in the Copacabana Hotel, in Havana, Cuba. The blast killed an Italian tourist.

But Posada is probably most notorious for his suspected role--along with another Cuban exile, Orlando Bosch--in planning the October 1976 midair bombing of a Cuban commercial airliner that killed 73 people.

Declassified CIA documents identified Posada and Bosch as the masterminds, citing a meeting between the two in Venezuela that occurred just before the bombing. Posada escaped from a Venezuelan prison in 1985, however, before a civilian trial could be completed.

In 2005, after being pardoned in Panama for his part in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, Posada allegedly snuck into the U.S. illegally, and was arrested following an international outcry.

But last September, U.S. Magistrate Judge Norbert Garney recommended releasing Posada, ruling that requests by both Cuba and Venezuela for his extradition cannot be honored because, Garney claimed, of the “probability” that Posada would be “tortured.”

Bush administration lawyers didn’t challenge the unsubstantiated claim that either country practices “torture”--setting up the most recent ruling by district Judge Kathleen Cardone, upheld by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ordered the 79-year-old Posada released on $350,000 bond.

The Justice Department has refused to classify Posada as a terrorist. Yet in court papers filed in his immigration fraud case, it described him as “an unrepentant criminal and admitted mastermind of terrorist plots.”

As Bernardo Álvarez Herrera, Venezuela’s ambassador to the U.S., wrote in the New York Times, charging Posada with immigration fraud instead of terrorism is “a travesty that could be equaled only by charging Osama bin Laden with entering and leaving Pakistan without a visa.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could step in to detain Posada until his trial, because the Cuban-born Venezuelan citizen faces a deportation order. But there’s no sign that the Bush administration is willing to bring Posada to justice--because, among other things, this would risk exposing the extent that the U.S. aided Posada in his crimes.

Posada’s release on bail is a slap in the face to the families of his victims. As Livio di Celmo, whose brother Fabio was killed in the Copacabana bombing, told the Miami Herald, “Luis Posada Carriles is a terrorist, and the U.S. government has refused to define him as so. This [release on bond] is an insult to my brother and the other victims of terrorism.”

His release is also a sharp contrast to the fate of tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants held in prisons across the U.S.

As New York Daily News columnist Albor Ruiz wrote, “While thousands of poor, decent, hardworking immigrants are kept detained in terrible conditions, Luis Posada Carriles, a dangerous man with a long criminal history and a pending deportation order, was freed...While hundreds of immigrant families are mercilessly torn apart by raids and deportations, this shady character was sent home to his wife and children.”

They also pay him, this guy was on their payroll as was Osama and Sadam Hussein at points and let's face it- the US is the biggest terrorist on earth, I can go more indepth but I have finals and must study.

I'm for control of a superpower as the US would attack any such nation, and if I move I'm going to Cuba.

I agree, it was created on some sound ideas but the problem is that they're illusioned, it was created under the illusion that capitalism can work and all people can have an equal chance. The US currently is as Che put it "the belly of the beast", and it's not at all amazing, there's nothing amazing about the highest deaths by handgun shooting in the world, or such a high poverty rate or how the government acts. Ok I'll switch that- it is amazing, but not in a good way.

Woot! Japan! (sorry I love Japan) but you do realize that Japan's current government is about as corporate and conservative as the U.S.'s; though the metropolitan areas of Japan are becoming quite liberal but the rural conservative votes are keeping the Social Democratic Party from taking power (this, to me, sounds like a paradox of the current U.S where the rural conservative vote got the damn Bush administration in power).

The Panthers no longer exist, take the government away and there's anarchy which based on our culture would be perhaps the biggest disastor in history. I agree, it could be made into a great place.

Of course the bulk of what is considered western civilization (the capitalist countries) has tended to ignore regimes it likes, or at least can receive a commodity from, and attacks the regimes it dislikes, or stops receiving commodities from. For example the U.S. ignored the atrocities of the Taliban and even funded them as long as they built an oil-pipeline from the Caspian Sea (or Black Sea I don't have a map in-front of me), but when they didn't build the pipeline the U.S. attacked and occupied them. Also, that d**k Cheney shook hands with Sadam only a year or so before the war in Iraq when the b*****d was gasing the Kurds. Hell the U.S. gave Sadam weapons right after the Gulf War were he attaked Kuwait.

The only good (and ironic) thing to come of the US funding contras and regimes was the fact that the US funded Fidel's revolution until they found out he was a communist.