One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, seemingly then and now. It will be interesting to see how this politically delicate plays out, especially given the US's stance on terrorism and since the spotlight is on them now.
Anti-Castro exile could test U.S. terror policies
By Tim Weiner
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
May 9, 2005
MIAMI – From the United States through Latin America and the Caribbean, Luis Posada Carriles has spent 45 years fighting a violent, losing battle to overthrow Fidel Castro. Now he may have nowhere to hide but here.
Posada, a Cuban exile, has long been a symbol for the armed anti-Castro movement in the United States. He remains a prime suspect in the bombing of a Cuban commercial airliner that killed 73 people in 1976. He has admitted to plotting attacks that damaged tourist spots in Havana and killed an Italian visitor there in 1997. He was convicted in Panama in a 2000 bomb plot against Castro. He is no longer welcome in his old Latin America haunts.
Posada, 77, sneaked back into Florida six weeks ago in an effort to seek political asylum for having served as a Cold War soldier on the payroll of the CIA in the 1960s, his lawyer, Eduardo Soto, said at a news conference last month.
But the government of Venezuela wants to extradite and retry him for the Cuban airline bombing. Posada was involved "up to his eyeballs" in planning the attack, said Carter Cornick, a retired counterterrorism specialist for the FBI who investigated Posada's role in that case. A newly declassified 1976 FBI document places Posada, who had been a senior Venezuelan intelligence officer, at two meetings where the bombing was planned.
As "the author or accomplice of homicide," Venezuela's Supreme Court said Tuesday, "he must be extradited and judged."
The U.S. government has no plan yet in place for handling the extradition request, according to spokesmen for several agencies. Roger Noriega, the top State Department official for Western Hemisphere affairs, said he did not even know whether Posada was in the country. Posada has not been seen in public, and his lawyer did not return repeated telephone calls seeking to confirm his location.
Posada's case could create tension between the politics of the global war on terrorism and the ghosts of the Cold War on communism. If Posada has indeed illegally entered the United States, the Bush administration has three choices: granting him asylum, jailing him for illegal entry or granting Venezuela's request for extradition.
A grant of asylum could invite charges that the Bush administration is compromising its principle that no nation should harbor suspected terrorists. But to turn Posada away could provoke political wrath in the conservative Cuban-American communities of South Florida, deep sources of support and campaign money for President Bush and his brother Jeb, the state's governor.
To jail Posada would be a political bonanza for Castro, who has railed against him in recent speeches, calling him the worst terrorist in the Western Hemisphere.
To allow his extradition would hand a victory to President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Castro's closest ally in Latin America and no friend to President Bush.
"As a Cuban, as a freedom fighter myself, I believe he should be granted asylum," said Marcelino Miyares, a veteran of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and president of the Christian Democratic Party of Cuba, which is based in Miami. "But it's a no-win situation for the United States government."
Orlando Bosch, the most prominent face of the violent anti-Castro wing in Florida, said in an interview broadcast Tuesday in Miami that he had spoken by telephone with Posada, who, "as everybody knows, is here."
Bosch, a longtime ally of Posada's, presented a similar problem for the United States in 1989, when the Justice Department moved to deport him despite resistance from Miami's Cuban-Americans.
The Justice Department called Bosch "a terrorist, unfettered by laws or human decency, threatening and inflicting violence without regard to the identity of his victims," in the words of Joe D. Whitley, then an associate U.S. attorney general. Whitley added: "The United States cannot tolerate the inherent inhumanity of terrorism as a way of settling disputes. Appeasement of those who would use force will only breed more terrorists. We must look on terrorism as a universal evil, even if it is directed toward those with whom we have no political sympathy."
The administration of President Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, overruled the deportation in 1990; Bosch remained in Florida. Whitley, now general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, declined to comment on the Posada case.
Posada is said to be sick with cancer, facing mortality. Some veterans of the Bay of Pigs say the armed struggle he represents is dying, too.
"I believe that movement is already dead," Miyares said.
Alfredo Duran, who was captured at the Bay of Pigs and later led a militant anti-Castro group, said that "after 9/11, it has become inexcusable to defend attacks that could kill innocent civilians."
"Everybody's renouncing violence except a small group of ultra-hard-core right-wingers," said Duran, now a lawyer in Miami advocating peaceful change in Cuba.
Duran said that Posada had never renounced violence and that the question for the United States was whether to denounce him despite his service during the Cold War.
Posada served with the CIA from 1961 to 1967, according to declassified U.S. government records. He was scheduled to land at the Bay of Pigs, the attack on Cuba ordered by the Kennedy administration, but his mission was canceled when the invasion collapsed. He kept in close touch with the agency after leaving it and joining Venezuela's intelligence service, known by its initials as DISIP, where he served as a senior officer from 1969 to 1974, according to the declassified records and retired U.S. officials who served in Venezuela.
On Oct. 6 1976, a Cubana Airlines flight with 73 people on board was blown out of the sky off the coast of Barbados in the worst terrorist attack in Cuban history.
A November 1976 FBI report, based on the word of a trusted Cuban-American informer, Ricardo Morales, places Posada at two meetings where the Cubana bombing was plotted.
In April 2004, Posada was given an eight-year sentence for endangering public safety in the Castro bomb plot case in Panama. Eight months ago, in her last week in office, President Mireya Moscoso of Panama pardoned him, citing humanitarian grounds. Moscoso, who has long had a home in Key Biscayne, has strong social ties to Cuban conservatives in South Florida, said Duran, the Bay of Pigs veteran.
Her successor, Martín Torrijos, criticized the pardon at his inauguration, saying, "For me, there are not two classes of terrorism, one that is condemned and another that is pardoned."
Posada left Panama City and flew to Honduras bearing a false U.S. passport, according to President Ricardo Maduro, who publicly denounced him.
Posada left Honduras in a hurry. Castro said in a recent speech that Posada then went to the Mexican resort Isla Mujeres and arrived in Florida on a boat owned by a Cuban-American developer in Miami.