The CIA created a vicious terrorist named Luis Posada Carriles in the 1960’s to use against Fidel Castro’s regime. To give but one example, he blew up Cubana Flight 455 in 1976 (a flight that took off from Barbados headed for Jamaica, but which was ultimately headed for Havana), killing 73 innocent civilians, including 25 members of the Cuban fencing team.
You can think of him as the same kind of operative as the one who gave Richard Reid explosive sneakers and a plane ticket, or as the one who gave Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab explosive underwear and a plane ticket. The only real difference is that Luis Posada Carriles was successful.
Posada didn’t stop there, of course. In 1997 he masterminded a string of bombings of Cuban hotels and nightspots (and then bragged about it to the New York Times). In 2000 he was arrested in Panama for attempting to assassinate Castro while he was making an appearance at a Summit there.
His relationship with the CIA and with the Bush Family goes back a long way, and he has always been protected by our government. But this has come to an end.
It was a simple whim that saved my life: I had finished reporting in Barbados quicker than anticipated and so I changed my flight to Havana, getting on an earlier plane. Two days later, a terrorist blew up the Cuba-bound flight I had been booked on.
All 73 people aboard perished.
I would have been the 74th.
On Monday, the man believed to have masterminded this horrific attack in 1976, Luis Posada Carriles, will go on trial in El Paso, Texas. But perhaps because he spent most of his adult life working for the Central Intelligence Agency, he is not being tried for that crime….
He is only being charged with violating immigration law and obstructing justice.
Actually, his trial has already started, and the Obama administration has added charges of perjury for lying about his terrorist past at a deportation hearing. Of course, this is making right-wing minds explode.
Kathleen Cardone, the U.S. District Judge presiding over the kangaroo court trial of Luis Posada Carriles, has ruled that the truth about the Castro dictatorship will not be permitted during the trial. Denying a request by the defense to use the truth to counter dubious and unreliable evidence provided to the prosecution by a criminal regime with a long and sordid history of lies, fabrications, and calumny, Judge Cardone has in effect banned the truth from the trial.
… The prosecution, under orders of the Obama/Holder Justice Department, is hellbent on turning an immigration trial into a full blown terrorism trial – truth, justice, civil rights, and the U.S. Constitution be damned. Their zeal to see this 82-year-old man locked up has led them to toss aside the Constitution and partner up with a brutal and murderous totalitarian regime.
Sharing the responsibility for this travesty is Judge Cardone, who has allowed the prosecution to quash and silence the truth, just as the Castros have done in Cuba for more than a half-century.
Not a single word of the preceding blockquote has even a passing resemblance to the truth, but that’s just how good ole commie-fighting Republiscum roll. The truth is, we have had legitimate differences with the Cuban government over the years and we have had valid concerns about their human rights record, but that we were not justified in trying to assassinate Fidel Castro and we had no more right to attack their civilian aviation than al-Qaeda has to attack ours. And I am going to be blunt here…while the degree and specificity of our foreknowledge of the Cubana Airliner bombing is still a matter of considerable dispute, we trained him to kill, we encouraged him to kill, and we shielded him for decades and continued to work with him as a resource and probably as an agent even after we knew that he was a mass murderer of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed proportions. If we are in Afghanistan because the Taliban refused to turn over Usama bin-Laden, then Cuba should be occupying our country and hunting in Kentucky caves for Mr. Posada.
A fugitive from justice in Venezuela where he escaped from prison while being tried for the October 6, 1976, mid air bombing of a Cuban jetliner which killed all 73 people on board, Posada showed up in Miami in March 2005. He was arrested on May 17 of that year by the Department of Homeland Security and held in an immigration detention center in El Paso for two years, charged with immigration fraud during the Bush administration. Since mid 2007, he has been living on bail in Miami. In April 2009, the Obama Justice Department added several counts of perjury relating to Posada denials about his role in organizing a series of hotel, restaurant and discotheque bombings in 1997.
According to [National Security Archive Cuba Documentation Project director Peter] Kornbluh, “it is poetic justice that the same U.S. Government whose secret agencies created, trained, paid and deployed Posada is finally taking steps to hold him accountable in a court of law for his terrorist crimes.”
The Obama administration has disappointed me in a number of areas related to our Permagov security state, but the brother deserves some credit for taking on this sacred cow. May the Gods see to his continued good health.
You can view the declassified CIA files at the National Security Archives.
