Today in El Paso, an accused terrorist wanted in Venezuela —
to face trial for a mid-air plane bombing with 73 people on board — will appear before an immigration judge for his 2nd hearing. The judge will weigh his demand for asylum in the US.
The Bush admin has denied and stalled Venezuela's request for his extradition. The accused terrorist - Luis Posada - entered the US illegally in March. [Posada is a Cuban exile and a naturalized citizen of Venezuela who worked for its intelligence service in the 1970s. He has CIA and Iran-contra connections, too.]
The Cubana Air bombing in 1976 was the first instance of a civilian airliner used as a terrorist weapon. 73 people on board were killed.
This comes on the heels of Rev. Robertson's 700 Club patwa against Venezuela's president. Bush's refusal to return Posada to Venezuela for trial is raising concern.
The special handling of Posada by the WH reminds me of a parallel 15 years earlier — when Bush's father overrode his Justice Department in 1990 and granted asylum to Posada's partner, Orlando Bosch.
The earlier case unfolded in 1989 and 1990 during the tenure of John Roberts as the deputy in the Solicitor General's office, and over the objections of DoJ personnel and the INS office in Miami. [The SG office typically is not a party to instances of presidential clemency (the Pardon Attorney at DoJ should have primary responsibility) or to asylum matters (INS). So there's a possibility Roberts would not have entered the fray on the pardons in 1990-93. [More on exceptions to the Pardon Attorney's role below.]
The Homeland Security judge today will judge the claim of Luis Posada Carriles, who was convicted in Panama and sentenced to 8 years for "endangering public safety" for his failed attempt to detonate C4 explosives in a packed auditorium at the University of Panama in 2000 to execute Fidel Castro. (The Cuban leader was a guest speaker at the Inter-American summit meeting there.) Posada and 3 collaborators were captured with 33 pounds of C-4 for the abortive assassination, enough explosive to kill 100s of bystanders. Panama's president responded to pressure last September by the Bush administration last September to free Posada. She gave him a full pardon 4 days before she left office.
More about Posada's past: "Our Man's in Miami. Patriot or Terrorist?" by Ann Louise Bardach, WaPo April 17
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.
Last month the Homeland Security judge in El Paso, William A. Abbott, decided he will rummage past Luis Posada's part in the 1976 mid-air bombing of Cubana Airline Flight 455 – which killed 73 civilian passengers and crew, including 24 athletes of the Cuba's youth fencing team – and the 2000 assassination attempt to examine an earlier incident: the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
The judge has called for legal briefs to tell him whether the 1961 invasion was a terrorist act. Posada "earlier told reporters he was involved in the Bay of Pigs operation" but according to his lawyers he was not a member of the actual landing and invasion force.
NY Times, Anti-Castro exile could test U.S. terror policies
May 9, 2005 NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Posada was involved "up to his eyeballs" in planning the [Cubana Airlines] 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 Bush Admin has so far refused to extradite Posada, and has detained him now only on the charge of having entered the country illegally without documents, and not on any charges of murder or terror.
< < Deja Vu > >
The president's father George HW Bush in 1990 and 1993 made two remarkable grants for pardon or asylum (even when we leave aside for a moment Bush's lame-duck 1992 pardons of convicted Iran-contra conspirators and Cap Weinberger, who was set to go to trial).
The first act of forgiveness in July 1990 was for Orlando Bosch, [a suspected mastermind (with Posada) of the Flight #455 explosion.
The second startling clemency came in January 1993 for a convicted heroin smuggler from Karachi, Pakistan over the objections of the prosecuting attorney and DEA agents.
According to the Miami Herald (link below), Posada and Bosch deny they were the plotters in the airline explosion.
"The truth about the plane bombing," Bosch said, is contained in a tape and a document in a safebox that "will be made public when I die."
link [free registration required].
- - - - - -
Bosch remained in prison in Venezuela through the mid 1980s, while still directing terrorist actions. He eventually was freed on humanitarian grounds after a long hunger strike. He came to the US without papers and was arrested for parole violation and then remanded to the custody of INS.
DoJ first denied a request by Bosch for asylum in 1989, the acting deputy attorney general at DoJ laid out the reasons why [ below ].
President Bush's grant to release Bosch from prison in July 1990 came over these objections, see below.
Nation magazine author David Corn wrote in 1990: "In yet another parole violation Bosch is now, according to the Miami Herald, organizing a group to raise money to buy and ship arms to Castro's adversaries."
The acting deputy 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." More than 30 countries refused to allow Bosch entry.
The INS District Director in Miami had blocked Bosch from remaining in the U.S. on the following grounds:
That he is or has been an alien who advocates or teaches or has been a member of an organization that advocates or teaches the duty, necessity, or propriety of assaulting or killing officers of any organized government. (8 U.S.C. 1182 (a) (28) (F) (ii)).
... an alien who advocates or teaches or has been a member of an organization that advocates or teaches the unlawful damage, injury or destruction of property. (8 U.S.C. 1182 (a) (28) (F) (iii)).
... an alien who advocates or teaches or has been a member of an organization that advocates or teaches sabotage. (8 U.S.C. 1182 (a) (28) (F)(iv)).
You can read it here. It will make your head spin.
Back to the present, Posada's appeal for asylum:
A post at dailykos 2 years ago (by Markos?) excerpts the South Florida Sun-Sentinel:
[Luis Posada Carriles] turned up in Central America working in Oliver North's secret Contra operation, along with Felix Rodriguez, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal with close ties to then Vice President Bush.
In 1998, Posada Carriles acknowledged in an interview with The New York Times that he had directed the bombing of a number of hotels in Havana the previous year which had resulted in the death of an Italian tourist. Though Posada Carriles confessed his culpability, no charges were ever filed against him in the U.S.
The post by Markos also notes:
The United States Justice Department ruled [in 1989] that Bosch should be deported because of his terrorist activities. The deportation order cited FBI and CIA reports that Bosch "has repeatedly expressed and demonstrated a willingness to cause indiscriminate injury and death," including 30 acts of sabotage in the United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Panama from 1961 through 1968. In the worst charge against Bosch, 73 people were killed when a bomb blew up a Cuban passenger jet. Acting Associate Attorney General Joe Whitley wrote in his decision to deport Bosch: ' The October 6, 1976, Cuban airline bombing was a CORU operation under the direction of Bosch. CORU is the name of Bosch's terrorist outfit.' That bombing marked the first time that a civilian passenger jet was turned into a weapon of terrorism.
So why does this country harbor and coddle terrorists?
I will not have the time to explore the January 18, 1993 clemency by Pres. Bush of convicted Pakistani heroin trafficker Aslam Adam. His last appeal through the court system had been denied to him by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in March 1990. [The link is a 1994 article by Eric Nadler in Rolling Stone.] Agents from DEA and prosecuting attorneys were not pleased (Houston Chronicle, Knight-Ridder Tribune News, Freeing of Drug Smuggler Baffles Legal Authorities, Mar. 28, 1993; Associated Press, Prosecutor Attempted to Block Pardon, Jan. 29, 1993. Of note, C. Boyden Gray and Sen. Jesse Helms pressed for Adam's release.
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The most memorable pardons of Pres. Bush 41 were, of course, the Iran-Contra pardons in 1992. Even before the pardons, factions in DoJ and other departments were withholding data demanded by the special prosecutor.
Despite the obstacles, the prosecutor Lawrence Walsh drew felony convictions for Oliver North (May 1989, convicted by a jury of 3 felony counts) and John Poindexter (April 1990, convicted by a jury of 5 felony counts). An appeals court overturned North's conviction by a 2-1 vote (with Laurence Silberman and Jesse Helms' protege David Sentelle voting to overturn) in July 1990. Judge Sentelle joined an appeals panel in overturning Poindexter's conviction also in November 1991.
According to the site of Robert Parry, the former AP reporter who covered the Contra funding scandal for the wire, recounted in 1996 the legal maneuvering:
When Walsh moved to appeal the [1990] North ruling (which was based an unprecedented application of immunity rules), Walsh was supported by the Justice Department's career appellate division. But
Walsh was opposed by Bush's solicitor general.
At the time,
Ken Starr was the solicitor general for Bush, and John Roberts was his principal deputy, the sole political non-career deputy in the office of the SG.
Note that the SG office at DoJ does not only argue cases before the Supreme Court. It also has responsibility for authorizing appeals or suggestions for rehearing en banc that any part of the federal government might want to take from an adverse decision.
The Supreme Court declined to hear ("denied certiorari" for) Walsh's challenge to the Appeals decision on Oliver North's case on May 28, 1991. [North v. U.S., 111 S.Ct. 2235] , following an en banc re-hearing by the full Circuit Court. The Supreme Court In December of 2002 denied certiorari of the Independent Counsel's challenge of the Poindexter case as well, petition filed in October.
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From a master's thesis analysis of East Tennessee State Univeristy titled, "Pardon You? Pardon Me. Controversial Usage of the Presidential Pardoning Power: From Carter to Clinton" [author, Mike Keith Allen] :
Pardons of Iran-Contra.
Discussion of the Christmas Eve 2002 pardons by Bush of Caspar Weinberger, Elliot Abrams, Duane Clarridge, Alan Fiers, Clair George and Robert McFarlane.
"This pardon came only one month after [independent prosecutor Lawrence] Walsh in a new investigation had indicted Clarridge and Weinberger for obstruction of justice. After the pardon Walsh commented — 'It demonstrates that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office – deliberately abusing the public trust – without consequence.' Walsh later followed up by stating, ' In light of President Bush's own misconduct, we are gravely concerned by his decision to pardon others who lied to Congress and obstructed official investigations.' . . .
"The Clarridge and Weinberger pardons went either further.
For the first time, a non-president [i.e., distinct from Richard Nixon] was pardoned before he was convicted or started to serve his sentence, which violated the guidelines of the Constitution. Walsh and other counsels charged -- Cover up. This continued an alarming area of pardons. Bush ... pardoned a mistake in his political past. This new precedent combined with the coverage of the controversial executive privilege introduced a new level of secrecy to the presidential ranks. . . .
Although Bush's explanation is worded very elequently, ... it reveals many flaws.
Bush claimed that the actions taken by these individuals were pardonable because terrorism had declined, democratic governments were elected, and the cold war had ended. If this is accepted, then Bush simply defended breaking the laws of the US because individuals had good intentions. Bush continued in his proclamation by stating that the last of the hoastages "has come home," therefore admitting that these actions had been taken directly to free the Americans held by pro-Iranian nationals. Most of the hostages had been released following Reagan's swearing in, and if that was the case, then there had to be negotiations between the two before Reagan took office.
This was extremely contentious considering Reagan had repeatedly stated that he had not negotiated with the Iranians during Carter's term.
Bush followed up by forgiving them because their common denominator was patriotism. This was also unacceptable considering terrorists around the world routinely commit illegal violations under the auspices of patriotism.
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--->> Back to the present. 1. Today's immigration/asylum decision for the ex-Iran-Contra supply coordinator should be interesting. 2. Senators should ask John Roberts if he gave any remarks, inputs, consultation or writings on any matter involving the pardons involving Iran-Contra, and any asylum disputes between different factions of DoJ/INS. Of note, one of Roberts' files from the Reagan period that is being withheld involved "humanitarian" assistance to Nicaragua. [ Shoving expenditures into the "humanitarian" area was a way to appear to be compliant with the restrictions Congress laid down that strictly forbade military aid.]
Administration sources told the New York Times that Roberts' papers from that period aren't covered by the Act, because they record "sensitive, deliberative, confidential" conversations among administration lawyers in developing cases for argument before the Supreme Court.
But that's hardly all they would show. Plenty else was of concern to the Solicitor General's office, which was busy being helpful to Iran-Contra conspirators such as Admiral John Poindexter, and hostile to then-Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh. What was going on at the Solicitor General's office, and being said about those still-murky times might shed light not just on Roberts, but on the president's father -- and maybe even explain a little about why George HW Bush is so fond of Judge Roberts.
Note also -- Although the Office of the Pardon Attorney in DoJ is supposed to be the important filter to consider clemency, we know that is not always the case.