Luis Posada Carriles, an admitted terrorist wanted for crimes in Latin America, had a nice dinner the other night.
...the man being honored by 500 fellow Cuban Americans at a sold-out gala was Luis Posada Carriles, the former CIA operative wanted in Venezuela on terrorism charges and under a deportation order for illegally entering the United States three years ago.
Posada Carriles should be behind bars right now. He's an international terrorist who was trained and financed by the US government. He was the ringleader in the bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people, has bombed hotels in Havana and abroad, tried to assassinate Castro, all with the full knowledge of the CIA. But he's not only free, but feted as a hero.
Venezuela's ambassador in Washington, Bernardo Alvarez Herrera, condemned the celebration of Posada as a mockery of justice and evidence of a Bush administration double standard in fighting terrorism.
"This is outrageous, particularly because he kept talking about violence," Alvarez said of Posada. "He said that the whole thing now is 'to sharpen our machetes' " for a confrontation with leftist regimes in Latin America.
The U.S. government has never given Venezuela a formal answer to its 3-year-old request for extradition of Posada, despite a treaty providing for such cooperation that has been in effect since 1922, the ambassador said.
Posada, a naturalized Venezuelan citizen, is alleged to have masterminded the bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1976 on which all 73 on board were killed, including a youth fencing team returning from a tournament in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas. He is also suspected of plotting a series of hotel bombings in Havana in the late 1990s, one of which killed an Italian tourist.
See, Posada Carriles is OUR kind of terrorist. He set bombs against our mutual enemies and tried to assassinate those our government wanted assassinated, like Castro. He has a full accounting of all kinds of nefarious actions that our CIA was involved in, and so the Bush Administration is protecting him. Protecting a known terrorist.
Peter Kornbluh, head of the Cuba Documentation Project at George Washington University's National Security Archive, has compiled declassified CIA and FBI documents on Posada that show he remained in close touch with Washington handlers throughout his covert service.
"The spectacle of a wanted international terrorist being publicly feted as a hero in Miami makes a mockery of the Bush administration's commitment to wage a war on terrorism," he said of Posada's coming-out party.
I seem to remember a speech wherein the President averred that "we will make no distinction between terrorists and the states who harbor them."
Hm.
Let the bombing of Miami commence!
More on Posada Carriles from my archives. He was a CIA operative, by the way, involved in all of these plots to overthrow governments and assassinate sovereign leaders, when a guy by the name of George Bush was CIA Director. In fact, the Cuban airliner bombing was carried out with full knowledge of the CIA, while it was under the auspices of Mr. Bush.
Disgusting.