It looks like
Luis Posada Carriles may soon be able to lead a comfortable life in the US.
US judge: Cuba jetliner bombing suspect should be freed
Anti-Castro activist Luis Posada Carriles, wanted in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner, should be set free, a federal US judge recommended Monday.
Posada Carriles has been in a Texas jail since May 2005 for entering the United States illegally.
Judge Norbert Garney found that Posada Carriles should be released because no country can be found to accept him, other than Cuba and Venezuela, both of which want to try him for a series of bombings.
Luis Posada Carriles (born February 15, 1928) is an anti-Castro and anti-Communist fugitive who is alleged to have been involved in numerous violent terrorist plots, including Operation 40, hotel bombings and the 1976 bombing of a Cubana Flight 455 in which seventy-three people were killed, including the entire teenage Cuban Olympic fencing team. He is also said to have been involved in Operation Condor, namely in Orlando Letelier's murder in Washington, D.C., a few weeks before Cubana de Aviación's explosion. Posada has lived in Venezuela, where he became a naturalized citizen and served in its political police; and the United States, where he served in the U.S. Army and developed a relationship with the CIA. Posada was convicted and jailed for a bombing attempt on the life of Cuban President Fidel Castro at a summit in Panama in 2000; in 2004 outgoing Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso pardoned and released him from prison.
Of course, we know the Bush Administration's offical policy on the harboring of terrorists:
As President Bush said, if you give safe haven to a terrorist, you will be treated as a terrorist. Those who harbor terrorists are just as guilty as terrorists.
Following this logic, the US discontinued its attempt to normalize relations with the Taliban regime of Afghanistan in 2001 (although having known about bin Laden's wherabouts for years) and securing a sweet deal on an oil pipeline, and proceeded to kill more than 3.000 civilians in less than six months by making the strategic choice to bomb densely populated areas.
"What causes the documented high level of civilian casualties -- 3,000 - 3,400 [October 7, 2001 thru March 2002] civilian deaths -- in the U.S. air war upon Afghanistan? The explanation is the apparent willingness of U.S. military strategists to fire missiles into and drop bombs upon, heavily populated areas of Afghanistan."
Professor Marc W. Herold
Ph.D., M.B.A., B.Sc.
March 2002
When U.S. warplanes strafed [with AC-130 gunships] the farming village of Chowkar-Karez, 25 miles north of Kandahar on October 22-23rd,killing at least 93 civilians, a Pentagon official said, "the people there are dead because we wanted them dead." The reason? They sympathized with the Taliban1. When asked about the Chowkar incident, Rumsfeld replied, "I cannot deal with that particular village."2
Indeed, it was far more important to bomb the hell out of Afghanistan than to actually capture the terrorists.
Their [the Taliban's] initial responses demanded evidence of bin Laden's culpability in the September 11th attacks and included a proposal to try him in an Islamic court. Later, as the likelihood of military action became more imminent, they offered to extradite bin Laden to a neutral nation. Moderates within the Taliban allegedly met with American embassy officials in Pakistan in mid-October to work out a way to convince Mullah Muhammed Omar to turn bin Laden over to the U.S. and avoid its impending retaliation. President Bush rejected these offers made by the Taliban as insincere.
(Sadly, Bush did not lack support for this decision.)
So what should the US governement do with Luis Posada Carriles? Should they just turn their back on a former employee?
Washington D.C. May 10, 2005 - Declassified CIA and FBI records posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive at George Washington University identify Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles, who is apparently in Florida seeking asylum, as a former CIA agent and as one of the "engineer[s]" of the 1976 terrorist bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455 that killed 73 passengers.
And, follwing the logic of President Bush (and those who supported him), could Venezuela and Cuba legitimately bomb US cities and take out a few hundred civilians in a "proportionate response?" After all, when the US did that after 9/11, the whole response was so picture perfect.