Estoy Muy Contento

That's what Luis Posada Carriles said yesterday and why shouldn't he be contented? The other day a Court in New Orleans ruled that he had not entered the country illegally and dismissed the deportation proceedings against him. Thus the elderly Carriles could go back to Miami to live out his days in Little Havana.

And who is Carriles you might ask? Well he is the man who, in 1976, planted a bomb on Air Cubana Flight 455 from Caracas to Havana killing everyone on board. Until 9-11 it was the largest act of terrorism in the Western Hemisphere. A Venezuelan Court found him guilty and sentenced him to life imprisonment but he escaped and made his way to South Florida where he lived the good life while the US refused to send him back to prison. Was it a case where the American Authorities thought he was wrongly convicted? Well no. As Peter Kornbluth, of the National Security Archives, points out there is strong evidence that Carriles was a CIA "Asset" involved in all kinds of nasty things. For one he seems to have worked on "Operation Condor" that little scheme to get the Junta in Argentina and the Pinochistas in Chile to help train the death squads in El Salvador and the "Freedom Fighters" in Nicaragua. He is also implicated in the car bomb deaths of Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffett in Washington DC, also in 1976 (he was a busy boy that year) and he was a great chum of another terrorist - Orlando Bosch - pardoned by George Herbert Walker Bush before leaving office.

Oh, and one other thing - he boasted to reporters in Miami that he planted the bomb on that airliner. Well the government had no choice after that. They had to act, but without much enthusiasm. Maybe that's because the Venezualians believe the CIA helped him get out of jail. But then who cares what those crazy guys think? Chavez is bad, bad, bad, right?

Now if the US were serious about terrorism they could still lock Carriles up under the PATRIOT Act. Send him to Gitmo. Hold him without trial or refuse him counsel like Jose Padilla.

(and which one sounds more dangerous?)

Or they could ship him off to the Hague for crimes against humanity.

But, instead, they send him back to South Florida. As Kornbluth said: "This sends a message around the world that the United States is not serious in its war on Terrorism." And how could they be?

After all this fellow is a state-sponsored terrorist.

And we're the state.

Comments

[Tambopaxi]

Gonzales, Posada..... Ugh. We'd be doing ourselves a favor if we sent them BOTH to Gitmo, or Cuba, or Venezuela... What a pair.

[Becky]

This is just the latest example in the long history of the US selling out legitimate interests in order to keep the ex-Batistas in Florida happy. It's all about Florida's electoral college votes.