Terrorist Luis Posada Carriles takes refuge in the US
Campaign News | Saturday, 2 April 2005
He is negotiating terms for his surrender to US authorities
BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD-Special for Granma International-
LUIS Posada Carriles, the most dangerous terrorist on the continent, who swore openly in Panama that he would continue to commit criminal acts, has taken refuge in the United States, where he has negotiated the details of his surrender, processing and residence with the US immigration authorities.
According to the Spanish news agency EFE, Posada Carriles has been negotiating his surrender to US authorities for several days. EFE claims that its information comes from “sources” linked to Cuban-American terrorist circles and local TV Station Channel 41 announced the news citing extra-judicial sources. For its part, El Nuevo Herald newspaper cites “a source familiar with the case.”
The Herald article says that Posada was negotiating “the details of his surrender, processing and residence in the United States” with the Department of Homeland Security’s local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.
Posada is responsible for numerous acts of terrorism, including the mid-flight explosion of a Cubana airliner over Barbados that killed 73 people in October of 1976. Venezuela has applied for his extradition based on those acts, after he escaped in 1985 from San Juan de los Morros prison, 140 km from Caracas, with the help of the Miami-based Cuban-American National Foundation.
AN INFERNAL HISTORY
An active CIA agent from 1963 as confirmed in documents declassified by the Church Commission, Luis Posada Carriles was in Dallas at the time of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and more than a few experts suspect that he was one of the snipers who killed the US president.
He also acted as a CIA expert in demolition and sabotage and as an informant until his excessively foul-smelling relationship with the South Florida world of drug trafficking led the Company to suggest that he look for a job elsewhere.
Posada joined - with the best recommendations from the CIA - the Venezuelan DIGEPOL, where he rapidly ascended to its leadership until that political police agency became the DISIP, using bloody repression to get rid of the guerrilla movement. There, according to his own words, he organized and participated in a veritable massacre, kidnapping, torturing and murdering with a free hand.
In 1976, after losing his position, he and his friend Orlando Bosch, the murderous pediatrician, organized the attack on the Cubana passenjer aircraft that killed 73 people and led to his being thrown in jail.
His escape from prison, negotiated and paid for by the founder of CANF and his old buddy from Fort Benning - Jorge Mas Canosa - enabled him to resurface at the Salvadoran military base of Ilopango, where together with Félix Rodríguez Mendigutía, a right-hand man of George Bush Sr, he organized a gigantic exchange of arms for drugs to benefit the Nicaraguan Contra, which caused the Coca-Contra scandal.
The old killer continued to organize assassination attempts against the Cuban president - including from La Esperanza yacht, which failed in Puerto Rico after an unexpected intervention by the Coast Guard - and terrorist actions such as the 1997 campaign against tourist locations in Cuba, until he was arrested in November 2000 in Panama.
Pardoned by President Mireya Moscoso on August 26 of last year, Posada disappeared during a stopover in Honduras, while his three Miami accomplices, Pedro Crispín Remón - the Omega-7 hired assassin - Gaspar Jiménez and Guillermo Novo of the CORU were welcomed in Miami... without even the slightest intervention on the part of individuals supposedly charged with enforcing US laws, including those against terrorism. And to the applause of some 50 individuals linked to terrorism.
In San Pedro Sula, where he arrived with a US passport in the name of Melvin Cloide Thompson, Posada was welcomed, supposedly, by his old buddy, arms trafficker and TV station owner Rafael “Ralph” Hernández Nodarse.
After a media circus, his trace was officially lost.
“OFFICIALLY OR NOT OFFICIALLY?”
According to US journalist Anne-Louise Bardach and several experts, Posada has made several illegal trips to the U.S over the years.
During a three-day interview with Bardach, beginning June 18, 1998, and in which he confessed to being payrolled by the CANF, Posada revealed that he had four passports from different countries using false identities.
“He admitted that he has an American passport but would not say how he obtained it or disclose the name,” wrote the reporter. “I asked when he last visited the United States and he answered with a laugh and a question of his own: “Officially or unofficially?” He added coyly that he had occasionally used his fake American passport to visit the States “unofficially”.
A friend of Posada’s later told Bardach that he had bought the passport from a corrupt official in Miami and that he was using “the name of a gringo from Atlanta, Georgia.”
“I have a lot of passports,” Posada told the journalist later in the interview. “If I want to go to Miami, I have different ways to go. No problem.”
Benefiting from the murderous tolerance granted in the United States to the same individuals who were being fought against by the five anti-terrorist Cuban patriots still unjustly imprisoned by imperialist justice, Posada has illegally returned to US territory with no problem.
WAS THE FBI UNAWARE OF THE OLD ASSASSIN’S PRESENCE?
Was FBI Special Agent in Charge Michael S. Clemens - a “terrorism expert” - unaware that Posada was in the United States? Are his services so badly uninformed in spite of their numerous ties with terrorist circles in Miami, as admitted by his predecessor, Héctor Pesquera? Didn’t the federal police know what Remón, Jiménez and Novo were already commenting on?
In an interview recently granted to the Miami Herald, Clemens emphasized that in the struggle against terror, Miami’s ports and airports were an absolute priority. Everything seems to confirm - with the crudeness of Posada’s appearance in Miami - that that priority does not apply to Cuban-American terrorists.
Just a few days ago, Ricardo Alarcón, president of the Cuban Parliament, presented to the press a declassified FBI document indicating that the US federal police 40 years ago knew the addresses where the international terrorist was living in Florida. In a sworn statement that is part of that document, Posada affirmed that had always acted with the conviction of having the tolerance of the US government.
“Do another 40 years have to go by before the FBI provides us with a document that includes the private address and contact that they assuredly continue to maintain with Mr. Posada?” the Cuban leader asked.
During his imprisonment in the Panamanian jail El Renacer, Posada as well as Remón Jiménez and Novo, repeatedly proclaimed on both Miami and Panamanian television that they hoped to get out of there in order to continue committing acts of terrorism.
Will the US legal apparatus continue to “negotiate” with the most dangerous terrorist on the continent?
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2005/abril/vier1/15posada.html
Terrorist Posada Carilles to seek asylum in US
MIAMI April 1: Cuban terrorist Luis Posada Carriles who plotted to kill Fidel Castro plans to seek asylum in the United States in hopes of avoiding prosecution in Venezuela for allegedly blowing up a Cuban airliner in 1976, according to a lawyer who will represent him.
Posada Carriles, 77, is also wanted by Cuba and could face execution if he were extradited there.
The attorney, Eduardo Soto, said he planned to file an application for asylum with the Homeland Security Department as soon as Posada is ready to come forward.
Foreigners seeking asylum generally get to stay in the United States while their case is decided and could remain permanently if they can prove they face persecution or are in fear for their lives if deported.
"I anticipate a huge struggle here, both on the immigration front and in other matters," Soto told The Miami Herald in a story published on Friday April 1.
If Posada is granted asylum, it could protect him from extradition to Venezuela even though it has an extradition treaty with the United States.
Posada, who is Cuban-born and a naturalized Venezuelan citizen, is wanted for escaping from a Venezuelan prison in 1985 while awaiting the outcome of a prosecutor's appeal of his acquittal in the airline bombing case.
Posada was also one of four men pardoned last year by Panama's former president, Mireya Moscoso, for their roles in an alleged plot to assassinate Fidel while the Cuban president attended a summit in Panama in 2000.
In Cuba, an editorial in Granma, Cuba's Communist Party daily, asserted that Posada has likely been in the United States for some time. Soto said he did not know Posada's exact whereabouts.
"The news is not news, and the announced legal process will only constitute a farce," said the editorial in April 1 editions of the newspaper.
"Who is going to think that a man whom Washington owes for so much dirty work would have to present himself to the courts threatened with deportation?"
Homeland Security Department officials declined comment on Posada, other than to say he was not in US custody. Soto said he expected to receive further instructions about Posada's plans from intermediaries early next week.
Posada, a veteran of the failed CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, has fought against Castro for decades and masterminded the series of 1997 bombings of prominent tourist spots in Cuba in whihc an Italian toruist was killed.
He and Orlando Bosch, a Miami pediatrician, where tried twice in Venezuela for the 1976 bombing of a Cubana airlines plane that killed 73 people.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-41cubanmilitant,0,2320711.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines
