US government moves to gag terrorist on CIA ties

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/may2007/posa-m03.shtml

By Bill Van Auken

3 May 2007

With his trial on immigration charges set for May 11, the US government has
filed a motion in federal court seeking to bar the international terrorist
Luis Posada Carriles from testifying on his role as an agent of the Central
Intelligence Agency.

Venezuela has demanded that Posada Carriles be extradited to face charges
there related to his masterminding of a 1976 bombing of a Cuban civilian
passenger jet that killed 73 people. He evaded punishment for the crime—at
the time the worst single act of terrorism in the Western Hemisphere—by
escaping a Venezuelan prison in 1985.

Violating international and bilateral treaties, Washington has rebuffed
Venezuela's request, charging Posada Carriles instead with minor violations
of US immigration law for entering the US without a visa and lying to
immigration officials. Last month, the terrorist, who had been in federal
custody since May 2005, was set free on bail and returned to Miami.

The release has provoked international protests and exposed the hypocrisy of
the so-called "global war on terrorism" proclaimed by a government that has
sponsored and continues to harbor and protect a wanted terrorist.

The nine-page motion submitted to the federal court in El Paso, Texas,
argues that the relationship between Posada Carriles and the CIA ended 30
years ago and therefore is irrelevant.

Declassified documents have established that Carriles was recruited as an
agent of the CIA in 1961, was sent into the US Army for a year of training
in demolition and terrorist tactics and remained directly on the CIA payroll
at least until 1967. From 1969 to 1974, he served as a senior officer in the
Venezuelan secret police, DISIP, charged with capturing, torturing and
killing left-wing opponents of the government. During that period he
remained an informant and "asset" of the CIA in Latin America.

In 1976, he planned the airline bombing, leaving its execution to two
employees of his private detective agency that he set up in Caracas after a
change of government forced him out of the secret police. Just two weeks
before the October 1976 airline bombing, he was involved in another
terrorist attack, this one in the center of Washington. A car bomb killed
the exiled former foreign minister of Chile, Orlando Letelier, and an
American aide, Ronni Moffitt.

After his escape from prison in Venezuela, Posada Carriles made his way to
El Salvador, where he became a key operative in the illegal terror war
against Nicaragua financed by the CIA and directed by the network
established by the Reagan administration under the direction of Lt. Col.
Oliver North of the National Security Council. He went on to Guatemala,
becoming a government intelligence officer during a brutal counterinsurgency
campaign that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

In the 1990s, by his own admission, Posada Carriles directed a series of
terrorist bombings against hotels and tourist spots in Cuba, killing an
Italian tourist.

And, in November 2000, he was involved in an aborted attempt to blow up a
conference hall in Panama, where Cuban President Fidel Castro was scheduled
to speak to hundreds of people. He was arrested and jailed for the plot, but
then pardoned by outgoing Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso in 2004,
reportedly as the result of either US pressure or bribes from anti-Castro
Cuban exile groups.

In response to the government attempt to quash any public testimony about
Posada Carriles's ties to the CIA, the terrorist's defense lawyers filed a
countermotion this week, insisting that it was impossible to discuss the
"context" of the case without dealing with their client's relation with the
agency. Moreover, the document claimed, this relationship "lasted for 25
years."

"The government's statement that his service to the United States ended in
1976 is incorrect," the document said.

The implications of the motion are clear. Posada Carriles was working for
the CIA when he planned and executed the terrorist bombing that murdered 73
people aboard the Cuban plane as well as the car-bomb assassination in
Washington. Moreover, he remained an agent or "asset" of the US intelligence
agency while continuing to carry out acts of terrorist and repressive
violence in Cuba, Central America and elsewhere for at least another decade.
Both of the 1976 terrorist acts took place when George H.W. Bush, the
current US president's father, was director of the CIA.

Declassified documents obtained by the National Security Archive
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB153/index.htm in 2005 establish
that the CIA had advance intelligence on the planned airline bombing and
that the FBI's attaché in Caracas had repeated contacts with one of the
operatives who placed the bomb on the plane and, just days before the
bombing, obtained a visa for him to travel to the US.

The US government's attempt to gag Posada Carriles about his CIA ties and
the countermotion alleging that these connections spanned at least 25 years
expose the real reason that the Bush administration refuses to abide by
international law and extradite him to Venezuela to face trial.

While the administration has offered the incredible justification that
Posada Carriles could face torture in Venezuela—this from a government that
has not only tortured its own detainees at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and
elsewhere, but also deliberately sent them to other countries to be
tortured—the real reason is that such a prosecution would expose
Washington's role in decades of terrorism and repression in Latin America.

On April 25, Venezuela's ambassador to the Organization of American States,
Nelson Pineda, charged the US with harboring a "convicted and confessed
terrorist" and demanded that Washington comply with its bilateral
extradition treaty with Venezuela. Pineda read out a statement from the
Venezuelan Foreign Ministry that stated:

"The freeing of the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is the final result of
the maneuver that the government of George W. Bush put in motion to protect
him and with this act it promotes impunity and disgracefully mocks the
memory of the victims of the bombing of the Cubana de Aviación plane that
took place in 1976.

"This act of complicity, committed by the sinister American president, seeks
to buy the silence of Posada Carriles, who has for many years been an agent
of the CIA and a pawn of the Bush clan, as the declassified documents of the
US demonstrate and therefore has valuable information about the criminal
activities carried out against the peoples of Latin America and the
Caribbean."

Responding to these charges, the US alternate representative to the OAS,
Margarita Riva-Geoghegan, ignored Venezuela's extradition request, baldly
stating, "The United States is not harboring Luis Posada Carriles." She
continued, "The United States is proceeding with its own national
prosecution in an area where Mr. Posada Carriles has broken US law."

Such claims are absurd on their face. The charges of murder and terrorism,
substantiated by Washington's own declassified documents, clearly take
precedence over the minor immigration infractions that are being used as a
pretense for ignoring the demand for extradition and providing a cover for
what is in reality the harboring and protection of Posada Carriles.

In Cuba, meanwhile, the annual May Day demonstration in Havana was dominated
by signs and slogans demanding the extradition of Posada Carriles as well as
the freeing of the "Cuban Five," five Cuban nationals who have been jailed
in the US since 1998. Framed up on conspiracy and espionage-related charges
for monitoring anti-Castro terrorist exile groups based in Miami, the five
were convicted in 2001 and sentenced to jail terms ranging from 15 years to
life.

See also:
Posada Carriles: terrorist who killed 73 in plane bombing walks
free<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/apr2007/posa-a20.shtml>
[20 April 2007]

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