McCain Campaign Palling Around with Terrorists in Miami?

[Billy Burnett]

McCain Campaign Palling Around with Terrorists in Miami?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roberto-lovato/mccain-campaign-palling-a_b_133288.html
{snip}

Lesnik and other observers point, for example, to McCain and his supporter's affiliations with long-time anti-Castro activists like Roberto Martin Perez. Perez, a member of numerous Cuban exile groups who appears in a recent McCain campaign ad, is one of the chief sponsors of a campaign to free Eduardo Arocena, the Cuban exile leader of the alleged terrorist group, Omega 7. Arocena was convicted on 25 counts and is serving a mandatory life sentence for his role in several terrorist incidents including 32 bombings and 2 politically-motivated murders. In his summary of the Omega 7 case, New York Appeals Court Judge Lombard declared, "From 1975 to 1982, Omega 7 conducted a series of bombings in the New York metropolitan area that injured bystanders and damaged homes, businesses, and a church. The bombsites included Avery Fisher Hall, Madison Square Garden, JFK Airport, the ticket office of Aeroflot (the Soviet airline), and the Cuban Mission to the United Nations." Arocena supporter Perez was recently seen hugging the GOP presidential candidate at a recent campaign event. In addition to Perez, supporters of Arocena, whose victims include Eulalio José Negrin, a New Jersey man who died in his 13 year-old son's arms, include one of John McCain's closest allies, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman. As recently as last July, Lieberman promised Arocena's wife that "I will carry it back. I will carry it back. Yeah. I feel...I think of you like you were my family."

Other McCain supporters in South Florida have also drawn fire for their connections to persons critics say are not designated as terrorists precisely because they are connected to powerful Republicans. "The GOP is the same party that is giving safe harbor to terrorists living on our midst, but these terrorists have powerful friends" says Silvia Wilhelm, Executive Director of the Cuban American Commission for Family Rights, a non-partisan not-for-profit organization that advocates for looser travel restrictions between the United States and Cuba. "What moral authority do they have to denounce links to terrorists? None," states Wilhelm, who has had to call the FBI after receiving bomb threats for her work around the travel restrictions. "Many of McCain's main supporters here in Miami -- Lincoln and Mario Diaz Balart, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen -- back Luis Posada Carriles, a known, convicted terrorist, who is walking around here with complete impunity."

Though they have been silent about the Posada case since the election campaign started, the Diaz-Balarts and Ros-Lehtinen lobbied the Panamanian government to pardon Posada and three other exiles caught with explosives in Panama during an assassination attempt targeting Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 2000. In a signed letter to the Panamanian written in 2003 on Congressional stationary the 3 Cuban American Congress members from South Florida stated, "We ask respectfully that you pardon Luis Posada Carriles, Guillermo Novo Sampol, Pedro Crispin Remon and Gaspar Jimenez Escobedo.'' Posada was convicted by civilian courts in Panama for his involvement in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people, most of whom were teenage and twenty-something members of the Cuban fencing team. A declassified FBI report states that " all but admitted that Posada and Bosch had engineered the bombing of the airline." McCain appointed Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart as his campaign's chief adviser and spokesman Latin American issues.

[Hope And Change]

1. K & R!

[Billy Burnett]

2. Lets get this to the Greatest Page. Please K & R.

:kick:

[Kadie]

3. .

:kick:

[Billy Burnett]

4. A shameless

:kick:

For the early evening crowd.