Why the U.S. Refuses to Prosecute the Cuban Exiles Posada & Bosch

[rman]

Democracy Now
Tuesday, October 10th, 2006
Twilight of the Assassins: Why the U.S. Refuses to Prosecute the Cuban Exiles Luis Posada Carriles & Orlando Bosch For the 1976 Bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/10/1355231

It was the first act of airline terrorism in the Americas: thirty years ago on October 6, 1976, 73 died in the bombing of a Cuban passenger plane. Now, one alleged mastermind lives freely in Miami, while another is being held on immigration charges in Texas. We speak to journalist Ann Louise Bardach. This past Friday marked the 30th anniversary of the bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455. On October 6th, 1976, the airline left Venezuela headed for Cuba. It would never reach its destination. Just minutes into flight after a stopover in Barbados, the plane exploded in mid-air. All 73 passengers were killed.

On Friday, relatives of the victims gathered at a cemetery in Havana. In addition to remembering their loved ones, the mourners also renewed calls for justice. The main suspect is currently in US custody. But the Bush administration won’t extradite him to Venezuela or Cuba to stand trial. The suspect’s name is Luis Posada Carriles. He’s an anti-Castro Cuban exile with extensive ties to the CIA. Posada was arrested last year after he snuck back into the United States following years of hiding in Latin America. He’s currently being held in a Texas detention center. A federal judge recently ruled that Posada should be freed pending deportation, but U.S. immigration officials said Thursday he’ll remain in custody. Cuba has accused the Bush administration of having a double standard on prosecuting terrorists.

Well today we take a closer look with a reporter who’s just written a major new piece about the Cubana bombing for the Atlantic Monthly. Yesterday, I spoke with the veteran author and journalist Ann Louise Bardach. She first interviewed Luis Posada Carriles in 1998 for The New York Times in one of his only in-depth interviews. Her latest article for The Atlantic Monthly is called “Twilight of the Assassins.” In addition to Luis Posada Carriles, Bardach also interviews Orlando Bosch. He’s another long-time anti-Castro exile who’s been implicated in the Cubana bombing among many other international crimes. I began by asking Ann Louise Bardach to talk about Posada and Bosch’s links to the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 and who else they worked with at the time.

(more..)

[al bupp]

1. To paraphrase someone...

He may be a brutal killer, but he's our brutal killer.

Saw this interview on LinkTV - it gets good toward the end:

AMY GOODMAN: Well, the government is clearly investigating something: they’re investigating you and the New York Times. Can you talk about their call for -- their subpoena of both of you for documents in this case?

ANN LOUISE BARDACH: Well, you know, I write in this story -- and on the Atlantic website I give a lot more background for people who are interested in subpoenas and the media issue and the whole background of this -- when Posada was finally arrested in 2005, I got a phone call -- FBI agents were calling me. Now, initially, I chatted, because I’ve always had good relations with various agents over the years. They had been very helpful sources to me. And then, one of them said, “We would like to see all your research, all your files, all your stuff.” And he said something about, “Can we see your FBI/CIA files, along with everything else?” And I said something like, “Why would you want to see my FBI files? You’re calling me from the FBI. I got them from you.” And there was a pause, and it was like, “Do us a favor. We can't seem to find ours.” And I thought maybe that was a joke. Well, evidently they weren’t joking.

And by the way, it’s been very hard to hold onto evidence in the Cubana shoot-down, not just in the Miami FBI office. In the Venezuelan DISIP, when Hugo Chavez was elected president, there was a huge, I was told, destruction of files, many, many files going back, not just this case, but many other sensitive cases. There was a fire, a mysterious fire, in the Trinidad police department that took their files. It’s interesting to me how hard it is for various intelligence agencies to hold onto their files in the Cubana shoot-down or anything related to Luis Posada and Orlando Bosch.

(emphasis mine)

[cspanlovr]

3. Thanks for sharing this interesting article.

I have to admit not really thinking about this at all. It seems so long ago. who is this guy Bosch? He's identified as a Cuban exile, but his name does not sound Cuban. Who is he? Where is he from?

[al bupp]

4. Who is Orlando Bosch?

From Wikipedia

Orlando Bosch (also known as Orlando Bosch Avila) is a Cuban exile and former CIA-backed criminal, head of CORU organization, which the FBI has described as "an anti-Castro terrorist umbrella organization". Attorney General Dick Thornburgh called Bosch an "unrepentant terrorist."

more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_Bosch

[Judi Lynn]

2. This is an astonishing interview. So much gov't level evil it's hard to

take in.

There are a LOT of questions which can be answered by reading it. Bardach is sublime in her mastery of this area of US history.

Here's something which illuminates an area of confusion I've struggled with for YEARS. She reveals just how it happened that no realistic judgements were handed down when the Cuban "exile" bomber/mass murderers, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles had been thrown into the slammer in Venezuela after they arranged the bombing of the Cubana airliner and ALL its passengers:

Now, about Orlando Bosch's acquittal, I looked at the lot of materials and the police reports and the court records and the Venezuelan files on this, and what’s completely clear is that there was tremendous pressure on the judges to acquit him.

The first judge dropped out of the case, because she got death threats. The second judge actually said to a Venezuelan reporter at the time that they were under tremendous pressure to acquit them. And he said at one point -- and I think it’s in the Atlantic Monthly piece, if I remember correctly -- he said, “Look, the government’s putting a lot of pressure on us, and the government will do what the government wants.” And remember, once Bosch and Posada are arrested, there was a siege of bombings and threats against Venezuelan facilities, Venezuelan properties and Venezuelan officials. So there was tremendous pressure. And, in fact, the judge, the second judge, later his own son was killed, and that was never quite clear what that -- an awful lot of people involved with this case had a very bad ending. And you really -- you couldn't get a judge that wanted to go near it.

In the end, when Bosch finally went to trial, almost all the evidence was ruled inadmissible. It was really stunning. All the police reports from Trinidad, the confessions of Ricardo and Lugo, all the reports out of Barbados, every shred of evidence that was extraordinarily compelling was ruled inadmissible on of the grounds of, guess what? They said, “Well, the interviews were done in an English-speaking country,” even though there were, you know, certified Spanish language translators involved at all times. So they threw out the file -- so there was no evidence. So once you got a judge to declare it inadmissible, what was there to try Bosch on? So, not surprisingly, he did win an acquittal. And I found that one of the more interesting points, because you hear this endlessly in Miami, how he won an acquittal.
(snip)

Once people start seeing just how damned DIRTY and how POWERFUL these events have been, they just might want to spend a lot of time starting to do research, to be able to learn more about it.

Thank you so much for posting this article. You can be sure I'm going to keep it for my own files forever.



Author Ann Louise Bardach

[rman]

5. kick

[Judi Lynn]

6. From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel: Posada Case

Posada Case

South Florida Sun-Sentinel Editorial Board
Posted October 12 2006

ISSUE: CIA report points finger at militant.

An act of terrorism that kills innocent people is an act of terrorism, criminal, deplorable.

The United States must tell what it knows of Luis Posada Carriles. The whole story.

Posada is a Cuban militant who has been accused by Cuban and Venezuelan authorities of bombing a Cuban airliner in October 1976. The attack was unwarranted and unjustifiable. Cuba, nor any other nation, will never become "free" or "democratic" by way of terrorism.

Posada is currently being held in a Texas detention center on an immigration-related violation. He has, for three decades, maintained his innocence, and was twice acquitted of the attack in Venezuela.

Now, a just released U.S. government report points yet another the finger at Posada and other right-wing Cuban militants as conspirators in the incident. The CIA document quotes Posada as telling the U.S. spy agency in June 1976 that exiles planned to blow up a Cuban airliner leaving Panama.

Like another document released in June of last year, it suggests Posada knew more than he's publicly admitted. That the CIA held on to this report for so long also suggests U.S. authorities, too, know more than they have let on.
(snip/...)

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/opinion/editorial/sfl-editafposada2oct12,0,7890061.story?coll=sfla-news-editorial



Relatives walk with photos and place flowers on the graves of the victims, at the Colon cemetery in Havana, Cuba on Friday, Oct. 6, 2006, during a ceremony in memory of the Cubana Airlines plane that exploded in midair while traveling from Barbados to Havana on Oct. 6, 1976. Cubans marked the 30th anniversary of the airliner bombing that killed 73 people.(AP Photo/ Javier Galeano)

Photo Credit: AP Photo

[Selatius]

7. The federal government proves itself illegitimate by hanging with...

these men. I would rather have no government than one governmant that claims to represent the people and simultaneously supports terrorists and murderers and thugs. You cannot stand up for people at the same time you defend those who kill innocent people.

[rman]

8. Does anyone know what the cover story was supposed to be?

Surely those who directed Posada and Bosch to blow up that airplane did not intent the CIA to be blamed for the attack.
Was anyone (Cuba?) supposed to take the blame, or was it perhaps supposed to be anonymous intimidation?

[Judi Lynn]

9. I'm not sure this is the correct answer, but the two who planted the bomb

had not expected to be caught very quickly. It appears they spilled the beans fairly quickly, and implicated Luis Posada Carriles, Orlando Bosch, etc., etc., etc.

Once those people's identity were known, it probably didn't take long at all to see the "larger picture," as they had become notorious already for their terrorism, and it was probably easy to learn they had both been involved with the U.S. CIA.

I've never heard anything beyond this, but it doesn't mean I'm right. Guessing.

As you remember, there was an unbroken line of terrorism going ALL the way back to the early days after the revolution, when Batista-supporting jerks started bombing sites all over Cuba, like department stores, passenger trains, factories, etc., and it has never really ended, even turning on Cuban "exiles" in this country who favored dialogue with Cuba, bombing and shooting them to smithereens.

[rman]

10. Ok so probably it was supposed

to be taken as evidence that there is strong Cuban opposition to Castro.
To bad for them so many people now know most of that opposition is a creation of the CIA and the mob.

[Judi Lynn]

11. It seems the hardship the Cubans have endured from the maggots

from Florida who've been terrorizing them, and nasty plots, schemes, and actions coming from the idiot wingl-nut dirtballs in the government here, as in Operation Mongoose, and US-based terrorism against Cuban officials, through Operation Condor, etc., has only hardened their resolve to succeed in the face of so many, varied assaults on them.

(A name you might check on sometime is Eduardo Arocena, {Cuban "exile) who testified at his murder trial that he had worked for the CIA and had handcarried vials of biological agents into Cuba as part of our biological warfare which was launched on their crops, livestock, etc., etc. That's a part of US history which has never gotten any publicity, wonder why!)

They've overcome horrendous obstacles to acheive amazing levels of success in medicine, education, medical research, science, the arts, sports, etc., and now, at the very top of _Bush's list is the plan to privatize all of their services, which means to rip everything away from them, EVERYTHING.

_Bush's seizure of their government would destroy them in ways the decades of violence and economic strangulation could NEVER accomplish.

Cuba is on _Bush's list, and it seems only having a decent Congress could ever possibly keep him from his worst intentions.

You're right in pointing out a lot of people are catching on these days. An awakening throughout the country through education on the subject would be a lifesaver, as it would void any support right-wing power-grabbers could muster with some more lies leading up to a bogus invasion of Cuba.