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Lockerbie Outrage Moves Obama to Extradite Long-Wanted Terrorist
by Thomas Harrington, August 25, 2009
http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=83280http://original.antiwar.com/thomas-harrington/2009/08/2... /
WASHINGTON – In a dramatic announcement made yesterday shortly after the president’s arrival on Martha’s Vineyard, the administration declared its intention to hand over Luis Posada Carriles, the widely acknowledged mastermind of the bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 that killed 73 people in 1976, to the Venezuelan government for prosecution. According to White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, Obama’s change of heart on the long-requested extradition of Posada, who was a citizen of Venezuela when he allegedly planned the crime, came after watching Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the convicted planner of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing in 1988, return home to a hero’s welcome in Libya.
"The president was sickened to see this man who bears responsibility for ending the lives of hundreds of completely innocent people, and forever altering those of the many thousands that loved them, walk free. Feeling their pain made him acutely aware of just how unfair it was to continue to let Mr. Posada, who in addition to the Cubana bombing has been implicated in numerous assassinations and as many as 41 other terrorist bombings throughout the Caribbean and Central America, get up each day in Miami and sip his morning coffee in complete freedom."
Since the "declaration" of the "War on Terror" in late 2001, the avowed goal of the U.S. government has been to prosecute terrorists wherever they might be in the world. As former president George W. Bush put it in a speech before a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20 of that year, "It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated."
Apparently, however, there was a large loophole in this policy for Posada and the many others like him assigned to use terrorist tactics on behalf of the U.S. government or organizations backed by what is often termed the "U.S. intelligence community."
A brief examination of Posada’s career demonstrates just how large this loophole is. In addition to his role in planning the Cubana bombing in 1976, Posada worked for the Reagan White House supplying U.S.-backed irregulars in Nicaragua and the armies of the Salvadoran and Honduran dictatorships with the arms they used to kill thousands of innocent civilians in the late 1980s. In the late 1990s, Posada directed a series of terrorist bombings in Cuba designed to cripple the growth of that nation’s burgeoning tourist industry, attacks he took full credit for in a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times.
Yet, despite his public admission of guilt in this and numerous other cases of terrorism, Posada lived a relatively unfettered life in the U.S. He did so, moreover, despite having been caught entering the country illegally, under an assumed name, sometime prior to 2005. In recent years judges have regularly deported Muslim immigrants for the slightest procedural infractions, but Posada was freed on bail by an immigration judge in Texas and allowed to return to Florida under house arrest in April 2007. A month later, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone in Miami dismissed all seven immigration charges against Posada. Though a grand jury in El Paso, Texas, recently issued a new set of indictments against Posada in relationship to the Cuban bombings and his entry into the U.S. on a fraudulent passport, Posada remained a free man until President Obama’s stunning announcement yesterday.
Gibbs concluded his announcement with the following remarks. "In the wake of September 11th, it was frequently asked ‘Why do they hate us?’. Many concluded that it was because they are jealous of our freedoms. We now know, however, that it is really because of the way we selectively condemn in others the types of murderous activities that we regularly license ourselves and our close allies to carry out with impunity. We believe that the extradition of Mr. Posada will be seen as a valuable first step in closing our enormous credibility gap around the issue of terror."
(Macondo News Service)
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WALTER LIPPMANN
Los Angeles, California
Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews /
"Cuba - Un Paraíso bajo el bloqueo"
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