Tom Crumpacker, Miami
The administration led by US President George Bush has done an excellent job of confusing the public about its plans regarding Luis Posada Carriles, the former CIA operative who blew up a civilian Cubana airliner in 1976, killing 73 civilians, mostly Cubans.
In 1986, Posada escaped from a Venezuelan prison, where he was awaiting prosecution for the bombing. Posada is a Venezuelan citizen, and he made the bomb in Caracas. He resurfaced in the US in May, and applied for asylum. While the Venezuelan government has applied to Washington to have him extradited, the Bush administration has not yet agreed, despite its extradition treaty with Caracas.
Instead, he is being held on suspicion of entering the US illegally. A provision in the US-Venezuela extradition treaty says the custodial state can keep the alleged criminal until its own proceedings against him arising from crimes committed there are completed.
Posada's immigration case is now set for hearing before a Homeland Security judge in Texas on August 29. On May 21 Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice indicated the Homeland case might go on for many months and his extradition would be determined on its completion. With motions and appeals and paid lawyers, this might mean years. This is not what the provision was designed for.
So why not just send him to the extradition judge and be done with it? What's the reason for keeping him here? Delay for delay's sake? Aggravate the Venezuelan government? Weaken the US claim to be the world leader in its "war against terror"?
Recently declassified (partially blacked out) CIA, FBI and State Department reports (Recently summarised by Peter Kornbluh and available at <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB153>) indicate that in the early 1960s, the CIA trained Posadas in demolition and explosives. He was ostensibly in the US military, February 1963 to March 1964, which was the cover CIA gave its training agents then.
During the 1960s, as a salaried agent he ran a school in Florida training others in his trade, financed by CIA. He also did forays to other countries to do covert bombings and assassinations.
The CIA was using him as an "operative" in Caracas in 1976. When he left Florida for Caracas to work with the Venezuelan intelligence agency DISIP, he had with him a supply of CIA bomb-making materials and explosive devices. On the date of the bombing of Havana-bound Cubana flight 455, October 6, 1976, he had supposedly left DISIP and was operating a private detective agency in Caracas.
The reports suggest that the Cubana bombing was a joint DISIP-CIA project and the CIA was involved in the planning. They refer to meetings in Santo Domingo in the summer and in Caracas in early September involving CIA agent Posada and his partner Orlando Bosch and top DISIP officials, at which discussions were held about bombing Cubana flights. At the time, Bosch was head of CORU, a new CIA-supported umbrella organisation of violent anti-Castro groups in the US.
In late September Posada reported to the CIA: "We're going to hit the Cubana airliner." On October 1, the US State Department — at Posada's request and under a special procedure — issued a US visa for the week of the bombing to one of Posada's two employees who placed the bomb in the plane restroom at the Barbados stop, then left the plane.
The other Posada employee-bomb-planter had a secret Caracas CIA telephone number in his belongings when arrested in Trinidad, after sending this message to Bosch: "A bus went off the cliff and 73 dogs died." These reports were not made available to the Venezuelan officials who prosecuted Bosch and Posada in the 1980s.
George Bush senior was the CIA director at the time of the bombing. He was vice-president when Posada was allowed to escape from jail during his trial in Venezuela. As president, Bush Senior pardoned Bosch for more than 70 terrorist offences, despite the strenuous objections of the Justice Department.
The reasons may be more sinister than simple loyalty to former employees. After his arrest for the bombing, the documents indicate that Posada threatened that if he was forced to talk, "there would be another Watergate".
The CIA contact for Bosch's exile group was a former Bush senior staffer, Ted Shackley. While Bush senior has claimed he was not involved with the CIA before his appointment as director, there is a November 28, 1963, memo from then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover suggesting otherwise. It mentions that information about propaganda developed by Cuban exile groups, which lied that the Cuban government was responsible for the assassination of President John Kennedy in Dallas six days before, had been sent to "George Bush of the CIA".
Bush was in Dallas at the time of the assassination. So was Bosch and Posada's close associate Guillermo Novo. These three were all part of "Operation 40", during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. They were assigned the job of assassinating key Cuban leaders, but were pulled out when the invasion failed. Many have since speculated that Operation 40 was involved in the JFK assassination.
Members of the unit have also been linked to: the regime changes in Dominican Republic, Chile, El Salvador and Nicaragua; the Watergate burglary; the Iran-Contra war; Operation Condor which exterminated many South American progressives and the 1997 Havana tourist hotel bombings.
It's likely that Posada could supply some of the missing pieces of the puzzles of the last 45 years. It seems as if the current Bush administration is trying to use Homeland's immigration cases, with Posada's cooperation, to delay or avoid decision on the extradition request in hope of preventing evidence of CIA's involvement past ugly deeds from becoming public in a Venezuelan proceeding.
From Green Left Weekly, July 20, 2005.
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