Thursday, June 09, 2005

Declassified CIA Documents : Posada Linked to 1976 Airline Bombing

New documents link Cuban militant Posada Carriles to airliner bombing: South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Okay, folks. This is where the rubber meets the road. Is the Bush administration's committment to fight terrorism mere public posturing, or is it genuine?
Cuban militant exile Luis Posada Carriles said shortly before the deadly 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that he and others "are going to hit a Cuban airplane,'' according to a declassified CIA document released Thursday.
Posada was arrested May 17 in Miami and was charged two days later with illegally entering the country. Venezuela has demanded his extradition to stand trial for the October 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner, but the Bush administration has so far refused to extradite Posada. Posada, in all likelihood, has friends in high Washington places:
Posada was trained in Guatemala in 1961 by the CIA to participate in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. That training included explosives and weapons. He was in the U.S. Army from March 1963 to March 1964 in Fort Benning, Ga., rising to the rank of second lieutenant and commanding a Ranger weapons platoon...(He) was used as a CIA source on Cuban exile activities and worked in 1965 with a Miami-based group attempting to overthrow the Guatemalan government.
The Bush administration has been silent about Posada, and the mainstream media--not surprisingly--have not been pushing the issue. But there is no end to administration rhetoric about fighting terrorism. Wouldn't Posada's extradition to stand trial for a mass murder be evidence that the "war on terror" is not merely a "war-on-people-we-define-as-terrorists?"

Peter Kornbluh, director of the (National Security Archive's) Cuba Documentation Project, said the documents demonstrate the need for the CIA to declassify what it knows about Posada "as a concrete contribution to justice for those who have committed acts of terror.''

Is the Bush administration "war on terror" for real? If so, we'll extradite this terrorist.

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