Terrorist Released

An El Paso judge released a suspected terrorist – Luis Posada Carriles, a man accused of engaging in CIA-sponsored terrorism in Cuba in the 1960’s and 70’s. Carriles is also suspected of being part of a 1976 plot that blew up a Cuban airliner, killing 73 innocent people.

Double standards abound here. President Bush has made it a point to threaten other countries who “harbor” terrorists. Will he now bomb Washington, DC?

Let’s be frank here. When US officials talk about terrorism, they only mean by official enemies of the United States. Acts of terrorism are OK, even encouraged, when done against official enemies. And that is the question here. It is Venezuela that sought extradition of Carriles, and the victims of the 1976 bombing were Cubans. Official enemies. No harm, no foul.

The US has a long history of terrorist activities in Cuba, from 1959 forward, even sponsoring an illegal invasion in 1963. Many of these activities were exposed by US Senator Frank Church in Senate Hearings in the late 1970’s, when he conducted the only investigation of CIA activities ever undertaken by the US Congress. The information dredged up by Church was the subject of a book originally banned by the CIA, The Fish is Red, by Warren Hinkle and William Turner. (The phrase “The Fish is Red” was the opening line of a poem by E. Howard Hunt that was code to signal the launching of the Bay of Pigs invasion.)

It’s a fascinating history, never covered, fading from memories. It’s about US terrorism, this of the overt variety. It’s what prompted Lyndon Baines Johnson to claim that the Kennedy Administration was running a “damned murder incorporated in the Caribbean”. The terrorism went on through the Johnson years into the Nixon Administration – I wouldn’t be surprised if it is still going on today. Castro may be fairly criticized, but it must be understood that he has real enemies and for sheer sake of survival must keep an eye on everything going on in his little paradise.

Anyway, Carriles figures prominently in all of the terrorism activities of the 60’s and 70’s in Cuba, and the FBI has strong evidence of his involvement in the 1976 airline bombing. He ought to be sent home to face the music, but get this – the judge who set him free did so because she said he might be tortured in Venezuela. I have an alternative then – send him to Gitmo.

It’s not unlike the case of Emmanuel Constant, who masterminded the torture, rape, and murder of thousands of Aristide supporters in Haiti, and is now living without surveillance in Queens, New York. If ever there were a case of a terrorist need of stringing up, it is Constant, yet he lives safely in the US, protected by our government.

As I said earlier, [text edited for fear of reprisal].