Texas judge grants bail to wanted terrorist

A US judge said on Apr. 6 that former CIA operative and wanted terrorist Luis Posada Carriles should be freed on bail until his trial on immigration fraud charges, but he remained behind bars at the request of federal prosecutors. Judge Kathleen Cardone said in a written order that 79-year-old Posada Carriles, despite "a controversial past" as an opponent of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, was not a flight risk because he is "old, infirm and has strong ties to the community." She set bail at a total of $350,000 and said Posada Carriles must wear an electronic monitoring device and live under house arrest with his wife in Miami. He was not immediately released because prosecutors asked that he be detained while they consider an appeal to a higher court. His attorney, Felipe Millan, said he hoped to get Posada Carriles out of jail by the end of next week. Posada Carriles was trained by the US Army at Fort Benning in Georgia and took part in the failed 1962 Bay of Pigs invasion against Castro. Declassified US documents show that Posada Carriles worked for the CIA until June 1976. He also helped the US government ferry supplies to the Contra rebels that waged a bloody campaign to topple the socialist Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s. He is wanted in Cuba and Venezuela for planning the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people. He was detained in Venezuela in 1976 and convicted in the case, but fled prison in 1985. Other declassified US government documents show that the CIA had concrete advance intelligence, as early as June 1976, on plans by Cuban exile terrorist groups to bomb the airliner. One document shows that the FBI's attache in Caracas had multiple contacts with one of the Venezuelans who placed the bomb on the plane, and provided him with a visa to the US five days before the bombing, despite suspicions that he was engaged in terrorist activities at the direction of Posada Carriles. He has also been linked to a series of 1997 bombings of hotels, restaurants, and discotheques in Havana that killed an Italian tourist and injured 11 others, as well as a plot to assassinate Castro seven years ago. He was sentenced to eight years in jail in Panama in the bomb plot against Castro during an Ibero-American summit there in 2000, but was pardoned by then outgoing President Mireya Moscoso. Posada Carriles has never been charged in US courts in connection with those terrorist acts, his critics contend, because he likely threatened to disclose other violence committed during his decades of covert work with the CIA. Posada Carriles has been in US custody in El Paso since May 2005 after entering the country illegally seeking asylum. His lawyer stated at the time that he was asking the Bush administration for asylum because of the work he had done for the CIA in the 1960s. He has been a political problem for the Bush administration because his past activities are viewed as terrorism. The government tried to find another country to take Posada Carriles, but none would accept him. He was indicted in January on seven counts of immigration fraud and is scheduled to be tried on May 11 in El Paso. Cuba slammed what it said was the US double standard on terrorism. "The court ruling is yet another confirmation of the George W. Bush administration's double standard on its alleged 'war on terror,'" the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma said. Havana and Caracas accuse Washington of harboring a known terrorist. US immigration authorities criticized the judge's release order, and said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials would arrest Posada Carriles. "We are disappointed with the ruling. We remind you there is an immigration detainer pending against Mr. Posada," ICE spokesperson Michael Keegan said. "This detainer means Mr. Posada will remain in federal custody although he will be transferred from the custody of the US marshals to that of" the ICE. The ICE said in a letter to Posada Carriles in March 2006 that "because of your long history of criminal activity and violence in which innocent civilians were killed, your release from detention would pose a danger to both the community and the national security of the United States." "Your expertise in assuming false identities, your disregard of immigration laws of the United States, your history of escape and the presence of your pending extradition request demonstrate that you pose a significant risk of fleeing if released from custody," the ICE letter said.