US accused of breaking anti-terrorism treaties

Cuba and Venezuela are accusing the US of double standards after a judge threw out immigration charges against a former CIA operative and convicted terrorist. Kathleen Cardone, a US district judge in El Paso, TX, dismissed the charges against Luis Posada Carriles on the grounds that the US government case was based on statements obtained from the 79-year-old under false pretences. Posada thought he was in an immigration interview that was actually a criminal interrogation, his lawyers said. The judge agreed, writing in her ruling: "The government's tactics in this case are so grossly shocking and so outrageous as to violate the universal sense of justice. "This court will not set aside such rights nor overlook government misconduct because the defendant is a political hot potato." Cuba says the United States is violating international anti-terrorism treaties by failing to prosecute Posada. Cuba said Washington should have arrested him under the PATRIOT Act as a security threat and that by not prosecuting Posada for his violent past, the United States had also failed to comply with UN Resolution 1373, a wide-ranging counterterrorism treaty adopted after the Sept. 11 attacks, among other international conventions. "The US government has not only violated its own laws and supposed commitment to its self-proclaimed 'War Against Terrorism,' but also to its own international obligations," said a government declaration. Posada was trained by the CIA at the US Army School of the Americas in 1961. He is wanted in Cuba and Venezuela, where he is accused of masterminding the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner in which 73 people were killed, including teenage members of Cuba's national fencing team. Investigators from Cuba, Venezuela and the US traced the planting of the bombs on the Cuban plane to two Venezuelan passengers, Freddy Lugo and Hernán Ricardo Lozano. Both men were employed by Posada at his private detective agency, based in Venezuela, and both subsequently admitted to the crime. A week after their confessions, Posada and Orlando Bosch were arrested on charges of masterminding the attack, and were jailed in Venezuela. Posada escaped in 1985 and played a role in the Iran-Contra scandal, a White House and CIA-sponsored operation to illegally supply arms to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Recently declassified US government documents suggest that, throughout most of his career, Posada remained in close contact with the CIA. He illegally entered the US in March 2005 and claimed asylum. For several months the Bush administration denied that Posada was even in the United States. On May 17, 2005, the Miami Herald embarrassed the administration into action by publishing a front-page interview with Posada (who sipped his peach drink on his Florida balcony, described his leisure reading and commented cheerfully that at first he "thought the [US] government was looking for me" but eventually realized that US officials had no interest in finding him). Only then did the administration detain Posada–but on immigration charges, not terrorism-related charges. So for now, Posada's a free man–even though the administration has sufficient evidence to arrest him for his role in either the 1976 airliner bombing or the 1997 Havana bombings. For that matter, Posada easily could be detained under Section 412 of the PATRIOT Act, which calls for the mandatory detention of aliens suspected of terrorism. It's not as if the evidence against Posada is seriously in dispute. In 1998, for instance, he "proudly admitted authorship of the hotel bomb attacks" to the New York Times, "describ[ing] them as acts of war intended to cripple a totalitarian regime by depriving it of foreign tourism and investment." He dismissed the deaths of those he murdered as "sad" but assured the reporter that he slept "like a baby." Cuba alleges that the Bush administration has treated Posada with kid gloves because of his anti-Fidel Castro past and his support in the influential US Cuban exile community. "If the well-known terrorist Posada is free without charges, it is the full responsibility of the White House," Dagoberto Rodriguez, Cuba's leading diplomat in Washington, said in a statement. He said the Bush administration had "done all it can to protect the bin Laden of this hemisphere for fear that he can talk about the connection between the US government and his terrorist activities." Venezuela has sought Posada's extradition for trial in the airline bombing, which occurred while the naturalized Venezuelan was living there. Posada, who was released on bail of $350,000 last month, has been living with his wife in Miami while awaiting trial. He was indicted in January on seven counts of immigration fraud, including lying to immigration authorities. Along with the plane bombing, he is accused in Cuba of plotting a series of 1997 Havana hotel bombings in which an Italian tourist was killed. He was jailed in Panama for plotting to kill Castro during an Ibero-American summit in 2000, but was pardoned by the outgoing president, Mireya Moscoso, in 2004. The Cuban exile could yet be indicted on terrorism charges in the United States by a federal grand jury in Newark, NJ, to determine his role in the 1997 Havana bombings. On May 11, Cuba published transcripts of telephone calls it said Posada made from El Salvador in 1997 to an associate in Venezuela about the Havana blasts. "We have two more explosions: we placed one in the Sol Palmeras Hotel in Varadero and the other in a discotheque in Havana," Posada said, according to the transcripts. Cuba did not say how they were obtained but said they were passed to the FBI as evidence. The Venezuelan ambassador to the US, Bernardo Álvarez Herrera, said: "Should Posada be allowed to escape justice for his vicious crimes it will send a powerful message to the international community that some terrorism is acceptable."