[News] Obama to extradite Luis Posada Carriles to Venezuela

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Lockerbie outrage moves Obama to extradite long-wanted CIA-terrorist 
Luis Posada Carriles to Venezuela...

Published: Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Bylined to: <mailto:external at vheadline.com>Thomas Harrington
http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=83280

Anti-War (Thomas Harrington): In a dramatic announcement made 
yesterday shortly after the President's arrival on Martha's Vineyard, 
the administration declared its intention to hand over Luis Posada 
Carriles, the widely acknowledged mastermind of the bombing of Cubana 
Airlines Flight 455 that killed 73 people in 1976, to the Venezuelan 
government for prosecution.

According to White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, Obama's change of 
heart on the long-requested extradition of Posada, who was a citizen 
of Venezuela when he allegedly planned the crime, came after watching 
Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the convicted planner of the Pan Am Flight 
103 bombing in 1988, return home to a hero's welcome in Libya.

"The President was sickened to see this man who bears responsibility 
for ending the lives of hundreds of completely innocent people, and 
forever altering those of the many thousands that loved them, walk 
free. Feeling their pain made him acutely aware of just how unfair it 
was to continue to let Mr. Posada, who in addition to the Cubana 
bombing has been implicated in numerous assassinations and as many as 
41 other terrorist bombings throughout the Caribbean and Central 
America, get up each day in Miami and sip his morning coffee in 
complete freedom."

Since the "declaration" of the "War on Terror" in late 2001, the 
avowed goal of the US government has been to prosecute terrorists 
wherever they might be in the world. As former President George W. 
Bush put it in a speech before a joint session of Congress on 
September 20 of that year, "It will not end until every terrorist 
group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated."

Apparently, however, there was a large loophole in this policy for 
Posada and the many others like him assigned to use terrorist tactics 
on behalf of the US government or organizations backed by what is 
often termed the "US intelligence community."

A brief examination of Posada's career demonstrates just how large 
this loophole is. In addition to his role in planning the Cubana 
bombing in 1976, Posada worked for the Reagan White House supplying 
US-backed irregulars in Nicaragua and the armies of the Salvadoran 
and Honduran dictatorships with the arms they used to kill thousands 
of innocent civilians in the late 1980s. In the late 1990s, Posada 
directed a series of terrorist bombings in Cuba designed to cripple 
the growth of that nation's burgeoning tourist industry, attacks he 
took full credit for in a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times.

Yet, despite his public admission of guilt in this and numerous other 
cases of terrorism, Posada lived a relatively unfettered life in the 
US. He did so, moreover, despite having been caught entering the 
country illegally, under an assumed name, sometime prior to 2005.

In recent years judges have regularly deported Muslim immigrants for 
the slightest procedural infractions, but Posada was freed on bail by 
an immigration judge in Texas and allowed to return to Florida under 
house arrest in April 2007.

A month later, US District Judge Kathleen Cardone in Miami dismissed 
all seven immigration charges against Posada. Though a grand jury in 
El Paso, Texas, recently issued a new set of indictments against 
Posada in relationship to the Cuban bombings and his entry into the 
US on a fraudulent passport, Posada remained a free man until 
President Obama's stunning announcement yesterday.

Gibbs concluded his announcement with the following remarks. "In the 
wake of September 11, it was frequently asked 'Why do they hate us?.' "

"Many concluded that it was because they are jealous of our freedoms. 
We now know, however, that it is really because of the way we 
selectively condemn in others the types of murderous activities that 
we regularly license ourselves and our close allies to carry out with 
impunity."

"We believe that the extradition of Mr. Posada will be seen as a 
valuable first step in closing our enormous credibility gap around 
the issue of terror."

<http://original.antiwar.com/thomas-harrington/2009/08/24/lockerbie-outrage-moves-obama/>http://original.antiwar.com/thomas-harrington/
2009/08/24/lockerbie-outrage-moves-obama/




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