[News] Orlando Bosch, history’s first passenger plane bomber, dead in Miami

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Orlando Bosch, history’s first passenger plane bomber, dead in Miami

Posted on 
<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/orlando-bosch-historys-first-passenger-plane-bomber-dead-in-miami/>April 
28, 2011 by <http://machetera.wordpress.com/author/machetera/>machetera
http://machetera.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/orlando-bosch-historys-first-passenger-plane-bomber-dead-in-miami/

Terrorism and media double standards

The two things you’ll notice immediately if you 
do a Google news search right now for the newly 
deceased Orlando Bosch are that first, mainstream 
press articles are calling him a “militant” 
rather than a “terrorist” and second, there is an 
unusual focus on his politically motivated 
“acquittal” in Venezuela for his involvement, 
along with Luis Posada Carriles, in history’s 
first bombing of a passenger airliner.  The 1976 
mid-air bombing of Cubana Flight 455 resulted in 
the deaths of all 73 passengers and crew on 
board.  Here’s the carefully crafted whitewashed 
sentence the wire services are peddling:

Prominent Cuban exile militant Orlando Bosch, who 
was acquitted in Venezuela in the 1976 bombing of 
a Cuban jetliner, died Wednesday at 84


Let’s just imagine for a moment what the general 
reaction might be for another obit crafted in a similar fashion:

Prominent Saudi exile militant Osama bin Laden, 
who the U.S. blamed for the 2001 attacks on the 
Twin Towers in New York, but then somehow never 
could locate, died Wednesday at 84


Shock?  Surprise?  Horror?  Disgust?

Don’t worry.  It’ll never happen.  There are good 
terrorists and bad ones, and clearly the 
mainstream media have settled on the fiction that 
Bosch is the former, so he gets to be a “militant.”

The propaganda effort is not limited to U.S. 
media, by the way.  The BBC stretches the story 
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-13217705>one 
step further by including the provably false 
claim that both Bosch and Posada Carriles were 
acquitted at civil trial in Venezuela.  Not so fast, boys.

In their 
<http://sdonline.org/40/%E2%80%9Cpusimos-la-bomba-%E2%80%93-%C2%BFy-que%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%9Cwe-planted-the-bomb-%E2%80%93-so-what%E2%80%9D/>splendid 
review of Alicia Herrera’s book, “Pusimos la 
bomba – ¿y qué?” [“We Planted the Bomb – So 
What?”], Dawn Gable and Karen Lee Wald provide a memory refresher.


this acquittal
referred only to the first trial, 
which was held in right-wing military courts.

The original civilian judge assigned the case had 
tossed it like a hot potato to the military 
tribunals after receiving numerous threats. 
Later, a military judge was the object of an 
assassination attempt which took the lives of his 
son and driver. We don’t know from [Herrera's] 
book, but we do from updated reports focusing on 
Posada Carriles, that the military “acquittal” 
was ruled null and void and that the retrial of 
all four was referred to a civilian court.

By this time, the Venezuelan government was 
caught between a rock and a hard place. On the 
one hand, they couldn’t just let terrorists 
guilty of bombing a passenger plane go 
unpunished. On the other hand, if they pushed too 
hard, Posada and Bosch might just reveal that 
high-level government officials – some say all 
the way up to President Carlos Andrés Pérez2 – 
had condoned and given them the green light to 
carry out such actions so long as they weren’t 
done in a way that would implicate the Venezuelan 
government. (Both Venezuelan and FBI-CIA 
documents obtained since then explicitly confirm 
the repeated assertions by Bosch and others who 
spoke to Herrera that DISIP and members of Carlos 
Andres Pérez’s staff were working behind the 
scenes to free them.) Ultimately, the government 
decided to convict the two men hired to do the 
job by Posada and Bosch, and let the more dangerous ringleaders go free.

The two Venezuelans who placed the bomb [Hernán 
Ricardo and Freddy Lugo] were convicted and 
sentenced to 20 years in prison. The documents 
that would have convicted Bosch and Posada had by 
this time mysteriously disappeared from police 
custody or were ruled inadmissible. (For 
instance, the police report of the blurted 
confessions by Lugo and Hernán to the Trinidad 
police, in which they stated they had been hired 
by Posada and Bosch, was thrown out because it 
was written in English!) But the nervous Posada, 
not trusting their friends in the Venezuelan 
hierarchy to come through for them, bribed his 
way out of prison before the trial was over. He 
is thus a fugitive from justice in Venezuela, on 
the Interpol’s “watch list” – something that did 
not stop the US government from employing him in 
Oliver North’s Contra supply network some months after his escape in 1985.

We’ll take that retraction any time now.





Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20110428/a6cc26c7/attachment.htm>