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<a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/157510/former-cia-asset-luis-posada-goes-trial">
http://www.thenation.com/article/157510/former-cia-asset-luis-posada-goes-trial</a>
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<br>
</font><font size=4><b>Peter Kornbluh // Former CIA asset Luis Posada
Carilles goes to trial<br>
</b></font><font size=3> <br>
On January 10 one of the most dangerous terrorists in recent history will
go on trial in a small courtroom in El Paso, Texas. This is not the venue
the Obama administration has finally selected to prosecute the
perpetrators of 9/11; it is where the reputed godfather of Cuban exile
violence, Luis Posada Carriles, may finally face a modicum of
accountability for his many crimes.<br>
<br>
In the annals of modern justice, the Posada trial stands out as one of
the most bizarre and disreputable of legal proceedings. The man
identified by US intelligence reports as a mastermind of the midair
destruction of a Cuban airliner <i>-- all seventy-three people on board
were killed when the plane plunged into the sea off the coast of Barbados
on October 6, 1976 --</i> and who publicly bragged about being behind a
series of hotel bombings in Havana that killed an Italian businessman,
Fabio Di Celmo, is being prosecuted for perjury and fraud, not murder and
mayhem. The handling of his case during the Bush years became an
international embarrassment and reflected poorly on the willingness
and/or abilities of the Justice Department to prosecute crimes of terror
when that terrorist was once an agent and ally of America. For the Obama
administration, the verdict will carry significant implications for US
credibility in the fight against terrorism, as well as for the future of
US-Cuban relations.<br>
<br>
Posada's trial gets under way almost six years after he brazenly appeared
in Miami and announced that he would seek political asylum in the United
States. Here was a fugitive from justice in Venezuela <i>-- Posada
escaped from prison there in 1985 while on trial for the plane bombing
--</i> who had been imprisoned in Panama from November 2000 to August
2004 for trying to assassinate Fidel Castro with more than 200 pounds of
dynamite and C-4 explosives. Despite an outstanding Interpol warrant for
his arrest, for two months the Bush administration permitted him to
flaunt his presence in Miami, where he is still considered a heroic
figure in the hard line anti-Castro exile community. Confident of his
welcome, Posada even filed an application to become a naturalized US
citizen. Only after the media turned their attention to the hypocrisy of
a White House that claimed to be leading a war on international terrorism
while allowing a wanted terrorist to flit freely around Florida did
agents from the Department of Homeland Security finally detain Posada, on
May 17, 2005.<br>
<br>
Initially Posada was incarcerated in El Paso for illegal entry into the
United States. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) went through
the motions of trying to deport him, but no country would take him. At
the same time, the United States refused to extradite him to the one
country that had a legitimate claim to him -- Venezuela. Only after the
immigration court decided to release him on bail did ICE officially
identify him as a terrorist: Posada's "long history of criminal
activity and violence in which innocent civilians were killed," ICE
wrote, meant that his "release from detention would pose a danger to
both the community and the national security of the United
States."<br>
<br>
To its credit, the Justice Department did quietly empanel a grand jury in
New Jersey to weigh an official indictment of Posada for masterminding
the hotel bombings in Havana. <i>(Evidence gathered by the FBI indicates
that Posada raised funds for that operation from Cuban-American
benefactors in Union City, New Jersey.)</i> In April 2006 government
lawyers decided to hold a naturalization interview with Posada while he
was in jail, surreptitiously gathering self-incriminating evidence
against him in the hotel bombing case.<br>
But, for reasons that remain under seal, the New Jersey grand jury
proceedings stalled. Initially, as a senior State Department official
confided, prosecutors were unable to secure a key piece of evidence --
the tape recordings of an interview Posada had given to then–New York
Times stringer Ann Louise BBardach in 1998, in which he appeared to take
full responsibility for the hotel bombings. "The Italian was in the
wrong place at the wrong time, but I sleep like a baby," Posada
proclaimed, according to his statements published in the Times. Under
subpoena, Bardach turned over the tapes to the grand jury on December 15,
2006. But no indictment was ever handed down.<br>
<br>
Instead, on January 11, 2007, Posada was indicted in El Paso on six
counts of making "false statements" and one of fraud about how
he came to the United States and for his use of false names and false
passports -- charges that carry an maximum sentence of five to ten years
each. To make matters worse for the credibility of the US legal system,
four months later Judge Kathleen Cardone dismissed all charges against
Posada. The government, she ruled, had engaged in "fraud, deceit and
trickery" in obtaining evidence against Posada under the guise of
conducting a naturalization review. The court, she declared, could
"not set aside <i>[Posada's legal]</i> rights nor overlook
Government misconduct [just] because Defendant is a political hot
potato."<br>
<br>
A free man, Posada took up residence in Miami. Since he is on the
government's no-fly list, Posada was forced to drive back to Florida,
where he has lived openly for the past several years, attending
right-wing exile fundraisers and even participating in public protests
against Castro's Cuba.<br>
But in August 2008 the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
overruled Cardone's decision and ordered Posada to proceed to trial. In
another positive turn of events in this long, twisted legal saga, in
April 2009 the new Obama Justice Department used the New York Times tapes
of Posada's interview with Bardach to file several additional counts of
perjury and fraud relating specifically to lying about "soliciting
other individuals to carry out...[the hotel] bombings in Cuba." To
be sure, Posada is still not being charged with actually perpetrating
those terrorist operations, only with lying about aspects of his
involvement in orchestrating them. But for the first time in a US court,
a team of lawyers from the Justice Department's Counterterrorism Division
will present concrete evidence to prove that Posada was indeed behind a
series of terrorist attacks on Cuban soil.<br>
<br><br>
<div align="center">* * * <br>
<b>Obtaining a conviction will not be easy.</b> Posada will turn 83 on
February 15; he suffers from a variety of physical ailments and does not
fit the image of a "terrorist alien," as government records
describe him. Posada's lawyers have charged that the key evidence against
him <i>-- the Bardach tapes --</i> contain unexplained gaps and erasures.
Bardach, who will be called as a witness to authenticate the tapes, has
publicly decried their use in the trial as a government violation of
freedom of the press and an assault on the rights of the Fourth
Estate.<br>
</div>
<br>
Moreover, in a pretrial ruling, Judge Cardone denied a Justice Department
motion to "exclude all testimony, evidence, questioning and argument
concerning defendant's relationship with the Central Intelligence
Agency." Posada's past agency associations were "irrelevant to
the charges," prosecutors submitted in court filings; introducing
his CIA connection in court would "divert the jury's attention away
from the basic charges in the indictment." But the judge ruled that
Posada could offer the existence of his relationship with the CIA
"to show his state of mind" when he allegedly made false
statements to authorities -- as long as he used only unclassified
information.<br>
<br>
The government has introduced into the court record an "Unclassified
Summary of the CIA's Relationship with Luis Clemente Posada
Carriles," which states that he first joined the agency as part of
its Bay of Pigs operation in 1961. "Posada was a paid asset of the
CIA from 1965 to 1967," when he left the United States to set up
operations in Caracas as an intelligence official of the Venezuelan
secret police, DISIP, "and again from 1968 to 1974," states the
summary. "From 1974 to 1976, CIA had intermittent contact with
Posada." The document reveals that in 1993, when Posada was an
escaped fugitive wanted by Interpol for the Cuban airplane bombing, the
agency intercepted intelligence on an assassination plot against him and
surreptitiously "contacted him in Honduras by telephone to warn him
about a threat to his life."<br>
<br>
CIA documents, obtained and posted by my organization, the National
Security Archive, show that in the mid-1960s Posada worked at a salary of
$350 a month as an instructor in sabotage and demolition for the CIA's
Maritime Training Section. The declassified records, which identify
Posada using his CIA cryptonym, AMCLEVE/15, also reveal his work as an
active snitch on other violent Cuban exile groups. "I will give the
Company all the intelligence that I can collect," Posada promised
his CIA handlers in 1966. "A/15 is dedicated to the overthrow of
Castro," his "Company" supervisor Grover Lythcott noted in
one secret report on Posada, but he "is not a typical 'boom and
bang' type of individual. He is acutely aware of the international
implications of ill planned or over enthusiastic activities against
Cuba." In an observation that proved to be wholly inaccurate,
Lythcott noted that Posada would "discourage activities which would
be embarrassing to WOLADY" -- the CIA's codeword for the United
States.<br>
<br>
Ironically, it is now the legal proceedings against Posada that could be
embarrassing to, and carry significant implications for, WOLADY. In the
six years Posada has been in the United States, his case has become a
spectacle around the world. Now, if he is found guilty and in effect
proven to be a mastermind of terrorism, the US government will have to
address the scandalously short sentence the perjury charges carry. If he
is found innocent and released, the Obama administration will have to
confront the fact that the US legal system is inadequate to hold Posada
even minimally accountable for his violent crimes, and that the United
States is, in the end, harboring an international terrorist.<br>
<br>
The government has introduced into the court record an "Unclassified
Summary of the CIA's Relationship with Luis Clemente Posada
Carriles," which states that he first joined the agency as part of
its Bay of Pigs operation in 1961. "Posada was a paid asset of the
CIA from 1965 to 1967," when he left the United States to set up
operations in Caracas as an intelligence official of the Venezuelan
secret police, DISIP, "and again from 1968 to 1974," states the
summary. "From 1974 to 1976, CIA had intermittent contact with
Posada." The document reveals that in 1993, when Posada was an
escaped fugitive wanted by Interpol for the Cuban airplane bombing, the
agency intercepted intelligence on an assassination plot against him and
surreptitiously "contacted him in Honduras by telephone to warn him
about a threat to his life."<br>
<br>
For Havana, where officials routinely refer to Posada as "the Osama
bin Laden of Latin America," the case remains a particular sore
point in US-Cuba relations. The Cubans have readily assisted the Justice
Department by welcoming teams of FBI agents and US prosecutors, turning
over more than 1,500 pages of documents as evidence from the hotel
bombings and making Posada's alleged accomplices in Cuba available for
depositions. But even as the US government allowed Posada to live freely
in Miami, it has kept Cuba on its terrorism list because, the State
Department claims, Cuba has not done enough to support the international
effort against terrorism. To add insult to injury, in the wake of the
Christmas 2009 terrorist attempt aboard a Detroit-bound plane, the Obama
administration put Cuba on the list of fourteen countries, including Iran
and Syria, whose citizens receive extra security screenings when
traveling to the States -- escalating tensions between Havana and
Washington to their highest level since Obama took office.<br><br>
<div align="center">* * * <br><br>
<br>
As the Posada case illustrates anew, the danger of terrorism relating to
Cuba has emanated not from Cuban territory but from the shores of the
United States. Just five years ago, Posada's ally and benefactor,
Santiago Alvarez, was busted in Miami by the FBI for illegally
accumulating a warehouse of war-grade armaments, presumably for use
against the island. Indeed, the Cubans are incensed by the contrast
between how the US legal system has treated Posada and the severe
treatment meted out to five Cuban counterterrorism agents sent to the
United States in the mid-1990s as part of La Red Avispa (Wasp Network) --
an espionage operation to gather intelligence on the activities of
Posada's supporters and other violent exile groups in Florida. (It was
Cuban agents spying on exile groups who ferreted out information that led
to Posada's November 2000 arrest in Panama for the attempted
assassination of Castro.) The so-called Cuban Five <i>-- Gerardo
Hernandez, Antonio Guerrero, Ramon Labanino, Fernando Gonzalez and Rene
Gonzalez --</i> were arrested in 1998, thrown into solitary confinement,
prosecuted on maximum charges of conspiracy and even homicide, and given
sentences from fifteen years to life. A court has reduced the sentences
of two of them, but the Cuban government continues to make their release
a top priority in communications with the Obama administration.<br>
</div>
<br>
A guilty verdict in the Posada case, and a determination by the Justice
Department and the Department of Homeland Security that Posada should be
imprisoned indefinitely as a perpetrator of terrorism, could still
contribute to conditions for better US-Cuban relations. As the trial
starts, however, the last word on its significance belongs to Posada's
victims. "He is not being charged as a terrorist but rather as a
liar," says Livio Di Celmo, whose brother, Fabio, was killed in one
of the hotel bombings in Cuba. "My family and I are outraged and
disappointed that a known terrorist, Luis Posada, is going to trial for
perjury and immigration fraud, not for the horrific crime of
masterminding the bombing of a civilian airliner," Roseanne
Nenninger, whose 19-year-old brother, Raymond, was aboard the Cuban
plane, told The Nation. "Our hope is that the US government will
designate Posada as a terrorist and hold him accountable for the pain,
suffering and loss he has caused to us and so many other
families."<br><br>
<br>
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