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Exiled Cuban militant gets a muted welcome home

The Cuban exile, a former CIA operative accused of terrorism, puts the Bush administration in a bind.

By DAVID ADAMS
Published April 21, 2007

MIAMI -- He’s perhaps one of the most notorious alleged terrorists in this hemisphere. Yet, U.S. officials released him from jail and allowed him to return to the comfort of his home and family in Miami.

Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile militant who has been linked to a 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people, arrived Thursday to a muted welcome in Miami.

He was released on $350,000 bail after a federal appellate court rejected the U.S. Justice Department’s request to keep Posada, 79, in a Texas jail where he had been held on immigration fraud charges for almost two years.

Posada is an international cause celebre whose case, critics say, undermines the credibility of the Bush administration’s antiterrorism campaign.

“This is one of the biggest black marks in our nation’s efforts to fight terrorism,” said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, a research institute in Washington that publishes declassified government documents. “It’s a spectacle that is making headlines around the world.”

Cuba has “energetically condemned” Posada’s release. Cuban leader Fidel Castro accused the administration in a public letter earlier this month of conspiring to release a terrorist “monster.”

To some Cuban exiles, Posada, a CIA operative in the 1960s, is an embarrassing reminder of U.S. government support for Castro’s overthrow. “He outlived his usefulness,” said Joe Garcia, former spokesman for the Cuban American National Foundation. “It’s a case of what do you do with your Cold War warriors?”

Even Miami’s exile-dominated Spanish language media were ambivalent about his release.

"We want him to know he’s not alone,” Sergio Rioseco, a longtime friend of Posada who turned out to welcome him home Thursday night, told WLTV, the local Univision affiliate.

Far less welcoming was radio host Max Lesnick, a critic of hard-liners, who also was quoted in the same WLTV broadcast. “(Posada) is the Osama bin Laden of North America,” he said.

Looking frail and wearing a crumpled white jacket, Posada had little to say Thursday after getting off a private jet with his attorney and U.S. marshals.

“I’m very happy. I’m very grateful,” he said, before he was hurried into a vehicle waiting to take him to his wife’s modest home in southwest Miami.

No other country would give asylum

Ever since Posada arrived in the country illegally in March 2005 the Bush administration has had a hard time deciding what to do with him.

He was held for allegedly lying on immigration forms about how he entered the country. Posada says he crossed the Mexico border like most “wetbacks.’’ U.S. officials believe he was smuggled to Miami by boat with the help of a group of Cuban exiles.

Initially, the Bush administration sought to deport him to a third country, arguing that he lost his U.S. residency by being absent from the country for so many years. But no country would take him.

The government ignored a request by Venezuela to extradite Posada on charges that he was involved in the 1976 airliner bombing. Posada escaped from a Venezuelan prison after being jailed for the plane bombing, and is considered a fugitive by the courts there.

Kornbluh and others say there is overwhelming evidence of Posada’s involvement in terrorism. They point to court records of his November 2000 arrest in Panama with 33 pounds of C-4 explosives as part of a plot to blow up Castro.

The New York Times also published an interview with Posada in 1998 in which the paper said he proudly took responsibility for a series of hotel bombings in Havana, one of which caused the death of an Italian tourist.

“We didn’t want to hurt anybody,” he told reporter Ann Louise Bardach. “We just wanted to make a big scandal so that the tourists don’t come anymore.”

Posada has since retracted those words.

Judge says no legal reason to hold him

Despite this evidence the U.S. government has never brought terrorism charges against Posada, though officials say they are still investigating his past. A New Jersey grand jury is reportedly hearing evidence related to the 1997 Havana hotel bombings.

When U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone in El Paso, Texas, ordered his release last week she described him as allegedly involved in “some of the most infamous events of Central American politics,” including the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the 1976 plane bombing, the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s, and the hotel bombings.

Despite all that, Cardone said there was no legal reason to further detain him.

“He is now older and more frail than he was when those events allegedly occurred,” she wrote. She ordered that he be allowed to live under house arrest in Miami while awaiting his May 11 immigration fraud trial in El Paso.

Critics allege the government is using a double standard in the Posada case because of his former CIA ties and his politically powerful right-wing Cuban-American allies in Florida.

Some say Patriot Act should have been used

By trying to hold him indefinitely on immigration charges, the Bush administration “painted itself into the proverbial corner,” said Kornbluh. “They didn’t want the political problems of prosecuting him as a terrorist, but they also didn’t want to face the hypocrisy of setting him free.”

The government denies giving Posada special treatment.

“We have to go through the legal court process. We can’t just unilaterally order a person to be held,” said Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman.

But critics say the government could have kept him in jail by invoking the Patriot Act, which allows holding suspects in “special circumstances” if there is a national security threat. “This is a perfect example of how those laws could be appropriately applied,” said Kornbluh. “This man has a resume that goes back 40 years of involvement in violence crime.”

Ironically, in its efforts to keep Posada in jail the Justice Department has played up his violent past.

“Due to 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,” the Department of Homeland Security wrote in March 2006 when it denied Posada’s request for asylum.

In September the Justice Department filed court papers labelling Posada “a terrorist alien” whose release “could have significant national and foreign relations consequences.”

David Adams can be reached at dadams@sptimes.com.

[Last modified April 25, 2007, 18:36:26]