"Free the Cuban Five, Prosecute Posada"

Q: There is a hearing in El Paso on April 3rd about Posada. Can you
tell us what it is regarding?

A: Posada Carriles is charged by the federal government for lying, not
for terrorism. The U.S. government is accusing Posada of immigration
fraud.
On Tuesday, there is a bond hearing to determine if Posada Carriles
will await his trial —to take place in May— in the streets of Miami
or in a New Mexico jail where he is currently. There is a woman who has
put up a commercial property which she has in Miami, with a value of
two million dollars. The judge will determine whether Posada, 1.) is a
person who would try to flee, and 2.) whether Posada is a danger to the
community.

That is the only thing to be decided on Tuesday, Apr. 3. The trial on
whether he lied or not in his naturalization petition, will take place
in May.
But it is obvious throughout all of Posada Carriles’ history, that he
is a person who has a propensity to escape or flee. He is already a
fugitive from justice. He escaped from a prison in Venezuela while
facing 73 homicide charges against him. There is now an order for his
arrest in Venezuela, for those 73 murder charges and he is a fugitive
from justice.

In spite of the extradition petition that the Venezuelan government
presented in June 2005, almost two years ago, in spite of the fact that
he is a fugitive in Venezuela after escaping from a Venezuelan prison
in 1985 —with the help of his accomplices in Miami, in spite of the 73
counts of first-degree murder for the 73 people who were on board the
Cubana Airlines passenger plane, despite all this, the United States:

First, refused to charge Luis Posada Carriles with being a terrorist.
Second, it has not attended to the extradition petition that Venezuela
has presented.
Third, the government issued a simple immigration violation charge
against him, accusing him of having entered the country illegally
through the border with Mexico.

And upon the conclusion of that immigration violation procedure, they
have charged him with lying. It is a felony to lie to a U.S. official,
and Posada Carriles did it when he alleged that he was a U.S. citizen
and lied about how he entered. He said that he had entered without
documentation through the border when in reality he entered Miami in
2005 on a boat named Santrina.

This is an individual who has a history of violence against defenseless
civilians. He is accused of bombing a plane with 73 passengers. He is
accused of murdering dozens of political prisoners in cold blood in
Venezuela in the 1970s, when he was head of special operations in the
intelligence services of Venezuela, called the DISIP. He is a person
who collaborated with the bloodiest forces in Central America,
specifically the paramilitaries in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

This man was key in the operation, the scandal later called
Iran-Contra, which gave arms and technical assistance to the Nicaraguan
contras, who committed so many human rights violations.

Posada was convicted in a trial in Panama for conspiring to bomb an
auditorium with C-4 explosives in the University of Panama, which would
have been full of Panamanian students listening to a speech that the
Cuban President Fidel Castro was going to give.

This is an individual with a long history of terrorism. He is known as
the Osama Bin Laden of Latin America. I cannot imagine that a U.S.
judge would determine that he is not a danger to the community and
release him.
But everything is possible in the United States. There is that danger.

Q: Why do you think the government is not extraditing or trying Posada
Carriles for the plane bombing? The Homeland Security prosecutors did
not even mention that crime of Posada when the immigration hearings for
Posada were held in June and August 2005 in El Paso, Texas.

A: During the whole immigration proceedings against Posada, it was
obvious that the United States had an interest in appearing to do
something with respect to Posada while in reality doing the minimum
possible.

I believe there is an understanding, not written, but an understanding
between the government and Posada, that he will be treated well by the
United States while he is in U.S. territory, in exchange for Posada not
saying all that he could about the U.S. intelligence services. Keep in
mind that Posada, by his own admission, is an individual who worked
with the CIA since at least 1962.
He was sent by the CIA to Venezuela in the 1970s to lead an
anti-subversive operation there, and to capture and torture individuals
who were seeking social change in Venezuela in the 1970s. He is a man
who has worked closely with the U.S. intelligence services since he
began his career.

Therefore, it does not surprise me that the United States is doing the
minimum to maintain Posada in prison, because it is not politically
wise for them to free him, but they will not extradite nor try him for
murder.
That is why, you see, they first initiate immigration charges, and
later they begin a criminal process, but they limit the accusation as
to whether Posada lied, not whether he is a terrorist.
He has a great deal of information that would be a very delicate matter
for the United States if he were to talk.

Q: Can you tell us something about Posada’s attacks against Cuba,
carried out by mercenaries in the 1990s, and the current investigation
being carried out in New Jersey over those crimes?

A: In the 1990s, Cuba experienced a very difficult economic situation,
that was the special period when the socialist camp collapsed and the
countries that traded with Cuba underwent drastic political changes.
They stopped trade relations, and the Cuban people endured hardship
because they had no resources. There was no oil, no fuel, and many
times no food.

Cuba opened up to tourism as never before since the triumph of the
Cuban revolution on Jan. 1, 1959. They opened up hotels and tourists
began to come to Havana and other cities in Cuba.

At the same time this was happening, various groups of Cuban origin in
the United States decided to unleash a wave of violence against the
tourist sector in Cuba. Terrorism is always against defenseless
civilians but it has a political goal. The political goal in this case
was to terrorize the tourists who wanted to travel to Cuba.

At that time, in 1997, Posada was in Central America, Guatemala,
Honduras and El Salvador. He moved from one country to another with
false passports. Posada was the mastermind behind that wave of terror.

Interestingly, it has been discovered that the organizations of Cuban
origin in the United States, specifically in New Jersey and Miami, sent
money to Posada by cable while he was in Guatemala. With that money,
Posada hired Guatemalan and Salvadoran mercenaries to take explosives
to Cuba, where they were detonated in the best and most luxurious
hotels and Cuban cabarets.

If you follow the money, you see that those New Jersey and Miami
organizations send money to Posada, Posada hires those people from
Central America, they go to Cuba and explode bombs.

After all those bombings, it seems that Posada wanted them to send him
more money for the successful campaign he was carrying out. He was very
upset about this and gave an interview in 1998 to two New York Times
journalists, Larry Rohter and Ann Louise Bardach. He told them he was
the mastermind of that wave of terror. He also told them he was
receiving money from certain organizations in the United States.

The New York Times published the story. Now the FBI along with a New
Jersey prosecutor, have opened a grand jury investigation to examine
the evidence that exists, which could possibly result in prosecutions
of Posada and others, for that wave of terrorist attacks that killed an
Italian in Cuba, named Fabio Di Celmo. The grand jury still has not
concluded. We don’t know if they will indict or not.

The United States is full of contradictions. Although I believe the
White House is trying to help its favorite terrorist, Luis Posada
Carriles, at the same time I am convinced that there are honest
prosecutors who work in the Department of Justice and who take
seriously the fact that that department is named Justice. I believe
there are those who want to carry out an investigation of this type.

However, the final decision as to what will happen will be made in the
White House, as well as in the immigration case. The Homeland Security
prosecutors were not able to act on their own, they had to follow
specific instructions from the White House.

The murder of Fabio Di Celmo was a horrifying crime. He was a man who
was having a drink in a hotel bar. He was on vacation when the bomb
exploded that killed him. That crime cannot go unpunished. Posada
Carriles must be tried not only for the plane bombing but also for the
murder of Fabio Di Celmo. I would be very pleased if he were tried for
that crime as well.

Q: The terrorist Santiago Alvarez brought Posada into Miami secretly on
his boat Santrina in March 2005. Afterwards, Alvarez was arrested for
an arms cache that he had in Miami. What is your opinion of the
government’s treatment of Santiago Alvarez?

A: In spite of being an accomplice of Posada, now the government is
reducing his already light sentence for illegal possession of weapons.
It is strange. Santiago Alvarez was the financial backer of Posada
Carriles, the man who paid for his trips and sent him money. This is an
individual who has been indicted and convicted for having an illegal
weapons cache in a house in southern Florida.
He is in prison now but he has not been charged for bringing Posada
illegally into the United States. What you say is true. They are
charging Posada for immigration fraud, alleging that he came on the
Santrina, with Santiago Alvarez and Mitat.
So then, why are they not charging Santiago Alvarez and Osvaldo Mitat
for bringing Posada to the United States? The law prohibits anyone from
helping another person enter the country illegally. It is a serious
crime, a felony. But if the person you are helping is not simply an
undocumented person who comes to the United States to be with his
family or to harvest artichokes in California, but instead is a
terrorist, the sanctions are more severe and Alvarez could be
imprisoned for decades.

But for that kind of a trial to happen Posada would have to be declared
a terrorist. I am sure that if Luis Posada Carriles’ name were
Mohammed, Alvarez would be facing much more serious charges than he is
now.

Another thing that occurs to me is the huge armament that Santiago
Alvarez had in southern Florida, machine guns, rocket launchers,
grenades. Why is no one asking what they were going to do with all
those weapons? Was there a terrorist operation being planned in the
United States? Against the United States, Cuba or Venezuela? It seems
to me that it is something that should be investigated and the press
should ask the U.S. authorities if they have investigated this.

It is too much of a coincidence that Posada arrived in the United
States at a time when the person who brought him has an enormous
arsenal hidden in a Miami warehouse. Miami is a city where they just
accused a group of individuals of being terrorists, because they
supposedly planned to blow up a building in Chicago. These individuals
didn’t even have a fake pistol. They had not one weapon or bullet and
they are accused of terrorism.

But here we have a man with a long history of terrorism, who is aided
by other individuals, friends and accomplices who are also involved in
terrorism, and nobody asks what actions these terrorists were going to
carry out.

Q: It is evident, with all that is happening in Miami, how the Miami
terrorists operate with total impunity, while the Cuban Five
anti-terrorists have been unjustly imprisoned for over eight years in
United States prisons. They are effectively kidnapped by Washington for
having struggled against Miami terrorism.

A: The case of the Five is one of the most unjust cases in the history
of United States jurisprudence. The Five did not come to the United
States, as the prosecutor on three different occasions stated in the
trial, "to destroy the United States." There is not any evidence
showing that.

Quite the contrary. The evidence shows that those individuals came to
this country to penetrate organizations of Cuban origin that carry out
terrorist actions against the island of Cuba, from U.S. territory.

The Five had to come to the United States, because the U.S. government,
instead of investigating, arresting and prosecuting the terrorists who
were carrying out hostile actions against Cuban civilians for decades,
instead of doing that, the U.S. organized the terrorists, trained them,
encouraged and supported them during all these decades.

Therefore, facing this situation, in order to defend their civilian
population—a civilian population that has suffered more than 3,000
murders since the Cuban revolution began in 1959—Cuba sent these
individuals to obtain information, not information of the United
States, not classified U.S. government information, but information on
the Miami terrorist organizations who were carrying out this wave of
terrorist acts.

After obtaining much of this necessary information, Cuba sent a
messenger to President Clinton about the information obtained by these
five anti-terrorists and delivered to him a hand-written letter by
President Fidel Castro. The letter was given to President Clinton by a
unusual messenger, Gabriel Garc=EDa M=E1rquez, Nobel Laureate in Literature=
.

Garc=EDa M=E1rquez has related how he felt carrying this letter, because he=

didn’t want to leave the Hotel Washington for fear that someone might
rob the letter. Garc=EDa M=E1rquez gave the letter to Clinton’s assistant,
Max McCarty, who commented to the Colombian writer the following: "The
United States and Cuba have a common enemy and that enemy is terrorism.
We can fight together against terrorism."

Cuba handed over documentation and waited and waited and waited for the
FBI to act and capture those terrorists. But instead of capturing the
terrorists, the FBI, through its Miami director, H=E9ctor Pesquera,
arrested the men who had infiltrated those organizations. In other
words, the FBI instead of using the information that Cuba gave it to
arrest the terrorists, it used that information to investigate and find
out who those individuals were that Cuba had penetrated into the
organizations.

After the FBI found out, it arrested the Five individuals, who were
convicted and received prison sentences of four life terms and many
years.
They were convicted without one single classified document in their
possession, with no evidence whatsoever that they had participated in
violence, much less homicide. And they were tried in Miami, in an
atmosphere highly contaminated by the hatred in Miami against Cuba.
Miami is a city where the very U.S. government has not wanted to see
its Cuba-related cases to be tried in Miami, knowing that such a trial
could not be fair in Miami.

But that is precisely where these courageous five men were tried. They
were tried in Miami and, of course, convicted, as would be expected.
This injustice cannot be tolerated. The Cuban Five must be freed and it
is Posada and the other terrorists living freely in the United States
who should be prosecuted.

Q: You were in Venezuela recently. Can you tell us if the government is
doing anything to back up its extradition petition?

A: Venezuela presented to the United States in June 2005, two volumes
totaling almost 2,000 pages of documents in support of its extradition
petition. There are more than enough documents for the United States to
extradite Posada or to try him in the United States.

The United States government has plenty of documentation, including the
documents declassified by the U.S. government itself and cited by the
CIA. These are not only in U.S. possession, they are easily available
on the Internet. The National Security Archives, a non-governmental
organization run by the George Washington University, has published
dozens of documents declassified by the U.S. government, very telling
about the terrorist activities of Luis Posada Carriles and his
participation in the plane bombing.

There are other documents in Venezuela about Posada’s terrorist
history. Posada did not become a terrorist with the plane bombing of
Oct. 6, 1976. He has been a terrorist since he left Cuba. He has a long
history in the Venezuelan archives. There is documentation about Posada
Carriles when he was head of special operations in DISIP. He was in
charge of anti-subversive operations in Venezuela. Just in Caracas
alone, he captured several prominent individuals who were part of the
Venezuelan social movement, whom he interrogated, tortured and
murdered. They were very meticulous about documenting their crimes.
Whoever reads "The Path of the Warrior," Posada’s autobiography, will
be able to verify some of those crimes.

Q: In June 2006 during the first hearing for Posada in El Paso,
Posada’s attorney Eduardo Soto told the press that Posada had been a
CIA agent until the mid-1990s. Does this statement hold any
significance?

A: I have never seen any proof that Posada has renounced his work with
the CIA.
The people who collaborate with the CIA are not necessarily employees
of the CIA. Working with the CIA is not like working in a factory,
where you punch your timecard in at 8:00 am and when you leave at 5:00
pm you punch out to prove you worked the whole day.

There are undoubtedly workers who work in Langley on a daily basis, who
receive their salary in checks that carry the CIA label. But the
majority of individuals who work with the CIA on a clandestine basis
are not conventional salaried employees. What they do is provide
information or they carry out operations that are directed or inspired
by the CIA. I do not think there is any evidence that Posada has
renounced these activities.

What’s more, if we talk about 1976 and the plane bombing, for example,
Posada sent his right-hand man—a Venezuelan named Hern=E1n Ricardo who
was his subordinate in the DISIP—to plant the bomb. Ricardo recruited
his associate, Freddy Lugo, also Venezuelan. These two men were the
direct perpetrators of the bombing. When they were captured in
Trinidad, they confessed to the police chief, Dennis Ramdwar, a police
commissioner, that: 1.) They were from DISIP, and 2.) they were CIA,
that their explosives-training was done by the CIA and that they
received CIA training on how to plant the bombs.

Ricardo said, "my boss is Luis Posada Carriles." There is an expression
in Spanish, to describe something very obvious: "It didn’t fall far
from the tree." I think that type of confession shows that Posada
Carriles and Hern=E1n Ricardo are individuals who in 1976 were trained in
the use of explosives and were inspired by the CIA to carry out
terrorist acts . There is absolutely no doubt of that.

Another curious thing. In Venezuela where I was recently, I saw the
little phone and address directory that Ricardo had when he was
captured in Trinidad after having placed the bomb.

In the first page of that book is the first and last name of the U.S.
diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Caracas, Joseph Leo. Now, I am not
saying that Joseph Leo is a CIA, but nobody can deny that that man was
a functionary of the U.S. embassy.

I ask myself, what is a terrorist —who just finished placing a bomb,
killing 73 passengers— doing with a phone directory that has the name
and telephone number of a U.S. diplomat based in the embassy in
Venezuela?

Q: By international law, the U.S. authorities still have an obligation
to try Posada. What can be done to win justice?

A: Venezuela’s extradition request is based on three different legal
instruments. The first, of course, is the extradition treaty between
Venezuela and the United States, signed in 1922. We also rely on
another legal instrument, the Convention for the Suppression of
Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Civilian Aviation, ratified in
Montreal in 1971. And the third, the International Convention for the
Repression of Terrorist Attacks Committed with Bombs, ratified in 2001,
which is retroactive.

Article 7 of the Montreal Convention says, "The Contracting State in
the territory of which the alleged offender is found" —in other words,
the United States— "shall, if it does not extradite him, be obliged,
without exception whatsoever and whether or not the offence was
committed in its territory, to submit the case to its competent
authorities for the purpose of prosecution."

Now, what does that mean? It means if Posada is in the United States
and if he committed a crime in Venezuela or elsewhere, and if the
United States does not want to extradite him to Venezuela, he has to be
tried in the United States, no exceptions.

Article 8 of the International Convention for the Repression of
Terrorist Acts Committed with Bombs says the same.
If he is not extradited to Venezuela, the United States has a legal
obligation to try Luis Posada Carriles in the United States, for the
plane bombing, for the 73 cases of homicide. This includes the little
girl Harry Paul, one of the few bodies that were recuperated in the
sea. Anyone who would see the photos of that child and what the bombing
did to her, would not hesitate to demand justice from the White
House. That poor child, seated in a seat next to her grandmother and
mother, was very close to where the first bomb exploded. Her corpse had
no brain, only pieces of her abdomen remained, with no intestines, no
heart, nothing.

Q: Many activists were in front of the court during the immigration
hearings for Posada last year. We mounted a wall in front of the court
to show Posada’s victims, which received a lot of press coverage. We
reached the public through television to tell the truth about Posada’s
crimes, something that the prosecutor did not do inside the Court. What
would you suggest we do to continue this struggle?

A: Continue with those types of actions. The people have to protest,
their voices should be heard. It is important to write letters to the
editors, to pressure the media. The news bewilders, people with such
unimportant stories—whether Britney Spears really shaved her head or
if an astronaut put on diapers in order to kill a woman who allegedly
took her boyfriend. They treat the people of the U.S. like idiots, in
order to avoid covering the true scandals, the real scandal of the U.S.
government keeping five anti-terrorist fighters in prison while
sheltering the Osama Bin Laden of Latin America for decades.

Q: Thank you so much.

Author: Gloria La Riva

(Gloria is the coordinator of the National Committee to Free the
Cuban Five.)