One of the most interesting and novel, websites around, Watching America, has a very interesting article up by Rolando Sarmiento Ricart, for the Adelante newspaper (Cuban), translated by Douglas Myles Rasmussen.
Rasmussen’s introduction:
Has the Bush Administration just released a known terrorist who had a hand in – among other things – the death of John F. Kennedy and the destruction of a passenger aircraft with 73 people aboard? According to this article from Cuba’s state-controlled Adelante, Luis Posada Carriles, who has just been set loose in Miami, is just such a man.
From the article:
To give a more precise description of his professional profile, Luis Posada Carriles is an expert at setting off C-4 explosives with a very short fuse, who goes from Bush to Bush, and whose detonations have not been silenced or hampered by the outrageous justice system in the United States or its famous Patriot Act.
And it’s a fact that the terrorist Posada Carriles, who has confessed to so many crimes, including the explosion in mid-flight of a Cubana Airlines plane with 73 passengers aboard, is an overall deadly threat to any nation, even the United States. This is the man that the Administration of George Bush is seeking to “judge” for his little immigrant lies, told in his quest to enter the land of the Anti-terror Gladiator.
It is very well-known that Posada Carriles, in Washington D.C. – the very heart of the United States, capital of the world’s most powerful nation – participated in a bombing attack that killed Chile’s former minister of foreign affairs, Orlando Letelier , and his North American associate, Ronnie Moffitt.
Sources very close to the terrorist also implicate him in the conspiracy to kill the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy. Nevertheless, the present administration in the “White House” – in quotes – welcomes this new bin Laden with the assurance that he is no threat to anyone. It would be good to remember that the inveterate dynamiter, in a 1998 interview with The New York Times, named himself as the chief organizer of a series of bombing attacks on hotels, shops and a diverse array of civilian installations in Cuba during the summer of 1997. These acts of deadly vandalism resulted in the death of Italian tourist Fabio Di Celmo and wounded some others, among them children.
He confessed to planning to kill Castro in on the campus of the University of Panama, but he was later pardoned by President Mireya Moscoso, who is now retiring in…
The US.
There is an interesting question here: if the US opposes all terrorism, shouldn’t the US go after people like Carriles? And, shouldn’t the US actively try to disarm the PKK in Northern Iraq? One of the main problems for the US right now is that many people consider the US to be hypocritical. Terrorism is terrorism is terrorism. No?
To read more about Luis Posada Carriles, go here. A former CIA operative, active during the Cold War. Obviously, during the CW, other rules were in place. It was not about fighting terrorism, it was about fighting the communist threat. Communism might have spread throughout Latin America, which would have been a disaster for the US, and thus for the West as a whole.
I do not have a problem with the CIA trying to kill Castro – sadly all attempts failed I’d say.
There is a difference between trying to kill Castro and trying to prevent communism from spreading on the one hand, and terrorism on the other. It seems to me that Carriles crossed that line.
That being said, and this is important to point out, I simply do not know much about Carriles. In fact, this was the first time I heard his name. I read a bit up on him, but there is still much more to discover. The man is a bit of a mystery.
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