POLITICS-U.S.
:A Terrorist Comes Home to Roost
Jim Lobe WASHINGTON, May 12 (IPS) -

The sudden and untimely arrival on U.S. territory of a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) asset and admitted terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles, poses an embarrassing challenge to the credibility of the Bush administration's war on terrorism.

Posada, who in an interview with the New York Times seven years ago admitted to organising a wave of bombings in Cuba in 1997 that killed an Italian tourist and injured 11 others, is best known as the prime suspect in the bombing of a Cubana Airlines flight shortly after it took off from Barbados in October 1976.

The incident, in which all 73 crew members and passengers including teenaged members of Cuba's national fencing team were killed, was the first confirmed mid-air terrorist bombing of a commercial airliner.

Then-President George Bush in 1990 pardoned Orlando Bosch, another Cuban exile opposed to President Fidel Castro and implicated in the plot, overruling a strong U.S. Justice Department opinion that called for Bosch's deportation.

Posada, who also worked for the operation supplying ''Contra'' rebels in Central America in the mid-1980s until the Iran-Contra scandal broke open with the downing of one of its planes, was also convicted of conspiring to assassinate Castro during a 2000 visit to Panama. A Panamanian court sentenced him to eight years in prison in 2004 but he was unexpectedly pardoned by outgoing President Mireya Moscosa last September and flew to Honduras.

”This is a real test of (President) George W. Bush's commitment to fighting terrorism,” said Peter Kornbluh, a Latin American specialist at the non-governmental National Security Archive (NSA). This week, the organisation released a series of declassified U.S. documents that detailed Posada's terrorist history and his previous association with the CIA.

”Already, U.S. credibility has been eroded in the six weeks since Posada apparently arrived in the United States without the government doing anything about it,” Kornbluh told IPS Thursday. He said Posada had apparently arrived in south Florida, almost certainly by boat, in late March.

A spokesperson at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Miami, where Posada's attorney, Eduardo Soto, announced April 12 that his client had filed an asylum claim, told IPS that its agents were not looking for Posada because ''no warrant for his arrest has been issued.”

”We do have an interest in talking with him but we don't have a way to exercise jurisdiction without a warrant,” she said.

Venezuela, where Posada was originally arrested shortly after the 1976 Air Cubana bombing, is expected to transmit a provisional arrest warrant to the State Department either Friday or Monday, according to Arelis Baiba, a spokesperson for its embassy here. The issuance of the warrant will be followed by a formal extradition request.

In deliberating on the case earlier this week, the Venezuelan Supreme Court referred to Posada as ”the author or accomplice of homicide,” adding, ”he must be extradited and judged.”

It is unclear how the Bush administration, whose ties to Venezuela are increasingly fraught, will react, although many analysts said they believe that Washington will not deport him to Caracas.

Some said that administration intermediaries are trying to persuade Posada to leave the U.S. precisely in order to avoid further embarrassment for Bush.>>>>continued

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