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A US court has ruled that a Cuban wanted on terrorism charges by Cuba and Venezuela should be set free from a Texas immigration detention centre.

Venezuela, which says he was behind a 1976 plane bombing that killed 73 people, condemned the latest ruling.

A Venezuelan government spokesman, Eric Wingerter, said the fact the ruling came on the fifth anniversary of the 11 September attacks would be particularly insulting to the families of those who died in the bombing of the Cuban airliner.

The judge noted that the US Supreme Court had ruled that those held on immigration violations could not be held indefinitely.

He also said no third country had been found willing to accept Mr Posada Carriles' deportation. The earlier ruling had said he could face torture in Cuba or Venezuela.

Mr Wingerter said: "If we are serious about fighting terrorism then we need to prosecute all terrorists, not just those opposed to US foreign policy."

The US Department of Justice said it was reviewing the court decision.

The entire Cuban fencing team was among those who died when the Cuban jetliner flying from Caracas was bombed.

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Cuban bomb suspect to be released

According to the Voice of Amerika (Miami Herald) the court based it decision on the fact that Posada is not a terrorist and it's illegal to illegally detain foreigners in Amerika.

Let's remember that this US government has recently claimed a unilateral right to bomb/attack those who 'harbour' accused terrorists.

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While the U.S. is fighting terrorism abroad, we should not be harboring terrorists at home,” Rep. McDermott continued. “I trust that our government will not grant an admitted terrorist like Mr. Posada asylum, when we have not even afforded counsel to hundreds of detainees we are holding at Guantanamo.”

President George Bush has made a point of his unwavering moral stand on the issue of harboring terrorists, pointed out Wayne Smith, former chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana (1979-1982), and now a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy.

But the personal involvement of the Bush family with Mr. Posada Carriles and with an associate, Orlando Bosch, could be making it more difficult for the President to make the decision to extradite Mr. Posada, the decision which would be morally consistent with U.S. policy.

“Jeb Bush, who was working at that point on the re-election campaign of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fl.), was one of the leaders of the campaign to allow Orlando Bosch to remain in the United States, to pardon him and to allow him to remain here. So George H.W. Bush, then the president, goes along, and they approve the pardon and allow him to remain.

“The Justice Department has said: ‘If we allow him to remain, we will have no credibility with other nations in urging them not to harbor terrorists.’ But we did harbor Orlando Bosch, and he has been living in Miami, a free man, and never expressed any regret for the bombing. On the contrary, he continues to say: ‘There were no innocent people on that plane,’” Mr. Smith argued. “He has never renounced terrorism, never expressed any regret for anything he has done.”

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This week marks the 30th anniversary of the bombing of the Cuban airliner which killed 73 people, the first act of airline terrorism in the Western hemisphere.

A recent Znet piece is here.

[ 11 October 2006: Message edited by: sgm ]

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“They have even designated a Yankee administrator, someone called McCarry, as if nothing had changed in this world since 1898, when they thwarted our independence and imposed a number of administrators over us,” he noted, alluding to U.S. intervention in the war at the end of the 19th century when the Cubans were victoriously combating their Spanish colonizers.

“The president of the United States is acting within that same absurd logic, when he says that there must be a transition in Cuba; that is, a shameful return to the garbage of neocolonial capitalism that they imposed in this country for exactly 60 years; or when they threatened us recently with the idea that they would be taking note of anyone who is opposed to that.”

“I repeat the advice that I gave him at that time: better to put on your list the annexationists on your Interests Section payroll, which are few, because you would need a lot of paper to write down the names of the millions of men and women who are ready to receive, gun in hand, their appointed administrator,” Raúl said to prolonged applause from the Congress delegates.

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[ 16 August 2008: Message edited by: sgm ]

[ 16 August 2008: Message edited by: sgm ]

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A man like Santiago Alvarez, who can be heard on a telephone, calling on one of his underlings to throw C-4 explosives into Havana's Tropicana nightclub and "do away with all that" - all that being hundreds of people - a man like Santiago Alvarez who had machine guns, bazookas and grenades in a massive Miami arsenal, is sentenced to only a four-year prison sentence this week in a southern Florida federal court.

Yet, the Cuban Five, five men who were in Miami working to prevent a terrorist like Alvarez from killing innocent people, who never possessed a weapon, who never engaged nor intended to engage in the "espionage conspiracy" they were falsely convicted of, received 15 years to double life after their 2001 trial, and the added punishment of being denied family visits.

Alvarez and his accomplice Osvaldo Mitat were allowed to plead guilty to only one charge of weapons possession. Before their sentencing, federal judge James Cohn said, "This court recognizes the ultimate objective and goal of Mr. Alvarez and Mr. Mitat has always been a free and democratic Cuba. This court does not question the altruistic motive here. However we are a nation of laws."
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[Bush's] actions are those of coddling the Cuban-American terrorists. U.S. Homeland Security waited two full months before arresting Luis Posada Carriles after he entered the United States illegally last year. When DHS was finally forced to detain Posada on May 17 because of a public press conference he held that morning, Homeland Security prosecutors avoided charging him with more serious crimes, like the Cubana plane bombing.

Instead, Posada's only formal charge to date is illegal immigration entry. To the extent that federal authorities may currently be investigating him for his role into several 1997 Cuban hotel bombings, it is probably to avoid prosecuting him for the plane bombing. That is because Bush Sr. was CIA director at the time of the Cubana bombing; Posada was a longtime CIA operative.

It is more than an oversight by Bush or previous presidents that Miami terrorists have existed, organized plots, and carried out attacks with total impunity.

The Miami terrorist phenomenon is financed, armed, and given a green light by the CIA, FBI and other arms of the government.

There is mounting evidence that proves without a doubt, terrorism against Cuba is part of U.S. government policy.
....

More than 3,400 Cuban people have died from U.S.-originated terrorist attacks.
Source

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Beginning in December 2005, the defense tried to have Alvarez released on bail. Alvarez was the owner of the motorboat that illegally brought infamous terrorist Posada Carriles to US soil.

Tuesday, two months after the defendants pled guilty to possession of weapons, Judge James Cohn announced the light sentence, made even lighter because their time served until trial will be counted.

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[ 19 November 2006: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

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Fidel Castro was right all along: terrorist Luis Posada Carriles had entered the United States on board the "Santrina". The Cuban leader had denounced it as such from the very beginning, following the criminal’s taking of refuge in the United States. Washington, meanwhile, resorted to distancing itself from the truth.
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An official statement by the US Justice Department affirms that Posada lied repeatedly about his entry into the United States, which took place in March, 2005, and that he had particularly lied regarding the transportation routes and methods used and who had accompanied him on the trip.

"In fact, Posada entered the United States by sea aboard the motor vessel "Santrina" accompanied by four individuals," says the indictment. The Attorney General’s Office let nearly a year go by before it publicly acknowledged that the Cuban president was right when he challenged the US government to prove otherwise.
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Posada traveled on the "Santrina", a vessel in the service of the Cuban-American mafia in Miami, the same one that’s also behind the traffic of people and drugs through Mexican waters and territory. Santiago Alvarez Fernandez-Magriña and Osvaldo Mitat, both with a long record of terrorist actions, were Posada’s hosts on board the "Santrina" and later harbored him in Miami.

On April 11, 2005, 19 days after the terrorist had illegally entered United States, Fidel Castro challenged the White House to say whether they were hiding Posada or not. He reminded President George W. Bush of his words on August 26, 2003: "if you harbor a terrorist, if you feed a terrorist, if you try to hide a terrorist, you, yourself, are just as guilty as the terrorist."
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Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated that her government did not have any evidence of the presence of Posada in the United States and that it was presumably an invention of the Cuban intelligence. By then the criminal had spent the first month of his stay in Miami.

Condoleezza’s deputy then, the undersecretary for Hemispheric Affairs, Roger Noriega, called it a Cuban-made maneuver, while State Department spokesman Richard Boucher craftily evaded responding to Fidel's assertions by referring the question asked by journalists to other departments, especially those of Homeland Security and Justice, whose spokespersons remained equally silent.

Around that time, Boucher had said curtly that there are some "reports" that Posada was in the United States, but that the issue of his "exact location" was a matter for other relevant authorities. By then, Posada had already appeared before the press in Miami.

Kevin Whitaker, responsible for the Cuban Desk at the State Department, responded to the head of the Cuban Interests Office in Washington, Dagoberto Rodriguez, that he did not have information on the presence of Posada Carriles in the US. Whitaker repeated the argument that Fidel Castro’s assertions were unreliable. These and other characters in the US ended up supporting the plot to support Posada, together with the Cuban-American mafia in Miami, who welcomed and harbored the criminal, and who keep silence today.

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[ 14 January 2007: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
Two of Posada's terrorist accomplices received slaps on the wrist last week in a US federal court

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Terrorist Santiago Alvarez handed over to the US police dozens of machine guns, C-4 explosives, and a grenade launcher that he tried to use against Cuba, sources reported on Friday.

This maneuver was a move by Alvarez, an accomplice of terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, to obtain a reduction of his four-year sentence for illegal possession of weapons.

The defense also presented rifles, detonators, and ammunition, The Miami Herald reported.

The terrorist and his accomplice Osvaldo Mitat were only convicted for conspiracy to possess weapons, and not for the objective he pursued with the deadly arsenal: terrorist actions against Cuba. Mitat was sentenced to three years in prison.

Due to an agreement with the prosecutor, legal authorities ignored five of the six initial charges. Both criminals will serve a shorter time in prison, discounting their 12-month detention.

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An appeals court Thursday blocked anti-Castro Cuban militant Luis Posada Carilles' release from jail just as he began the process to be freed on $250,000 bond.

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans issued the order after he had already been transferred from the Otero County, N.M., jail to the federal courthouse in El Paso to sign paperwork that would have freed him.

Posada, 79, was escorted back to New Mexico, wearing a red prison uniform and shackled at the waist and feet.

He was to be turned over to immigration officials because he has a pending order for deportation. He will remain there until at least Tuesday, the deadline for his attorneys to respond to the appeals court order.

Prosecutors filed the emergency motion early Thursday in response to U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone's decision to deny the Justice Department's motion to keep him jailed.

Posada has been jailed since May 2005, when he was arrested on charges of sneaking into the United States illegally.

A federal immigration judge ruled in 2005 that Posada must be deported, but said he could not be sent to his native Cuba or Venezuela, where he is a naturalized citizen, because of fears that he could be tortured.

Authorities have not been able to find a country willing to take the former CIA operative and U.S. Army soldier.

Posada is wanted in Cuba and Venezuela on charges that he was in Caracas when he plotted the deadly 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner. Posada has denied involvement.

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- Source

[ 16 August 2008: Message edited by: M. Spector ]