Download Freedom Fighter, CIA Operative, Terrorist: Posada Carriles, “The Bin

Posada Carriles, “The Bin Laden of
the Americas”
Horace Campbell
Before Osama Bin Laden, there was Luis Posada Carriles
Horace Campbell, who is from Jamaica, is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at
Syracuse University
The news regarding the killing of Osama Bin Laden by United States military forces
hit the airwaves on Sunday, May 1, 2011, prompting jubilation among many people
in the United States and other places around the world. This triumphalism of US
citizens, who were directly or indirectly affected by the military activities of Bin
Laden’s al Qaeda group, emanated from the belief that Bin Laden’s death served
justice to the victims for the September 11, 2001 attack on the US. It is, however,
important to note that as dreadful as Bin Laden was, modern international terrorism
did not begin with him. As quiet as it is kept, international terrorism did not begin
on September 11, 2001. Before Osama Bin Laden, there was Luis Clemente
Faustino Posada Carriles, also known as Posada Carriles or “Bambi”, according to a
de-classified CIA file.
On October 6, 1976, plastic explosives stuffed in tubes of toothpaste brought down
Cubana Flight 455 leaving Barbados for Cuba. This singular attack on the Cubana
Airline killed all 73 passengers on board, including some of the best athletes in the
Caribbean, and was especially felt among Cuban youths who lost 24 members of
their Olympic fencing team. This fencing team had recently competed and obtained
all gold medals in the Central American and Caribbean Championship.
Investigations by the governments of Cuba, Barbados, Guyana, Trinidad, Venezuela
and the United States ascertained that the mastermind of the explosion was Posada
Carriles. The Caribbean demanded that Carriles and his accomplices be brought to
swift justice.
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Cubans show photos of the victims of the 1976 Cubana bombing in front of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. Each of the
73 flags behind them commemorates one of those who died in the terrorist act
Guyanese victims of the Cubana bombing. Source: Kaiteur News
Carriles was a key operative in many CIA campaigns against Fidel Castro and Cuba.
Additionally, Posada was involved in a wider campaign of political repression
involving kidnappings and assassinations all across South America. This campaign,
called Operation Condor, had the special imprint of the dictators in Argentina and
Chile. Orlando Letelier was a former minister of Chilean president, Salvador
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Allende’s government, who along with his secretary was assassinated by a car
bomb explosion in Washington, D.C. on September 21, 1976. This was an example
of American supported terrorism spilling on to the streets of the capital of the
United States. Posada Carriles was directly linked to Operation Condor and to the
assassination of Orlando Leteiler. It was only weeks after this killing on the streets
of Washington that terror struck the Caribbean in the attack on the Cubana flight.
Carriles was reported to have boasted about his involvement in the bombing of the
Cubana aircraft. He was for a short time incarcerated in Venezuela, but later
“escaped.” After this “escape” on August 18, 1985, and hiding out for 15 days,
Posada was whisked away from Venezuela and transported to Aruba on a shrimp
boat. From Aruba, he travelled on a private aircraft to Costa Rica and afterwards to
El Salvador where he was at the frontline in the terror campaign against the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
The trail of blood and destruction left by Carriles in the Caribbean, South and
Central America over the past fifty years are a hallmark of the veritable history of
the CIA in the Americas. During the military destabilization and devastation that
was called the “Contra Wars,” Posada Carriles was a key asset for the right-wing US
forces, and he has been associated with death squads in El Salvador and
Guatemala. Posada, while working as security advisor to the government of
Guatemala, carried a Guatemalan passport. This was a country where 40,000 to
50,000 people disappeared during the war and approximately 200,000 were killed.
In the 1990s, it was from this genocidal space where Posada and the Cuban
National Foundation planned more terrorist attacks against Cuba.
In 1997, Carriles masterminded a series of bombings in Havana that killed a tourist.
The Panamanian government in 2000 convicted Carriles in an assassination attempt
on Fidel Castro who was visiting Panama for a summit. Posada Carriles served four
years in prison before he was pardoned by the Panamanian president in her last
week in office. Undoubtedly, the Panamanians succumbed to pressures from the US
security forces.
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Extract from FBI report linking Posada Carriles to the Cubana bombing. The full memo is available at
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB202/index.htm
Luis Posasa Carriles
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A fugitive from Caribbean justice, in 2005, Carriles turned up in the United States,
where he was arrested and charged with minor immigration offenses. Instead of
prosecuting Carriles for the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 and other terrorist acts,
the United States only accused him of obstruction of justice and perjury.
Specifically, the US accused Carriles of lying to an immigration officer about the
manner in which he entered the United States.
In this post-9/11 world, where the United States has manufactured jurisdiction,
pressured or cut deals with other countries to extradite those on its terror watch or
most wanted lists, these negligible charges reinforce the double standards of the
United States in relation to terrorism and terrorists. The governments of the
Caribbean, especially Barbados, Cuba, Trinidad and Venezuela, which have pursued
Carriles for over 30 years, were outraged when Carriles was acquitted of even these
minimal charges in a trial held in El Paso, Texas on April 8, 2011. The fact that he
was tried on immigration and perjury charges instead of charges related to acts of
terrorism was itself an indicator of the blowback that confronts the US as it seeks to
present itself as a force against terrorism internationally. Today, in the aftermath of
the killing of Osama Bin Laden, the Caribbean people are calling on President
Obama to extradite Posada to Venezuela to stand trial.
BIN LADEN OF THE AMERICAS OR AMERICA’S FREEDOM FIGHTER?
Posada Carriles has been identified with acts of international terror for over fifty
years. Born in Cuba in 1928, Carriles left Cuba after the overthrow of the Batista
dictatorship and joined the forces fighting against Fidel Castro in Cuba. Because he
was fighting communism --- in this case, communism in Cuba --- in the eyes of the
US, Posada Carriles was not a terrorist, but a freedom fighter. But “fighting for
freedom” US style was not confined to terrorist acts solely against Cuba. As noted
above, these acts were carried out against the peoples of the Caribbean and
Venezuela. Carriles was trained in the use of explosives by the CIA, and his use of a
tube of toothpaste for the bomb came from training that he and his forces received
from the CIA. Although Carrilles was an anti-communist zealot, it was his training
by the CIA and CIA finances that made him a lethal force.
It was the same anti-communist zeal that was inspired within the Caribbean when
the US mobilized in the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. In this war,
the tactics and strategies of Carriles and the Caribbean terrorists were mobilized to
train anti-communist forces of all forms, especially persons such as Osama Bin
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Laden. Sources from the West itself do not contest the fact that during the antiSoviet jihad, Bin Laden and his fighters received American and Saudi funding. Bin
Laden himself had security training from the CIA. This training followed the lines
that had been refined with the anti-communist Cubans. The strength of the
recruitment of Osama Bin Laden was that, unlike Posada, Osama provided some of
his own money and helped raise millions from other wealthy anti-communist Arabs.
Osama Bin Laden then recruited hundreds of thousands for his jihad. Today, many
countries in Africa are suffering the repercussions of this alliance between the CIA
and Osama Bin Laden
It was a strange twist of history that the release of Posada Carriles came on April 8,
2011 approximately nine days before the 50th anniversary of the abortive Bay of
Pigs invasion of Cuba. This aborted invasion continues to have a decisive effect on
the politics of the US. The failure of this invasion is one of the alleged reasons that
sections of the US intelligence and military establishment decided to assassinate
President John F. Kennedy. This has been the allegation in numerous books on the
assassination of President John Kennedy. The most recent book outlining in detail
the culpability of the intelligence agencies was written by James Douglass, JFK and
the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. Douglass presents a very
compelling argument that Kennedy was killed by “unspeakable” forces within the
US national security establishment and pointed to the links of these unspeakable
forces to international terrorism. Scholars and researchers are still awaiting the
declassification of the information on a CIA elite intelligence unit called Operation
40 to shed more light on JFK’s assassination.
This episode of the killing of a US President and the efforts of the CIA to
assassinate President Fidel Castro of Cuba have now been well considered as high
points of US support for international terrorism. No less a body than the United
States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to
Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) in 1975
discussed alleged plots to kill foreign leaders. Known as the Church Committee, this
Senate body investigated alleged plots to kill: Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Fidel
Castro (Cuba), Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Ngo Dinh Diem (Vietnam) and
Rene Schneider (Chile). The report established that the US government was
implicated in several of these assassination plots. The Church Committee’s report
stated that, “short of war, assassination is incompatible with American principles,
international order and morality. It should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy.”
http://www.archive.org/details/allegedassassina00unit Despite this admonition by
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a committee of the United States Senate, the CIA, working with its agent Carriles,
stuffed explosives in tubes of toothpaste to kill young Caribbeans a year later.
Any terrorist organization needs a pool of citizens willing to carry out acts of
terrorism. After the debacle of the Bay of Pigs (April 17 -19, 1961), the US
intelligence and military circles found a pool of willing accomplices from among the
ranks of those Cuban exiles who were bent on overturning the socialist experiment
in Cuba. These exiles had repaired to Miami, Florida and acted as a conservative
force in US politics for over half a century. They not only supported the most brutal
dictators in Latin America but were hired by the US to destabilize the Democratic
Republic of the Congo so that the African independence project could be derailed.
Posada Carriles hailed from this Cuban exile Community in Florida; he was
associated with groups that carried names such as Alpha 66, the F4 Commandos,
the Cuban American National Foundation, and Brothers to the Rescue. Among the
more infamous of these American “freedom fighters” were Orlando Bosch (recently
deceased) and Jorge Mas Canosa. Numerous reports from quality news outlets
identified Posada Carriles as someone who had been in the service of the CIA since
1961. According to a lengthy New York Times article in 1998, titled “A Bombers
Tale: Taking Aim at Castro; Key Cuba Foe Claims Exiles’ Backing,” we are told,
“Jailed for one of the most infamous anti-Cuban attacks, the 1976 bombing of a
civilian Cubana airliner, [Carriles] eventually escaped from a Venezuelan prison to
join the centerpiece of the Reagan White House’s anti-Communist crusade in the
Western Hemisphere: Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North’s clandestine effort to supply arms
to Nicaraguan contras.” http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/12/world/a-bomberstale-taking-aim-at-castro-key-cuba-foe-claims-exiles-backing.html
The experiences of US terror throughout Latin America during the Reagan years
require that peace activists internationally have a different orientation on terrorism
than the United States. The long standing war in Colombia in the so called “war on
drugs” was part of a process of militarization and destructive terrorism that
wreaked havoc on the Caribbean and Central America. Posada Carriles along with
Elliot Abrams, a foreign policy official within the administrations of Presidents
Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who was convicted in 1991 for withholding
information from Congress in the Iran-Contra affair; and John Negroponte and
other luminaries of the conservative forces in the US played key roles in supplying
and supervising the CIA-backed contra mercenaries who were based in Honduras.
This Contra War claimed over 50,000 lives. During the same period, Honduran
military death squads, operating with Washington’s support, assassinated hundreds
of opponents of the US-backed regime. Negroponte later surfaced as US
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Ambassador to Iraq and was a leading spokesperson in the “war on terror.”
Negroponte had held cabinet-level positions in both George W. Bush’s and Reagan’s
administrations such as the first ever Director of National Intelligence and US
Ambassador to the UN (Bush) and Deputy National Security Advisor (Reagan).
As the case of Carriles and many others demonstrate, long before the anticommunist jihad, long before Bin Laden, and long before declaring the infamous
global war on terror, the US had trained and enlisted some of the world’s most
notorious terrorists and called them “freedom fighters.” Most sections of the US
media acknowledge that the FBI and the CIA were quite aware of the terrorist
activities of Posada Carriles. Posada Carriles was a “freedom fighter” for the US in
the Caribbean and Latin America, while Osama Bin Laden was a “freedom fighter”
for the US in Asia and just as Jonas Savimbi was a “freedom fighter” in Africa. This
was the same period when those legitimately fighting for liberation in Africa were
deemed to be terrorists. The same CIA and the US military labeled the African
National Congress of South Africa a terrorist organization and its leaders were
considered terrorists.
Carriles’ escapades as an American “freedom fighter” did not end with his escape
from incarceration in Venezuela in the 1980’s or with his links to the 1997 Cuban
bombings. Carriles was complicit in many terrorist activities directly or indirectly
related with many of the over 600 plots to assassinate Castro. In 2000, Posada was
arrested with 200 pounds of explosives, along with three associates. Five Cubans
who worked to expose to the US authorities the terrorist activities of the Cuban
American National Foundation and other exile groups in Miami were arrested by the
US in 1998. The Cuban Five, also known as the Miami Five (Gerardo Hernández,
Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González), are
five Cubans convicted in Miami of espionage, conspiracy to commit murder, and
other illegal activities in the US. These Cubans, who exposed acts of terrorism
planned from US soil, are still incarcerated while Posada Carriles walks free.
SEPTEMBER 2011 AND THE “WAR ON TERROR”
While the FBI and the US security forces were working to convict the Cuban Five,
right before their very noses, the conspirators planning September 11 were being
trained at a flight training school in Florida to use airplanes as weapons against US
targets. Subsequent to the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on
September 11, 2001, security efforts to “make the world safe from terrorism”
became a major preoccupation for the US government, influencing global politics,
banking and commerce, diplomacy and the movement of ideas and peoples across
the globe. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks there was an outpouring of
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solidarity from all parts of the globe for the citizens of the United States. The US
government sought to benefit from this solidarity and ascribed unto itself the task
of leading the international effort to combat terrorism (supposedly on behalf of the
rest of the world). For a short moment, the media represented Afghanistan as the
base for international terrorists, and in particular Osama Bin Laden. The US
government launched a war against the Taliban government of Afghanistan in
October 2001, and Central Asia became one of the primary fronts in the war against
terrorism.
President George W. Bush argued after the September 11 attacks that, “aiding and
harboring terrorists” was on the same level as committing terrorist acts. The fact
that 30 years after the attacks on the Cubana Airlines the US continued to harbour
the known perpetrators of the crime, brought to the fore the reality that the US
government had been committing terrorist acts long before September 11 and its
so-called war on terror. It was much clearer after September 11, 2001 that the rule
of harbouring terrorists only applied to those who the US deemed to be terrorists.
POSADA ON TRIAL
The full details of the comings and goings of Carriles in the service of the CIA is in
the public domain. When Posada Carriles entered the US in 2005, the vigilance of
the Caribbean investigators ensured that his quiet return was publicized. There was
a massive demonstration in Cuba exposing the double standards of the Bush
administration that was fighting terrorism but protecting terrorists. Posada Carriles
was arrested and charged with eleven counts of perjury and obstruction only after
the publicity from the Caribbean and the calls from Venezuela for him to be
extradited back to Venezuela to stand trial.
This is how the New York Times in 2006 carried the story of his detention in the
United States:
Cubana Airlines Flight 455 crashed off the coast of Barbados on Oct. 6,
1976, killing all 73 people aboard. Plastic explosives stuffed into a
toothpaste tube ignited the plane, according to recently declassified
police records. Implicated in the attack, but never convicted, was Luis
Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile who has long sought to topple the
government of Fidel Castro. Today, Mr. Posada, 78, is in a detention
center in El Paso, held on an immigration violation while the
government tries to figure out what to do with him. His case presents
a quandary for the Bush administration, at least in part because Mr.
Posada is a former CIA operative and United States Army officer who
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directed his wrath at a government that Washington has long opposed.
Despite insistent calls from Cuba and Venezuela for his extradition, the
administration has refused to send him to either country for trial.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/world/americas/08posada.html?
ref=luisposadacarriles
The strength of the terrorist alliances with the US ensured that Carriles understood
that he was above the law. As his attorney, Felipe D. J. Millan, tellingly asked in the
above New York Times article, “How can you call someone a terrorist who
allegedly committed acts on your behalf?” Mr. Millan went further to defend
Carriles’ actions that though Carriles was considered a terrorist in Latin America and
the Caribbean he indeed was a freedom fighter for the US. Mr. Millan maintained
that by denying or ignoring the fact that Carriles acts were committed in his fight
for America, “would be the equivalent of calling Patrick Henry or Paul Revere or
Benjamin Franklin a terrorist.”
When Carriles was acquitted on all charges in the El Paso court on April 8, the
Caribbean community was collectively outraged. In Barbados, where the initial
terrorist act was committed, the editorial of the main newspaper, The Nation, was:
“Painful Recall Over Acquittal of Cuban Exile.”
http://cubaldirect.posterous.com/041211-nation-news-barbados-editorial-painful
The Venezuelan government protested the acquittal and demanded that the United
States comply with international treaties and extradite Posada Carriles to face trial
before a Venezuelan court. The Venezuelan government further mentioned that,
“the legal proceedings in El Paso represented little more than a continuation of
Washington’s protection of the CIA terrorist, which, the Venezuelan Foreign Affairs
Ministry said, has become an emblematic case of US double standards in the
international fight against terrorism.” The Cuban government described the verdict
as an “outrage” and an “insult,” charging that Washington continues to harbor and
protects “the Osama bin Laden of Latin America.”
LESSONS FOR THE YOUNGER GENERATION
Students in Africa who do not know the history of United States terrorism will need
to study the country’s intricate plot to assassinate presidents and freedom fighters
at home and abroad, in addition to understanding the relationship of some US law
enforcement agencies to international terrorism. The US justifies its creation of the
United States Africa Command (Africom) on the grounds that it is assisting the fight
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against terrorism in Africa. People that really care about Africa must question the
credibility of Africom against the background of the US tradition of training
terrorists to fight for American interests while labelling freedom fighters as
terrorists. How credible is the US war on terror when the country harbours such a
brutal terrorist as Posada Carriles while keeping in custody the Cuban Five? Brutal
terrorism of the Posada genre is reinforced by the economic terror against Cuba as
manifest in the illegal economic blockade against Cuba. The conservative forces of
the Cuban National Foundation in Florida are now connected to counter
revolutionary forces against the rights of ordinary citizens in the US.
Students in the US who study International Relations are seduced by the discourse
on fighting against terror, but these students are presented with abstractions that
leave out the history of US-sponsored terrorism, especially in the past fifty years.
Illegitimate US aggression throughout the globe by the CIA and sections of the US
armed forces is a familiar political phenomenon and is well documented for those
who care for the truth. The Federation of American Scientists has chronicled the
numerous interventions by the US since 1945 and among the activities listed have
been armed aggression, destabilizing governments, suppressing movements for
social change, assassinating political leaders, perverting the course of elections,
manipulating labor unions, manufacturing “news”, teaching torture, creating death
squads, engaging in biological warfare and drug trafficking, training mercenaries,
and working with Nazis and their collaborators. Scholars and activists who write
on low intensity wars have been highlighting the ways in which the government of
the United States was the principal supporter of terrorism. Noam Chomsky has
been forthright in documenting the ways the US has acted as the leading terrorist
state in the world, showing how these relationships have operated in Latin America
for decades.
The US Africa Command created a disinformation platform, Operation Objective
Voice, to confuse Africans. One of the requirements of psychological warfare and
information warfare is for some truth to serve as the basis of the information that is
being peddled. The experience of Posada Carriles is one of the examples that
expose the false narrative that the US is genuinely involved in a war against terror.
There is so much public information on the details of the Cubana Airlines flight 455
that any objective voice within the US military today would seek to distance
themselves from the forces within the state that supported dastardly acts of terror
and international crimes. In reality, however, the criminal actions associated with
killing 73 Caribbean youths are compounded by the economic terrorism unleashed
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by the US banking system and the forces that spread the doctrine of neo-liberal
capitalism. Billions of dollars are scooped up from Africa, the Caribbean and Latin
America by the US financial oligarchy and these are the forces that benefit from all
forms of terror. Direct crimes such as those of Carriles and the economic crimes of
the International Monetary Fund are two sides of the terror of international
capitalism. These forces collaborated yesterday to assassinate John F. Kennedy and
are at work today to ensure that in spite of the economic crisis, billions are spent
on weapons and the spread of wars in Afghanistan, Libya and other parts of the
world. Is it possible that Carriles was not incarcerated because he has information
that would be even more explosive than the facts revealed in the books on
Operation Condor, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought
Terrorism to Three Continents and JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died
and Why It Matters? According to an organization called the National Committee
to Free the Cuban Five,
A footnote in a document filed by Posada’s lead defense attorney on
January 28, 2010, is quite revealing about the kind of classified
information that Posada Carriles threatens to expose in the course of
the trial. His attorney, Arturo Hernández, argues in that motion, “The
Defendant’s CIA relationship, stemming from his work against the
Castro regime through his anti-communist activities in Venezuela and
Central America, are relevant and admissible to his defense.” The
motion furthermore alleges that the US government had been
complicit in bomb-setting in Cuba and asked the court to compel the
government to declassify all information that shows the “involvement,
knowledge, acquiescence and complicity [of the U.S. Government] in
sabotage or bombings in Cuba.” Also, the motion requests disclosure
of “[t]raining, instructions, memos or other documents reflecting
orders to the Defendant to maintain secrecy and not disclose his
relationship or information regarding his activities on behalf of the U.S.
Government or any of its Agencies.”
http://www.freethefive.org/usTerrorism/USTerrPertierraDay2530911.h
tm
Now that many Americans feel that justice have been served with the death of Bin
Laden, the question is: do the citizens of the Caribbean and their relatives and
acquaintances, who were victims of Posada Carriles’ terrorism, deserve justice?
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The acquittal of Carriles reminds us of the dangerous intersection between
militarism, terrorism and those forces that profit from war and mind control. Could
the global war on terror be an exercise in mind control just as the trial and acquittal
of Carriles exposed the contradiction of decades of unleashing terror? The fact that
the Obama administration could not reverse the intersection of history and the
contemporary heritage of the operations of the US terror machine ensure that it is
up to the peace movement to intensify the efforts to dismantle the financialmilitary-information complex that remains above international law.
6 May 2011
[email protected]
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