Anti-Castro Terrorist Released in U.S.

^{Luis Posada Carriles:
A Protected Terrorist?}

Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban national wanted by both Cuba and Venezuela on terrorist charges, has been released from U.S. jail. Posada, a former CIA operative and anti-Castro militant, was being held on an immigration charge after having entered the U.S. illegally in 2005. He will be tried on these charges in May, and has been released in the meantime to his Hialeah, Florida, home.

Cuban officialdom is furious over the decision: Posada is wanted in connection with the fatal downing of Cubana Flight 455 in 1976, and admitted responsibility for a series of hotel bombings in Havana.

Posada has proved to be a persistent paradox for the Bush administration, trapped between anti-terrorism and anti-Castro positions. As Peter Kornbluh, head of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archives wrote in the NACLA Report on the Americas in 2006:

The case of Luis Posada Carriles has become an international embarrassment for the Bush administration. Ever since Posada illegally entered the U.S. using a false passport and showed up in Miami in March 2005 expecting to be granted political asylum for his early career as a CIA anti-Castro agent, his presence in the United States has created a major quandary for the White House. Should the President stand by his repeated commitment that no country should harbor international terrorists and expel Posada to Venezuela, where he escaped from prison in 1985 while being prosecuted for the Air Cubana bombing? Or should the Administration yield to its hard-line anti-Castro constituents in Florida and protect Posada as an emblematic figure in the history of the U.S. aggression against the Cuban Revolution?

So far, the Administration has chosen neither by keeping Posada in the U.S. while pursuing the immigration charge.

Also see: Profile of Luis Posada Carriles