HARPERS: Our terrorist who blew up an airliner

[yurbud]

If the Democrats get either or both houses of Congress back, one of the orders of business should be Church committee type investigations of these kind of operations.

To the degree that terrorism is a real problem, part of the blame belongs to actions like this. Unfortunately, blowing up a plane probably has the least impact on the targeted countries. Far more devastating for the people on the receiving end, and therefore to their perception of us is when we support coups or assassinations of leaders in other countries, even democratically elected ones, as happened in Iran and Guatamala in the 1950s, Chile in the 70s, and Venezuela on the Bush watch. In the last case, enough of the Venezuelan military was sick of being seen as the bad guys by their own people to rescue Chavez and thwart the coup. But the Bush people aren't through with him yet.

If we were serious about spreading democracy, we wouldn't kill and overthrow the leaders of other countries just so some oil company or plantation or sweatshop owner can pad their profits.

Posada: A Double Standard in the War on Terror

Posted on Friday, October 6, 2006.

By Michelle Garcia.


On October 6, 1976 seventy-three people were killed when terrorists blew up Cubana Flight 455, which was on its way from Barbados to Cuba. Thirty years later, on September 11, 2006, Luis Posada Carriles, one of the men who allegedly carried out the attack, was sitting in a Texas prison when a federal judge in El Paso, Texas, ordered him released from detention. If a U.S. district court upholds the ruling, Posada could be on the street within a few weeks.

Why would the U.S. government set free a notorious terrorism suspect when it was simultaneously turning the American legal system upside down to permit the indefinite detainment and torture of suspected terrorists? Terrorism, it seems, lies in the eye of the beholder.

Posada, you see, is an old Cold Warrior. He received CIA training for the 1961 U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba to oust Fidel Castro and is known to have carried out a number of U.S. government operations in Latin America. Posada was arrested after the Cubana Flight 455 bombing and tried by a Venezuelan military court, which acquitted him. In 1985, he escaped from jail while awaiting a civil trial. (Posada denies any involvement in the bombing, but FBI reports place him at several meetings in Caracas where the plan was hatched.)

Out of prison, operating under the name Ramon Medina, Posada ran arms to U.S.-backed Contras for Lt. Col. Oliver North; he has served as a spy for the Salvadoran president and military junta leader Napoleon Duarte; and he admitted to a New York Times reporter in 1998 that he organized a string of bombings of hotels and restaurants in Cuba during the 1990s....


FULL TEXT:

http://harpers.org/mg-posada-1160087414.html

[ShockediSay]

1. The World sees US hypocrisy more starkly than ever these days

And we want to know "Why do they hate us?"

We have targeted ourselves for terrorists of every stripe

Right on post< regrettably

[yurbud]

2. I think the only people who were fooled before was us

[enough]

3. k&r

[Judi Lynn]

4. Very decent of Harper's to publish this. Our government has kept his

history very, very quiet all these years, and he has been compared, outside this country, to Carlos the Jackal.

Everyone knows about him and his cohort, Orlando Bosch, and others, except the American people, who have unknowingly been his hosts for decades while he murdered, bombed, and destroyed lives all over the world.

Thank you, yurbud. (Sorry I got here too late to have my recommendation counted.)

[Vidar]

5. Kudos to Harpers for exposing American hypocrisy .