At least he’s not harbored in a harbor, if you know what I mean.

I was just reading about runaway inflation in Zimbabwe, where bread costs about 30% more than last week — $66,000 Zimbabwean per loaf (that’s 66 US cents, if you can believe it). I was trying to get a better sense of the situation when I happened to read an op-ed piece in The Herald:

The case of Luis Posada Carriles has become an international embarrassment for the Bush administration. Ever since Posada illegally entered the US 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.

I do not remember hearing much about the Carriles case, you? And yet the Herald makes it seem like Bush himself is worried.

Here’s a little more background from the Washington Post:

Trained by the CIA in the use of explosives as part of the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, Posada has been linked through the years with the bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner that killed 73 people; bombings in Cuban tourist hotels that killed an Italian tourist and injured 11 other people; and a 2000 plot to assassinate Castro in Panama.

Does that make him a terrorist? To be frank, and according to the CIA definition, yes.

Just to confuse things a little there appears to be plenty of documentation linking Carriles to the CIA, so I would expect some might try and suggest he is a patriot for blowing up civilian aircraft…although President Bush himself declared “Any nation that harbors terrorists are as responsible as the terrorists themselves.”

José Pertierra, a lawyer representing the government of Venezuela in the extradition case of Carriles, had this perspective on the situation:

There are enough laws in the United States to keep this terrorist in jail. What is lacking is the political will to do so. From the beginning of this drama, George W. Bush has wanted to shelter, rather than prosecute, the terrorist. Somewhere in a drawer in the Department of State are the pleadings filed by Venezuela, asking for his preventive detention as well as his extradition. The Bush Administration thus far ignores them and instead mocks U.S. law, as well as three separate extradition treaties signed, ratified and conveniently used by the government of the United States in other cases in its war on terror.

Hmmm. It is not as though relations between Chavez and Bush are warm right now, and an ex-CIA operative must have some importance/relevance to Bush Senior (not to mention Cheney and Rumsfeld), but what is Bush Junior’s position on this guy? With articles like this one from the Foreign Policy in Focus, it will be interesting to see whether the mainstream press picks up on the debate:

Posada has confided to journalists and others that for four decades he had worked on and off with the CIA to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro. In 1976, Posada teamed up with Orlando Bosch, another obsessed Castro-hater, and hired two Venezuelan killers to detonate a bomb on board a commercial Cubana flight over Barbados. Seventy-three passengers and crew members died. This was a blatant terrorist act. The hired weasels ratted on Posada to the police, landing him in a Venezuelan prison.

After a decade of inconclusive judicial proceedings, Posada’s Miami buddies bribed the prison officials and Posada “escaped” to Central America, where he worked for Lt. Col. Oliver North in supplying the Contras in their CIA-backed attempt to overthrow the Nicaraguan government.

In 1990 in Guatemala, an unknown gunman shot Posada in the face. He recovered, but didn’t regain full use of his voice. Even that didn’t stop him. In 1997, he recruited a Salvadoran to bomb hotels in Cuba. One bomb killed an Italian tourist. Cuban cops grabbed the Salvadoran, who named Posada as his employer.

Posada even boasted about his violence against Cuban tourism to two New York Times reporters in July 1998. How did he feel about killing the innocent civilian, they asked? “I sleep like a baby,” he replied.

*Sigh* I think I was hoping to live life without ever hearing the name “Oliver North” again, especially in relation to a current US President’s foreign policy in Latin America. I see an historic theme emerging here, however, and a recent briefing by Wayne Smith, Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy indicates that the US not only allowed Carriles into the country, but enabled him to do so:

Posada Carriles is in the United States thanks to the intervention of Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Congressmen Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart, all of whom petitioned the then-president of Panama, Mireya Moscoso, to pardon him and three other Cuban exile terrorists—which she did, as one of her last acts before leaving office.

So the US government supposedly helped get Carriles out of jail in Panama, and then “discovered” him trying to enter the US, and now refuses to extradite him to Venezuela? January 24th, 2006 was the deadline for his release, but I do not see any news at all in February on the subject. I assume he is still in US custody, but who is reporting on this issue now and what is the Bush Administration position? Will Carriles be tried for his crimes, let alone extradited?