Venezuela’s Ambassador the United States, Bernardo Alvarez, protested the Bush administration’s tolerance of the dinner. “This is outrageous, particularly because he kept talking about [more] violence,” the ambassador said.
Posada, a naturalized Venezuelan citizen who worked for Venezuela’s intelligence agency in the 1970s, masterminded the 1976 Cubana airline bombing, according to evidence compiled by the U.S. government and in South America.
Despite Posada’s record – and despite the strong evidence against him in U.S. government files – Florida Gov. Jeb Bush made little effort to capture Posada when he sneaked into Miami in 2005. Posada was detained only after he held a news conference.
Then, instead of extraditing Posada to Venezuela, the Bush administration engaged in a lackadaisical effort to have him deported for lying on an immigration form.
During a 2007 court hearing in Texas, Bush administration lawyers allowed to go unchallenged testimony from a Posada friend that Posada would face torture if he were returned to Venezuela. The judge, therefore, barred Posada from being deported there.
After that ruling, Ambassador Alvarez accused the Bush administration of applying “a cynical double standard” in the “war on terror.” As for the claim that Venezuela practices torture, Alvarez said, “There isn’t a shred of evidence that Posada would be tortured in Venezuela.”
Different Standards
The kid-glove treatment of Posada and other right-wing Cubans stands in marked contrast to President Bush’s tough handling of Islamic militants. While Posada is afforded all U.S. legal protections and then some, suspected Islamic terrorists are locked away without trial at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and face “alternative interrogation techniques.”
On May 15 in a speech to the Israeli Knesset, Bush even denounced Western political leaders who advocate negotiations with “terrorists and radicals,” likening the idea to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler.
But Bush’s hard-line stance doesn’t apply to terrorism that’s in line with U.S. foreign policy or that connects to Bush’s family. In those cases, opposite standards apply.
For instance, even as Posada’s record for terrorism was relevant to his immigration case, the Bush administration sat on evidence implicating him in a series of 1997 hotel bombings in Havana that killed an Italian tourist.
The Associated Press reported that an FBI document, belatedly filed with the court, revealed that a confidential source had planted a listening device in a Guatemalan utility company office, picking up conversations about smuggling a “putty-like explosive” into Cuba in the shoes of operatives posing as tourists.
The source added that another employee of the utility company found 22 plastic tubes in a closet in August 1997 labeled "high-powered explosives, extremely dangerous." The explosives were being mixed into shampoo bottles, the employee said.
According to the AP, the confidential source provided the FBI with a fax about wire transfers from individuals in New Jersey that was signed Solo, one of Posada’s aliases.
The FBI concluded that at least $19,000 in wire transfers connected to the hotel bombings were sent from the United States to El Salvador and Guatemala to a "Ramon Medina," the code name used by Posada in the 1980s when he worked on Oliver North’s operations. [AP, May 4, 2007]
In 1998, in interviews with a New York Times reporter, Posada admitted a role in the Havana bombings, citing a goal of frightening tourists away from Cuba.
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