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 Rules
The kid-glove treatment of Posada and other right-wing Cuban terrorists stood in marked contrast to George W. Bush's tough handling of Islamic militants. While Posada was afforded all U.S. legal protections and then some, suspected Islamic terrorists were locked away without trial at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In a further ironic twist, the Bush-43 administration allowed Venezuela to be smeared about torture while Bush and his top aides were concealing the fact that they had authorized extensive torture on suspected Islamic "terrorists," including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other brutal torture techniques at CIA "black sites."
Posada also made no apologies for his long terrorist career. In 1998, in interviews with a New York Times reporter, Posada admitted a role in a wave of Havana bombings, citing a goal of frightening tourists away from Cuba.
Similarly, his alleged co-conspirator in the Cubana Airlines bombing, Orlando Bosch, showed no remorse for his violent past. In a TV interview with reporter Manuel Cao on Miami's Channel 41, Bosch justified the mid-air bombing that killed 73 people in 1976.
When Cao asked Bosch to comment on the civilians who died when the Cubana plane crashed off the coast of Barbados, Bosch responded, "In a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Fidel Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach."
"But don't you feel a little bit for those who were killed there, for their families?" Cao asked.
"Who was on board that plane?" Bosch responded. "Four members of the Communist Party, five North Koreans, five Guyanese." [Officials tallies actually put the Guyanese dead at 11.]
Bosch added, "Four members of the Communist Party, chico! Who was there? Our enemies""
"And the fencers?" Cao asked about Cuba's amateur fencing team that had just won gold, silver and bronze medals at a youth fencing competition in Caracas. "The young people on board?"
Bosch replied, "I was in Caracas. I saw the young girls on television. There were six of them. After the end of the competition, the leader of the six dedicated their triumph to the tyrant. " She gave a speech filled with praise for the tyrant.
"We had already agreed in Santo Domingo, that everyone who comes from Cuba to glorify the tyrant had to run the same risks as those men and women that fight alongside the tyranny."
[The comment about Santo Domingo was an apparent reference to a meeting by a right-wing terrorist organization, CORU, which took place in the Dominican Republic in 1976 and which involved a CIA undercover asset.]
"If you ran into the family members who were killed in that plane, wouldn't you think it difficult?" Cao asked.
"No, because in the end those who were there had to know that they were cooperating with the tyranny in Cuba," Bosch answered.
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