Venezuela demands US hand over 'terrorist'

Venezuela's government has accused US immigration authorities of protecting a Cuban exile who Caracas wants extradited to face trial for a 1976 plane bombing that killed 73 people. The US Immigration Customs and Enforcement Agency ruled on Wednesday that Luis Posada Carriles, who was detained by US authorities last May after illegally slipping into the country from Mexico, would stay in custody.

Venezuela, which has strained relations with the US under leftist President Hugo Chavez, rejected this an attempt to avoid its request for extradition of Posada, a naturalised Venezuelan and former CIA operative. Both Venezuela and Cuba charge Posada masterminded the attack on a Cuban airliner as it took off from Barbados and view him as a terrorist. The two countries are ideological allies and accuse the United States of using double standards in its treatment of Posada, given its "war on terrorism".

"We again call on the White House to honour its international treaty obligations and either extradite or prosecute Luis Posada Carriles for 73 counts of first degree murder," the Venezuelan embassy in Washington said in a statement on Wednesday. A US judge ruled in September that Posada could face torture in Cuba or Venezuela and should not be deported to those countries. The case has tested already tense relations between the United States and Venezuela, the world's fifth largest oil exporter and a top supplier to the US market. Posada is being held in El Paso, Texas. Immigration authorities said in a statement that Wednesday's ruling followed a routine review, and held out the possibility that he could eventually be deported to a third country, not Cuba or Venezuela.

Posada denies involvement in the Barbados bombing, but admits working against Cuban President Fidel Castro. Recently declassified US documents show that Posada worked for the CIA at least from 1965 until
June 1976. A former CIA collaborator, he escaped from Venezuelan prison in 1985 awaiting retrial for the bombing. A military court initially acquitted him in the 1980s. In 1985 he turned up in El Salvador where he helped the US government ferry supplies to Contra rebels in Nicaragua. He is accused of taking part in numerous plots to kill Fidel Castro, including one to assassinate the Cuban leader during an Ibero-American summit in Panama in 2000. He was jailed for eight years in Panama but was pardoned last year and appeared to be laying low until reports began circulating that he had entered the United States.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200603/s1599676.htm

We can't get Bush or Congress to follow the simplest, oldest laws on our books; how can we expect him to honor a treaty?

ruled in September that Posada could face torture in Cuba and Venezuela...".

WHERE does Posada stand more of a chance of being tortured for what he knows? Which country has defied all morality, as well as national and international and military law, to place thousands of prisoners in a special, unprotected category called "enemy combatant," invented whole cloth by the "president" of the Bush junta, and who has held them in prison for years without charges, and who has then freely tortured whomever it wishes to torture with no accountability, and who has whisked anonymous prisoners off in "black flights" to torture dungeons in middle Europe and points east, and has furthermore slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has furthermore announced its intention to continue committing the felony of domestic spying in the U.S., and has furthermore deliberately outed an entire CIA counter-proliferation agency, putting all of its covert agents and contacts at risk of death, at a time when US and world security depends on good counter-proliferation efforts, and has lied its way into a war for oil, and has looted the American people blind, and has destroyed the US election system?

Which country did all of these things? Cuba? Venezuela?

Which country is the rogue state, notorious around the world for unjust war and torture?

Where is Posada safer from torture? Where is justice in his case more likely to be done? What does he know about US death squads in Latin America, and will he live to ever tell what he knows--should he be inclined to--if he remains in prison in Texas?

The truth of the matter is that the Bush junta are the terrorists and are PROTECTING terrorists, and are using their usurped power to cover up their own heinous crimes and to destroy any opposition to their greedy, murderous, illegitimate government.

There is NO evidence--none!--of torture in Cuba or Venezuela, while evidence of torture by the Bush junta abounds. So the judge's ruling is ridiculous. Those governments--Cuba and Venezuela--are motivated by something that is almost foreign to our ears--the good of the people--and are part of a profound leftist revolution that has swept Latin America over the last several years, with leftist governments elected, often by big majorities, in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Venezuela and Bolivia--virtually the entire map of South America--with Peru and Mexico likely to be next.

These governments have a common theme--anti-imperialism, anti-US domination and self-determination. In Chile, they just elected socialist Michele Batchelet as president--who was tortured by the US-backed dictator Pinochet, a dictator who came to power after operatives like Posada--under orders from Nixon/Kissinger--destroyed the government of Chile's elected president, Salvador Allende, and either assassinated him, or, at the very least, brought about his suicide (on, of all days, September 11--in 1973). It took Chile 33 years to recover from this massive and dreadful US interference in Chilean affairs--a history that reverberates, and is repeated, throughout Latin America, from the 1960s to as recently as 2002 and the US-backed/Bush-junta coup attempt against another democratically elected South American president, Hugo Chavez.

The Posadas of this world, and the Bushites who fund and protect them, are the enemies of democracy. It is THEY who torture. It is THEY who murder innocent people and assassinate the peoples' chosen leaders. It is THEY who create disruption and chaos, and fund unnecessary strikes and other efforts to destabilize representative government. Because their power is illegitimate, and they must operate underhandedly, with secret funds and stolen elections. And it is no surprise--albeit a shame and a disgrace--that the Bush junta is protecting this death squad operative. The members of this junta are, of course, even bigger criminals than Posada. All should be on trial for their crimes. And the punishment for the members of the Bush junta, in my opinion, should be lifelong community service, in poverty--with all their assets seized and contributed to the common good of all the people they have harmed.

A response to this paragraph:

"There is NO evidence--none!--of torture in Cuba or Venezuela, while evidence of torture by the Bush junta abounds. So the judge's ruling is ridiculous. Those governments--Cuba and Venezuela--are motivated by something that is almost foreign to our ears--the good of the people--and are part of a profound leftist revolution that has swept Latin America over the last several years, with leftist governments elected, often by big majorities, in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Venezuela and Bolivia--virtually the entire map of South America--with Peru and Mexico likely to be next. "

Reports by Amnesty International on Human Rights violations in Venezuela:
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news/press/15354.shtml
http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/venezuela/document.do?id=F075A829FDC8DDCF80256E8C004200F9
http://web.amnesty.org/report2003/ven-summary-eng

In Spanish: number of documented reports of torture received by the Defensoría del Pueblo in Venezuela:
http://www.defensoria.gov.ve/detalle.asp?sec=140505&id=987&plantilla=8

"Venezuela: Torture and brutal repression by the army". Includes images.
http://www.vcrisis.com/index.php?content=letters/200403042045

An article on torture in Venezuela.
http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=14835

The US isn't half as bloody as most of the world's societies; when cases such as those arise because of US actions, it tends to hurt more because of the US's ideological and economic position. That's how I see it.

...for the CIA at least from 1965 until June 1976."

and that is really all ya need to know.

r in Texas, may be transferred to Miami to testify at a trial there, the Miami Herald reported. His testimony was sought by lawyers for Santiago Alvarez and Osvaldo Mitat, two friends of his who were arrested on federal weapons charges ..."

Detained Cuban militant still in custody
http://www.newkerala.com/news2.php?action=fullnews&id=30736

HE. BLEW. UP. A. PASSENGER. PLANE!!!!!