Posada lawyer may call Kerry, North

Jun. 07, 2006

In an effort to free Cuban exile militant Luis Posada Carriles from federal detention and help him qualify for U.S. citizenship, his attorney may call on U.S. Sen. John Kerry and Oliver North of Iran-contra fame to testify about Posada's ties to the U.S. government.

Posada's lawyer, Eduardo Soto, said Tuesday that he is considering subpoenaing Kerry and North because their testimony may assure U.S. immigration officials that Posada was working for the U.S. government during the contra war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the mid-1980s.

Soto said Posada, who was once a legal U.S. resident, should receive U.S. citizenship because he served as an active-duty soldier for the U.S. Army in Vietnam, and later as a paid U.S. agent in Nicaragua.

"He was the lead prosecutor in Iran-contra," Soto said of Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who unsuccessfully challenged President Bush for the White House in 2004. "He is a man who has personal knowledge of investigations, reports, testimony, everything that Iran-contra entails."

Kerry spokeswoman April Boyd said she did not have "immediate information" on the senator's knowledge about the contra war.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/14760173.htm


Go for it Posada. Let's open up that Iran/Contra can of worms. Let's air as much dirty laundry as possible to save your old wrinkled ass.

does need to be reopened. The American people were never told how really deeply we were involved in the murders in Central America ( hell South America for that matter). How we would support any roving death squads that chanted the 'death to the communists' mantra. And we didn't give a damn who the killed. Old people, children, school kids/college kids, women, nun, priests. Any and everybody was fair game.

Old senile Ronald Reagan was asked 150 questions during the hearings. He said that he didn't know or 'couldn't remember' 125 times. That epitomizes those hearings. WE NEED NEW ONES.

The more crap in the news about how corrupt/incompetent/evil/unjust this family is, the better...

Funny thing the judge is concerned about other countries that might use torture.
What about Mad king Boy George's signing statement concerning torture?
The bill that was passed and Mad king Boy George signed for the photo op, then added the signing statement that he can ignore the bill because of his narrow minded view of the Constitution.

have him snuffed than to allow him to get on a witness stand. He knows where too many of the bodies are buried! He's also so pompous, so full of himself, nothing would give him greater pleasure than to start relating the tales of how much he has done against suspected leftists all over the world as an agent of the American violent right-wing.

DU'er Say_What shared this file many Democrats would find very interesting:

Hit" Cuban Plane, CIA Document States

Served as Instructor, Informant for Agency for more than a Decade

Other Documents Highlight Creation of Exile Terrorist Umbrella Group;
Subsequent Acts of Terrorism and Violence attributed to Orlando Bosch

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 157


Posted - June 9, 2005

Washington D.C. June 9, 2005 - Luis Posada Carriles spoke of plans to "hit" a Cuban airliner only days before Cubana flight 455 exploded on October 6, 1976, killing all 73 passengers aboard, according to a declassified CIA document from 1976 posted by the National Security Archive today. The unusually detailed intelligence was provided by a source described as "a former Venezuelan government official" who "is usually a reliable reporter," according to the secret report.

Posada, a violent anti-Castro exile, is due to have his first legal hearing on June 13, after entering the United States illegally in March and applying for political asylum from the Bush Administration. After living for almost two months in Miami unmolested by law enforcement officials, he was detained on May 17. Venezuelan authorities say they are planning to formally request his extradition back to Caracas where he escaped in 1985 after being incarcerated for alleged involvement in the bombing of the Cuban airliner.

The CIA document described a $1000-a-plate fundraiser in Caracas held between September 22 and October 5, 1976, to support the activities of Orlando Bosch, the head of CORU, which the FBI has described as "an anti-Castro terrorist umbrella organization." The informant quoted Bosch as making an offer to Venezuelan officials to forgo acts of violence in the United States when President Carlos Andres Perez visited the UN in November, in return for "a substantial cash contribution to organization." Bosch was also overheard stating: "Now that our organization has come out of the Letelier job looking good, we are going to try something else." Several days later, Posada was reported to have stated that "we are going to hit a Cuban airplane" and "Orlando has the details." (Both the Bosch and Posada statements were cited in an October 18th, 1976 report to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger posted by the Archive on May 17th.)

Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, called these documents "part of a trove of intelligence records that provide leads and evidence on major acts of terrorism committed by violent anti-Castro groups." He called on the CIA to fully declassify its voluminous files on Posada "as a concrete contribution to justice for those who have committed acts of terror."

The Archive also posted a declassified CIA summary that provided new details of Agency ties to Posada and Bosch in the 1960s and 70s. The CIA "traces" noted that Posada "was recruited by the Agency to serve as a Maritime Training Branch instructor" in early 1965 and also was "used as a source of information on Cuban exile activities." The CIA continued to maintain relations with Posada after he became a high ranking official in the Venezuelan secret police, DISIP, between 1967 and 1974, although the nature of Posada's work for the Agency during that time remains censored in the document. The CIA also admitted that it had multiple contacts with Orlando Bosch in 1962 and 1963.
(snip/...)

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB157/index.htm

and usually gets a front row seat anytime a Bush comes to town.

Posoda's problem is his own mouth. Otherwise, he'd be knocking back cafe con leches with his CANF pals in Little Havana.

an "unknown assailant" shot him in the mouth in Guatemala, and he suffered a devastated jaw.

Lost History: The CIA's Fugitive Terrorist

By Robert Parry

WASHINGTON -- On Feb. 7, 1992, at 9 a.m., in Room 426 of the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, two FBI agents sat down with a fugitive terrorist. For 6 1/2 hours, the agents debriefed the man who spoke with a faint slurping sound, the result of a bullet that had struck his face and nearly sliced off his tongue.

The fugitive, then in his early 60s, labored through his story, including his usual denial that he had committed the mass murder of scores of civilians. But the agents were not interested in that long-ago act of terror. They wanted to know instead about the man's secret work for Ronald Reagan's White House.
(snip)

Then, in October 1986, when one of North's supply planes was shot down and the operation was exposed, Posada's last job was to clear the safe houses of incriminating evidence. One federal drug enforcement officer, Celerino Castillo, later told the FBI that shortly after the houses had been cleaned out, Salvadoran drug agents raided them searching for evidence of contra narcotics smuggling.

After the FBI interview ended on Feb. 7, 1992, Posada walked out of the U.S. Embassy to freedom. The 31-page summary of his interview was stamped "secret" and filed away in the records of the Iran-contra investigation conducted by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh who brought no charges based on Posada's information. A partially censored version of Posada's debriefing was recently obtained by The Consortium from the National Archives.

In some ways, the 1992 FBI interview was just one more strange chapter in Posada's long career as a shadow soldier in the Cold War. But the bizarre situation, in which an accused international terrorist could freely enter and leave a U.S. embassy, also spoke volumes about Washington's ambivalence over criminal activities by former CIA operatives. Many of these warriors have enjoyed virtual licenses to kill or to commit other crimes with what some police agencies call "get-out-of-jail-free cards."

Like hundreds of other young Cubans, Posada enlisted in the CIA's Cold War adventures in 1960, after fleeing Castro's communist revolution. Posada received paramilitary training for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, but his battalion stayed behind in reserve in Nicaragua, as Castro's forces overwhelmed the exile invasion force on the beach.

International Warfare
But Posada's war was only beginning. Back on the CIA payroll in the mid-1960s, he slipped arms into Cuba for possible future insurrections. He worked with anti-Castro extremist Orlando Bosch in sabotage attacks against Cuban targets, from ships to embassies. "There was a time when I thought this was the way to liberate Cuba," Posada told The Miami Herald. "Attack everything that served Fidel. Make him lose an embassy here, a consulate there."
(snip/...)

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/lost13.html