National Committee to Free the Cuban Five

Well-known investigator exposes alliance between McCain and terrorists

• The Posada file handled at the "highest level" in the Justice Department, attorney reveals to Ann Louise Bardach • Another source tells her that the New York grand jury investigation has been paralyzed to protect the Republican campaign

by Jean-Guy Allard
Oct. 21, 2008
Reprinted from Granma Internacional

Ann Louise Bardach, the U.S. reporter famous for her interviews with Luis Posada Carriles and her investigations into Cuban-American terrorism, has written an extensive article for the website www.slate.com [read the article here] on the close ties between Republican presidential candidate John McCain and notorious terrorists in Miami, Florida.

Bardach emphasizes that the McCain campaign has "its own questionable connections to terrorists."

"McCain has allied his campaign with the Cuban Liberty Council, an uncompromising anti-Castro group that has all but dictated policy to George W. Bush," Bardach writes. "Two of the council's most prominent members, media personality Ninoska Perez-Castellon and her husband, Roberto Martin Perez, have been among McCain's most dedicated campaigners and champions in Miami."

"As a result, McCain's campaign and advisers find themselves allied with and/or supporting militants who have committed acts that any reasonable observer would define as terrorism," says the well-known investigator.

Bardach notes that in his book The Ways of the Warrior, international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles thanks the two current members of the Cuban Liberty Council for their help. She confirms how "hundreds of pages" of declassified FBI, CIA and State Department documents "leave no doubt" that U.S. authorities agree with intelligence services in "Venezuela, Trinidad and Cuba" that Posada and Orlando Bosch planned the mid-flight destruction of a Cubana airliner in 1976.

"OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE" FROM THE STATE HANDED OVER IN 2007

Bardach, whose testimony in the Posada case before the New York grand jury prosecutors unsuccessfully tried to restrict, also reveals that an attorney for the terrorist’s accomplices told her that the investigation is now paralyzed in order to protect the Republican campaign.

These campaign individuals were advised by the FBI that they would be called on to appear in 2007. "Now they say that they are convinced that nothing will happen because of the elections and the damage that could be done to the ‘ticket’ of McCain, the Diaz-Balarts and (Ileana) Ros-Lehtinen."

According to the journalist, Posada received guarantees before entering U.S. territory.

Posada supporters told her that he had been discreetly reassured by various exile leaders in Miami that he would be allowed to live freely in the United States, like Orlando Bosch, Bardach writes.

After the international scandal over his release, a grand jury was convened in January 2007 in Newark, New Jersey to hear evidence against Posada and about the attacks in Havana, she says, noting how FBI investigators testified that Posada had smuggled explosives into Cuba in "shampoo bottles and shoes."

Dozens of witnesses have testified before the grand jury over 30 months. On September 19 and 20 of 2007, two witnesses called to give state evidence offered overwhelming proof implicating Posada and his accomplices, she says.

The Posada file is being handled "at the highest level" of the Justice Department, a defender of the old CIA agent confirmed to Bardach.

LIEBERMAN MEETS WITH AROCENA’s WIFE

Bardach reveals how on July 20, while supporting the McCain campaign in Miami, Senator Joe Lieberman (then a vice presidential hopeful) met with the wife of imprisoned terrorist Eduardo Arocena, former leader of the Omega 7 organization, and assured her that he would try to get a presidential pardon for her husband.

Arocena is a terrorist capo who spread death in U.S. territory from 1975 to 1983. At the time, his group was described by the FBI itself as the most dangerous terrorist organization on the continent.

The investigator explains that in choosing Congressman Lincoln Díaz-Balart to be his top advisor on Latin America, McCain was putting his trust in a man who, together with his colleague Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, has secured the release of two other terrorists, Jose Dionisio "Bloodbath" Suarez Esquivel and Virgilio Paz Romero, both convicted of the 1976 killing of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his colleague Ronni Moffitt in Washington.

Bardach goes on to reveal that Valentín Hernández, sentenced to life in prison for having murdered Luciano Nieves, a Cuban immigrant who supported normalization of relations with Cuba, is now free in Miami thanks to pressure brought by Díaz-Balart.

Nieves was surprised by Hernández and an accomplice on February 21, 1975, as he left the Variety Children’s Hospital in Miami, where he had gone to visit his sick 11-year-old. From his room, the boy could hear the gunshots.

On May 2, 2005, there was a fundraising gala for Luis Posada at the Big Five Club. Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ros-Lehtinen were guests, the reporter writes.

Months earlier, a "relaxed and conversational" Posada attended another event for a notorious counterrevolutionary. A short distance away from him, in the midst of the clinking of glasses, were congress members Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ros-Lehtinen, she continues.

What is most probable is that if the McCain-Palin ticket wins in November, the proceedings against Posada will be thrown out, the experienced journalist says.

Ann Louise Bardach is the author of Cuba Confidential (Vintage). She directs the Media Project at the University of California in Santa Barbara and regularly collaborates with well-known U.S. publications.

She did her famous interview of Luis Posada Carriles for The New York Times, in which the murderer confesses that his activities are financed by the Cuban American National Foundation.

In 2006, she revealed how Posada’s file with the Miami FBI was suddenly put through the paper shredder "in 2003."