National Committee to Free the Cuban Five

Bombing victim's brother applauds Posada indictment

by Alfonso Chardy
Apr. 10, 2009
Reprinted from The Miami Herald

A federal indictment of Luis Posada Carriles linking the Cuban exile militant to Havana tourist site bombings in 1997 shows the U.S. government is finally acting in the case, the brother of an Italian tourist killed by one of the bombs said Thursday.

Livo di Celmo

'My family and I have been waiting 12 years for the U.S. government to officially link Posada Carriles to international terrorism,'' said Livio Di Celmo, brother of Fabio Di Celmo, who was killed in the Copacabana bombing. ``It's about time now that something is being done.''

Livio Di Celmo was one of several people who spoke at a telephone news conference giving a cautious welcome to the indictment handed up by the grand jury in El Paso Wednesday. People who routinely denounced the U.S. government under the Bush administration for allegedly failing to prosecute Posada forcefully suddenly expressed some satisfaction.

Some even left the impression the indictment was made possible by the change in administrations, a perception shared by some Cuban exiles who support Posada.

''It appears to come within the context of a new willingness to listen to Havana,'' said Mario Echevarria, president of Municipalities of Cuba in Exile, which is organizing an April 26 lunch for Posada to raise funds for his defense.

Cuban state media reported on the indictment, conveying the impression the Cuban regime was pleasantly surprised. The government news agency Prensa Latina and the Communist Party newspaper Granma said the indictment signaled a ''surprising shift in strategy'' by federal prosecutors. The Justice Department denied any political overtones.

ADDITIONAL COUNTS

''Indictments are brought only when the facts and the evidence of the particular case permit,'' said Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman. ``This superseding indictment is no exception. Yesterday, the United States sought and obtained a superseding indictment against Mr. Posada that added new counts based in part on additional information the government obtained since the first indictment was returned.''

FBI agents visited Cuba in the fall of 2006 to gather evidence in the bombings, and a federal grand jury in New Jersey had been looking at Posada's alleged fundraising for the bombings among Cuban exiles in Union City.

The superseding indictment did not charge Posada, 81, with planting bombs or plotting the bombings that rocked Havana hotels, discotheques and restaurants. It only accused him of lying in immigration court about his alleged role in the attacks.

The indictment charged Posada with perjury for denying in 2005 ''soliciting others'' to plant the bombs and arranging for a Salvadoran suspect to carry out the bombing that killed Di Celmo.

Posada could not be reached for comment. His Miami attorney, Arturo V. Hernandez, said his client ''obviously cannot be happy'' with the new indictment but has ``faced so many other challenges in his life that this is just one more.''

Hernandez said Posada intends to plead not guilty. An arraignment had been scheduled for April 17 in El Paso, but Hernandez said that won't happen and that motions and pleadings will be filed in court documents. Jury selection is now scheduled to begin Aug. 10.

José Pertierra

José Pertierra, a Washington, D.C., attorney who represents the Venezuelan government, said Caracas viewed the indictment as a ''positive first step on the part of the Obama administration'' in the Posada case. But Pertierra said the United States has to go further and indict Posada for murder in connection with the bombings and comply with the Venezuelan government's renewed demands that Posada be extradited to Caracas to stand trial.

EXTRADITION

He said President Hugo Chávez planned to raise the extradition issue when he attends the fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago. President Obama is scheduled to attend the April 17-19 meeting.

Posada was charged in Caracas in connection with the 1976 bombing of a Cubana de Aviación jetliner off Barbados that killed 73 people.

Posada, who has denied any connection to the plot, was tried and acquitted in a military court in 1980, but the verdict was later annuled and the case refiled in civilian court. Posada escaped from prison in Venezuela before the civilian court acted. After Posada turned up in Miami in March 2005, the Venezuelan government demanded his extradition.

Indictment of Anti-Castro Militant Could Boost U.S.-Latin Ties

by Tim Padgett and Siobhan Morrissey
Apr. 10, 2009
Reprinted from TIME Magazine

There's a piñata of reasons why relations between the U.S. and Latin America deteriorated under George W. Bush. But the most serious was Bush's petulant assumption that the region didn't back his war on terror, especially after most Latin American governments refused to bless his invasion of Iraq. But Latins argue they had a hard time taking the Bush crusade seriously when he himself was harboring a suspected terrorist. That would be Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile, suspected, arrested and once convicted (though later pardoned) in various countries for crimes that included the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner that killed 73 people; the 1997 bombings of two Havana hotels that killed an Italian tourist; and a 2000 plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. After entering the U.S. illegally in 2005, Posada, 81, is today a free man in Miami.

But the Obama Administration, a week before the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad, looks set to reverse Posada's good fortune. Wednesday night, federal prosecutors filed a superseding 11-count indictment against the aging militant in which, for the first time, the U.S. links him to at least the 1997 bombings. It doesn't directly charge Posada with the crime; but it accuses him of lying about his role in it, claiming he perjured himself and obstructed justice in 2005 when, while answering questions from immigration authorities, he denied involvement in the Havana attacks even though he told the New York Times in 1998 that he'd taken part in them. Posada's Miami lawyer, Arturo V. Hernandez, says his client denies the charge. "[His] defense will be a clear and direct one, which is that he told the truth," Hernandez tells TIME. "We share in a common sense of optimism about the truth coming out in the end." (Hernandez won't say why Posada claims he didn't lie to immigration officials; but Posada in the past has suggested that his flawed English led to a misunderstanding in the Times interview.) (See the top 10 news stories of 2008.)

Either way, the official shift in the treatment of Posada will likely enhance the hemisphere's early optimistic mood about President Obama when he lands in Trinidad next week. "This will certainly be construed by Latin America as a positive step," says Daniel Erikson, a senior analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C., and the author of The Cuba Wars. "The region sees the Posada case as one of the worst examples of a U.S. double standard regarding the rule of law, a subject we often lecture Latin America about."

Both Cuba and Venezuela, where Posada had citizenship when the the Cubana Airlines flight blew up in 1976, have demanded Posada's extradition. So far federal judges have declined to send him to either country, where Posada insists he would be tortured. (Cuban President Raul Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez have insisted he wouldn't.) But some analysts believe that if the U.S. were to eventually lock Posada away — a grand jury in New Jersey is also investigating his involvement in the bombings — it might turn down the extradition volume in Havana and Caracas. Though it urged Obama to go further than mere perjury charges against "the hemisphere's most famous terrorist," the Cuban government's official newspaper, Granma, on Thursday called Posada's indictment "a surprising strategic change." (Read "What Ch[a {a}]vez Win Means for Latin American Democracy.")

Posada's is a quintessentially cold war story. As a CIA operative in the 1960s he worked unsuccessfully to overthrow the communist regime of then Cuban leader Fidel Castro (who officially ceded power to his younger brother Raul last year because of failing health). At the time of the 1976 airliner bombing he worked for Venezuela's secret police. Despite abundant evidence against him, a Venezuelan military tribunal acquitted him of the Cubana attack. That verdict was overturned, however; and in 1985, while Posada was being tried in a civilian criminal court, he escaped disguised as a priest. Posada and three other Cuban exiles were convicted in 2000 of conspiring to kill Fidel Castro during a summit in Panama. But four years later, inexplicably, then Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso pardoned the four men. (The Bush Administration denied it had pressured her as a favor to Miami's politically powerful exile community.)

Cuba insists it has ample evidence to try Posada for the 1997 bombings, which killed Italian businessman Fabio di Celmo as he sat in the lobby of the Copacabana Hotel. "My family and I have been waiting 12 years for the U.S. to officially link Posada to international terrorism," di Celmo's brother, Livio di Celmo, told reporters Thursday on a conference call. But the U.S. may have felt emboldened to indict Posada this week for perjury in no small part because the FBI — whose informants have linked Posada to the 1976 airline bombing, and whose agents in 2006 traveled to Havana to conduct their own investigation of the hotel bombings — in turn may have stronger evidence of Posada's participation. One of the issues Posada is accused of lying about is whether he arranged for a Salvadoran man, Raul Cruz Leon, to take explosives to Cuba in 1997. Dennis Jett, an international relations professor at Penn State University and a former U.S. Ambassador to Peru, says the new Posada indictment is "probably just an extension of the judicial process that has been underway for years, rather than a change pf policy."

Still, Obama can add the Posada indictment to the list of fence-mending planks he's taking to Trinidad — most of them involving Cuba, which has shaped up to be the central focus of the summit. Most Latin American leaders consider a change in Washington's Cuba policy — including the 47-year-old trade embargo — to be a sine qua non for improving hemispheric relations in general, the strongest indication that the U.S. is willing to deal with Latin America with the same multilateral, dialogue-based approach that Obama pledged at the G20 Summit this month in London.

Though he has said he'll keep the trade embargo intact until he sees more political reform in Cuba, Obama is expected to lift restrictions on Cuban-American travel and remittances to the island before the Americas summit begins. The U.S. Congress, for its part, appears closer than ever to passing legislation to lift the Cuban travel ban for all U.S. citizens — prominent lawmakers such as Indiana's Republican Senator Richard Lugar now call the embargo a failed policy — a measure Obama would probably sign. At the same time, Fidel and Raul Castro have both in recent days expressed an unusual willingness to talk with the U.S. about improving Washington-Havana relations. The two aging communists even met with a delegation of U.S. congressmen this week and asked what they could do toward that end. One possible answer: if the U.S. does lock up Posada, Cuba could respond in turn by freeing some of the scores of dissidents languishing in its own prisons.