Untitled Document

The May 8, 2007 decision of a Texas court to summarily drop all outstanding charges against Luis Posada Carriles for various immigration violations is but the latest indignity in this pitiful charade of justice.

There is a mountain of evidence proving that Posada Carriles has committed the following crimes, among many others:

· he was the chief organizer of the 1976 bombing of an Air Cubana flight which killed 73 crew and passengers;

· he served as the CIA’s front man responsible for running guns to the Nicaraguan Contras during the 1980s counter-revolutionary war which killed thousands of innocent civilians;
· he was the architect of the 1997 hotel bombings in Havana which killed Montreal resident Fabio Di Celmo; and
· he was a co-conspirator in plotting the failed assassination attempt of President Fidel Castro Ruiz in Panama in 2000.

And yet despite extensive evidence pointing to his guilt, the U.S. government refused to pursue charges against Posada for international terrorism; nor would it agree to extradite him to Venezuela to face trial for his crimes. Instead, Washington chose to protect Posada while giving a semblance of judicial action against him.

The fact that this monster is openly shielded from prosecution by the U.S. government and is now ‘free’ to continue his terrorist activities with his gang of thugs in Miami is a shameless affront to all humanity.

This sordid affair, taken together with the conviction and imprisonment of the “Cuban Five” – the five Cuban heroes whose only “crime” was to monitor and report the conspiratorial plans of anti-Cuban terrorist groups operating in Southern Florida in order to prevent future attacks on the Cuban people – pulls away the thin veil of lies behind Washington’s so-called “war on terror”.

It is not simply a question of inconsistency in applying its anti-terrorism policy, or even a matter of crass hypocrisy on the part of the Bush Administration. The Posada affair proves that the entire “war on terror” is a sham, a public-relations pretext to justify the aggressive pursuit of U.S. imperialism’s self-serving interests at home and around the world.

The Canadian people also have every right to be incensed by the complete silence of the Harper government on this fiasco, given the likely guilt of Posada in the murder of Canadian resident Di Celmo in 1997. This silence, while Ottawa persecutes Canadian residents of suspected ‘terrorist activities’ on the basis of far less evidence (or none whatsoever), is surely another sign of the Harper government s’ snivelling subservience to, and collusion with, the Bush Whitehouse.

The Communist Party joins with the Cuban people and millions of democratic voices around the world in demanding that Posada Carriles be brought to justice for his crimes, and in calling for freedom for the imprisoned Cuban Five.