4-21-05, 9:02 am

From The Panama News

Certain contradictions in US President George W. Bush's rhetoric about a worldwide War on Terror have come to the fore again, several months after they were at the center of attention in Panama. One Luis Posada Carriles in in the United States applying for legal residence there, and the Bush administration has little to say about it.

Recall that late last August, outgoing President Mireya Moscoso issued a list of pardons (one of which was for this reporter, but that's another story) that included four anti-Castro Cuban activists who were serving prison terms here. One of the men --- their leader, in fact --- was Posada Carriles.

The men had been convicted for endangering public safety, in connection with a plot to set off enough plastic explosives to level two city blocks when Fidel Castro spoke at the University of Panama's main auditorium during a November 2000 Ibero-American summit. The auditorium is about half a block from Seguro Social's Arnulfo Arias Hospital Complex, one of the nation's largest health care facilities and the plot elicited a prosecution with both public and private accusers.

Over a years-long process evidence went missing, attorneys for the private accusers showed far more zeal than the public prosecutors and the most serious allegations were dropped on unusual legal grounds, but the men were ultimately convicted of lesser crimes.

All during the legal proceedings, the governments of Cuba and Venezuela had demanded Posada Carriles's extradition. Cuba wanted him for masterminding a string of 1990s hotel bombings that killed a young Italian tourist, and both Venezuela and Cuba wanted him for his role in placing a bomb aboard a civilian airliner, which blew up over the Caribbean Sea in 1976, killing all 73 persons aboard. In fact Posada Carriles had escaped from a Caracas prison where he was incarcerated for that bombing, for which he was subsequently convicted and handed a long prison sentence in absentia.

The pardons were widely criticized here, including with some strong remarks by President Torrijos in his September 1 inaugural address.

In the wee hours of the morning of their pardon, the Cuban exiles were met by then National Police Chief Carlos Barés and escorted to the airport, where two chartered planes met them. His three accomplices flew in one of the planes to Florida's Opa Locka airport, where they received a heroes' welcome from supporters and the Bush campaign cemented its support with voters of extreme right persuasion in that state. The other aircraft headed to an unknown destination in Central America, said at the time to have been Honduras.

As a reward for the pardons the Bush administration granted Moscoso an exception from its announced policy of denying US visas to corrupt foreign officials, and these days she spends most of her days in Miami. This past January Moscoso was a guest of honor on the US Senate floor for the swearing in of Senator Mel Martinez.

The story of Posada Carriles's entry into the United States first broke in the government-controlled and strictly censored Cuban press. The sources for those initial stories was never specified, but it appears that the information came from Cuban spies within the Miami-based exile movement.

Citing the leftist website Rebelión, Cuba's Communist Party newspaper Granma reported documentary evidence that Moscoso was bribed to issue the pardons. But a visit to that website doesn't turn up those alleged documents, and it would be very much out of the Panamanian style of corruption to leave a paper trail of anything so sleazy.

After the stories in Rebelión and the Cuban press, Posada's lawyers in Miami confirmed that their client had entered the United States from Mexico and would be applying for political asylum and a US green card.

According to a speech by Fidel Castro, Posada came into the United States from the Mexican state of Quintana Roo on a fishing boat owned by a Cuban-American activist.

There are claims by both Posada Carrlies's supporters and detractors that he worked on the CIA payroll and for off-the-books American efforts to aid the Nicaraguan Contras, and that history of collaboration with clandestine US operations is likely to be raised by his lawyers in support of his application to stay in the United States.

Meanwhile both Venezuela and Cuba have petitioned the United States for Posada Carriles's extradition. Neither of these requests has much chance of being granted. In the US courts and on the right wing of American public opinion it is very likely that the anti-Castro activist will win the day.

But things look very different in the court of world opinion. Juan Carlos Cremata, whose father was one of the 73 people killed in the 1976 airliner bombing, bitterly denounced the prospect that a 'terrorist can enjoy impunity and receive protection from the US administration,' and added that 'by harboring Posada [Bush] will lose all credibility.'

If one believes Rebelión and the Cuban press, however, there wasn't much credibility to lose in the first place. They allege that a bribe of  $4 million plus a new Lincoln Town Car was negotiated for Mireya Moscoso by her sister, former first lady Ruby Moscoso de Young, during a 2004 visit to Miami; that the payment was coordinated by a Miami banker and the money was laundered through a bank in Liechtenstein; that the US Embassy here issued Posada Carriles documents, including an altered American passport in the name of Melvin C. Thompson, which allowed him to go underground in Central America; and that prior to these transactions the Moscoso administration had been urged by former US Secretary of State Colin Powell and to let the anti-Castro activists go.

The Bush administration's War on Terror policy has been marked by waning international support, including the steady withdrawal from Iraq of the military contingents of countries that had participated along with the United States and Great Britain in the initial invasion. Bush's standing in Latin America and the Caribbean has been marked by an impasse in talks for a Free Trade Area of the Americas, widespread opposition to the US intervention that deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power in Haiti and a failure to win support for American attempts to depose the government of Venezuela. Although the Posada Carriles affair has received little attention in the United States outside of Miami, it has been a bigger story in this region, where it is generally taken as evidence that the Bush administration's opposition to terrorism is not as resolute as claimed.