5-26-05, 7:45am

What is the difference between blasting a Cubana de Aviacion plane in flight on October 1976 and the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States?

At first sight and without any doubt, they are both despicable terrorist attacks that are worthy of world condemnation and all the weight of justice on its authors.

The US-manufactured Cubana airplane carried 73 passengers including Cubans, Guyanese and Korean citizens, among whom was the Cuban fencing team returning home with the gold medal won at a tournament in Caracas.

“Stick to the water, Felo” is a phrase which millions of Cubans keep in their memory. These words come from the sound track of what happened in the cabin of the DC-8, after the blasts that made the plane fall off the coast of Barbados.

Twenty-five years later, four commercial planes, also manufactured in the US, were hijacked and turned into lethal weapons which took the lives of about three thousand persons in the New York Twin Towers, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania.

The attack on the Cubana flight was silenced by Washington. Its authors, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles were trained and recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in its purpose of eliminating the island’s revolutionary process.

The CIA instructed them in the use of explosives and preparation of attacks later on executed against Cuba and third countries, including the own US territory.

Plane hijackings did not start in September 2001. They had been previously practiced against the greater of the Antilles. The pirates were welcomed as heroes in the United States, which gave them the residence in that country since early 1959.

If US citizens reacted with horror to the sight of planes crashing into the Twin Towers, in Cuba bombings ordered by the CIA against airports on the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion, caused death and outrage.

Then they used painted planes with the acronym of the Cuban Revolutionary Air Force. The White House even deceived its ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, who was ridiculously exposed when he denied the facts.

Those B-26 also gunned down rural population in the Cienaga de Zapata (Zapata Swamps), innocent victims of that State terrorism policy.

If the Twin Towers attack took the lives of around three thousand persons, the figure is about equal to the human losses suffered by the Cuban people during the criminal attacks launched on Cuba from the great Northern power. As to the difference between both actions, the US launched its alleged antiterrorist global crusade to answer the 2001 attacks, including the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq.

Before a West Point audience, President George W. Bush proclaimed the preemptive strike doctrine threatening “60 or more dark places in the planet.”

Since then, the President has spent billions of dollars in domestic control measures, among which is the biometric test of those entering the country.

While a manhunt is allegedly on in Afghanistan and Iraq after Bin Laden, the real White House policy on terrorism, its double-standard, is exposed by the presence on US territory of Luis Posada Carriles.

The most notorious terrorist of the western hemisphere, as president Fidel Castro has described this criminal, has asked his godfathers for political asylum, a sort of reward for his criminal career.

His buddy Orlando Bosch had received refuge from the George Bush father’s administration, in spite of having been described then by the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the Justice Department as one of the most dangerous terrorists.

There is confusion among officials of the Republican administration in the face of reiterated accusations from Havana about the entrance of Posada Carriles to US territory, fact confirmed by the attorney handling his asylum petition.

The New York Times says the definition of terrorism by the Bush administration has been put to the test. The daily points to three variants: giving asylum, detaining the criminal or extradite him to Venezuela, whose judicial system made the demand to Washington.

First, there are the commitments to the counterrevolutionary groups of Cuban origin in the south of Florida, who have marked the way for Washington’s policy in regards to Cuba. Also, its double morale toward terrorism has put the US on the crossroads.

The great difference between Osama Bin Laden and Luis Posada Carriles is not that both share terrorism, but that Posada Carriles used it against Cuba.

The bottom line is the end has always justified the means for the US when trying to eliminate the Cuban Revolution is concerned.

From Prensa Latina