Megrahi Case Moves Obama to Extradite Long-Wanted Terrorist to Venezuela for Prosecution

WASHINGTON (MNS) In a dramatic announcement made yesterday shortly after the President’s arrival on Martha’s Vineyard, the Administration declared its intention to hand over Luis Posada Carriles, the widely acknowledged mastermind of the bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455 that killed 73 people in 1976, to the Venezuelan government for prosecution. According to White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, Obama’s change of heart on the long-requested extradition of Posada (he was a citizen of Venezuela when he allegedly planned the crime) came after watching Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the convicted planner of the Pan-Am Lockerbie bombing of 1988, return home to a hero’s welcome in Libya.

“The President was sickened to see this man who bears responsibility for ending the lives of hundreds of completely innocent people, and forever altering those of the many thousands that loved them, walk free. Feeling their pain made him acutely aware of just how unfair it was to continue to let Mr. Posada, who in addition to the Cubana bombing has been implicated in numerous assassinations and as many as 41 other terrorist bombings throughout the Caribbean and Central America, to get up each day in Miami and sip his morning coffee in complete freedom”

Since the “declaration” of the “War on Terror” in late 2001, the avowed goal of the US government has been to prosecute terrorists wherever they might be in the world. As President George W. Bush put it in a speech before a joint session of congress on September 20th of that year. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

Apparently, however, there was a large loophole in this policy for Posada and the many others like him assigned to use terrorist tactics on behalf of the US government, or organizations which have the backing of key elements of what is often termed the “US intelligence community”.

A brief examination of Mr. Posada’s career demonstrates just how large this loophole is. In addition, to his role in planning Cubana bombing in 1976, Posada worked for the Reagan White House in the Contra War, supplying US backed irregulars and the armies of the Salvadoran and Honduran dictatorships with the arms they used to kill thousands of innocent civilians in those two countries and Nicaragua in the late 80s. In the late 1990s, Posada directed a series of terrorist bombing in Cuba designed to cripple the growth of that nation’s burgeoning tourist industry, attacks he took full credit for in a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times.

And yet, despite his public admission of guilt in this and numerous other cases of terrorism, Posada remains a free man within the US. He has done so, moreover, despite having been caught entering the country illegally (under an assumed name) sometime prior to 2005. At a time when the judges regularly deport Muslim immigrants to the country for the slightest procedural infractions, Mr. Posada was freed on bail by an immigration judge in Texas and allowed to return to Florida in a under a regime of house arrest in April of 2007. A month later, Miami US District Judge Kathleen Cardone miraculously dismissed all of the seven immigration charges against Posada. Though a grand jury in El Paso, Texas has recently issued a new set of indictments against Posada in relationship to the Cuban bombings and his entry into the US on a fraudulent passport, Posada remained a free man until President Obama’s stunning announcement yesterday.

Gibbs concluded his announcement with the following remarks. “In the wake of September 11th, it was frequently asked “Why do they hate us?’. Many concluded that it was because they are jealous of our freedoms. We now know, however, that it is really because of the way we selectively condemn in others the types of murderous activities that we regularly license ourselves and our close allies to carry out with impunity. We believe that the extradition of Mr. Posada will be seen as a valuable first step in closing our enormous credibility gap around the issue of terror.”