Yes America has backed terrorists over the decades to do some dirty work. Luis Posada Carriles is one of them. Carriles was found guilty for planning the bombing of a Cuban passenger plane. But he was also engaged in other terrorists activities on behalf of his American handlers. Posada who escaped from jail in Venezuela was given refuge after a bit of posing & going through the motions of a trial in the United States by the Bush administration .
Anyway here is an article by Amy Goodman about Posada Carriles and his terrorist activities:
U.S. Frees International Terrorist April24,2007 by Amy Goodman at TruthDig
A terrorist lives in Miami. He is not in hiding, or part of some sleeper cell. He’s an escaped convict, wanted internationally for blowing up a jetliner. His name is Luis Posada Carriles. As the nation was focused on the Virginia Tech shooting, the Bush administration quietly allowed Posada’s release from a federal immigration detention center.
It was Oct. 6, 1976, a clear day in the Caribbean. Cubana Airlines Flight 455 departed from Barbados, bound for Cuba. Posada then ran a private investigative firm in Venezuela. Two of his employees left C-4 plastic explosive on board, disguised as a tube of toothpaste. Shortly after takeoff, the bomb exploded and the plane went down. All 73 people on board were killed.
Among them were six young Guyanese students on their way to Cuba to study medicine. Now an American citizen, Roseanne Nenninger, sister of Raymond Persaud, one of those students, was 11 years old when her brother was killed: “We had a huge farewell party for our brother and everyone came, the family members, everyone from the local community, all his friends, school friends, so it was a great day for all of us. And the next day, we all went to the airport. He was dressed in his brown suit that was made by a tailor especially for him getting on a plane. It was his first time on an airplane. We watched him walk on the tarmac and head onto the airplane. And it was a great moment for all of us.”
Within hours, he was dead. He was just one of the victims, one of 73. There was also the entire Cuban Olympic fencing team, young athletes. Each with a name, each with a story. The Cubana Airlines bombing remains to this day the only midair bombing of a civilian airliner in the Western Hemisphere. Posada was tried and convicted in Venezuela of organizing the bombing. He was imprisoned, then escaped in 1985.
Posada , who will be 80 next year, is a Cuban-born Venezuelan national. He has been a violent opponent of Fidel Castro since the early 1960s. Declassified CIA and FBI documents reveal the extent of Posada’s violent career. Through the decades he hopscotched around Latin America, smuggling arms, running drugs, plotting coups, working with Augusto Pinochet’s dreaded secret police, assisting with Oliver North’s illegal Contra war against Nicaragua—the list goes on. He was a paid CIA “asset,” and also served in the U.S. Army, rising to the rank of second lieutenant, at Fort Benning, Ga. He has been implicated in the bombing of hotels in Havana. He was caught and convicted of attempting to assassinate Castro in Panama.
Thanks to the Federation of American Scientists’ Government Secrecy Project and the private, nonprofit National Security Archive at George Washington University, the public can read for itself the declassified documents. These documents show what it means for U.S. intelligence agencies to work with “unsavory” characters. Endeavors like the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba of 1961 and the failed Iran-Contra program need operatives, and so the U.S. government hires violent criminals and overlooks their conduct, as long as the policy objectives are being pursued.
And so it is ironic that on the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, April 19, following the mass slaughter on the Virginia Tech campus, the U.S. government quietly released this convicted terrorist and mass murderer.
We learn the names of the Virginia Tech victims, their accomplishments and their aspirations. Naming the victims, hearing their stories, dignifies their lives, helps us comprehend the magnitude of the loss. So too should we learn about the 73 innocent civilians killed on Cubana Airlines Flight 455.
Venezuela wants Posada extradited. The U.S. has refused. Washington, D.C.-based attorney Jose Pertierra is representing Venezuela in this case. He says international law is clear: “The law says you extradite or prosecute, but you don’t free him into the streets of Miami.”
The Bush administration, and disgraced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, should designate Luis Posada Carriles the terrorist that he is. Justice, and the memory of his many victims, demands it.
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As Amy Goodman points out we should be as outraged at the deaths of the civilians on board the plane which Posada Carriles and his co-conspirators murdered as we would by any other senseless brutal terrorist attack on civilians anywhere.
And as Ivan Eland argues in this article at Media With Conscience that often the definition of " Terrorism " is one which precludes the actions of the government or other agencies to which the definer is a part of. In other words when my government or group attacks civilians it is justified in doing so. When others target civilians to " terrorize " them they are committing a crime and are acting unethically and immorally.
Reverend Wright Is Not Totally Wrong/ May 10, 2008
Not all terrorism experts agree on the definition of terrorism, mostly because, as Rev. Wright argues, it might incriminate the U.S. government. Another trick among such experts to exclude U.S. government actions is to use the term “terrorism” to apply only to attacks by small, non-governmental groups, rather than the much more potent terrorist attacks by governments. That ploy is a curious twisting of the term “terror,” because the term originated during the French Revolution to describe the slaughter of the revolutionary French government. Over the centuries, governments have had many more resources than the relatively poor rag-tag groups and thus have slaughtered on a much grander scale. Finally, groups, like governments, sometimes perpetrate terrorist attacks and sometimes commit non-terrorist attacks.So as the saying goes one country's Freedom Fighters are another country's terrorist. The Contras fighting against the Sandinista in Nicaragua were freedom fighters according to Ronald Regan . But in fact they were terrorist out to undermine and destroy the regime in power in Nicaragua by terrorizing the civilian population.
A good analytical working definition of terrorism is the purposeful targeting of civilians in the adversary’s country to get them to put pressure on their government to change policy. After all, if a group or government is targeting an adversary’s government or military, we probably should call this a “war,” not terrorist strikes. Of course, the term “terrorism” is never neutral and always politically charged. Although it may be politically incorrect to say so, by the aforementioned analytical definition, only two-thirds of the successful attacks on 9/11 could be properly labeled as terrorist attacks. Since the goal of al Qaeda was to kill civilians in the two world trade towers, these attacks could rightly be labeled terrorism. The third attack was aimed at the Pentagon, the national command center of the U.S. military. Since Osama bin Laden had declared war on the United States, this attack might be described as a diabolical surprise attack, but not terrorism per se. Similarly, any attacks—whether against Israeli military or civilian targets—by Hamas and Hezbollah, groups that do not recognize Israel’s right to exist, are incorrectly bundled together by the U.S. government and media as terrorist strikes.
By the prior analytical criterion, is Rev. Wright’s accusation correct that the U.S. government (notice I did not use the words “we” or “America” here) has committed terrorist attacks? Rev. Wright mentioned the attacking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs at the end of World War II. (One might also add the conventional fire-bombings of German and Japanese cities.) The primary goal of these attacks was to purposefully attack the adversary’s civilian population in order to damage morale and motivate the enemy’s citizens to pressure their government to sue for peace. Proponents of such bombing will say that the enemy was nefarious, and in the case of Japan, dropping the atomic bombs obviated the need for a U.S. invasion, thus saving the lives of many U.S. military personnel. Nevertheless, by the analytical definition, these attacks were terrorist strikes that were questionable when the war had already been won, when the United States knew that the Japanese had made overtures to surrender, and when exchanging the lives of civilians to save military combatants was morally dubious. Furthermore, because Japan is an island, instead of an invasion, the United States simply could have blockaded the Japanese into surrender—which would have been much more humane, especially if emergency food and medical supplies were allowed to transit the quarantine.
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In El Salvador in the 1980s American backed death-squads managed to destroy all dissent within El Salvador in order to keep a brutal American backed Regime in power. If that meant murdering Archbishop Romero and a few priests and nuns and a host of teachers, professors, social workers , journalists and other unarmed civilians then that's the dirty work of which US authorities approved. So the murder of thousands of civilians was justified in order to prevent any move on the part of the people of El Salvador towards the left. Democratic ideals and such never really entered into America's or the CIA's calculations in regard to these supposedly sovereign nations such as El Salvador , Nicaragua, Chile, Honduras, the Dominican Republic or Cuba etc.
and so it goes,
GORD.
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