A Terrorist Among Us?

Cuba Protests Possible Release Of Alleged Bomber In U.S. Custody

(CBS) 
The latest irritant protested by Havana is an electronic news ticker, streaming human rights messages and calls for democracy in large red letters across the side of the American Mission virtually every night from 6 p.m. to midnight for the past week. The ticker was activated at exactly 8 a.m. local time, Tuesday just as Castro began to speak.

"How brave the cockroaches are. Little Bush must have sent the order," declared an irate Castro.

Among this morning’s messages in Spanish was a quote from Abraham Lincoln: "No man is sufficiently good to govern others without their consent" and "If it’s a battle of ideas (Castro’s name for the ideological confrontation with the United States), why can’t [people] disagree with their government?"

Castro also accused the Bush Administration of pandering to Miami’s hard-line Cuban exiles with a "macabre transition plan" for a post-Castro Cuba and moves toward violating the bilateral migration accord with the island.

Billboards and posters went up on Monday along the march route comparing Mr. Bush, Posada and Adolf Hitler. One of the billboards read: "They want to free Posada" next to a photo of sobbing people, presumably relatives of the 73 on board the Cuban airliner that exploded in mid-air Oct. 6, 1976 off Barbados. Declassified CIA and FBI documents identify Posada as a former CIA agent and one of the "engineers" of that terrorist bombing.

In 1985 Posada escaped from a Venezuelan prison where he had been jailed awaiting trial for the Cubana incident. He turned up in El Salvador as part of network run by Lt. Col. Oliver North of the Reagan Administration’s National Security Council supplying guns to the Nicaraguan contras.

Although Posada denies involvement in the plane explosion, he told the New York Times in 1998 that he was behind a string of Havana hotel bombings the previous year that injured 11 people and killed an Italian businessman.

In 2000 he was arrested along with three other Cuban exiles in Panama with 33 pounds of C-4 explosives apparently intending to assassinate Castro during a student rally at the University of Panama. The four were pardoned in September 2004 and Posada disappeared. His three co-conspirators traveled to Miami where they were welcomed as heroes.

Last March Posada illegally entered the United States from Mexico. He has been held in an El Paso, Texas immigration detention center since being picked up in Miami last May. Posada, 78, calls himself "a Cold War Warrior" and says he wants to spend the rest of his life with his wife and grown children in Miami.

Peter Kornbluh, at George Washington University’s National Security Archives has spent years getting CIA and FBI documents pertaining to Posada declassified. He sees Posada’s presence in the United States as posing "a direct challenge to the Bush Administration’s terrorism policy." The documents released so far, he says, leave "no doubt that Posada has been one of the world’s most unremitting purveyors of terrorist violence."