The AP is reporting: “Luis Posada Carriles’ Cold War past has made for an uncomfortable present. The Cuban exile accused of planning the deadly bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1976 was set to make an appearance before an immigration judge Monday on charges that he entered the United States illegally earlier this year. His case has sparked an international battle, with several Latin American and Caribbean governments demanding his deportation and retrial as a terrorist in Venezuela.”

The following are available for interviews:

WAYNE SMITH
Available for a limited number of interviews, Smith is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. He said today: “We should treat everyone who is accused of terrorist activity in a similar way. Posada is a naturalized Venezuelan citizen, that country has asked for his extradition, there is evidence he is guilty and we have an extradition treaty with them. We should do the normal thing and extradite him.” Smith is a long-time expert on Latin American affairs and was chief of the U.S. Interest Section in Cuba from 1979 to 1982.
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GREGORY WILPERT
Wilpert is an editor of Venezuelanalysis.com. He is a sociologist and former Fulbright scholar currently in Venezuela. He said today: “Venezuela’s Embassy in the U.S. submitted additional materials Friday that document Venezuela’s reasons for requesting the arrest and extradition of Cuban-Venezuelan terrorist Luis Posada Carriles. The U.S. had turned down the initial request for Posada’s arrest, submitted last May 13th, saying that it had received insufficient documentation. According to the embassy’s communiquee, ‘The documents presented include ample evidence of probable cause that Luis Clemente Posada Carriles is responsible for the explosion aboard the plane on October 6, 1976.’

“According to the embassy statement, ‘the government of Venezuela reiterates to the government of the United States its duty to honor agreements established in the Extradition Treaty in place between the two countries.’

“The Washington-based National Security Archive, a non-profit organization dedicated to researching U.S. intervention in other countries, presented declassified CIA documents yesterday that quote Posada as saying, ‘We are going to hit a Cuban airplane,’ shortly before the bombing took place in 1976.”
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ROBERT PARRY
Parry is editor of ConsortiumNews.com. In a recent article titled “Bush, Posada & Terrorism Hypocrisy,” he wrote: “If Posada were a suspected Islamic terrorist — not a CIA-trained right-wing Cuban exile ­- there’s no question that the Bush administration would be showing zero tolerance for his presence inside the United States….

“All legal niceties would be swept aside. The Bush administration -­ and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s state police -­ would be leaving no stone unturned in searching for the fugitive. There would be a manhunt with every known associate hauled in for questioning while the national news would be giving the story around-the-clock coverage.

“Indeed, there’s a good chance that if a lawyer for, say, an al-Qaeda terrorist had publicly announced that his client was hiding in the United States — as Posada’s lawyer Eduardo Soto did last month — the lawyer himself would be detained and put under intense pressure to give up his client’s whereabouts.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167