Jean-Guy Allard (granma): "And When Will Miami's Terrorist Nest be Cleared Out?"

Now, ain't that a damn good question!
magbana

"And when will Miami’s terrorist nest be cleared out?

JEAN-GUY ALLARD

• DESPITE being denounced and calls from Venezuela for his extradition, Luis Posada Carriles, the most dangerous terrorist in the hemisphere, is still conspiring to murder with his accomplices without any intervention from the U.S. legal authorities.

Miami continues to have a strong nucleus of right extremists from various Latin American countries, who consider this city and the United States as a sanctuary for their activities, given that hundreds of fugitives, presidents and henchmen of dictatorial regimes have found a safe refuge there over the years.

Since his arrival in the United States and his arrest by officials reluctant to bother him, Luis Posada Carriles has received the treatment of the feared member of the brotherhood of killers whose seal as untouchables dates back more than half a century.

Freed by a judge (an accomplice to the intelligence apparatus) in El Paso after delay tactics orchestrated by corrupt district attorneys from the Bush era, Posada has met – many times publicly – with terrorist elements during the last few months and Latin American newspapers have reported the reactivation of his Central American network.

Once again at liberty, the old conspirator has reconstituted, most notably in El Salvador, the network that he bragged about years ago in his book The Way of the Warrior, the true confession of a psychopath paid by the yanki government. In this pamphlet promoting terror, he confides that "he can count on a private army."

Cuban researcher José Luis Méndez Méndez commented on this subject, "He is a man highly trained in the use of explosives, in the use of arms; in capacity and techniques for killing, disappearing, kidnapping, which is recorded at great length as he narrates how he organized and structured the services he directed, besides bragging about his successes."

ALWAYS SURROUNDED BY KNOWN KILLERS

The height of this self-confessed CIA hit man’s arrogance came when he recently appeared in the Alpha 66 offices surrounded by known terrorists with past police and even FBI files.

In April, Posada Carriles participated in an assembly of known terrorists organized by Angel De Fana Serrano and covered by the press. Serrano took part in the 1997 plot masterminded by Posada to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro during an Ibero-American Summit on Margarita Island, Venezuela.

At the end of February, also at the initiative of Posada and De Fana, Miami terrorists and Cuban American mafiosi met with Venezuelan coup plotters headed by traitorous military officers, without any interference from U.S. authorities.

On the front line of that conspiracy was Patricia Poleo, a fugitive from Venezuelan justice in the case of the assassination of district attorney Danilo Anderson. Qualified as a star agent by the CIA for her actions against Venezuela, which she directed from the United States, the daughter of millionaire editor Rafael Poleo also has links to Cuban terrorists, the Colombian right and her Venezuelan coup-supporting family. She is behind a number of operations against the Bolivarian Revolution from the U.S. embassy in Caracas.

The Venezuelan conspirators participating in that meeting included none other than Army Colonel Gustavo Díaz, Pedro Carmona’s aide-de-camp during the coup against President Chávez in 2002. Also present was the traitor Captain Javier Nieto Quintero of the National Guard, linked to a 2004 case involving Colombian paramilitaries, and Lieutenant José Antonio Colina Pulido, responsible for bomb attacks on Spanish and Colombian diplomatic offices in Caracas in 2003.

To illustrate the level of conspiracy more fully, in January 2008, Cuban-American De Fana was invited to speak to the press at an Miami event organized by Petr "Peter" Kolar, the Czech ambassador, together with Congressman Lincoln Díaz-Balart; Caleb McCarry, at that time head of the Bush Plan for the annexation of Cuba; Orlando Gutiérrez Boronat, millionaire member of the Cuban Democratic Directorate; and Mauricio Claver Carone, director of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC, the Miami lobby group in Washington.

Despite all the denunciations and with the complicity of the press, since his release Posada has been making regular appearances before those nostalgic for the Batista dictatorship. In Miami’s Big Five Club, he shared an exhibition with another killer, José Dionisio "Pool of Blood" Suárez Esquivel, sentenced for the assassination of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and pardoned by George W. Bush a few days before 9-11.

The U.S. magazine Salon also revealed that he took part, with terrorists Pedro Remón and Reinol Rodríguez (two of his most servile killers) in a public Alpha 66 activity in the Miami Havana Restaurant in Westchester. "Pool of Blood," Pedro Remón and Reinol Rodríguez are members of the operatives circle closest to Posada.

TORTURER AND KILLER LOPEZ SISCO IN THE FRONT LINE

From Miami, Posada and his gang of killers have achieved – without interference and with the inertia or help of the authorities – the reactivation of his infernal operations with the complicity of several of his old buddies, all well known to the U.S. intelligence agencies.

According to a number of sources, former Venezuelan Captain Henry López Sisco has also been pointed to as one of Posada’s accomplices in the San Salvador plot. He has just been condemned in Venezuela as responsible for the massacres that occurred in that country in the 1970s and 80s.

Henry López Sisco was chief of operations at the Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services (DISIP) and one of the most repugnant figures in Posada’s circle of friends in Venezuela.

A Secret police torturer and killer under Carlos Andrés Pérez, López Sisco is tied to a long succession of murders, disappearances and abuses unleashed in the 1970s to eliminate groups of young rebels. He headed the meetings between representatives from Carlos Andrés Pérez’ government and the head of Pinochet’s DINA in August of 1975, and organized an attack on the Cuban Embassy on April 12, 2002, during the failed coup against Chávez.

López Sisco belongs to the same Cuban-American network as Francisco Pimentel, an accomplice in the 1997 Havana attacks; Nelis Rojas, a terrorist who took refuge in Miami; and Hermes Rojas, who tortured people with Posada in El Salvador.

Other suspects include Peña Exclusa, the Venezuelan fascist leader who has been in El Salvador for some months as an aide to the presidential campaign of ARENA – the party responsible for the assassination of Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero. Peña has also been designated as a conspirator in the recent assassination attempt on Bolivian President Evo Morales by the gang of neo-Nazis that dominate the city of Santa Cruz.

Another name pointed to in the San Salvador conspiracy is Venezuelan Vice Admiral Molina Tamayo, one of the plotters of the coup that took place on April 11, 2002. He is currently in Central America, along with several other traitors to the Bolivarian Revolution.

ALL THE CONSPIRACIES LEAD TO THE NORTH

In the last few weeks, a number of events reveal renewed activity in terrorist circuits in contact with U.S. intelligence mechanisms.

Among others, Bolivian authorities have identified a phony NGO, the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), based in the New York Empire State Building, as a key player in the conspiracy to assassinate President Evo Morales. The plot was thwarted on April 16 in Santa Cruz.

The HRF is directed by Cuban-American Armando Valladares, who served time in a Cuban prison for placing explosive devices in stores and movie theatres in 1960. He began to work again with the CIA after he left the island.

The Bolivian District Attorney’s Office has identified Hugo Achá Melgar, the representative of HRF in Bolivia, as the financer of the terrorist gang of Hungarian and Croat neo-Nazis.

Hugo Achá and his accomplice Alejandro Melgar are still at large in the United States with the complicity of immigration authorities.

Valladares is an old Cuban-American mafiosi whose ties of friendship with the Bush-Reagan clan are praised by terrorist capos in Miami.

Not only have U.S. anti-terrorist agencies ignored the exposure of those acts, but HRF representatives traveled to Honduras to participate as an accredited NGO at the OAS Summit, in company with other CIA front agencies implicated in interference operations in Latin America, among them Vivanco’s biased Human Rights Watch.

MIAMI FBI: WHO’S GIVING ORDERS TO TOLERATE THIS?

The mafia apparatus in Miami is so well protected that Republican Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen attended a public meeting on April 6, 2008 at which Posada was present, organized by a terrorist association linked to the CIA.

The federal government and the state of Florida spend millions of dollars annually on multiple-crime operations under the leadership of various state "commandos" of specialists in the war on terrorism in the Florida peninsula.

However, this enormous anti-terrorist apparatus has never shown any interest in the Miami gangs launching terrorist campaigns against Cuba and Venezuela.

The Miami FBI is scandalously associated with the impunity awarded to the terrorist network represented by Posada. Luis Posada Carriles’ file was even spirited away from the archives of this agency in 2003, while the international criminal was in prison in Panama.

Months after the administration change in Washington, nothing seems to have changed in the banana republic where the monstrous Orlando Bosch, the pediatrician killer, sleeps peacefully in his bed.

Composed of individuals known for their links with anti-Cuban mechanisms in the U.S. intelligence services, the Posada network is a product of the old mechanism created in Miami over the last few decades – beginning with the gigantic CIA JM-WAVE station – that nobody dares to touch.

More than ever before, Miami continues to be the great continental trash can for all the defeated oligarchies. •
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http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2009/junio/juev11/Miami.html

The coddled "terrorists" of South Florida
Anti-Castro Cuban exiles who have been linked to bombings and assassinations are living free in Miami. Does the U.S. government have a double standard when it comes to terror?
By Tristram Korten and Kirk Nielsen

Editor's note: Research support was provided by the Puffin Foundation Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.


Jan. 14, 2008 | On a hot subtropical Sunday, deep in the humid brush bordering the Everglades west of Miami, Osiel Gonzalez squints down the worn barrel of an AK-47 rifle and squeezes the trigger. With a crack and kick the bullet whizzes over a field of neatly trimmed grass and hits a human silhouette on a paper target 40 yards away.

Gonzalez wipes the sweat off his brow and smiles. Perspiration stains the neck and armpits of his camouflage jacket. All around him are men in fatigues, some flat-bellied on the grass shooting rounds, others cleaning their weapons or picking through ammunition boxes. The air is thick with cigar smoke. At age 71, Gonzalez is still one of the best marksmen at this training camp for Alpha 66, the paramilitary Cuban exile group formed in 1961 "with the intention of making commando type attacks on Cuba," as the organization's Web site baldly puts it. Gonzalez hopes to put his skills to use when the second revolution comes, the one that will tear his homeland free from the grip of communist dictator Fidel Castro. At that point Gonzalez hopes to have a Cuban soldier in his sights, not a paper silhouette.

Plans to attack Cuba are constantly being hatched in South Florida. Over the years militant exiles have been linked to everything from downing airliners to hit-and-run commando raids on the Cuban coast to hotel bombings in Havana. They've killed Cuban diplomats and made numerous attempts on Castro's life.

But, other than an occasional federal gun charge, nothing much seems to happen to most of these would-be revolutionaries. They are allowed to train nearly unimpeded despite making explicit plans to violate the 70-year-old U.S. Neutrality Act and overthrow a sovereign country's government. Though separate anti-terror laws passed in 1994 and 1996 would seem to apply directly to their activities, no one has ever been charged for anti-Cuban terrorism under those laws. And 9/11 seems to have changed nothing. In the past few years in South Florida, a newly created local terrorism task force has investigated Jose Padilla and the hapless Seas of David cult, and juries have delivered mixed reviews, but no terrorism charges have been brought against anti-Castro militants. The federal government has even failed to extradite to other countries militants who are credibly accused of acts of murder. Among the most notorious is Luis Posada Carriles, wanted for bombing a Cuban jet in 1976 and Havana hotels in 1997. It is, perhaps, a testament to the power of South Florida's crucial Cuban-American voting bloc -- and the political allegiances of the current president.

In Greater Miami, home to the majority of the nation's 1.5 million Cuban-Americans, the presence of what could credibly be described as a terrorist training camp has become an accepted norm during the half-century of the anti-Castro Cuban diaspora. Alpha 66 and numerous other paramilitary groups -- Comandos F4, Brigade 2506, Accion Cubana -- are so common they've taken on the benign patina of Rotary Clubs with weapons.

But Alpha 66 members are eager to remind you that even if they are graying and prosperous they are not toothless old tigers. Their Web site boasts that "in recent years" they've sabotaged Cuba's tourist economy by attacking hotels in the beach resort of Caya Coco. At the group's headquarters in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami, the walls are hung with the portraits of dozens of men who have died on Alpha 66 missions.

~snip~
They deny they have anything in common with the militants hiding in the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan. "No, we are not terrorists," says Gonzalez, the second-in-command and a co-founder of the group who, when he is not donning fatigues and shouldering a rifle, is a financial consultant. "We don't want to kill civilians."

"Our goal is to free our country for our children and grandchildren," drawls Al Bacallao, who has already retreated to the porch's shade behind Gonzalez and the shooting range. The 61-year-old Bacallao was raised in Georgia after arriving from Cuba at age 8, and is the rare Cuban exile with a Southern twang. "The United States fought for its liberty, why can't we?"

But Alpha members may have a fluid definition of what a civilian is. Raking the coast with .50-caliber machine-gun fire certainly does not exclude civilian casualties, nor does attacking tourist spots. By his own admission, Bacallao, who joined Alpha 66 23 years ago, has gone on several missions to Cuba. In 1993 U.S. authorities arrested him and a boatload of other men setting out for the island.

"Our plan was to land and make a hit and run -- those are the best actions, you know," recounts Bacallao, as rifle shots punctuate the air. "And we had everything on board; a .50 caliber gun, hand grenades, AK-47s, plastic explosives. We had enough to blow up Florida, Georgia and Alabama!" He lands hard on the "bam" in Alabama. Then he laughs. "But we broke down. The motor started failing and the currents were strong. Eventually we were picked up."

"Let me tell you, we were treated like animals," he says. "And all we were trying to do was liberate our country."

But if he was treated like an animal, he is not in a cage. Federal prosecutors charged him and his companions with illegal weapons possession but a judge dismissed the case against most of the men, and a jury found the rest not guilty. Like other anti-Castro exiles before him, despite violent acts he is free to continue reporting to the training camp, and free to continue preparing for counter-revolution.

~snip~
At the beginning of Castro's reign, the U.S. was more than sympathetic to the militant exiles. In the 1960s, the U.S. government actively encouraged and supported anti-Castro violence, including the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion. "Throughout most of the 1960s, rolling back the Cuban revolution through violent exile surrogates remained a top U.S. priority," says Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive and a specialist on U.S. policy toward Cuba. With exile involvement, the U.S. government made numerous attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro between 1961 and 1975, though the number cited in the title of the British documentary "638 Ways to Kill Castro" may be an exaggeration. Many anti-Castro Cubans went to work for U.S. intelligence and compiled long résumés of covert activity. In the 1980s, some assisted with the Reagan administration's covert effort to arm the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Cuban-American entanglement with the CIA eventually bled into U.S. politics; two of the five "plumbers" who broke into the Democratic Party's national headquarters at the Watergate in 1972 were Cuban-American. Tolerance for anti-Castro militancy, meanwhile, also had domestic consequences. Throughout the '60s and '70s and into the '80s, exiles carried out dozens of bombings and assassinations in Miami and other American cities, targeting people they deemed too accommodating to the Castro government.

Over time, as Kornbluh notes, the exiles seemed to change their approach somewhat as they aged and as they prospered economically -- and as the CIA backed away. By the 1980s, says Kornbluh, support for militancy "shifted from official funding to private backing from wealthy Cuban-Americans." Much of the anti-Castro activism among Cuban-Americans was directed by a Miami businessman named Jorge Mas Canosa, head of the Cuban American National Foundation. Cuban intelligence, and even anti-Castro militants, have linked CANF to violent plots targeting Cuba.

Still, however, the militants continued to train within the borders of the U.S., and to amass weaponry. Retired Army Col. Larry Wilkerson remembers attending briefings during Caribbean war game exercises from 1992 to 1997 where he learned of the exiles' capabilities. "We would always be fed this intelligence and I was astounded at how many suspected caches of arms they had access to not just in Florida, but in California, New Jersey and other places; light machine guns, grenades, C4, dynamite, all manner of side arms and long arms," recalls Wilkerson, who was former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff from 2002 to 2005. "It was a veritable terrorist haven. This is Hezbollah in Florida, if you're looking at it through Havana's eyes."

More:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/01/14/cuba/