Sponsor of terrorism: the United States

Imagine a group of five CIA officers dispatched to a foreign country to investigate and report on an Al Qaeda cell planning a series of major bombings in the United States, including hotel and shopping mall bombings. Then, imagine the outcry if the five CIA agents were arrested by the nation where they were assigned and hit with trumped up charges, found guilty before a kangaroo court, and sentence to life terms in prison for espionage. The United States would demand revenge and likely take military action against the host country. The harboring of terrorists was the justification used by the Bush administration to attack Afghanistan.

The above scenario is exactly what occurred to five Cuban intelligence agents dispatched to Miami to report on the activities of Cuban exiled terrorists who were planning a series of terrorist bombings against foreign tourists and Cuban civilians in Cuba during the 1990s. In September 1998, five Cubans -- Gerardo Hernandez Nordelo, Ramon Labanino Salazar, Antonio Guerrero Rodriguez, Fernando Gonzalez Llort, and Rene Gonzalez -- were arrested in Miami, and after the longest federal trial in U.S. history, were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage by a jury that was tampered with by the Department of Justice and FBI. They have been put in solitary confinement and some have not been allowed to see their wives and mothers because the Bush administration is denying them visas to travel to the U.S. Furthermore, the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, DC has been restricted to a 12-mile radius within the nation’s capital -- they are not permitted to speak at symposia on behalf of their jailed agents beyond Washington. However, yesterday, this editor attended a symposium at George Washington University Law School in DC on the plight of the "Cuban Five."

After the federal trial judge in Miami rejected the defense request for a change of venue to Fort Lauderdale from Miami because of the nature of Miami’s rabid, right-wing Cuban exile community, the defense appealed the decision to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which, on August 9, 2005, issued a 93-page opinion on the venue issue. Unanimously, a three judge panel ruled that the Cuban Five did not receive a fair trial in Miami. This was the first time a court reversed a decision based on venue. Immediately, the Bush Justice Department ordered an appeal of the decision to an en banc panel of the 11th Circuit (12 of the 13 judges on the court, one judge recused himself).

According to Leonard Weinglass, the attorney for Guerrero, "Miami is home to over 600,000 exiles that harbor a ’state of war’ mentality against the Cuban government. Even the U.S. government, in a pretrial motion in another case one year later, argued to the Court that it was ’virtually impossible’ for a fair trial to be held in Miami in a case that touched upon Cuban issues."

Weinglass added, "for forty years this country has hosted a network of terrorism in Florida directed at Cuba; it has recruited them, trained them and armed them, and when Cuba repeatedly asked if the United States, the host country, to rein in these terrorists, they were met with inaction, and so Cuba sent a group of people here to monitor the activities of the terrorist network in Florida, and when they for too close, the FBI stepped in and arrested the Five, and prosecuted them before the exiled community in Miami, and they were sentenced to life terms in prison."

In fact, many individuals close to this case report that southern Florida is a virtual independent right-wing republic acting with its own foreign policy, a foreign policy that is pampered and supported by southern Florida’s Cuban GOP congressional delegation, particularly Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

Weinglass said, "this case is more easily understood if you think of the case of Orlando Bosch, a member of that terrorist network, who planted a bomb on a Cubana airline in 1976, which exploded in midair, killing 73 people. Mr. Bosch applied for residence in the United States after that episode, and the Justice Department and the INS deemed him an undesirable person, pointed to 30 years of terrorist activity including the bombing, and asked that he be barred from entry in the United States. But Orlando Bosch had a friend in Florida, a young man who wanted to be governor: his name was Jeb Bush . . . He intervened with his father who was then the President of the United States, and George Bush Sr. overruled the Justice Department and the INS and granted Orlando Bosch’s residence in the United States. He now walks as a free man in Miami, Florida. He walks as a free man, while the Five, who had no guns, no explosives, created no harm in the United States, did not involve themselves in any classified information here, did not interfere with national security, are serving life in maximum security prisons here in the United States. The next time the Bush administration moralizes about the war on terrorism, remember Orlando Bosch, and remember the Cuban Five."

It is also noteworthy that when Bosch and his CIA-trained team bombed the Cubana airliner off of Barbados on October 6, 1976, the director of the CIA was none other than George H. W. Bush. Bosch was assisted by Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban-born and naturalized Venezuelan terrorist who has been protected by Governor Bush in Florida and George W. Bush in Washington. On May 22, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency ruled that Carriles would continued to be held in custody in El Paso after trying to illegally enter the country from Mexico and not be extradited to Venezuela for the terrorist bombing of the Cubana aircraft. The Venezuelan embassy in Washington reacted by stating, "We again call on the White House to honour its international treaty obligations and either extradite or prosecute Luis Posada Carriles for 73 counts of first degree murder." Recently declassified U.S. government documents show that Posada worked for the CIA at least from 1965 to 1976. Official investigations by the governments of Cuba, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana (several Guyanese perished in the bombing) concluded that the Cubana plane was downed in a terrorist attack. The United States never investigated the incident.

A Barbados official investigation found that their Trinidadian colleagues had discovered links between a Venezuelan in Trinidad involved in the bombing and the CIA. Chapter VIII of the report states: "one of the Venezuelans -- Mr. Lozano -- told the Trinidad and Tobago police chief that he was a member of the US Central Intelligence Agency, that his boss was a man who lived in Caracas and whose name was Luis Posada Carriles; that he had been three times to the US embassy in Barbados during the few hours that they [he and his Venezuelan bombing colleagues] were in that country after the plane blew up, hours they needed to do two things: go to the US embassy, and stop off at the hotel [Holiday Inn] to call a Caracas telephone number belonging to Luis Posada Carriles and another number belonging to Orlando Bosch Avila."

U.S. terrorism, directed by George H. W. Bush when he was CIA director, brought down a civilian jet liner off of Barbados. That makes Bush and his son, who continues to protect the bombers, no better than Osama Bin Laden -- or does it place them in the very same agent provocateur camp?

This editor arrived for Navy duty in Barbados less than a year after the Cuban exiles bombed the Cubana plane. The government of Barbados called for help from the US Naval Facility to assist in rescue operations. Rescue operations soon became an operation to recover bodies, including those of women and children. US Navy personnel who were scuba divers, as well as Navy corpsmen, assisted in the recovery operations. They were traumatized by what they saw but even more troubling was the what they later discovered -- the their own government aided and abetted in the terrorism. It was something my Barbadian friends often mentioned -- how could the U.S. assist in a terrorism operation in a friendly country like Barbados? I also became aware of the activities of Gerald Bull’s Space Research Corporation near Grantley Adams International Airport. My Bajan friends in the government told me that it was a CIA operation to shoot rockets into the ionosphere for purposes of weather modification -- the ultimate goal was the steerage of Caribbean hurricanes to hit Cuba. An Intel Corporation activity near the deep water careenage in Bridgetown turned out to be a CIA front operation aimed at derailing leftist political parties in nearby islands like Grenada, Dominica, and St. Lucia. The Barbadians were incensed at these activities. As a U.S. Naval Officer with a Top Secret and Crypto/NATO COSMIC security clearance, I had no answer for them at the time. But I do now.

I agree with Seymour Hersh’s prediction that George W. Bush, after he leaves office, should be snatched by foreign law enforcement officers and whisked away to stand trial for war crimes. But it should not stop with Dubya -- his father and brother Jeb should also be hauled off to stand trial before an international court of justice -- for aiding and abetting terrorism. Let’s not forget Poppy Bush’s involvement in the terrorism bombing off the coast of Barbados and the September 21, 1976 car bombing on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, DC that killed former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt. Manuel Contreras, the Chilean intelligence head who planned the bombing, was being paid by George H. W. Bush as a CIA asset at the time of the car bombing.

The anti-terrorist Cuban Five team had uncovered plans by members of the Cuban exiled community in Florida, who were protected by Jeb Bush and his family, to launch terrorist attacks against civilian targets in Cuba. Poppy Bush provided three ex-US Air Force militarized Cessna aircraft to Jose Basulto, an ex-CIA veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion who founded the group "Brothers to the Rescue," a coordinating activity for the terrorist attacks on Cuba.

On October 7, 1992, Cuban exiles from Florida launched an armed seaborne attack against the Varadero Meilia Hotel in Cuba. The terrorists were later arrested by the FBI but released on orders from the Poppy Bush White House. On January 7, 1993, Tony Bryant, the leader of the terrorist group "Commandos L," announced plans to bomb more hotels and other targets in Cuba and warned foreign tourists to "stay away from Cuba." On November 7, 1993, Humberto Perez, spokesperson for the terrorist group Alpha 66, said "we consider anyone staying in a Cuban hotel to be an enemy."

On March 11, 1994, Miami-based terrorists fired on the Guitart Cayo Coco Hotel in Cuba. In November 1994 Posada and five accomplices smuggled weapons into Cartagena de Indias in Colombia to assassinated President Fidel Castro during the 5th Ibero-American Summit. The Coast Guard during the 1990s intercepted a number of vessels with armed men heading from Florida to Cuba. The FBI released all of thdetained terrorists. On April 12, 1997, a bomb exploded in the Melia Cohiba Hotel in Havana. On July 12, 1997, bombs exploded in the Capri and Nacional hotels. The GOP-connected Cuban American National Foundation gave unconditional support to these terrorist bombings in Cuba. On October 4, 1997, bombs exploded in the Triton, Chateau Miramar, and Copacabana hotels. The latter explosion killed a young Italian tourist, Fabio di Celmo. The same day, a bomb exploded at the Bodeguita del Medio restaurant. On October 27, 1997, the US Coast Guard stopped a vessel west of Puerto Rico that was manned by well-armed mercenaries. It was on its way to Venezuela’s Margarita island with the intention of assassinating Fidel Castro during the Nov. 7, 1997 Ibero-American Summit. The vessel was registered to a Florida company whose chairman is a member of the board of directors of the Cuban American National Foundation. The mercenaries confessed about their intention to assassinate a foreign head of state but were acquitted in December 1999 following a rigged trial.

On July 12 and 13, 1998, Posada told the New York Times that he organized the bombing campaign against Cuban hotels and restaurants and that the Cuban American National Foundation and its chairman Jorge Mas Canosa was in charge of providing the funding mechanisms for the attacks. On November 17, 2000, a group of terrorists headed by Posada were arrested in Panama for planning to assassinate Fidel Castro at the 10th Ibero-American Summit. On October 22, 2002, Miami’s Nuevo Herald revealed ties between the Cuban terrorist group Comandos F-4 and former members of the Venezuelan National Guard and the April 2002 coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. F-4 trained Venezuelan and Cuban commandos involved in the coup in "open fields in Homestead." In January 2003, the Wall Street Journal reported that Rodolfo Frometa, chief of Comandos F-4, announced in Miami the creation a of Cuban-Venezuelan "civic-military alliance" to overthrow Presidents Chavez and Castro and that 50 mercenaries were receiving military training "in a polygon located in The Everglades." On March 29, 2003, Orlando Bosch called for a march in Miami to support George W. Bush’s military attack on Iraq. On March 22, 2004, Florida GOP Rep. Lincoln Diaz Balart called for the assassination of Fidel Castro.

On June 16 and 17, 1998, Cuba received an FBI delegation and turned over to them documents and other evidence pointing to the involvement of 40 terrorists in the United States in bombings and other attacks. The FBI took the information but obviously used it to determine that Cuba had obtained it from their agents in the United States -- three months later the Cuban Five were arrested in Miami. The Cuban-American terrorists were allowed to continue their terrorist activities against Cuban civilian targets.

Now we have this information from La Paz, Bolivia, where leftist Evo Morales recently took over as President. An American named Claudio Lestad, a.k.a. Triston Jay Arnero, formerly of of New Orleans, Washington state, and Placerville, California and his Uruguayan girlfriend were arrested for bombing two La Paza hotels, killing two Bolivian couple who were doctors and injuring at least seven other people. California authorities say that Arnero has a troubled past as a youth and was in and out of juvenile correctional facilities. Court records indicate that upon release from juvenile detention, Arnero wanted to move abroad to work at an oil refinery. Lestad also uses several aliases, including Lestat Claudius de Orleans y Montevideo. An Israeli citizen caught in Trinidad last year and investigated for detonating bombs in the country also used various aliases. The FBI investigated that incident but pressured Trinidad to release the man and he flew back to Israel. President Morales said, "This American was putting bombs in hotels . . . the U.S. government fights terrorism, and they send us terrorists." Bolivian authorities said the two were planning a bombing attack at a third hotel when they were caught and had been responsible for other hotel bombings around the country that did not cause any injuries. Bolivian police also said that Arnero was also planning to bomb the Chilean consulate in La Paz. The US Embassy in La Paz responded, "We’re concerned about remarks made by the president and we have expressed those concerns to the Bolivian government." The embassy said nothing about the involvement of an American in terrorist attacks. Morales called on the Bush administration to stop sending terrorists to Bolivia to "disrupt democracy."

Bush I and II: International terrorists and war criminals

Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca said the bombings were designed to halt and destabilize reforms that Evo Morales and his government are trying to introduce in the country.

Some right-wing news outlets in the United States began to spin the story that Arnero is a follower of the neo-cons’ favorite bogeyman, Osama Bin Laden, a fairly amazing claim considering Arnero insists he is a Wiccan high priest. [Note: this is how we must wade through the neo-con/Bush propaganda purveyors, they are actually terrible spinmeisters and their lies, such as this about Arnero and Bin Laden, are extremely transparent]. One other issue of importance is that the Cuban Five story has been totally ignored by the US media. Cuba turned over the very same documents on terrorist activities in Florida that it gave to the FBI to The New York Times. The Times never published the documents or admitted it even had them. WMR will attempt to obtain these documents from the Cuban government and we will definitely publish them.