What if I were to tell you that a man allegedly responsible for masterminding the bombing of a passenger plane that killed 73 people was not going to be prosecuted for the crime?

Would you be outraged?

Would you want the United States to demand that this terrorist be brought to justice?

What if I were to tell you that this individual was in the United States?  And that the United States government was not extraditing him to the country where the attack was planned or even to the country whose airliner was downed?

Welcome to Bushworld.

A U.S. appeals court has ruled that an anti-Castro Cuban exile and former CIA operative accused in Cuba of a 1976 plane bombing that killed 73 people should stand trial for an immigration violation, court records showed on Friday.  The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans on Thursday said a lower court erred in dismissing an indictment against Luis Posada Carriles days before he was to stand trial in El Paso, Texas, for allegedly lying during 2006 efforts to become a naturalized U.S. citizen.

The court sent the case back to U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone, who threw the charges out last year on grounds of government misconduct.  Posada Carriles, 80, who lives in Miami, has been sought for trial in Cuba and Venezuela for masterminding the bombing of a Cubana Airlines jet. . . .

In the U.S. Cuban exile community, he has been feted as a freedom fighter for his long fight against Fidel Castro, who took power in Cuba in a 1959 revolution and ruled until February, when his brother Raul Castro became president.

I have been a vocal critic of Cuba’s dictatorship for nearly twenty years.  In the early 1990s, I wrote a book on Cuba’s misuse of psychiatry to persecute dissidents.  In response, Granma, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper, called me a “creative fiction made up by diseased gusano minds.”  I have nothing but contempt for the Castro regime, and for what it has done to the Cuban people.

Yet now I find myself in the odd (and frankly, incredibly distasteful) position of taking the same side of an issue as the Castro brothers.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the bombing of Cubana Flight 455:

Flight 455 was a Cubana de Aviación flight departing from Barbados, via Trinidad, to Cuba. On 6 October 1976 two timebombs variously described as dynamite or C-4 planted on the Douglas DC-8 aircraft exploded, killing all 73 people on board. . . .

Investigators from Cuba, Venezuela and the United States traced the planting of the bombs to two Venezuelan passengers, Freddy Lugo and Hernán Ricardo Lozano. Both men were employed by Posada at his private detective agency based in Venezuela, and they both subsequently admitted to the crime.

A week after the men’s confessions, Luis Posada and Orlando Bosch were arrested on charges of masterminding the attack, and were jailed in Venezuela. . . .Posada was found not guilty by a military court; however, this ruling was overturned and he was held for trial in a civilian court. Posada escaped from prison with Freddie Lugo in 1977, turning themselves in to the less-than-sympathetic Chilean authorities. He was immediately extradited, and was held without conviction for eight years before escaping while awaiting a prosecutor’s appeal of his second acquittal in the bombing. His escape is said to involve a hefty bribe and his dressing as a priest.

So not only is this guy allegedly responsible for the bombing, he’s also an fugitive.  So why aren’t we turning him over to Venezuela?

The reality is that the Bush Administration will do almost anything to prevent Posada Carriles from being turned over to the governments of Venezuela and Cuba.  The Bushies realize any such move would set off a firestorm in Little Havana that will make the Elian Gonzalez case look like a garden party.

So instead, the U.S. government has charged Posada Carriles with immigration violations.  If he’s found guilty (or even if he’s not), he may be extradited to Panama for allegedly plotting to kill Castro during a 2000 summit.  Not to make light of those charges, but they pale in comparison to what he allegedly did to Flight 455.

If that wasn’t bad enough, here’s a kicker, via the National Security Archive:

The National Security Archive today posted additional documents that show that the CIA had concrete advance intelligence, as early as June 1976, on plans by Cuban exile terrorist groups to bomb a Cubana airliner. The Archive also posted another document that shows that the FBI’s attache in Caracas had multiple contacts with one of the Venezuelans who placed the bomb on the plane, and provided him with a visa to the U.S. five days before the bombing, despite suspicions that he was engaged in terrorist activities at the direction of Luis Posada Carriles.

[snip]

There is no indication in the declassified files that indicates that the CIA alerted Cuban government authorities to the terrorist threat against Cubana planes. Still classified CIA records indicate that the informant might actually have been Posada himself who at that time was in periodic contact with both CIA and FBI agents in Venezuela.

So not only have we failed to turn him over now, we did nothingto warn the Cuban government or try to prevent the bombing back then.  Because our informant was in all likelihood Posada himself.

Ramsey Clark once argued that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom figher.”  What a load of horse dookie.  Terrorism is terrorism, no matter whether it’s commited by our enemies or our friends.  And those responsible should be brought to justice.

If the exiles in Miami had any sense, they’d see how important it is to apply the same standard of justice to this case as they want to use on a regime responsible for numerous deaths, innumerable human rights violations, and widespread misery.  You don’t have to accept the legitimacy of a government to recognize its right to prosecute those responsible for the murder of its citizens.

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This can’t be good news for the Bush Administration:

Osama bin Laden’s ex-driver, Salim hamdan, has been sentenced to five-and-a-half years imprisonment for supporting terrorism at the first US military trial in Guantanamo Bay.  Hamdan’s acquittal of conspiracy to murder means that on time served he could be eligible for release in just six months, despite prosecutors’ pleas to give him no less than 30 years imprisonment.

I have argued that the next President should commute Hamdan’s sentence to time served.  To their credit, that is for all intents and purposes what the jury did.  Given the fact that they also refused to convict him on the conspiracy charge, this decision represents a pretty serious blow against the Bush Administration’s subvert justice.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the Bushies don’t have arrows left in their dark quivver.  Before the trial started, Administration officials intimated that even if he were found not guilty, Hamdan would not be released.  If that proves to be the case, then the entire tribunal process truly is a farce.

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No, I’m not talking about The Joker.

I’m not a big fan of what Rebecca McKinnon calls “parachute journalists” — reporters who spend a very limited time in a country and then write stories describing “ancient ethnic hatreds” and “the profound despair of local villagers,” as if they had spent the last thirty years living there.  It’s the war correspondent ethos run amok.

The latest is from Carol Rosenberg of The Miami Herald, who spent two whole days in Guantanamo covering the war crimes trial of Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver.

That said, I did find one item in Rosenberg’s story interesting:

In the al Qaeda world of driver Salim Hamdan, exhortations to martyrdom and railing at the infidels can become mind-numbing.  Or so claimed several FBI agents who testified last week at the trial of Osama bin Laden’s driver, the Yemeni with a fourth-grade education. ”Mr. Hamdan pretty much got tired of hearing the same thing over and over again,” said FBI Agent George Crouch Jr. And so, he “tuned out.”

I haven’t seen this reported anywhere else, and it certainly makes sense.  If you’ve ever been in a car with a bunch of metalheads listening to Motörhead at maximum volume, sooner or later you’re going to start tuning out Lemmy, no matter how awesome a rock god he may be.

What isn’t clear from Rosenberg’s account is whether the FBI agents were testifying for the prosecution or the defense.  You’d think that would be an important detail, one worthy of putting in the freaking story.

But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Rosenberg’s story is its sheer banality.  She makes it sound no different from a visit to District Court — if a District Court sold “Got Freedom?” t-shirts** and kept bottled water in a portable mortuary.

This is the best the Bush Administration could do?  Set aside, just for a moment, the due process violations and the allegations of torture.  Assume, just for a moment, that the Bush Administration is right — that these guys deserve to have the book thrown at them.  I know that it’s hard to do without causing your brain to explode, but just for argument’s sake, go along with me for a minute.

So the trials start.  And who’s the first defendant?  Osama’s driver.  A guy with a fourth-grade education.  Do they think he’s Alfred to Osama’s Batman or something?  Or that he’s the criminal mastermind?  Seriously?  Maybe it would help if The Wall Street Murdoch Journal ran an op-ed called “What Hamdin and The Joker Have in Common.”

If the Allies had used the Bush Administration’s approach after World War II, they would have started with, I don’t know, Ezra Pound before they got around to prosecuting Goebbels, Speer, et. al.  That is if Pound was a retarded 19-year-old from West Virginia.

It just doesn’t make any sense.  But then again, you’d think I would have learned by now not to expect sanity, logic, or even consistency from the gang of thugs we call the Bush Administration.

**Shouldn’t the t-shirts read “Don’t Got Freedom”??  It is Guantanamo, after all.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia, used under a GNU Free Documentation License.

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