Martinez and Carriles
From Jon Lee Anderson's current New Yorker piece on Cuba (my emphasis):
Castro has used the case of Luis Posada Carriles to argue that America has a double standard in its war on terror. Posada Carriles, a Cuban who holds Venezuelan citizenship, has spent the past forty-five years trying to kill or depose Castro. He is wanted in Venezuela for allegedly helping to plan the midair bombing of a Cuban passenger jet near Barbados in October, 1976, which killed all seventy-three people on board. (Cubans, citing recently declassified C.I.A. and F.B.I. documents that appear to support them, accuse the agency of having had prior knowledge of the attack.) In between escaping from a Venezuelan jail and—as he admitted to the Times—planning the bombing of hotels in the summer of 1997, killing an Italian tourist, Posada Carriles worked for Oliver North’s program to resupply the Contras in Nicaragua.
...Senator Martinez didn’t want to comment directly on the Posada Carriles case, because it was in the courts. But he denied that it had anything to do with the war on terror. “Cuba began the practice of hijacking airliners, and if Luis Posada Carriles bombed an airliner”—Martinez paused—“without condoning any specific act of violence, there was a hostile state of affairs at the time. This is no longer an issue and is just being used by a failed regime to keep people stoked up. We need to talk about the future, not the past.”
Wow. Just...wow. I realize Martinez himself is a Cuban refugee, but it's still amazing to read a US senator speaking that nonchalantly about someone accused of blowing up his own country's civilians.
Castro has used the case of Luis Posada Carriles to argue that America has a double standard in its war on terror. Posada Carriles, a Cuban who holds Venezuelan citizenship, has spent the past forty-five years trying to kill or depose Castro. He is wanted in Venezuela for allegedly helping to plan the midair bombing of a Cuban passenger jet near Barbados in October, 1976, which killed all seventy-three people on board. (Cubans, citing recently declassified C.I.A. and F.B.I. documents that appear to support them, accuse the agency of having had prior knowledge of the attack.) In between escaping from a Venezuelan jail and—as he admitted to the Times—planning the bombing of hotels in the summer of 1997, killing an Italian tourist, Posada Carriles worked for Oliver North’s program to resupply the Contras in Nicaragua.
...Senator Martinez didn’t want to comment directly on the Posada Carriles case, because it was in the courts. But he denied that it had anything to do with the war on terror. “Cuba began the practice of hijacking airliners, and if Luis Posada Carriles bombed an airliner”—Martinez paused—“without condoning any specific act of violence, there was a hostile state of affairs at the time. This is no longer an issue and is just being used by a failed regime to keep people stoked up. We need to talk about the future, not the past.”
Wow. Just...wow. I realize Martinez himself is a Cuban refugee, but it's still amazing to read a US senator speaking that nonchalantly about someone accused of blowing up his own country's civilians.
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