US Says Proof Insufficient to Extradite Terrorist Posada
CUBA, March 24, 2008. "There is not enough proof against the international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles," said Caroline Wilson, representative of legal matters for the US mission at the UN. And yet it will soon be two years since a US immigration official announced that the criminal was a danger to national security.
On March 27, 2006, the director for Miami of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Robert E. Jolicoeur, pointed out to Posada in a letter that he was denying him his freedom because of his "long record of criminal actions and violence that involved innocent civilians."
"His setting free would represent a great danger for the security of the community and the nation," said Jolicoeur, highlighting to Posada the accusations presented in Caracas for his pat in the attack against a Cuban airplane that cost the lives of 73 passengers in 1976; his arrest in Panama, in 2000, as responsible for an intended attack against the Cuban leader Fidel Castro; his public admission of having organized a terrorist campaign against tourist facilities of Havana in 1997; and his long relationship with terrorists.
However, in answer to the positions of Cuba and Venezuela, in the UN Security Council, Wilson said without reserve that her country "had carefully followed the effective processes of law in the case of Posada Carriles," according to the report of EFE.
"As happens in the democracies of the world, a person cannot be tried or extradited if there is not sufficient proof that he committed the crime that he is accused of," she stated.
She then repeated that the immigration magistrate that authorized the deportation of Posada Carriles, after his illegal entry into the country in 2005, at the same time impeded his sending to Venezuela or Cuba "for fear" that the former agent of the CIA, who was a torturer with the Venezuelan DISIP, "would be tortured."
Wilson finished using the pretext that her government appealed the decision of a federal judge that liberated him last year for the migratory crimes that were imputed, when recognizing in a complacent way the statements of the defense that alleged an interpreter's errors during the interrogation of the old assassin.
José Pertierra, lawyer from Venezuela, already pointed out on several opportunities that that appeal is nothing more than a dilatory maneuver by the White House, while judicial remedies and abundant evidence exists to charge Posada as a terrorist.
In July of the last year, the outgoing ambassador of the United States in Venezuela, William Brownfield, now installed in Bogotá, in declarations to the daily paper Panorama, made it quite clear that the United States had no intention of putting Posada at the disposition of Venezuelan justice. ( Cubaminrex – Granma ).