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Case of the Cuban Five Is a Breach of Justice, Says US Retired Colonel

CUBA, June 21, 2010. US Col. (Ret.) Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, said the case of the five Cuban antiterrorists who remain unjustly imprisoned in the United States is “an egregious breach of justice.”

The Cuban Five —as Gerardo Hernandez, Rene Gonzalez, Antonio Guerrero, Ramon Labañino and Fernando Gonzalez are internationally known— were arrested in 1998 and given harsh sentences for monitoring anti-Cuba extremist groups in South Florida that were planning and carrying out terrorist attacks against the island.

According to the website www.antiterroristas.cu , Wilkerson said that “there are just so many violations of what I would call justice, fair play, in the course of putting these people in prison. And to give someone two life sentences for essentially trying to protect his country against people in Florida?”

Speaking to The Real News Network, he mentioned that the FBI recently discovered a whole cache of munitions in southern Florida, including dynamite, machine guns, small arms and grenades used by the CIA to train Cuban-Americans in the 1960s for the invasion of Cuba.

Wilkerson also criticized Cuba’s inclusion in the US State Sponsors of Terrorism list. “And we have Posada Carriles, who killed 70-plus Cubans on an airliner he bombed, in Miami, living scot-free,” he said in reference to international and self-confessed terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, who masterminded, among many other crimes, the 1976 mid-air bombing of a Cuban airliner off the coast of Barbados that killed all 73 people on board. (Cubaminrex- ACN)