School for liars

Posada Carriles Tells the El Paso Court “I lied because the CIA taught me how.” – Español

By José Pertierra

Translation: Machetera – Tlaxcala

In a motion presented yesterday before the federal court in El Paso, where he is being tried for perjury rather than murder, Luis Posada Carriles offers the curious defense that due to his many years of work with the CIA, his statements when interrogated by U.S. immigration officials shortly after illegally entering the United States in March of 2005 were “the result of confusion, mistake” and “faulty memory.”

Posada alleges that throughout his employment with the CIA, he used various false identities and passports to facilitate his undercover work against Cuba, Venezuela and other Latin American countries.  So many lies have led him to be confused now, according to the 14 page legal argument his legal team has presented to Judge Kathleen Cardone.

The prosecutors wish to exclude all the evidence regarding Posada Carriles and the CIA from this trial, arguing that it is irrelevant as well as confidential.  Washington knows that Posada has plenty to tell and it is trying to limit his testimony and the evidence to the greatest extent possible so as not to expose the crimes committed by Posada Carriles throughout his decades of work for the CIA.

There are declassified CIA cables in existence, for example, as well as confessions from the material authors of the crime, which establish that Posada was the intellectual author behind the explosion of a Cubana airlines civilian airplane on October 6, 1976, where 73 passengers were killed.

Venezuela presented a request for his extradition in June of 2005, and this remains pending, without the White House attending to it.  Posada confessed to the New York Times in 1998 that he had orchestrated a terrorist campaign against hotels and restaurants in Havana which caused the cold-blooded death of Fabio Di Celmo in the Hotel Copacabana, as well as wounding many others.

In previous documents, Posada alleged that everything he did in Latin America, he did “in Washington’s name.”  He wants the jury, which is to decide whether he is guilty of perjury, to hear all the evidence on March 1st and be made aware of his close relationship with the CIA.  He also knows that the more he threatens to reveal about his relations with the CIA, the more those who conceal the skeletons in Washington’s closet begin to tremble.

In order to convince Judge Cardone that his relationship with the CIA is relevant to the trial in which he is being accused of being a liar, Posada Carriles’ defense is  that it was the CIA who taught him how to lie.  Hmmmm.

Machetera is a member of Tlaxcala, the international network of translators for linguistic diversity. This translation may be reprinted as long as the content remains unaltered, and the author and translator are cited.

Posada Carriles’ word games fall flat in El Paso

The Judge Presiding Over the Case of the Terrorist Posada Carriles Reacts to His Legal Technicality - Español

By Jose Pertierra

Translation: Laura Boué and Machetera – Tlaxcala

Kathleen Cardone, the U.S. judge who dismissed the first case against the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, accusing the Government of having engaged in “fraud, deceit and trickery” in his immigration interview and who later took up the legal case against him once again, has just opened an interesting window in the litigation.

In an order dated January 21, 2010, Cardone has revealed part of the inner workings of the case that will be heard on March 1^st in El Paso, Texas, and whose documentation has until now been kept under seal and the strictest secrecy.

The judge has just published a document which openly cites a motion by Posada’s attorney to disallow Count One in the new trial, which accuses him of having made false declarations when he denied asking other people to carry out a series of bombings in Cuba.

Cardone’s document reveals that Posada does not deny having participated in a conspiracy to explode bombs in Havana in 1997, one of which killed the young Italian Fabio Di Celmo in a bar at the Hotel Copacabana.  But he does not accept guilt for the homicide either.  His defense is a legal technicality that the judge, through this order, absolutely rejects.

Count One has to do with a question that an immigration official posed to Posada in 2005: “Are the comments true that you made (to a journalist) for an article in the New York Times in which you admitted soliciting other people to carry out these explosions?”  Posada responded in the following manner: “I am saying that is not true.”  The prosecutors suggest that this answer is false and constitute perjury.  Posada alleges that the answer is literally correct, because the article in the New York Times and the tape recordings made by the journalist Ann Louise Bardach do not include the word “solicit.”  Consequently, Posada repeats, his answer is literally correct.

The motion presented by Posada’s attorneys did not convince Judge Cardone, who unequivocally declared that the question by the immigration official is not dependent on the word “solicit.”  “The sense of the questions that were asked of Posada is not dependent on the precise use of that word.”  In other words, Posada knew very well that the immigration official who interviewed him in relation to his application for residency in 2005, wanted to know if Posada denied having been involved in the 1997 conspiracy for having exploded bombs in hotels and restaurants in Havana in that year.

The person who carried out the murder of Fabio Di Celmo is a Salvadoran named Rene Cruz Leon, who admitted having placed at least six bombs in Havana, including the one that killed the Italian tourist.  Cruz Leon confessed his crimes, was tried in Cuban courts and in 1999 was sentenced to death.  Currently he is a prisoner in the Guanajay prison in Cuba.

Cruz Leon says that the person who recruited him and gave him the explosives is a Salvadoran named Francisco Chavez Abarca, one of Posada Carriles employees in El Salvador.  A 1997 Miami Herald investigation revealed that Luis Posada Carriles recruited Chavez Abarca for a terrorist campaign against Cuba and that he in turn recruited Cruz Leon, who says he was promised $2,000 for every bomb that was set off in Havana.  After Cruz Leon was arrested, Posada Carriles said, “He’s not a Cuban.  He did it for money.”

Another of the material authors of the terrorism against Cuba in 1997 is the Salvadoran Otto Rodriguez Llerena, also openly linked with Luis Posada Carriles, who operated under the name of Ignacio Medina.  He admitted that he’d been promised $1,000 for each C-4 bomb detonated.  “My mistake was in letting Posada Carriles use me,” Rodriguez Llerena told the Miami Herald journalist Jim DeFede in 2005.

Posada Carriles’ defense argument oscillates between a technicality relative to the use of the word “solicit,” and the fact that everything the terrorist did prior to that in Latin America was done in the name of his employer, the CIA.

The Federal court in El Paso is not falling for the legal technicality, and it has not allowed him to use the CIA’s name in his defense.  But “those who will make the decision about his innocence or guilt are, nevertheless, the jury,” Judge Cardone concluded in her order.

It’s worth recalling that the trial against Posada is not for murder in relation to the killing of Fabio Di Celmo.  Nor is it about the terrorist campaign against Cuba in 1997, nor about the mid-air explosion of a plane full of passengers on October, 1976, for which there is an abundance of proof of Posada’s participation as its intellectual author.  The prosecutor is charging him with having lied to U.S. government officials during the immigration process undertaken by Posada upon arriving in the United States, illegally, aboard the Santrina yacht in March of 2005.

He is strictly being judged as a liar in order to give the impression that “something is being done” against terrorism.  Meanwhile, the extradition request presented by Venezuela on June 15, 2005 remains pending.  Until now President Obama has paid it no attention, just like President George W. Bush.

Laura Boué and Machetera are members of Tlaxcala, the international network of translators for linguistic diversity. This translation may be reprinted as long as the content remains unaltered, and the author and translators are cited.