Posada Verdict: Like Charging Hitler With Disturbing the Peace, and Then Acquitting Him

14 Apr 2011

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A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

There was certainly no justice in an El Paso jury’s acquittal of the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles – but then, a just outcome was impossible. The bomber of a Cuban airline, drug runner for the CIA and the Contras, and attempted assassin of Fidel Castro, was charged only with telling lies to U.S. immigration authorities. It was an insult to Posada’s victims to try him at all on such insignificant counts – a sick joke that showed the U.S. has no respect for the opinions of mankind.

Posada Verdict: Like Charging Hitler With Disturbing the Peace, and Then Acquitting Him

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“Posada’s trial only makes sense as a satire on the utter fraudulence of American justice.”

The United States is the main base for terrorism in the world. That statement is true on both the large and smaller scales. Washington shows no inclination to dismantle its nuclear terror systems, despite the fact that the Cold War ended nearly a generation ago. Instead, the U.S. constantly upgrades its weapons of worldwide annihilation, introducing new generations of nuclear weaponry that have no plausible reason to exist other than to cause the rest of the planet to live in terror of the United States.

At the opposite end of the terror spectrum, there is Luis Posada Carriles, the 83-year-old veteran assassin, mass murder,er drug runner and all around hit man for U.S. imperialism in the Americas. Last week, it took an El Paso jury less than three hours to find this arch criminal not guilty of lying to U.S. immigration authorities about how he reentered the United States in 2005.

Posada’s El Paso trial only makes sense as a satire on the utter fraudulence of American justice. The U.S. knew very well Posada was a mass killer, having paid his salary to carry out murder and mayhem for many, many years. By charging Posada with such a miner offense, the U.S. insulted the memory of his victims and their relatives, including the 73 people blown out the sky by the bomb Posada’s team planted on a civilian Cuban airliner, in 1976. All 24 members of Cuba’s gold-medal fencing team perished. But Posada continued his work for the U.S. government for decades, attempting to assassinate Fidel Castro in Panama, running drugs for the CIA and the contras in Central America, and planting bombs that killed a tourist in Cuba.

“America insists to its own citizens – and to a world that knows better – that the rule of law is what makes the U.S. the great exception and hope of planet Earth.”

Posada’s crimes were Washington’s crimes and, of course, the U.S. would never put itself on trial, would never risk a legal proceeding that might provide a window on American terror. But the amoral, home-country of international terror, the United States – the unchallenged headquarters of industrial scale assassination, coups, disappearances, a global network of secret prisons and torture centers, the fountainhead of fortuitous fatal illnesses and convenient accidents, this country that, in the words of Frederick Douglass, “is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future,” this can-do businessman's republic that inspired at least 638 plots to kill Fidel Castro – insists to its own citizens and to a world that knows better, that the rule of law is what makes the U.S. the great exception and hope of planet Earth.

As if to prove the truth of the greatest lie ever told, the Americans put Luis Posada through the formalities of trial on charges that were so dwarfed by his known crimes, it was like putting Hitler on trial during World War Two for creating a public disturbance.

Meanwhile, the Cuban Five are serving four life sentences and 75 years, respectively, for trying to halt the terrorist activities of Luis Posada's political comrades in Miami. They also got a trail, but nobody could say it was fair, and the truth is, most Americans don't care about fairness – they care about their prejudices and hatreds, which are nurtured by, to paraphrase Frederick Douglass again, a steady diet of lies about the American past, its present, and its future.

For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford. On the web, go to www.BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

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