Terrorist Posada Caught by Authentic Journalists

The growing international scandal over the United States government’s protection of international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, the Cuban-born, Miami-fed, CIA-paid, confessed architect of the 1976 terrorist passenger jet bombing that killed 73 civilians, places George W. Bush’s so-called wars on terror and drugs in doubt as never before.

Today, Luis Gómez and I report the stories about how Authentic Journalists first caught Posada Carriles on Mexico’s Isla Mujeres – en route to Florida, where he now evades an extradition order to face trial in Venezuela for that 1976 jet bombing.

Gómez, in his report, "The Bloody Face of Bambi," traces the four-decade history of Posada Carriles, a man alleged to have committed 560 separate terrorist acts: the “Latin American Osama bin Laden,” operating under the cloak of official protection, who has openly admitted to many of his violent crimes.

I pick up the story on March 14, 2005, when on Isla Mujeres – poetically, the campus of the first Narco News School of Authentic Journalism – reporters from the daily Por Esto! – our victorious co-defendants in the Drug War on Trial case of 2001 - covering a news story about a shrimp boat adrift off the isle’s sandbanks, took photographs of the S.S. Santrina’s crew: the faces of the alleged smugglers and co-conspirators of Posada Carriles.

The discovery of the identities of these international terrorists has led to a growing war of words and legal demands that has Venezuela invoking extradition treaties with the United States, the Bush administration violating international law, and has Cuban comandante Fidel Castro reading aloud from Por Esto! in his morning televised press conferences – “This is Authentic Journalism!” he lectured foreign correspondents, waving Por Esto! in hand – and publicly discussing the work of Authentic Journalist Mario Menéndez and the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism.

The ongoing investigation into the Caribbean terrorist trail has now led to a story of the ugly confluence between terrorism, narco-trafficking, and the smuggling of illegal immigrants with the unsavory role of the ex-Cuban Miami mafia in an organized crime network on the scale of the Iran-Contra arms-for-drugs networks that the late Gary Webb reported in the 1990s. Then, as now, Luis Posada Carriles is at the center of it, and receives protection from Washington from a man named Bush.

As Mr. Bush said after the September 11, 2001 attacks: “He who protects a terrorist is a terrorist.”

“What is the United States doing giving asylum to someone who exploded a civilian airliner?” asks Castro, who after listening to a presentation by Mexican Authentic Journalist Renán Castro at an international anti-terrorism summit earlier this month, in which Castro explained how known narco-traffickers protected Posada Carriles on his path to the United States, rose from his seat to say:

“There are things that nobody dares say, and what you have just said here are the words of the valiant. They use those boats for drugs. You have denounced something that has not been mentioned until now, that the boat is also dedicated to drug trafficking. That’s serious. But the most serious thing is what they did in violation of United States laws, smuggling terrorists, something that is severely punished in the United States…”

The story is reaching a boiling point. And, today, Gómez and I call on all the Authentic Journalists in our network to pull hard on the frayed threads of the curtain that hid these terrorists, and those who protect them, from public view.

Today we issue the call – as we did weeks ago in Bolivia – for the “Authentic Journalism swarm” to assemble and finish this story from a thousand directions.

(Also of note, and related: our report includes a link to Narco News Authentic Journalism professor Andrew Stelzer’s essay in this month’s Clamor magazine discussing the very kinds of issues for journalists that the Posada investigation raises, and today we link to and translate journalist Vicki Pelaez’s column in the New York daily El Diario comparing the trajectories of Gary Webb and Bob Woodward: “Two Journalists, Two Fates.”)

See the historic photographs of the terrorist boat and its crew on Isla Mujeres, read the story of how Authentic Journalists pulled a thread that now reveals the role of drug trafficking and immigrant smuggling in the Posada case, and follow Gómez’s chronology of the criminal record of América’s most wanted terrorist:

http://www.narconews.com/Issue38/article1353.html

The facts of the Posada Carriles case can topple an Empire that is no more formidable than a shrimp boat adrift in a sea of terrorism and narco-trafficking.

Authentic Journalists: Pull this string. Yank hard, and do it for justice. Avenge the lies. Do it for Gary Webb.

From somewhere in a country called América,

Al Giordano
Correspondent
The Narco News Bulletin
http://www.narconews.com

© Scoop Media