Bush's Record on Anti-Terrorism

Don't Look Too Closely

By SAUL LANDAU
CounterPunch

"President George W. Bush has promoted himself as single-mindedly tough on terrorists and those who protect them. "We make no distinction between those who committed these acts and those who harbor them," he told the nation on September 11, 2001. But Muslims or Arab suspects with no evidence or charges against them generally get "rendered" to other nations or Guantanamo while anti-Castro terrorists who destroyed an airplane with passengers aboard get kid glove treatment.

The most dramatic example of Bush coddling Castro-hating terrorists involves Luis Posada Carriles. On October 6, 1976, agents working for Posada and Orlando Bosch, another hate screaming anti Castroite, planted a bomb on a Cuban commercial plane and blew it up shortly after it took off from Barbados. All 73 passengers and crew members perished. Thirty years later, Posada sits in an El Paso jail cell. Since his airliner "success" he went on to add new notches to his terrorist gun ­ including an attempted assassination of Fidel Castro in Panama in 1999.

When Posada illegally entered the United States last year, Homeland Security agents ignored him until he held a press conference. Then, embarrassed that they had not grabbed him when he entered the country without a visa, they gently arrested him and charged him with "illegal entry." Washington has since refused to answer Venezuela's request to extradite him to the place where he plotted the airliner bombing. The excuse accepted by the El Paso judge for not considering Venezuela was that Venezuela might torture him; ironic in light of Bush authorizing torture for terrorist suspects this October.

Compare the way Homeland Security handled Posada with the case of Maher Arar. In 2002, officials arrested Arar when he landed at JFK airport in New York, to change planes on his way to Canada where he lived. U.S. immigration authorities placed the Syrian-born Canadian citizen and software engineer on a plane. Before boarding the aircraft he had demanded from U.S. authorities his rights to a lawyer, to hear charges against him as established by international law. The official told him: "The INS is not the body or the agency that signed the Geneva Convention against torture." Hearing he was bound for Syria, Arar says he foresaw torture.

Canadian police had previously informed U.S. officials that Arar was "an Islamic extremist suspected of being linked to the al-Qaida terrorist network." U.S. officials didn't ask Canada to verify the data, however. Indeed, a Canadian inquiry completed in September 2006 found that days before the U.S. rendered Arar to Syria, Canadian police had advised the FBI that they possessed no definitive evidence of Arar's links to terrorist groups. Yet, Arar remained in solitary confinement and was tortured at the behest of Washington for almost a year. Flimsy suspicion based on one Canadian report and countered by another provided Homeland Security with sufficient motive to deport Arar and request that Syria torture him."