The GOP’s Bill Ayers?
The
McCain campaign has its own questionable connections to bombers and
assassins.
By
A.L. Bardach Read Spanish Version
From
Slate Magazine
The
campaign of John McCain has made much of Barack Obama’s relationship
with Weather Underground bomber-turned-university professor Bill
Ayers, whom Republicans call an "unrepentant terrorist."
Indeed, the Obama-Ayers connection has become a centerpiece of the
McCain-Palin campaign. V.P. nominee Sarah Palin mentions Ayers in
practically every public appearance, and John McCain has all but
promised to bring up Ayers in tonight’s debate.
McCain’s
campaign, however, has its own questionable connections to
terrorists. Since John F. Kennedy’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion,
Florida’s Cuban-Americans have been regarded as a reliable Republican
voting block. And from 1960 until Sept. 11, 2001, some exile
hard-liners in Miami endorsed a double standard on terrorism in which
anti-Castro militants and bombers were judged to be "freedom
fighters," regardless of the civilian deaths and collateral
damage they caused in Cuba and
the
United States, as well as elsewhere. While the Cuban-American
community has undergone dramatic changes — with the majority now
supporting dialogue with Cuba and an end to restrictions on travel
and remittances — hard-liners still control the major levers of
power in Miami. Such is their clout in turning out reliable voters
that McCain dropped his stance of 2000, when he said he would support
normalizing relations with Cuba even under Fidel Castro. ("I’d
be willing to do the same thing we did with—with Vietnam.")
McCain
has
allied his campaign with the Cuban Liberty Council, an uncompromising
anti-Castro group that has all but dictated policy to George W. Bush.
Two of the council’s most prominent members, media personality
Ninoska Perez-Castellon and her husband, Roberto Martin Perez, have
been among McCain’s most dedicated campaigners and champions in
Miami.
As
a result, McCain’s campaign and advisers find themselves allied with
and/or supporting militants who have committed acts that any
reasonable observer would define as terrorism. On July 20, while
campaigning for McCain in Miami and just prior to speaking at a
McCain event,
Sen. Joe Lieberman met with the wife of convicted serial bomber
Eduardo Arocena and promised to pursue a presidential pardon on his
behalf. Arocena is the founder of the notorious Cuban exile militant
group Omega 7, renowned for a string of bombings from 1975 to 1983.
Arocena
was convicted of the 1980 murder of a Cuban diplomat in Manhattan. In
1983, Arocena was arrested and charged with 42 counts pertaining to
conspiracy, explosives, firearms, and destruction of foreign
government property within the United States. He is currently serving
a life sentence in federal prison in Indiana. His targets included:
-
Madison
Square Garden (he blew up an adjacent store); -
JFK
airport (Arocena’s group planted a suitcase bomb intended for a TWA
flight to Los Angeles — in protest of the airline’s flights to
Cuba. The plane would have exploded if not for the fact that the
bomb went off on the tarmac prior to being loaded); -
Avery
Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center (causing damage to three levels of the
theater and halting the performance of a music group from Cuba); -
the
ticket office of the Soviet airline Aeroflot; -
and
a church.
He
also attempted to assassinate the Cuban ambassador to the United
Nations.
Arocena
was also convicted of the 1979 murder of New Jersey resident Eulalio
José Negrín. The 37-year-old Negrín, who
advocated diplomacy with Cuba, was machine-gunned down as he stepped
into his car, dying in the arms of his 13-year-old son.
Nevertheless,
Lieberman, who at the time was McCain’s first choice for vice
president and is said to top McCain’s list for secretary of state,
was caught on video promising Miriam Arocena he would petition
Washington to grant a pardon to her husband. "It’s my
responsibility; it’s my responsibility. I will carry [the pardon
request] back. I will carry it back," Lieberman told Arocena
just before addressing a group at a McCain event. "I think of
you like you were my family. … I’ll bring it back. I’ll do my
best."
Queried
on the matter, a Lieberman spokesman demurred, telling the AP, "Sen.
Lieberman does not intervene in criminal proceedings including
requests for pardons. The correspondence was merely forwarded without
any comment, endorsement or support whatsoever."
Another
vocal champion of an Arocena pardon is CLC member Roberto Martin
Perez, who narrates a McCain commercial about Castro that has played
in South Florida. His wife, radio host Ninoska Perez-Castellon, says
that the McCain campaign has queried them about making a television
spot as well.
Miami
attorney Alfredo Duran, Bay of Pigs veteran and a leader of the Cuban
Committee for Democracy, explains the GOP strategy: "They think
that the Arocena campaign will energize a certain segment of the
ultra-conservative exile community that will deliver for McCain and
the Republican Party."
Arocena
is not the only militant who’s received help from McCain’s team. In
September, McCain announced he was choosing Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a
Republican congressman from Miami, as his senior adviser and
spokesman on Latin America. Rep. Diaz-Balart is a fierce hard-liner
on Cuba, advocating, at various times, a blockade of the island, even
military action if needed, to unseat Fidel Castro (his former uncle,
once married to Diaz-Balart’s aunt). He, too, has been a supporter of
certain kinds of terrorists who have struck on American soil. Since
2000, Diaz-Balart and his colleague Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen have
lobbied for and helped win the release of several convicted exile
terrorists from U.S. prisons. Among the most notorious were Omega 7
members Jose Dionisio Suarez Esquivel and Virgilio Paz Romero, both
convicted for their roles in the 1976 assassination of Chilean
diplomat Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt
with a car bomb in Washington, D.C. According to four agents I
interviewed, the FBI also suspects the pair were involved in other
bombings and attacks. (Suarez is known by the nickname "Charco
de Sangre"
— Pool of Blood.)
Diaz-Balart
also pushed for the release of Valentin Hernandez, who gunned down
Miami resident and Cuban émigré Luciano Nieves in
February 1975, for speaking out in support of a dialogue with Cuba.
Nieves was ambushed by Hernandez in a hospital parking lot in Miami
after visiting his 11-year-old son. Hernandez also went on to kill a
former president of the Bay of Pigs Association in an internecine
feud. Hernandez was captured in Puerto Rico in 1977 and sentenced to
life in prison. Today, Hernandez is living freely in Florida.
Nor
has McCain’s senior adviser Diaz-Balart ever wavered in seeking "due
process" for legendary bombers and would-be Castro assassins
Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch. Both were charged with the
bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1976, killing all 73 civilian
passengers — the first act of airline terrorism in the Americas. In
2005, when I asked him about those who died — many of them teenage
athletes — Bosch responded, "We were at war with Castro, and in
war, everything is valid."
After
serving nine years, Posada "escaped" from prison in
Caracas, Venezuela, thanks to a bribe paid to the warden. Posada
gives effusive thanks in his memoir, Los
Caminos del Guerrero,
to at least two members of the Cuban Liberty Council for their help
in resettling him during his early fugitive days. After serving 11
years, Bosch won an acquittal (following death threats to several
judges hearing the case). However, hundreds
of pages of memorandum of the FBI, CIA, and State Department,
released by the National Security Archives,
leave no doubt that U.S. authorities fully concurred with Venezuelan,
Trinidadian, and Cuban intelligence that the two men had masterminded
the airplane bombing.
Former
Attorney General Richard Thornburgh described Bosch, who spent four
years in federal prison for firing a bazooka into a Polish freighter
bound for Havana in Miami’s harbor, as an "unreformed terrorist"
and recommended immediate deportation when he showed up in Miami in
1988. But there were political considerations in Miami. Ros-Lehtinen,
then running for Congress and now the Republican leader of the House
foreign-affairs committee, lauded Bosch as a hero and a patriot.
After she personally lobbied then-President George Bush (with her
campaign manager Jeb Bush at a meeting noted in the Miami media),
Bush overruled the FBI and the Justice and State departments, and
Bosch was granted U.S. residency.
In
1998, I interviewed Luis Posada in Aruba for an investigative series
for the New York Times in which he claimed to have orchestrated
numerous attacks on both civilian and military targets during his
50-year war to topple Castro. Most notably, Posada took credit for
masterminding the 1997 bombings of Cuban hotels that killed an
Italian vacationer and wounded 11 others.
Posada
made his last failed attempt to eliminate Fidel Castro at the
Ibero-America Summit in Panama in November 2000. After his trial and
conviction in 2004, Diaz-Balart (along with his brother, Rep. Mario
Diaz-Balart, and Ros-Lehtinen), wrote at least two letters on
official U.S. Congress stationery to Panamanian President Mireya
Moscoso seeking the release of Posada and his collaborators.
"We
ask respectfully that you pardon Luis Posada Carriles, Guillermo Novo
Sampol, Pedro Crispin Remon and Gaspar Jimenez Escobedo," went
one missive. On Aug. 24, 2004, Posada and his fellow conspirators —
all with colorful rap sheets — received a last-minute pardon from
the outgoing Moscoso.
Posada’s
supporters tell me that he had been quietly assured by several Miami
exile leaders that he would be allowed to live free in the United
States like Bosch. While still a fugitive, Posada slipped into Miami
in 2005. But following international outrage over his release, a
federal grand jury was impaneled in Newark, N.J., in January 2006 to
hear evidence against Posada for the Havana hotel bombings. FBI
investigators testified that Posada had smuggled plastic explosives
in shampoo bottles and shoes into Cuba a few weeks prior to the
bombings.
At
the cost of millions of dollars, dozens of witnesses have testified
to the grand jury over two and a half years. On Sept. 19 and 20,
2007, two witnesses, compelled to turn state’s evidence, offered
damning evidence implicating Posada and his confederates.
(Disclosure: The New York Times and I were subpoenaed in the matter
but have not appeared before the grand jury, citing First Amendment
protections.)
But
election year politics seem to have interfered with the case. One of
the attorneys representing Posada’s comrades in the case told me that
the defendants received target letters last year and were warned by
the FBI that they would be indicted by the end of 2007. Now he says
it is certain nothing will happen because of the 2008 elections and
the damage that could be done to the McCain ticket, the Diaz-Balarts,
and Ros-Lehtinen. Another Posada attorney told me that he had been
assured that Posada’s case "is being handled at the highest
levels" of the Justice Department.
In
the meantime, Posada has resettled in Miami. In November 2007, the
Big Five Club, an elite watering hole for Miami’s movers and shakers,
hosted an art show and fundraiser to benefit Posada and his
comrade-in-arms, Letelier assassin José Dionisio Suárez.
On May 2, 2008, there was another gala fundraiser in honor of Luis
Posada at the Big Five Club. Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ros-Lehtinen
were both invited.
A
few months earlier, a relaxed and expansive Posada attended a tribute
for a well-known Cuban dissident. Just a few feet away from him, amid
the ding of clinking glasses, were Reps. Lincoln Diaz-Balart and
Ros-Lehtinen. Should McCain-Palin prevail in November, those pesky,
pending indictments against Posada are very likely to get tossed.
Ann
Louise Bardach has written the "Interrogations" column for
Slate
and is the author of Without
Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana, and Washington,
to
be published in April, and Cuba
Confidential:
Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana.
