A leading American, independent investigative institution wants the outgoing Barack Obama-administration to finally release still secret documents, under the country’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), related to the surviving mastermind of the 1976 twin-bombing of the Cubana Airliner.
The unique organisation – the National Security Archive (NSA) – “founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars to check rising Government secrecy” is calling for officials “to declassify all remaining intelligence records” on Miami-resident, Cuban-born Luis Posada Carriles, who is free and ailing at 88.
In a statement on its website, the NSA said such action “would shed light on his activities, provide historical evidence for his victims, and offer a gesture of declassified diplomacy towards Cuba.”
“Now is the time for the Government to come clean on Posada’s covert past and his involvement in international terrorism,” asserted Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Archive’s Cuba Documentation Project (CDP). Relatives of “his victims, the public and the Courts have a right to know.”
During covert talks in 2013 and 2014 between White House officials and representatives of Cuban President Raul Castro that led to the historic restoration of diplomatic relations, “the Cubans repeatedly raised the issue of Posada’s presence in the US.” the NSA disclosed. President Obama visited the island earlier this year, the first such trip by an American leader since President Calvin Coolidge in 1928.
Kornbluh has previously described the naturalized-Venezuelan as “a leading purveyor of terrorism” and urged “a historical and judicial accounting.” In scathing testimony to a Congressional Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee on International Organisations, Human Rights, and Oversight, in 2007, he questioned Posada’s preferential treatment within the context of the superpower’s leadership in the war on terror and cited files that the NSA have publicized as “simply the tip of an iceberg of evidence – much of which remains secret and stored in the archives of the US national security agencies.”
“Even though we have gathered dozens of documents on this case…there are hundreds more that I believe this Committee and the American people have a need to know about – indeed a right to know about.” Kornbluh categorized several sets – declassified but heavily censored pieces, hiding information; specific Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) briefs on the attack and its aftermath; and a comprehensive CIA “201” portfolio on Posada featuring Volume Five covering the time of the Cubana explosion.
“In this day and age when none of us can board a plane with a bottle of water or a dispenser of deodorant, the American people deserve to know that their Government has retrieved and examined every detail of how terrorists brought down an airliner using a tube of toothpaste,” he declared in his presentation. The second, more devastating bomb that sent the plane into its death dive off the scenic Barbados coast was concealed in a Colgate container stashed in the rear washroom.
Located on the campus of the George Washington University in the capital, the NSA reposted a commemorative array of critical online material clearly implicating Posada in the mid-air atrocity, on the recent 40th anniversary of Flight 455’s downing in which all 73 passengers, including 11 Guyanese and the entire Cuban fencing team died.
An annotated list of four volumes of still-locked away records on Posada’s long career with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), his acts of violence and his participation with hardline partner, Orlando Bosch in the Caribbean tragedy, are mentioned in the items sent out. Bosch died in 2011 in Miami.
One report revealed that days before the airliner’s sabotage a CIA source had overheard Posada bragging, “We are going to hit a Cuban airliner” and “Orlando has the details.” A key passage of another warned “some people in the Venezuelan government are involved in the bombing, and that if Posada Carriles talks” then the informant and “others in the Venezuelan government ‘will go down the tube,’” and “we’ll have our own Watergate.”
Posada illegally entered the US in 2005 by a friend’s boat, the “Santrina” and after a highly publicized press conference he was detained and prosecuted for immigration fraud in Texas but eventually acquitted. His presence caused an international imbroglio for the President George W. Bush-establishment which bowed to pressure from the powerful Cuban exile community. The President’s brother Jeb was at the time Governor of Florida, a battleground swing state.
Hundreds of pieces connected to the case were ordered sealed following requests from the Miami Herald and the Associated Press which tried to get a look, while the FBI reportedly shredded much of its evidence against Posada. His attorney, Arturo Hernandez submitted that the defendant’s relationship with the CIA was relevant and admissible, stemming from Posada’s work against the Fidel Castro regime, through to anti-communist activities in Venezuela and Central America.
In his Congressional testimony, Kornbluh alluded to a dossier of 700 closed FBI and CIA logs that formed part of earlier immigration proceedings against Bosch, Posada’s co-conspirator, who had also returned illegally to the US, in 1988, when he too was detained for over a year as an excludable alien. Bosch eventually received an administrative pardon from the White House of the elder Bush patriarch, President George H.W Bush which overruled the Department of Justice (DOJ).
An NSA Senior Analyst, Kornbluh dubbed the Cubana bombing “a crime of tremendous consequence” and one “that remains relevant today because of our pressing need to understand how terrorists actually plan and commit such acts of mass murder…”
“I dare say that had this crime been committed more recently, and if Posada’s first name was Mohammed rather than Luis, this evidence would have been more than sufficient to get him rendered to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” he argued.
Attorney Hernandez’s motion alleged that the American Government was complicit in bomb-setting in Cuba and asked that it declassify all such information showing this “involvement, knowledge, acquiescence and complicity” plus full disclosure of training instructions, memoirs or other paperwork and all activities on behalf of the US or any of its agencies.
According to the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), another contentious issue between the two countries was Cuba’s designation by the U.S. State Department (SD) as a sponsor of terrorism, a status first assigned in 1982 in light of Fidel Castro’s training of rebels in Central America. He announced in 1992 that Cuba would no longer support insurgents abroad, and the SD’s 2013 report found “no evidence that the country provided training or weapons to terrorist groups. Cuba’s continued inclusion on the list was a major obstacle to talks about restoring diplomatic relations following the 2014 rapprochement.” In May last year, Cuba was removed, the Council explained in its September 2016 backgrounder.
Acknowledging that US domestic politics have long made détente with Cuba risky, the Council singled out the large Cuban-American community in southern Florida as traditionally influencing American policy towards the communist state. Both Republicans and Democrats have feared alienating a strong voting block in the key swing state in elections, it said.
“The Cuban exile community in the Miami area, which makes up about 5 percent of Florida’s population, has been ‘a pillar of Republican support in presidential elections since 1980,’ writes Arturo Lopez-Levy in the Foreign Policy Journal. In Tuesday’s election, Republican candidate Donald Trump won the 29 vital electoral votes or 10.7 per cent needed to clinch the Presidency.
In the last three decades, the NSA has increasingly led invaluable legal and other efforts advocating open government, and indexing and publishing former secrets as the leading non-profit user of the 1967-effective landmark FOIA, which gives Americans “the right to know” or to request public access to data from any federal agency. Nine exemptions protect US interests such as personal privacy, national security and law enforcement.
Yet, “the FOIA requires agencies to proactively post online certain categories of information, including frequently requested records. As the Congress, the President and the Supreme Court have all recognised, the FOIA is a vital part of our democracy,” the DOJ affirms online in a link devoted to the law.
“President Obama and the Department of Justice have directed agencies to apply a presumption of openness in responding to FOIA requests” and urged “a spirit of cooperation with FOIA requesters.” The Office of Information Policy at the DOJ oversees adherence and “encourages all agencies to fully comply with both the letter and the spirit of the FOIA.”
It is because of the tireless NSA efforts that a trove of remarkable evidence was divulged over the years about the Cubana and other crimes. Combining a unique variety of functions, the extraordinary Archive operates as an investigative journalism centre, international affairs research institute, library/repository of declassified US documents, and public interest law firm defending and expanding access to government data.
Entirely privately funded by individual donations and foundation grants, the organization’s US$3M annual budget also relies on publication revenues with some 70 books in print by Archive members and fellows. The NSA is highly acclaimed, winning numerous illustrious honours for its investigative journalism and scholarship, among them a 2005 Emmy and the 1999 George Polk and 1998 George Foster Peabody Awards. Among other commendations are the 1996 Pulitzer Prize, the 1995 National Book Award and the 2010 Henry Adams Prize.
The Archive has helped in high-level convictions covering genocide in Guatemala, to human rights cases in Sierra Leone, Argentina, Peru and Uruguay.
It has made more than 50 000 targeted FOIA requests to over 200 offices and agencies of the US Government, which opened up a record 10 million pages of confidential records, with over a million set out on the World Wide Web (WWW). The Archive has filed scores of lawsuits lasting years too, forcing the freeing up of items ranging from the letters of President John F. Kennedy/President Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis to the previously censored photographs of homecoming ceremonies with flag-draped caskets for war casualties.
Last June, President Obama signed the most significant collection of improvements to the FOIA since its passage 50 years ago. The important bipartisan, bicameral Bill reflected many of the NSA’s findings from its audits and litigation, and mandated a 25-year sunset for FOIA exemptions. Days ago, the changes forced the CIA to halt its rigid stone-walling and to let go of “dirty linen” in the long-contested Volume Five of its official account of the failed Cuban Bay of Pigs Invasion.
NSA Director Tom Blanton remarked: “Now the public gets to decide for itself how confusing the CIA can be. How many thousands of taxpayer dollars were wasted trying to hide a CIA historian’s opinion that the Bay of Pigs aftermath degenerated into a nasty internal power struggle?”
ID reads that agent Luis Posada Carriles was judged by his “Company” – the CIA – and Supervisor Grover Lythcott as “not a typical boom and bang” type but someone “acutely aware of the international implications of ill planned or over enthusiastic activities against Cuba” who “would discourage activities which would be embarrassing to WOLADY” the Agency’s codename for the US, a NSA file indicates.
