The U.S. is a safe haven for terrorists.

last updated 8 January 2015

Mexico

Editorial

Turns out the U.S. hasn’t declared war on all terrorists, just the ones that kill Americans, said Mexico City’s La Jornada in an editorial. A U.S. judge just let Luis Posada Carriles, the former CIA operative wanted in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people, out of jail in New Mexico. Posada, now 79, is “the very embodiment of the international terrorist.” Born in Cuba, he worked for the Batista regime’s secret police, informing on those loyal to Fidel Castro, before training as a terrorist at the U.S. Army’s notorious School of the Americas in Georgia. His exploits included bombing Cuban embassies around the world and organizing the sale of drugs to purchase Iranian weapons for the Nicaraguan contras—the crux of the famous Iran—Contra scandal of the Reagan era. Yet rather than extraditing Posada to Venezuela, where he holds citizenship, to stand trial for these crimes, the U.S. set bail at $250,000, “which the terrorist networks in the Miami Cuban community easily raised.” Now he gets to lounge around at his wife’s house in Miami while awaiting trial on the insultingly trivial charge of immigration fraud. The White House is simply “not about to allow one of its own terrorists to face justice.” Such a blatant double standard has “erased Washington’s moral authority in the war on terror.”