MIAMI — He has admitted to bombing Havana hotels, served time for plotting to assassinate Fidel Castro and for more than 20 years was a fugitive from charges of blowing up a Cuban airliner.
But 17 months after Luis Posada Carriles was arrested and sent to a Texas immigration lockup, U.S. officials have declined to label him a terrorist or charge him with a crime. On Friday, a federal judge in El Paso gave the U.S. government until Feb. 1 to bring a case against Posada or the reputed bomber will be freed.
He has become a political liability for the Bush administration in its declared global war on terrorism.
As a veteran of nearly five decades of covert operations in Latin America, including the Bay of Pigs invasion, clandestine Cold War actions and the Iran-Contra affair, Posada knows where Washington's bodies are buried.
If Posada, 79, were to be prosecuted, he probably would seek to defend himself against any criminal charges by arguing that his violent actions were on behalf of his CIA masters.
His Miami lawyer, Eduardo Soto, alluded to his client's past collaboration with U.S. intelligence services as he pressed the Cuban militant's unsuccessful quest for political asylum.
"A public trial of Luis Posada would certainly reveal embarrassing details on the degree to which U.S. covert operatives used terrorism as a tool in the 1960s," said Peter Kornbluh of the independent National Security Archive at George Washington University.
Kornbluh has compiled declassified CIA and FBI evidence of Posada's role in the 1976 plane bombing, near Barbados, of a Cuban airliner in which all 73 on board died. Among the documents in the archive's online dossier is one recently obtained through Freedom of Information Act litigation that shows Posada informed his CIA minders of the plot to blow up the airliner three months ahead of the attack.
The administration has avoided bringing a criminal case against Posada, who enjoys strong support among Miami's politically powerful Cuban exiles, by handling him like any other immigration offender and simply seeking his deportation.
Posada returned to Florida in March 2005, reportedly on a fellow exile's shrimp boat sent to fetch him from an island off the Yucatan Peninsula. He'd made his way there six months after being pardoned by outgoing Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso in August 2004 after serving four years for attempting to kill Castro at a Panama summit in 2000.
