Dear Miami Herald: Learn how to spell TERRORIST!

Luis Posada Carriles hasn’t been in Cuba for at least five decades now, and that’s not the only thing the Miami Whore–sorry, Herald–gets wrong about him. I’ll excerpt a few passages from one of their latest reports on him. It’s called “Cuban militant Posada is heard on tape discussing bombings”. See if you can spot their problem:

Jurors in the Luis Posada Carriles perjury trial on Monday finished listening to more than two hours of taped excerpts from an interview the Cuban exile militant gave to a New York Times writer 13 years ago in which he talks about bombings in Cuba in 1997 that killed an Italian tourist.

The excerpts were played for the jury by Posada’s lead defense attorney, Arturo V. Hernandez, in an apparent bid to show that his client did not admit to proud “authorship’’ of the Cuban bombing campaign as then New York Times writer Ann Louise Bardach and another reporter, Larry Rohter, wrote in a New York Times article based on the interview published July 12, 1998.

But in testimony Monday, her fourth day on the witness stand, Bardach again stood by the story noting that while Posada did not directly say he was the proud author of the attacks, he clearly conveyed proud authorship of the actions in the “totality’ of his statements.

It was the first time since the trial began Jan. 10 that the jurors have heard the entire tape of excerpts, two hours and 40 minutes, from Posada’s interview with Bardach in Aruba in June 1998. The jurors followed the tape, in which Posada’s words are hard to decipher, with a voluminous transcript.

In their story, Bardach and Rohter wrote that in the interview, “Mr. Posada proudly admitted authorship of the hotel bomb attacks last year.’’

That’s the first. Did you spot it? No? Here’s another. This is their sidebar:

This one makes it much clearer, because the mistake is repeated three times. In all three cases, Posada is referred to as a “Cuban militant”. A pretty grievous error, since he was never a, er, militant on behalf of Cuba, but on behalf of the CIA, against Cuba. Actual Cuban militants look more like this:

Or like this:

But not, most emphatically not, like this:

Cuba Journal reports that this was Luis Posada Carriles’s US Army photo. He was a second lieutenant with the rear-guard echelon of the infamous Brigade 2506. I say infamous because this brigade carried out the foiled assault on Cuba otherwise known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Posada wasn’t in it at the time, though; he joined the brigade AFTER that epic failure. Invasor reports that Posada was in the CIA’s training camp at the time. He didn’t get around to formally joining the US Army (no doubt working in what we laughingly call intelligence) until 1963.

A militant? Perhaps, but certainly not a Cuban one. A military member is a more accurate way of saying it; a member of the US military, more accurate still. Most accurate of all, though, would be to call him what he really was: a CIA operative and a professional terrorist. And he was also a torturer. But let’s let Invasor sketch the picture for us:

Posada was sent to direct the repressive organs in Venezuela, first in the Police General Division (DIGEPOL) and later in the Department of Intelligence and Prevention Services (DISIP). He was connected to the assassination plots against Cuban officials in Chile and the one orchestrated against Cuban President Fidel Castro during his visit to that country in 1971. He had received and delivered to the commando in charge false documentation crediting them as members of the Venezuelan television team. He is also related to the disappearance of the Cuban officials murdered in August 1976 in Argentina.

He carried out several criminal missions in various countries of the area and created a team of terrorists that he sent to the Chilean Secret Police (DINA) during Pinochet’s fascist government.

Posada recruited two Venezuelans, Hernan Ricardo Losano and Freddy Lugo, to carry out Barbados Crime the sabotage against a civil Cuban airliner in Barbados. These two mercenaries placed the bombs on a CUBANA airliner minutes after the flight took off the Barbados airport in October 6 1976 killing all 73 people on board. He and Orlando Bosch Avila were arrested the following day for having sponsored the crime.

When the Venezuelan police arrested Posada Carriles on October 7, 1976 they found in his office a map of the city of Washington with drawings showing the daily journey Orlando Letelier-the former Chilean foreign minister-used to take to his office before being murdered.

On August 8, 1982 Posada escaped from jail and managed to get into the Chilean embassy in Caracas, but he was sent back to prison. On November 4, 1984 he tried again to escape but he failed. On August 18, 1985 he finally managed to escape from the maximum security prison in San Juan de los Morros.

El Salvador then became the favorite sanctuary of this Cuban terrorist. In September of 1985 he joined another terrorist of Cuban origin, Felix Rodriguez Mendigutia, who had arrived in El Salvador in February of that year following Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North’s instructions to organize the air supply to the “contras” in Nicaragua to support their insurgent actions.

That same year a group of terrorists from Miami visited Posada in his refuge in El Salvador and recommended he move to Honduras. Among them were Juan Perez Franco, then president of the Brigade 2506 and Rolando Mendoza, a former mercenary of the same Brigade who also visited him in December 1988 to organize an attack against the Cuban president when he would visit Venezuela.

Quite the criminal career for a mere “militant”!

The Herald slipped up a bit in its sidebar when it mentioned his CIA ties, but other than that, it sticks to the touching story of a brave, rebellious militant, fighting for freedom on behalf of Washington against evil wicked Fidel. Someone who couldn’t possibly have bragged to Ann Louise Bardach (then of the New York Times) for three whole days about his terrorist activities against Fidel’s “totalitarian” régime:

Hernandez zeroed in on the absence of any statement in the tape or the transcript in which Posada proudly admits authorship. Hernandez specifically noted that in one passage where Bardach asks Posada to confirm a Miami Herald story about his alleged role in the bombings, the exile militant answers: “More or less.’’

Hernandez then adds: “Posada says more or less, not the same as proudly admits, wouldn’t you say, Ms. Bardach?’’

“That is just not so,’’ Bardach said. “I would agree that in that one passage, it’s an admission.’’ Later she added: “You don’t contact a reporter from the New York Times and spend three days talking. He wanted publicity.’’

Surely not to help him, a veteran of the US Army and the CIA, gain legal, permanent resident status? No, he’s just a poor misunderstood “militant” who had to slink into the US illegally, and then lie about it, because his old comrades wouldn’t grant him residency any other way, boo hoo.

I just love how the Miami Herald takes up for him, ever so subtly, while pretending to report objectively on his case. It’s so cute, and even kind of touching.

But there are times, and this is one of them, where I really wish they would learn how to spell the word we all know they’d use if they were really objective. And it’s not spelled M-I-L-I-T-A-N-T.

It’s spelled T-E-R-R-O-R-I-S-T.