American terrorism: Cuba and the Bush connection

The November issue of The Atlantic reviews thirty years of American terrorism, with a thread of once-removed Bush connections. Emphases mine. Bosh and Postada, anti-Castro cubans, are the alleged masterminds. The youths who blew up the plane were quickly arrested and served twenty years in Venezualan prisons...

Twilight of the Assassins

It was the first act of airline terrorism in the Americas: thirty years ago, seventy-three people died in the bombing of a Cuban passenger plane. Now, one alleged mastermind lives freely in Miami, while another awaits trial on other charges in Texas...

...why did the Reagan and Bush administrations hire Posada and grant Bosch U.S. residency, when the CIA believed they’d had a hand in blowing up the plane?...

...the attention Posada garnered from the Times series was more than he had bargained for. His boasts of masterminding the bombings compromised his supporters in South Florida and New Jersey, some of whom he named as providing him with money. If the attorney general decides to try Posada for acts of terrorism, Exhibit A will be Posada’s own admissions. Two grand juries, one in El Paso and another in Union City, New Jersey, empaneled intermittently to investigate Posada’s activities, have subpoenaed several exile militants and detained one who refused to testify. What’s clear from the meandering investigation, however, is that the Bush Justice Department has been reluctant so far to prosecute this case....

... George H. W. Bush became director of the CIA in January 1976 and served through January 1977. Bush succeeded William Colby... Colby had implemented major reforms, including a prohibition on political assassinations, and was the first director to give major public briefings to Congress on agency operations. These actions deeply alienated some of the CIA’s more committed Cold Warriors, many of whom backed the appointment of Bush.

When Bush took up his post, he offered Ted Shackley, the former head of JMWave, the CIA’s third most powerful job: associate deputy director. Bush appears to have had contacts with Cuban exiles as far back as the 1960s, when, according to a declassified memo by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI briefed him on their response to the assassination of John F. Kennedy...

Shackley was a divisive figure, and relations between Henry Kissinger’s State Department and George Bush’s CIA were painfully strained—so much so, according to William Rogers, the assistant secretary of state for Latin America, that the State Department rarely relied on CIA intelligence. “The agency was controlled by hard-liners,” he said. “They had an agenda, and the intelligence was lousy.” Shackley later played a role in the Iran-Contra affair.

Bush’s tenure at the CIA coincided with the worst spate of bombings and assassinations by Cuban exile militants in Latin America and in the United States. At that time, bombs went off regularly in Miami; sometimes there were several explosions in one day. In December 1975, thirteen bombs went off in forty-eight hours, striking at the very heart of the city: the airport, the police department, the state attorney’s office, the Social Security building, the post office, and the FBI’s main office...

...In 1989, securing Bosch’s release was one of the cornerstones of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s congressional campaign in Miami. She praised Bosch as a hero and a patriot on exile radio stations and raised $265,000 for his legal defense fund. Her campaign manager was a political neophyte, but one who had the ear of the White House. His name was Jeb Bush.

On August 17, 1989, Jeb Bush attended a meeting he had arranged for Ros-Lehtinen with his father to discuss the matter. The following July, President Bush rejected his own Justice Department’s recommendation and authorized Bosch’s release... ... Two years later, the Bush administration granted Bosch U.S. residency.

...In 2002, Governor Jeb Bush appointed Raoul Cantero, Orlando Bosch’s attorney, to the Florida Supreme Court...

The Bush family has not always been unequivocally opposed to terrorists, even terrorists who've bombed American targets. (I'd forgotten about the Miami bombings -- back when Miami was a small town. That was around the time the FLQ was bombing and kidnapping in my home province of Quebec.) I am sure a similar story could be told about many American political families and the IRA. The Bushies and the Kennedys seem to have more than a passing resemblance in several respects.

The story adds another gloss to George W's Oedipal complex, and to the passionate hatred of "terrorism" that became his watchword. As has been pointed out many times, "terrorist" is a relatively meaningless term. It also suggests reasons why Jeb could never have run for the presidency -- even before 9/11.

Lastly, politically controlled and worse-than-worthless intelligence was not an invention of George Jr and Dick in Iraq. George Sr pioneered it when he ran the CIA ...