Today, Alejandro Armengol links to a Granma article that reports that the case of Luis Posada Carriles, the notorious Cuban exile militant, has been rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. The International Herald Tribune also has the story from the AP.Posada's lawyers were delivered a devastating reversal last August when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against them, allowing Posada's case on criminal immigration charges to continue. Back in August, it was expected that the Supreme Court would not take the case.
Earlier this month, Luis Posada Carriles attended the Eight National Congress of Alpha 66 at the Big Five Club in West Miami. The event also served as an exhibition of Posada's paintings.
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Update: Radio Mambi this morning read El Nuevo Herald on Posada's Supreme Court rejection. Posada's lawyer, Arturo Hernandez, is asking to postpone the trial until next year. Which is very odd because in the article Hernandez says that he was not surprised by the Supreme Court's rejection, but now he needs at least TEN MONTHS to prepare his case for 2010. If he anticipated a rejection, which was the likely decision by the US Supreme Court, what has he been doing for the past SIX MONTHS since the Fifth Circuit Court's decision last August?
There have been sufficient delays in this case.
After the El Nuevo Herald article was read, co-host Enrique Encinosa, who also serves as a news editor for Radio Mambi, commented that this entire judicial process is "offensive" and "shameful" given Posada age and historical background. (Encinosa believes certain acts of terrorism are justified.)
Back in November 15, 2007, Posada's lawyer, Arturo Hernandez, appeared before a US House Subcommittee and explained:
"Mr. Posada Carriles is now almost 80 years old. His is the story of a man’s singular mission to combat Castro’s violent revolutionary communism in all its manifestations and permutations wherever it has reared its ugly head and at whatever personal cost to him. His individual struggle against communism was in a very real sense the often unobserved struggle of our hemisphere to avoid the sovietization of Latin America as part of the great ideological and strategic contest between the United States and the Soviet Union known as the 'Cold War'... and, it is no exaggeration to suggest that more than a few South American and Central American countries owe their democracies to the sacrifices incurred by men and women such as Mr. Posada Carriles."
Hernandez dismisses the accusations of Posada's involvement in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban civilian plane that killed 73 people because the "forensic evidence alone proves that he is innocent." But, I have written before that there's good reason to believe that the forensic evidence in that case is most likely worthless.
[Photo above of Luis Posada Carriles recently at the Big Five, from Alpha 66 website.]
