Commentary
Will U.S. double standard bring chickens home to roost?
By Gregory Kane

HAVANA – It was on this, my third trip to Cuba that I heard a constant refrain from government officials on this Caribbean island long at odds with the “Norte Americanos” – those running the U.S. government.

That refrain involved the phrase “double standard.”

On my first trip to Cuba, in 2004, government officials talked of the double standard of the United States condemning terrorism and countries that harbor terrorists while we allowed a known terrorist, Orlando Bosch, to live freely in Miami.

By 2006, my second trip, they added Luis Posada to the list.

Bosch and Posada are anti-Castro Cubans who have been linked to the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that took 76 lives. Also, they’ve been tied to a string of bombings and assassinations in America and abroad. So it is not without reason that Alejandro Gonzalez Galiano, Cuba’s vice foreign minister for Latin American and Caribbean Issues, said during my most recent visit, “Posada is one of the most dangerous, or perhaps the most dangerous terrorists, in this hemisphere.”

Posada slipped into the United States — via Miami — in 2005 and was whisked off to a detention center in El Paso, Texas, for violating immigration laws. But Posada wasn’t on America’s terrorist watch list. Assata Shakur, the former Black Panther who escaped from a New Jersey prison in 1979 and now lives in Cuba, is on America’s terrorist watch list.

I think these Cubans may be on to something with their claim about double standards. Posada’s crimes have been documented.

Now let’s compare Posada – the guy linked to the murder of 76 people aboard an airliner, dozens of bombings and a string of assassinations – to Shakur.

In May of 1973, Shakur was in a car on the New Jersey Turnpike when shooting broke out between two men who were riding with her and two New Jersey state troopers. Shakur was wounded badly enough that one arm was incapacitated. Two witnesses testified at her subsequent trial that her wounds indicated she was shot with her hands raised. One of the men Shakur was riding with was killed. A state trooper was killed and another wounded.

If we’re to believe the state of New Jersey, then Shakur was involved in a shootout in which she was wounded but somehow managed to wound one state trooper and fatally shoot a second. If we’re to believe the medical experts who testified at her trial, she had her hands raised when she was shot.

In either case, it doesn’t seem that Shakur would fit the classic profile of a terrorist. But on America’s terrorist watch list she remains. Posada’s name hasn’t been anywhere near America’s terrorist watch list, much to the consternation of Cuban government officials.

“How can you explain the contradiction?” asked Ricardo Alarcon, president of the National Assembly, which is Cuba’s legislative body. “Fighting a war on terrorism and harboring a terrorist. The United States has failed to extradite Posada or bring him to trial.” (Posada is wanted in Venezuela, where he escaped from jail while waiting to be tried for bombing the Cuban airliner.)

Posada also has problems with the law in the United States. The FBI had an extensive file on his connection to bombings in Cuba, which violate America’s Neutrality Act. When I told Alarcon that the November, 2006 edition of the American magazine The Atlantic reported that the FBI had “lost” its files on Posada’s case, he could scarcely contain his skepticism.

“The whole idea,” Alarcon answered, “is never to permit a trial because many things could come up.”

One thing surely won’t come up, because it’s already widely known: Bosch lives in Miami because President George Herbert Walker Bush allowed Bosch to remain in the United States, over the objections of his own Department of Justice. Cuban officials reprinted a letter from America’s acting associate attorney general in their book Cuba: The Untold History. (Cuban government officials have the annoying habit of backing up their allegations with facts.)

“For 30 years Bosch has resolutely and perseveringly perpetrated acts of violence,” the letter reads. “He has threatened to carry out and has carried out violent acts of terrorism against numerous targets, including countries friendly to the United States and high-ranking officials of these countries…The United States cannot tolerate the inherent use of terrorism as a means for resolving controversy.”

But tolerate it we did. And, the record shows, we even encouraged it when the target was Cuba.

That’s what Cubans mean by a “double standard.” It’s what Alarcon means when he told a group of black American journalists that “you have a regime that is allegedly fighting terrorism and at the same time protecting terrorists.”

It’s the same double standard that allows us to label a woman wounded in a shootout a terrorist while charging a man on the lam from mass murder charges with piddling immigration violations.

It’s the kind of double standard that makes chickens want to come home to roost.