[NYTr] Bush and Posada have a buddy in Congress: Dana Rohrabacher, Terrorists' Pal

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Granma International - Nov 30, 2007
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2007/noviembre/vier30/48dana-i.html


Bush and Posada have a buddy in the Congress hearings

BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD
Granma International staff writer

DANA Rohrabacher, (R-California), the Republican congressman who
denigrated witnesses documenting Luis Posada Carriles’ participation
in acts of terrorism during the Congressional hearing on his crimes,
is a personal friend and fanatic follower of Oliver North, Posada’s
ex-boss when he was trafficking arms for drugs in the Salvadoran
airbase of Ilopango, under instructions from the CIA.

Rohrabacher described former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier,
assassinated in the heart of Washington on Pinochet’s orders, as a
"Castro agent." He later added that during the cold war the rules were
different: assassinating agents of enemy countries was justifiable,
thus preparing a way out for Posada Carriles.

In his attempt to weaken testimony that might incriminate the
international terrorist, the distinguished representative of the
Republican Party, a personal friend of Congresswoman Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen, failed to mention his links with North and the CIA
connection that provoked the ill-named Iran-Contra scandal.

Rohrabacher, who spent his youth surfing on Californian beaches,
transformed himself from a beach bum into a speech writer for Ronald
Reagan.

"WE HAVE PEOPLE TO TAKE CARE OF THESE THINGS"

Ten years after his seven in the service of that administration, he
recalled at a $150-a head banquet dedicated to Oliver North, how he knew
the shamed officer, the executor of the most diabolical plans of George
Bush Sr., then vice president.

"He was just a guy who worked on the upper floor of the White House. We
always knew that he toured the whole world doing crazy things.... We had
no idea what he did! I remember how, at some point, I went to Ollie
during the Contra war to ask him: ‘What can I do to help?’ He made a
number of suggestions (none of them even close to the legal line), but
added: ‘You don’t have to do it, we have people to take care of these
things,’" the politico from Huntingdon, California related.

When the Reagan regime was over, he took advantage of his relationships
to get himself a seat in Congress in 1998... using North as the star for
collecting his election campaign funds.

Rohrabacher is so enthusiastic about "Ollie" North and the gross
illegality of his methods, that he recently became a defender of Erik
Prince, the owner of Blackwater, the U.S. company that hires out
thousands of mercenaries and murderers to the U.S. government for its
continued occupation of Iraq.

Prince is on the way to becoming a U.S. hero like Oliver North was," he
said.

By chance, Prince was also a buddy from the White House years.

SPONSOR OF THE HELMS-BURTON ACT

A great admirer of Jesse Helms, Rohrabacher was one of the co-sponsors
of the Helms-Burton Act.

Inspired by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Díaz-Balart, Cuban-American
congress members of terrorist descent, he never missed a chance to
attack Cuba, especially through lies and slander, clearly a specialty
he honed in his time at Reagan’s side.

In 1999 he even repeated in Congress that China controlled Panama
thanks to the aid of "Castro agents" (a bit obsessive?), and, in 2001,
he unsuccessfully tried to create a scandal around China which --
according to his highly personal theory -- was supplying weapons to
Cuba.

Like Mario Díaz-Balart, he continues to defend Jack Abramoff and his
misdeeds. In 2000, that scandalously corrupt character used him as a
bank reference for buying the Miami SunCruz Casinos.

PROPOSING BAN ON FAMILY REMITTANCES

Rohrabacher is in himself a collection of the barbarities of the U.S.
ultra-right, a man who is in the habit of recalling, not only in tone
but appearance, another of his heroes and predecessors, Senator Joe
McCarthy.

He hates immigrants with a neo-fascist conviction. He was one of those
demanding a wall on the border with Mexico; he urges handing over
illegal immigrants needing hospital treatment; he proposes that
undocumented people not be attended to in emergencies; and has even gone
so far as to suggest an absolute ban on sending remittances abroad, a
measure that would mean the instant ruin of a number of Central
American countries.

In addition to being profoundly racist, he is against abortion, attacks
sexual minorities, defends possession of firearms, systematically
favors U.S. military interventions in the world, and made himself the
champion of war "by all means" against terrorism.

He is one of the most ardent advocates of the "surrender" of prisoners
kidnapped in various countries and transported to indulgent nations in
CIA secret flights to be tortured.

He is, of course, against any measure in favor of the environment. With
his highly particular sense of humor, he joked in a Congressional
session on this issue that global warming is provoked by carbon dioxide
emissions entering the atmosphere on account of "dinosaur flatulence."

That is the personality of the buddy of the Bush clan and the Miami
mafia in the Congressional hearing on Posada Carriles, now that the
so-called anti-terrorist judges have put the legal proceedings against
this criminal to sleep in El Paso and the grand jury investigation in
New Jersey seems to have evaporated.

North recruited him; the DEA has a file on him

IN 1985, shortly after escaping from the Venezuelan jail where he was
being held for the sabotage a Cubana passenger plane, Luis Posada
Carriles was recruited as logistics chief of the diabolical
machinations via which Félix Rodríguez Mendigutía -- a CIA operative who
had ordered the assassination of Ernesto Che Guevara in 1967 -- filled
North’s orders to supply the Nicaraguan counterrevolution with weapons.

All of this with funding obtained from highly illegal operations and in
violation of an explicit ban on the part of the U.S. Congress.

During the whole of that period, the old CIA collaborator directed the
maneuvers of a fleet of aircraft from the Ilopango airport in El
Salvador, paying the crews with bags of cash from Miami, and supervised
the secret arms and drugs store.

On October 5, 1986, when one of Posada’s light aircraft, piloted by
Eugene Hasenfus, was brought down and the illegal operation was
revealed to the U.S. public, it was Posada who removed all traces of
the giant conspiracy.

Celerino Castillo, an agent from the Drug Enforcement Agency, later
testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence
Committee that his informants had seen stores of drugs, weapons and
money in the Ilopango base. He also stated that many of the Nicaraguan
Contra pilots, the beneficiaries of the clandestine operation, were on
file as drug traffickers.