Saul Landau comes up with one truly worthy of The Onion, from Progreso Weekly:
Posada to address UM graduates
DRAFT OF SPEECH FOUND IN EL PASO TEXAS JAIL CELL OF LUIS POSADA CARRILES AFTER HE WAS BAILED OUT TO GRADUATING STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERISTY OF MIAMI
WTF?
Graduation means time to face reality. So, get used to violent death. I don’t mean Virginia Tech. Take my case. Some people define me as a terrorist. I stand here today proudly and tell you I used violence to try to destroy the Castro dictatorship and free Cuba. And I will continue to try even in very twilight years.
President Bush has ordered massive killing for freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over there, every day, American soldiers and Iraqis together kill several times the number of people who died in Blacksburg Virginia. This violent Christian fight for freedom has been going on for centuries. I am a crusader — like Bush.
Small minded people quote Bush saying, "He who harbors a terrorist is as guilty as the terrorist." But he meant Arabs, not people who want to assassinate Castro, like me. In all modesty, I’m a patriot. Bush knows that. That’s why the Justice Department has not charged me with terrorist crimes. If killing supposedly innocent people became the criteria for terrorism then Bush himself would have to be accused of being a far bigger terrorist than me.
Bush and I make war against evil people, like Castro, Saddam Hussein and Hugo Chavez. It doesn’t matter if their children and women die in our noble cause. That’s what history has been about. Do you think brave crusaders cared about such sentimentality?
Look at what this country has done, not what its leaders have said. President Jefferson talked of freedom while condoning slavery. Wilson talked about non intervention while intervening in Mexico, Haiti and Nicaragua. Kennedy said: "Ask not what your country can do for you. Rather, ask what you can do for your country." He said ask. But he didn’t answer the question, did he? In 1961, Kennedy claimed he wanted to free Cuba and launched me and my comrades to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Some of us stayed behind to kill the remaining communists after the invaders consolidated their beachhead.
Kennedy was a hypocrite. He talked the talk, as the colored people here say, but he didn’t walk the walk. That’s why some of my old compadres celebrate the day of his death. He chickened out at the Bay of Pigs and during the 1962 Missile Crisis when he could have liberated Cuba with U.S. armed forces and bombs. Instead, he shook hands with that fat Commie pig Nikita Khrushchev and agreed to leave Castro alone.
Well, I didn’t leave him alone.
(Wait for applause to die down)
Afterwards the CIA trained me at Ft. Bennning, along with my friends Jorge Mas Canosa, a great Cuban patriot — may he rest peacefully — who always supported me when I escaped from that prison in Venezuela where I was locked up after people ratted on me for blowing up the plane over Barbados. I’m not saying I did engineer that little job. But I’m not saying I didn’t.
(Wait for laughs to end)
I also want to thank my other Ft. Benning compadre Felix Rodriguez. Are you here mi socio? Well, thank Felix for capturing and killing Che Guevara in 1967. Bien hecho.
My career as a freedom fighter shows the difference between me and those Arabian monsters like bin Laden. I tried to bomb Havana, not New York. I tried to kill Castro, not Cheney.
I am wanted by Cuba and Venezuela but not by the CIA, that trained me to free my country, for who I later worked as a loyal and successful agent from 1965 through 1976. In the late 1980s, I helped Lt. Col. Oliver North re-supply the Contras to kill Sandinistas, Castro’s allies.
My CIA amigos helped me plan and execute assassination plots against Castro. I tell you this to illustrate reality and to warn you to plan your moves with precision when you go out into the world and undertake patriotic tasks to free the world from communism, Islamic fanaticism and sentimental liberalism.
The CIA made a beautiful assassination instrument for me in 1971 at the time Castro was traveling to Chile. Their lab people placed a gun inside a TV news camera so that when the cameraman pointed it at Fidel’s face and pulled the trigger the camera wouldn’t start filming, but rather, the gun would fire. A perfect plan. Only the man we hired was a coward. When he saw Castro’s bodyguards all over the press conference room, he couldn’t do it. I sent the camera to Caracas where Fidel would stop on his return to Cuba. Again the man we hired proved ineffective. But the CIA people prove to be true assassins in the cause of freedom.
Documents have been released which claim I alerted the CIA to my plan to bomb a Cuban commercial airplane over Barbados in 1976, a job I supposedly did with my friend and colleague Orlandito Bosch.
If I admit involvement, the U.S. government must charge me with terrorism. If I deny it, many of you will think I’m lying. What would you do? As graduating students you may face such moral dilemmas in your life. My lesson is: live with ambiguity, but don’t get distracted from your mission.
Do I feel badly about the passengers who died when the Cubana plane crashed? I quote Orlando Bosch who told a Miami reporter: "In a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach."
Why would I feel for the relatives of dead Communist Party members, North Koreans and colored people from Guyana along with Cuban fencers indoctrinated by communists. Those who had not defied Castro, nor left the island to fight from Miami are fair game along with those foolish enough to visit this war zone. We warned in the summer of 1976 that people traveling to and from Cuba, which helped glorify the tyrant, would run serious risks.
Those CIA released cables about me and Bosch say I was working for Venezuelan intelligence and informing the Agency. Listen to this cable. "A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, ‘we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,’ and that ‘Orlando has the details’." That’s in the CIA report.
Nothing happened, however, until Freddy Lugo and Hernan Ricardo, those guys we hired, I mean allegedly hired, confessed they had planted the bomb and named Bosch and me as the planners. I admit I was careless. Learn from my mistakes. I left in my Caracas apartment some Cubana Airlines timetables. That’s poor tradecraft.
I made another mistake in the 1990s when some of us became desperate to finish off Castro because the U.S. government wouldn’t do the job. I’m not admitting I planned the bombing of Cuban hotels, which killed an Italian tourist. But I warn you graduating seniors: don’t shoot your mouth off to reporters. When those New York Times journalists Anne Bardach and Larry Rohter asked how I felt about that Italian dying in the bombing I said I slept like a baby.
OMG!
In Panama, with my compadres Guillermo Novo and Pedro Remon — well, I won’t admit the C 4 plastic explosives were for anything but fireworks — our visits coincided with Fidel’s, if you get my drift. Panamanian cops found my fingerprints on the explosives.
So young students, in life you too will make slips. But even if you don’t succeed in achieving your ends, keep going and don’t let violence and death deter you from doing the right thing. You are not old enough to GAS (Geezers Assassination Society). At 79, I’m still practicing my profession.
For centuries, civilization has etched into stone the idea of killing for a good cause. So Viva Cuba Libre! Viva La Muerte and Viva my faculty friend who invited me here. I won’t mention names, but his initials are J.S. and he gets a well-deserved grant from a government agency to run a worthy project that will help all Cubans when we retake our beloved island.
(Raise fist, wait for applause to subside before leaving stage to retrieve walker)
LOL!
I can’t imagine anything funnier than an old terrorist like the CubanaBomber being asked to address a graduating class; if anything, the Bushies are hoping he’ll fade into the woodwork so they’ll never have to live up to their anti-terror rhetoric. They’re still hoping to kick him out to a country that would rather not be harboring a terrorist, but no such luck. (Cuba and Venezuela would both be happy to take him, but that’s no good either; they’d put him on trial, and BushCo can’t have that, because if he sings on the stand, Bush the Elder will be implicated in his crimes. Ol’ Herbert-Herbert was, shall we say, prominently instrumental in the CubanaBomber’s career, as well as several other ghastly ex-Cuban criminals’.)
BTW, all the crimes Landau’s piece refers to are no jokes. They are real right down to the blood-chilling remarks Posada made to the press in his coy admissions of guilt.
Little wonder Dennis Kucinich–apparently the only US congressman with any real cojones–has called for the Cubanabomber’s extradition to Venezuela.
