Knowing that Fiorella Maza is back in Peru certainly makes me feel safer. This Peruvian track star, college student and ballet dancer was clearly a threat to our values:
Fiorella Maza, a standout student, ballet dancer and track star, had just started her freshman year at Miami Dade College when immigration agents knocked on her door.
Instantly, her middle-class American life was turned upside down.
Maza now spends most of her time inside a drafty old home in Peru's capital city. She's dislodged from her circle of friends, socially disoriented. She speaks only rudimentary Spanish.
''I never thought I could be sent to Peru,'' said Maza, 19, who was brought to West Kendall illegally as a toddler and was deported in March. ``It's like a foreign country to me.''
Don't get outraged just yet. Save your anger for this:
A federal judge dropped charges against former CIA operative and anti-Castro Cuban militant Luis Posada Carriles on Tuesday, blasting what she called government "fraud, deceit and trickery" in an interview with Posada that led to the charges.
Posada, 79, was charged with seven counts of immigration fraud. He was arrested in Miami in May 2005 after entering the country illegally.
U.S. district judge Kathleen Cardone ordered Posada's electronic bracelet cut off in the courtroom Tuesday and cleared the way for him to return to Miami a free man.
Posada's attorney, Arturo Hernandez, told CNN the ruling was "an incredible legal victory."
The Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security said they were reviewing Cardone's decision.
On October 6th, 1976 Cubana Flight 455 was destroyed after takeoff by a bomb detonation that had been placed in the aircraft toilets in which all seventy-three people on board were killed, including many young members of a Cuban fencing team. Five people from North Korea were also killed on board the flight. This bombing would have been plotted at the same meeting, attended by Luis Posada Carriles and DINA agent Michael Townley, where Chilean former minister Orlando Letelier's assassination, in Washington, D.C. in 1976, was decided. Bosch was jailed in Venezuela awaiting trial for his role concerning the Cubana Flight 455 bombing, but he was never convicted of these charges.
In 1968 Bosch was arrested in Florida for an attack on a Polish freighter with a 57 mm recoilless rifle and was as a result sent to prison for a ten year term. In 1987, almost a decade after the Flight 455 incident, Bosch was freed from Venezuelan charges and went to the United States, assisted by US Ambassador to Venezuela Otto Reich; there, he was ultimately arrested for a parole violation. Bosch was pardoned of all American charges by President George H.W. Bush on July 18, 1990 at the request of his son Jeb Bush, who later became Governor of Florida; this pardon was despite objections by the then President's own defense department, that Bosch was one of the most deadly terrorists working "within the hemisphere." Although many countries seek Bosch's extradition he remains free in the United States. The political pressure to grant Bosch a pardon was begun during the congressional campaign run by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, herself a Cuban American, and overseen by her campaign manager Jeb Bush. The resultant pardon reputedly saw huge celebrations in Miami, in what was then called 'Free Orlando Day.'"
Like father, like son.
George Bush's America: protecting us against Peruvian teenagers, providing refuge for a terrorist. The mind reels.
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