This is a perjury case, the prosecutor announced during his opening remarks on the first day of trial. His strategy is to first show the jury the lies the Luis Posada Carriles told to Immigration authorities, and then, perhaps early next week, tell the jury the truth. Today we heard statements, many of them false, that Posada Carriles made in April of 2006, during his naturalization interviews with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Posada applied for United States citizenship under a little-known provision of the law that qualifies an applicant for citizenship anyone who has performed military service for the U.S. during a time of military conflict, provided that the applicant is also a person of good moral character.

“Your Honor, I ask myself whether Attorney Hernández is trying to confuse and obfuscate the jury,” Prosecutor Jerome Teresinski complained in annoyance this morning. The problem arose when the prosecutor tried to introduce into evidence the naturalization application that Posada sent to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) in 2005, plus the tape recordings and transcriptions of the resulting two interviews performed by USCIS Officer Susana Bolaños in El Paso on April 26 and 27, 2006.

The U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the Cuban Five in Miami, Caroline Heck Miller, refused to press criminal charges against Luis Posada Carriles despite a request to do so from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), testified DHS attorney Gina Garrett-Jackson today in court. Responding to defense questions, Garrett-Jackson, the DHS prosecutor who directed Posada’s asylum case in 2005 said that she asked Caroline Heck Miller to charge Posada criminally, rather than simply rely on a deportation case. “I asked Heck Miller to consider criminal charges against Posada. However, she was not interested in that, and because of that, I stopped asking her for it.”

The first of the 18 witnesses in the case against Luis Posada Carriles that the prosecution announced that it wishes to present in the coming three weeks testified today: Gina Garrett-Jackson. She is the person who was charged with litigating Posada´s deportation case for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2005. Visibly nervous and with a tendency to respond to questions with long and tedious monologues, Ms. Garrett-Jackson remained on the platform the entire day. She testified that she was assigned the Posada Carriles asylum case starting in May of 2005. Garrett-Jackson worked in the Miami office of the Department of Homeland Security.

We all stood at the sound of the gavel that announced the entrance of the twelve jurors and four alternates who will decide if Posada Carriles is guilty of having lied to U.S. authorities. At 10 a.m. sharp, the jurors took their seats. They arrived to hear the opening statements in the case that will keep them in the El Paso Federal Court until next month. Opening statements by attorneys offer a jury an idea of what the evidence will show during the course of the legal proceeding against the accused. They are like promises to the jury. It’s a dangerous tactic, because if the attorney doesn’t deliver the goods promised during his opening statement, the jury might think that the evidence is weaker than it really is.

With a jury of five men and seven women empaneled, opening statements in the trial for immigration fraud against Luis Posada Carriles, will be heard tomorrow. Judge Kathleen Cardone is the presiding judge. The government attorneys will offer up the opening salvo. Prosecutor Timothy Reardon requested 60 minutes to introduce the case to the jury, and Posada Carriles’ defense lawyer asked for the same block of time. After opening statements by both sides, the prosecution will begin the process of presenting evidence, including witnesses. The defense will be able to cross-examine them.

What would have happened if the South African racists had used nuclear weapons against the Cuban and Angolan troops? What would the international reaction have been? How would such a barbaric act have been justified? How would the USSR have reacted? These are questions we must ask ourselves. When the racists handed over the government to Nelson Mandela, they didn’t say a single word to him, nor did they say what they did with those weapons. Investigation and the denunciation of such events would be of great service to the world, at this time. Dear compatriots, I urge you to present this topic at the World Festival of Youth and Students.

There is a lot to talk about when the United States is embroiled in a colossal scandal as the result of the documents published by Wikileaks; nobody doubts their authenticity -notwithstanding any other motivation of that website. However, at this time our country is immersed in a battle against cholera in Haiti, something that becomes a threat for all the other peoples of Latin America and the Third World.

On Thursday, Michel Chossudovsky, professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa, was invited to appear on the Mesa Redonda television program. He participated along with Osvaldo Martinez, director of the Research Center on World Economics.

Exactly 34 years ago, 73 innocent people were assassinated: 11 Guyanese, 5 citizens of the Democratic Popular Republic of Korea and 57 Cubans. They were killed in midair when a bomb exploded aboard a Cubana de Aviación passenger plane that had just taken off from Barbados. Among them were 24 young Cubans from the national youth fencing team who had just swept all the gold medals at the Fourth Central-American and Caribbean Championships held in Venezuela.

The members of the Committee of Families of the Victims of the Cubana airliner blown-up off the coasts of Barbados, a commercial flight sabotaged in 1976 that exploded in-flight taking the lives of the 73 people on board, 57 of them Cuban, are appealing to you today because the mastermind of that crime, Luis Posada Carriles, is living in the United States where the legal authorities are reluctant to try him as the terrorist he is.

Cubavision and Cubavision International (in English) presents the the second chapter of the documentary “the terror route” with declarations by the terrorist Francisco Chávez Abarca who is now in prison in Havana after being extradited from Caracas. His declarations relate to terrorist acts in Venezuela by opponents of the Bolivarian government.