By Kathleen Kern

At their last meeting before they blew up the civilian airliner, the terrorists agreed on code words. They would call the plane a “bus” and the passengers “dogs.” Freddy Lugo and Hernán Carrado, who had received training in explosives from the CIA, boarded the plane in Trinidad. After they planted their bombs — hidden in a toothpaste tube and camera — they got off during a stopover in Barbados.

Nine minutes after the plane left Barbados, the bombs exploded. The pilot tried to return to the airport, but when he realized the burning plane was doomed, he banked and crashed into the ocean so that no one on land would be hurt. All 73 passengers died. Their average age was 30.

The same week that an Alexandria, Va., jury found Zacarias Moussaoui eligible for the death penalty after being convicted of involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Orlando Bosch, who helped plan the bombing of the plane in Barbados, was interviewed on a Miami television station.

The interviewer asked whether he felt remorse for the families of those who died, for the members of the fencing team, who proudly wore their medals onto the plane after winning at the Youth Fencing Championship and Caribbean games in Caracas, Venezuela.

Bosch said the young athletes deserved death and their parents deserved to suffer because they were “cooperating with tyranny.”

So why is Moussaoui facing the death penalty for wanting to hijack a plane and Bosch, who masterminded the actual bombing of a civilian aircraft, free to give interviews in Miami? Why was Bosch granted asylum in the United States and a full pardon by George Bush Sr.?

Because Bosch is a Cuban who hates Fidel Castro.

Months before the 1976 bombing, the CIA told the U.S. State Department that Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles planned to attack a Cuban airliner. Washington never informed the Cuban government of these plans.

Venezuela tried to prosecute the terrorists. The first judge at their trial recused herself after threatened with death and blackmail. A Mafia-style assassination killed the son and chauffeur of the second. Posada Carriles escaped from the Venezuelan prison, with help from wealthy Cuban exiles, and went on to mastermind operations in Central America’s “dirty wars” during the 1970s and ’80s — including those that were a part of the Iran-Contra scandal.

Cuba sent five men to infiltrate anti-Castro terror cells in the 1990s and then turned over to the Clinton administration, via Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the intelligence linking Posada Carriles and Bosch to the downing of the Cuban plane in 1976 and other acts of terror. Instead of arresting Posada Carriles and Bosch, the FBI arrested the five undercover agents, who are serving life sentences in maximum-security prisons. A three-judge panel on a Court of Appeals later ruled that they had not received a fair trial in Miami. At the behest of the Bush administration, all 12 judges of the 11th Circuit in Atlanta nullified this ruling.

The fiery deaths of janitors, waiters, secretaries and corporate executives on 9/11 break my heart every time I think of ithem. The fact that Zacarias Moussaoui found the carnage gratifying surely indicates he should be locked up. But when we consider the meaning of the word “terrorist,” we should also think of Bosch and Posada Carriles who called their victims “dogs” and expressed no remorse for their agonizing final moments as they fell, burning, into the sea.

Pictures and stories of those who died on CU flight 455 are at www.familiesforjustice.cu/interface.en/design/static/victimas-cubanas.tpl.html.