Mike the Usurper wrote:
] ] The department did not say what it planned to do with
] ] Posada, who is wanted by Venezuela and Cuba. But it said
] ] that generally, the U.S. government does not return
] ] people to Cuba or to countries acting on Cuba's behalf.

This is an interesting comment for the US government to be making.

Right now, I'm reading a new book by Timothy Naftali, "Blind Spot", that tells the "secret history" of American counterterrorism. (I recently memed a review of it from the New York Review of Books.)

In the book, it is explained that during the 1970s, the US experienced a rash of hijackings in which (for the most part) American citizens commandeered commercial airliners in attempts to reach Cuba and also frequently used the incidents to make various public statements of an anti-American nature.

I'll include a brief excerpt related to the above ... (pages 65-66 in the book):

In the days that followed [the November 1972 hijacking of Southern Airlines Flight 49], even the political taboo of dealing with Fidel Castro was temporarily suspended. After the Castro regime arrested the hijackers and sent word that they were interested in negotiating an antihijacking pact with Washington, the Nixon administration initiated indirect negotiations through the Swiss. Three months later, the United States and Cuba initialed the first agreement ever between the two countries since Castro had come to power. Both countries agreed either to try hijackers or to return them and to provide safe passage for the aircraft or ship and its passengers. In a concession to the Cuban government, which had concerns about the activities of Cuban-exile groups in the United States, the two countries agreed to prosecute terrorists who used the territory of one signatory to attack the other. Havana and Washington also agreed to retain the right to grant political asylum to each other's dissidents.

I highly recommend the book to those with a historical and/or contemporary interest in the subject of counterterrorism in particular and international relations in general.