Articles of El Paso Diary

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.

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.