Shortly before a federal judge dismissed the government’s watered-down case against Luis Posada, the FBI produced more damning evidence that the Cuban exile was involved in a series of terrorist bombings.

Posada, an aging anti-Castro activist, had frequent meetings with two Guatemalan businessmen believed to have had a hand in bombing attacks on tourist hotels in Havana during the 1990s, according to FBI allegations reported by the Washington Post.

But those allegations didn’t keep a federal judge from dismissing the government’s attempt to try Posada, not as a terrorist, but on the milquetoast charge of lying to immigration officials about how he entered this country in 2005.

The immigration charge was a face-saving effort by the Bush administration to deflect attention from its refusal to treat Posada like the terrorist suspects it’s holding at Guantanamo Bay.

Those detainees are considered cold-blooded enemies of the United States. For more than four decades, Posada has had the government of Fidel Castro in his crosshairs.

Posada, a dual citizen of Cuba and Venezuela, was jailed in Panama along with three Cuban Americans for plotting to kill Castro during a visit to that country in 2000. Four years later, the men were pardoned by Panama’s outgoing president. The three Cuban Americans quickly returned to the United States without incident, and Posada left Panama for parts unknown.

The most troubling charge against Posada is that he was part of a terrorist clique responsible for bombing a Havana-bound commercial airliner in 1976. The explosion killed 76 people – mostly Cuban citizens.

Posada was involved “up to his eyeballs” in that bloody act of terrorism, Carter Cornick, an FBI counterterrorism specialist who investigated the bombing, told the New York Times in 2005. That charge is supported by a declassified State Department report that quotes Posada as telling someone shortly before the plane was downed: “We are going to hit a Cuban airliner.”

Of course, none of this is proof positive that Posada was involved in any of these terrorist acts. But it’s more evidence than the Bush administration is willing to reveal in the cases against most of the 385 alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

So why has Posada been ordered into home detention instead of being hustled off to one of the cagelike cells at Guantanamo Bay?

It seems that some acts of terrorism, real or perceived, are acceptable to the Bush administration – if the target is Fidel Castro’s government. No one in the White House is going to say so publicly, but it’s hard to draw any other conclusion from the way Posada is being treated.

For all of the Bush administration’s righteous indignation about terrorism, it coddles Posada. Wanted in Cuba and Venezuela for his alleged role in the 1976 airplane bombing, he is allowed to hide in plain sight in South Florida, where he is treated as a hero by more than a few of that area’s Cuban Americans.

Keep in mind that the most damning evidence against Posada doesn’t come just from Cuba or Venezuela. It also comes from the FBI, the State Department and other U.S. government sources.

But none of this has caused the Bush administration to treat Posada with the same disdain it has shown for the terrorist suspects being held at Guantanamo. While secret military tribunals will determine the fate of many of those detainees, it’s a good bet Posada soon will be freed from the gentle (in his case at least) clutches of the American criminal justice system.

And the rest of us are supposed to believe that the enemy of a Bush administration enemy – even a terrorist – is our friend.