Posted on 02/16/2008 6:43:00 PM PST by jdm
For those who have forgotten just how corrupt the Clinton’s are (like anyone could forget) this story should bring shivers down your spine. Debra Burlingame, the sister of Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, writes about the Armed Forces of National Liberation [FALN] terrorist group that had wreaked havoc on American soil for decades. 146 bombings and armed robberies were linked to the group including this account of a bombing in 1982:
It was nearly 10 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, 1982. Two officers on New York Police Department’s elite bomb squad rushed to headquarters at One Police Plaza, where minutes earlier an explosion had destroyed the entrance to the building. Lying amid the carnage was Police Officer Rocco Pascarella, his lower leg blasted off.
“He was ripped up like someone took a box cutter and shredded his face,” remembered Detective Anthony Senft, one of the bomb-squad officers who answered the call 25 years ago. “We really didn’t even know that he was a uniformed man until we found his weapon, that’s how badly he was injured.”
About 20 minutes later, Mr. Senft and his partner, Richard Pastorella, were blown 15 feet in the air as they knelt in protective gear to defuse another bomb. Detective Senft was blinded in one eye, his facial bones shattered, his hip severely fractured. Mr. Pastorella was blinded in both eyes and lost all the fingers of his right hand. A total of four bombs exploded in a single hour on that night, including at FBI headquarters in Manhattan and the federal courthouse in Brooklyn.
In 1975 the group placed a bomb in a popular tavern in New York, timed it to go off during the lunch hour, and killed four including ripping the head off of one person and injuring 60.
Pretty bad peeps right? Not bad enough to prevent Bill Clinton from greasing the squeaky wheel by releasing 16 members of the group from prison where they were convicted and sentenced to 30-90 years.
On Aug. 7, 1999, the one-year anniversary of the U.S. African embassy bombings that killed 257 people and injured 5,000, President Bill Clinton reaffirmed his commitment to the victims of terrorism, vowing that he “will not rest until justice is done.” Four days later, while Congress was on summer recess, the White House quietly issued a press release announcing that the president was granting clemency to 16 imprisoned members of FALN. What began as a simple paragraph on the AP wire exploded into a major controversy.
Mr. Clinton justified the clemencies by asserting that the sentences were disproportionate to the crimes. None of the petitioners, he stated, had been directly involved in crimes that caused bodily harm to anyone. “For me,” the president concluded, “the question, therefore, was whether their continuing incarceration served any meaningful purpose.”
His comments, including the astonishing claim that the FALN prisoners were being unfairly punished because of “guilt by association,” were widely condemned as a concession to terrorists. Further, they were seen as an outrageous slap in the face of the victims and a bitter betrayal of the cops and federal law enforcement officers who had put their lives on the line to protect the public and who had invested years of their careers to put these people behind bars. The U.S. Sentencing Commission affirmed a pre-existing Justice Department assessment that the sentences, ranging from 30 to 90 years, were “in line with sentences imposed in other cases for similar terrorist activity.”
What squeaky wheel you ask?
Hillary Rodham Clinton was in the midst of her state-wide “listening tour” in anticipation of her run for the U.S. Senate in New York, a state which included 1.3 million Hispanics. Three members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus — Luis V. Gutierrez (D., Ill.), Jose E. Serrano, (D., N.Y.) and Nydia M. Velazquez, (D., N.Y.) — along with local Hispanic politicians and leftist human-rights advocates, had been agitating for years on behalf of the FALN cases directly to the White House and first lady.
Initial reports stated that Mrs. Clinton supported the clemencies, but when public reaction went negative she changed course, issuing a short statement three weeks after the clemencies were announced. The prisoners’ delay in refusing to renounce violence “speaks volumes,” she said.
The Clintons were caught in an awkward predicament of their own making. The president had ignored federal guidelines for commutation of sentences, including the most fundamental: The prisoners hadn’t actually asked for clemency.
To push the deal through, signed statements renouncing violence and expressing remorse were required by the Justice Department. The FALN prisoners, surely relishing the embarrassment and discomfiture they were causing the president and his wife, had previously declined to accept these conditions. Committed and unrepentant militants who did not accept the authority of the United States, they refused to apologize for activities they were proud of in order to obtain a clemency they never requested.
So desperate was the White House to get the deal finalized and out of the news, an unprecedented 16-way conference call was set up for the “petitioners” who were locked up in 11 different federal facilities so that they could strategize a response to the president’s offer. Two eventually refused to renounce their cause, preferring to serve out their lengthy sentences rather than follow the White House script.
Mr. Clinton’s fecklessness in the handling of these cases was demonstrated by the fact that none of the prisoners were required, as a standard condition of release, to cooperate in ongoing investigations of countless unsolved FALN bombing cases and other crimes. Mrs. Clinton’s so-called disagreement with her husband on the matter made no mention of that fact. The risk of demanding such a requirement, of course, was that the prisoners might have proudly implicated themselves, causing the entire enterprise to implode, with maximum damage to the president and potentially sinking Hillary Clinton’s Senate chances.
Congress voted to condemn these clemencies. 95-2 in the Senate, 311-41 in the House. But they happened anyway. Through all the terrorist attacks committed against our country during the Clinton years including WTC I, the Oklahoma Bombing, the Khobar Towers bombing, and the 1998 African embassy bombings Bill Clinton talked a good fight while doing nothing. And when the chips fell between getting more votes and keeping terrorists locked up he chose the votes.
It would be a mistake to dismiss as “old news” the story of how and why these terrorists were released in light of the fact that it took place during the precise period when Bill Clinton now claims he was avidly engaged, even “obsessed,” with efforts to protect the public from clandestine terrorist attacks. If Bill and Hillary Clinton were willing to pander to the demands of local Hispanic politicians and leftist human-rights activists defending bomb-makers convicted of seditious conspiracy, how might they stand up to pressure from other interest groups working in less obvious ways against U.S. interests in a post-9/11 world?
Radical Islamists are a sophisticated and determined enemy who understand that violence alone will not achieve their goals. Islamist front groups, representing themselves as rights organizations, are attempting to get a foothold here as they have already in parts of Western Europe by deftly exploiting ethnic and racial politics, agitating under the banner of civil liberties even as they are clamoring for the imposition of special Shariah law privileges in the public domain. They believe that the road to America’s ultimate defeat is through the back door of policy and law and they are aggressively using money, influence and retail politics to achieve their goal.
And money, influence and retail politics are the forte of Team Clinton. But don’t tell that to some conservatives with a serious case of McDS like Ann Coulter who believe that Hillary would be tougher in the War on Terror then McCain. It’s enough to make you ill.
Lastly, lets not forget that Puerto Rico has 63 delegates to give to one person, no splitting of delegates there.
Journalists at several news outlets have indicated that in the tradition of the island’s party politics, Puerto Rico’s 63 delegates will all be awarded to a single candidate and not necessarily follow the majority of the popular vote. This would give Puerto Rico Democratic Party leaders the greatest single influence in the 2008 primary, with a 43% greater disparity than the California primary produced. In contrast, the party’s Delegate Selection Plan states that delegates are to be allocated in a manner similar to other state caucuses.
63 delegates for the release of 16 convicted terrorists. In the minds of Team Clinton this was a fair trade.
ping
Joe Connor’s dad was killed at the tavern. He and I had lunch when I was in New York showing HILLARY! UNCENSORED. The segment of Joe in the tavern from HILLARY THE MOVIE will make you cry.
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