Site Presented By
Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
The former president's decision to release Puerto Rican terrorists in 1999 prompted outrage from Congress and his wife. Now it also bolsters claims that he was "soft on terrorism."
Feb 4, 2002 | On Dec. 13, the New York Times metro section printed the bleak story of Patricia Flounders, whose husband Joseph died at the World Trade Center, and who herself committed suicide three months later in the couple's "just-finished dream house." It's hard to think of a single personal narrative that better captures the devastation wrought by al-Qaida on Sept. 11. Near its end, however, the article contained a curious anecdote:
"At her husband's memorial service, Mrs. Flounders stood in black at the head of the receiving line ... and asked people to attend a reception at Fraunces Tavern, in the financial district.
"Mrs. Flounders explained that she had selected the landmark tavern as the site for the reception 'because they, too, were once bombed,' she said, referring to the 1975 bombing by a Puerto Rican nationalist group in which four died and more than 60 were injured."
This, as it happens, was one of the few post-Sept. 11 media references to the United States' long history of grappling with Puerto Rican terrorism. That's baffling, considering that as recently as August 1999, President Clinton offered to commute the sentences of 16 members of the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN (a Spanish acronym for the Armed Forces of National Liberation). It was FALN that was responsible for the Fraunces Tavern attack, as well as over 100 bombings during the 1970s and 1980s, largely in New York and Chicago.
Clinton's move set off a firestorm at the time, leading the first lady, then running for the Senate in New York, to distance herself from her husband. It also ultimately resulted in a 95-2 Senate measure that condemned the clemencies and called them "deplorable." Nevertheless, 11 former FALN members were freed soon afterward, and they returned to their homes in Chicago and Puerto Rico.
For once and future Clinton bashers, the subject of the FALN clemencies could hardly be more fruitful. Indeed, even as evidence mounts with each successive New York Times or Washington Post installment of what went wrong in fighting terrorism during the Clinton administration, Clinton's detractors have overlooked a key piece of evidence. The former president's behavior on the FALN issue almost certainly adds evidence that he was "soft on terrorism," as well as revealing a breed of pre-Sept. 11 liberal-left politics that demanded the exculpation of former terrorists who were labeled "political prisoners."
Those who lobbied for the clemencies have little interest in defending them today. Clemency supporters who did not return calls for this article include the Democratic Puerto Rican representatives Nydia Velázquez and José Serrano of New York and Luis Gutierrez of Chicago, who both acted as Washington proxies for nationalist-leaning Puerto Rican activists in the FALN furor and even pushed for unconditional pardons. (Clinton at least required that the prisoners renounce violence -- and some would not, and were therefore denied clemency.) Collectively, Velázquez, Serrano and Gutierrez bowled over Puerto Rico's single nonvoting representative to the U.S. Congress, the pro-statehood resident commissioner Carlos Romero-Barceló, who repudiated talk of the FALN members as "political prisoners" and opposed pardons outright, though he later accepted conditional clemency.
Ethnic one-upmanship appears to to be a factor in support for the FALN among Puerto Ricans. As one influential Puerto Rican, who asked not to be named, puts it, "Within the Puerto Rican or Hispanic context in the continental United States, to be in favor of independence and these people who were incarcerated is to place oneself on the most authentic left in your community. Which means you are the loudest mouth on ethnic matters. No one can accuse you of being insufficiently Puerto Rican."
The ties between Puerto Rican identity politicking and the island's often militant independentista movement dates back to the 1920s and 1930s, several decades after Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the United States at the close of the Spanish-American War. Those years saw the founding of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party under the leadership of the fiery, Harvard-educated orator Pedro Albizu Campos, an FALN role model who ultimately advocated Puerto Rico's liberation from the United States by violent means.
In the 1960s, Puerto Rican nationalists forged enduring ties with the anti-Vietnam War left in the continental United States, and the cause of Puerto Rican independence became wedded to feminism, socialism and the sexual revolution. Today the Puerto Rican Independence Party wins just 4 percent of the vote in Puerto Rico, but independentistas are disproportionately represented among the island's intelligentsia and cultural elite. And many of those leftists had no qualms about dubbing the FALN members "political prisoners" because in doing so, they were allying themselves with individuals who had been jailed for taking on that imperialist oppressor, the United States, and thereby dedicating their lives to Puerto Rican autonomy, cultural homogeneity and independence. Never mind the terrorism.
