Barack Obama, Debra Burlingame, domestic terrorism, Eric Holder, FALN, Hillary Clinton

Eric Holder told subordinates to alter FALN pardon recommendations

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The Los Angeles Times today reported:

Attorney general nominee Eric H. Holder Jr. repeatedly pushed some of his subordinates at the Clinton Justice Department to drop their opposition to a controversial 1999 grant of clemency to 16 members of two violent Puerto Rican nationalist organizations, according to interviews and documents.

Details of the role played by Holder, who was deputy attorney general at the time, had not been publicly known until now. The new details are of particular interest because Republican senators have vowed to revisit Holder’s role during his confirmation hearings next week.
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Some religious groups and influential individuals, including President Carter, had endorsed the commutations. But Clinton’s decision outraged law enforcement officials, who had tried to contain a bombing campaign in New York, Chicago and elsewhere in the 1970s and 1980s by groups seeking independence for Puerto Rico from the United States.

New interviews and an examination of previously undisclosed documents indicate that Holder played an active role in changing the position of the Justice Department on the commutations.

Holder instructed his staff at Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney to effectively replace the department’s original report recommending against any commutations, which had been sent to the White House in 1996, with one that favored clemency for at least half the prisoners, according to these interviews and documents.

And after Pardon Attorney Roger Adams resisted, Holder’s chief of staff instructed him to draft a neutral “options memo” instead, Adams said. The options memo allowed Clinton to grant the commutations without appearing to go against the Justice Department’s wishes, Adams and his predecessor, Margaret Colgate Love, said in their first public comments on the case.

“I remember this well, because it was such a big deal to consider clemency for a group of people convicted of such heinous crimes,” said Adams, the agency’s top pardon lawyer from 1997 until 2008. He said he told Holder of his “strong opposition to any clemency in several internal memos and a draft report recommending denial” and in at least one face-to-face meeting. But each time Holder wasn’t satisfied, Adams said.

The 16 members of the FALN (the Spanish acronym for Armed Forces of National Liberation) and Los Macheteros had been convicted in Chicago and Hartford variously of bank robbery, possession of explosives and participating in a seditious conspiracy. Overall, the two groups had been linked by the FBI to more than 130 bombings, several armed robberies, six slayings and hundreds of injuries.

Although unmentioned in the L.A. Times’ report, none of the convicted FALN (and Los Macheteros) members personally requested clemency or pardon. Debra Burlingame wrote of this last February, in the Wall Street Journal:

9/11, al Qaeda, Guantanamo, New York Times, Osama bin Laden, September 11, WMD, World Trade Center

New York Times’ poster boy for ‘torture’ and rendition sues U.S.

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How quickly the New York Times forgets. On September 12, 2001, Times’ Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote:

Regardless of whether the carnage is reliably traced to one of the jihad sects, it is true that the magnitude of the pain inflicted on America yesterday moves us into the very exclusive club of democracies for which terrorism is not peripheral, remote or episodic, but a horrible routine.

Mr. Keller was wrong; thanks to President George W. Bush, his administration, the FBI, our intelligence agencies, and the United States military, terrorists attacks on our soil did not become our horrible routine since September 11, 2001.

While the Pile still smoldered at the World Trade Center and anthrax began arriving in peoples’ mailboxes, U.S. officials fanned out across the globe and worked with foreign nations to track down Islamic terrorists. In early October, senior U.S. officials demanded that Pakistan President Pervez Mursharraf fire then Director General of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Mahmud Ahmad. It seems that Lt. Gen. Ahmad was real chummy with senior al Qaeda moneyman Ahmed Omar Sayeed Sheikh. Reliable sources (then and now) say Omar, using the alias Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad, had funded 9/11 lead hijacker Mohamed Atta with $100,000. At the time, the U.S. also presented to President Mursharraf evidence that top ISI officials had previously facilitated meetings between WMD experts and al Qaeda.

With that in mind, look at what the New York Times has never reported about both former Guantanamo detainee Muhammad Saad Iqbal and the radical Islamic Defenders Front.