Archive for January, 2008

against Luis Posada Carriles, Salon.com publishes a hit-piece that makes it sound as though Miami is awash in terrorists.

In Greater Miami, home to the majority of the nation’s 1.5 million Cuban-Americans, the presence of what could credibly be described as a terrorist training camp has become an accepted norm during the half-century of the anti-Castro Cuban diaspora. Alpha 66 and numerous other paramilitary groups — Comandos F4, Brigade 2506, Accion Cubana — are so common they’ve taken on the benign patina of Rotary Clubs with weapons.

Later–much later in the article–you get the admission that a lot of these so-called terrorists have either been tried and acquitted, or have actually completed serving their sentences.

The article brags that “Research support was provided by the Puffin Foundation Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.” Google the Nation Institute and the resulting description tells you where they’re coming from:

A liberal-left independently funded and administered organization, committed to a just society and the principles of the First Amendment.

Meanwhile, you rarely here the “liberal-left” complain about left-wing terrorists–and I’m referring to those whose attacks took place here in the United States, not other countries–walking free in the US. In fact, they tend to get glowing profiles in major newspapers like the New York Times–on September 11, 2001:

No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen

By DINITIA SMITH
Published: September 11, 2001

”I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. ”I feel we didn’t do enough.” Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970′s as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings. And he still has the ebullient, ingratiating manner, the apparently intense interest in other people, that made him a charismatic figure in the radical student movement.

Now he has written a book, ”Fugitive Days” (Beacon Press, September). Mr. Ayers, who is 56, calls it a memoir, somewhat coyly perhaps, since he also says some of it is fiction. He writes that he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972. But Mr. Ayers also seems to want to have it both ways, taking responsibility for daring acts in his youth, then deflecting it.