CODE PINK to visit Cuba - will they visit cop-killer Joanne Chesimard and FALN William Morales?

Today on the FreeRepublic Hour on Rightalk Radio, my guest was Joe Connor. Joe's dad was killed in an FALN bomb blast at Fraunces Tavern in 1975.

Among the people we discussed were Bill Clinton, who pardoned FALN terrorists to help his wife, William Morales, FALN chief bombmaker being protected by Fidel Castro, and Joanne Chesimard, a cop-killer who is also being protected by Castro.

The Bush-hating and despicable women from Code Pink, the group harassing wounded soldiers and families at Walter Reed Army Medical Center every week, will soon be off to visit their pal Fidel in his island paradise.

We wonder if the Code Pinkos have any plans to demand that Castro extradite the cop-killer and the FALN murderer bombmaker during their visit. What are the chances?

"Cuba is one of the most beautiful and fascinating countries on Earth—and George Bush says you can’t go there. Well, we’re going anyway, and we invite you to join us!"

SOURCE
In September of 1998, [Maxine] Waters wrote a letter of apology to Castro after she had voted in favor of a bill calling on him to turn over former Black Panther Joanne Chesimard. Convicted 25 years earlier of murdering a New Jersey state trooper, she escaped from prison and received refugee status in Havana. While there, she took on a new name which Waters failed to recognize. When Waters learned the woman she'd voted to extradite was a Black Panther murderer, she urged Castro to continue safeguarding Chesimard, because she had been "persecuted for her civil-rights work."

LIFE AFTER TERROR (son of FALN victim; Clinton pardons)
NY POST (via email from Joe Connor) | January 2005 | Joe Connor

Posted on 08/06/2005 8:35:38 PM PDT by doug from upland

LIFE AFTER TERROR

By JOSEPH F. CONNOR

YOU sometimes hear how the first World Trade Center attack was a warning that the city ig nored. But it wasn't the first: Tomorrow is the 30th anniversary of the New York terrorist attack that killed my father, Frank T. Connor — the Jan. 24, 1975, bombing of Fraunces Tavern.

The killers struck on a warm, clear and pleasant winter's day. My dad, a 33-year-old officer of Morgan Guaranty Trust, was having lunch with clients. The bomb killed him and three others in unspeakably gruesome ways. One of his colleagues was decapitated; silverware from the table was lodged in the torsos of the others. This is the grotesque reality of terrorism.

A man goes to work one day, and out of nowhere his life is taken from him and his family. I was 9 years old, my brother Tom, 11.

The cowardly attack was meant to kill many more than those four innocents but immediately before the blast the bomb was kicked out of the way by an unsuspecting restaurant employee — shifting the brunt of the explosion away from the main dining area and directly into my father's table.

All these years later it is still hard to accept that his lunch party actually moved to "a better table" only minutes before the explosion.

This is the inexplicable randomness of terrorism.

The attack turned out to be the deadliest of the 130-plus bombings by the FALN, terrorists who claimed Puerto Rican independence as their cause. In due course, the group's members were caught or driven into hiding.

Those were different times. Our family never received so much as a phone call offering help from our state or federal representatives or the Red Cross. There were no lawsuits. When a family acquaintance offered his legal services, we dismissed him as an ambulance chaser.

But in many ways, we were better off "forgotten." We had friends, family, faith and each other for support. We cried together alone and focused our energies on looking ahead — doing all the things that my dad would have wanted for us.

My Irish-born mother Mary earned her GED and went on to graduate from college in 1986. Grandma Connor, through the grief of losing her only child, dedicated herself to my mother in raising my brother Tom and me.

The first question I remember asking the day of my father's death was, "Is grandma still our grandmother?" The definitive way in which my mother answered, "Yes, of course she is" reassured me that our family would stick together. That set the tone for our lives going forward.

We never felt like victims. Like my mother and grandmother, Tom and I were pushed to self-sufficiency, and rose to the challenge, focusing on school and sports, graduating grade school, high school and college, beginning careers, marrying and having children.

We are driven by never letting my father's memory down. Not to overcome the obstacle of his death would have diminished the meaning of his life and we loved him far too much for that.

We put the notion of terrorism aside — until August 1999, when the wound was reopened.

That's when President Bill Clinton offered executive clemency to 16 core members of the FALN.

Hillary Clinton was then eyeing the Senate seat soon to open up in New York, and pardons for the FALN were a longtime priority for many prominent city Democrats. We were outraged — our father was being betrayed for cheap politics. We "went public" as a family for the first time. Enlisting the same energies that saw us through the previous 24 years, we fought to keep those thugs in prison. We failed there — 14 of the 16 accepted clemency and were released that September. We were successful in that we did not back down; the issue should haunt the Clintons in the years to come.

Because times have changed in many ways — the next time terror hit our family, it hit the entire American family.

Like our father 26 years before us, Tom and I commuted every day through the World Trade Center. On 9/11, we were horrified eyewitnesses to the planes hitting the towers — and to working people just like us falling or jumping to their deaths.

I thought I might die that day — only blocks from Fraunces Tavern. But I managed to get home to Danielle and the kids. They would not grow up without their dad, like I did.

Tom and I got out — but our closest cousin, and our father's godson, did not. Steven Schlag worked on the 104th floor of the North Tower. Killed at 41, he left a wife and small children — like our father.

Like so many who waited with us in hope for word on our father that January evening in 1975, Tom and I sat in vigil at Steve's house that horrible September 2001 evening, waiting for word from him.

I remember staring bleary-eyed at Steve's father Donald (my father's first cousin and as close to a brother as he could have been), suffering through this nightmare yet again. Through my own tears and shock I tried to lend hope, while knowing there was none.

Our family has endured and learned from the effects of terrorism for 30 years. We know there are no magic words to make it better. But I want to offer some words of hope to those families more recently affected: Even now, more than three years after the fact, you are on a lifelong, daily struggle. It may feel overwhelming at times, but you can overcome by drawing on your lost loved one, each other and your faith in God for strength.

Thirty years after Fraunces and a grown man, I still grieve every day for my father, but push on — as our whole family has since his death, never letting him down and always keeping his memory alive.

I can think of no better way for my father, Frank Thomas Connor, to be remembered than as a symbol of hope for those facing the struggle we began 30 years ago.

Joseph F. Connor works in the financial services industry.

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