* FOR THE RECORD * - When Congressmen Support Terrorism -* The Enemies Within * (Insight Magazine, 22 Jan 03)
An Insight investigation finds that at least a dozen sitting members of the House and Senate have provided active support to terrorist organizations, armed clandestine groups that targeted and killed Americans, or regimes that sponsor terrorism. Some of the lawmakers have been at it for years -- even decades. [...][Barbara] Lee and [Carlottia] Scott [then staffers to Rep. Ron Dellums] pushed the PRG cause for some time, finally persuading Dellums to visit Grenada in early 1982. Insight has obtained a letter that Scott wrote to Bishop after that visit, following a stop in Cuba. Addressing the Grenadian leader as "My Dearest," she described ideas that she, Lee and Dellums had for promoting the Marxist-Leninist regime's cause in Washington. "Ron had a long talk with Barb and me when we got to Havana and cried when he realized that we had been shouldering Grenada alone all this time," she wrote. "He's really hooked on you and Grenada and doesn't want anything to happen to building the Revo[lution] and making it strong.
He really admires you as a person and even more so as a leader with courage and foresight, principle and integrity. Believe me, he doesn't make that kind of statement often about anyone. The only other person that I know of that he expresses such admiration for is Fidel [Castro]."
Several other such U.S. lawmakers have championed a domestic terrorist group, the Armed Forces of National Liberation (known by its Spanish initials of FALN) that seeks to impose a Marxist-Leninist regime on Puerto Rico and secede from the United States.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the FALN planted more than 130 bombs and killed at least six people. Reps. José E. Serrano (D-N.Y.), Nydia M. Velázquez (D-N.Y.) and Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.), all left-wingers of Puerto Rican ancestry, embraced the cause of 16 convicted FALN members serving time in federal prison. Serrano called them "political prisoners," according to the People's Weekly World, the official newspaper of the Communist Party USA.
They campaigned to pressure then-president Bill Clinton to issue pardons to free the radicals, even though the terrorists themselves had not requested that their sentences be commuted. When Clinton agreed to grant them clemency in August 1999, Serrano blasted him for requiring them to renounce violence as a precondition of their release.
Of course there is no need to remind FReepers of Hillary Clinton's connection to the the FALN terrorists.
Hillary Clinton changed her position, but not two of her colleagues-to-be. Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) and the late Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) were the minority of two standing on the far left with the amnesty [i.e. voting against a Senate resolution criticizing President Rapist's commutations].Several lawmakers even have rallied to the causes of American terrorists and terrorist collaborators arrested and imprisoned abroad. Lori Berenson, a member of the Marxist-Leninist Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) in Peru, was convicted and imprisoned in harsh conditions under the country's strict antiterrorist laws.
Her congresswoman from home, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), has interceded on her behalf; so have Reps. Jim Leach (R-Iowa) and Jim McGovern (D-Mass.). McGovern has allied himself with violent revolutionary movements since the 1980s, when he was a staffer for the late Rep. Joseph Moakley (D-Mass.). He has helped the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador, facilitating the shipment of material aid and American volunteers for the Cuban-backed group's rural civic-action efforts, according to documents and letters he signed in the 1980s that Insight has obtained.
Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) secured the release in the 1980s of Jennifer Jean Casolo, an operative with the FMLN, after Salvadoran authorities found her house in San Salvador had been a clandestine arsenal.
El Salvador was a breeding ground of sorts for witting and unwitting congressional support for foreign extremist groups that targeted American military and civilian personnel and U.S. interests. The country's bitter guerrilla war in the 1980s attracted a score or more of U.S. lawmakers to assist FMLN propaganda, civic-action and fund-raising operations.
Most of the congressmen seemed otherwise ignorant of El Salvador and unaware that the groups they were supporting were FMLN fronts. But some, including [John] Conyers, signed direct-mail fund-raising letters to raise money for FMLN fronts -- in Conyers' case, a group called Medical Aid to El Salvador, which channeled medicine and first-aid supplies to FMLN-controlled groups and regions. Insight has a copy of the Conyers letter, which the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador at the time, Edwin Corr, assailed in a long cable as being full of FMLN disinformation about the nature of the conflict and of U.S. involvement.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), now House minority leader and the most powerful woman in Congress, signed many letters on behalf of FMLN causes in the 1980s. Among the letters, copies of which Insight obtained, are requests to the U.S. Embassy and to the Salvadoran military and civilian leadership urging them to grant safe-conduct passes to radical American activists into FMLN-controlled regions.
A former Salvadoran ambassador to the United States tells Insight that his government felt intense pressure to grant the passes demanded by U.S. lawmakers, even though authorities knew the activists were with FMLN support groups and that their activities provided material support to the communist guerrilla forces and their civilian infrastructure.
Other sitting lawmakers who publicly endorsed, assisted or lent their names to FMLN causes include Sens. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), and Rep. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.), according to literature published by FMLN support groups such as the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador.
The FMLN assassinated American military trainers, U.S. Marines who guarded the embassy in San Salvador, American businessmen and CIA assets, and a retired American Jesuit priest, the Rev. Francisco Peccorini.