Catastrophe - Dick Morris [64]
Joseph Connor—the son of Frank Connor, who was murdered at the age of thirty-three in the FALN bombing of Fraunces Tavern in 1975—testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee to protest Holder’s nomination as attorney general. In his testimony he noted that the FALN pardons had been condemned at the time by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 95–2!
Connor’s eloquent testimony also brings us face-to-face with the aftermath of terrorism:
These terrorists took away my father’s life; never allowing him to see his sons play sports in high school, never allowing him the pride in seeing his boys graduate high school and college, or meet his daughters-in-law. They took from him the joy of being father and a grandfather. They took from my mother the promise of growing old with her first love.238
And Connor poses some questions for Holder.
* * *
QUESTIONS HOLDER HAS YET TO ANSWER:
Why did Holder ignore the recommendations of the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, the former pardon attorney, prosecutors, and even his own Justice Department and champion the release of self-proclaimed terrorists?
Why does Holder continue to hide behind executive privilege when posed direct questions on the issue—even as he was about to become part of what was being billed as the “most transparent administration in American history”?
Why did Holder fail to contact victims or their families but meet with supporters of the terrorists?
Why did Holder provide advice to the terrorists by coming up with the idea that they renounce violence in order to get clemency?
Why did Holder make the unprecedented decision to allow the terrorists to make conference calls between prisons?
Why did Holder fail to require them to provide information to resolve unsolved crimes as a condition for the pardon?239
* * *
Of course, the real reason Clinton and Holder granted the commutations to the FALN terrorists was to promote Hillary’s candidacy for the Senate in New York State, the home to the largest concentration of Puerto Ricans in the nation. To warm their reception for this newcomer to New York State, President Clinton was determined to grant the commutations that were being demanded by some of the ultra-left leaders of the New York Puerto Rican community.
But appointing Holder as attorney general is only part of a pattern of Obama designations that send a clear message to those trying to protect us against terrorist attacks: that they—not the terrorists they are investigating—are in the Justice Department’s sights.
The worst new appointee is Dawn Johnsen, the new head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It is the OLC that advises a president on what he can and cannot legally do in terrorist investigations. In a 2008 article entitled “What’s a President to Do? Interpreting the Constitution in the Wake of Bush Administration Abuses,” Johnsen signaled how far backward she would lean over to protect terror suspects’ rights.
Hey, Dawn, how about us American citizens?
The National Review’s Andrew McCarthy argues that Johnsen views the War on Terror “as something President Bush started after 9/11 rather than a years-long jihadist provocation to which the United States finally responded.” He notes that “this framework would make it impossible to prosecute as war crimes such pre-9/11 atrocities as the bombings of the USS Cole and the embassies in East Africa.”240
Johnsen dismisses President Bush’s justification of warrantless surveillance of al-Qaeda communications into and out of the country as an “extreme and implausible Commander-In-Chief theory.”241 As McCarthy notes, however, “in fact, the practice was strongly supported by federal court precedent and has been reaffirmed by the appellate court Congress created specifically to consider such issues.” Amazingly, McCarthy quotes Johnsen as saying that “job applicants