Among the more than 200 commutations handed out yesterday, President Obama commuted the sentence of Oscar López Rivera, a member of Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (FALN), a Marxist-Leninist terrorist group advocating Puerto Rican independence. He is set to be released May 17.
FALN was responsible for more than 130 bombings in the United States that killed four people and seriously injured police officers. The New York Daily News has a pretty horrifying recap of their reign of terror in New York (nor is the paper’s liberal editorial board happy with Obama’s decision here):
López Rivera was arrested in 1981 and got 55 years in prison, but later had his sentence extended another 15 years for trying to break out of Leavenworth. At the time he was sentenced, López Rivera told the court: “I am an enemy of the United States government.” (Other members of FALN went so far as to directly threaten judges and promise more acts of violence.) He wasn’t kidding. FALN, like other Marxist terrorist groups, had a typically frank and turgid manifesto that unreservedly endorsed violence in the name of destroying the “Yanki capitalist monopoly,” and the group quickly claimed credit for the bombings they committed via press release.
In 1999, President Clinton offered clemency to 16 members of FALN on the condition they renounce violence. Twelve accepted the deal. López Rivera declined the offer of clemency because not all of members of FALN agreed to accept it. At the time, Hillary Clinton said she opposed her husband’s clemency for FALN. However, it was a popular cause among both Puerto Ricans and left-wing activeists—this Guardian article incredibly calls López Rivera “one of the world’s longest-serving political prisoners.”
And probably a good cause for a carpet-bagging former first lady who wanted to run for senate in New York to get behind. In fact, despite publicly opposing the clemency, it was later reported that Hillary Clinton was likely the driving force behind it:
However, when the Clintons offered clemency to FALN, it was politically self-serving. With Obama, the reason behind López Rivera’s commutation is an open question. He’s been in jail for 35 years, and one could view the clemency as simply compassionate. But the unfortunate vagaries of our criminal justice system mean there are plenty of nonviolent offenders with draconian sentences for lesser crimes than López Rivera.
When Obama was running for president in 2008, it was considered unforgivably unfair to talk about the fact that he had a longstanding relationship with an unrepentant and violent left-wing terrorist, Bill Ayers. (In 2001, Ayers told the New York Times “I don’t regret setting bombs … I feel we didn’t do enough.” Obama’s campaign threatened critics who talked about the two men’s relationship, and it’s now generally agreed that the Obama campaign was dishonest about the closeness of Obama’s relationship with Ayers.) It really was an outrage and the worst example of right-wing nuttery to go so far as to suggest that Obama actually endorsed the causes of violent left-wing terrorists.
But that was 2008. With the commutation of López Rivera on his way out of the White House eight years later, it’s difficult to imagine Obama is endorsing Marxist terrorists, as López Rivera swore off violence years ago. But it is fair to say that this is yet another piece of evidence that Obama’s personal political sympathies are far more radical than he ever let on.
