Before deciding to offer clemency to 16 imprisoned members of the FALN, the Puerto Rican terrorist group, President Clinton no doubt solicited the opinions of a number of different people -- his lawyers, his political advisers, representatives of various interest groups, and of course -- ludicrous denials aside -- his wife, the Senate candidate from New York. What's striking, though, is that no one from the White House called Richard Pastorella.
Pastorella, a former New York City police detective, knows quite a bit about the FALN. On New Year's Eve 1982, he was outside a federal building in downtown Manhattan when an FALN bomb went off. He and another officer were gravely injured. Pastorella was permanently blinded in both eyes. All five fingers were torn from his right hand. His body was peppered with shrapnel, and his hearing was destroyed. It took two years, 13 operations, and 22 titanium screws to repair his shattered face. Pastorella's family (including two teenage sons, both of whom are now New York City cops) remains devastated. "We will never have clemency from our injuries," Pastorella says.
Pastorella believes that at least one of the terrorists Clinton is set to release was directly involved in the bombing that blinded him. Some of the others, he says, helped steal the explosives for the bomb. All of them, he points out, belonged to a group that was dedicated to committing violence against the U.S. government. Between 1974 and 1985, the FALN committed at least 120 bombings around the country, killing five people and injuring more than 60. At the time they were arrested, some of the soon-to-be released terrorists were planning -- and were videotaped by the FBI planning -- to blow up two government buildings in Chicago.
Apologists for the FALN -- and there are many, including, naturally, Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu -- point out that none of the prisoners who are being released was convicted of setting off bombs that killed anyone. It's an argument, says Pastorella, that sets a new threshold for clemency requests: "Terry Nichols wasn't actually at the [federal building] bombing in Oklahoma City. So he can say what [FALN members] are saying: 'Well, I wasn't there. I had nothing to do with it.' Does that mean that we say to him at some point, 'Well, you spent ten years of your life in prison, you poor soul, why don't we let you out in society again so you can get a second shot at us?'"
Good question. And as Pastorella points out, if Clinton's FALN members had so little to do with the violence the group committed, how come the bombings stopped when they were locked up? Pastorella has other good questions, too: Why didn't Clinton wait until the FALN members showed contrition before offering to release them? How is making deals with FALN members different from negotiating with other terrorist organizations? And why didn't the White House ask for an impact statement from Pastorella or the widows and families of other victims of FALN violence? Pastorella doesn't know the answers to these questions because, as he said, no one from the administration ever called.