“DAYS OF RAGE” REVISITED. Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence by Bryan Burrough is reviewed by Scott Johnson of Power Line:
The groups whose story Burrough tells conducted a campaign that included thousands of bombings and many horrible murders, yet most have been entirely forgotten. Why? In his epilogue, Burrough gives the penultimate word to Joseph Connor. On his ninth birthday Connor lost his father in the 1975 bombing of the Fraunces Tavern by the FALN in New York City. Burrough notes that “[W]hat truly drives [Connor] ‘mental’ is the notion that modern terrorism on U.S. soil dates only far aback as the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. ‘That gets me every time,’ he says. ‘To think that America thinks none of this ever happened, that it’s not ever remembered, it’s astounding to me. You know, I blame the media. The media was more than happy to let all this go. These were not the kinds of terrorists the liberal media wanted us to remember, because they share a lot of the same values. They were terrorists. They were just the wrong brand. My father was murdered by the wrong politics. So they were let off the hook. That what we’re left with today, a soft view of these people, when they were as hardened as anybody. They were just terrorists. Flat-out terrorists.’”
Burrough also notes that Bill Clinton pardoned 16 of the 18 FALN terrorists convicted in the group’s two bombing campaigns; the other two convicted FALN members rejected Clinton’s offer of pardon. Debra Burlingame condemned these “terror pardons” in a superb 2008 Wall Street Journal column. Kudos to Bryan Burrough for remembering these events in a book that makes it more difficult for us to forget again.
Read the whole thing.