Cops Ask Clinton To Rescind Offer

Información enviada a Mario Rojas, Director de Tlahui. Puerto Rico, a 27 de Agosto, 1999. Cops try to stop release.

Tuesday August 24 1:37 PM ET
Cops Ask Clinton To Rescind Offer
By DONNA DE LA CRUZ Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) - President Clinton's offer of clemency to 16 Puerto Rican independence advocates imprisoned after a wave of bombings on U.S. targets is an insult to the victims, law enforcement officials said.

"We are begging him, as a friend of law enforcement, to rescind his offer and let them serve out the sentences that they justly deserve," Thomas J. Scotto, president of New York´s Detectives´ Endowment Association and the National Association of Police Organizations, said Monday. "They are criminals. They are not patriots."

White House officials dismissed suggestions that Clinton's offer is politically motivated.

"This is something that has been under consideration for quite some time," White House spokesman Barry Toiv said.

Earlier this month, Clinton said he would offer clemency to 16 members of the FALN - the Spanish initials for Armed Forces of National Liberation - if they signed statements asking for commutations, agreed to renounce violence and abided by all conditions of release set by law or the Parole Commission. They have not yet met the conditions.

The FALN members staged some 130 bomb attacks on political, military and civilian targets in the United States from 1974 to 1983. Bombings attributed to the FALN killed six people and wounded dozens, but none of those offered clemency was involved in attacks that resulted in fatalities.

Clinton's offer came in response to human rights officials who argued that the sentences were too harsh. The 16 are serving sentences ranging from 15 years to 90 years.

But former Detectives Richard Pastorella, and Anthony Senft and former police Officer Rocco Pascarella said they have been forgotten. Pastorella and Senft were injured as they tried to disarm a bomb on New Year's Eve in 1982. Pascarella was injured that same night when a bomb exploded outside New York police headquarters.

Pastorella, who was blinded, called the offer a move designed to help Hillary Rodham Clinton gain the Hispanic vote should she run next year for the U.S. Senate in New York.

"This is really truly pandering to the Hispanic community, to the Latino community, for the vote when Mrs. Clinton runs," Pastorella said.

He was joined at the news conference by two other former cops injured in those attacks, police Commissioner Howard Safir and representatives of the city's five police unions.

Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who also is exploring a Senate run, supports the police but did not attend the news conference.

"The president... said the premise of his pardoning them was that they would renounce violence, and now it´s a week or 10 days later and they haven´t renounced violence - that´s got to tell you something," Giuliani told reporters in Rochester "The failure of the people involved to quickly renounce violence gives you a sense that this was a mistake."

From: ALM alm1998@aol.com
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