Major Garrett:

In 1950, [Officer Leslie W.] Coffelt... was a member of the White House Police Force, the fore-runner to the US Secret Service Uniformed Division.  On Nov. 1 of that year, he was standing post with three other officers [at Blair House, where President Truman and his wife were living during White House renovations].  At the time, city buses dropped off passengers on Pennsylvania Avenue near Blair House.
...
Two Puerto Rican nationalists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, approached Blair House from opposite directions and opened fire.  Coffelt, stationed inside a guard booth, suffered three gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen.  Coffelt rallied enough to exit the booth, brace himself against it and, from a distance of about 30 feet, shoot Torresola to death with a single shot to the head.

In 1952, Collazo was sentenced to death, but President Truman commuted his sentence to life imprisonment.  He was sent to the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. Collazo’s sentence was commuted to time served by President Jimmy Carter on September 6, 1979...  President Carter also commuted the sentences of Collazo’s fellow nationalists Irving Flores, Rafael Cancel Miranda, and Lolita Lebrón...  Upon their return to Puerto Rico, they were received as heroes by the different independence groups...  In 1979, Collazo and the other nationalists were decorated by Cuba’s President Fidel Castro.

While the pardon scandals that marked Bill and Hillary Clinton’s final days in office are remembered as transactions involving cronies, criminals and campaign contributors, the FALN clemencies of 1999 should be remembered in the context of the increasing threat of domestic and transnational terrorism that was ramping up during the Clinton years of alleged peace and prosperity.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 20:36:07 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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