Sen. John McCain with Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Roberto Martin Perez
It's a bit of political Karma, really. Wednesday night in the last of the 2008 presidential debates, Senator John McCain spent an awful lot of time attacking Senator Barack Obama for his ties to Bill Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground Organization, a radical group that split off from Students for a Democratic Society in the late 1960s and early 1970s executed a riot and bombing campaign across the country. Obama served on a bi-partisan school reform board with Ayers ten years ago. Here's the exchange.
Now, in the heat of the final days of the election, it seems that the media are giving Senator McCain's own connections to convicted domestic terrorists, in this case Cuban-American terrorists, some equal time.
Yesterday, writing in Slate, Anne Louise Bardach, wrote this piece: "The GOP's Bill Ayers? The McCain campaign has its own questionable connections to bombers and assassins."
I'm proud to say that the Havana Note and our friends at the Cuban Triangle, were on this story when it broke out of Miami.
The jist is this, Senator Joe Lieberman, the head of the hard-right Cuban Liberty Council Roberto Martin Perez, and Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart, all active advisers and surrogates of the McCain Campaign, are arguing that a number of Federally-convicted domestic terrorists, with long lists of bombings, assassinations, and lawlessness, should have their sentences commuted or their convictions pardoned.
What is especially disturbing to me is that Sen. Lieberman has carried the commutation request for Eduardo Arocena, the leader of Omega 7, a group that set off a string of bombings in the New York City metro area that triggered the creation of the nation's first-ever joint counter-terrorism task force. Yet Sen. Lieberman is the current chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, responsible for domestic counterterrorism. Oh, and many of his constituents work and play in the places Arocena bombed, like Lincoln Center, JFK Airport, and Madison Square Garden.
Senator McCain is said to be thinking about Sen. Lieberman for a cabinet position, should he win the election. Lincoln Diaz-Balart is his senior adviser for Latin America. Roberto Martin Perez has narrated McCain campaign ads.
Senator Obama has denounced the acts of Bill Ayers unequivocally. It was the right thing to do. Now it is time for McCain, Lieberman, Diaz-Balart and Martin Perez all to denounce their terrorists. If McCain's advisers cannot, they should be fired by the Campaign, and, should Senator McCain become president, be excluded from his administration.
There should be no place in the U.S. government for supporters of terrorism. Both campaigns should be able to agree on that.