March 1 1954-1971 The Wonderful World of Terrorism

[Valin]

March 1, 1954 | Puerto Rican Nationalists Open Fire on House of Representatives

 

Members of the Capitol Police held the Puerto Rican nationalists Lolita Lebron, Rafael Miranda and Andres Cordero as they were taken into custody on March 1, 1954, after a shooting from a House gallery.

 

On March 1, 1954, the Puerto Rican nationalists Lolita Lebron, Rafael Miranda, Irving Flores Rodriguez and Andres Figueroa Cordero entered the United States Capitols House of Representatives chamber and began firing at members of Congress, injuring five.

 

(Snip)

 

Particular attention was given to Ms. Lebron, who was dressed stylishly with high heels and bright red lipstick. Piercing the confusion were the screams of the Puerto Rican woman: Viva Puerto Rico! She emptied the chambers of a big Luger pistol, holding it in her two hands, and waving it wildly. Then she threw down the pistol and whipped out a Puerto Rican flag, which she waved but never did manage to unfurl fully.

 

The four shooters were members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, an organization that called for full independence for Puerto Rico, which has been under United States control since the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898. The party often used violent means to advance its cause, including an assassination attempt on President Harry S. Truman in November 1950, months after he signed a bill allowing Puerto Rico to draft its own Constitution.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

Mar 1, 1971: Bomb explodes in Capitol building

 

 

 

A bomb explodes in the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., causing an estimated $300,000 in damage but hurting no one. A group calling itself the "Weather Underground" claimed credit for the bombing, which was done in protest of the ongoing U.S.-supported Laos invasion.

 

The so-called Weathermen were a radical faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); the Weathermen advocated violent means to transform American society. The philosophical foundations of the Weathermen were Marxist in nature; they believed that militant struggle was the key to striking out against the state to build a revolutionary consciousness among the young, particularly the white working class. Their primary tools to achieving these ends were arson and bombing. Among the other targets of Weathermen bombings were the Long Island Court House, the New York Police Department headquarters, the Pentagon, and the State Department. No one was killed in these bombings, because the bombers always called in an advanced warning. However, three members of the Weather Underground died on March 6, 1970, when the house in which they were constructing the bombs exploded.

 

 

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[Valin]

Fire in the Night
The Weathermen tried to kill my family.
John M. Murtagh
30 April 2008

 

During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama’s answer: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” Obama was indeed only eight in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder me.

 

In February 1970, my father, a New York State Supreme Court justice, was presiding over the trial of the so-called “Panther 21,” members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Early on the morning of February 21, as my family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at our home on the northern tip of Manhattan, two at the front door and the third tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car. (Today, of course, we’d call that a car bomb.) A neighbor heard the first two blasts and, with the remains of a snowman I had built a few days earlier, managed to douse the flames beneath the car. That was an act whose courage I fully appreciated only as an adult, an act that doubtless saved multiple lives that night.

 

I still recall, as though it were a dream, thinking that someone was lifting and dropping my bed as the explosions jolted me awake, and I remember my mother’s pulling me from the tangle of sheets and running to the kitchen where my father stood. Through the large windows overlooking the yard, all we could see was the bright glow of flames below. We didn’t leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside. The same night, bombs were thrown at a police car in Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn. Sunlight, the next morning, revealed three sentences of blood-red graffiti on our sidewalk: FREE THE PANTHER 21; THE VIET CONG HAVE WON; KILL THE PIGS.

 

For the next 18 months, I went to school in an unmarked police car. My mother, a schoolteacher, had plainclothes detectives waiting in the faculty lounge all day.....(Snip)