According to The Havana Note the Junior Senator from Connecticut has promised to seek a pardon for terrorist Eduardo Arocena. (h/t C&L)
Before addressing a pro-McCain event in Florida on July 20, 2008, Senator Joe Lieberman was recorded on video telling Miriam Arocena, wife of Eduardo Arocena, the Federally-convicted leader of the Cuban-American terrorist group Omega 7, that he will carry back to Washington her request for a Presidential pardon for her husband. Arocena is serving a mandatory life sentence and was convicted on 25 Federal counts in New York and 24 counts in New York.
I urge you to read the entire piece in The Havana Note
Why would Joseph Lieberman be interested in doing this? Why would he want this person pardoned?
Cozying up to Cuban-American extremists in South Florida has been a part of American political culture for decades. It is an unseemly ritual that has nevertheless persisted because of the dysfunctional peculiarities of our Electoral College that grants Florida 27 votes, exactly 10 percent of the electors needed to win the White House.
Thanks to the sleuthing of avid Cuba-watcher Phil Peters over at Cuban Triangle we now know that:
Lieberman said:
"It's my responsibility, it's my responsibility. I will carry it [the pardon request] back. I will carry it back. Yeah. I feel...I think of you like you were my family.... I'll bring it back. I'll do my best."
You can see the video at The Havana Note.
What makes this friendship between Lieberman and this particular terrorist group appalling is:
Much of the operational activity of Cuban-American terrorist groups has been planned in South Florida and directed at the island of Cuba itself. Arocena's Omega 7 group, however, was different. It perpetrated an eight-year-long spree of violence that was planned in Newark, New Jersey and Miami, Florida, and took place here in the United States against public and private targets across the New York and Dade County metro areas.
In the New York Times story appearing after Arocena's conviction in Federal court, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Tabak, the lead prosecutor in the Arocena case, said hatred of Cuban Communism "does not justify murders and bombings in the United States."
The junior Senator from Connecticut, Joseph Lieberman, is chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. Feel safer now?