The good, the bad and the crazy


Since no one is perfect, the virtuous purveyors of death and destruction naturally need flexibility. Mistakes occasionally occur. For example, when U.S. drones–a basic weapon for virtuous terrorists–routinely whack civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and other remote areas, the Pentagon occasionally admits its honest mistake. The drone directors, of course, had every reason to believe that the corpses, when alive, were terrorists and not school children and housewives.


While the world followed Libyan and Afghan wars in which “good-terrorist” bombs blew away scores of bad people and bad-terrorist bombs blew away additional scores of good ones, few paid attention (certainly not the mass media) to the June celebration in Hialeah Florida. Mayor Carlos Hernandez invited the media to “join us at our next City Council meeting where Cuban activist and artist Luis Posada Carriles will receive the Key to the City of Hialeah, along with a proclamation naming the day Luis Posada Carriles Day in Hialeah.”


How exactly Posada–a freedom fighter, thus a good terrorist–“advanced democracy” by masterminding, with fellow Cuban exile Orlando Bosch (who recently died after being honored multiple times in Miami), the bombing of a Cuban airliner over Barbados, almost 35 years ago, never became clear. Everyone, however, agreed on the facts: 73 passengers and crewmembers perished. Trinidad police arrested Posada’s and Bosch’s henchmen who named the two as masterminds of the act. Venezuelan authorities then arrested the dynamic duo. (The price good terrorists must sometimes pay!)

Bribes from rich exiles and pressure from U.S. government officials got the two heroes released. To advance the cause of freedom, authorities occasionally look the other way.

Let’s not carp on the nature of Cuban exile violence. In 1976, exiles seeking freedom for Cuba bombed the Miami FBI headquarters and Post Office; big deal that in that same year five members of the Cuban Nationalist Movement worked with the Secret Police of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to car bomb Orlando Letelier, Chile’s former Ambassador to Washington, and his colleague Ronni Moffitt, less than a mile from the White House. Letelier was a socialist and Ronni ­ well, collateral damage, as they say.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, anti-Castro freedom fighters, the media rarely remind us, detonated hundreds of bombs, killed scores of their enemies on U.S. territory, not in Cuba. Max Lesnik, a magazine publisher and writer who disagreed with the violent exiles, got repeatedly bombed, but miraculously survived. He never grasped the logic of those whose aim was to bring down the Cuban government exploding bombs in U.S. cities. Often times, the good terrorists’ methods seem to defy ordinary human reason and seem to be nothing more than insane acts or means of extorting money. But the media and key Florida politicians always explain that these well-meaning bombers are passionate and will do anything for freedom.

Their bombs sometimes get exploded just to make a point. In 1970, the New York’s Fifth Avenue Cinema announced it would run my “Fidel” documentary. Public Television had broadcast it a year earlier, an act of provocation to Cuban exiles. Why else would they bomb the station except to demonstrate the moral perfidy of portraying ideas contrary to their own.



Bad terrorists, like those who did the World Trade Center and regularly detonate themselves in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and the weirdos who hid explosives in shoes and knickers, have caused our government to reduce our freedoms. That’s how dangerous they are.

The cuckoo category, however, emerges every so often, the latest being in Norway. The first reports from “experts” on Anders Breivik’s massacre blamed Muslim jihadists–as they did some 20 years earlier when ex-GIs bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. When big-time violence occurs, the media turns to people like Stephen Emerson, self-dubbed “expert”, who immediately blamed the Oklahoma bombing on Muslim extremists ­ as did other “experts.”




Saul Landau’s new film, Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up is available in DVD from Cinema Libre Studio. He’s an Institute for Policy Studies fellow.