The editor complained when he saw the story. You can’t apologize for a terrorist, he said.
Respected?
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“Yeah, not to mention his service in the early years of Vietnam. He was a hero; the army awarded him the Bronze Star for valor.”
“You sound like the government. They stonewalled me for five weeks, and then when I finally got the interview some flunky of the warden insisted on standing over us keeping time. ‘It’s for your own protection,’ he told me. Do you know that one of the government’s counterterrorism strategies reads, ‘The media . . . must never be permitted to demonstrate the terrorist as a normal human?”
What does that mean?
“Yeah. Look, there may be something particular here that produces people like Lopez-Rivera. He didn’t simply return from Vietnam to take up arms. He sought legal means. He worked for the Northwest Community Organization. He counseled drug addicts and founded an alternative high school. But somewhere along the line, the proponents of change always meet the powers that be and the latter bust heads open. Take the ’68 Democratic convention and the Humboldt Park riots and Hoover’s ‘dirty tricks.’ Some, like Lopez-Rivera, just never stopped fighting back.”
