PERU: The case of Lori Berenson

Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 2004 5:08 PM Lori Berenson is jailed in Peru on charges of complicity with terrorists. Tim Brown answers those who depict her as an innocent victim: "The leaders of the Communist revolutionary movement in El Salvador have publicly confirmed that Berenson was an official and duly recognized member of that organization. She is lying when she says she was not, and her own movement has said so publicly, and those who continue to believe her are simply ignoring the truth. Further, the FMLN's written membership records, complete with a full face contemporary photo and her signature were shown to me in San Salvador several years back and fully confirm this. I predict that, just as with other guerrilla movements I have been able to document, when the records of MRTA become available she will be found to have been an official member of that movement as well. But, and regardless of reality, documents or anything else, Berenson will continue to deny the truth and those on the pro-revolutionary and fellow-traveling left will continue to claim they believe her and not the evidence and will admit the truth only if they decide to leave their ideologically cozy nests. That is the way of the revolutionary left: When it is convenient, lie. And it is the way of its sympathizers is to believe lies regardless of the evidence.

I have little doubt that Berenson did not get what in the United States would have been considered a totally fair and objective trial according to the forms of English civil law and that the conditions in which she is imprisoned do not live up to the standards of an American prison. But then, the hundreds of Peruvians and Salvadorans she helped MRTA and the FMLN kill did not get trials at all and the conditions in their graves are worse than those of "Lorita's" prison. And if she has dared even to try to do in any country ruled by the kind of people she was trying to help come to power, such as Cuba or the Soviet Union, what she did in Peru while trying to hide behind her American passport, she would simply have been shot, buried and forgotten".