Terrorist Threat of the Week, as conveyed by the New York Times: “Andrew Young says in Michigan that he will continue to speak out.”
The most recent phase of President Carter’s program to extend amnesty to men who incurred service-related legal difficulties during the Vietnam era was made public last week by the Pentagon. The new plan offers the upgrading of less-than-honorable discharges to deserters and other “victims” of what editorialists nowadays refer to as an “illegal” war, so long as they make application within six months to their military review boards. Amusingly enough, the old pro-amnesty argument—resting upon the notion that it is meet that criminal penalties be removed from those war resisters who acted out of concern for a higher principle—has been shelved; the theorists behind the latest scheme insist that most of those with less-than-honorable discharges are worthy of lenity precisely because their wrongdoing was not ideologically motivated but proceeded from the fact that they were ignorant, unsuited to military discipline, and plagued by personal problems. Before the appeal to the Higher Morality goes completely out of fashion, perhaps the President will take it upon himself to extend amnesty to the FBI investigators whom the Justice Department is indicting for the illegal entries, searches, and phone-tappings they carried out against antiwar terrorists in the heyday of the Movement, when men of good will were justifiably concerned for yet another Good—the security of their country. In this context, President Carter’s commutation to eight years of the sentence of G. Gordon Liddy, the last of the Watergate burglars to languish in the pen, is an encouraging sign.
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