Once again, The New York Times is carrying water for a terrorist — in this case, Lori Berenson, who openly acknowledges she was a “collaborator” with one of the two groups that plunged Peru into what may have been the worst terrorist maelstrom the world has ever seen.
To read the huge article running in the coming Sunday Times Magazine, now available online, you might actually mistake Berenson for a holy innocent — a good and noble person who made a few dumb mistakes out of an excess of ideological zeal for which she was compelled to pay with nearly two decades of her life.
And to look at the cover image of the 40-year-old Berenson holding the toddler to whom she gave birth in prison, you might mistake her for the Madonna with Child — the central image of medieval painting, consciously evoked by photographer Mary Ellen Mark.
So the newspaper that covered itself in eternal shame with a puff piece about the domestic American terrorist Bill Ayers published on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 — among the lowest points in its history — has chosen to descend back into the apologia abyss.
The group with which Berenson “collaborated” was the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (or MRTA), the smaller of the two monstrous terrorist entities that nearly cast Peru into the abyss in the 1980s and ’90s.
The extraordinarily sympathetic article by the often-brilliant novelist Jennifer Egan has much in common with the “Free Lori” activists who have been calling for her release since her arrest in 1995. They talk about how gentle and well-meaning she is and complain about the handling of her case, but give us no reason to believe that mere “collaboration” was the full extent of the connection which landed Berenson in jail — and from which she was finally paroled in January.
Berenson was arrested and charged with treason in 1995, based on one unambiguous fact: She was the co-signer of the lease to a house in Lima that was a hideout and ammo dump for the Tupac Amaru.
She’d been posing as a credentialed journalist for far-left American publications, and had been reporting inside the Peruvian assembly with a photographer — a photographer who, it turned out, was married to a leading figure in the terrorist group. Peruvian officials claim they were staking out the parliament building to help the MRTA design a plan for its takeover.
Berenson defenders scoff at the claim, but offer no counterveiling evidence. Nor can they explain why, if she had been a railroaded innocent, the Tupac Amaru would have included Berenson’s name prominently on a list of prisoners it demanded the government free after it seized the Japanese Embassy in Lima a year after her arrest and held 70 people hostage for four months.
Finally, they offer a “she was tired and cranky” defense to explain away the infamous image of Berenson shrieking in court in 1995, baring her teeth as she snarled in Spanish that “in the MRTA, there are no criminal terrorists. It is a revolutionary movement!”
That was enough for Peru’s human-rights activists, who wanted nothing to do with her: “She admitted she belonged to them, so she is not an innocent person,” said Susana Villaran, head of Peru’s largest human-rights group, in 1996.
Her case has been retried twice. The first time was in Peru, and it resulted in a conviction on a lesser charge than the original treason. Then, after lobbying efforts by Berenson’s supporters, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights declared her trials had been unfair — not that the charges were untrue. And two years later, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights reversed that declaration and found her guilty yet again.
Though she spoke words of remorse in court as she sought her parole last year, she recently told Newsweek: “I don’t regret what I’ve done, because I don’t think my intentions were bad. My intentions were positive, whatever that’s worth.”
That’s Berenson’s self-justification. What’s the Times’ excuse? Egan’s piece dominates the cover of Sunday’s magazine — which debuts a redesign.
Editors and managers at places like the Times make very deliberate choices when it comes to the featured content in refurbished sections. It speaks volumes that the magazine’s new editor, Hugo Lindgren, considers this outrageous puffery — about a person who is, at the very best, a terrorist stooge — to be a wonderful calling card for the magazine’s new era.
Looks a lot like the bad old days to me.
johnpodhoretz@gmail.com