osama is not dead, page-41

ronsterm

A good point. Clinton hailed Mandela as a great leader. Reagan hailed Mandela as a terrorist..........

US drops Mandela from terrorist list
Posted Wed Jul 2, 2008 8:45am AEST

The United States has removed former South African president Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress (ANC) from a three-decade old immigration watch list for possible terrorists.

In time for the anti-apartheid leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner's 90th birthday on July 18, President George W Bush signed a bill on Tuesday (local time) which effectively ended a system in which Mr Mandela had to get special certification from the US Secretary of State that he is not a terrorist in order to visit the United States.

Now Mr Mandela and members of the ANC will be able to simply apply for visas to travel to the US, the State Department said.

"Today the United States finally has removed from its legal code a vestige of that time of collective insults against human dignity," House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman said, one of the bill's supporters.

"The label of 'terrorist' will no longer be affixed to associates of the ANC - among them one of the world's great heroes, Nelson Mandela.

"Our country stands with those who struggled to bring the reprehensible system of apartheid to an end."

Mr Mandela won the Nobel peace price in 1993, and was president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999.

The original purpose of the law, introduced during the 1980s while Ronald Reagan was president, was to fight terrorism.

In April, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged a Senate committee to remove the restrictions on the ANC party, calling it a "rather embarrassing matter that I still have to waive in my own counterpart, the foreign minister of South Africa, not to mention the great leader Nelson Mandela."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/07/02/2291630.htm