Crocodile Tears
 
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had adopted a policy known as the Tar Baby Option, according to which the US sought to maintain close relations with the white rulers in South Africa. Ronald Reagan continued to support links with South Africa, describing the ANC as "a terrorist organization", but congressional pressure forced increased distance between the two governments.--Wikipedia

If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world it is the United States of America. They don't care for human beings. Who are they now to pretend that they are the policemen of the world, the ones that should decided for the people of Iraq what should be done with their government and their leadership?--Nelson Mandela
 
      It was a CIA tip in 1962 to their buddies in the fascist South African police that put Nelson Mandela in prison for 27 years. And it was only five years ago, long after Mandela had served as president of his country, won the Nobel Peace Prize and had become a universally admired figure, that Washington finally removed him from its terrorist watch list.
    Official America and its kept media hated Mandela just as they hated Martin Luther King. To them, Mandela was a communist terrorist, the worst things, apart from also being a Muslim atheist, that anyone could be. (In fact, he was for a time a member of the South African Communist Party.)
    In other words, most of the encomiums to Mandela we’ve heard from on top in recent days are, like the Mafia attending the funerals of its victims, obscene exercises in cynicism.
    Back when the apartheid regime was at its murderous worst, the pro-Nazi racists who ran it were reassured that the U.S. and Israel*, its two best friends in the world, had its back.
    But in time, the forces of freedom won out, sending apartheid rule to hell and inspiring the beaten down across the globe.  Washington had to reluctantly join the celebratory crowd, lest it lose propaganda points by mourning or, worse, trying to revive the ancien regime. 
     Plus there were business opportunities aplenty in the new democratically-ruled South Africa. Calling its president a criminal was obviously not the way to make friends and profits. And so the official U.S. designation of Nelson Mandela as a terrorist was quietly dropped by the Bush administration in 2008. Pols and pundits switched gears as they had done with Chairman Mao back in 1970 and began pretending that Mandela was their hero all along.
    Mandela was lucky. If he had remained on the list after 2008, Obama might have droned him.

*See: The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa by Sasha Polokow Suransky.