The Obama campaign’s response to Jerome Corsi’s book about Senator Barack Obama makes clear that they are determined to delegitimize even legitimate criticisms of the senator by mixing them up with smears. Even mainstream journalists have noted that their rebuttal document at times employs risible arguments and overreaches in attempting to defend certain aspects of Senator Obama’s career.
One example is the defense of Obama’s relationship to William Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn — two unrepentant former members of the domestic left-wing terror movement known as the Weathermen.
Amazingly, instead of disowning Ayers — which would make a lot more sense — Obama’s rebuttal document defends the man who implicated himself in terror bombings in his own 2001 memoir,
Fugitive Days. The document calls it a “lie” that Ayers is an “unrepentant domestic terrorist” and that “
the impression of Ayers’s good citizenship is incorrect.” It attempts, with endorsements from Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and two university professors, to make the case that Ayers is really a model citizen.
A model citizen — at least if you overlook the sworn congressional testimony that ties Ayers to a murder.
Ayers and Dohrn were credibly accused, in classified testimony before a Senate subcommittee in 1974, of involvement in the murder of a police officer in San Francisco, as well as an attempted (and unsuccessful) anti-personnel bombing in Detroit. It is an aspect of Ayers’ story that the mainstream media has completely
ignored and even covered up.
Ayers and Dohrn were never prosecuted for their alleged involvement in Weatherman terrorism because of government misconduct in gathering evidence against them. But Ayers has freely admitted to involvement in Weatherman bomb plots, and he has said he does not regret planting bombs. Ayers has defended his actions, arguing, “The reason we weren’t terrorists is that we did not commit random acts of terror against people.”
But Larry Grathwohl, an FBI mole within the Weathermen, connected Ayers to the planning — and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, to the execution— of a police station bombing in San Francisco in February 1970 that killed one officer and injured two others.
Grathwohl testified that Ayers had discussed the deadly incident after the fact. The revelation came as Ayers was talking about the organizational difficulties in running a terrorist cell:
[H]e cited as one of the real problems that someone like Bernardine Dohrn had to plan, develop, and carry out the bombing of the police station in San Francisco, and he specifically named her as the person that committed that act. . . . He said that the bomb was placed on the window ledge and he described the kind of bomb that was used to the extent of saying what kind of shrapnel was used in it. . . . [I]f he wasn’t there to see it, somebody who was there told him about it, because he stated it very emphatically.
Grathwohl also testified about an unsuccessful Weatherman bombing in Detroit, which he said Ayers had planned to be executed when the maximum number of people would be present:
The only time that I was ever instructed or we were ever instructed to place a bomb in a building at a time when there would be people in it was during the planning of the bombing at the Detroit Police Officers’ Association building and the 13th precinct in Detroit, Mich., at which time Bill said that we should plan our bombing to coincide with the time when there would be the most people in those buildings.
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