Obama and the Weather Underground Terrorists

In April, Sen. Barack Obama said this when questioned about his associations with Weather Underground terrorist William Ayres:

"This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense, George."

New information has surfaced that exposed the lie that Obama told above. His associations and connections to William Ayres and Ayres's wife Bernardine Dohrn were more extensive than what Obama admitted to.



While it is true that Obama was a mere child when the Weather Underground set off bombs at police stations, banks, The Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, Obama was in his thirties when the association began. (I was in my teens at the time of the bombings and I remember them well.) But why did Obama associate himself with radical terrorists? Any decent person with a bit of common sense wouldn't. That is like associating with Timothy McVeigh (of Oklahoma City Bombing fame). Obama can't claim ignorance about knowledge of Ayres's past history.

Rick Moran at The American Thinker writes:

As we wait for the press and others to go through the thousands of documents related to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge where Barack Obama served as President of the Board and terrorist William Ayers headed up the operations arm, we can say for certain that Obama is a liar of the first magnitude.

Reviews of the Annenberg Challenge records show this so far:

The UIC records show that Obama and Ayers attended board meetings, retreats and at least one news conference together as the education program got under way. The two continued to attend meetings together during the 1995-2001 operation of the program, records show.

In 1970, a nail bomb intending to kill U.S. soldiers, and designed by Ayres, accidentally exploded in a townhouse. The explosion killed three WU operatives, including Ayres's then-girlfriend Diana Oughton.

The bomb was intended for detonation at a dance that was to be attended by army soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Hundreds of lives could have been lost had the plan been successfully executed. Ayers attested that the bomb would have done serious damage, "tearing through windows and walls and, yes, people too."

Michael Barone wrote on August 22 in U.S. News & World Report:

In my U.S. News column this week, I make a brief reference to the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist bomber William Ayers and his connections to Barack Obama. They were closer than Obama implied when George Stephanopoulos asked him about Ayers in the April 16 debate—the last debate Obama allowed during the primary season. To get an idea of how close they were, check out Tom Maguire's Just One Minute blog and Steve Diamond's Global Labor and Politics. The Obama-Ayers relationship is also mentioned in David Freddoso's The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate.

Ayers was one of the original grantees of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school reform organization in the 1990s, and was cochairman of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, one the two operational arms of the CAC. Obama, then not yet a state senator, became chairman of the CAC in 1995. Later in that year, the first organizing meeting for Obama's state Senate campaign was held in Ayers's apartment. Ayers later wrote a memoir, and an article about him appeared in the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001. "I don't regret setting bombs," Ayers is quoted as saying. "I feel we didn't do enough."

Ayers was a terrorist in the late 1960s and 1970s whose radical group set bombs at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.

You might wonder what Obama was doing working with a character like this. And you might wonder how an unrepentant terrorist got a huge grant and cooperation from the Chicago public school system. You might wonder—if you don't know Chicago. For this is a city with a civic culture in which politicians, in the words of a story often told by former congressman, federal judge, and Clinton White House counsel Abner Mikva, "don't want nobody nobody sent." That's what Mikva remembers being told when he went to a Democratic ward headquarters to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, and it rings true. And it's a civic culture in which there's nobody better to send you than your parents.

That's how William Ayers got where he was. When he came out of hiding because the federal government was unable to prosecute him (because of government misconduct), he got a degree in education from Columbia and then moved to Chicago and got a job on the education faculty of the University of Illinois-Chicago Circle. How did he get that job? Well, it can't have hurt that his father, Thomas Ayers, was chairman of Commonwealth Edison (now Exelon) and a charter member of the Chicago establishment. As Mayor Richard M. Daley said recently, in arguing that the Ayers association should not be held against Obama, "His father was a great friend of my father."

For Obama, the outsider who gained the trust of the insiders, the position is different. He was willing to use Ayers and ally with him despite his terrorist past and lack of repentance. An unrepentant terrorist, who bragged of bombing the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon, was a fit associate. Ayers evidently helped Obama gain insider status in Chicago civic life and politics—how much, we can't be sure unless the Richard J. Daley Library opens the CAC archive. But most American politicians would not have chosen to associate with a man with Ayers's past or of Ayers's beliefs. It's something voters might reasonably want to take into account.

One of the few of the MSM, Jake Tapper, Senior Washington Correspondent of ABC News wrote:

They served on a board together when Obama was a state senator. Ayres donated $200 to Obama's campaign in 2001. They sat on a panel together in 2002 called "Intellectuals in Times of Crisis." Obama went to Ayres and Dohrn's home in 1995 to be introduced to some of the more influential liberals in the area by the state senator he was preparing to succeed, Alice Palmer.

Last month, when the ad by The American Issues Project targeted Obama's association with Ayres was run in 150 cities in battleground states, the Obama campaign tried to prevent the ad from being shown and tried to sic the Justice Department on the organization. Obviously, Obama does not want his association with Ayres to be known by the electorate. Fortunately, the move by the Obama campaign only drew more attention to the ad.

At the time, McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said, "The fact that Barack Obama chose to launch his political career at the home of an unrepentant terrorist raises more questions about Senator Obama's judgment than any TV ad ever could."

When Ayres had the charges against him dismissed (due to FBI misconduct), he boasted, "Guilty as hell, but free as a bird!"

The association of Barack Obama and William Ayres and Bernardine Dohrn should be enough to disqualify Obama for the presidency or even a State Department or Defense Department security clearance.

The MSM has pretty much ignored this story, with few exceptions. They only picked up on it when the American Issues Project ad ran and the Obama campaign screamed bloody murder.

It is now obvious that Chicago is the hotbed for radicalism, and Obama was right in the thick of it. His associations call to question the fitness and judgment of Barack Obama to be elected president.