Obama’s terrorist co-chairman

J. Michael Sharman
Published: October 13, 2008

Beginning in 1995, Barack Obama and Bill Ayers served together on the board of the Annenberg Challenge Project. Before it closed in 2003, CNN reports, it had given hundreds of thousands of dollars to social change projects promoted by Ayers.  1

Ayers was the person responsible for getting the Annenberg grant for Chicago. 2 He was one of the three founders of the Project. 3 The Project’s minutes note that Ayers and Obama wrote its bylaws together. 4 Ayers was the co-chair of the Project’s “Collaborative”, which shaped its educational policy. 5

In 1995, a few months after Obama became chairman of the Annenberg Challenge, his political career began when state Sen. Alice Palmer introduced Obama to a dozen-or-so folks gathered in the Hyde Park living room of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn as the person to take her place in the Illinois State Senate. 6

In 1997, Obama wrote a glowing review in the Chicago Tribune for one of Ayers’ books. 7 CNN also reported that he was listed with Ayers as a panelist at a forum organized by his wife, Michelle Obama. 8

From 1999 to 2001 9 , Ayers and Obama also served together on the board of the Woods Foundation of Chicago, and grants were made from it to Obama’s church, Trinity United Church of Christ, and to the Children and Family Justice Center, which is run by Ayers’ wife, Bernadine Dohrn. 10

So why, during an April 2008 debate with Hillary Clinton, did Obama claim that he knew Ayers simply “as a guy who lives in my neighborhood?” 11
William “Bill” Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn first met in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1967. Until recently, though, she was the more famous of the two, mainly because of her incendiary speeches: In 1969, when Charlie Manson went on his killing spree, Dohrn told an SDS rally, “Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach.”  12

It was she who made the public announcement on May 21, 1970: “Hello. This is Bernardine Dohrn. I’m going to read a declaration of a state of war. This is the first communication from the Weatherman Underground. … Within the next 14 days, we will attack a symbol or institution of Amerikan injustice.” 13

In 1970, Ayers’ then-girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed in a bombmaking accident in Greenwich Village. Ayers went underground. By that time, Bernadine Dorhn was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List” 14, and the Weather Underground 15 was listed as a “Domestic Terrorist Organization” by the FBI. 16

Ayers and Dohrn have three children: In 1977 they had Zayd Atheola, named after a Black Panther killed in a shootout with police four years earlier; In 1980 they had Malik Cochise, named after Malcolm X and the Apache war chief; and Chesa, Kathy Boudin’s son, has been raised by Dohrn and Ayers since his mother was jailed for a Brinks robbery when he was 14 months old.  17

In an August 22, 1996 PBS interview with Dorhn and Ayers, they were asked by interviewer Elizabeth Brackett, “As you look back now, the bombings, what the Weathermen did claim credit for, would you do it differently now?” Ayers said, “I doubt it…[W]hat we did was certainly serious and had consequences for us personally, but I don’t think it was, it was anything that was uncalled for. I mean, I think it was called for.”

Dorhn answered, “The movement was never not into violence.” 18

On September 11, 2001, in an incredible ironic coincidence of timing, under the headline, “No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives”, The New York Times published an interview with Bill Ayers that had this now-famous opening line:  “‘I don’t regret setting bombs,‘’ Bill Ayers said. ‘I feel we didn’t do enough.’” 19

The NYT interviewer reminded Ayers that in 1970 he had summed up the Weatherman creed by saying, “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.” He told her, “It was a joke about the distribution of wealth.”

The reason for the NYT interview was to launch Ayers’ new book, “Fugitive Days”, in which he admitted participating in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972.

“Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,” he wrote.

In his book, Ayers also claimed responsibility for breaking Timothy Leary out of jail. Writer Richard Stern, reports of another prison break Ayers was involved in: during dinner with Dohrn and Ayers, Ayers was describing to Stern how “they’d gotten Eldridge Cleaver from a California prison to a Morocco haven” before Dohrn stopped him from saying more. 20

After Malik’s birth in 1980, they decided to come out of hiding. Their Federal charges had been dropped years earlier due to prosecutorial misconduct, and Dorhn pleaded guilty to reduced state charges and got a fine and three years probation. A few months later, when she was asked to testify about Kathy Boudin’s Brinks robbery, she claimed she knew nothing about it. The feds then asked for a writing sample, Dorhn refused, and she was given 7 months for refusing to testify. “I felt grand juries were illegal and coercive,” said Dorhn, a law school graduate. 21

It was during a jail furlough that Dorhn and Ayers married. 22

The August 2001 issue of Chicago Magazine had an article about Ayers titled “No Regrets” accompanied by a posed photo of Ayers in an urban alleyway, nonchalantly standing on a crumbled American flag.

In that month before 9/11, the article recites his past of domestic terrorism and reports: “This—violence, death, and white-hot rhetoric—is his past and Ayers insists he has no regrets. ‘I acted appropriately in the context of those times,’ he says.”  23

Three days after 9/11, David Horowitz wrote of an interview he did with Ayers ten years before: “Ayers reviewed his activities as a terrorist for my tape recorder. When he was done, he broke into a broad, Jack Horner grin and summed up his experience: ‘Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.’” 24

In 2003, the film “The Weather Underground”, with interviews of Dorhn, Ayers, and two other Weather Underground members, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary.

In a January 2004 interview of Dorn and Ayers posted on the film’s website, they were asked, “Would you do it again under similar circumstances?”

Ayers answered, “Being almost 60, it’s impossible to not have lots and lots of regrets about lots and lots of things, but the question of did we do something that was horrendous, awful?… I don’t think so.”

Dorhn’s answer was, “At the end of the day, I feel like we were lucky to be in that history. We were lucky to be in that history. We were lucky to be in that moment where there was hope and a sense of libratory possibility.”  25

In 2006, Bill Ayers took his fourth trip to Venezuela to speak to educational “reformers” who are part of Hugo Chavez’ Bolivarian Revolution. On Ayers’ website is the content of his speech. He said, “We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution…” He encouraged them to “continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane… Capitalism promotes racism and militarism – turning people into consumers, not citizens.”

In Spanish, Ayers told his fellow reformers, “La educacion es revolucion! Viva Presidente Chavez! Viva La Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta La Victoria Siempre!” 26

Chairman Obama. Co-Chairman Ayers. They are more than simply two guys who live in the same neighborhood.

J. Michael Sharman is an independent columnist who practices law in Culpeper. His column appears Tuesdays in the Star-Exponent. 

1 http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/07/obama.ayers/
2 http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/10/05/fact-check-is-obama-palling-around-with-terrorists/
3 Kurtz, Stanley “Founding Brothers: What’s behind Obama’s early rise?” Sep 24, 2008 http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTM4ZmU1NGFkODJlMjhmYjkxMjg4Y2Q0NTVlYjAzMmY=
4 Chicago Annenberg Challenge Board Of Directors Minutes, 3/15/95
5 Kurtz, Stanley “Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools” Wall Street Journal, Sep 23, 2008
6 http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/07/obama.ayers/
7 Chicago Tribune, 12/21/97
8 http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/07/obama.ayers/
9 http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/10/05/fact-check-is-obama-palling-around-with-terrorists/
10 http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/07/obama.ayers/
11 http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/07/obama.ayers/
12 Smith, Dinitia “No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen”, The New York Times, September 11, 2001
13 http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/pacificaviet/scheertranscript.html
14 Smith, Dinitia “No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen”, The New York Times, September 11, 2001 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DE1438F932A2575AC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
15 “The FBI’s analysis of its motivations, beliefs, and international travels are outlined in this summary.” http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/weather.htm
16 http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/10/05/fact-check-is-obama-palling-around-with-terrorists/
17 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/weather/radicals_8-22.html, TALES FROM THE UNDERGROUND, AUGUST 22, 1996, TRANSCRIPT; and Smith, Dinitia “No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen”, The New York Times, September 11, 2001 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DE1438F932A2575AC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
18 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/weather/radicals_8-22.html, TALES FROM THE UNDERGROUND, AUGUST 22, 1996, TRANSCRIPT
19 Smith, Dinitia “No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen”, The New York Times, September 11, 2001 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DE1438F932A2575AC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
20 http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/10/the_william_ayers_he_knows.php
21 Smith, Dinitia “No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen”, The New York Times, September 11, 2001 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DE1438F932A2575AC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
22 Smith, Dinitia “No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen”, The New York Times, September 11, 2001 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DE 1438F932A2575AC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
23 Coburn, Marcia “No Regrets” Chicago Magazine, August 2001 http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/August-2001/No-Regrets/
24 Horowitz, David “Allies in War”, FrontPageMagazine.com , September 14, 2001 http://www.islet.org/horowitz/20010914.htm
25 “The Weather Underground: Exclusive Interview : Bernadine Dorhn and Bill Ayers” , January 2004 http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/weatherunderground/interview.html
26 http://billayers.wordpress.com/2006/11/07/world-education-forum/