1981, New York City: Just a Bizarre Coincidence?

It’s 1981, New York City. Barack Obama is residing two blocks away from Weather Underground leader William Ayers. We know very little about Obama’s life in NYC during that period; supposedly he transferred from Occidental College and completed undergraduate studies at Columbia University. Obama’s academic records and, in fact, the records of his life from those years in New York are lost. [See references at end.]

At Occidental, Obama belonged to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a radical socialist organization of which the Weather Underground was an off-shoot. Did Obama continue his SDS membership at Columbia? (I read recently that Columbia was a major SDS center.)

In 1981, former Weather Underground members along with a few former Black Panthers are arrested in association with the robbery of a Brinks armored truck 20 miles north of Manhattan. A guard is killed and the driver is wounded. $1.6 million is recovered.

One of the Weather Underground members arrested for the Brinks crime is Kathy Boudin. She is sentenced to 20 years-to-life. Boudin leaves behind a child, Chesa Boudin, who ends up being raised by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn while her mother lives in prison.

One of the former Black Panthers arrested in connection with the Brinks robbery is Nathaniel Burns, a member of the Black Liberation Army. Burns is also known as Sekou Odinga. Burns/Odinga is sentenced to 25 years-to-life for attempted murder of a police officer. (ODINGA, sound familiar?)

Obama and Ayers later end up collaborating on several controversial projects in Chicago. They work together to grant funds to Rashid Khalidi, Trinity United Church of Christ, and ACORN, among other “worthy” recipients. Ayers and Dohrn host a soirée at their home to launch young Barack’s political career. (But we’re now to believe that Barack did not know that Ayers and Dohrn created and starred in the Weather Underground, for which they were tried as criminals.)

As we often see in Obama’s history, here again there are a few degrees of separation that cause curious and intelligent people to ask: Is this just another set of odd coincidences?

I believe that Obama knew Ayers in New York City, and that he’s hiding the association with Ayers, among others, in refusing to provide information about his life there.

Obviously Obama’s campaign is lying (and insulting our intelligence) when it audaciously claims that Obama knew nothing of Ayers’ affiliation with the Weather Underground, up until…when?..(I must have missed that part of Axelrod’s explanation. When does he claim that Obama learned about Ayer’s lifelong project, the WU?)

In any event, accepting Axelrod’s explanation would require us to conclude that Obama is stupid. Really stupid, which sort of flies in the face of the magna cum laude thing from Harvard, right?

When did Obama first learn about Ayers? When did he first meet Ayers? What were his “off-campus” activities in New York? Perhaps if Obama were open about his life, and did not go to such extreme lengths to cover up fundamental facts of his existence, we would not be forced to outline such events as the 1981 Brinks robbery.

1969 was the year of the Flint convention where I believe the Weatherman group was formed....

See this:

Weatherman ....Declared "war on Amerikkka" at its Flint War Council in 1969

**************************EXCERPT******************

Declared "war on Amerikkka" at its Flint War Council in 1969
Responsible for the deaths of police officers and the wanton destruction of public property
Some former members are now comfortably ensconced in University professorships

Weatherman (known colloquially as The Weathermen) was a political faction elected in 1968 to lead the radical group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The organization took its name from a line in the Bob Dylan song Subterranean Homesick Blues ("You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"). Emerging in 1969 as the most militant wing of the SDS's Revolutionary Youth Movement, the fledgling Weatherman issued a "manifesto" eschewing nonviolence and calling instead for armed opposition to U.S. policies; advocating the overthrow of capitalism; exhorting white radicals to trigger a worldwide revolution by fighting in the streets of the "mother country"; and proclaiming that the time had come to launch a race war against the "white" United States on behalf of the non-white Third World.

Grounded in identity politics, Weatherman ideology and rhetoric rebelled against what later came to be known as America's "white skin privilege." Weatherman opposed the strategy of a rival SDS faction, Progressive Labor, which rejected the sexual and chemical excesses of the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s in favor of a purer, Marxist-Leninist popular front movement aimed at developing student-labor alliances.

FBI files from 1976, recently made public under the Freedom of Information Act, confirm the connections between Weatherman, Havana, and Moscow. Weatherman leaders like Mark Rudd traveled illegally to Havana in 1968 to engage in terrorist training. There, camps set up by Soviet KGB Colonel Vadim Kotchergine were educating Westerners both in Marxist philosophy and urban warfare.

At a 1969 "War Council" in Flint, Michigan, Weatherman leader Bernardine Dohrn (currently a law professor at Northwestern University and a Board member of the ACLU) praised the serial murderer Charles Manson and his accomplices: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach. Wild." She then proclaimed that the time had come to launch a war against "Amerikkka" (Weatherman always spelled "America" this way, to convey the group's belief that the nation was ineradicably racist to its core). Toward this end, Dohrn advocated the formation of an even more radical "Weather Underground" cult to carry out covert terrorist activities rather than public acts of protest. By early 1970, her wish would be realized.

Weatherman's first public demonstration was its October 1969 "Days of Rage" protest in Chicago, timed to coincide with the trials of the Chicago Seven (a group of radical leftists led by Tom Hayden), who had fomented a riot at the Democratic Party nominating convention in that city the previous year. Advertised with the slogan "Bring the war home," "Days of Rage" sought to create enough chaos to shock the American public out of its alleged complacency vis a vis the Vietnam War.

The opening "Days of Rage" salvo, designed to glorify the anarchist movement, was the October 8 demolition of a statue dedicated to the memory of eight policemen who had been killed in the Haymarket Labor Riot of 1886. Thereafter, some 300 people -- both members and supporters of the Weatherman agenda -- ravaged Chicago's business district, smashing windows and destroying automobiles. Six people were shot and seventy were arrested. The violence continued, though on a smaller scale, for each of the next two nights. As Sixties historian Todd Gitlin observed, however, no popular uprising was sparked by these events, much to the group's dismay. Notable "Days of Rage" leaders included Bill Ayers, now a Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, and Mark William Rudd, currently a mathematics professor at a New Mexico community college.

Weatherman was further radicalized by the December 1969 shooting death of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton by Chicago police. Hampton was a street thug who, in his much-heralded "morning education" programs, taught black youths that violent opposition to the U.S. government was a worthy goal. He was quoted in a 1969 Chicago Sun-Times article as saying, "I am at war with the pigs," and forecasting an armed struggle between blacks and whites. He routinely carried weapons and instructed his subordinates to do the same. For Weatherman, Hampton's death provided one more excuse to pursue a revolutionary agenda. In March 1970 the organization issued a "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States government, using for the first time its new name, the "Weather Underground Organization" (WUO), adopting fake identities, and pledging to pursue covert activities only.

Shortly after that Declaration, three members of the Weather Underground accidentally killed themselves in a Manhattan townhouse while attempting to build a powerful bomb they had intended to plant at a social dance in Fort Dix, New Jersey -- an event that was to be attended by U.S. Army soldiers. Hundreds of lives could have been lost had the plot been successfully executed.

The Weather Underground went on to claim credit for some 25 bombings over the next several years, detonating explosives at the rebuilt Haymarket statue, a bathroom at the Pentagon, the Capitol barber shop, the New York City police headquarters, and a variety of other targets.

The Weather Underground also (for a fee of $25,000) helped psychedelic drug guru Timothy Leary break out of a California prison and arranged for his transport to Algiers. When Leary was re-arrested in 1974, he cooperated in the FBI investigation of WUO in exchange for a lighter sentence.

By the time the U.S. withdrew its military forces from Vietnam in 1975, the Weather Underground was clearly losing vitality as an organization, having failed to invigorate a new radical movement in the U.S. or to inspire an all-out war against the government. In the wake of President Jimmy Carter's amnesty for draft dodgers, members of the group began to emerge from hiding. Many were never prosecuted; others had their convictions overturned. Some, like Rudd, Dohrn, and Ayers, claimed places for themselves in academia, while others attempted to return to the mainstream.

On October 20, 1981 -- long after the Weather Underground had ceased to exist -- former Underground member Kathy Boudin and her soon-to-be husband, David Gilbert, were accomplices in the robbery of a Brinks armored car in Nyack, New York. In the course of that heist, one Brinks guard and two Nyack police officers were murdered. Also involved in the robbery was Judith Clark, who had served a prison term for her participation in the "Days of Rage." Boudin hired attorney Leonard Weinglass, a law partner of her father, to defend her in the case. Weinglass arranged for a plea bargain whereby Boudin pled guilty to one count of felony murder and robbery, in exchange for a prison sentence of twenty years to life. She was paroled in 2003, however, over strong opposition from New York State police. Gilbert remains in New York's Attica State Prison, having refused to bargain.

In 1985, former Weather Underground members Susan Rosenberg (who also was implicated in the Nyack robbery) and Linda Evans were apprehended while transporting 740 pounds of explosives which they both acknowledged were slated for use in additional bombings. Rosenberg was sentenced to 58 years in prison, Evans 40; President Bill Clinton pardoned both women in January 2001.

Searching around ....google came across this:

The Trojan Candidate

**********************EXCERPT*******************

The ~~Education~~ Radicalization of Barack Obama

Largely due to his association with Frank Davis, Barack was sent to the mainland with a set of ready-made contacts and a set career path. Potentially as early as high school, Barack was introduced to Bill Ayers.

Barack Obama’s first public speech was at an Occidental College event sponsored by the Students for Economic Democracy a branch of the Campaign for Economic Democracy [CED]. Far Left radical Tom Hayden who met with Marxist officials several times during his antiwar career chaired this fringe group in the late 70’s and early ’80’s. Several of the CED principal activists were also veterans of the Hayden-campaign and of the very radical group, Students for a Democratic Society.
Hayden was an important anti-American figure in the Students for a Democratic-Society a militantly leftist organization. 60’s radical Tom Hayden played a pivotal role both as founder and as principal author of this student group’s basic manifesto, the “Port Huron Statement.” This document condemned the American political system as the cause of international conflict and a variety of social ills — including racism, materialism, militarism, and poverty.

The Port Huron Statement reflected certainly elements of the CPUSA ideology regarding the national and international problems and results of the ‘American political system’.

In 1969 Hayden’s students for democracy group began imploding into factions. One of them, a group calling itself Weatherman, was elected to SDS leadership and proclaimed that the time had come to launch a race war on behalf of the Third World and against the United States. The Weatherman declared “war on AmeriKKKa” at its Flint War Council in 1969.
The new entity dissolved Hayden’s Students for a Democratic Society and formed a terrorist cult in its place, which was given the name Weather Underground.

It seems then that in the beginning of Barack Obama’s speaking career the group he was involved with had links to Marxists, the Weathermen, and Bill Ayers. Years after his first public speech at Occidental College Barack Obama found himself working several years with William Ayers, the founder of the terrorist cult Weather Underground, first in New York at Columbia, and then in Chicago.

After a short time at Occidental, Obama finished his undergraduate education at Columbia University in New York where he attended from 1981-1984. Bill Ayers received a degree from Bank Street College in 1984. Colombia and Bank Street College are only two blocks apart. It is likely that Obama and Ayers were neighbors in New York, and attended similar events like the “socialist conferences” Obama has admitted to attending in New York. As cited here at NQ, Obama visited Pakistan with his college roommate in 1981 using an Indonesian passport.

In the crucible of radical left discussions that are always present in the international city of New York, Obama is likely to have attended lectures by Khalid Al-Mansour, Louis Farrakahn, and other internationalists, socialists and black liberationists as Obama furthered his career. Al-Mansour’s viewpoints were described in an excellent post by Larry Johnson. In his studies at Columbia in Political Science, he is likely to have studied Marxist thought, black revolutionary movements, and revolutionary techniques such as those espoused by Saul Alinsky, Maoists, the Black Panthers, and American left radicals such as Ayers.

From David Horowitz's FrontPageMag.com/DiscoverTheNetworks.org:
"On October 20, 1981 -- long after the Weather Underground had ceased to exist -- former Underground member Kathy Boudin and her soon-to-be husband, David Gilbert, were accomplices in the robbery of a Brinks armored car in Nyack, New York. In the course of that heist, one Brinks guard and two Nyack police officers were murdered. Also involved in the robbery was Judith Clark, who had served a prison term for her participation in the 'Days of Rage.' Boudin hired attorney Leonard Weinglass, a law partner of her father, to defend her in the case.

Weinglass arranged for a plea bargain whereby Boudin pled guilty to one count of felony murder and robbery, in exchange for a prison sentence of twenty years to life. She was paroled in 2003, however, over strong opposition from New York State police. Gilbert remains in New York's Attica State Prison, having refused to bargain.

In 1985, former Weather Underground members Susan Rosenberg (who also was implicated in the Nyack robbery [Brinks truck robbery/murder]) and Linda Evans were apprehended while transporting 740 pounds of explosives which they both acknowledged were slated for use in additional bombings. Rosenberg was sentenced to 58 years in prison, Evans 40; President Bill Clinton pardoned both women in January 2001."
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6808

AMBUSH: THE BRINKS ROBBERY OF 1981
[triple murder involving former Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army and Black Panthers members]

Jeral Wayne Williams (AKA Mutulu Shakur)
[stepfather of murdered rapper Tupac Shakur]

"The armored truck's final stop was the Nanuet National Bank on the second level of the mall. The crew was due to pick up almost $1.6 million dollars in cash from the bank. Inside the truck was an additional several hundred dollars in cash from earlier collections. Pete Paige was assigned to guard his partner as he handled the cash. His partner was assigned to enter the bank, retrieve the moneybags with Paige and place them into the back of the armored vehicle.

Also in the same parking lot that afternoon was a red Chevy van that cruised the area while the guards went inside the mall. The rear and side windows had been covered with plastic so no one could see inside. Inside the van was a man named Mutulu Shakur, 31, already a veteran of several armored car and bank robberies committed in the Bronx, Mt. Vernon, NY and Paramus, NJ. Shakur was an adopted name. His real name, or slave name as he described it, was Jeral Wayne Williams. He was a black nationalist who ran a financially corrupt acupuncture clinic in Lincoln Hospital in New York City, the first such clinic in the Bronx. Williams was an articulate and persuasive individual who recruited many disciples to follow him. Under the banner of black self-determination, he convinced his accomplices that it was up to them to seize funds from legitimate sources and "redistribute" the money to various black causes. With each robbery committed, the gang improved on its methods and became more sophisticated. They studied the reaction of guards and the police. They took the time to learn how police handled and investigated such crimes. Then, they made the appropriate adjustments on the next job.

"David J. Gilbert, 37, rented the vehicle that same day in the Bronx. Gilbert was a long time member of the Weather Underground and a fugitive from the state of Colorado where he faced charges of assault and possession of explosives. The passenger in the front seat of the U Haul was Kathy Boudin [another former Weather Underground member], on the run from the law since the townhouse explosion in 1970. The couple had dropped off their one-year old child with a babysitter in the morning and was waiting for the return of the red van."

"In the back of the red van were Cecilio 'Chui' Ferguson, 35, Samuel Brown AKA Solomon Bouines, 41, Samuel Smith AKA Mtayari Sundiata, 37, and Donald Weems AKA Kuwasi Balagoon, 35. There were others present, but it has never been proven who, or how many. All the men in back of the van were members of a group they called 'The Family.' Most of them had ties to the Black Panthers or the Black Liberation Army, radical political groups that had many violent confrontations with police during the 1970s."

"At approximately 3:55 p.m., Paige, a 24-year Brink's veteran and his partner, Joe Trombino, 48, exited the doors to the Mall rolling out the moneybags on a hand truck. They walked over to the Brink's truck and began to load up the bags onto the rear deck. Simultaneously, the red van pulled up and the rear doors swung open. One of the suspects, armed with a shotgun, ran to the front of the truck and immediately fired two blasts directly at the bulletproof windshield. The guard in the front seat ducked just in time and was unhurt.

Another suspect, wearing a ski mask, opened up with his M-16 automatic rifle before his feet even hit the pavement, striking Paige in the neck, arm and chest. He was killed instantly.

Joe Trombino fired just one shot before he was hit several times in his upper arm and shoulder. The bullets all but severed his arm off his shoulder. "I've got no arm!" he screamed. But Trombino would survive that day, only to perish years later in another terrorist attack at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001."

http://www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/terrorists/brinks/4.html

David Gilbert (mugshot)
and Kathy Boudin (right)

"Their founding document [the Weather Underground's] called for the establishment of a "white fighting force" to be allied with the "Black Liberation Movement" and other "anti-colonial" movements[1] to achieve "the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism."..."-Berger, Dan (2006). Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. AK Press, 95.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatherman_Underground#cite_ref-Berger_0-0

Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (Paperback) by Dan Berger
http://www.amazon.com/Outlaws-America-Underground-Politics-Solidarity/dp/1904859410

The Investigation

The suspects were often described as "urban terrorists" in the press and cops everywhere were deeply worried about the role of the Black Liberation Army.

The B.L.A. was a notorious and violent group of extremists who planned and carried out unprovoked shootings of uniformed police officers. During the 1970s and early 1980s, there were several of these types of killings of which the B.L.A. were suspect. On May 20, 1971, New York City Police Officers Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones were shot and killed in an ambush in Harlem. The following year, on January 28, 1972, officers Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie were murdered outside a restaurant in Manhattan. Another such shooting occurred on the night of April 16, 1981 when uniform cops pulled over a suspicious van in the St. Alban's section of Queens. Without any warning, two men jumped out of the rear of the van with machine guns and opened up on the unsuspecting cops. Both were immediately killed. This cold-blooded killing enraged cops everywhere. A later investigation indicated that an escaped radical, Joannne Chesimard, one of the most sought after individuals in America, may have been in that van. She was serving a life sentence for her role in the murder of a New Jersey State trooper in 1973 when she escaped from custody in 1979. This theory was never proven, but to this day, many of the investigators who worked on that case believed it to be true.
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/terrorists_spies/terrorists/brinks/10.html

"[Bernardine] Dohrn [Bill Ayers' co-terrorist wife] once was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List. She served seven months in prison for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury investigating a 1981 armored truck robbery in Nyack, N.Y., in which two police officers [and 1 Brinks guard] were killed."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20011101/aponline190504_000.htm

"They [Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn] later became legal guardians of Chesa Boudin, the son of former Weathermen David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, after his parents were arrested for their part in the Brinks Robbery of 1981.[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers

"Officer Waverly Brown and Sergeant Edward O'Grady were shot and killed by heavily armed members of the Black Liberation Army who had just robbed a bank and were attempting to escape. The suspects had just murdered an armored car guard and wounded two other guards before loading themselves into the back of a rental truck to be driven away by accomplices. The truck was stopped at a roadblock manned by several Nyack officers."

Sergeant Edward O'Grady

http://www.odmp.org/officer/10136-sergeant-edward-j.-ogrady-jr.

Officer Waverly Brown

http://www.odmp.org/officer/2372-police-officer-waverly-l.-brown

BRINKS KIN RIP JUDGE
By MARSHA KRANES

September 27, 2006 -- Outraged relatives of the two cops and a security guard slain in the 1981 Brinks armored-car heist blasted a federal judge yesterday for ordering that the woman convicted of driving the getaway car get a new trial.

"It defies comprehension. It defies logic," the son of slain Brinks guard Peter Paige said of the decision handed down by Manhattan federal Judge Shira Scheindlin.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/09272006/news/regionalnews/brinks_kin__rip_judge_regionalnews_marsha_kranes.htm

Meet the Newest Member of the Faculty
Clinton pardons a terrorist, and now she's teaching in Clinton, N.Y.

BY ROGER KIMBALL
Friday, December 3, 2004

At Hamilton College--an elite liberal arts institution in Clinton, N.Y.--you can take courses in Roman civilization, Shakespeare and the "Emergence of Modern Western Europe, 1500-1815." All well and good. You can also take something called "Resistance Memoirs: Writing, Identity and Change." That last course--a month-long, half-credit seminar--is scheduled to begin next month. Its teacher is Susan Rosenberg, formerly of the Weather Underground.

Remember the Weather Underground? Its self-described revolutionaries, mostly middle-class, dedicated themselves to supporting radical black causes and tearing apart American society in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1970, they blew up a townhouse when a bomb detonated prematurely and killed a few of their troops. Kathy Boudin, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and other high-profile members of the group spent the next decade or so running from the police and, some of them, continuing to pursue careers in criminal violence.

Ms. Rosenberg did her part. In October 1981, in an operation code-named "The Big Dance," several black radicals and members of the Weather Underground held up a Brinks armored car in Nanuet, N.Y. In the course of that act of domestic terrorism, they murdered Peter Paige, a Brinks guard, and police officers Edward O'Grady and Waverly Brown, the only black officer on the Nyack, N.Y., force. Ms. Rosenberg, then still at large, was indicted as an accessory.

According to John Castellucci's "The Big Dance," an account of the Brinks robbery, Ms. Rosenberg's role in the Brinks job was performing surveillance, driving a getaway car and transmitting orders. "Any white who had taken part in the robbery," Mr. Castellucci writes, "would have received orders from her."

Mr. Castellucci reports that the Brinks robbery was only one of several violent episodes that Ms. Rosenberg was involved with in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was finally apprehended in November 1984 while unloading a cache of weapons--including 740 pounds of explosives--at a storage facility in Cherry Hill, N.J. ..."

http://www.opinionjournal.com/forms/printThis.html?id=110005979

_________________________________________________________

"Obama graduated from Columbia University in 1983, and moved to Chicago in 1985 to work for a church-based group seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods plagued with crime and high unemployment. In 1991, Obama graduated from Harvard Law School where he was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review."
http://obama.senate.gov/about/

_________________________________________________________

Bill Ayers' education:
1987 - Ed.D, Columbia University, Curriculum & Instruction
1987 - M.Ed, Teachers College, Columbia University, Early Childhood Education
1984 - M.Ed, Bank Street College, Early Childhood Education
1968 - B.A., University of Michigan, American Studies
http://education.uic.edu/directory/faculty_info.cfm?netid=bayers

_________________________________________________________

Bank Street College
Where We Are and How to Get Here:

Bank Street College is located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at 610 West 112th Street, between Broadway and Riverside Drive.

Bank Street College is located in a bustling family and university neighborhood four blocks from Columbia University and one block from St. John the Divine, the largest Gothic cathedral in North America. We are a short bus ride from Lincoln Center and Fifth Avenue. Our main building is just a few steps off Broadway, a busy avenue lined with shops and restaurants. We are conveniently located near subway lines, bus routes, and major roads.
http://www.bankstreet.edu/aboutbsc/visiting.html

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