Posted on 04/26/2008 11:43:11 AM PDT by doug from upland
First, some excerpts from the NY SLIMES --- ''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.''
Mr. Ayers is probably safe from prosecution anyway. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said there was a five-year statute of limitations on Federal crimes except in cases of murder or when a person has been indicted.
Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''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,'' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And he says he doesn't actually remember suggesting that rich people be killed or that people kill their parents, but ''it's been quoted so many times I'm beginning to think I did,'' he said. ''It was a joke about the distribution of wealth.''
He went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.'s 10 Most Wanted List. J. Edgar Hoover called her ''the most dangerous woman in America'' and ''la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.'' Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married.
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by Mark Gado
THE EXPLOSION
Brownstones stand like soldiers in a row on tree-lined West Eleventh Street in lower Manhattan. Many were built at the turn of the century when pride in workmanship still prevailed in the building trades. Eleventh Street is just three blocks north of famed Washington Square Park, once a public execution ground in the 19th century, and extends west through Greenwich Village, past historic Hudson and Bleecker Streets, ending finally at West Street on the shore of the Hudson River.
A long line of artists, writers, actors, musicians and celebrities of every manner and fashion has called this area home. Herman Melville and Walt Whitman once lived here. And Edgar Allen Poe wrote The Raven when he lived in a boarding house on Greenwich Street in 1844. The great "Satchmo" played the blues here from time to time and Sara Vaughn often performed in Village jazz clubs, along with Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, "Cannonball" Adderly, Monk and Miles Davis.
On March 6, 1970 at 11:55 a.m., Susan Wager, former wife of film actor Henry Fonda, was in her basement at 50 West Eleventh Street with her housekeeper sorting her laundry. A few minutes before noon, she heard a tremendous explosion outside her building. "We both looked at each otheryou could feel it, a real quaver ran through the ground," she later told reporters.
Immediately, she heard two more rapid-fire explosions. Mrs. Wager hurried up the steps and out into the street. She saw that the explosions came from building number eighteen. As she ran down the block, Mrs. Wager saw the flames blowing out the front windows of the townhouse. There was concrete debris lying on the sidewalk and large pieces of the townhouse on the tops of parked cars. In the doorway, she saw a "red, incandescent glow, more scary than flames" emanate from inside the 1st floor hallway.
It was then she took notice of two girls that staggered out of the burning townhouse and into the street. One girl was wearing blue jeans. The other was completely naked. The explosion had burned the clothes off her body. Mrs. Wager thought they were both around twenty years old. The girls were dazed and covered with soot and ash but they did not appear to be seriously injured.
A large chunk of the building façade then crashed to the street just feet from where the girls were standing. Both victims were trembling and appeared to be in shock. Mrs. Wager took them over to her house, just yards away and brought them into her living room. She took them upstairs to a bathroom and gave them some clothes to wear.
Mrs. Wager then went downstairs, told the housekeeper to make some coffee and went back outside to look for more victims. When she reached the building at 18 West Eleventh, it was fully engulfed with flames. Residents were outside on the street and sirens could be heard in the distance. Within minutes, the fire apparatus was pulling into Eleventh Street from Fifth Avenue. The fire was roaring and neighbors were evacuating the block. Mrs. Wager then went back to her home to check on the two girls.
When she entered her living room, her housekeeper said the girls were gone. "Well the girls have left, they were going to the drugstore to get some medicine," she said. Mrs. Wager thought that was odd.
Meanwhile, the fire consumed the townhouse as gas lines exploded and windows shattered into the street. But firefighters were able to get hoses on the inferno quickly and soon, it was brought under control. In the early evening, a man's body was found in the basement and a short time later, a woman's torso was discovered on the first floor. Police also found several handbags with personal identifications that were stolen from college students over the previous few months. Late that same night, cops located at least 60 sticks of dynamite, a live military antitank shell, blasting caps and several large metal pipes packed solid with explosives. Neighbors, including actor Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door, began leaving in droves.
The dead man was later identified as 23-year-old Theodore Gold, a leader of a student strike at Columbia University in 1968. He was a member of the Weathermen, a radical group of college students who believed that the only way to change America was through confrontation and violence. The dead girl, whose body was horribly mangled by the powerful blast, was eventually identified as Diana Oughton, another former college student. Seven days later, police managed to locate another dismembered body of a male. His identity remained a mystery until the Weathermen later claimed it was Terry Robbins, one of their own members.
James P. Wilkerson, a radio station owner from the Midwest, owned the townhouse. His daughter, Catherine Wilkerson, 25, was also a known member of the Weathermen. She was currently out on $40,000 bail on assault charges in Chicago where she struck a police officer with a club during a political demonstration. A close friend of Catherine's, a girl named Kathy Boudin, was staying with her at the time of the blast. Boudin, too, was out on $20,000 bail on similar charges in Chicago. Neither of the girls could be located. Police soon speculated that the town home was being used as a bomb factory and the occupants were probably assembling bombs when something went very wrong.
But it was just speculation. Only those inside the house could say for sure. Three were already dead and the two girls who had fled from the house after the explosion could not be found. One of the girls was identified through photographs as Cathy Wilkerson. Police were almost certain that the other girl who disappeared was Kathy Boudin.
Certainly this story adds some much needed depth to the picture of Obama's Inner Circle.
I wonder if the 3 POS’s making the bomb had an oh-sh*t moment just before the thing went off.
I hope so.
I knew these Weather-rats when I was a college kid. Ted Gold was my roommate for a brief time. It was a lucky break when he blew himself up, instead of killing the innocent people he was targeting.
If Barack Obama is pals with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, then he is evil also. I may even have to vote for crazy John McCain to stop him.
It is sickening how anyone could vote for this RACIST I fondly call the Obomination.
OK, who thinks he isn't trying to indoctrinate every malleable little mind he can?
Well, Bill, given what happened to Diana and her comrades, you’re right. You guys didn’t do enough.
With this kind of left-wing, dope smoking scum, a girlfriend is a mere convenience. What’s the problem? He can always get another one.
Mr. Ayers’ attitude is simply an extension of the Democratic Party position, it’s as if a political ideology could induce steroids.
As for Obama’s pastor, that’s what the Democrats think and say behind closed doors. For proof, see Obama’s SF comment about bitter peoople clinging to guns and G-d.
Yours truly,
The Woim
Bookmark
I want to stop Hillary now. Obama is the guy to whom America will say NO!
The opening of KGB files, I understand, revealed references to them as well.
These people are dangerous. All remaining ones need to identified and watched carefully.They are an enemy within -still.
Nope, we don't need him as President Fur Shur.
These people are running loose!
The opening of KGB files, I understand, revealed references to them as well.
These people are dangerous. All remaining ones need to identified and watched carefully.They are an enemy within - still..
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