The Center for Public Intellectuals and The University of Illinois-Chicago (Ayers, Dohrn, Obama)

The Center for Public Intellectuals & The University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC)
April 19th-20th, 2002, Conference
[Participants include: William/Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Sen Barack Obama]

This conference is part of the Center's mission of helping to create a more engaged civil society, working towards social change, fostering coalitions between theorists and activists, and combating anti-intellectualism in contemporary culture. It will be both a celebration of ideas and a rigorous examination of the roles and responsibilities that intellectuals play in society.

We introduce the “meta” theme of the conference by hearing “success stories” from diverse voices discussing their experiences intervening intellectually.

Timuel Black, Chicago activist; Prof. Emeritus, City Colleges of Chicago
Lonnie Bunch, President, Chicago Historical Society
Bernardine Dohrn, Northwestern University Law School, Children and Family Justice Center
Gerald Graff, UIC, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Richard Rorty, Stanford University, Philosophy

Alternative breakout tours led by Chicago activists. Tours of Bronzeville and other communities, and visits to organizations that are working on partnering theorists with activists.

IV. Intellectuals in Times of Crisis
Experiences and applications of intellectual work in urgent situations.

William Ayers, UIC, College of Education; author of Fugitive Days
Douglass Cassel, Northwestern University, Center for International Human Rights
Cathy Cohen, University of Chicago, Political Science
Salim Muwakkil, Chicago Tribune; In These Times
Barack Obama, Illinois State Senator
Barbara Ransby, UIC, African-American Studies (moderator)

"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"
-Bill Ayers ("intellectual"), New York Times, September 11, 2001:

"Dig It. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!"
-Weather Underground leader and wife of Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn ("intellectual"), referring to the Manson murders

Allies in War
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, September 17, 2001:

ON THE MORNING OF THE ATTACKS on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, along with a million other readers of the New York Times including many who would never be able to read the paper again, I opened its pages to be confronted by a color photo showing a middle-aged couple holding hands and affecting a defiant look at the camera. The article was headlined in an irony that could not have been more poignant, "No Regrets For A Love Of Explosives."

The couple pictured were Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former leaders of the 1960s’ Weather Underground, America’s first terrorist cult. One of their bombing targets, as it happened, was the Pentagon.

"I don’t regret setting bombs," Ayers was quoted in the opening line of the Times profile; "I feel we didn’t do enough."

In 1969, Ayers and his wife convened a "War Council" in Flint Michigan, whose purpose was to launch a military front inside the United States with the purpose of helping Third World revolutionaries conquer and destroy it.

Taking charge of the podium, dressed in high-heeled boots and a leather mini-skirt – her signature uniform – Dorhn incited the assembled radicals to join the war against "Amerikkka" and create chaos and destruction in the "belly of the beast."

Her voice rising to a fevered pitch, Dohrn raised three fingers in a "fork salute" to mass murderer Charles Manson whom she proposed as a symbol to her troops. Referring to the helpless victims of the Manson Family as the "Tate Eight" (the most famous was actress Sharon Tate) Dohrn shouted:

"Dig It. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!"

(big snip)

Today William Ayers is not merely an author favored by the New York Times, but a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

His Lady Macbeth [Bernardine Dohrn] is not merely a lawyer, but a member of the American Bar Association’s governing elite, as well as the director of Northwestern University’s Children and Family Justice Center.
[it's true! see: http://www.law.northwestern.edu/faculty/profiles/BernardineDohrn/]

Article: Allies in War -by David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, September 17, 2001
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=63512670-BF7C-42A0-B41D-5D0FB9E09C09
___________________________________________________

Confession (Manson Family)

When they got in the house, Susan [Atkins] said that in the living room there was a man on the couch and a woman on the chair reading. Then some of Susan's group stayed in the living room, while Susan went into the bedroom where Sharon was sitting on the bed talking to Jay Sebring. They quickly put nooses over Sharon and Jay's heads so that if they moved they would choke.

Frykowski ran for the door. "He was full of blood," she said and claimed that she had stabbed him three or four times. "He was bleeding and he ran to the front part, and would you believe that he was there hollering 'Help, help, somebody please help me,' and nobody came? Then we finished him off."

"Sharon was the last to die," Susan said with a laugh as she described how Sharon was begging her, " Please don't kill me. Please don't kill me. I don't want to die. I want to live. I want to have my baby. I want to have my baby."

Susan said she just looked at Sharon straight in the eye and said, "Look, bitch, I don't care about you. I don't care if you're going to have a baby. You had better be ready. You're going to die and I don't feel anything about it...In a few minutes I killed her."

Susan said she saw that there was Sharon's blood on her hand and she tasted it. "Wow, what a trip! To taste death, and yet give life."

Source: http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/notorious/manson/confess_4.html

"Dig It. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!"
-Weather Underground leader and wife of Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn

An interesting and certainly overlooked note here is that both the Weather Underground and Manson Family were about inciting a race-based overthrow of the U.S. government. So it's no wonder that Bernardine Dohrn admired 'Charlie' as she did/does? Their agendas and motivations were very similar.

Charles Manson and the Manson Family
By Marilyn Bardsley

Helter Skelter

Another facet of Charlie, although not nearly as important to him as his music, was his philosophy. To a large extent, this "philosophy" was a con, something he dreamed up to impress his followers, but he probably believed some of it.

The core of this philosophy was a kind of Armageddon. Charlie preached that the black man was going to rise up and start killing the whites and turn the cities in to an inferno of racial revenge. The black man would win this war, but wouldn't be able to hang onto the power he seized because of innate inferiority.

In 1968, Charlie was forecasting racial war when all of a sudden the Beatles released their White Album, which had the song "Helter Skelter." The lyrics fit Charlie's theory to a tee: "Look out helter skelter helter skelter helter skelter/She's coming down fast/ Yes she is/Yes she is." Now, the racial Armageddon had a name. It was Helter Skelter.

Helter Skelter would begin, according to one of Charlie's devotees, "with the black man going into white people's homes and ripping off the white people, physically destroying them. A couple of spades from Watts would come up into the Bel Air and Beverly Hills district...and just really wipe some people out, just cutting bodies up and smearing blood and writing things on the wall in blood...all kinds of super-atrocious crimes that would really make the white man mad...until there was open revolution in the streets, until they finally won and took over. Then the black man would assume the white man's karma. He would then be the establishment..."

Charlie and the Family would survive this racial holocaust because they would be hiding in the desert safe from the turmoil of the cities. He pulled from the Book of Revelations, the concept of a "bottomless pit," the entrance of which, according to Charlie, was a cave underneath Death Valley that led down to a city of gold. This paradise was where Charlie and his Family were going to wait out this war. Afterwards, when the black man failed at keeping power, Charlie's Family, which they estimated would have multiplied to 144,000 by that time, would then take over from the black man and rule the cities.

"It will be our world then," Charlie told his followers. "There would be no one else, except for us and the black servants. He, Charles Willis Manson, the fifth angel, Jesus Christ, would then rule the world. The other four angels were the Beatles.

How did this hokey philosophy result in the blood bath at the Tate and LaBianca houses? Well, Charlie the Prophet had already forecast that the murders would start in the summer of 1969, but as the summer went on, it looked as though the "prophet" was wrong. "The only thing blackie knows is what whitey has told him," he said to one of his followers just before the murders. "I'm going to have to show him how to do it."

After the LaBianca murder, one of Manson's girls, Linda Kasabian, was told to take Rosemary LaBianca's wallet and credit cards and leave them in the ladies room of a gas station in an area heavily populated by blacks. That way, when, theoretically, the credit cards would be used by some black woman, it would appear that blacks were responsible for the LaBianca deaths. However, the credit cards were never used or turned in to the authorities.

http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/notorious/manson/skelter_6.html
_________________________________________________________

"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

________________________________________________________

From the New York Times, August 24, 2003

"they [the Weather Underground] employed revolutionary jargon, advocated armed struggle and black liberation and began bombing buildings, taking responsibility for at least 20 attacks. Estimates of their number ranged at times from several dozen to several hundred."

Article: Quieter Lives for 60's Militants, but Intensity of Beliefs Hasn't Faded
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F04E4DE1539F937A1575BC0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2

Bill Ayers TODAY (April 6, 2008), from his own red communist star-headed website, begging to debate communism vs capitalism with Sean Hannity and STILL calling for revolution!

"Imperialism. I’m against it, and if Sean Hannity and others were honest, this is the ground they would fight me on. Capitalism played its role historically and is exhausted as a force for progress: built on exploitation, theft, conquest, war, and racism, capitalism and imperialism must be defeated and a world revolution—a revolution against war and racism and materialism, a revolution based on human solidarity and love, cooperation and the common good —must win.

We begin by releasing our most hopeful dreams and our most radical imaginations: a better world is both possible and necessary.

Source: Bill Ayers' own website:
http://billayers.wordpress.com/2008/04/page/2/
_________________________________________________________________________________

"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"
-Bill Ayers, New York Times, September 11, 2001:

Article: "No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen"
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DE1438F932A2575AC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

_________________________________________________________________________________

Source: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/31617_Obama_Gave_Bill_Ayers_Book_a_Rave_Review/comments/#ctop
_________________________________________________________________________________

From The Weekly Standard, 'Barack Obama's Lost Years', 08/11/2008:

"Ayers opposes trying even the most vicious juvenile murderers as adults. Beyond that, he'd like to see the prison system itself essentially abolished. Unsatisfied with mere reform, Ayers wants to address the deeper 'structural problems of the system.' Drawing explicitly on Michel Foucault, a French philosopher beloved of radical academics, Ayers argues that prisons artificially impose obedience and conformity on society, thereby creating a questionable distinction between the 'normal' and the 'deviant.' The unfortunate result, says Ayers, is to leave the bulk of us feeling smugly superior to society's prisoners. Home detention, Ayers believes, might someday be able to replace the prison. Ayers also makes a point of comparing America's prison system to the mass-detention of a generation of young blacks under South African Apartheid. Ayers's tone may be different, but the echoes of Jeremiah Wright's anti-prison rants are plain."

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/386abhgm.asp?pg=2
_________________________________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________________________

"This is a guy [Bill Ayers] 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."

Source: ABC News - Transcript: Obama and Clinton Debate, April 16, 2008
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/DemocraticDebate/Story?id=4670271&page=2
_________________________________________________________________________________

[Obama] is named Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge founded by Bill Ayers
(article typo has Ayers instead of Obama)

In late 1993, Bill Ayers, now an associate professor of education at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus, organized a team to put together a grant proposal to secure nearly $50 million from the Annenberg Challenge. The money was to be used by Ayers and co. to bolster the radical Local School Councils reform project that Ayers and Obama had championed back in 1988 through the ABCs.

The grant application was successful and in early 1995 Barack Obama was named chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Ayers was named co-chair of the Challenge’s operative and strategic body, the Chicago School Reform Collaborative. Ayers and Obama work together for the next five years on raising an additional $60 million in matching money from local foundations and corporations and using the money to intervene in the governance of the Chicago public schools.

The Challenge through a multi-million dollar Leadership Development Initiative intervened in the School Council elections in the middle of what was known as the Chicago School Wars. At the same time Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was pushing, successfully, to gut the power of the Councils.

http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/08/12/the-obama-ayers-top-ten-highlights-of-the-20-year-obama-ayers-connection/
_________________________________________________________________________________

"The Small Schools Workshop was founded in 1991 at the University of Illinois at Chicago to provide support for teachers who were trying to create new smaller learning environments. Its director is Michael Klonsky, a former professor of education at UIC."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Schools_Workshop
_________________________________________________________________________________

Some background on Bill Ayers' SDS comrade, Michael Klonsky
(Chicago Annenberg Challenge-related)

"One of Bill Ayers’ and Bernardine Dohrn’s comrades in the late 60s Students for a Democratic Society was Mike Klonsky. When Dohrn and Ayers moved in one direction toward the violent tactics of the Weather Underground, Klonsky, in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, dropped the pro-Russian communist politics of his parents and became a committed Maoist. As leader of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) in 1977 [not to be confused with Communist Party USA. CPML no longer exists, CPUSA formed decades earlier and is still around-ETL], he travelled to Beijing and was toasted by the senior Beijing leadership.

When the crazy left of the 70s died in the 80s, Klonsky went to graduate school in education in Florida and then moved to Chicago.

While driving a cab there he [Michael Klonsky] was recruited by his old friend Bill Ayers to head up a new project called the Small Schools Workshop in 1991. It’s offices were in the Department of Education building at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus where Ayers taught.

In 1995 the newly formed Chicago Annenberg Challenge headed by Ayers and Obama gave the Workshop a grant of $175,000.

The Annenberg Challenge also had its office space in the same building as Ayers Department and the Workshop, rent free courtesy of the University.

In 2008 Klonsky ran a blog on the official Obama campaign website on education policy and “social justice” teaching. When discussion of the Klonsky blog emerged in the blogosphere, it was promptly shut down by the campaign and all of the posts made by Klonsky were removed from the site."

http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/08/12/the-obama-ayers-top-ten-highlights-of-the-20-year-obama-ayers-connection/
_________________________________________________________________________________

In 1977, the October League was reorganized as the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) [again, not Communist Party USA (CPUSA) -ETL] and former SDS activist Michael Klonsky became party chairman. Also in 1977, Klonsky traveled to China and the CPML was recognized by the Chinese Communist Party as its official sister party in America.

(snip)

In January 1981, Michael Klonsky resigned as party chairman, and the CPML disbanded that same year.

The previous Red Encyclopedia description of the CPML was incorrectly combined with that of the Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist).

http://reds.linefeed.org/past.html
_________________________________________________________________________________

From Investor's Business Daily (IBD), August 27, 2008:

"Ayers, now a tenured distinguished professor of education at UIC, works to educate teachers in socialist revolutionary ideology, urging that it be passed on to impressionable students.

One of Ayer's descriptions for a course called 'Improving Learning Environments' says prospective K-12 teachers need to 'be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and ... be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, teaching for social justice and liberation.

The Annenberg papers are quite extensive — 132 boxes containing 947 file folders with 70 linear feet of material. They undoubtedly contain more surprises regarding Obama's relationship with Ayers, one of many relationships Obama has sought to hide.'..."

Article: Annenberg Papers: Putting On Ayers?
http://www.ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=304729375940845
_________________________________________________________________________________

Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA [Maoist]
Revolution #63, October 1, 2006

Interview with Bill Ayers:
"On Progressive Education, Critical Thinking and the Cowardice of Some in Dangerous Times"
http://rwor.org/a/063/ayers-en.html
_________________________________________________________________________________

YouTube Video:
The O'Reilly Factor confronts Bill Ayers:
[Ayers tells the reporter: "Get off my (private) property, then calls police -The Weather Underground and Black Liberation Army bombed several police stations, two officers dead as a result]
October 24, 2008:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP3uvK9gTIY

30-Y.O. Unsolved SF Murders Reopen
[Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army, Ayers, Dohrn]

BAY AREA (KRON) -- The unsolved murder of two San Francisco police officers has languished as cold cases for 30 years until now. A federal grand jury has been looking into the murders. Many of the people now under investigation both as potential targets and witnesses in this case are scattered across the country. Many of them are now in their 50s and 60s. Investigators believe the crimes were politically motivated and committed by militant radical groups.

On August 29, 1971, sergeant John Young is killed in a barrage of gunfire when two men walk into the Ingleside police station and begin shooting at officers sitting behind the glass partition. It is the second unsolved police killing in 18 months.

On February 16, 1970, officer Brian McDonnell is killed when a bomb explodes at Park Police Station. Attorney Joe O'Sullivan, at the time was a young police officer. "It was just bedlam. I don't think we were able to get into the station. I think it was cordoned off. Nobody really knew the exact nature of the devastation," he says.

For three decades, the police murders remained unsolved. Evidence from the two crime scenes sat in the police property room.

KRON 4 News has learned that three years ago, San Francisco police secretly re-opened the case. Armed with new forensic technology and with State and Federal agencies helping, SFPD investigators began to work full-time on the murders.

And now, sources tell us, those investigators have identified potential suspects: former members of two militant groups in the '60s and '70s -- the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army, people who've been out of the spotlight for decades. The most prominent among them is Bernadine Dohrn, a former leader of the Weather Underground and now a law professor at Northwestern University in Illinois.

30-Y.O. Unsolved SF Murders Reopen [part 1 of 3]
http://www.kron4.com/Global/story.asp?S=1519460

Patriot Act Used to Reopen Murder Case? [part 2 of 3]
http://www.kron4.com/Global/story.asp?S=1521312

Survivor of Old Murder Case Speaks Out [part 3 of 3]
http://www.kron4.com/Global/story.asp?S=1523015&nav=5D7lJ5fb

______________________________________________________________________________

The following from wikipedia is well documented and sourced.

Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell

"In a bombing that took place on February 16, 1970, and that was credited to the Weathermen at the time,[19][20] a pipe bomb filled with heavy metal staples and lead bullet projectiles was set off on the ledge of a window at the Park Station of the San Francisco Police Department. In the blast, Brian V. McDonnell, a police sergeant, was fatally wounded while Robert Fogarty, another police officer, received severe wounds to his face and legs and was partially blinded.[21]

Weatherman leader Bernardine Dohrn has been suspected of involvement in the February 16, 1970, bombing of the Park Police Station in San Francisco. At the time, Dohrn was said to be living with a Weatherman cell in a houseboat in Sausalito, California, unnamed law enforcement sources later told KRON-TV.[22]

An investigation into the case was reopened in 1999,[23] and a San Francisco grand jury looked into the incident, but no indictments followed,[22] and no one was ever arrested for the bombing.[23]

An FBI informant, Larry Grathwohl, who successfully penetrated the organization from the late summer of 1969 until April 1970, later testified to a U.S. Senate subcommittee that Bill Ayers, then a high-ranking member of the organization and a member of its Central Committee (but not then Dohrn's husband), had said Dohrn constructed and planted the bomb. Grathwohl testified that Ayers had told him specifically where the bomb was placed (on a window ledge) and what kind of shrapnel was put in it. Grathwohl said Ayers was emphatic, leading Grathwohl to believe Ayers either was present at some point during the operation or had heard about it from someone who was there.[24]

In a book about his experiences published in 1976, Grathwohl wrote that Ayers, who had recently attended a meeting of the group's Central Committee, said Dohrn had planned the operation, made the bomb and placed it herself.[25] In 2008, author David Freddoso commented that "Ayers and Dohrn escaped prosecution only because of government misconduct in collecting evidence against them", Freddoso wrote.[24][26]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatherman_(organization)#Anti-personnel_bomb_set_on_window-ledge_in_San_Francisco

SOURCES:

[19] http://www.lapismagazine.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=110&Itemid=59

[20] Former Weatherman Larry Grathwohl's October 18, 1974 testimony to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee

[21] http://www.sfpoa.org/journal/journals/20070201.pdf
(SAN FRANCISCO POLICE OFFICERS ASSOCIATION)

[22] http://www.kron4.com/Global/story.asp?S=1519460

[23] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/17/BAGPRO6J7J1.DTL&type=printable

[24] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Barack_Obama

[25] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0870003350

[26] http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=ODVlZTZlM2M5NTMxMzllMjJkODVkNzQ3YTFjMTY0NzE=

The 1981 Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army-related Triple Murder in Nyack, NY

"(Brinks guard) 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."

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)

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

Marcia Froelke Coburn of ChicagoMag.com reveals the reason for the Ayers' children's names:
"For two radicals once living underground, Ayers and [Bernardine] Dohrn have raised three accomplished children: Zayd (named for a fallen Black Liberation soldier and colleague), 24, graduated from Brown University and has an M.F.A. degree in writing from Boston University, where he now teaches; Malik (for Malcolm X), 21, is attending the University of California at San Diego; and Chesa, 20, their adopted son, just finished his sophomore year at Yale University."
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/08/obamas-benefact.html

"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
_________________________________________________________

From the New York Times, August 24, 2003

Article: Quieter Lives for 60's Militants, but Intensity of Beliefs Hasn't Faded
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F04E4DE1539F937A1575BC0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2
_________________________________________________________

Excerpt from the article "Patriot Act Used to Reopen Murder Case?"
November 11, 2003

"The first murder occurred in February of 1970 [Bernardine Dohrn strongly suspected] when officer Brian McDonnell was killed after a bomb exploded at Park Police Station. Then the following year, sergeant John Young lost his life when two men walked into Ingleside station and began shooting at officers sitting behind a glass partition. For three decades, the police murders remained unsolved. The evidence collected at the crime scenes sat in the police property room. ... Sources tell us, those investigators identified as potential suspects are former members of two militant groups in the 60's and 70's: the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army.

Article: Patriot Act Used to Reopen Murder Case? (link below)
November 11, 2003

_________________________________________________________

30-Y.O. Unsolved SF Murders Reopen [part 1 of 3]
http://www.kron4.com/Global/story.asp?S=1519460

Patriot Act Used to Reopen Murder Case? [part 2 of 3]
http://www.kron4.com/Global/story.asp?S=1521312

Survivor of Old Murder Case Speaks Out [part 3 of 3]
http://www.kron4.com/Global/story.asp?S=1523015&nav=5D7lJ5fb
______________________________________________________________________________

"FBI informant, Larry Grathwohl, who successfully penetrated the organization from the late summer of 1969 until April 1970, later testified to a U.S. Senate subcommittee that Bill Ayers, then a high-ranking member of the organization and a member of its Central Committee (but not then Dohrn's husband), had said Dohrn constructed and planted the bomb. Grathwohl testified that Ayers had told him specifically where the bomb was placed (on a window ledge) and what kind of shrapnel was put in it. Grathwohl said Ayers was emphatic, leading Grathwohl to believe Ayers either was present at some point during the operation or had heard about it from someone who was there.[24]

In a book about his experiences published in 1976, Grathwohl wrote that Ayers, who had recently attended a meeting of the group's Central Committee, said Dohrn had planned the operation, made the bomb and placed it herself.[25] In 2008, author David Freddoso commented that "Ayers and Dohrn escaped prosecution only because of government misconduct in collecting evidence against them", Freddoso wrote.[24][26]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatherman_(organization)#Anti-personnel_bomb_set_on_window-ledge_in_San_Francisco

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.