Posted on 10/14/2008 2:57:25 AM PDT by markomalley
A few days ago I recounted in these pages a short history of the Weathermen, a domestic terrorist organization founded by Obama friends Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. I listed their many criminal acts and the warm welcome they received from the Chicago establishment, leaders of which were Mr. Ayers’ father, Thomas G. Ayers, former president of the local utility, and his friend, lawyer Howard Trienans of white shoe law firm Sidley Austin, when they emerged from the underground.
For those unfamiliar with the story, it must be shocking to learn that Ayers and Dohrn are not in prison, as they should be. It will probably not be so shocking to learn that the reason is that liberal Idaho Senator Frank Church made it his mission to eviscerate the FBI’s counterintelligence program not only by public investigation and exposure but also by the criminalization of the activities necessary to gather intelligence and counteract terrorism before it can be carried out.
Church’s ill-conceived program was, unsurprisingly, buttressed by Jimmy Carter whose reprehensible administration prosecuted the FBI agents who had so effectively neutralized domestic terrorist groups like the Weathermen that they had largely stopped their depredations. The dual efforts crippled the FBI and its counterintelligence effort. The consequences of this project were finally realized in full flower on September 11, 2001.
Since the McGovern years, institutional suicide has been liberal policy. Civil liberties are dependent upon having lives in which one can exercise those liberties. The most basic duty of government is to protect its citizens from harm. The Left views the world in the abstract. If the preservation of theoretical notions of individual rights results in the deaths of innocents, so be it. Better that a thousand should die (as long as it isn’t me) than that the rights of a single predator be infringed. Easy enough for them to say.
Law enforcers know better. They know that for liberty to flourish, life must be preserved. But liberal orthodoxy elevates the form of law over the substance of life. That is what led the Warren Court to adopt the exclusionary rule that prohibits prosecutors from introducing at trial relevant evidence of guilt if it was obtained in a way that is constitutionally suspect. It was the wrong solution to a real problem. It is a concept utterly incomprehensible to the European governments that liberals otherwise so lionize and wish for us to emulate. But to the Left, it is completely acceptable that a vicious murderer go free if, to convict him, prosecutors must use evidence obtained by extra-constitutional means.
This is of a piece with the Left’s view of terrorism merely as a law enforcement problem. We should be clear about what law enforcers do. They find, try and punish those who victimize others. They arrive at a murder scene after a murder has been committed and solve it. Law enforcement is a noble calling but to the victim it is a bit too little and much too late. By the time law enforcement personnel are involved, the victim is dead. Law enforcers do not prevent murders from occurring. To do that, they must have and act on advance intelligence. And to gather that intelligence, they must sometimes resort to tactics that are disapproved in the rarified precincts of the Supreme Court and Harvard Law School where all is abstraction and they do not have to see the blood of victims.
The FBI understood that when dangerous people develop programs of organized murder, it is not enough to catch them after the deed is done. The consequences of delay are too devastating. The greatest service it can provide the people of this nation is to prevent murderers from actualizing their impulses. So the FBI developed a program of investigation and disruption – endorsed by every president after Harding – that depended for its success on activities that were off the books. When it comes to terrorism, intelligence agencies need more flexibility than they do for ad hoc criminality.
In the ‘60s and early ‘70s, the FBI’s targets were domestic terrorists like Ayers and Dohrn, the Weathermen and Black Nationalist organizations. The measure of their success is that after 1972, those organizations found themselves paralyzed and their effect marginal.
To their rescue rode Church, full of righteous zeal, imposing on federal intelligence agencies such a strict reading of the rules that they no longer had the flexibility to act to prevent crime rather than to solve it. At his side was Jimmy Carter, whose Justice Department demonstrated to those inclined to employ effective tactics to prevent further attacks that their efforts would be rewarded by prosecution and disgrace.
It was in that context that Ayers and Dohrn surfaced in 1980. They clearly understood by that time that the FBI had been neutered by the Carter Administration and the evidence against them would not be available to prosecutors at trial. Up to that time they had lived for years in the protective womb of the corrupt Chicago establishment while the FBI fruitlessly hunted them. Because his father was a well-positioned member of that establishment Ayers did not fear inadvertent detection in a city in which his family was so well known and so powerful. In later years, he described, with apparent irony, his relationship with his father after his surfacing as being as if they had never been apart. With his father’s close connections in the legal establishment in Chicago, it is not hard to guess who provided the legal advice that it was safe, finally, to turn themselves in.
The advice was correct. After the charges against Dohrn and Ayers were dropped because the clear evidence against them could no longer be used, Ayers smugly proclaimed: “Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. Ain’t America great?” The final insult to accompany the injury he and Dohrn had done their country. They reemerged into the welcoming bosom of the Chicago establishment as if their murder and treason had been nothing more than a youthful indiscretion; a mere childhood game.
Interestingly, Dohrn did not hesitate to accept the support of that establishment, the capitalist elite against which she railed for so many years, when she was offered, and accepted, a job at Sidley Austin, a mainstream corporate law firm. Howard Trienans, managing partner of the firm, offered the job at the request Ayers’ father. No other felon could aspire to such employment. It is nice, even for Kiddy Kar communists, to have daddy’s influence. The irony of her accepting the position using the influence of Chicago aristocracy was apparently lost on Dohrn. On the other hand, she could just have been the beneficiary of some Sidley Austin “hire a felon” program.
The fact that they escaped prison is troubling enough. Equally troubling, though, is that they likely had help from important people in Chicago’s establishment in evading arrest. But the broader lesson, and one for which we paid a dear price 21 years later, is that when intelligence agencies are crippled by fastidious legislative inquisitions, we should not wonder when those agencies fail to “connect the dots” and murderers go free. That is the danger when abstract solutions are imposed on real problems.
Ayer’s wife, Bernadine Dohrn = Domestic Bin Laden
From;
http://www.sodahead.com/question/155269/
Bernadine Dohrn made numerous contacts with Fidel Castro’s Cuban Mission at the UN in 1968 and 1969, during which time she arranged for SDS groups to visit Havana.
After returning from Cuba, Dohrn and others met with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong representatives in Budapest, Hungary, to discuss antiwar strategy on US campuses. Speaking a few days later at an assembly of revolutionary student movements at Columbia University, Dohrn reported that the Vietnamese communists she met in Budapest were working with US GIs in Saigon, attempting to obtain military information.
As a gesture of solidarity, the Vietnamese who Dohrn met in Budapest presented her with a ring made from an American aircraft shot down over North Vietnam. Bill Ayers would receive a similar ring while meeting with Vietnamese communists in Toronto. He later recalled being so moved by the gesture that he “left the room to cry.” He said, “I realized...America was an evil... and that I was... living inside the belly of the beast....”
In January 1969, at the request of the Cubans and the Vietnamese, Dohrn assembled another SDS delegation to travel to Havana to plan what the Chicago Sun-Times called an “antiwar campaign during an eight-day seminar with representatives of Hanoi and the Viet Cong.”
Dohrn became a key planner in the founding of the Venceremos Brigades. Ostensibly a “solidarity” program for US leftists to visit and support Castro’s Cuba, the group was actually organized by Cuban intelligence as a covert attack on US security.
Cuban secret police offered the “brigadistas” money, advice and logistical support. Some Americans were also given guerrilla warfare training and instructed in the use of weapons and explosives.
While they were in Cuba, Huynh Van Ba, a representative of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam (Viet Cong) advised his American allies to “look for the person who fights hardest against the cops.” Dohrn stayed in telephone contact with Ba after returning home.
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.