Bill Ayers defends Weather Underground bombings
...Ayers, a retired professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago, co-founded the anti-Vietnam War Weather Underground group that bombed the U. S. Capitol, the Pentagon and other buildings in the late 1960s and into the early 1970s. The radical Weather Underground took its name from lyrics in a Bob Dylan song.
The United States is the most violent country that has ever been created, Ayers said. ...
...“To conflate a group of fundamentalist people [in Boston] who are nihilistic in some way with a group of people who spent their lives trying to oppose the murder of 6,000 people a week … and still the killing went on. And still the killing went on. What would you have done?” Ayers said. “There’s no equivalence [with Boston]. Property damage. That’s what we did.”...
...Ayers said his wife, Bernardine Dorhn, also a prominent former member of the Weather Underground and now a Northwestern University law professor, spoke several years ago at a Kent State May 4 commemoration....
...In his talk to the crowd, Ayers mentioned that in 1970, he lost three friends in the Weather Underground, including his lover, Diana Oughton. He did not explain in his talk how they died – they were killed when nail bombs they were making in a Greenwich Village townhouse blew up.
Telling the crowd the circumstances of those deaths would have been “inappropriate,” Ayers said afterward. “Everybody here knows,” he said.
Authorities said the bombs were intended to be used at a dance at the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey.
“No one knows for sure but I think they were. And had they carried it out it would have been a catastrophe,” Ayers said. “But they didn’t and it didn’t happen. But what did happen is, on that same day John McCain murdered civilians. Do we have any responsibility for that? Should there be any reconciliation for that? Should he tell the truth about it?”
(McCain, a Navy pilot, was held by the North Vietnamese as a prisoner of war from October 1967 to March 1973)....
