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William Ayers, who was a founder of the 1960s and 1970s radical group the Weather Underground, told FOX News correspondent James Rosen in a candid 2004 interview that he still believed he was “on the side of justice” years after the group’s wave of attacks.In the interview, conducted three years after the September 11 attacks, Ayers argued the U.S. government had carried out “many other acts of terror...even recently, that are comparable,” and claimed he and his bomb-planting comrades were “restrained” in their actions.Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, served with Barack Obama on the board of the charitable Woods Fund of Chicago for three years and helped launch Obama’s political career in Illinois by hosting in his Hyde Park home an informal campaign event for the future state senator in 1995.Ayers claimed the Weathermen were driven by “hope and love,” not despair, and said he did not think the group’s violent acts, targeting federal officials and local law enforcement officers, were “a big deal.”Interviewed in May 2004 in connection with Rosen’s book “The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate,” published recently by Doubleday, Ayers affirmed that 9/11 was “an act of pure terror,” one that had caused him to weep, and that terrorism is “always wrong, always evil.” But Ayers also condemned the Bush administration for using the attacks “to advance a right-wing agenda on every front: every uterus must be examined, every tree chopped down, every oil well dug. I mean, it’s absolute madness.”“I mean, the only group of people that I know who weren’t weeping for the next several weeks [after 9/11] were the people who were busy typing legislation into their computers,” Ayers continued.When asked about some Palestinians who had been captured on videotape dancing in the streets after the attacks, Ayers said coverage of those individuals had been “overwrought” in the U.S. media, and added: “[E]verybody in the world knows that Americans are geographically challenged and historically challenged. We don’t have a sense of who we are or where we are. So I think every American that I know was weeping over the next several weeks, and devastated and shocked. Was that an act of pure terror? It absolutely was.“And there are many other acts of terror carried out by our government, even recently, that, that are comparable. And there are other acts of terror that have gone on in places like Bosnia that we forgot to notice.”Explaining how he became a leader of the radical 1960s antiwar group, the Weathermen (and its subsequent fugitive incarnation, the Weather Underground), Ayers was unrepentant about the group’s planting of bombs in the Capitol, the Pentagon, and other sites. “I think I was on the side of justice and ultimately it will be seen that way,” Ayers said. “I don’t think our move was so much towards violence.“I think that what we did was to look at this situation of 2,000 people a day being murdered [in Vietnam] and try to figure out a couple of things. One is, how can we effectively resist the war, when we thought our charge was to convince the majority of the American people to oppose it. We did. And still the war went on, and still the murder went on. So what do you do?“And in that moment, SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] and every other organization came unglued, and people went different ways. Some people joined the Democratic Party, tried to build a peace wing within it; some people went to factories; some people went to Europe; some people ran away to the hills of California. What we did was try to build the capacity to survive what we saw was an impending American fascism.“We didn’t want to — we looked at the conspiracy trial [of the Chicago Seven], which we were very close to, and we didn’t want to spend two years defending ourselves. That seemed like a complete waste of energy and time. And so we said to ourselves, ‘What are we going to do?’… We saw the movement either being targeted like [Black Panther leader] Fred Hampton and shot in the head, or targeted like the Chicago Seven, dragged into federal court, where they had to spend zillions of resources and energy and people-hours defending themselves against this completely corrupt government and this completely corrupt Justice Department on this completely corrupt charge.“So, yeah, we, we found that an appalling alternative. And so we set about building a clandestine organization. And the whole point was to survive them and then possibly to take the fight to them against the war and against, against empire, generally … I think we were moving in a direction that said demonstrations — you know, we’ve tried to demonstrate. We’ve tried to petition our government. We’ve gone door to door and knocked on doors. We’ve talked to our neighbors. We’ve talked to, you know, our parents, our Republican parents. And everybody agrees with us; but we can’t stop the war. So what do we do?”Yet Ayers rejected the notion, advanced in a 2002 documentary about the Weather Underground, that he and his fugitive comrades — including his wife, Bernardine Dohrn — were animated solely by rage over their inability to stop the Vietnam War. “I don’t buy that even a little,” Ayers said. “I think that we were driven by hope and love and aspiration as much as we were driven by despair.”A Marxist offshoot of the progressive SDS, the Weathermen took their name from Bob Dylan’s 1965 alienated-youth anthem “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (with the line “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”), and initially demonstrated their resistance to “Amerikan” imperialism through armed street clashes with police.Soon, however, the group’s members assumed clandestine identities, changed their collective name to the Weather Underground, and began detonating bombs at courthouses, correctional facilities, police stations, the Capitol and the Pentagon. Between October 1969 and September 1973, the Weather Underground claimed credit for some twenty bombings across the country, in which no one was harmed — save the three cell members who perished in a Greenwich Village townhouse in March 1970, when one of their creations detonated prematurely.Ayers claimed the fact that no other individuals were killed as a result of the Weathermen’s actions was “by design.”In his autobiography, Fugitive Days: A Memoir, Ayers recalled, he posed the question: “How far are you willing to take that step into what I consider the abyss of violence? And we really never did, except for that moment in the townhouse.… I actually think destroying property in the face of that kind of catastrophe is so — restrained. And I don’t see it as a big deal. I mean, the Catholic Left, when the Berrigan Brothers climb into nuclear silos and hammer on the warheads, is that terrible terrorism and violence? I don’t, I don’t get it. I don’t see what the equivalency is. Yes, they’re crossing a line; yes, they’re breaking the law; yes, they’re using weapons. But they’re also not hurting anybody; they’re not killing anybody. Meanwhile, in the background, 2,000 people are being lined up at a pit and shot. And [laughs] where those things become equivalent just boggles my mind.”While Ayers denounced Stalinism as a “poisonous, dogmatic mind-breaking kind of logic,” he lamented that “we examine less in this country … the way the ideology of anti-communism wreaks the same results.” Speaking from his home in Hyde Park, in Chicago, Ayers accused President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld of “murdering innocents … humiliating people … [and] devastating a country” in the invasion of Iraq.“[Y]ou know, it’s easy, sitting in America, with all of our wealth and privilege, and layers and layers of denial, it’s easy to say, to point to all the evil out there in the world and say, ‘But we’re good people, we’re good people,’” Ayers said. “[T]he problem there is that we fail to actually look at our history and our impact on the world. So if you say something — if you point out what’s happened in the last two weeks [a reference to the Abu Ghraib scandal], ‘Oh, that’s an aberration.’ That’s the face — that’s — ‘and un-American.’ I love that! Donald Rumsfeld says it’s un-American! When this began, George Bush said we’re going to shock and awe. What the hell is shock and awe? It’s murdering innocents; it’s humiliating people; it’s devastating a country. So we’re doing it now up close and personal.” Asked about President Bush’s ability to connect with voters, Ayers said: “Well, he’s very charming, and charm does get you pretty far in American politics. It’s kind of frightening.”Other subjects on which Ayers commented included the Abu Ghraib Scandal, FOX News, John Kerry’s flawed response to Republican attacks on his war record, and the American use of military technology in the Middle East.As in the days of Noah...
