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Why isn't Ayers in jail?

Burgold

By Burgold
in The Tailgate

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Burgold

Burgold

Posted
Posted

He was a domestic terrorist and many are saying was on par with Bin Ladin in terms of vileness and attrocity. Why isn't he in jail? Why is he being allowed to shape minds in a major University? Why is he being allowed to help form education policy on boards? How is this man free?

He's not in hiding. He's a terrorist. Yet he has for more than 30 years been allowed freedom to continue his tyranny of thought and action. Why have the authorities, the government, and all involved not taken actions against this man if he is the unrepetent treasonous monster that everyone wants to depict.

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Henry

Henry

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Posted
The case was dismissed due to illegal evidence gathering activities.

Here's a letter from the lead prosecutor on the Obama Ayers 'relationship'.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003873017

I do take issue with the statement in your news article that the Weathermen indictment was dismissed because of “prosecutorial misconduct.” It was dismissed because of illegal activities, including wiretaps, break-ins and mail interceptions, initiated by John N. Mitchell, attorney general at that time, and W. Mark Felt, an F.B.I. assistant director.

I'm confused. What's the difference between illegal activities performed by the attorney general and “prosecutorial misconduct?”

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DjTj

DjTj

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I do take issue with the statement in your news article that the Weathermen indictment was dismissed because of “prosecutorial misconduct.” It was dismissed because of illegal activities, including wiretaps, break-ins and mail interceptions, initiated by John N. Mitchell, attorney general at that time, and W. Mark Felt, an F.B.I. assistant director.

I'm confused. What's the difference between illegal activities performed by the attorney general and “prosecutorial misconduct?”

Well, I think he's trying to make a distinction between prosecutorial misconduct and investigative misconduct.

The misconduct didn't occur after anyone was indicted; it occurred while they were investigating Weather Underground. That involved the Attorney General and the FBI, but it didn't involve this particular prosecutor.

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Henry

Henry

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Well, I think he's trying to make a distinction between prosecutorial misconduct and investigative misconduct.

The misconduct didn't occur after anyone was indicted; it occurred while they were investigating Weather Underground. That involved the Attorney General and the FBI, but it didn't involve this particular prosecutor.

Ok. For future reference to you lawyer types, to us laymen it's all the same thing. :)

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DjTj

DjTj

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Posted
Ok. For future reference to you lawyer types, to us laymen it's all the same thing. :)
Well, I think this guy is worried about the laymen.

His title was "lead prosecutor" of the Weather Underground. The New York Times article claimed "prosecutorial misconduct." ... If you see those two statements, you would probably assume that the lead prosecutor did something wrong.

He just wants to clear that up because he didn't actually do anything wrong. By the time he got the case, everything had already been screwed up.

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PleaseBlitz

PleaseBlitz

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Posted
what happened to the "presumption of innocence"? The guy is not a convict, so at worst he is an alleged criminal, big difference. So the allegation of Obama being "an associate of a terrorist" is wrong on two counts.

I think he lost the presumption of innocence when he admitted to the acts of terrorism.

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Burgold

Burgold

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Seriously though, if he is an unrepentent terrorist hasn't he ever made an error filing his taxes? Hasn't he ever been caught jaywalking? There are a thousand ways to get scum in jail if you need to. OJ may spend the rest of his life in jail for trying to steal his own property. What'shisface was put in jail for life for messing up on his income taxes. If Ayers is the American version of Bin Ladin why would he be allowed to be free and teach kids?

I get what you're saying, Henry and I agree that he was at one time a monster given what we think we know, but if he still is a monster, if he still is a threat, then surely... he would not have been given a free pass and been allowed to rise to pretty high heights.

Edit: And truman's right. If McCain was "palling" around with clansmen who were known lynchers and fire bombers I would be outraged and want that known lyncher and terrorist buried in a jail cell for the rest of his life.

What's weird to me here is that Ayers seems to be getting a pass.

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daveakl

daveakl

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what happened to the "presumption of innocence"? The guy is not a convict, so at worst he is an alleged criminal, big difference. So the allegation of Obama being "an associate of a terrorist" is wrong on two counts.

I think the presumption of innocence goes out the window when he admit's to doing it.

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aREDSKIN

aREDSKIN

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I personally don't care about any supposed tertiary connection between Ayers and Obama, but let's all stop trying to pretend Ayers in an ok guy. He got off on a technicality and has been largely unapologetic since.

Tertiary?? LOL It's more connected than that.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24485226-7583,00.html

THE seemingly inevitable ascent of Barack Obama to become US president has hit a hurdle, as he is forced to confront accusations, supported by a hard-hitting television ad campaign, that he had a long-time association with two of America's leading terrorists from the 1960s, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, one-time leaders of the Weathermen (also known as the Weather Underground).

It is not in dispute that Obama began his political career in 1995 at the home of Ayers and Dohrn, when his sponsor (herself on the far left of the Democratic Party and a champion of the Soviet Union as late as 1986) arranged for him to meet some influential leftists and potential campaign supporters and contributors who could launch his career.

In the best-selling expose The Obama Nation (2008), Jerome Corsi reports that one of the attendees at this launch recalls how Ayers and Dohrn introduced Obama as "the best thing since sliced bread".

Subsequently, "the record shows that connections between Obama and Dohrn have actively continued since Obama launched his political career in their living room in 1995".

For example, Michelle Obama and possibly also Barack Obama worked at the same law firm at the same time as Dohrn in 1984-88, while in 1995 Ayers co-founded the Chicago Annenberg Challenge using a $US50 million grant and selected Barack Obama to be the first chairman of the board of the project, a position that Obama held for eight years. Obama and Ayers also served together on the board of the philanthropic Woods Fund for three years after Obama joined the board in 1999. Obama also served on the Leadership Council of the Chicago Public Education Fund with Ayers's father and brother.

These facts cast doubt on the recent claims by Obama's campaign manager that Obama knew Ayers only slightly and only because they lived in the same neighbourhood and their children went to the same school. Apart from the above connections, Ayers's children are much older than Obama's.

Equally unlikely is the claim that Obama knew nothing of Ayers and Dohrn's terrorist past. As Corsi remarks, people familiar with Chicago politics "wonder how Obama can think we are so gullible as to believe Obama was the only person in Chicago who did not know Ayers's bomb-throwing terrorist fame".

But even if there was a long-term association between Obama and Ayers and Dohrn, is that necessarily a bad thing?

The answer requires a brief review of the turbulent time of the 1960s when Ayers and Dohrn were leaders of the Weathermen and signatories of the ultra-radical manifesto You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows, released at the national convention of the revolutionary Students for a Democratic Society in June 1969.

This 20,000-word manifesto called for a communist revolution in the US; the victory of communist North Vietnam in the Vietnam War; and the creation of "two, three, many Vietnams" designed to consume all of America's military resources. It denounced all police as "pigs" and detailed strategies to defeat them; and advocated a vanguard role for black people, supported by university students and young people, in the revolutionary overthrow of American society.

The Weathermen advocated urban guerilla warfare and terrorism and undertook an intense campaign of bombings, violent demonstrations, riots and jail breaks from 1969 into the early '70s, beginning with the Days of Rage, held in October 1969, to correspond to the trial of the Chicago Eight. In 1970, the group issued their Declaration of a State of War against the government of what they dismissed as AmeriKKKa.

Ayers participated in 30 bombings in this period, including attacks on the New York Police Department headquarters in 1970, the US Capitol in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972.

Ayers had gone underground as a terrorist following a lethal mistake in a Greenwich Village townhouse, in which three members of the Weathermen were killed (including Ayers's then girlfriend) when a nail bomb being constructed as an anti-personnel device exploded.

In 1970, Ayers (whose father was a wealthy chief executive of a large telecommunications company and later obtained his son's freedom from prison) described the Weathermen's message: "Kill all rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at."

Similarly with Dohrn. After the Charles Manson-led Tate-LaBianca murders in 1969, Dohrn enthused: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!"

Bizarrely, in September 1970 the Weathermen were paid $20,000 by a psychedelics distribution organisation called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love to break out of prison the leading advocate of LSD, Timothy Leary. Leary escaped to Algeria, where he joined the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver in exile.

Ayers published his autobiography Fugitive Days: A Memoir on September 10, 2001, and was quoted in The New York Times on 9/11 as saying: "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough". When asked if he would "do it all again", he responded: "I don't want to discount the possibility." A month earlier he was photographed for a magazine interview standing on the American flag.

In November 2007, during a speech given by Ayers at a reunion of SDS members, Ayers was recorded as praising the group's spirit of rebellion and quoted communist revolutionary heroes in support of his views, while Dohrn referred to the US government as the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world" and complained that life in America involves living in "the belly of the beast" and at "the heart of the monster".

Obama was, of course, only about nine when all this started, and wasn't directly involved in the Weather Underground. However, in his autobiography Dreams From My Father (2004), he makes it clear that he was seeking in his youth to construct an identity as an African-American activist, drawing inspiration from Malcolm X, the radical face of the Nation of Islam, and other radicals from the '60s.

Indeed, in his second book, The Audacity of Hope (2006), he declares himself to be a pure product of the '60s and specifically distinguishes the "pre-1967 liberalism" of his mother with "its sweet-natured romanticism", from his own radical political outlook based in the hard-core revolutionary currents of 1968 and the other violent years that followed.

He described how his vision of the '60s was shaped by images of Black Panther leader Huey Newton, the fierce battle between police and demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic national convention, the ignominious last-second escape of defeated US personnel from Saigon, and the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont where Hells Angels bashed a young man to death.

Starting college in 1979, Obama describes how he chose his friends carefully: "The more politically active black students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performers."

He describes how they discussed "neo-colonialism, Frantz Fanon (the Black Power hero and apostle of cleansing violence), Eurocentrism, and patriarchy"; and how he read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness "to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid ... Their demons."

Obama concludes: "Despite a 40-year remove, the tumult of the '60s continues to drive our political discourse."

The question that the American people may have to ask themselves is how much this extremist milieu still drives Obama's political outlook and how much it will guide his decisions, policies and appointments throughout the federal government system as the next president of the US

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DjTj

DjTj

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For example, Michelle Obama and possibly also Barack Obama worked at the same law firm at the same time as Dohrn in 1984-88, while in 1995 Ayers co-founded the Chicago Annenberg Challenge using a $US50 million grant and selected Barack Obama to be the first chairman of the board of the project, a position that Obama held for eight years. Obama and Ayers also served together on the board of the philanthropic Woods Fund for three years after Obama joined the board in 1999. Obama also served on the Leadership Council of the Chicago Public Education Fund with Ayers's father and brother.
When the most important paragraph of your article starts with a sentence containing the phrase "and possibly also," your evidence may be weaker than you think.
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Larry

Larry

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I personally don't care about any supposed tertiary connection between Ayers and Obama, but let's all stop trying to pretend Ayers in an ok guy. He got off on a technicality and has been largely unapologetic since.

Translation: The United States Government knowingly violated the Constitution.

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Henry

Henry

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I get what you're saying, Henry and I agree that he was at one time a monster given what we think we know, but if he still is a monster, if he still is a threat, then surely... he would not have been given a free pass and been allowed to rise to pretty high heights.

Let's put it this way. If I was introduced to him today, I'd probably tell him I'd rather not shake his hand and find someone else to talk to.

I understand that once you enter the world of politics you no longer have that luxury, which is why I give Obama a pass on that. But I am not interested in hearing how Ayers is now some great neighbor, any more than I am interested in hearing how Roman Polanski no longer rapes 13 year-olds, or Leonard Little no longer slams his car into middle-aged women or that Samuel Sheinbein is no longer interested in chopping up his neighbors for kicks.

Just because someone finds a way to wiggle through our legal system, that doesn't mean I have to pretend they didn't do what they did.

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Larry

Larry

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I bet the libs would be up in arms if McCain was hanging around a Klansmen that blew up a black church 40 years ago, but got off on a technicality. (yeah, strawman)

One possible difference: The anti-war protesters were right, but the Klansmen were Wrong?

Another possible difference: About half of the US population were anti-war. (Which also means that the odds are overwhelming that any hypothetical jury will be roughly half composed of anti-war people), whereas a tiny portion of the population are former Klansmen.

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Larry

Larry

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Seriously though, if he is an unrepentent terrorist hasn't he ever made an error filing his taxes? Hasn't he ever been caught jaywalking? There are a thousand ways to get scum in jail if you need to. OJ may spend the rest of his life in jail for trying to steal his own property. What'shisface was put in jail for life for messing up on his income taxes. If Ayers is the American version of Bin Ladin why would he be allowed to be free and teach kids?

As I pointed out in my just-previous post, any hypothetical jury will have people who were opposed to the war on it.

And many of those people remember the government targeting people for harassment based simply on their political views.

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