Justice for Victims of the Weather Underground

A live
version of “Forensic Files” hits Washington, D.C. on March 12, as pressure
mounts for an expanded probe of Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, and
their alleged roles in the 1970 bombing murder of a San Francisco policeman.
Ayers and Dohrn, now university professors, were members of a communist
terrorist gang called the Weather Underground during the 1960s and 1970s whose
aim was to support communist regimes and anti-American movements around the
world and destroy the United States. The group received terrorist training in
Communist Cuba and was advised by Soviet and Cuban intelligence agents.

 

A former
FBI informant, a retired San Francisco policeman, a veteran congressional
investigator, and an internationally-renowned researcher into extremist
movements will be appearing at the National Press Club to urge federal
authorities to get to the bottom of what really happened on February 16, 1970,
when a bomb filled with heavy metal staples exploded and ripped through the
body of San Francisco
Police Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell at the Park Station police
headquarters. McDonnell was in the hospital for two days, bleeding from his
wounds, before he finally died.

 

The
bombing was listed by the FBI as the work of the Weather Underground, but Ayers
and Dohrn, two of its top members, never claimed credit for the blast. They
have tried to insist over the years that their bombs never hurt or killed
anyone, except their own members. However, the consistent testimony of former
FBI informant Larry Grathwohl, who participated in meetings with Ayers, has
been that Ayers told him that Dohrn planted the bomb.

 

What’s
more, the bomb that killed three of their own members when it accidentally
exploded in a New York townhouse was an anti-personnel device intended for an
Army dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Mark Rudd, another member of the Weather
Underground, reveals in a new book that he was in favor of planting the bomb,
saying that he wanted “this country to have a taste of what it had been dishing
out daily in Southeast Asia…” What the U.S. had been trying to do was prevent a
communist takeover of South Vietnam.  

 

One might
think that a case as old as the McDonnell killing would never be solved. But
those familiar with real-life crime shows, such as “Forensic Files” on the
TruTV cable channel, know that law enforcement authorities don’t like to give
up, and that advances in forensic science have greatly improved the ability to
solve the “cold cases.”

 

To prove
the point, in 2007, members of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) were indicted
for the 1971 killing of another San
Francisco Police Sergeant, John Young.

The BLA worked with the Weather Underground.

 

In fact,
the Weather Underground and the BLA in 1981 tried to rob a Brinks truck and
killed three law enforcement officers in Rockland County, New York. Weather
Underground members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert went to prison for their
roles in the assault, while their “comrades,” Ayers and Dohrn, raised their
child, Chesa Boudin. Dohrn was jailed for seven months for refusing to
cooperate with a federal grand jury investigating the murders. 

 

Chesa
Boudin would grow up and live in Venezuela and become a self-described “foreign
policy adviser” to Marxist ruler Hugo Chavez, implicated by the evidence and
newspaper accounts in support for the Colombian FARC and Middle Eastern terror
groups. By his own admission, Ayers has traveled four times to Venezuela to
lecture on “educational” issues. He was described by Venezuelan authorities
during one appearance as a former leader of a “revolutionary and
anti-imperialist group” that “brought an armed struggle to the USA for more
than 10 years from within the womb of the empire.”

 

At the
March 12 news conference at the National Press Club, former congressional
investigator Herbert Romerstein will release a detailed report on how the
Weather Underground waged a campaign of violence and murder that targeted
police and the public. Former FBI informant Grathwohl will repeat his calls for
further investigation and justice in the case of Sergeant McDonnell, and Jim
Pera, a retired San Francisco police officer who worked with McDonnell and was
one of the first on the scene of the bombing, will describe the devastating
effect of the blast. Ground-breaking international blogger Trevor Loudon and I
will release a report examining how a new “student movement,” under the
direction of Ayers and Dohrn and others of their ilk, is emerging on college
campuses.

 

During
their time in the Weather Underground, before they became “respectable” and
“mainstream” and associated with politicians like Barack Obama, Dohrn and Ayers
signed a document, “Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary
Anti-Imperialism,” dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert F.
Kennedy. Dohrn, perhaps even more notorious than Ayers, once praised mass
murderer Charles Manson as a “true revolutionary” and declared, “Dope is one of
our weapons.” Rudd, in his new book, reminisces about his sexual promiscuity,
involvement in bombings, and LSD trips. He is today a prominent member of
“Progressives for Obama.”

 

These
terrorists, who are hawking books and traveling on college campuses around the
country, are increasingly being met with public resistance. Hundreds recently
turned out to protest an Ayers speech at St. Mary’s College in California. But
can the terrorists continue to escape legal accountability for their past
actions and the violence they inflicted on others? In the McDonnell case, the
Biennial Report (2007-2008) of the California Department of Justice reported
that “In 2000, the SFPD [San Francisco Police Department] reopened its
investigation into the bombing of the Park Police Station and requested
investigative assistance from the DOJ. The DOJ’s Bureau of Forensic Services
was also assigned to identify a latent print collected from the original crime
scene.” 

 

“The FBI and the San Francisco police department were
looking to prosecute Bernardine Dohrn for murder” about six years ago,
Grathwohl told me. “They were really pushing it and then it dropped off the
radar.” The March 12 event is designed to put it back on the radar.

 

Participants
in the press conference, organized by my educational organization, America’s Survival, Inc., are
under no illusions that the Obama Administration will react favorably. After
all, the new Attorney General, Eric Holder, was involved in the Clinton
Administration pardons of members of the Weather Underground and Puerto Rican
FALN terrorist group. But the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, is
independent of the Administration and has a 10-year term that expires in 2011.
He doesn’t have to answer to Holder or Obama.

Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. This is an excerpt of one of his columns, which can be read in its entirety here.