During the 2008 campaign, John McCain's pro-Iraq War op-ed was judged by the Times editorial page as unworthy ofpublication [1](even though Barack Obama had penned a pro-withdrawal one for the paper just a week before).
But this weekend, one well-known personality from the campaign broke his silence and claimed that precious piece of journalistic real estate: 1960s domestic terrorist and Obama friend Bill Ayers wrote an op-ed for Saturday's edition, "The Real [2]Bill Ayers [2]," setting out his side of the story.
Ayers claimed not only that he never killed anyone (debatable, as the leader of a terrorist group that killed people) but told two falsehoods: That his group never attacked people; and that he regrets some of what he did then.
I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices - the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious - as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.
The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be - and still is being - debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.
That ignores the story of Judge John Murtagh, whose family was attacked when he was presiding over a trial of the Black Panthers, as related by his son in City [3]Journal [3]:
In February 1970, my father, a New York State Supreme Court justice, was presiding over the trial of the so-called "Panther 21," members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Early on the morning of February 21, as my family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at our home on the northern tip of Manhattan, two at the front door and the third tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car. (Today, of course, we'd call that a car bomb.) A neighbor heard the first two blasts and, with the remains of a snowman I had built a few days earlier, managed to douse the flames beneath the car. That was an act whose courage I fully appreciated only as an adult, an act that doubtless saved multiple lives that night.
I still recall, as though it were a dream, thinking that someone was lifting and dropping my bed as the explosions jolted me awake, and I remember my mother's pulling me from the tangle of sheets and running to the kitchen where my father stood. Through the large windows overlooking the yard, all we could see was the bright glow of flames below. We didn't leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside. The same night, bombs were thrown at a police car in Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn. Sunlight, the next morning, revealed three sentences of blood-red graffiti on our sidewalk: FREE THE PANTHER 21; THE VIET CONG HAVE WON; KILL THE PIGS.
....Though no one was ever caught or tried for the attempt on my family's life, there was never any doubt who was behind it. Only a few weeks after the attack, the New York contingent of the Weathermen blew themselves up making more bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse. The same cell had bombed my house, writes Ron Jacobs in The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. And in late November that year, a letter to the Associated Press signed by Bernardine Dohrn, Ayers's wife, promised more bombings.
Allahpundit at Hot Air filled in more blanks that the Times fact-checkers were either ignorant of or didn't bother with:
Question via Jules Crittenden [4]: Why'd the NYT accept this piece when they know he's lying? They were the ones who reported [5] on 9/11 that he wished he'd set more bombs; they were the ones who reminded [6] us a month