Which way is the wind blowing today in Bill Ayers' neighborhood?
By Paula Boyard
“Hello.
This is Bernardine Dohrn. I’m going to read A
Declaration of a State of War. This is the first communication from the
Weatherman underground. All over the world, people fighting Amerikan
imperialism look to Amerika’s youth to use our strategic position behind enemy
lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire….Tens of thousands have
learned that protest and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only
way…”
“…We
fight in many ways. Dope is one of our weapons. The laws against marijuana mean
that millions of us are outlaws long before we actually split. Guns and grass
are united in the youth underground. Freaks are revolutionaries and
revolutionaries are freaks. If you want to find us, this is where we are. In
every tribe, commune, dormitory, farmhouse, barracks and townhouse where kids
are making love, smoking dope and loading guns—fugitives from Amerikan justice
are free to go…
“…Within
the next fourteen days we will attack a symbol or institution of Amerikan
injustice. This is the way we celebrate the example of Eldridge Cleaver and H.
Rap Brown and all black revolutionaries who first inspired us by their fight
behind enemy lines for the liberation of their people.”
“Never
again will they fight alone.”
With that announcement, broadcast on
radio stations across the country on July 31, 1970, the Weather Underground,
which included Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, and others, split from
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and declared war on “Amerika.” This
group already had a string of bombings, arsons, and other terrorist activities
under its belt; two months before the announcement three members of the core
group had been killed building a bomb in a Greenwich Village townhouse.
An FBI report later stated the group possessed enough explosives to level both
sides of the street.
In the two years after the “Declaration
of a State of War,” there would be two more high-profile bombings — a New York
City police station and the Pentagon.
It’s rather fascinating to compare
members of the Weathermen to Anwar al-Awlaki, the American
citizen-turned-terrorist who is the subject of the leaked white paper defining
the parameters for drone strikes against American citizens abroad. The Washington Post reports:
The
U.S.-born Muslim cleric played key roles in the
Fort Hood, Tex., shooting rampage in 2009 that killed 13 people, as well as
last year’s foiled attempt to put bombs on cargo planes bound to the United
States. His words led a young
Nigerian to attempt to blow up a jetliner
over Detroit, and inspired an unemployed Pakistani man to drive a bomb-laden
vehicle into the heart of New York’s Times Square. … So effective was his
message that the CIA last year put him on the agency’s official target list,
making him the first American citizen to be designated for death, wherever he
could be found, without judicial process.
The CIA targeted Awlaki and in 2011 he
was killed by a drone strike in Yemen. The
DOJ white paper defended such targeted killings of U.S. citizens, asserting
the inherent right of the United States to national self defense under
international law, Congress’s authorization of the use of all necessary and
appropriate military force against this enemy, and the existence of an armed
conflict with al-Qa’ida under international law.
The paper laid out a three-part test for
killing a U.S. citizen who is “an operational leader continually planning
attacks against U.S. persons and interests” and who is outside the United
States:
(1)
A high-level official of the U.S. government must determine that the targeted
individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United
States;
(2)
A capture operation would be infeasible–and those conducting the operation
would continue to monitor whether capture becomes infeasible; and
(3)
Such an operation would be conducted consistent with applicable law of war
principles.
What does any of this have to do with
domestic terrorists like Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers?
In October 1970, the Chicago Daily News reported
(see
FBI file) on the radical leftist activities of Americans traveling between
the U.S. and communist Cuba, calling the country a “revolutionary factory.”
Fidel Castro’s Cuba had become a veritable post-graduate training ground for
radicals in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hardcore anarchists and left-wing
professors visited alongside peaceniks who picked sugar cane and oranges for
Castro’s collective. Some 4000 Americans visited Cuba for varying lengths of
time during that decade.
The
Chicago Daily News described the results:
Bernardine
Dohrn, mini-skirted Weatherwoman and 30 fellow activists met with Vietnamese
communists in Havana in July, 1969.
Three
months later, with the fiery Bernardine in command, a shocked Chicago watched
as several hundred ultra-radical Weathermen staged a wild window-smashing
rampage which they called “Four Days of Rage” in protest against the Vietnam
War.
Beyond
any doubt, Cuba has shaped, supplied technical training to, given political
indoctrination for and perhaps most important of all, served as the inspiration
for the American radical movement in its avowed aim to bring down the American
system that it so fiercely despises…
…The
ubiquitous Miss Dohrn, a brilliant University of Chicago law school graduate,
mapped her anti-war campaign during an eight-day semester with representatives
of Hanoi and the Viet Cong. She journeyed to Havana at their request.
Now
a fugitive sought by the FBI, Bernardine was heard from last week when she
claimed credit for blowing up for the second time within a year, a police
memorial statue in Chicago’s Haymarket Square.
So, would Dohrn and other Weathermen
qualify for a visit from the U.S. Department of Drones? Let’s just imagine for
a moment that instead of going “underground” in the U.S., Dohrn and other
members of the group had taken refuge in Cuba and continued to plot against
“Amerika.”
According to the Justice Department memo,
she would need to be “an
operational leader continually planning attacks against U.S. persons and
interests.”
Check.
“A high-level official of the U.S.
government must determine that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat
of violent attack against the United States.”
Bernardine
Dohrn: “I’m going to read A
Declaration of a State of War. This is the first communication from the
Weatherman underground. All over the world, people fighting Amerikan
imperialism look to Amerika’s youth to use our strategic position behind enemy
lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire….Tens of thousands have
learned that protest and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the
only way…”
Government
officials knew Dohrn and her comrades were very serious about their threats.
Thirteen members had been indicted just a week before in a national bombing
plot.
Check.
“A
capture operation would be infeasible–and those conducting the operation would
continue to monitor whether capture becomes infeasible.”
Would Castro have allowed American
officials into Cuba to capture American domestic terrorists who were plotting
to overthrow the U.S.? The math is easy on this one.
“Such
an operation would be conducted consistent with applicable law of war
principles.”
As long as you didn’t waterboard Dohrn
before you droned her…
Of course, we can’t know what would have
happened if the U.S. had possessed drones in 1970, but I’m just pointing out
that the situation with the Weathermen wasn’t all that different than that of
Awlaki.
Dohrn and other Americans spent time in
Cuba during the Vietnam War. Communist Cuba supported the enemy during the war
and Dohrn actually met with enemy Viet Cong leaders “at their request.” She and
others in her group planned and carried out acts of terror against public
venues, including a New York City police headquarters and the Pentagon. And it
could have been much, much worse. Harvey Klehr, professor of politics and
history at Emory University, said of the Greenwich townhouse explosion, “The
only reason they were not guilty of mass murder is mere incompetence.”
So, Mr. President, Americans would like
to know…
If your fugitive friends Bill Ayers and
Bernardine Dohrn and the rest of the Weathermen had fled to Cuba in 1970, would
you have sent a drone after them? Because I don’t see a whole lot of difference
between the Weathermen and Anwar al-Awlaki, except that the Weathermen
were more successful than most of Awlaki’s protégés.
While this may seem like a futile
intellectual exercise, I think it’s important to answer the question of how
broadly the sphere of Obama’s drone powers would extend. I don’t personally
object to the use of drones to take down an enemy combatant hell-bent on
killing Americans — even if he is an American citizen. You forfeit your right
to due process, and any other rights as an American citizen, when you join
forces with an enemy that is at war with our country.
But I want to know if President Obama
will use these war powers consistently. We’ve already seen members of Occupy
Wall Street plotting to blow up a bridge in Cleveland. Their group tolerated
violent criminals and anarchists in their camp and the movement is built on the
same ideology that led to the violent Weather Underground.
If OWS reorganizes after a hiatus (as the SDS did) and returns with a new,
violent “Black Bloc” iteration, will the Obama administration treat them as
terrorists and hunt them down with drones if they flee by private jet with
Michael Moore to some OWS Mecca like Venezuela or Cuba?
The answer, of course, should be “yes,”
unless the purpose of the white paper on the use of drones was nothing more
than an after-the-fact attempt by the Obama administration to cover their
backsides in the wake of a drone assassination that sent the Left
into a severe state of cognitive dissonance. Or unless they would refuse to
attack enemy combatants with whom they share an ideology.
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