Obama Associate Implicated In Murder Plot
By Cliff Kincaid
September 17, 2009
The sub-headline over the article says it all: "The investigation into a cop killing in the '70s leads to a law professor who helped launch Barack Obama's political career." The law professor is former Communist terrorist Bernardine Dohrn, a leader of the Weather Underground known for praising mass murderer Charles Manson.
Writer Peter Jamison, who is based in San Francisco, where the cop killing occurred, spent months working on the story and developed many different sources of information. Jamison, who can't be dismissed as a right-winger pursuing a partisan agenda designed to make Obama look bad, examined the evidence in the 1970 Park Police Station bombing case. He finds that it goes straight to Dohrn and other members of the Weather Underground, including her husband, fellow terrorist Bill Ayers, now a professor of education at the University of Illinois.
His article is being syndicated by Village Voice Media, a source of news and information for newsweeklies in several major U.S. cities. The outlets include the SF Weekly (web site) in San Francisco, the Miami New Times, (web site) and the St. Louis Riverfront Times. (web site)
The story is actually an old one, and Accuracy in Media had publicized some of the evidence (web site) in the case before the 2008 presidential election, when the media were repeating the lie that the Weather Underground had never killed anyone with their campaign of violence.
In sworn testimony that goes back to the 1970s, former FBI informant Larry Grathwohl had implicated Ayers and Dohrn in the knowledge and/or planning of the bombing murder of San Francisco Police Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell. Metal staples from the powerful bomb ripped through his body, killing him after several agonizing days in the hospital.
The new evidence in the case developed by Jamison adds to the solid information already available and raises the question of when, if ever, the bombers will be prosecuted. There are other witnesses to the bombing plot.
He reports, "Now, speaking publicly for the first time about the investigation, former FBI agents have told Village Voice Media the basis for their belief that the Weather Underground was behind McDonnell's murder. The agents have revealed that two credible eyewitnesses--both former left-wing radicals tied to the Weathermen--gave detailed statements to investigators in the 1970s alleging that Dohrn and Howard Machtinger, another member of the group, were personally involved in organizing the deadly attack. Both witnesses claimed to have participated in meetings where the bombing was planned, and one confessed to having cased the police station for the Weathermen prior to the explosion."
Jamison discloses that Dohrn, Machtinger, and Ayers were targets of a secret federal grand jury investigation in 2003 into McDonnell's killing. He quotes a left-wing lawyer as saying "it was clear they were the targets. They weren't called--other people were called about them. The Weather Underground was the target of Park Station [investigators]."
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