Bernardine Dorhn

Last night, Barack Obama denied launching his political career in the living room of William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn prior to his first run for the Illinois State Senate in 1995.

That denial must be based upon quibbling over the difference between a formal announcement at a Ramada Inn, September 19, 1995, and an “introduction” to prominent liberal Hyde Park democrats over coffee at Chez Ayers whose specific date is uncertain but which occurred around very much the same time. Lynn Sweet.

The precise chronological order of Obama’s 1995 campaign events is obviously less important than the question of his association and long term relationship with terrorists and the nature of their crimes.

WorldNetDaily quotes an FBI informant:

While defenders of unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers cling to the rationalization that he never killed anyone during a spree of bombings in the 1970s, his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, built and planted the bomb that killed a San Francisco police officer in 1970, an FBI report claimed. …

While Ayers himself has never been implicated in a death among the high-profile bombings of the Capitol, the Pentagon and several other targets of the Weather Underground he served as a leader, it’s not true that there were no fatalities associated with the attacks.

On Feb. 16, 1970, Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell of the San Francisco Police Department was killed by shrapnel from an anti-personnel bomb planted on a window ledge at the force’s Park Station. The pipe bomb was filled with heavy metal staples and lead bullet projectiles. Another officer, Robert Fogarty, received serious wounds to his face and legs, and was partially blinded in the attack.

Dohrn, then living in a Weather Underground cell on a Sausalito, Calif., houseboat, has long been suspected of involvement in the bombing.

An FBI informant, Larry Grathwohl, who successfully penetrated the organization from the late summer of 1969 until April 1970, later testified to a U.S. Senate subcommittee that Ayers, then a high-ranking leader of the organization and a member of its Central Committee (but not then Dohrn’s husband), told him Dohrn constructed and planted the bomb.

Grathwohl testified that Ayers had told him specifically where the bomb was placed (on a window ledge) and what kind of shrapnel was put in it. Grathwohl said Ayers was emphatic, leading Grathwohl to believe Ayers either was present at some point during the operation or had heard about it from someone who was there. In a book about his experiences published in 1976, Grathwohl wrote that Ayers, who had recently attended a meeting of the group’s Central Committee, said Dohrn had planned the operation, made the bomb and placed it herself.

Grathwohl recounted in his report that Ayers complained to other Weather Underground operatives that they were not contributing enough to the bombing campaigns, pointing out that Dohrn built the bomb and planted it herself.

Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell, SFPD, murdered February 16, 1970