Obama, Ayers, Dohrn and double jeopardy

William Ayers, in the age of terrorism, will be Barack Obama’s Willie Horton.

~ Larry C. Johnson, former counterterrorism expert

I don’t regret setting bombs. … I feel we didn’t do enough.

~ William Ayers, N.Y. Times interview, Sept. 11, 2001

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but it vexes me to no end every time I see or read anything about Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, co-founders of the radical ’60s anarchist group the Weather Underground.

Ayers and Dohrn are people who are very close friends to Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama, who over the years sat on various boards with Bill Ayers and to whose home Obama was compelled to make a pilgrimage at the beginning of his political career to secure their blessings and exploit their essential financial and political connections in Chicago.

How in a rational world could Obama, a man that wants to be president of the U.S., have actively associated (for perhaps over 20 years) with people like Ayers and Dohrn, avowed, unrepentant terrorists? On Sept. 11, 2001, shortly before the first planes hit the Twin Towers in New York, Bill Ayers gave an interview for the New York Times, in which he lamented, “We [the Weather Underground] didn’t do enough.” Well, what did they do?

From 1969-73, the Weather Underground committed hundreds of acts of violence and terrorism in America and against her citizens. Some of the more spectacular acts included the bombing of the U.S. Capitol, the State Department, the Pentagon and the New York Police Headquarters.

On March 6, 1970, several of their WU members, including Ayers’ then-girlfriend, Diana Oughton, were killed in a New York apartment as they were preparing a nail bomb to blow up the Fort Dix Army base in Burlington County, N.J. This bomb was designed by Bill Ayers himself and intended to be built according to his expressed specifications.

For committing such treasonous, hateful crimes against humanity in the past, why are Ayers and Dohrn today not only free citizens, but are well-paid, tenured professors at the University of Chicago and Northwestern Law School, respectively? Because liberals dominate the academy, the trial lawyers associations and all levels of the judicial system.

More precisely, Ayers and Dohrn got off on a technical violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, and the dismantlement of the so-called COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program). Apparently, the FBI blew their case against them by illegally wiretapping their terrorists’ plots without a warrant.

During this period, the Senate’s Church Committee, Congress and several pivotal court cases eventually ruled COINTELPRO operations against terrorist, communist and socialist groups to be outside the lawful statutory limits of FBI activity and thus contravened constitutional protections of freedom of speech and association.

I wrote about FISA in an earlier column called, “OBLEPA – ‘The Osama bin Laden Equal Protection Act’” where I cited the history of this perverted law first proposed by President Carter and passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress in 1978:

President Carter, no doubt was motivated by the findings of the zealous and partisan “Church Committee” chaired by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, from 1972-75, sought to seriously weaken the effectiveness of the CIA, NSA, FBI and the dozen or so other intelligence agencies under the pretext of bringing reform and accountability to what liberal Democrats considered immoral and untrustworthy agencies.

To his credit, President George W. Bush has since 9/11 made a major plank of his war on terrorism to remove some of the irrational strictures of FISA, which Congress amended in July 2008 so that the phone companies can monitor the lines and send notice of foreign terrorist plots or communications to America directly to the FBI without the bureaucratic red tape of first securing a warrant from a FISA court judge each time. On this issue, Democrats in Congress have fought Bush every step of the way.

FBI bungling of what should have been a slam dunk case against Ayers and Dohrn allowed them to beat the criminal charges on a technicality of an illegal wiretap surveillance violation, thus Ayers and Dohrn are now protected by the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against double jeopardy – “… nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.”

An article on Wikipedia.com cites the legal history of the Fifth Amendment:

This clause [double jeapardy] is intended to limit abuse by the government in repeated prosecution for the same offense as a means of harassment or oppression. It is also in harmony with the common law concept of res judicata which prevents courts from relitigating issues which have already been the subject of a final judgment.More specifically, as stated in Ashe v. Swenson, 397 U.S. 436 (1970), “when an issue of ultimate fact has once been determined by a valid and final judgment, that issue cannot again be litigated between the same parties in any future lawsuit.”

Stanley Kurtz, a Hoover Institute Fellow and National Review contributor, has for the past few months done yeoman’s work in forcing the University of Chicago library to open up its files on the so-called “Annenberg Challenge,” a prestigious foundation that Obama as chairman and Ayers, as the founder and a board member, served together from 1995-2000 to give grants to Chicago-area organizations to support educational opportunities for minorities.

During the years Ayers and Obama served together on the board of the Annenberg Challenge, they were responsible for disbursing over $49 million dollars, supplemented by another $100 million dollars in public and private funding – yet Obama minimizes his relationship with Ayers.

If I were president, I would demand that the Justice Department find some crime, any crime, that the Weather Underground had committed in the past that was not yet adjudicated that can be connected to Ayers and Dohrn to bring them up on charges of terrorism, murder, conspiracy under the RICO statues or under whatever criminal charges I could legitimately muster.

As a lover of America the arrogance of Ayers and Dohrn is galling to me, and as president I would endeavor to once and for all wipe that smug smile off their faces by imposing upon these rogues a very long stint in federal prison.

Regrettably, that plan seems no longer feasible unless new felony charges can be discovered. However, I would encourage some of the family members of those who the Weather Underground unlawfully murdered to bring a class action civil lawsuit against Ayers, Dohrn (a la O.J. Simpson) and against the University of Chicago and Northwestern University – academic institutions that continue to aid and abet these murderous terrorists.

While I understand and respect the legal and judicial history of the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against prosecuting someone twice for a capital offense, we do have the confessions of these people in books, speeches, interviews and in court transcripts. We know that these terrorists for years created utter anarchy and mayhem in America yet have not paid any price for their crimes against humanity and remain unrepentant to this day.

That Obama has no record as a community organizer, as the author of two best-selling memoirs, as a Chicago state representative, as a constitutional law professor, or as an Illinois senator of putting one pro forma statement against the villainous Ayers and Dohrn on the Congressional Record speaks volumes of actually who Obama the Man really is.

Ellis Washington, former editor at The Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute, is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including “The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law” (2002). See his law review article “Reply to Judge Richard Posner.” Washington’s latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust.”[print_link]

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