Bill Ayers Speaks, Following Campaign Silence

Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the 1960s radical group Weather Underground, gained renewed notoriety when the McCain campaign reminded voters that Ayers and Obama had crossed paths in Illinois. Ayers remained silent about accusations of himself as a "terrorist" during the campaign, but today he spoke out in a New York Times op-ed. Ayers balances regret for past acts with his justification for them on the grounds that peaceful protest against the Vietnam war had proven useless. An excerpt:

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.

Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.

Read more about Bill Ayers.