On Saturday, William " I don't regret setting bombs" Ayers took to the op-ed page of in the New York Times to inform the world that the Weather Underground wasn't a terrorist organization:
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.
Remember when the Times spiked John McCain's op-ed on Iraq because it didn't "mirror" Obama's op-ed and include the Republican's take on " timetables"? Would it have killed Ayers's editor to ask the former "extreme vandalizer of racist national symbols" to explain why, precisely, the Weather Underground's murdering police officers and plotting to murder hundreds of soldiers and their dates didn't qualify as terrorism? I suppose Ayers would answer that the U.S. troops had it coming because they were the real terrorists, as he wrote earlier this year. At least one person at the Times would definitely understand why Ayers preferred that U.S. troops were killed instead of North Vietnamese soldiers, but that doesn't explain why Ayers was allowed to white-wash history.