Bill Ayers defends Weather Underground bombings - Local - Ohio
There is, of course, no equivalence between the Weather Underground bombings and what McCain did. McCain as a fighter pilot in Vietnam was acting on the legal and moral authority of a democratic nation, the United States, while Ayers was committing criminal terroristic acts of violence. Again and again Ayers claims that McCain's actions and the actions of the United States were illegal, but that's only his opinion, an opinion most any legal authority would acknowledge is completely wrong. There is no responsible legal entity that would claim that war in defense of national self interest, in this case as one chapter of the Cold War, is not a legitimate act of a sovereign nation. I know of no one outside of fringe radicals who claims that LBJ committed troops to Vietnam illegally.
The Weather Underground per se did not kill anyone although in some of their bombings they showed no concern for the possiblity of casualties. Former members of the organization killed three policemen shortly after the group fell apart, apparently in pursuit of revolutionary aims. The Weather Underground on at least one occasion built a bomb meant to be an antipersonnel device, a nail bomb, but it went off prematurely and killed three of their own members instead. Ayers now looks back and tries to claim credit for avoiding deaths, but the nail bomb they tried to build puts the lie to this claim, and Ayers and his ilk should receive no credit just for being poor bomb makers.
Oddly enough, the acts of the Boston bombers might be more legitimate than Ayer's bombings were if they were acting on behalf of a foreign power at war with the United States. As acts of war they are not, strictly speaking, criminal matters. If they are just a couple of nut cases who imagined themselves as acting on behalf of some cause without any real authority to do so, then it's a criminal matter, of course.
