The Whitewashing of William Ayers

The headline in today's Washington Post metro section makes one gasp: "GOP Head Compares Obama to Bin Laden."

And then we read the comment that spurred the outrage:

    According to a report in this week's Time magazine, the Virginia party chairman, Del. Jeffrey M. Frederick (R-Prince William), told Virginia volunteers working for GOP nominee John McCain that Obama and bin Laden "both have friends that bombed the Pentagon."

The comment is a little glib, a little too cute, perhaps; maybe a bit close to irreverence about 9/11, but not inaccurate, and fairly mild for a ugly election season (must I remind you about Sandra Benhard alleged jokes about the rape of Sarah Palin?).

The Post then takes a bit of interesting license, clearing Ayers of any role in the bombing of the Pentagon, even though he took credit for the act in his book. They write, "Ayers did not participate in the bombing of the Pentagon but admitted to involvement in other blasts."

Ayers' description of the act in Fugitive Days:

    Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.

I thought about the justification for each action. Sometimes I answered technically: we worked hard and did our best to take care, to focus, to do no harm to persons and no more damage than we’d planned. The psychological answer, I think, was that we were young with an edge of certainty and arrogance that I would be hard-pressed to recreate or even fully understand again.

The moral justification requires remembering the context of the times. I could barely justify eating my own breakfast because it seemed a kind of inaction, or a kind of moving along blindly as if normal life included unending slaughter. I went for days on end with nothing to eat, no money of my own, no change in my pocket, thinking only of how to stop the war, how to make the price for continuing the war great, how to reach out to the victims of the war and stand alongside them and experience something of what they were experiencing. I wanted intimate knowledge of their situation, of their suffering. I’d marched on the Pentagon more than once, scaled its walls, confronted armed troops there, and even peed on its side. If I could have, I’d have duct-taped it shut, or put it in a trash compactor, but the closest I could come was a tiny bomb in a toilet drain.

We’d already bombed the Capitol, and we’d cased the White House. The Pentagon was leg two of the trifecta.

From his own description of urging on the group, it's difficult to justify the claim that Ayers "did not participate" in the bombing, even if someone else actually placed the bomb in the Pentagon women's room. Also note that Ayers was one of the Underground's bomb-builders, and to the best of my research, we have never learned who built the bomb that detonated in the Pentagon.

UPDATE: A reader says he contacted the reporter who wrote the piece, who indicated the line about Ayers lack of involvement was not in his original version and was added by editors. Hmmm...