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Weather Underground provides local & long-range weather forecasts, weather reports, maps & tropical weather conditions for locations worldwide. The Weather Underground Organization (WUO), or Weathermen is a leftist terrorist organization now possibly inactive. Since its inception the Weather Underground identified its fundamental strategic thesis with the Maoist Chinese. Latest weather radar map with temperature, wind chill, heat index, dew point, humidity and wind speed for Seattle, Washington. Northern California is under a Fire Weather Warning through Friday, including cities such as 15 Oct 2020, 8:00 am. Record High Potential in the Southwest. With a persistent ridge of high pressure settling over the Pacific and building into the Southwest, there will.
Claim: Barack Obama had an acquaintanceship with Bill Ayers, a former domestic terrorist.
Status:
Q: A gentleman named William Ayers, he was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that. And in fact, on 9/11 he was quoted in The New York Times saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough.”
Fs 2 5 2 – note manager job. An early organizing meeting for your state senate campaign was held at his house, and your campaign has said you are friendly. Can you explain that relationship for the voters, and explain to Democrats why it won’t be a problem?
A: This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English [sic] in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis.
And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense.
Although Obama’s dismissing Ayers as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” could fairly be considered a deliberate attempt to minimize or play down a more substantial acquaintanceship between the two men, the fact remains that they aren’t (and never were) particularly close. Obama has denounced Ayers’ violent radical activities (which took place when Obama was just a child), Ayers didn’t advise Obama on policy issues, the two were not close friends, and they have not remained in regular contact over the last several years:
A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that
“The suggestion that Ayers was a political adviser to Obama or someone who shaped his political views is patently false,” said Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman. Mr. LaBolt said the men first met in 1995 through the education project, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and have encountered each other occasionally in public life or in the neighborhood. He said they have not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Mr. Obama began serving in the United States Senate in January 2005 and last met more than a year ago when they bumped into each other on the street in Hyde Park.
(The above-cited article was the one referenced by Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin when she began stating on the campaign trail that Democratic candidate Barack Obama had been “palling around with terrorists,” even though the article said just the opposite: that Obama and Ayers “do not appear to have been close.”)
In August 2008, Stanley Kurtz suggested there was a “cover-up“ in the making because he could not access a “large cache of documents housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)” which contained “the internal files of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge” and would “provide significant insight into a web of ties linking Obama to various radical organizations.” Documents including all the records of the Annenberg Foundation were in fact released shortly afterwards; the Chicago Tribune examined them and found, as reported by UPI:
Reporters reviewing records in Chicago have so far found nothing startling in documents linking Sen. Barack Obama to 1960s radical William Ayers.
The UIC records show that Obama and Ayers attended board meetings, retreats and at least one news conference together as the education program got under way. Subnautica early access b753 download free. The two continued to attend meetings together during the 1995-2001 operation of the program, records show.
Kurtz also claimed that “Obama assumed the Annenberg board chairmanship only months before his first run for office, and almost certainly received the job at the behest of Bill Ayers.” This claim was inaccurate, as FactCheck.org noted:
To the contrary, Ayers was not involved in the choice, according to Deborah Leff, then president of the Joyce Foundation. She told the Times, and confirmed to FactCheck.org, that she recommended Obama for the position to Patricia Graham of the Spencer Foundation. Graham told us that she asked Obama if he’d become chairman; he accepted, provided Graham would be vice-chair.
The bipartisan board of directors, which did not include Ayers, elected Obama chairman, and he served in that capacity from 1995 to 1999, awarding grants for projects and raising matching funds. Ayers headed up a separate arm of the group, working with grant recipients. According to another board member, Ayers “was not significantly involved with the challenge after Obama was appointed.”
Kurtz subsequently claimed in a Wall Street Journal article that Obama and Ayers were partners in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), an effort that “poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.” But as Education Week noted of the CAC, that organization was not “radical” but rather “reflected mainstream thinking among education reformers”:
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, chaired from 1995 to 1999 by Barack Obama, is being portrayed by some critics of the Democratic presidential nominee as an attempt to push radicalism on schools.
In fact, the project undertaken in Chicago as part of a high-profile national initiative reflected mainstream thinking among education reformers. The Annenberg Foundation’s $49.2 million grant in the city focused on three priorities: encouraging collaboration among teachers and better professional development; reducing the isolation between schools and between schools and their communities; and reducing school size to improve learning.
The week after the 2008 presidential election, Ayers himself acknowledged in an interview that he hadn’t known Barack Obama all that well:
Vietnam-era radical Bill Ayers said he doesn’t know President-elect Barack Obama any better than “thousands of other Chicagoans” and the two never talked about Ayers’ anti-war activities. In a television interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” the college professor disputed the contention that in the new afterword of a paperback edition of his 2001 memoir “Fugitive Days” he describes himself and Obama as “family friends.”
“I’m describing there how the blogosphere characterized the relationship,” Ayers said. “I would really say that we knew each other in a professional way, again on the same level as say thousands of other people.”
In fact, Ayers said he didn’t even know Obama when he hosted a coffee early in Obama’s political career at Ayers’ home in the Chicago neighborhood where the two live. Ayers added that he agreed to have the meet-the-candidate event after a state senator asked him to.
“I think he was probably in 20 homes that day as far as I know,” he said. “But that was the first time I really met him.”
Ayers and Obama also served together on a Chicago school reform board and a foundation board, but their discussions were limited to the issues before those boards.
“The truth is we came together in Chicago in a civic community around issues of school improvement, around issues of fighting for the rights of poor neighborhoods to have jobs, housing and so forth,” Ayers said.
“The truth is we came together in Chicago in a civic community around issues of school improvement, around issues of fighting for the rights of poor neighborhoods to have jobs, housing and so forth,” Ayers said.
And he elaborated on those issues in a December 2008 newspaper piece:
The dishonesty of the narrative about Mr. Obama during the campaign went a step further with its assumption that if you can place two people in the same room at the same time, or if you can show that they held a conversation, shared a cup of coffee, took the bus downtown together or had any of a thousand other associations, then you have demonstrated that they share ideas, policies, outlook, influences and, especially, responsibility for each other’s behavior. There is a long and sad history of guilt by association in our political culture, and at crucial times we’ve been unable to rise above it.
President-elect Obama and I sat on a board together; we lived in the same diverse and yet close-knit community; we sometimes passed in the bookstore. We didn’t pal around, and I had nothing to do with his positions.
Last updated: 6 December 2008
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Join Britannica's Publishing Partner Program and our community of experts to gain a global audience for your work! Laura LambertFreelance writer and editor. Her contributions to SAGE Publications's Encyclopedia of Terrorism (2011) formed the basis for her contributions to Britannica.
Alternative Titles: Weather Underground Organization, Weatherman
Weather Underground, also called Weather Underground Organization, formerly Weatherman, militant group of young white Americans formed in 1969 that grew out of the anti-Vietnam War movement. The Weather Underground, originally known as Weatherman, evolved from the Third World Marxists, a faction within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the major national organization representing the burgeoning New Left in the late 1960s. Members of the Weather Underground sought to advance communism through violent revolution, and the group called on America’s youth to create a rearguard action against the U.S. government that would bring about its downfall.
The original Weatherman, the “action faction” of the SDS, was led by Bernardine Dohrn, James Mellen, and Mark Rudd and advocated street fighting as a method for weakening U.S. imperialism. At the SDS national convention in June 1969, the Third World Marxists presented a position paper titled “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows” in the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes. The article, the title of which was taken from a song by American musician Bob Dylan, asserted, among other things, that black liberation was key to the movement’s anti-imperialist struggle, and it emphasized the need for a white revolutionary movement to support liberation movements internationally. The article became the founding statement of Weatherman.
Early actions
Weatherman launched an offensive during the summer of 1969. In one action in the Northeast, it tried to recruit members at community colleges and high schools by marching into classrooms, tying up and gagging teachers, and presenting revolutionary speeches. At the Harvard Institute for International Affairs, the group smashed windows, tore out phones, and beat professors.
From October 8 to 11, 1969, Weatherman worked to organize thousands of young people in a direct assault on the police, whom they called “pigs.” The group called this a “National Action,” but newspapers called it “Days of Rage.” The protests were to begin on the second anniversary of the death of Argentine-Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara and were to coincide with the trial of the “Chicago 8”—eight men charged with conspiracy for their actions during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago one year earlier. On October 6, 1969, Weatherman members blew up a statue in Chicago’s Haymarket Square that commemorated the policemen who had died in a riot in 1886. That message of confrontation and violence was echoed in Weatherman’s signs and slogans, which read, “Bring the war home” and “The time has come for fighting in the streets.” However, “Days of Rage” proved to be only minimally successful. The demonstrations had a low turnout—as low as 100 by some counts—as well as several incidents of random pointless rioting. By the end of the weekend, 284 people, including local youth and SDS members, had been arrested; total bail amounted to more than $1.5 million.
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Frustrated with the inefficacy of traditional forms of political protest after “Days of Rage” and other antiwar demonstrations throughout November 1969, Weatherman members called for a national “war council” meeting of the SDS that December. Members of the group discussed the need to instruct themselves in the use of firearms and bombs in order to target and attack sites of power in the United States and discussed the need to kill police. Much of this discussion was fueled by the killing of two party leaders of the Black Panthers, Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, by Chicago police. In that meeting, held in Flint, Michigan, Weatherman decided to go underground and become a small-scale paramilitary operation carrying out urban guerrilla warfare.
Weather Underground History
Weatherman goes underground
By early 1970 Weatherman had split into several underground cells throughout the country. These cells, usually with three to five men and women living together in a house, were connected to the Weatherman leadership, called the Weather Bureau, by active members who provided aboveground support. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which began investigating the group in June 1969, estimated Weatherman’s total strength at this time at 400 members. The cells were located predominantly in Berkeley, California; Chicago; Detroit; and New York City.
Within months Weatherman made its way into headlines and the public imagination. On March 6, 1970, three founding members of Weatherman—Diana Oughton, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbins—died in an explosion while making bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse. Two other members, Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson, escaped. Investigators found 57 sticks of dynamite, 30 blasting caps, and timing devices in the rubble. The FBI stepped up its investigation. By April, federal indictments for the “Days of Rage” action had come down against 12 Weatherman members, and Weatherman, collectively, was charged with conspiracy.
Weatherman members began bombing targets across the country in 1970, using tactics from the handbook Firearms and Self-Defense: A Handbook for Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Easy Riders and from Brazilian Marxist writer and terrorist Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. The more significant targets included the New York City Police Department headquarters, the Presidio army base in San Francisco, a Long Island City courthouse, and several banks in Boston and New York. Most of the bombings were preceded by a warning, to prevent casualties, and were followed by a communiqué, dubbed “Weather Report.” Weatherman used these “Weather Reports” to justify attacks, citing recent police and government actions such as the Kent State shootings, which involved the killing of four students by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, or the unlawful incarceration of other revolutionaries. The reports also often commemorated revolutionary efforts throughout the world. By year’s end, several Weatherman members had made it onto the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, which had been expanded to 16 to accommodate them.
The bombings continued throughout 1971. Weatherman placed two bombs at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., both of which exploded on March 1. In August the group attacked three offices of the California prison system after the mysterious murder of prison revolutionary George Jackson in the San Quentin prison yard. Two weeks later, after 30 inmates were killed in a revolt at New York’s Attica penitentiary, Weatherman bombed the office of the state commissioner of corrections in Albany.
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