The Day I Bombed The Pentagon--By Bill Ayers

The following is from William Ayers own account of his participation in the bombing of the Pentagon, as reprinted by Sweetness & Light:

The Pentagon was ground zero for war and conquest, organizing headquarters of a gang of murdering thieves, a colossal stain on the planet, a hated symbol everywhere around the world. Do you know what the word for Pentagon is in Chinese or Korean, Arabic or Haitian Creole? Pentagon.

We went back and forth, not only between us but within each one of us. I called up all the courage I could summon in order to take the next risk—to bomb the Pentagon, say—and then I ran my commitment through the severest tests. And then I thought, enough. There must be another way. And then the ferment stirred and the demand to do more, to go further, again issued forth. Back and forth. Without end.

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…

Sure, lefties. Bill Ayers isn't a terrorist. Then neither is Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, or Osama bin Laden. Just think, Barack Obama launched his political career in the home of a terrorist who was a member of Weather Underground, a terrorist group that killed Americans, and left people maimed by their bombs.