The murderers in residence currently include Cathy Boudin, already a member of the faculty at Columbia and now 2013 Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at NYU Law School as well. Moynihan fills us in on Cathy’s pre-academic career.
In 1984, Boudin, a member of the Weather Underground, a violent, oafish association of upper-class “revolutionaries,” pled guilty to second-degree murder in association with the infamous 1981 Brinks armored car robbery in Nyack, New York. Babbling in the language of anti-racism and anti-imperialism, Boudin assisted in ending the life of three people, including Waverly Brown, the first black police officer on the Nyack police force, and left nine children fatherless. She was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. In 2003, Boudin was released; by 2008 she had landed a coveted teaching position at an Ivy League university.
The most famous Weather Underground bombers-cum-professors are, of course, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn (also a former Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at NYU, which must consider bomb-making skills when making its selection), whose infantile politics and tenure on the FBI’s Most Wanted List never dented the confidence of the University of Illinois or Northwestern University.
Ayers and Dohrn have long maintained that their bombing campaigns never deliberately targeted people, a claim that elides a rather important event: the famous 1970 explosion at a Weather bomb factory in New York City that killed three people, all of whom were constructing nail-packed pipe bombs for deployment at an army dance in Fort Dix, New Jersey. The goal was to blind, maim, and kill. Boudin was present, but escaped the explosion and evaded capture. She insisted during her 2003 parole hearing, against logic and and all available evidence, that she was unaware the house was being used to construct bombs.
On the Right, of course, there is respect for the rule of law, and murder is not applauded, though at times it is difficult to resist a man in uniform. At the New Yorker, John Lee Anderson zeroes in on Margaret Thatcher’s revoltingly cozy friendship with Chilean dictator/murderer/torturer Augusto Pinochet. Thatcher started selling arms to Pinochet in 1980, reversing the previous government’s policy and he won her heart, apparently, by siding with Britain against his fellow right-wing torturer/murderers in Argentina during the Falklands War.
Politics does make strange bedfellows, but Thatcher carried things to ridiculous extremes, treating Pinochet as a personal friend, playing host on his yearly visits to London long after he left office. Free markets and full prisons! It’s a good combination!
As for the Center, we have to go no further than our own President, Barack Obama. Jonathan S. Landay, writing for McClatchy, discusses the President’s wide-ranging snuff program in Pakistan, which, not too surprisingly, is a bit more wide-ranging than the President lets on.
Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified “other” militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan’s rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show.
The administration has said that strikes by the CIA’s missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against “specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces” involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting “imminent” violent attacks on Americans.
“It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative,” President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 6, 2012, interview with CNN. “It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.”
Copies of the top-secret U.S. intelligence reports reviewed by McClatchy, however, show that drone strikes in Pakistan over a four-year period didn’t adhere to those standards.
The intelligence reports list killings of alleged Afghan insurgents whose organization wasn’t on the U.S. list of terrorist groups at the time of the 9/11 strikes; of suspected members of a Pakistani extremist group that didn’t exist at the time of 9/11; and of unidentified individuals described as “other militants” and “foreign fighters.”
