Shades of Ayers…

In breaking news, five foreign-born Muslim men have been found guilty of conspiring to kill US soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey.  This trial echos another attempt on base personnel decades before.

NOW…

“A federal jury in New Jersey has found five Muslim immigrants guilty of conspiring to kill U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix in a case the government said demonstrated its post-Sept. 11 determination to stop terrorist attacks in the planning stages.

The defendants were acquitted of attempted murder charges but face life in prison for conspiring to kill military personnel.”

THEN

“For 11 years prior to her role in the triple murder in Nyack, Boudin had lived as a fugitive from justice. Between 1970 and 1972, Boudin and her Weather Underground comrades conducted a bombing rampage that included attacks on New York City police headquarters, the U.S. Capitol building, and the Pentagon. The Weathermen also networked with the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and other terrorist groups and criminal syndicates across the nation.

Boudin was also directly involved in an abortive plot to set off a bomb at New Jersey’s Fort Dix Army Base during a dance. The bomb to be used was an anti-personnel weapon packed with screws and nails–the sort of destructive device now favored by Palestinian suicide bombers. Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers, in his 2001 memoir Fugitive Days, admits that the bomb would have done “some serious work beyond the blast, tearing through windows and walls and, yes, people too.”

The potential victims of the planned attack included not only U.S. soldiers but also any women brought to the dance as dates, and any other civilians within the blast radius. But the bomb detonated prematurely at the Greenwich Village apartment being used as a Weather Underground safe house, killing three members of the terrorist cell. “The only reason they were not guilty of mass murder is mere incompetence,” comments Professor Harvey Klehr of Emory University, author of several books on the history of Communism. “I don’t know what sort of defense that is.””