Guilty as Hell, Free as a Bird (For Now)

vorlos

Junior News Editor
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/guilty_as_hell_free_as_a_bird_1.html

Bill Ayers' famous quip may come back to haunt him. There is no statute of limitations on murder charges.

On February 16, 1970, someone planted a bomb at San Francisco's Park Police Station. It was placed in a window of the business office and timed to explode at shift change, when the maximum number of officers would be there, either finishing up or starting their work.

It was a powerful blast, throwing one officer in the station parking lot completely over his patrol car and sending shrapnel for over two city blocks. The bomb fortunately detonated a few minutes early so the destruction was less than it might have been. Still, nine were wounded, one -- Officer Robert Fogarty -- badly enough that he retired from the force on disability, and one, Sergeant Brian McDonnell, 45 year old married father of two, was killed.

http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2008/10/who-killed-brian-v-mcdonnell.html
McDonnell.jpg

Sergeant Brian McDonnell

On Thursday, March 12, 2009, Cliff Kincaid of America's Survival Inc. held a press conference at the National Press Club, launching the Campaign for Justice for Victims of Weather Underground Terrorism, to focus public attention on evidence that may finally bring the alleged perpetrators to justice: Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

He has a lot of support. In a letter to Mr. Kincaid's group, the San Francisco's Police Officer's Association writes:

There are irrefutable and compelling reasons to believe that Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, members of the terrorist group 'Weather Underground', are largely responsible for the bombing of Park Police Station and other police stations throughout the United States during their 'tour of terror' in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This case has been reopened and evidence is being gathered. Meetings have been held among local and state authorities, including current and former law enforcement officials, to obtain justice. That is why the "Campaign for Justice for Victims of Terrorism" held this press conference. They want to bring pressure on Obama's Justice Department, now headed by former Clinton Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, to release all of the evidence in their possession.

It's true that some evidence in the past that could have been used against the Weather Underground was ruled inadmissible -- because of the way it was collected, not because of its veracity. But there is much more that can and should be used. The belief is that it lies in the Justice Department or the FBI.

This is where a problem emerges. In addition to the outrageous pardons of fugitive criminal Marc Rich and 16 FALN terrorists, Holder provided key assistance to two Weather Underground members implicated in the Brinks Robbery murders, pardoning them quietly along with Rich -- who of course got all the headlines.

Given the Attorney General's apparent sympathy for terrorists, and Bill Ayers' perceived status as President Obama's friend and mentor, the Justice Department may be reluctant to provide all of the evidence in the Park Station bombing case unless they are forced to do so.

Under the Bush Administration, such a press conference would not have been necessary. After all, the federal authorities under Bush provided evidence and assistance that resulted in the 2007 arrests and indictments of members of the Black Liberation Army for the murder of another San Francisco policeman, John Young, in 1971. That case is now underway.

A process of evidence-gathering has been underway in the McDonnell case as well. But now that Obama and Holder are in power, that process could come to a screeching halt. That was the reason for the March 12 America's Survival, Inc. news conference -- to make sure that federal assistance doesn't stop and that it accelerates. One hope is that FBI Director Robert Mueller, who is technically independent of Obama and Holder since his contract runs through 2011, can act on his own to obtain and make available all the evidence that is needed in this case.

Featured at the event were individuals with critical knowledge of both the bombing and the people involved. Larry Grathwohl, a former undercover FBI informant, is best remembered for his chilling 1980s testimony describing how Ayers told him that once the revolution succeeded they would have to murder 25 million Americans.

In his book, Bringing Down America - An FBI Informer with the Weathermen, Grathwohl describes a meeting where Ayers reveals Dohrn's role in the bombing. It was in the context of a complaint that other Weathermen were slackers:

"Too many of you are relying on your leaders to do everything," he said sternly. Then ...he mentioned the park station bombing. "It was a success," he said, "but it's a shame when someone like Bernardine has to make all the plans, make the bomb, and then place it herself. She should have to do only the planning."

This book repeated sworn testimony Grathwohl had provided before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1974. His testimony has been consistent for decades -- Ayers told him that Dohrn planted the bomb, and Ayers had detailed knowledge of its make-up and where it was placed. Such knowledge could have come only from the bomber, or from someone who assisted in building the bomb.

In its 2007-2008 biennial report, the California Department of Justice confirmed the case is open and added that the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. has been asked to analyze fingerprint evidence from the scene of the Park Station bombing. Page 16 of the report reads:

In 2000, the SFPD reopened its investigation into the bombing of the Park Police Station and requested investigative assistance from the DOJ. The DOJ's Bureau of Forensic Services was also assigned to identify a latent print collected from the original crime scene.

We don't know at this point whose fingerprints those are. But we do know the FBI obtained the fingerprints of Ayers, his comrade Mark Rudd, and other Weather Underground members at a bomb factory in San Francisco (see final page of this PDF report).

According to FBI sources, Grathwohl's testimony was corroborated by another Weather Underground source, Karen Latimer, who apparently had second thoughts about her participation in the violent group's activities and gave her story to the police. Unfortunately, Latimer died sometime later under questionable circumstances.

A bit earlier, in January of 1970, Grathwohl had listened as Ayers described to him plans for the bombing of two police stations in Detroit, Michigan. As he related to the FBI agents on the case:

Bill Ayers had debriefed me regarding every aspect of the plans we had developed before telling me I was being reassigned to Madison. Bill's two major requirements were that the bombs go off at the same time and that the greatest number of police officers would be killed or injured. Both bombs were to contain fence staples or roofing nails to ensure this effect. Bill Ayers didn't care if innocent people were also killed or injured. Bill had even gone so far as to tell us that the bomb at the 13th precinct should be placed on a window ledge. [As they later did at the park station bombing.]

Those bombs fortunately failed to detonate. Larry's press conference statement can be viewed here.

Larry's description of the bomb components, particularly the use of fence staples, got the attention of retired San Francisco police officer Jim Pera. Pera was one of the first on the scene the day of the bombing and described the scene:

The window to the business office and an interior window, where prisoners were processed for booking were blown out. The walls and furniture were pock marked by shrapnel. Barbed wire fence post staples, from the bomb, were scattered throughout the ground floor of the station. Blood was all over the floor, desks and walls and was heaviest where Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell suffered mortal wounds to his neck, eyes, face and brain.

Pera also recovered a piece of evidence, a fence staple identical to the type described by Larry Grathwohl, as shown below.

He went on to relate:

The station looked like a scene one might expect to see in a war, with wounded officers, blood, shattered windows, damaged walls, floors and ceilings, but then -- it was a war. It was indeed an urban war and it was being conducted by subversive and murderous groups, such as the Weather Underground, whose doctrine advocated the overthrow of the U.S. government, by any means, including murder and assassination, with the goal of replacing it with communism, and by their allies in the Black Liberation Army, whose primary purpose was to kill police officers and destroy our system of government as we know it. (BUT THEN THEY FOUND IT WAS EASIER TO SIMPLY PROPOGANDIZE 24/7 VIA THE MEDIA, INDOCTRINATION VIA "EDUCATION," AND ORDER THE RABBITS AROUND. THE RABBITS GAVE FREEDOM AND THEIR COUNTRY UP VOLUNTARILY. WHO KNEW IT WOULD BE SO EASY?)

Jim Pera was right on the money. They were part of an international conspiracy. Cliff Kincaid, with the assistance of veteran Congressional investigator Herbert Romerstein, have done yeoman's work in documenting the Weather Underground's treasonous activities, including multiple trips made by Ayers and other Weathermen to Cuba and North Vietnam to meet with their communist handlers, some of them from the Cuban intelligence service, the DGI, and even the Soviet KGB.

Ayers and Dohrn have not reformed at all since turning themselves in. In fact, Ayers in particular is now traveling often to the "new Cuba" -- Venezuela.

As Kincaid relates, Ayers has visited Venezuela multiple times to give "education seminars" where he was hailed as:

... a former leader of a "revolutionary and anti-imperialist group" that "brought an armed struggle to the USA for more than 10 years from within the womb of the empire." He returned to the U.S. after hailing "Presidente Chavez," to resume his brainwashing activities at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Not surprisingly, Ayers has described Chavez's Venezuela in glowing terms. At the World Education Forum in Venezuela, he concluded his speech with the following gem:

...we, too, must build a project of radical imagination and fundamental change (HOPE AND CHANGE). Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education- a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation.... Viva Mission Sucre! Viva Presidente Chavez! Viva La Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta La Victoria Siempre!

Ayers' adopted son, Chesa Boudin (offspring of Weathermen Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, (the latter is still in prison) has worked extensively in Venezuela as "a foreign policy advisor to the Chavez government" - without registering as a foreign agent as required by the U.S. government -- and is co-author of a propaganda book, The Venezuelan Revolution: 100 Questions and 100 Answers. As the Amazon.com book review describes it, the authors: "demonstrate considerable sympathy for Chavez and his efforts, and are ultimately dedicated to revealing Chavez as a legitimately elected patriot bent on social justice..." (THERE'S THAT CONSTRUCT AGAIN. "SOCIAL JUSTICE")

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Chesa Boudin

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David Gilbert

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Kathy Boudin, Then


Sure.

Chesa Boudin is seen as a key part of the emerging new "progressive" movement and the resurrected "new SDS (Students for a Democratic Society)" on college campuses. Meanwhile, Ayers and his cohorts have created the Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), referred to by former Weatherman Mark Rudd as "the SDS old people's auxiliary." See p. 20 of this report by Kincaid and Trevor Loudon.

Meanwhile, in a related development, Kincaid reports that Rudd is planning to publish an autobiography, Underground; My Life with SDS and the Weathermen, that describes his activities in the group. In a pre-release copy of the book he admits complicity in the Fort Dix bomb plot:

"...A few nights before [the explosion], Terry [fellow Weatherman Terry Robbins] had told me what his group was planning. ‘We're going to kill the pigs at a dance at Fort Dix,' he said. It was to be an antipersonnel bomb made out of stolen dynamite with sixteen-penny nails for shrapnel. Noncommissioned officers and their wives and dates in New Jersey would pay for the American crimes in Vietnam... I assented to the Fort Dix plan when Terry told me about it. (Emphasis, mine.) I too wanted this country to have a taste of what it had been dishing out daily in Southeast Asia..."

The plot was never executed as the bomb exploded while under construction, killing Weathermen Terry Robbins, Diana Oughton and Ted Gold. This book is set to be published by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Kincaid hopes that public furor over the Weathermen's reign of mass murder will force Murdock to cancel the book, as he ultimately did with O.J. Simpson's proposed "If I did it" murder book and TV special.

Sergeant McDonnell left a widow to fend for herself and two children. Those children were damaged for life, robbed of critical fatherly love, guidance and support for the rest of their lives. How, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, does that make them "equal?" How does that make them "liberated?" How does that make this world a better place? How could you, raised with silver spoons in your spoiled little mouths, never having had to work or support a family without the help of "Daddy", claim to be the administrators of "equality" or "justice?" How on earth do you arrogate to yourselves the role of God?

In his concluding remarks, Jim Pera offered an emotional challenge to the approximately fifty journalists assembled:

"Before giving these two despicable people a forum, in your newspapers and periodicals, perhaps you should do a little bit of research, on their past and present activities. You will find that under those calm facades and intellectual masks, that Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, are vicious, cowardly terrorists.

Give up your political correctness, overcome your liberal bias and do some honest research into the background of these two criminals, Ayers and Dohrn. Uncover their past and reveal them to the public. The American people deserve nothing less."

I couldn't have said it better, and I hope Billy Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn finally get what they have coming to them.

It's up to you, Mr. President. You said you found the actions of the Weather Underground despicable. As Cliff Kincaid said at his press conference, "prove it." Tell your Attorney General to provide the evidence to bring the killers of Sgt. McDonnell to justice.
 
http://www.democracynow.org/2003/8/21/ex_weather_underground_member_kathy_boudin

Ex-Weather Underground Member Kathy Boudin Granted Parole


After 22 years in jail, Boudin was granted parole yesterday. We talk to her son Chesa Boudin who was 14 months old when his parents were arrested; her attorney Leonard Weinglass; Jeff Jones, a founding member of the Weathermen and Norma Hill, who called for Boudin’s release even though she was a victim in the 1981 bank heist that led to Boudin’s arrest. We also play excerpts of the new documentary "Weather Underground." [Includes transcript]

"When I walk out of the prison gate I will gently touch the air that surrounds me like a shawl. It is autumn and the leaves are floating in circles of reds, browns, and oranges. I am with my child in freedom, a reunion with my family and friends who have lived these decades with me."

These are the words of Kathy Boudin, a former member of the radical group the Weather Underground. She has served 22 years in prison for her role in a botched armed robbery in 1981 in which three men were killed.

She was granted parole in a surprise decision yesterday. She is 60 years old.

In the 1960s Boudin, daughter of civil rights attorney Leonard Boudin, joined the Weather Underground a radical group who were convinced that only militant action could end racism, inequality and the war in Vietnam.

They took responsibility for bombing two dozen public buildings, including the Pentagon, eventually landing on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

In 1981, Boudin was recruited by Black Liberation Army members to drive the getaway vehicle in an armored car heist in Rockland County, New York. The idea was to have white people drive the getaway vehicle, a U-Haul truck, to throw off pursuers.

A security guard was killed in the robbery at the Nanuet Mall. Their truck was later stopped at a roadblock and two police officers were gunned down by gunmen at the back of the truck. Boudin was unarmed and sitting in the passenger seat at the time. She was apprehended as she fled, pleaded guilty to felony murder and robbery and was sentenced to 20 years to life.

Her son was just 14 months old at the time.

In prison, Boudin has served her time as a model inmate. She developed a program on parenting behind bars and helped write a handbook for inmates whose children are in foster care. She also earned a master’s degree in adult education and literacy. In the late 1980s she helped design an AIDS support program that is now used as a model at prisons across the country.

Boudin has spent 22 years behind bars. She is expected to be freed from her New York state prison by late September.

Her possible release has been staunchly opposed by the families, friends and colleagues of the three men killed.

Boudin said she was terrified during the gun battle and aid there was no way "to pay the debt for my being involved or participating in the crime that destroyed families and destroyed men."

Leonard Weinglass, attorney representing Kathy Boudin.
Chesa Boudin, son of Kathy Boudin. He recently graduated from Yale University and received a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. He was a baby when his parents were arrested and imprisoned. He was raised by Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, themselves former members of the Weather Underground.
•Tape: * "Weather Underground,"* new documentary directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel

•Jeff Jones, former member of the Weather Underground. He now works as the communications director for the Environmental Advocates of New York.

•Norma Hill, she was dragged from her car at gunpoint during the 1981 robbery and testified for the prosecution in the ensuing trials, but later befriended Kathy Boudin while both were working with AIDS patients in prison.
 
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20080636,00.html


The Radical Odyssey of Terrorist Kathy Boudin Ends with a Bang, Then a Whimper

By Gioia Diliberto

Among the angry soldiers of the radical left who made the strife-ridden '60s their battleground, most had negotiated a strained separate peace. One by one they had drifted in from the cold, usually to face criminal charges, after tiring of their stunted lives on the run. But some, like the obstinate handful of Japanese jungle fighters who hid out on the islands of the Pacific for decades, would not concede that their war had ended.

One such holdout was Katherine Boudin, 38, who was arrested last month during a bloody shootout following an armored-car robbery in suburban Nanuet, N. Y. Eleven years earlier Boudin had run naked into a Greenwich Village street after an explosion at a town house where she and other would-be revolutionaries were storing and manufacturing bombs. She had not been seen publicly since. Below, pieces of the Kathy Boudin puzzle are laid out, and on the following pages former terrorist Jane Alpert, who once lived underground, recounts that existence, which she ultimately rejected.

According to Jean Boudin, Kathy's mother, her daughter came home unexpectedly on that icy-cold March day in 1970 after the explosion that killed three of her friends. Mrs. Boudin didn't know what had happened or that Kathy had been involved; Kathy apparently volunteered nothing. "Sleep well," Jean Boudin later remembered calling to her daughter. "Will I see you in the morning?" "Not sure," replied Kathy evasively. She was gone before her parents awoke the next day.

Although the Boudins—Jean, a poet, and Leonard, a well-known left-wing lawyer—say they did not talk with their daughter again until her recent arrest on murder and robbery charges, they did see the obscure 1976 film in which Kathy read the poem at right. Filmmaker Emile de Antonio, who shot the documentary during three days with the Weather Underground in L.A., suspected that all was not well with the fugitives. "It was clear," he says, "they had agreed in advance to present a coherent, rational line. But I sensed this was really a chaotic group on the verge of disbanding."

In fact, Boudin's fellow radical Cathy Wilkerson, another survivor of the Greenwich Village explosion, surrendered to authorities in 1980, followed by Weatherpeople Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. All three had reportedly clashed with Boudin about the future direction of the movement. Eventually Kathy joined the May 19 Coalition—named for the birthdate she shares with Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh. The group evidently links feminism and black liberation, and considers violence a desirable tactic.

From earliest childhood, Boudin was exposed to radical politics. Her father once defended the Rev. Philip Berrigan and other activists, and house-guests included liberal celebrities such as I.F. Stone, Noam Chomsky, Pete Seeger and Dr. Benjamin Spock. Athletically and academically gifted, Kathy majored in Russian literature at Bryn Mawr, graduating in absentia with high honors in 1965, while studying in the Soviet Union. The turning point in her life, she told de Antonio, came the following year, when she saw a young minister killed by a bulldozer during a civil rights demonstration in Cleveland. Rejecting conventional activism, she joined the Weathermen, later traveling to Cuba to meet with Vietcong representatives and co-authoring The Bust BOOK, a guide for young radicals on what to do when arrested.

While her movements as a fugitive remain largely a mystery, Boudin, with her year-old son, Chesa (probably named for Black Liberation Army leader Joanne Chesimard), has lived in Manhattan for the past year and a half. Although she was on welfare, Boudin shared a five-room Morningside Drive flat with newspaper reporter Rita Jensen (who says she knew Kathy only as Lynn Adams). A militant feminist, Boudin preferred not to live with the boy's father, believed to be David Gilbert, 37, a co-defendant in the Nanuet robbery that resulted in the murder of a Brink's guard and two policemen. Two weeks ago, Jensen remembers, Boudin went to a flea market to buy a snowsuit for Chesa. Three days later she struggled briefly, then pleaded "Please don't shoot," as she was captured at gunpoint by an off-duty corrections officer. Why, finally, had it come to this for Boudin, while most of her onetime radical comrades had settled for more conventional lives? "I don't have the answer, but I suspect Kathy is made of sterner stuff," says one family friend. "Also, I expect she couldn't admit failure. She couldn't go home and say, guess there isn t going to be a revolution after all.' "


Underground is not the right word. It makes it seem too simple, as if there is an easy way to disappear, a place to go. Beneath the city streets there is no safe passage. You moved among your people, a gentle wind invisibly winding into their lives, constrained a normal human response to daily injustice with an exhausting effort, a ballooning breath of anger caged inside, carefully choosing the moment of attack. And with muscles taut like the stretched skin of a drum, rode the subways between two businessmen studying your picture in the New York Tim Although we had never seen one another, I wondered how you liked to spend those moments when freedom meant you knew they didn't know. And during those last months when they hunted you hard, I was an invisible supporter working on another front, knowing of those tearing-apart times when the days are like the flashes of a strobe light, and the earth turns with a racing rhythm, running the guerrilla through the changes of a normal lifetime in a single month. And when you were captured, sister, I wept, for all of us.

Boudin dedicated this poem to Joanne Chesimard, who was convicted of killing a New Jersey state trooper and later escaped from prison.
 
http://denverabc.wordpress.com/prisoners-dabc-supports/political-prisoners-database/david-gilbert/

David Gilbert

According to the New York DOC, David has been transferred to Auburn CF. His address as of June 24, 2011 is:

David Gilbert
#83-A-6158
Auburn Correctional Facility
PO box 618
Auburn NY 13021

American radical organizer, author and prisoner David Gilbert (b. 1944) was a founding member of Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society and member of The Weather Underground Organization. Following eleven years underground he was arrested with members of the Black Liberation Army and other radicals following a botched armored car robbery in 1981. He is now a well-known prisoner serving time in upstate New York.

David Gilbert grew up in a Jewish family in Brookline, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Inspired in his teens by the Greensboro sit-ins and other events of the American Civil Rights Movement, he joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) at age seventeen. He entered Columbia University in 1962. In his junior year he helped to found the Independent Committee Against the War in Vietnam [ICV] and later the school’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. He travelled regularly to Harlem while working as a tutor, and saw Malcolm X speak at Barnard College in February 1965, experiences he describes as formative. Known by the late ’60s primarily as a young theorist, publishing articles in New Left Notes and other movement publications, he went on to play an organizing role in the April-May 1968 Columbia student strike.

As Columbia SDS grew during the Spring 1967 term, Gilbert tended to return to the Columbia campus only to offer a “radical education” counter-course for Columbia SDS freshmen and sophomores in a lounge in Ferris Booth Hall. Most of his activism was centered downtown at the New School for Social Research or at the New York SDS Regional Office.

Gilbert’s father was a liberal Democrat who worked as a manager in a toy company and Gilbert was still just a left-liberal Democrat, politically, when he entered Columbia College in the fall of 1962. But by the fall of 1965, Gilbert was speaking on the sundial against the war in Viet Nam at ICV rallies, was a revolutionary communist and New Left radical on a political level, somewhat bohemian culturally and very intellectual, morally passionate and earnest. He always seemed to be in a pleasant and enthusiastic mood. He also seemed to be one of the New Left activists around campus who knew the most about any politically relevant subject. As an orator and agitator, Gilbert was also quite good. And as a day-to-day organizer, Gilbert was very hardworking.

After graduating from Columbia College in June 1966, Gilbert spent most of his days and evenings during the fall of 1967 downtown attending grad school at the New School, building an SDS chapter there or attending meetings at the New York SDS Regional Office. He and other New York Regional SDS activists were both working to build SDS and attempting to build an “adult,” non-student Movement for a Democratic Society [MDS] of ex-student radical professionals who had left the campus scene, for meaningless off-campus 9-to-5 jobs. In addition, Gilbert spent his spare-time studying Marx’s Das Kapital book and writing New Left theoretical papers on imperialism and U.S. domestic consumption, consumerism and “the new working-class.” In October 1967, Gilbert looked somewhat like Marx, himself, having grown a long beard.

In 1969 SDS split into different ideological factions and the Weathermen emerged, its purpose being to build up armed struggle amidst young white Americans in support of the Black Panthers and other militant groups and also oppose the war in Vietnam via actions that “Bring the War Home”. Gilbert joined this group in 1969 with his friend Ted Gold, who in early 1970 would die in the infamous New York City townhouse explosion that killed three Weather members. The group’s participants went into hiding at this point, and the organization was renamed the Weather Underground.

Exactly what Gilbert did in the Weather Underground between 1970 and the group’s demise around 1975 is not known. Not on the group’s coordinating committee (the Weather Bureau) he did act as a regional leader, spending at least some of these years in Colorado. The Weather Underground committed several bombings and actions in this period against government and business targets. As support for the group began to wane on the left the pace of actions lessened and some members of the Weather Underground reemerged. Most were not proscecuted or did not serve time in prison despite having been sought by the police for years; police misconduct was the cause of many charges eventually being thrown out of court (see: COINTELPRO). Gilbert did not emerge, however; he and his partner Kathy Boudin remained active even following the birth of their son Chesa Boudin in August 1980.

In the late 1970s or early 1980s Gilbert and other white activists took the name RATF (Revolutionary Armed Task Force), declaring their solidarity with the Black Liberation Army (BLA).

In 1981, this group participated along with several members of the BLA in an attempt to rob a Brinks armored car at the Nanuet Mall, near Nyack, New York. While Gilbert and Boudin waited in a U-Haul truck in a nearby parking lot, armed BLA members took another vehicle to the mall, where a Brinks truck was making a delivery. They confronted the guards and immediately began firing, almost severing the arm of guard Joe Trombino and killing his co-worker, Peter Paige. The four then took $1.6 million in cash and sped off to transfer into the waiting U-Haul. The truck was soon stopped by police, who were looking for black, not white, perpetrators, and therefore did not suspect Gilbert and Boudin. Officers questioning the couple were then attacked by BLA members who emerged from the back of the vehicle. Two police officers, Waverly L. Brown and Edward J. O’Grady, died in the shootout.

Gilbert fled the scene with other RATF and BLA members but was later caught by police, tried, and sentenced in 1983 to 75 years for three counts of felony manslaughter. His extremely long sentence for participating in this action (especially when compared to Kathy Boudin’s 20-years-to-life, from which she has been paroled) may be due to his decision not to participate in his trial, not recognizing the authority of the state to try him.

Gilbert co-founded an inmate peer education program on HIV and AIDS in the Auburn Correctional Facility in 1987, and a similar more successful project in Great Meadows Prison in Comstock following his transfer there. He has published book reviews and essays in a number of small/independent newspapers and journals which were collected into the anthology No Surrender: Writings from an Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner (Abraham Guillen Press) in 2004. He has also published longer single pieces on the topic of misleading AIDS conspiracy theories and white working class political consciousness. The 2003 documentary The Weather Underground featured interview segments with Gilbert, raising his profile beyond those in the small political prisoner support network who have been following his progress since his incarceration. The DVD release of The Weather Underground features a longer interview with Gilbert as an extra.

He has served time in numerous upstate New York prisons, and is currently at the Clinton Correctional Institution in Dannemora NY.
 
http://www.eviltwinbooking.com/events.cfm?view=Speakers&artist_id=159

Chesa Boudin is currently working at the San Francisco Public Defender on a Liman public interest fellowship where he focuses on the intersection between immigration and criminal law. Chesa served as a law clerk to the Hon. Margaret McKeown of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals from 2011-2012. In 2011 Chesa completed his J.D. at Yale Law School. A Rhodes Scholar, he earned two master's degrees from Oxford University in 2006 and 2004. In 2003 he graduated summa cum laude from Yale College honors in the history department and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Chesa has been profiled on the front page of the NY Times and been interviewed on CNN and in dozens of newspapers and radio programs. He has been invited to give over 100 lectures in English and Spanish at venues across the US and on three continents on topics ranging from the impact of parental incarceration to Latin American politics, from community service in universities to US foreign policy.

Chesa has translated, edited, and authored several books. His most recent book, Gringo: A Coming of Age in Latin America, was published by Scribner in 2009. His scholarly law articles cover a range of topics such as direct democracy, immigration, institution building, and the rights of children with incarcerated parents.

Chesa has visited over 90 countries and all seven continents. He used his time abroad to learn Spanish and Portuguese. He serves on the boards of Justice for Families and Music for Autism. He is an avid runner and surfer, including annual marathons or 200 mile relay races for charity.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin

Early life and family

Chesa Boudin was born in New York, NY, on August 21, 1980. His parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, were radical anti-war activists and members of the Weather Underground. His mother's family had a long left-wing history. His great-great-uncle was Louis Boudin, a Marxist theorist, lawyer, and author of the acclaimed Government By Judiciary. His grandfather, attorney Leonard Boudin, had represented such controversial clients as Judith Coplon, Fidel Castro, and Paul Robeson. Chesa Boudin's great uncle was the famed independent journalist I.F. Stone.[6] Chesa Boudin's uncle, Michael Boudin, is currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

When Chesa Boudin was 14 months old,(whose name is Swahili for “dancing feet”), his parents were arrested for three murders associated with the Brinks Robbery (1981) in Rockland County, New York. His mother was sentenced to 20 years to life and his father to 75 years to life for the felony murders of two police officers and a security guard. Leaving their infant son without parents, Chesa Boudin was adopted by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, and raised as one of their three sons. His mother, Kathy Boudin, was released under parole supervision in 2003.
 
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/ugly-american-rhodes-scholar-goes-south

The Ugly American: A Rhodes Scholar Goes South

James Kirchick

Gringo: A Coming-of-Age in Latin America
Chesa Boudin (New York: Scribner, 2009)


Chesa Boudin is the biological son of two terrorists and was raised by another pair of terrorists. He was 14 months old when his birth parents, ex–Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, took part in a 1981 Brinks truck robbery in which they were complicit in the murder of two police officers and a security guard.

Sentenced to prison, Boudin and Gilbert delivered Chesa (whose name is Swahili for “dancing feet”) into the arms of William Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn, erstwhile Weathermen who earned unlikely prominence in the 2008 presidential campaign due to Ayres’s association with Barack Obama.

If Boudin never mentioned his parents’ or foster parents’ radical pasts (or their contemporary political views, which remain extreme) in his new book, Gringo, a log of time he has intermittently spent in Latin America over the past decade, it would be unfair to burden him with this inherited freight. But far from avoiding the legacy of his parents, Boudin embraces it. It is impossible to understand him, the author says, without understanding the strong impression that their politics made on his own.

After winning a Rhodes Scholarship in 2002, Boudin, one of the most outspoken antiwar activists at Yale University, gave a front-page interview to the New York Times. “My parents were all dedicated to fighting U.S. imperialism around the world,” he said. “I’m dedicated to the same thing.” Given such a commitment, it is hardly a surprise that Gringo is a postmodern version of the travelogues in which leftists of an earlier generation touted the glories of the Soviet Union, Communist China, the Cuban revolution, and other man-made horror shows.

The only difference is that Boudin lacks the literary and imaginative gifts that André Gide, Lincoln Steffens, C. Wright Mills, and other of these earlier writers, however debased their political illusions, possessed. (On page 3, for instance, Boudin breaks what surely must be the cardinal rule of travel writing, saying that he set off on his Latin American journey “to find myself.”)

Boudin can’t decide whether he wants to write a political treatise, a journalistic account of his wanderings, or a literary memoir, and those familiar with the region will see in Gringo a tepid imitation of Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries. Indeed, Boudin explicitly compares his South American trek to that of the voguish Argentinean.

Boudin’s journeys take him across the continent, from studies at the University of Santiago to the chic streets of Buenos Aires. Aside from a brief stint working as a translator in the administration of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, the author takes only rare breaks from his “political tourism,” to interview a union leader here or a community activist there. Latin Americans, in his view, fall into two categories: the poor masses supportive of the “revolutionary” policies he favors, and the middle and upper classes, depicted here as nefarious and solely concerned with guarding their privilege. None are represented as individuals with unique aspirations and viewpoints.

Instead, Boudin patronizes his subjects. “Kindness and sympathy were often apparent in their eyes and smiles,” he writes of poor bus passengers in Guatemala. Of sweatshops (“one of the faces of neoliberalism that defined the economic landscape I was traveling through”), Boudin observes that the factories “provided jobs, but they didn’t look like the kind of place I could imagine working in.” There are few places in Guatemala where this Ivy League travel writer “could imagine working in.” Such observations are unleavened by economic literacy; distinctions between the developed and undeveloped world are left unexplored here.

It does not occur to Boudin that his subjects might view any chance to work as a blessing. Being an opponent of “neoliberalism” and its attendant afflictions, the author would rob the Latin American poor of what few choices they currently have. (The degree to which the neoliberal record beats Boudin’s own socialist prescriptions, and what he lauds as the “practical idealism” of William Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn, absolutely escapes him.)

Boudin’s neat social categorizations routinely betray him. Note the shock he experiences when he finds that the poor Guatemalan family he’s living with doesn’t seem especially interested in the plight of his parents, whose story he explains over dinner. (“If I thought having parents in prison was going to give me street credibility in San Andres, the distraught look that passed between my hosts dispelled that misconception immediately.”) Boudin plows forward with his hosts, uttering a string of clarifying nouns to humanize his family: “Bebé, padres, crimen, tres muertos, politico, negros, imperialismo, Nueva York.”

Boudin is further dismayed when the host family evinces indifference toward his lectures about the long history of American crimes against the people of Latin America. “Their silence at first puzzled me,” Boudin observes, expressing the bewilderment of a sheltered ideologue. “Why weren’t they as eager as I to criticize imperialism in general and United States foreign policy in Latin America in particular?” Obviously, they’re suffering from false consciousness. Contrast the noble if naive Guatemalan poor to his “middle-class” hostess in Chile, who “regularly insulted” her domestic help and “lectured me about how silly the communists and rabble-rousers were to have gotten in the way of what she regarded as Pinochet’s solid economic plans.”

Toward the middle of the book, Boudin heads to Venezuela, having grown tired of Brazil, where the “moderation” and relatively pro-American foreign policy of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva disappoints him. Boudin expected Lula to be more of a radical. His lack of revolutionary zeal and seeming adherence to the “Washington consensus” that Boudin so despises stood in stark contrast to that of neighboring President Hugo Chavez, whose “Bolivarian Revolution” promised to be the New Jerusalem, much as Stalin’s Russia and Castro’s Cuba were for earlier generations of political pilgrims.

Once in Caracas, Boudin starts living the life he had always dreamed of as a revolutionary. His first encounter with Chavez occurs at a massive rally with thousands of red-shirted Chavistas where the self-appointed heir to the Bolivarian Revolution appears onstage alongside a who’s who of the international, anti-American Left: Nicaraguan strongman Daniel Ortega, Marxist intellectual Tariq Ali, actor Danny Glover, conspiracy theorist and sometime congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, as well as lesser figures like the president of the Cuban National Assembly. Using his gringo connections, Boudin quickly earns himself a perch in the presidential mansion working as a translator for senior Chavez officials. Now in the entourage of a bona fide populist revolutionary, Boudin can finally emulate, albeit in nonviolent fashion, his biological and adoptive parents. He begins signing e-mails “in the belly of the revolution.” He hangs with other gringos of the “politically progressive expat scene in Caracas.” When he returns to Oxford to complete a thesis on Venezuela, he finds himself having to defend the authoritarian ruler from peers skeptical of his demagoguery and thuggish tactics. Boudin characterizes his role as “play[ing] my small part in defending a democratic alternative,” even though Chavez has deployed a series of undemocratic means to preserve his place in power.

Boudin’s worshipful depiction of Chavez is aided by a series of unsupported claims. More than once he airs the baseless theory that the Bush administration supported a military coup against Chavez in 2002. He heaps scorn upon the United States for centuries of meddling in Latin America and distorts its current involvement in the region as wholly malign. Yet the following sentence is his only comment about Chavez’s support for the FARC, a Marxist terrorist group that has waged a guerilla war in Colombia since the 1960s: “Ecuador and Colombia had a border spat that Chavez got involved in.”

In his sole mildly critical passage about Chavez, Boudin writes of a Venezuelan friend who confided that she had been “told who to vote for in the party nomination process, not as a suggestion but as an order from above.” This Boudin sweeps aside as sounding “more like old-school Chicago machine politics than revolutionary participatory democracy.” But even the seediest Chicago solon didn’t shut down independent television and radio stations, spew anti-Semitism, jail opponents, or establish a parallel security apparatus loyal only to him. All have been hallmarks of Chavez’s reign, but are never mentioned in Boudin’s account.

Meanwhile, the author has nothing but contempt for Colombia’s Álvaro Uribe, the most promising leader in Latin America. Elected president in 2002, Uribe salvaged the country by working with the United States on an aggressive counterinsurgency fight against the FARC, which has plagued Colombia with kidnapping and murder for 45 years. Naturally, Boudin detests Uribe for his alliance with the United States and his decision to crack down on the FARC, laying blame for the country’s violence entirely at his feet. Boudin strongly supports the democratic will of Latin American peoples when they elect Chavez, but not in the case of Uribe, whom he depicts as a borderline fascist and American stooge, despite the fact that the Colombian president has consistently posted higher approval ratings than any other leader on the continent, soaring above 90 percent last summer after he ordered the successful rescue of 15 FARC-held hostages.

At one point, Boudin recalls a friendly conversation with the former head of Cuba’s national airline “over a mojito in a hotel lobby.” There, the apparatchik recounted the heroic legal work that Boudin’s grandfather Leonard, a legendary left-wing lawyer who defended Paul Robeson and the Church of Scientology, did on behalf of the Castro regime. That political inheritance is always in the back of his mind. Boudin seems unable to discuss his parents without justifying their crimes. The 1981 heist that left three men dead was “tragically bungled,” he writes. In his telling, the deaths of innocents were the consequence of an operation that became entangled in happenstance, not the result of deliberate choices and actions. The author leaves the impression that it was the “bungling” of the robbery that made it “tragic,” and that had things gone according to plan, the act would have been something far short of calamitous.

In some quarters, his family’s crimes provide access. He praises Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela as “one of the few places on the planet where having parents in prison in the United States for politically motivated crimes actually opened doors rather than closed them.” These crimes always provide a reference point. Relating how he became close with the children of victims of the Pinochet regime, Boudin writes, “Of course, I too have parents who paid a heavy price for their radical politics, and this common experience was undoubtedly part of what drew the three of us together in friendship.”

But it wasn’t Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert’s “radical politics” that earned them lifetime jail sentences (Boudin was released on parole in 2003). It was their complicity in a triple homicide.

Boudin describes the 9/11 terrorist attacks in similarly anodyne fashion, writing of the “arbitrary death” and “random violence” that occurred on that day, as if the murder of 3,000 American civilians was not a well-coordinated act of aggression with a specific political purpose and message.

He was in Chile at the time of the terrorist attacks and one of the book’s most glowing portrayals is of Luis Vitale, a leftist historian there who praises his students for burning the American flag every July 4th. Boudin unwittingly portrays Vitale’s depravity by recounting how, on September 12, he asked Boudin, the only gringo in the room, if any of his family or friends died in the attacks. When Boudin responds in the negative, Vitale lets out a “Bien” before launching into a discourse on the depredations of the Pinochet junta and America’s criminal record in Latin America.

The day after 9/11, the author notices a poster affixed to a mural of Che Guevara alleging that the “probable perpetrators of the crime” of child hunger were “rich countries.” The rest of his dirigiste economic cogitation amounts to little more than a repetition of bullet points from Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, the best-selling bible of the antiglobalization crowd, which argues that “neoliberal” economists view disasters as opportunities to implement free market reforms. Boudin parrots Klein’s line, right down to the specious allegation that Milton Friedman wrote Pinochet’s economic policies. (In reality, Friedman met once with Pinochet for 45 minutes.) Boudin puts some of Klein’s hypotheses in the mouths of characters he encounters along his journey. The reader cannot help but wonder if these individuals actually said the things he has attributed to them.

Boudin’s reportage often drifts into the unintentionally comical. This is certainly true in terms of tone: Argentina under the rule of the left-leaning Néstor Kirchner regime, for instance, is portrayed as a land of milk and honey. (“I ate a succulent steak, and fresh pasta so perfect I might easily have been in Tuscany.”) It is also true in terms of content: in Chile, Boudin notes that the “transportation infrastructure and government regulation were both thoroughly developed” and, unlike everywhere else on the continent, “the bus service inside Santiago was, like the city’s metro system, first-rate,” but it never occurs to Boudin that Pinochet, having deterred Chile from the socialist path followed by other Latin American governments, might deserve some credit for these latter-day wonders.

Boudin possesses, in extremis, a quality afflicting much of my generation: an aptitude for shameless self-revelation coupled with an utter lack of self-awareness. “I had introduced myself as a freelance writer with a radical family background,” he writes of his meeting with a Bolivian journalist. “And it occurred to me, as on many occasions previously, that I might appear as just another rich kid without a proper job looking to make a name for himself off of Latin America.” It is in these rare moments of candid reflection that Chesa Boudin makes the critic’s work easy.
 
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/chatterbox/2002/12/weatherson.html


Weatherson

Chesa Boudin, radical chic Rhodes scholar.

By Emily Yoffe|Posted Monday, Dec. 9, 2002, at 7:22 PM ET

One of the most significant baubles a young American can earn is a Rhodes scholarship—another would have to be a front-page story in the New York Times celebrating the award. Today the Times lauded Chesa Boudin, 22, for overcoming "striking challenges" to earn this most establishment certification of promise. Boudin's parents, the Times noted, missed his "Phi Beta Kappa award, high school graduation, Little League games" because since he was 14 months old they have been in prison. The article opens by describing how Boudin was not even able to share the news of his accomplishment with them.

Boudin's parents are Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, who were members of the violent 1960s radical group the Weather Underground. They are in prison for their part in the murder of two police officers and a guard as the result of a robbery of a Brinks armored car in New York at the late, unradical date of 1981.

The Times, while having space to describe the origin of Chesa's unusual name—Swahili for "dancing feet"—apparently didn't have room for the names of the men murdered. They were Sgt. Edward O'Grady, police officer Waverly Brown, and Brinks guard Peter Paige. You can read more about them at www.ogradybrown.com.

Nor does the Times mention the obvious point that the nine children left fatherless that day—the youngest was 6 months old—have also missed the pleasure of having their fathers see their accomplishments over the years.

Chesa Boudin was raised by another pair of Weather Underground members—Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. A Times article about Ayers' memoir of his unrepentant days as a bomber of the Pentagon and the Capitol building ("I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough") appeared, unfortunately for the sales of Ayers' book, last Sept. 11. "Morally clueless" is how Tim Noah described Ayers in a pre-Sept. 11 Chatterbox.

Certainly, Chesa should be judged only by his own words and deeds, not those of his biological or adoptive parents. But both in today's Times article and a January 2001 article in Salon,he seems to share Ayers' obtuseness. In the Salon piece, he manages to describe the indignities of visiting his incarcerated father without giving the slightest nod to what got his father put away in the first place or to the suffering endured by the families of the murdered men.

Chesa seems concerned only with the suffering of more worthy people. His application for the Rhodes scholarship, according to the Times, observed: "As a child, I relished my personal freedom and tried to compensate for my parents' imprisonment. Now, I see prisons around the world: urban misery in Bolivia, homelessness in Santiago and illiteracy in Guatemala." It's hard to fathom the connection between his privileged mother's imprisonment for murder (she is the daughter of a prominent lawyer and graduated from Bryn Mawr) and that of poor people in Latin America.

To make clear he has embraced the ideology of all his parents, he observes: "We have a different name for the war we're fighting now—now we call it the war on terrorism, then they called it the war on communism. My parents were all dedicated to fighting U.S. imperialism around the world. I'm dedicated to the same thing." Has no one ever told this young man that communism oppressed millions? Was he too busy reading the profile of his adoptive father—himself a terrorist —on Sept. 11 to understand the significance of that day? Is his really the kind of "potential for leadership"—as described by Elliot Gerson of the Rhodes Scholarship Trust—that should be rewarded?
 
http://www.democracynow.org/2003/8/21/ex_weather_underground_member_kathy_boudin

Ex-Weather Underground Member Kathy Boudin Granted Parole


After 22 years in jail, Boudin was granted parole yesterday. We talk to her son Chesa Boudin who was 14 months old when his parents were arrested; her attorney Leonard Weinglass; Jeff Jones, a founding member of the Weathermen and Norma Hill, who called for Boudin’s release even though she was a victim in the 1981 bank heist that led to Boudin’s arrest. We also play excerpts of the new documentary "Weather Underground." [Includes transcript]

"When I walk out of the prison gate I will gently touch the air that surrounds me like a shawl. It is autumn and the leaves are floating in circles of reds, browns, and oranges. I am with my child in freedom, a reunion with my family and friends who have lived these decades with me."

These are the words of Kathy Boudin, a former member of the radical group the Weather Underground. She has served 22 years in prison for her role in a botched armed robbery in 1981 in which three men were killed.

She was granted parole in a surprise decision yesterday. She is 60 years old.

In the 1960s Boudin, daughter of civil rights attorney Leonard Boudin, joined the Weather Underground a radical group who were convinced that only militant action could end racism, inequality and the war in Vietnam.

They took responsibility for bombing two dozen public buildings, including the Pentagon, eventually landing on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

In 1981, Boudin was recruited by Black Liberation Army members to drive the getaway vehicle in an armored car heist in Rockland County, New York. The idea was to have white people drive the getaway vehicle, a U-Haul truck, to throw off pursuers.

A security guard was killed in the robbery at the Nanuet Mall. Their truck was later stopped at a roadblock and two police officers were gunned down by gunmen at the back of the truck. Boudin was unarmed and sitting in the passenger seat at the time. She was apprehended as she fled, pleaded guilty to felony murder and robbery and was sentenced to 20 years to life.

Her son was just 14 months old at the time.

In prison, Boudin has served her time as a model inmate. She developed a program on parenting behind bars and helped write a handbook for inmates whose children are in foster care. She also earned a master’s degree in adult education and literacy. In the late 1980s she helped design an AIDS support program that is now used as a model at prisons across the country.

Boudin has spent 22 years behind bars. She is expected to be freed from her New York state prison by late September.

Her possible release has been staunchly opposed by the families, friends and colleagues of the three men killed.

Boudin said she was terrified during the gun battle and aid there was no way "to pay the debt for my being involved or participating in the crime that destroyed families and destroyed men."

Leonard Weinglass, attorney representing Kathy Boudin.
Chesa Boudin, son of Kathy Boudin. He recently graduated from Yale University and received a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. He was a baby when his parents were arrested and imprisoned. He was raised by Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, themselves former members of the Weather Underground.
•Tape: * "Weather Underground,"* new documentary directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel

•Jeff Jones, former member of the Weather Underground. He now works as the communications director for the Environmental Advocates of New York.

•Norma Hill, she was dragged from her car at gunpoint during the 1981 robbery and testified for the prosecution in the ensuing trials, but later befriended Kathy Boudin while both were working with AIDS patients in prison.

Good thing her name was not Hale, or that she had a law degree, or played a concert violin, or she would still be serving time.

Such nice people those leftist radicals of the 1960-75 time periods who the media never told the public who they were or their ancient hate filled pathologies for US.

Holdomor, the forced famine of the Ukraine after FDR gave the USSR agriculture credits in 1932 is no joke, as mass terror and murder was perpetrated against millions of White Russian Christians

White's today in the majority are so dumbed down and living in fear, with no political protections to even protest verbally and honestly against the usurpers tyrants of today with their media club to beat US every day with lies and intimidation IMO.
 
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...were-imprisoned-wins-san-francisco-d-n1079586

Chesa Boudin, whose parents were imprisoned, wins San Francisco D.A.'s race
The son of anti-war radicals sent to prison for murder when he was a toddler, said he wants to reform the criminal justice system.

Nov. 10, 2019, 5:00 PM PST

90


SAN FRANCISCO — Chesa Boudin, the son of anti-war radicals sent to prison for murder when he was a toddler, has won San Francisco's tightly contested race for district attorney after campaigning to reform the criminal justice system.

The former deputy public defender declared victory Saturday night after four days of ballot counting determined he was ahead of interim District Attorney Suzy Loftus. The latest results from the San Francisco Department of Elections gave Boudin a lead of 8,465 votes.

Loftus conceded and said she will work to ensure a smooth and immediate transition.

Boudin, 39, became the latest candidate across the nation to win district attorney elections by pushing for sweeping reform over incarceration. He said he wants to tackle racial bias in the criminal justice system, overhaul the bail system, protect immigrants from deportation and pursue accountability in police misconduct cases.

Loftus was appointed the interim district attorney by Mayor London Breed last month after George Gascon announced he was resigning and moving to Los Angeles to explore a run for DA there.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California accused Breed of undermining the democratic process.

Loftus was endorsed by the city's Democratic establishment, including Gov. Gavin Newsom and Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris.
 
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