Wednesday, August 20, 2008

More 'Weather' Challenges for Obama

The story that isn't a story just won't go away for Barack Obama. His connection with Weather Underground Pentagon bomber cum professor William Ayers has never been fully explained, and if files pertinent to their relationship remain sealed, it may not.
Stanley Kurtz is an unhappy camper. And he's unhappy because he's been denied access to files that may fill in the blanks surrounding the relationship between Democratic Presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama in his association with a known terrorist, William Ayers.

According to Obama and Ayers, there is simply no story. They both sat on a foundation together, they've had passing acquaintance through the years, but there is no "relationship." If that's the case, then why are there files relating to the Obama and Ayers connection that are not viewable at the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois, Chicago? That's what Kurtz wants to know in his article in National Review, detailing his pursuit of a story that supposedly "isn't there," but very much seems to be, in that there is such large evidence of a cover-up going on surrounding the relationship between Obama and Ayers.

Unfortunately, I don’t yet have access to the documents. The Special Collections section of the Richard J. Daley Library agreed to let me read them, but just before I boarded my flight to Chicago, the top library officials mysteriously intervened to bar access. Circumstances strongly suggest the likelihood that Bill Ayers himself may have played a pivotal role in this denial. Ayers has long taught at UIC, where the Chicago Annenberg Challenge offices were housed, rent-free. Ayers likely arranged for the files of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to be housed in the UIC library, and may well have been consulted during my unsuccessful struggle to gain access to the documents. Let me, then, explain in greater detail what the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) records are, and how I have been blocked from seeing them.


Is there something that the Obama campaign is afraid of the American people seeing? Is there something there that Ayers doesn't want uncovered? What, exactly, is in these files that is such a secret that access to them is being treated with the same scrutiny as official classified governmental documents? It should be noted that these files are being housed at a library, a place that is, by definition, a repository of information that is made available to the public. The government is not in possession of these files.

So why the secrecy, unless there is something in there that someone doesn't want to be made public?

Kurtz plans to continue his endeavors for access to these documents. I wish him well, and hope that he can gain access to them. I won't discount, however, the possibility that by the time he is allowed access that there will be things that have been removed, after all of the hooplah surrounding his initial probe into this story.

Once and Always, an American Fighting Man

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