NEW EVIDENCE TIES AYERS AND DOHRN TO COP KILLING

At 10:45pm on February 16th, 1970 inside the Park Police station in San Francisco, CA an officer by the name of Brian McDonnell was standing at the Teletype machine. A co-worker named Frank Rath was seated nearby. As Rath leaned back in his chair to relax, a bomb loaded with inch-long fence staples on a nearby ledge outside exploded right in front of McDonnell.

Rath escaped death by leaning backward moments before the blast but McDonnell wasn't so lucky. Staples severed his jugular and lodged in his brain. He died days later. Officer James Pera was one of the first on the scene. He was 24 years old at the time and revered McDonnell as a mentor.

No one has been arrested for the murder of McDonnell. Over the years, two groups have been suspected - the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers.

On September 16th, AN ARTICLE by Peter Jamison was published in San Francisco Weekly that has some astonishingly new revelations from this nearly 40 year-old case.

speaking publicly for the first time about the investigation, former FBI agents have told SF Weekly the basis for their belief that the Weather Underground was behind McDonnell's murder. The agents have revealed that two credible eyewitnesses — both former left-wing radicals tied to the Weathermen — gave detailed statements to investigators in the 1970s alleging that Dohrn and Howard Machtinger, another member of the group, were personally involved in organizing the deadly attack. Both witnesses claimed to have participated in meetings where the bombing was planned, and one confessed to having cased the police station for the Weathermen prior to the explosion.

Larry Grathwohl successfully infiltrated the Weather Underground for the FBI and testified under oath in the 1970's that Bill Ayers told him that Bernadine Dohrn was responsible for the Park Police station bombing. Grathwohl's account was that Ayers was attempting to demonstrate how a woman was doing more than the rest of the male members of the group.

Grathwohl vindicated?
Based on information uncovered by Willie Reagan, a retired FBI agent who has been working on a task force that is investigating the bombing, it appears that the credibility of Grathwohl's story has been significantly bolstered. Two witnesses, whose stories Reagan came across while going through documents provide that additional credibility. Matthew Landy Steen, who was a writer for an underground newspaper and Karen Latimer, a former Weather Underground member who was willing to testify in return for immunity.

Steen told agents he had attended a Bay Area meeting in January 1970 at which half a dozen Weather Underground activists discussed their plans to plant a bomb at Park Police Station. Among those Steen placed at the meeting were Dohrn, the Weather Underground's charismatic leader; and Machtinger, who investigators believed to be one of the group's principal bomb technicians.

Also in the case file were multiple forms from interviews with a former Weather Underground member named Karen Latimer. In the mid-1970s, years after Steen spoke to the FBI, Latimer came forward to say that she had attended a separate planning session for the Park Station attack with Dohrn and Machtinger in the winter of 1970.

Jamison reports that prosecutors were very close to filing charges based solely on Latimer's testimony.

Latimer claimed to have personally cased the station, and could describe the package that had held the explosive device before it had gone off. "It was just too detailed," the investigator familiar with the case said. "It was A to Z without leaving out L and M. I was convinced."

I will be delving into this story much further on my September 20th program. In particular, I'll be taking a look at the role of current Attorney General Eric Holder. When you consider all of the things he's done / not done in light of these findings, perhaps some hard questions need to be asked relative to his motivations.

Be sure to read the ENTIRE ARTICLE by Jamison. Calling it eye-opening is an understatement.

On Friday, September 18th, I had the opportunity to interview both Larry Grathwohl and James Pera on these new findings. You can listen to the interview by CLICKING HERE (starts at approximately the 18:15 mark).

Lastly, if Grathwohl's testimony is vindicated, so is his credibility. If his credibility is vindicated, shouldn't more people view this clip of him from 1982 in which he discusses the intentions of the Weather Underground based on his first hand accounts from their meetings?