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144 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography

that he shared the same conflicts about marriage. “We have to learn how to be committed,” he said,
“and hold out the possibility of endless reinventions.”


Indeed, a good agent provocateur should be able to re-invent himself or herself several times in a
career. A champion in this was Arthur Koestler, who went from being a Zionist in Palestine to a
KPD communist to a Cold War hardline anti-communist, to a Jungian dealer in paranormal and
psychic phenomena, ending up as a voluntary euthanasia advocate. He also changed nationalities
several times, from Hungarian to proto-Israeli to German to British. The best guess is that he was a
British agent from the very early stages on. Ayers, by contrast, still has a ways to go if he wants to
get into the Spy Museum.


WARD CHURCHILL, WEATHERMAN AND PARALLEL LIFE


TO AYERS AND DOHRN


Another key Weatherman supporter who figures in the life of Ayers and Dohrn is Ward
Churchill, who was up to the end of 2007 probably the best known former Weatherman still active
in politics, largely because of his statement noted earlier that the office workers who died in the
World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 were “little Eichmanns,” servants of imperialism who
deserved what they got. Churchill also became infamous as a supporter of the CIA’s blowback
theory of 9/11, which he saw not as a false flag operation by the Anglo-American intelligence
community, but rather as just retribution for the crimes of US imperialism. This tirade had made
Ward Churchill a favorite target of Fox News Channel personalities like O’Reilly and Hannity.
Churchill stated that anyone who doubted the official US version of 9/11 – the 19 Arab hijackers,
Osama Bin Laden, al Qaeda, etc.- was really a racist who did not believe that Arabs were capable of
great things – a very imaginative defense of the US government line. Especially in 2005-2007,
Churchill was repeatedly attacked by the reactionary Fox News Channel personalities O’Reilly and
Hannity, and was ousted from his tenured post at the University of Colorado with much fanfare.


Back around 1970, Ward Churchill had been a Weatherman, just like Ayers and Dohrn. Today
he poses as an American Indian activist. A recent critical account of Ward Churchill by Bob Black
alleges that c. 1970,


Ex-Weathermen were even less popular than Vietnam veterans. It took Churchill awhile to find
his way from the warpath to the career path. He became a staff writer for Soldier of Fortune
magazine. Finally he discovered, or invented, his Indian heritage. In 1978 he took on the new
role of professional Indian. By 1983, he was “director of Planning, Research and Development
for Educational Opportunity Programs at the University of Colorado/Boulder.” In plain English,
he was an affirmative-action bureaucrat, a paid race-monger. He made the most of the gig, and
very possibly wrote himself a job description to jump into academia. So he is now, without even
possessing a doctorate, a tenured ethnic-studies professor at the university in the posh resort
town of Boulder. Tom Giago, an enrolled Oglala Sioux born and raised on the Pine Ridge
reservation, the publisher of Indian Country Today, considers Churchill a “white profiteer, a
police agent and a terrorist.”... If Churchill’s indigenism is the radical threat he says it is, why
does the government pay him to propagate it? When Churchill first surfaces, he is killing
indigenous people for the U.S. Government. Next he is a member of the agent-ridden
Weatherman SDS; then a staff writer for Soldier of Fortune; and then a sachem in the agent-
riddled American Indian Movement. Next, notwithstanding this unsavory background, he works
as a bureaucrat for a state university, from which gig he is bootstrapped into a tenure-track
faculty position for which he has no qualifications, and soon he is tenured. His noisy presence
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