His rationale: “Because the war in Vietnam was a war of terror.”
INTERVIEWER: Obviously in the organization there were bombings that were set up. I know you’ve written about it, you said maybe it was a mistake. Is it fair to say you were a domestic terrorist?
AYERS: That is not true. Well the reason it is not fair is because if you define terrorism in an even-handed way what you would say is that terrorism is any act that indiscriminately targets civilians for the purpose of coercing a political view, and I never did that, and we never hurt anybody, and we never killed anybody. It is a well-known fact for example that the war in Vietnam was a war of terror and if terrorism. If you take a stable definition of terrorism, it can apply to a cult or a political group or a religious group or a group of fanatics or a government, and overwhelmingly the amount of violence that is perpetrated on people indiscriminately by governments is overwhelmingly greater than by cults or groups or political… So with that stable definition, what would we call Russia’s behavior in Chechnya? Would you call that terrorism? I would. Would you call China’s behavior in Tibet terrorism? I would. And we can go right down the line. We can even say, for example, that Sherwood’s march to the sea, even though it was for a good cause, but it was indiscriminate killing of innocents. I don’t think what I did was terrorism. It may have crossed the lines of legality, it may have crossed the lines of commonsense, you could call it despicable, and I have my own criticisms of it.