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Dinitia Smith, who wrote the piece that was most unserendipitously published in the NY Times edition of 9/11/01, significantly distorted Ayers's views, as Ayers himself protested in a letter to the editor published in the NYT on 9/15/01 (quoted in Daily Kos, 10/9/08):
She [Dinitia Smith] and I spoke a lot about regrets, about loss, about attempts to account for one’s life. I never said I had any love for explosives, and anyone who knows me found that headline sensationalistic nonsense. I said I had a thousand regrets, but no regrets for opposing the war with every ounce of my strength. I told her that in light of the indiscriminate murder of millions of Vietnamese, we showed remarkable restraint, and that while we tried to sound a piercing alarm in those years, in fact we didn’t do enough to stop the war.
Anybody who's ever been interviewed for a newspaper article and then read the article knows how utterly commonplace it is for the interviewer to make serious errors of fact and interpretation. Furthermore, it's pretty obvious from the 9/11 article that Smith went into her interview with Ayers with her mind already made up about his book, and that she was not carefully listening to him in the interview, and heard only what she had already decided she was going to hear.
Whatever else one may think about Ayers, his patience and self-restraint during the months of this campaign have been remarkable.
