Kathy Boudin, by the time she walked out of the New York state penitentiary on parole last summer after serving 22 years for murder and bank robbery, should have been a forgotten name, but, thanks to the New York Times and similar organs, she was probably better known when she left prison than when she entered.  What seems to have been a well-orchestrated movement for her rehabilitation and release started several years ago, with a long article about her in the New Yorker and several front-page stories in the Times that have helped keep her and the lies she and her comrades seek to perpetuate before the public.

Boudin is a murderer, a terrorist, and a criminal—but not an ordinary one.  The daughter of lawyer Leonard Boudin (always described by the press as a “civil-liberties attorney” but, in fact, a Communist Party shill) and the granddaughter of Louis Boudin, a party founder, she became one of the best-known New Left loudmouths of the 1960’s and a founding member of its offshoot, the terrorist Weather Underground.  Before the day of her arrest in 1981, Boudin had last been seen running naked from the remains of a Greenwich Village townhouse that her Weather buddies had managed to blow up with their own bomb.  That was in 1970.

Eleven years later, on October 20, 1981, a gang of hoods calling itself the Black Liberation Army swiped $1.6 million from a Brinks armored truck at a bank in Nyack, Long Island.  One robber fired a shotgun point-blank through the windshield of the truck, killing the driver, while two other guards were wounded.  The killers were stopped at a roadblock not far away but managed to gun down two police officers as they approached their van.  Some of the gang escaped, but one of those who did not was the elusive Boudin, nabbed by the cops as she tried to flee.

What made the robbery and murders notable was their transparent ideological motivation.  Not only Boudin but Weatherpersons David Gilbert and Susan Clark were arrested and convicted for their roles in the crime, and the remnants of the Underground (now calling themselves the “May 19th Communist Organization,” after the common birthdays of Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X) soon launched a public-relations crusade to defend the “political prisoners.”

Mr. Gilbert (still serving his 75-year-to-life sentence) is the father of Boudin’s son, Chesa, named after Joanne Chesimard, now a fugitive in Cuba and another veteran of the Black Liberation Army wanted for the murder of a New Jersey state trooper.  Chesa himself was the recent subject of a fawning New York Times front-pager when he won a Rhodes Scholarship.

The Nyack Brinks job was hardly the first of the “expropriations,” as the p.r.  crusaders dubbed their robberies.  The FBI quickly linked the gang to at least five other heists, all committed by black gunmen with white women as decoys or accomplices who rented the escape vehicles.  (Boudin later told her parole board she “felt extremely guilty about being white.”)  At least two guards were murdered and several wounded in these crimes, and nearly $900,000 was stolen.  To this day, that money has never been recovered.

Nothing quite demolishes the fiction that we are today “at war with terrorism” better than the release and rehabilitation of the real and largely unrepentant terrorist Kathy Boudin.  Her exact role in planning and committing the series of robberies and murders remains obscure, but it was a significant one that involved full knowledge of what had happened, what was happening, and what would happen.  Kathy Boudin is as much of a terrorist and a murderer as any of those who actually pulled the trigger, and there is no indication at all that she regrets her involvement.  This country does not wage war on terrorists; it gives them parole and makes their children Rhodes Scholars.

As for Chesa, he was reared by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, also major players in the Weather Underground.  (Miss Dohrn, it turned out, just happened to work at a Manhattan boutique from which I.D. documents used in the robbery-murders had been stolen.)  They, too, have enjoyed some friendly coverage in the New York Times.  In a story headlined “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives,” Mr. Ayers informed the Times, “I don’t regret setting bombs.  I feel we didn’t do enough.”  You can look it up.  The story ran on September 11, 2001.