Former federal prosecutor decries William Ayers link

In 1973, Ibershof tried to put William Ayers, a founding member of the Weather Underground, in prison for an alleged conspiracy to bomb political targets. Ayers, now an education professor in Chicago, has become a fixture in John McCain's attempt to raise doubts about Barack Obama.

Obama met Ayers when the former radical hosted an event to introduce Obama at the start of his political career. The two have served together on boards, but are not close.

"It seemed manifestly unfair to tar him with this association," Ibershof said in a telephone interview this weekend from his home in Mill Valley. "Sen. Obama had known Ayers during a period he was named Citizen of the Year in Chicago, not when he was committing those terrorist acts."

So Ibershof wrote a letter to the New York Times, saying he was "amazed and outraged" that Obama was being linked to the former radical's terrorist activities, which occurred when "Mr. Obama, was, as he has noted, just a child."

Ibershof, a registered Democrat, has donated about $200 to Obama's presidential campaign, but the 73-year-old former prosecutor said nobody put him up to his protest.

"I came to this gradually but surely watching the campaign," Ibershof said. "It just didn't make any sense to me."

In the letter, Ibershof also defends his reputation, taking issue with the characterization that the case against Ayers was dismissed for "prosecutorial misconduct." The government dropped the case after the Nixon administration's "illegal activities, including wiretaps, break-ins and mail interceptions," were exposed, he said.

Ibershof was a young prosecutor in Detroit in 1972 when he took over the prosecution of the radical Weathermen. Ayers, the group's "education minister" who was then in hiding, and 14 other Weather Underground leaders had been accused of plotting at a 1969 meeting in Flint, Mich., to launch a terror campaign.

Ibershof said the bombings were thought to include a 1970 pipe bomb attack on a San Francisco police station, which killed an officer. The crime has never been solved.

But before the trial even began, some of the defense lawyers asserted their offices had been broken into and searched, Ibershof said.