<p>Matthew Landy Steen (born August 22, 1949) is a former member of the Weather Underground Organization, a New Left activist and editor of Berkeley Tribe and other underground newspapers in the 1960s. He was indicted for dozens of bank robberies in the early seventies used to finance underground Weathermen activities; Steen was also once suspected of involvement in the 1970 Park Precinct Police Station bombing in San Francisco. This forty year old connection was used by print and broadcast media, websites and blogs, to pillory 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama for ties to the radical Weatherman organization of the 1970s in an attempt to derail the election of the nation's first African-American President.
Steen was serving a ten year term in Lompoc federal prison when the convicted "Watergate Six" defendants, John Dean, Charles Colson, et al., arrived at the Lompoc "Honor Camp" to begin their own sentences. The U.S. Justice Department had convened special federal grand juries in 1972 in Portland and Seattle to investigate his suspected involvement with triple embassy bombings in Washington, D.C.; the U.S. Capitol bombing; and throwing a tear gas canister at</p>