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Eric Rudolph: Olympic Park Bomber

MrRING

MrRING

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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030601/ap_on_re_us/eric_rudolph&cid=519&ncid=716


Agents Comb Woods in Bomb Suspect Probe

MURPHY, N.C. - With suspected Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph finally in custody, federal agents in camouflage headed into the rural North Carolina woods Sunday to begin retracing his steps and determine whether he had help evading authorities during the five years he lived on the run.

Aside from a stubbly beard, Rudolph was clean, healthy and casually dressed when he was caught early Saturday by a rookie police officer who spotted him scavenging for food behind a grocery store.

"He didn't look like he'd been living in the woods," said Murphy Police Officer Charles Kilby. His mustache was neatly trimmed, and there was little difference between the Rudolph who was caught and the one pictured on wanted posters issued at the beginning of the manhunt in 1998, he said.

Rudolph, a 36-year-old former soldier and survivalist, is accused of the July 27, 1996, bombing at Atlanta's downtown Olympic Park that killed a woman, wounded 111 others and stunned a world focused on the fanfare of the 25th modern Summer Olympics.

He also is a suspect in a bombing at an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Ala., that killed a police officer, and bombings outside a gay nightclub and an office building in Atlanta that contained an abortion clinic.

In all, two people were killed and about 150 were injured.

Rudolph is thought to be a follower of the white supremacist Christian Identity religion that is anti-abortion, anti-gay and anti-Semitic. Some of the bombs were followed by messages signed "Army of God."

During a search across 550,000 acres of Appalachian wilderness that at one time involved 200 agents, Rudolph became an almost a mythic figure. Many in the region mocked the government's inability to root him out. He inspired two country-western songs and a top-selling T-shirt bore the words "Run Rudolph Run." A $1 million reward offer from the government went unclaimed.

"My heart aches for him. What he did was wrong, I know, but I understand where he was coming from," said Sarah Greenfield, 63, of nearby Marble. "People around here, they take care of their own. You can't put a price on a man's head, and I don't know anybody who would have given him up, even for a million dollars."

Saturday morning, it wasn't the FBI, but a rookie police officer from the small town of Murphy who spotted Rudolph behind the grocery and arrested him. Patrolman Jeff Postell, 21, came around the back of the Save-A-Lot with his patrol car lights off when he saw the man crouched behind the store. Another officer later recognized the man as Rudolph.

"I don't really deserve any credit," Postell later said. "I think I put a lot of people's feelings at ease."

With Rudolph in custody, authorities now have access to clean DNA samples that could be used to more closely link him to evidence collected in the case, Swecker said.
 
AndroMan said:
Probably been caught a bit short, since Sadman Hussein stopped sending the postal orders. ;)
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Sorry AndroMan, but that's a total non-sequitur. Eric Rudolph is a terrorist, but entirely of the home-grown variety.

I hadn't heard that they decided to pin the Olympic park bombing on Rudolph. Last I heard, they were trying to tapdance out of very publicly tarring that security guard for the crime. And I see no notice in these recent reports about the FBI's slipshod handling of that!
 
Philo T said:
I hadn't heard that they decided to pin the Olympic park bombing on Rudolph. Last I heard, they were trying to tapdance out of very publicly tarring that security guard for the crime. And I see no notice in these recent reports about the FBI's slipshod handling of that!
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I think they tie together because of the Army of God letters that was sent with the varous bombs... or maybe it was the bomb components were all of the same manufacture, so that's how they are tied together.

And the other poor guy who was accused, Richard Jewell, he was a press phenomenon for a while, but he'd pretty much gone back into ordinary private life after his exoneration. IIRC, he was blackballed by over-ambitious FBI types looking to further their career based on psychological profiles, because they looked at Jeweel's recaction to publicity and figured "Hey, he did it". Correct me if I'm wrong.

Personally, my knee-jerk reaction is that Rudolph is gulity. His family seems unstable, one of his brothers cut off his own hand with a saw to protest Rudolph being named the bombing suspect.
 
Christian Terrorist Rudolph Sentenced

greets

Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion

Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan


Monday, July 18, 2005

Christian Terrorist Rudolph Sentenced
What the Rightwing Press Will not Say

Notorious Christian terrorist Eric Rudolph was sentenced to two life terms on Monday. The one-time fugitive had carried out four bombings that terrorized the southeastern areas of the United States. Among his crimes were the blowing up of an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed a policeman, and a bombing of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia.

As his sister-in-law made clear, Rudolph is driven by the ideology of the "Christian Identity" hate group. Terry Nichols of the Oklahoma City bombing was likewise connected to Christian identity and their "Elohim City".

Of course, you won't see the headline above in American newspapers, even though any Muslim who acts as Rudolph did would be called an "Islamic terrorist" (a particularly objectionable term because "Islamic" means "having to do with the Muslim faith). It is like talking about "terrorism rooted in Christianity."

Other things you won't see in the American press about this story (satire alert):

Thomas Friedman will not write an op-ed for the New York Times about what is wrong with white southern Christian males that they keep producing these terrorists. He will also not ask why Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are not denouncing Eric Rudolph every day at the top of their lungs.

No reporter will interview frightened Iraqis about their fears at hearing that there are 138,000 armed Christians in their country belonging to the same faith as the bomber, Rudolph, some of them from his stomping grounds of Florida and North Carolina.

Daniel Pipes will not write a column for the New York Post suggesting that white southern Christians be put in internment camps until it can be determined why they keep producing terrorists and antisemites.

George W. Bush will not issue a statement that "Christianity is a religion of peace and we will not allow the Eric Rudolphs to hijack it for their murderous purposes."

Frank Gaffney will not write a column for the Washington Post castigating the Republican Party for appeasement in surrendering to the terrorist threats of radical Christians, by now opposing reproductive rights.

Max Boot will not point out that if the United States could only keep the Philippines in the early twentieth century by killing 400,000 Filipinos, than that was what needed to be done, and if the US can only beat back radical Christians by killing 400,000 of them, then that may just be necessary.

Pat Buchanan will not write a column blasting King George III for having promoted the illegal immigration into the American south of criminal elements, whose maladjusted descendants are still making trouble.

posted by Juan @ 7/18/2005 06:34:00 PM

Source:

Please visit the source as it has many links to defenitions to terms such as "Christian Identity" and things of that nature.
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http://www.juancole.com/2005/07/christian-terrorist-rudolph-sentenced.html

mal
 
And as soon as we have...oh, about ten thousand Eric Rudolphs out there...and dozens of mainstream Christian religious leaders embracing his actions....and dozens of Christian spokespeople and academics explaining that while they OF COURSE repudiate Rudolph's methods, we have to understand WHY he felt compelled to act, Prof. Cole's attempt at satire and commentary will have some validity.

Until then... NOPE.

Shadow
 
Perhaps he is!

Of course, virtually every news story dealing with him discussed his own warped, twisted brand of "Christianity".. and Fox News, that bastion of Right Wing propoganda, described Rudolph's religious beliefs as follows...

Rudolph, believed to be a follower of a white supremacist religion that is anti-abortion, anti-gay and anti-Semitic, eluded a 5 1/4-year manhunt in the Appalachian wilderness. He was captured near a grocery store in Murphy, N.C., in 2003.

Wow. That is pretty blunt, now isn't it? ... racist, anti-gay and anti-Semitic.

I think some of those same words might apply to ANOTHER set of religious beliefs much in the news these days, no?

So, melf, as I noted... one kook is a kook. But when the kooks start to add up, across the globe, well, then you have a movement. I doubt the good Professor, mentioned in the original post, has the intellectual consistency to deal with that.

Shadow
 
I doubt the good Professor, mentioned in the original post, has the intellectual consistency to deal with that.

Shadow
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Your right Shadow-he is one of them commie teachers I bet !! causes all kinds of trouble in them there young minds he teaches!! :nooo:
 
Far-Right Militias and Anti-Abortion Violence

greets

some more stuff

Far-Right Militias and Anti-Abortion Violence
When Will Media See the Connection?
By Laura Flanders

When the Oklahoma City bombing captured the attention of the mainstream media, some women's rights activists expected that the attack would end mainstream media's reluctance to report on violence against abortion-providers and other domestic terror threats. That reasonable hope was dashed.

With its first reporting of the Oklahoma story, the New York Times (4/20/95) ran a list headlined "Other Bombings in America", which spanned four decades and included some attacks that claimed no injuries or lives. But none of the 40 officially documented bombings that have targeted women's clinics in that period was mentioned.

Media investigations of where right-wing militants get their violent ideas generally ignored the Army of God manual, which recommends 65 ways to destroy abortion clinics and includes an illustrated recipe for making a "fertilizer bomb" from ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. The manual turned up in 1993, buried in the backyard of an anti-abortionist indicted for arson and acid attacks on nine clinics. But headline-writers avoided describing it as a "Manual for Terrorists," as the New York Times identified a militia document in 1995 (4/29/95).

The first person convicted of violence against a women's health center ignited a gas can in a crowded New York City clinic in 1979. Since 1982, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, there have been 169 arson and bomb attacks on women's health centers in 33 states. In the '90s, when five workers in such clinics have been murdered, people calling themselves "pro-life" publicly advocate violence as a way to make legally sanctioned abortion impossibly unsafe.

In January 1994, the Supreme Court agreed with pro-choice groups that anti-abortionists could legitimately be investigated for conspiracy, but influential media have been harder to convince. In fact, the national media's gentle handling of the anti-abortion story has amounted to a quasi-conspiracy itself.

See No Terrorists

Four days before the first abortion provider was killed in Florida in 1993, directors of women's health centers in that state and Texas held a news conference to call attention to an organized campaign of terror that was striking clinics across the U.S. The New York Times (3/6/93) portrayed that event as a pro-choice publicity stunt: "Like a conclave of unreconstructed Cold Warriors, [pro-choicers] appeared intent on fighting new battles, to avoid becoming victims of their own success," the Times' Felicity Barringer wrote.

When Dr. David Gunn was shot three days later outside his clinic in Pensacola, rather than investigate the feminists' claims that Gunn's killing was part of an organized strategy, the newspapers of record reported the death as if it had been fated: "A Collision of Causes", the Washington Post labeled it (3/13/93); "Separate Visions on Bettering Lives Collide" was the New York Times' headline (3/14/93). Dr. Gunn and his killer were presented as somehow equivalent: both men were "consumed by abortion," according to another Post story (3/12/93) that was headlined "Doctor, Accused Killer both Impassioned".

The World Trade Center bombing, a month earlier, had been reported without the talk of "impassioned" victims and terrorists "colliding." Nor were advocates of anti-Western terrorism turned into credible media commentators.

But after Pensacola, anti-abortion zealots, even criminals, were regularly sought out by media for their views. Many news organizations quoted John Burt, the regional director of Rescue America, the group whose anti-choice demonstration Michael Griffin attended on the day he shot Gunn. The Washington Post (3/13/93) cited Michael Bray, "another Project Rescue leader," without mentioning that Bray was a convicted clinic-bomber. (He'd targeted several abortion clinics and the offices of the National Abortion Federation and the ACLU.)

In late 1993 (12/8/93), Nightline's Ted Koppel hosted an in-studio discussion of doctor-killing. His only guests were Helen Alvare, a representative of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (which issued a statement post-Pensacola comparing the violence of murder with the "violence of abortion"), and Paul Hill, director of the anti-abortion group "Defensive Action," which advocates killing doctors on the grounds that abortion is violence.

Ted Koppel echoed this definition of violence when he opened the show by comparing the number of legal abortions with the number of murdered doctors--what he called "the latest casualty count from the battlefield between the pro-life and the pro-choice movements." Although terrorism is one of Koppel's favorite subjects--FAIR's study of Nightline counted 52 programs on the topic in 40 months (Extra!, 1-2/89)--the word "terrorism" was never used by him to describe anti-abortion violence. Instead, a sympathetic Koppel said that Hill's advocacy of murdering doctors raised a "very, very difficult moral question." (See Extra! Update, 2/94.)

Hill, like Griffin, was a protege of John Burt, whose group issued a wanted poster for Dr. John Bayard Britton, Gunn's replacement. The poster "exposed" Britton "for the butcher that he is." Seven months after his appearance on Nightline, Hill gunned down Britton and James Barrett, his escort, at the same Pensacola clinic.

See No Agenda

With all the media's familiarity with these "pro-lifers," it's surprising that Koppel, the Washington Post, the New York Times, et al. have had such a hard time cottoning on to the fact that militia men and anti-abortion zealots can sometimes be one and the same.

Not all anti-abortionists are advocates of violence, nor do all militias put stopping abortion on the top of their list of goals. But while it would be wrong to lump both groups entirely together, it's equally indefensible for mainstream media to have kept militia who target federal agents, and the anti-abortion militants who target feminists (and women, especially poor women), so far apart.

John Burt, a former Klansman, borrows tactics like his "wanted" posters from the KKK, and says that "fundamentalist Christians and those people [the KKK] are pretty close." (The Progressive, 10/94) Paul Hill told USA Today (3/7/94), "I could envision a covert organization developing -- something like a pro-life IRA."

Anti-abortion activists like these share agendas, rhetoric and tactics with the militia. Others, like Matthew Trewhella, director of Missionaries to the Preborn, have formed militia groups of their own. Trewhella pastors a church-based militia whose priority is defeating abortion. He's also a member of the National Committee of the U.S. Taxpayers Party (USTP), what Covert Action (Spring/95) calls "one of the largest poltical manifestations of the theocratic wing of the Christian right."

In 1994, Planned Parenthood released a video showing Trewhella speaking at a Wisconsin state USTP convention. "What should we do?" Trewhella asked. "We should do what thousands of people across the nation are doing. We should be forming militias." According to Planned Parenthood, the USTP sold a Free Militia manual on how to form an underground army. Defending the "right to life" against "legalized abortion" is the first of the manual's stated reasons why one should take up arms.

Following the December 1994 shootings of two health clinic workers in Brookline, Mass., Reuters ran an investigative story, "Chilling New Link Suspected Among Anti-Abortion Activists" (1/13/95), that connected Brookline murder suspect John Salvi with militia activism, but the Reuters piece was overwhelmingly ignored.

See No Link

In December 1994, NBC refused to air a segment of the program TV Nation in which Roy McMillan of the Mississippi-based Christian Action Group said that assassinating Supreme Court justices would be justifiable homicide, and that the pesident was in "probable harms way." TV Nation producer Michael Moore believes that the airing of the segment could have led to arrests that might have prevented the Brookline clinic killings. "It's a federal offense to say the president should be killed," Moore told USA Today (1/16/95). Eventually the interview aired on the BBC in Britain, but not in the U.S.

Long before the Oklahoma bombing sent reporters scrambling for militia information, mainstream media had Planned Parenthood's research. "All the national networks and the major dailies have had our material for over a year," Planned Parenthood's Fred Clarkson said in May 1995. But most national news outlets skipped the story. Last fall, in the wake of Paul Hill's arrest, Newsweek went so far as to commission a special investigation of rising right-wing violence, including anti-abortion militants and extremist militias.

After the Oklahoma City suspects turned out not to be Arabs, the networks' favorite terrorist experts were flummoxed, so producers had to find other people who knew something about militias. And national news outlets did turn to researchers like Clarkson and others who could draw the lines between various violent far-right movements. A news producer at one major cable network, however, rescinded an invitation for Clarkson to appear just hours before the scheduled broadcast. "He said they couldn't have someone from Planned Parenthood on about militias," Clarkson told Extra!, "because they'd have angry pro-life viewers calling in and they didn't want to take that heat."

That kind of intimidation does influence how these issues are covered. New York Times columnist Frank Rich has been one of the few journalists to pick up on the Planned Parenthood's information about Trewhella's involvement with militias--his column "Connect the Dots" ran April 30--but it's a connection that his own paper has been loath to make. After a May 15 press conference, Clarkson heard from reporters that the "evidence of a link" between anti-abortion and militia activity was inadequate.

"For some reason, the same blind eye that's been turned to the domestic terrorism we call clinic violence remains turned that way even when we have militia groups among whose major issues is being opposed to abortion," Clarkson told FAIR's CounterSpin radio show (5/19/95).

"When people say can you prove a link between militias and anti-abortion groups, I have to say no," said Clarkson. "There's no link. They're the same people in very many cases.... Abortion is part of the agenda. It's not a separate issue, it's the same."
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http://www.fair.org/extra/9507/militias-anti-abortion.html

mal
 
Richard Jewell: The media are fickle, they will make into a hero but the next day they will destroy your life. Richard Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser) was a security guard at a concert during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. He discovered a bomb and helped clear the area before it exploded. Two people died in the blast but many more would have perished if it hadn't been for his alertness. At first he is hailed as a hero but then a former employer holding a grudge suggests to the FBI that Richard might have planted the bomb. The nightmare begins. Olivia Wild plays a reporter who sleeps with an FBI Agent to get the story on Jewell (the real life journalist denies this). She writes a story which portrays Richard as a terrorist, she even hides in the back of Richard's lawyer's (Sam Rockwell) car to try and get more information She is a narcissist but not delusional, she gets the stories that makes the front page.

Director Clint Eastwood working from a screenplay by Billy Ray lets this tale unfold at a measured pace. Richard is eccentric, obsessive in his attention to detail but has also lost two law enforcement jobs to his inability to let minor things go. The scenes where this is revealed are carefully crafted. Richard is literally an innocent abroad who will incriminate himself if he opens his mouth. The predatory nature of Wilde is revealed in one shot where the shadows from blinds give her tiger stripes on her face. Rockwell puts in a powerful performance as lawyer Watson Bryant who has outwit the FBI's attempts to set Jewell up. Cathy Bates for once pays a sympathetic character, Richard's mother. She doesn't wield an axe, only infinitives are split. She deserves her Oscar nomination.

A powerful human drama of injustice, abuse of media power and also the failure of Federal Agencies to properly investigate a serious terrorist action. 9/10
 
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