April 15, 2005
Eric Rudolph - 'American terrorist'
Abortion clinics on alert after Olympic bomber calls for more violence against them.
By Tom Regan| csmonitor.com
Abortion clinics around the US are "bracing for attacks" after convicted murderer and Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph issued a "manifesto" justifying attacks against such clinics and their workers. Associated Press reports that federal officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are calling US clinics to make sure their security is up to date.
'When one of these extremists puts out a call to action, oftentimes others do try to follow in their footsteps,' said Vicki Saporta, head of the National Abortion Federation, which represents 400 US clinics. 'He clearly is speaking to the extremists who believe in justifiable homicide.'
Reuters reported Thursday that Mr. Rudolph pleaded guilty to the bombing of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, as well as to attacks on abortion clinics and a gay nightclub. Rudolph said "abortion, gay rights and the federal government" motivated him to attack the targets listed above.
AccessNorthGa.com reported that one of the people in the courtroom to see Rudolph's guilty plea was "Pendergrass Police Officer Richard Jewell, the man wrongly suspected in the Olympic Park bombing for a time."
In an editorial earlier this week, The Birmingham News said Rudolph's actions were "nothing short of terrorism and should be punished as such." The Courier-Journal.com of Louisville, Ky., also describes Rudolph as a "domestic terrorist."
An editorial in the Berkshire (Mass.) Eagle says that Rudolph is not just an "extremist" but is "an American terrorist." The editorial points out that his actions killed two people, wounded 120 others, and "terrorized" people in three states.
Curiously, the Justice Department allowed Mr. Rudolph to plead guilty and avoid the death sentence that in other circumstances the feds have been quite energetic in pursuing. The official explanation was that a trial and a death sentence would have made a "martyr" of this man, who as a high-profile fugitive for five years eluded a giant manhunt and became something of a folk hero in rural Appalachia....
Maybe the prosecutors thought they couldn't get him and so opted for an easy plea. But there are powerful people for whom the spectacle of an unrepentant murderer for the unborn, a clean-cut movie star handsome Christian terrorist, posed political problems. Better to defend life in the abstract, keep the focus on the enemy at the gates and keep skeletons like Eric Rudolph locked up in the closet.
Spokesmen for several anti-abortion groups said that while they agreed with Mr. Rudolph's beliefs about abortion, they did not agree with his statement that violent action was necessary. The Decatur (Ala.) Daily argues in an editorial that people should not see all of those who are opposed to abortion as being like Rudolph, whom the paper labels "a disgrace, even among murderers."
The victims of Rudolph's attacks say they "heard little remorse and a lot of defiance" during his appearence in an Alabama court on Wednesday. Voice of America reports that many of these people believe he should have received the death penalty, instead of four-consecutive life terms.
"Why should he sit in an air-conditioned prison and watch cable TV and spend the rest of his life loafing and doing nothing," says one woman.
"It's going to be a sad day for me, knowing that he will not get the death penalty for injuring all the other people plus myself," says Emily Lyons.
CNN reports that a government spokesman defended the plea bargain, saying that only after authorities had struck a deal with Rudolph did he reveal the various locations where he had hidden 250 pounds of dynamite.
Among the items was a fully constructed 25-pound dynamite bomb filled with 20 pounds of screws as shrapnel found across the street from the National Guard Armory in Murphy, North Carolina. The armory was where federal investigators set up their command post to search for Rudolph after witnesses pointed them to the area following the January 1998 bombing of a Birmingham women's clinic.
The Los Angeles Times reports that two key witnesses were at the heart of the case against Rudolph. Jermaine J. Hughes, who was a student at the University of Alabama at the time of the bombings, and attorney Jeff Tickal.
Mr. Hughes looked out his window the morning of the blast and saw one man walking away from the clinic as others walked toward it. Hughes followed the man (who turned out to be Rudolph) to a fast-food restaurant, where Hughes called the police with a description of Rudolph.
Mr. Tickal, who was in the same restaurant, overheard Hughes' call, and also decided to follow Rudolph. He wrote down the license plate number of Rudolph's truck on a coffee cup. Tickal described his efforts as an "automatic reaction."
Although neither man has asked for reward money, authorities say they may give them each half of the $1 million reward that was offered for Rudolph's capture.
As if to cement Rudolph's label as a terrorist, the Associated Press reports that he will likely spend 23 hours a day for the rest of his life in a small cell at the "Alcatraz of the Rockies," the "Supermax" prison in southern Colorado that is also home to "Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber; Richard Reid, who tried to ignite a shoe bomb on a trans-Atlantic flight; Ramzi Yousef, who was involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; and Terry Nichols, who helped carry out the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995."
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