Eric Rudolph is a convicted and confessed domestic terrorist. As summarized by the Associated Press, “Rudolph is scheduled to be sentenced to multiple life terms July 18 after pleading guilty in April to the deadly bombings at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and a Birmingham abortion clinic in 1998. He also admitted bombing a women’s clinic and gay bar in Atlanta in 1997.”
Rudolph spent five years simultaneously on the FBI’s Most Wanted List and on the lam in the backwoods of North Carolina, hiding out from the feds. Now he has published part of his story of life on the lam on the web site of the Army of God, a group many consider to be a domestic terrorist organization. Many of its members have been convicted of crimes against abortion providers, including murder, attempted murder, arson, bombing and kidnapping. They are hailed on the site as “Heroes of the Faith.”
Rudolph is listed among the “Prisoners For Unborn Children” who are defined as “Those incarcerated for saving unborn babies about to be murdered by babykilling abortionists.”
The AOG reports that the 5,500 word piece is “Eric Rudolph’s story while on the lam. Recently transcribed from a handwritten copy he sent.”
Its the tale of a survivalist and a revolutionary — acquiring the food he needed to survive in the woods, eluding capture, and living to fight another day. “Preparation is the key to success in most human endeavors, Rudolph writes, “but this is especially true when attempting to move two tons of grains twenty miles with no transportation or equipment, and doing this right under the noses of the two hundred F.B.I. agents who were looking for me.” Rudolph also discusses how he had planned to attack another abortion clinic as well as the FBI’s Rudolph-hunting headquarters, but he was unable to do so.
Rudolph suggests that his first story, won’t be the last. “But just wait until you hear about the time the cops took me to get some gas for my stolen truck. Maybe next time.”
The A tlanta Journal Constitution reports that Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Charles Stone, who was one of the lead investigators in the Rudolph case, says “Based upon the information contained in this, there’s no doubt it was written by Eric.”
Curiously, the newspaper reported only that the story “was posted on a Web site operated by an anti-abortion group head quartered in Virginia.” But it was not hard to guess which one. Rudolph’s are not the only writings by major criminals published by the Army of God.
Currently, the AOG has posted the entire text of a book by convicted murder Paul Hill, titled Mix My Blood with the Blood of the Unborn.
In 2001 AOG posted stories by Clayton Waagner while was on the FBI’s most wanted list. I wrote at the time on Salon.com: “Waagner, who escaped from the DeWitt County Jail in Clinton, Ill., in February and has eluded capture since, says he’s been driving across the country stalking abortion clinics, assembling a cache of weapons and compiling dossiers on clinic staff in order “to kill as many of them as I can.” Clayton made his threats on the ‘Clayton Waagner Message Board,’ hosted by the antiabortion Army of God.”
“‘Pray,’ he asks his supporters, ‘that every one I kill causes a hundred to quit.'”
…”‘Thanks to some very generous bank financing’ — an apparent reference to the Harrisburg heist (and, the FBI believes, possibly others), Waagner says he is ensconced in a ‘very secure safe house’ and has assembled ‘the tools I would need to wage war.'”
“Waagner is far from a populist antihero, merrily thumbing his nose at the cops. His beliefs and plans are more comparable to those of the grimly methodical Timothy McVeigh, the Aryan Republican Army and other violent far-right revolutionaries of the past decade, including, of course, the Army of God, a shadowy, loosely affiliated band of antiabortion terrorists who’ve taken responsibility for assorted clinic violence. Waagner envisions himself pitted against ‘the most powerful country in the world'” — a country that views him as a terrorist.”
“They’re right,” he declares. “I am a terrorist. And that’s the reason I’m posting this letter.”
The Army of God continues to celebrate the criminal exploits of the likes of Hill, Rudolph, and Waagner. Meanwhile, prochoice leaders, and former undercover FBI agent Mike German, believe that the support network that spawned and supported them needs to be further investigated.
[Crossposted from FrederickClarkson.com]
