By Nicholas Stix
Alex Linder Interview III Transcript, June 27, 2007
(Part of "The Knoxville Horror: Crime, Race, and the Media," October 31, 2007, VDARE.com
Linder Interview I
Linder Interview II)
Alex Linder and I spoke for the last time on June 27.
AL: You and I are the only ones who have really written substantively about this. I’m working on another piece myself.
What I did was, I went to the grave of Channon Christian. I tried to find his. I found the cemetery, but I couldn’t find the grave, and it was too late.
I went to the crime house, and that was funny, because there’s a white woman living there, super happy to be in that house.
NS: The house on Chipman Street?
AL: On Chipman Street, yeah. [Recalls what the woman told him.] “I mean, I saw it in the paper, and was like, ‘Oh, it’s come free at last! I’ve had my eye on this house for years.’”
NS: And she knows what happened there?
AL: [Chuckling] Yeah, she knows, they know what happened there! She’s – I wrote this up in my thing – she’s like, “I’m totally happy to be out of Union County.”
NS: Why, Union County’s worse?
AL: [Laughing] It’s like, well, see, this is the thing, it didn’t fit neatly into a racialist paradigm, but I reported it honestly. She said, “You know, ah, it’s a bunch of OD’ing rednecks, and kids running around, and lots of trailers and stuff,” and she was absolutely happy to be in that house. [To her:] Do you realize it’s the worst crime probably ever committed in Tennessee? “Yeah, yeah, no real problem with that….”
[I read Linder the rationalizations of NBC/WBIR news producer, Katie Allison Granju, insisting that the crimes had no connection to race whatsoever, that the fact that the attackers and victims were of different races was purely coincidental, and that anyone seeing a racial nexus is as dumb as the title character in The Jerk, who, upon seeing a bad guy shooting at him but hitting oil barrels, thinks the bad guy has it in for oil barrels.]
AL: That’s typical liberal tripe. They raped her for hours. Now, what do you imagine they were doing? They raped her in front of him. You don’t think there wasn’t some interest in humiliating him, and that wasn’t racial?
What’s dumbest of all about these people [like Granju] is probably they’re going to get that b---h [Coleman] to turn, and she’ll talk about what they were actually saying – is one possible way it will turn out. And then all of these people will have egg on their face, except they’ll just do what they do, which is ignore it.
NS: Well, actually, I don’t know if you recall this, but if you read Stephen Webster’s classic article on the Wichita Massacre, the prosecutor at the time in Wichita, Nola Foulston, avoided asking any questions [of the lone survivor] that could elicit such a response, such as “They said, ‘White this, white that….’”
AL: You probably do what I do, you google “Channon Christian,” and check Google blogs, don’t check the news, check the blogs, that’s where you’ll get not only that Granju stuff, but all kinds of stuff.
Look, Fred Reed wrote about this, like yesterday.
NS: Fred Reed?
AL: Fred Reed wrote about it. Not the rally, but he wrote about the crime and I guarantee, what all these guys are doing, they’re reading us “racists” who are pushing the envelope. But you know, we push the Jew thing, because integration is the real story here. Now, some of the guys get trapped up in was it a hate crime or not. Of course it was, but that’s beside the point. The point is that integration guarantees this stuff happens over and over and over. Until you get rid of that policy, it will continue to happen. And that’s what – they won’t allow you to say that in their media.
No matter what you say your motive is in holding these rallies, they’ll claim that it’s to get it called a hate crime. And I explained it over and over, I’m like, “Look, Sweetie, …”
NS: Explained to whom?
AL: Most of their people are saying something or spraying something. Versus 2 million real interracial crimes.
NS: Who were you explaining that to? You said, “I explained that to somebody.”
AL: I explained it to all the mainstream reporters I talked to. They don’t care; they won’t run it. The most we’ve ever pushed out of them was that Howard Witt, finally, in the very last subhead of his newspaper story, admitted that – he used the figure, I don’t know where he got it – 645,000 interracial crimes, 85 or 90 percent of which are black-on-white. That’s the most we’ve been able to force out of them. Not one will dare to print that there are 40,000 interracial rapes a year that are basically all black on white….
You can’t get that stuff into the junk media, as I’m calling it now. They will not print the stuff. That thing in the Chicago Tribune was the first ever I’ve seen in a big paper, where they’ve printed one statistic.
NS: A friend from Chicago sent me that article, and on his blog he explained – I was ready to explode because of all of the stuff that the article didn’t mention – but he emphasized that this is a mainstream, daily newspaper. With that caveat, it was amazing what the guy put in that article.
AL: We got that from the pressure of maybe a few dozen people doing it. It’s fired people up, I’ll tell you. We need to keep doing it, and keep more pressure on them.
And I called them out by name in my speech at the second [demonstration]. We got a DA here who can’t decide if he wants the death penalty. And there’s nothing but pressure from whites that will cause them to… [breaks off sentence]. They’re all indoctrinated, and they’re all politicized, and it’s a bad deal.
NS: Now, what do you think about the DA not making a stand about the death penalty?
AL: I think it’s going to take pressure from the white community to get him to change his mind. Again, I don’t fully know what his deal is, but from the little bit I’ve been able to gather, he’s basically against the death penalty. He’s made a couple of smartass comments, in that regard. But he also has approved it at least once, that I know of.
So, here’s the thing, the Jews control the country. They head up the white community, so white identity is illegal. According to them, you must never identify racially, because if you could, you’d come together and say, “Geez, this system is crazy. It’s killing us. And then, what do we do when our kids are killed? We go hold a candlelight vigil. This is a problem that has a solution….
Then we got into the whole thing with [Leonard] Pitts, and what have you. And he wrote about us.
[On June 3, Pulitzer Prize-winning, black syndicated Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts had mocked whites who are outraged over the Knoxville Horror, writing, “I have four words for them and any other white Americans who feel themselves similarly victimized.
“Cry me a river.”
Rather than Pitts getting pilloried and fired, a la Don Imus, the MSM, including his managing editor, Dave Wilson, have celebrated him, and portrayed him as a hero/victim. It seems he received hundreds of angry e-mails and letters, and neo-Nazi Bill White posted his address and telephone number on the Internet. The FBI has reportedly been investigating death threats against Pitts. Somehow, when those of us who expose the socialist MSM’s lies and racism get hate mail and death threats, the socialist MSM do not portray us as victim/heroes.
In a second column about the reaction to his racist column on the Knoxville Horror, Pitts lied about the target of his “Cry me a river” line, saying he just “gave that advice specifically to white supremacists yelling genocide and other stupid things.” I guess he just plum forgot about the “and any other white Americans who feel themselves similarly victimized” clause.
I condemn the individual who published Pitts’ personal information, and suggest that Pitts get a gun, if he hasn’t already, and be prepared to use it, if necessary, to defend himself and his loved ones. But so far, I’ve only read four of his columns, and he lied in each. The threats against Pitts do not retroactively vindicate his racism or his lies. Pitts needs to find a more suitable trade for a compulsive, racist liar, such as politics or the law.]
AL: We got four or five national mentions of this [the rallies].
NS: It was VNN that posted the personal information of Pitts, right, or was it …
AL: Bill White did it. We probably have more readers than he does. But he does that, but I approve of it. Personal pressure is the only thing those people understand. They will never treat you fairly.
I challenged the guy to a debate. I put up $5,000 of my money. “I will debate you any time, any place, anywhere.” You know, he’s a syndicated columnist and a Pulitzer Prize winner? It’s a symptom of a sick and wrong system.
NS: Now, you contacted Pitts?
AL: All kinds of our guys e-mailed him, and I posted publicly the challenge, whatever, I didn’t contact him personally. I just wrote what I wrote, I kind of [unclear] his article, and made my points. And I said, “I’ll debate you anywhere, anytime, on race and crime.”
I tried to get on CNN, after our rally. They had James Edwards and Hal Turner. I said, get me on there with one of those – with Jesse Jackson or [unclear]
NS: Are you talking about the June 16 rally?
AL: After our first rally [May 26], I came back, and I talked to one of the chicks producing the Paula Zahn show. But you know, I’m out [unclear], it’s been a long day. They got James Edwards on there, he did a great job.
NS: I’m not familiar with James Edwards.
AL: He does The Political Cesspool radio show.
NS: Oh, yes, yes, yes.
[One month later, Edwards had me on as a guest, to talk about the Knoxville Horror. He was a very gracious host.]
AL: He was on there, and so was a pre-recorded clip of Hal Turner, who spoke after I was arrested.
So, that was the first national mention of this case. Well, it wasn’t technically the first, but it was really the first where it was more than about one minute. It was about eight-and-a-half minutes. They went into it. And they kind of took up, “Is the media covering this up?” And then they took the hate crime angle on it a little bit. So, they didn’t really frame it right, but it was the first thing, and it was purely because of our rally. Our rally was the only reason the AP did a story like the Monday before.
They’re so evil and vile. Their whole thing was to put the liberal spin and their own agenda in the mouths of the parents of the victims.
They were working on the Christians. Gary Christian wore a Confederate shirt to like the first hearing that he ever went to [in mid-January], and made the motion of the gun [at defendant Eric Boyd].
Well, they kind of got him to back up, to say, “Well, that was the only shirt in my closet; my wife is kind of mad about that”; and a couple of other little things. So, they’re kind of pressuring him.
But the Newsoms say straight up, they don’t think it started out as a hate crime, “but we think it turned into that.” She said, Mary said, “I don’t know, what else could have motivated it?”
The media is totally interested in that red herring, “Is it a hate crime?” Writing about double-standards won’t do anything. You gotta get rid of this system. And I know who created the system, and I know why they created it.
NS: [chuckling] We’ve been down that road before, so I’m not going to waste any time on it.
AL: No, there’s no point talking, because we probably disagree about that, so I’m just trying to describe to you … There’s one thing I wanted to mention. You would probably know more about this than me, since your black supremacy, etc. There was a report that said overtly that Davidson was a Black Gangster Disciple.
NS: Right. Yes, he was, in jail.
AL: Now, you tell me. Isn’t that prima facie evidence of a hate crime?
NS: Well, that’s what I wrote. I wrote that as one of my arguments in American Renaissance [July, 2007].
AL: What you did, I used. I don’t mean that I quoted you. What I mean was, when I got up there and gave my speech, all of the other guys are Klan guys, and they’re all talking about, “Oh, we got to call this a hate crime,” and they’re yelling about, “Bring back the rope.” That’s nice, but it’s kind of emotional froth.
But I said the only thing we can do for Channon Christian is there’s two things. This is from you: We can get the autopsy report on what actually happened, A. And B, we can demand this a-----e DA give them the death penalty. And that was more or less influenced by what you said. But now, see, these kids at the gravesite that I talked to basically said they didn’t release any reports.
So, the cops are insisting – I’ve had numerous cops say to me, “Oh, no, no, they weren’t sexually mutilated, absolutely not,” and “They were not members of the Black Gangster Disciples.”
But that appeared in one of those local reports, right?
NS: Right.
AL: Isn’t that what you were drawing it from?
NS: Yeah, yeah.
AL: Right, and it appeared one time in one local posting from like a TV station.
NS: Right.
AL: Affiliate. And after that, no one has said anything about it. So, how can we believe anything these cops say?
They were talking about how I assaulted them. “Oh yeah, attacking the police.” B------t!
NS: Wait, is this June 16, they were talking about it?
AL: The cops that I talked to that day [May 26], in the process of being arrested and booked [unclear], and the guards and what have you.
But then, the father of, I think Chris Newsom, said he was in parts. [If Hugh Newsom said that, it could have been the result of his son having been set on fire.]
NS: The father of Chris Newsom said that?
AL: I’m pretty sure there’s somewhere that he said the guy was at least somewhat dismembered. Now, maybe that’s not the same as sexual mutilation, but unless we raise the pressure on these people, they are not going to say anything.
You made a good point, the Wichita thing. Maybe that is how they’ll try to play it.
Another smart guy told me he thinks though [Vanessa] Coleman might roll over, that she realizes that, “Hey, maybe I can get out of this. I didn’t initiate it.” But she joined in on it, too.
So, nothing short of pressure from the white community will move this corrupt elite an inch.
NS: Do you see the white community in Knoxville applying any pressure?
AL: We are. We got some locals. Not that they would ever mention this. They totally played it like, what they did at the first rally is, they’d go up to people and say, “Where you from?” So, it’s the total flip of the so-called civil rights era. They took pains to emphasize that we’re out-of-towners who were there to stir up trouble.
They didn’t accept that when they were bringing about the situation that got Channon and Chris killed. And now they cover it up – and they have to cover it up.
It’s not about bias or double-standards. They have to cover it up. The system is based on opening whites up for Jews and minorities to eat off. And that’s what they fear. I tell you, I can feel that fear. They’re very strong, but man, it’s – they know what’s underneath that. And if we get to people with the message, “Here’s what’s going on. This society’s being operated for Jews for their benefit and they’re using minorities to eat you, and to knock you down, to prevent you from talking about it, that’s what’s actually going on. It’s just bad faith and terrorism, all the way around. This crime can be laid at the feet of integration.
And I’ll tell you what. We haven’t had the last rally. I can’t tell you when we’ll do another, but we’re not done with it. Now, remember, the trials are coming up next May. And the only thing that makes this worth talking about is, it’s equivalent to Martin Luther King.
If integration is good – and that’s how I start off talking about, well this is its fruit – I want all of you people who are for integration to stand up, and look at this and say, “Yes, that’s the fruit of integration. Forty-thousand white women raped a year, tens of thousands of white men killed.” And you know, you’re a big stats guy, maybe I got this from you or someone else. They said before civil rights, I think this figure is from ’58, like three percent of all rapes on both sides were interracial.
So, basically the two communities were [unclear]. And that was freedom. That’s what freedom is. And see, the Jews did it, and you may not want to believe it, but that’s who it was. They’re going to, buying Congress, and they’re writing the laws. It may be white guys out front, but it’s Jews writing the laws. They go in there, and they say, “No, you can’t have that freedom. No, you can’t protect your community with segregation. They smear free association, and they call it “segregation,” and they call it “apartheid.” Of course, they don’t call it that in Israel. You know when they built walls – why can’t we come up with laws or walls to protect our Channon Christians and Chris Newsoms? No, we’re supposed to be open to being preyed on by those, those feral savages. And unless whites identify as white and fight back, the system will just keep a lid on it.
And I’ll tell you what I’ve personally observed and learned is, you see how democracy is supposed to function. The media are supposed to be a check on the cops and the politicians. But the truth of the matter is, the media, the politicians, and the cops are on the same side, and they form an elite that is corrupt and very, very hostile to the ordinary people. And man, did I perceive that. They f----n’ hate me.
Those reporters are talking, the cameramen …
NS: Were they openly hostile?
AL: I’m saying, “We’re telling the people what’s really going on. You’re covering up the truth. How do you call yourselves reporters? You’re obscurers.”
And man, they’re all sniggering, and the little Oriental b---h is rolling her eyes, and tapping her foot.
Oh, f—k them. They’re wrong.
They have very good reason to fear, because I’m just the first of what’s going to be just a pouring out of people sick of what’s going on in this country.
Immigration is probably an even better place to look at it, right now. The elite is corrupt and hostile to the interests of the people. I mean, when you’ve got that kind of a government, that’s a revolutionary situation. All it takes is people not having enough to eat, or TV going off or some kind of calamity.
NS: [Laughing] TV; the TV’ll do it.
AL: If the TV’s on, they can probably keep controlling things, but if something goes off, there’s nothing in the refrigerator, or the TV goes off, who knows what will happen. But a lot of people are getting angry, and you can see it building up.
We got four or five kind of national articles out of that. If there’s constant agitation, it will work. ‘Cause everyone’s starting to …
NS: Now, when you say “national articles,” you’re talking about the May 26 rally.
AL: No, I’m talking about – what I mean by national is something that’s basically picked up, it’s not just in Knoxville. I mean, like the AP story before our rally was picked up almost everywhere. Why? Because it put the liberal spin in the mouths of the parents of the victims. Then the AP story and the local stuff after the rally was reprinted in the Chicago Tribune. You had Leonard Pitts, right, the syndicated black columnist, Pulitzer Prize-winner. He wrote an article talking about it, ending with “Cry me a river.” Bill White made that personal, and, you know, we played along with it because that’s the only way you get a response. That’s still going on.
NS: But what do you think about the death threats against Pitts?
AL: Oh, I don’t know that he’s received any death threats. All I know is he’s claimed he’s received 400 e-mails. Death threats? He’s got – I’ve got death threats. I’ve called the FBI about death threats. They couldn’t care less of the death threats.
These are completely corrupt, hostile organizations. I could tell you as many stories as you want to hear about the FBI going in and helping foreign governments who don’t have the First Amendment, shut down white Web sites. That’s what’s going on. I mean, they serve a hostile elite. And, you know, we have to press back, we have to fight back, how we can.
Poor Leonard. He’s got a syndicated column. I mean that thing he wrote, that ended with “Cry me a river,” that was reprinted from coast to coast. He’s basically – and you know what? If you dig up his past words, he’s anti-white. He has fun terrorizing whites with threats of racism.
I mean, I don’t like this system. I’m qualified to be a syndicated columnist. I’d like to have that nice income and nice lifestyle that go with it. You know? Why should he have it? He’s not as talented as I am. He doesn’t know anything. He’s not clever. He’s just another stupid n----r who, unlike a thousand others, he can actually string together two or three sentences. But I guarantee, he’s never written anything worthy of a Pulitzer.
NS: No, no, that was a political award. I’ve read a few of his pieces on black-on-white crime and the Duke rape hoax, and the “Cry me a river” column was actually fairly typical of him, except that he got more dramatic. He didn’t show that he had absolute contempt for white crime victims in the past.
AL: He sure did. And look at his little crybaby response… [Unclear] You have to make it personal.
You can’t get any redress from our controlled media anymore than you can from our controlled politicians.
Look, I say this stuff all day, I write it. The people voted time after time. They vote against affirmative action. They vote against open borders. And what do you get? The people who control the courts just throw it out. They don’t care. They don’t care what the people want.
We are the Democrats who represent whites. We speak for what the people want. They don’t want this insanity. There’s nothing suicidal about the white race. They just want to live as they are, but all the authorities have been so corrupted for so long that people – it’s like being hit by successive waves. You don’t know whether you’re up or down.
So, I’m trying to lead a kind of a new elite, saying “Here’s what’s going on, here’s the cause for all this.” You have to get to what’s causing it, not just endlessly talk about the symptoms, the manifestation. That’s my problem with AmRen.
NS: But you don’t have a lot of followers, right now.
AL: We have probably more than we’ve ever had. We got a good surge from the thing, and we’re not a formal group, either. But maybe we’ll move in that direction, we’re trying to.
NS: Are you familiar with a Village Voice article that came out in June…
AL: About Kelso and them? About Stormfront?
NS: Right. About them having the day of – on May 26, on that weekend – of them having a get-together in New York, I think it was, yeah. That they went to New York City, instead of to the rally. She didn’t mention the rally at all, Maria Luisa Tucker, the writer. But while you guys were in Knoxville, they were in New York.
AL: Yeah, well, we’ve had some hostilities with them, but I tried to mend fences with [unclear]. Kelso was at the June one, and producing it, and getting it up there.
You know, I don’t control what other people do, some of them haven’t liked the way I’ve gone about it, but I don’t care. We’re doing it the right way, and…
NS: No, but I’m just wondering why they would be in New York. Was that intended as a slight against the Knoxville rally … organizers?
AL: I don’t know. [Chuckling] You’d have to ask them.
NS: Were they unaware of it? They couldn’t have been unaware of the Knoxville rally.
AL: Oh, well, no, I don’t know if they allowed ... They may have changed now, they may not have been posting stuff about VNN. Some of them really haven’t liked VNN in the past, and they’ve worked against us or they’ve prevented people from talking about our rallies. That’s just how it is. It’s kind of sad. I hope it’s changed a little, but in the end, you know, we do what we do at VNN, and move forward and don’t worry about that.
And I think it’s a little better after the second one. It wasn’t hosted by them, it was hosted by a third party [the Rev. Ken Gregg], and he invited everyone, and it all seemed to work out fairly well.
NS: The fellow from “ABC.”
AL: Yeah. Well, I think that was a kind of an ad hoc group put together. The guy’s an old-time organizer, old-time Klan guy who used to work with [North Carolina Klansman, White Patriot Party founder, and sometime Linder associate] Glen Miller.
NS: So, he was an old Klan man?
AL: I think so. I think he’s Klan and CI right now.
NS: CI?
AL: Gregg, that is. CI, Christian Identity. Now, I’m not any of that, but it’s kind of a pan-racial gathering.
NS: Now, the news media said that very few people showed up for the second rally.
AL: There were probably more people than at the first one. I would say there were a hundred to 200 people. It’s hard to tell, because there’s photographers in there, and there’s other people you don’t know if they’re pro or not. No, there were plenty of people there.
NS: Now, I have to backtrack here.
AL: I wish there were thousands. But there [unclear]. But there were probably more than the first one. I had Pat tell me there were a hundred at the first one; I’d say there were probably more like 200 at the second one.
NS: Well, the media claimed there were less than 30 for your rally, the first time.
AL: They claimed that.
NS: You think there were about 100 the first time?
AL: That’s what one of my guys told me, but I can’t tell you, because I didn’t really see it.
NS: Right. Because you were…
AL: I was arrested before it started.
NS: This is about the behavior of the reporters. At the first rally, I know from their own videos that they were going up to every demonstrator from your rally, and asking him where he was from. Are you aware of them asking any of the counter-demonstrators where they were from?
AL: No….
It was a curious thing…. We told people, “Just dress up, we’re not going to absolutely ban it, but we really don’t want swastikas and that kind of stuff.” Trying to focus on the crime here. And so one guy – this was very odd. And he was supposedly a local, is what we were trying to determine, so he may well have been a plant or something. He looked o.k., but he had a swastika red shirt on. That was odd, and of course, the cameras focused on that. And that could well be a dirty trick or a plant or something. But other than that, our guys dressed pretty good, they looked pretty good.
NS: So, no one knew who the heck that guy was.
AL: Well, maybe someone does. All I’ve heard is that he was supposedly someone local. But he was certainly no one I knew. And no one that the people I know, no one stepped forward, he hasn’t stepped forward, so I had to assume he was a plant or someone pretending, deliberately there to show that swastika, so they could go, “Hate, swastika came to downtown Knoxville.”
They lie, anyway. I really despise the controlled media.
NS: Now, were reporters again asking demonstrators where they were from during the June 16 rally?
AL: That’s a good question. I’m not really sure. I’ve read pretty much all the news articles, but I haven’t seen all the videos.
NS: But you’ve read all the articles you could find.
AL: All of the articles are on a thread at VNN Forum that I could find…
NS: Of the June 16 rally.
AL: And they’re all pretty much there. And then I tried to [unclear] the blog stuff I could find.
NS: I want you to tell me about the behavior of the reporters at the June 16 rally, vs. the reports that they wrote up. Were they professional?
AL: That’s hard to say. I can just say, ok, they were shooting the camera, they’re watching me to see if I’d do anything squirrelly, a little bit. [NS chuckles.]
All I can tell you is they interviewed Ken Gregg. A blonde woman interviewed him, I don’t know who she was with, he was the organizer. After I was done speaking, I talked to a kid [Matt Lakin] from the News Sentinel, the main paper there, for a long while. And I noticed, they sent him. The first rally, they’d had it covered by Jamie Satterfield, and she – thank God, they used a good picture that helped our side, but the story itself was remarkably biased. And she basically implied that we who were protesting this crime and the system that produced it were tormenting and torturing the parents. And she doesn’t [unclear] refer to Letalvis and Lemaricus, they were totally, they cover up the details of it.… So, she’s a typical liberal….
Matt Lakin, and I talked to him [at the second rally]. He treated me more fairly, but that’s a little more how it is, when you’re direct and personal with them, and they think you might be coming back. And once you look in their eyes, and kind of talk to them a little bit, and like, “Hey, c’mon, bro, I want to be treated as fairly as anybody else,” but you get those local TV c---s, they are f----n’ …
NS: This is Jamie Satterfield’s story on the May 26 rally, “Slaying victims lost in the furor.”
AL: How are they lost, when we’re holding a rally about them?! Like they’re writing these stories anyway, like the AP cares. And here’s the thing, this may be a point you can use. They act like, “Oh, everyone’s sick of hearing the details,” but they never really put out the details. And they acted like everyone was sick of hearing the details about Day Two onward. Let’s linger on them a little bit. Not one paper has tried to evoke the horror and misery those people went through, right? Not one of them has done any emotional flavor or color piece, where they really dig into what this must have been like. You know, because then it becomes obvious, if you’ve been raped for hours and hours on end, there’s a little bit of hate involved there. They don’t ever dramatize or put into color what happened. And they won’t put it in statistical context, either. So, they play their game like, “Yeah, we’ve been talking about this all along. We’ve covered AP; we’ve covered [unclear]”; blah, blah, blah, since it happened. Explain that the only AP stories that ever get picked up are the ones that are putting the leftist spin on it, that it had nothing to do with race….
I mean, here’s the thing. They can be legitimate reporters. The point is, you’ve got guys 20 miles away who’ve never heard of it [prior to the Internet agitations and rallies.] It just stays within – of course, the town where it is, is going to cover it, to some extent. They’re still not going to really cover it exactly right, I wouldn’t say. But it’s never allowed to escape there. And then, yeah, I would say the [May 18] AP story was where it started getting really propagandistic. When they realized, what, these guys are going to try and make it a national issue and a famous case, and now we’ve got to go and preventively, and defuse any racial anger and give them a bogus explanation of what happened, “Oh, it’s nothing to do with race,” and just keep a lid on. Never report the crime in true context. And they uniformly do that.
And just the little pressure we’ve been able to put on them has forced concessions from them. I mean, that’s the Chicago Tribune story, right there.
Why would they even write about it, or talk about it, unless they – a lot of them, the ones who aren’t Jews, they really do have some concept that they’re not doing their job. They know that they’re subject to these political pressures, right? They know that if they tell the truth about crime, you just can’t do that. You can’t really explain to white people what’s going on. That’s, that [chuckling], the system will blow at that point.
NS: How is it that the only reporter that’s put the story in context is a Jew?
AL: You haven’t put it in context.
NS: Oh!
AL: I’ve put it in context. [NS laughs.] No; you pretended not to understand that integration, which is a Jewish production, is the cause of this. That’s the difference. You’ve done a good job reporting a lot of the details, but you haven’t ultimately explained, we have a system in which blacks are allowed to prey on whites. Who set up that system? That’s the point that matters. And my answer, [chuckles] easily demonstrable, it’s the Jews who set it up, and then they cover up the crimes. All those papers are run by Jews; you know that. The Chicago Tribune’s even owned by Jews….
NS: I want to go over another thing that we talked about last time, so that I have it on tape. You told me that you do not identify yourself as a neo-Nazi.
AL: I never really identify what I am. I usually say, conservative. They’re such a useless bunch of cowards that [chuckles]. My background is Edmund Burke, and solid conservative thinkers, and then mixed in with them, some of the Germans.
NS: And you also said you don’t think of yourself as a white nationalist.
AL: No, I do. I just don’t like to go in for [names?]. I want people to focus on what I say, not what I call myself. Whatever. It doesn’t matter; they call me whatever they want [unclear]. I’m focused on my message, and putting it out in every possible forum, and get the labels out of the way. Judge based on what I’m saying. Check it out for yourself. See, that’s what honest men say. They say, “Check it out for yourself.” They don’t smear you, like the controlled media do.
They don’t have a case. Their case is loaded into the terms, so that everyone knows they’re supposed to hate our people without ever thinking about it, or questioning what they say.
NS: Now, put yourself in the position of people reading about you, say from this interview, when it comes out, or hearing something you said, and they read about your charges against the Jews. How do you think they’re going to identify you, politically?
AL: I don’t know – let me put it this way. The AP story that came out after my arrest said I fought the police. Now, there’s visual evidence that’s not the case. But when the media has it loaded against you, you’re this evil, hateful Nazi, well, what would an evil, hateful Nazi do? Why, of course, he would attack the police. They’re very violent people. So, that’s the fictional story put out by the controlled media, and they maintain a blockade against the facts. They are not reporters, they’re simply agenda-pushers and obscurers.
The great part is now that everyone in America has a digital camera, and can go to these events and tape it among themselves, I’m not even sure why we talk about those guys any longer….
NS: Is there anything else that’s on your mind that you’d like to say?
AL: I want to win you over to make you a Jewish Nazi….
Anyway, it’s good to talk to you.
NS: Same here.
AL: You, Satterfield, and me are probably three who’ve written about it more than anyone, I would think. And isn’t that kind of scary, in a way?
NS: Yes, yes, it is….
AL: The liberals can be – essentially, they’re cultists, because you can’t be a liberal and admit evidence into your head. You have to be with a bunch of other people who are all agreed on thinking a certain way, and [say to] reality, “Just stay out of there.” And they don’t like anything that intrudes on that. And the Jews have channeled this.
I consider it like, probably only a minority of whites would be liberal naturally, and they’d be controlled by the sane majority. But the Jews use this, and they channel liberalism for their own ends, and they are much better organized than any other class in society. I mean, that’s easily provable. And they use their organizing to prevent us from organizing. All they have to do when they control these top organs is demonize us, and just call us “haters,” and imply that we have some moral or medical problem, rather than we’re honest men making our case. That’s why we say “We’re the good guys.” We make our case honestly. We back it up with evidence, and that’s how you do it.
NS: I have to warn you, I’m going to have to cherry pick this interview, because I’ve already got something like 4,000 words from the first one….
AL: I have mixed feelings about you, I’m sure you have mixed feelings about me, but you’re writing about this, you’re talking about this, I’m learning from what I’m hearing from you, and hopefully, you’re getting some stuff from me that maybe you haven’t seen. You gotta really check the links on there [at VNN].
Basically, what’s happened is the media’s not really relevant. But for the actual coverage of this stuff, they’re completely irrelevant. It’s all our guys doing video and writing about this. And guys like you, who are writing and using some of the facts. I don’t think you’re going as far as you can, but I understand. How are you gonna see Jews as bad people? You have an inherent reason not to see it that way.
NS: Well, of course, I know that we’re the chosen people. [AL laughs]. But I can warn you; people are going to have very strange responses to this piece. They’re going to have strange responses not just to you, but to me.
AL: Just quote me correctly, and try to get out the essence of my point of view, and I’m happy.
Friday, October 26, 2007
The White Supremacist, the Jew, and the Knoxville Horror, Part II
By Nicholas Stix
Alex Linder Interview II Transcript, June 7, 2007
(Part of "The Knoxville Horror: Crime, Race, and the Media," October 31, 2007, VDARE.com))
Linder Interview I
Linder Interview III
On June 7, I spoke with Alex Linder about his May 26 arrest.
The following interview is choppier than the first, with many indirect quotes, because it is from my notes, which could not keep up with Linder’s rapid-fire speech. But since much of the content repeated the previous conversation – Jews, Jews, Jews – the losses were minimal.
NS: Were you trying to get arrested?
AL: "No, I was not. I walked where I needed to go to speak to the public….
"It wasn’t posted or anything [that demonstrators were not permitted in the street].
"They came up, threw me on the ground…. The whole thing took about 15-20 seconds.
"What they did was – the officer’s foot, he’s tripping me – they took me down very quickly. They were grinding away [pushing his face bloody into the street, and giving him sore ribs]. They didn’t punch me."
Linder couldn’t figure out what the vandalism charge referred to, speculating that perhaps police “claim I broke their camera."
AL: “I know that I didn’t grab them. It’s amazing.
“As you know, I didn’t file a permit for this…. I didn’t want to. They just acted as if I filed the permit.
“People – it’s just so long since they’ve seen an American.” [Linder is referring to what he understands to be the proper exercise of a citizen’s First Amendment rights.]
“They assaulted me, as if I’d applied for a permit, as if I’d agreed to the conditions.”
Linder insisted he didn’t resist police. I believe him.
Linder would not call himself a neo-Nazi or white supremacist.
“A lot of times I would say, ‘conservative.’ A lot of the background is conservatives.”
He spoke of “The Germans – Nietzsche, Spengler, Hitler and Goebbels,” and of American Lothrop Stoddard.
Linder also cited the Italian conservative revolutionary, Julius Evola: “I don’t see the stuff as very complex. It’s basically the Jews took over.” (According to this Evola passage, Linder has misinterpreted him.)
Linder maintains that he is “a Burkean conservative,” which will likely come as a shock to fans of Edmund Burke, who emphasized the natural, free-flowing character of social institutions, and who shunned radicalism, as well as to the WS/NN/W world. (I am unaware of any passages in Burke that call for slaughtering Jews.)
Linder suggests I visit the German Propaganda Archive, which contains, among other things, speeches by Hitler and Goebbels: “It’ll turn you into a Jewish Nazi.”
(Would a “Jewish Nazi” kill other Jews, or simply commit suicide?)
At one point, Linder notes of the motivation for the rally, “If this were just a one-off [a unique crime], we wouldn’t be rallying.”
In case anyone suspects I’ve exaggerated Linder’s genocidal anti-Semitism, I’ll quote him one more time from the interview:
“Every Jew in the world ought to be afraid of true justice. I would set up a world trial [for the Jews] like American Idol. Once the people heard the evidence, they’d say they have to be done away with.”
Note that Linder is also a Holocaust-denier. I’ve never understood why admirers of Hitler would deny that the Holocaust took place. Holocaust-denial makes the Führer sound like a failure. I would think that Hitlerites would be shouting from the rooftops, “He did it! The Führer killed half the world’s Jews!”
In spite of his plan to kill all of the world’s Jews, Linder is a most gracious interview subject. When my defective Maxell tape snaps, he offers suggestions for technical alternatives to tape recorders, and agrees to permit me to interview him a third time.
Alex Linder Interview II Transcript, June 7, 2007
(Part of "The Knoxville Horror: Crime, Race, and the Media," October 31, 2007, VDARE.com))
Linder Interview I
Linder Interview III
On June 7, I spoke with Alex Linder about his May 26 arrest.
The following interview is choppier than the first, with many indirect quotes, because it is from my notes, which could not keep up with Linder’s rapid-fire speech. But since much of the content repeated the previous conversation – Jews, Jews, Jews – the losses were minimal.
NS: Were you trying to get arrested?
AL: "No, I was not. I walked where I needed to go to speak to the public….
"It wasn’t posted or anything [that demonstrators were not permitted in the street].
"They came up, threw me on the ground…. The whole thing took about 15-20 seconds.
"What they did was – the officer’s foot, he’s tripping me – they took me down very quickly. They were grinding away [pushing his face bloody into the street, and giving him sore ribs]. They didn’t punch me."
Linder couldn’t figure out what the vandalism charge referred to, speculating that perhaps police “claim I broke their camera."
AL: “I know that I didn’t grab them. It’s amazing.
“As you know, I didn’t file a permit for this…. I didn’t want to. They just acted as if I filed the permit.
“People – it’s just so long since they’ve seen an American.” [Linder is referring to what he understands to be the proper exercise of a citizen’s First Amendment rights.]
“They assaulted me, as if I’d applied for a permit, as if I’d agreed to the conditions.”
Linder insisted he didn’t resist police. I believe him.
Linder would not call himself a neo-Nazi or white supremacist.
“A lot of times I would say, ‘conservative.’ A lot of the background is conservatives.”
He spoke of “The Germans – Nietzsche, Spengler, Hitler and Goebbels,” and of American Lothrop Stoddard.
Linder also cited the Italian conservative revolutionary, Julius Evola: “I don’t see the stuff as very complex. It’s basically the Jews took over.” (According to this Evola passage, Linder has misinterpreted him.)
Linder maintains that he is “a Burkean conservative,” which will likely come as a shock to fans of Edmund Burke, who emphasized the natural, free-flowing character of social institutions, and who shunned radicalism, as well as to the WS/NN/W world. (I am unaware of any passages in Burke that call for slaughtering Jews.)
Linder suggests I visit the German Propaganda Archive, which contains, among other things, speeches by Hitler and Goebbels: “It’ll turn you into a Jewish Nazi.”
(Would a “Jewish Nazi” kill other Jews, or simply commit suicide?)
At one point, Linder notes of the motivation for the rally, “If this were just a one-off [a unique crime], we wouldn’t be rallying.”
In case anyone suspects I’ve exaggerated Linder’s genocidal anti-Semitism, I’ll quote him one more time from the interview:
“Every Jew in the world ought to be afraid of true justice. I would set up a world trial [for the Jews] like American Idol. Once the people heard the evidence, they’d say they have to be done away with.”
Note that Linder is also a Holocaust-denier. I’ve never understood why admirers of Hitler would deny that the Holocaust took place. Holocaust-denial makes the Führer sound like a failure. I would think that Hitlerites would be shouting from the rooftops, “He did it! The Führer killed half the world’s Jews!”
In spite of his plan to kill all of the world’s Jews, Linder is a most gracious interview subject. When my defective Maxell tape snaps, he offers suggestions for technical alternatives to tape recorders, and agrees to permit me to interview him a third time.
The White Supremacist, the Jew, and the Knoxville Horror
Alex Linder Interview I Transcript, April 6, 2007
(Part of "The Knoxville Horror: Crime, Race, and the Media," October 31, 2007, VDARE.com)
Linder Interview II
Linder Interview III
Nicholas Stix (NS): You told me [in your email] that you’re holding the rally on May 26th.
Alex Linder (AL): Correct.
NS: So that will be Memorial Day Weekend?
AL: Yeah.
NS: And do you have any idea how many people you expect, or hope to get to show up?
AL: No, I really don’t. We’re advertising it on our forum, and wherever we can. And we are going to do some prep work to get the general public, but all are welcome, so we’ll see.
NS: Right. And do you have any idea of speakers you intend to invite?
AL: Yeah, I’m going to speak, we’re going to have Hal Turner speak, probably have Ed Fields speak.
NS: Ed Field [sic]?
AL: Yeah, and possibly one or two others.
NS: Now, I don’t have to tell you that this, these crimes have undergone a media blackout, in terms of the national media.
AL: That’s correct.
NS: How do you explain that?
AL: Well, it’s the Jewish media control. And the fact that any kind of non-white crime doesn’t fit their agenda, so they suppress it.
NS: Now, various reports have been published in, on blogs – both white and black blogs, oddly enough – which have claimed that both victims were sexually mutilated. I’m sure you’re familiar with these reports.
AL: Yes.
NS: No officials in local law enforcement in Knoxville or federal law enforcement have made these reports, to my knowledge. I’ve spoken with people, and they’ve refused to make any statements. Well, they’ve variously said they don’t know, the feds have, and local law enforcement has refused to confirm or disconfirm any of these reports. Do you have any idea where these reports have emanated from?
AL: Well, as best I can tell, they’re coming from people who are inside there who are relating it through [sighs] oh, by the time you get in a blog it’s either second or third person, but what are you gonna do? This stuff is always hushed up.
[Chuckles]. I would have to [pauses] Oh, God. I spent a couple of nights reading through everything and there’s, that’s out there, and it’s pretty clear it’s coming from the cop, investigation that they, that they sodomized ‘em, and they pissed on ‘em, and they dumped chemicals on ‘em.
NS: No, no, no. That’s not what I’m talking about.
AL: They covered it up. They cover it up.
NS: The documents, no the documents, the official documents show that they’ve been charged formally with having raped both members of the couple, the man and the woman. And with having raped the woman orally, vaginally, and anally. This is not at issue.
AL: Yeah.
NS: The issue is the charge, the claims that the, Mr. Newsom was sexually dismembered, and which would presumably be while he was alive, and that um that Ms. Christian had her breasts chopped off.
But there’s actually no apparent beef. The mainstream media outlet, the Knoxville News [Sentinel], did publish reports that the killers poured cleaning fluid down Ms. Christian’s mouth while she was alive, supposedly to get rid of DNA. So that’s not, I mean, that’s actually been in the mainstream media, the local media, of course. So, but the issue, the reports that have not been published by any mainstream media outlet are the blog reports charging the sexual mutilation of the victims.
AL: So, what?
NS: Hmm?
AL: So, what?
NS: No, I was just wondering if you had any sources.
AL: Look, you’re writing for AmRen [American Renaissance].
NS: Right.
AL: AmRen wants to focus on the crime.
NS: Right.
AL: And obsess about it. I’m interested in the systemic nature of this problem, which is why it’s being suppressed. And that goes to the Jewish control. The Jews are the ones who produce the policies that ensure that this stuff happens. That’s the important thing here. Yeah, the fact is they were, any way you want to cut it, they were murdered, they were raped, and they were tortured, a combination of those. I know [American Renaissance editor Jared] Taylor wants to get people obsessing about that but that’s not the important thing here. The important thing here is that the Jews set up the system that allows this stuff to happen. It literally facilitates it. These kind of crimes weren’t happening fifty years ago, because niggers knew they would be lynched, and they were kept out of white communities, and white communities were allowed by law to protect themselves.
Now, the Jews re-wrote the laws, and that is the main issue here. Now, I know you don’t want to say that, and I know that you are probably a Jew yourself.
NS: I most certainly am.
AL: You are a Jew, and yet you are writing for a ostensibly [laughs], a publication that, that represents white people. That’s what’s such a joke about Jared Taylor’s approach. Whites are second-class citizens at AmRen, just as they are in the broader society. It’s the Jews who set up the so-called civil rights that denied whites the free association. That’s what produces crimes like this. And Jared Taylor damn well knows that, but he won’t allow his people to say it on his Web site. So, we don’t take the same view that AmRen takes. That’s assuming that AmRen is honestly motivated, which I don’t assume personally.
NS: What do you think AmRen’s motivations are?
AL: I think it may well be just a false front.
NS: A false front for…?
AL: The Jews. The Jews are putting money into it. He’s allowing Jews to speak. He’s allowing Jews to criticize whites on a site; he does not allow whites to criticize Jews. You tell me how that’s any different from the New York Times or any other major media. Same system of taboos applies at AmRen that does everywhere else in society. And he wants his people to be obsessed about blacks and black crime. Blacks are a headless community. They’re not capable of leading themselves or organizing themselves. The Jews set up the NAACP [reader’s note: this is actually true], and the Jews re-wrote the rules so the white communities were left open to exactly this kind of crime. Which we have named a “hush” crime, ‘cause it focuses not only on the black criminals but the Jews who hush up what’s going on even while they’re trumping up the garbage allegations at Duke, and reporting on that crap for a year.
NS: [Writing feverishly.] I’m trying to keep up with you.
AL: I mean, I’ve written a bunch on our site, so if you have any problem, you’ll find what I’m telling you written there.
NS: Let me just go back here. Alright, I know you told me in your email that the Web site will announce the time and place, the exact time and location of the rally.
AL: Well, we have the time, but we don’t have the exact location or the [unclear] we’re not going to talk about it quite yet.
NS: Yeah, no, I, would imagine not. And so, I’ll just check around that time.
AL: Yeah, so if you check the week of the rally, we …. We might do it multiple places. It just depends. We want to have some access to the public. We don’t want, we’re tired of going to these events and applying for a permit and being shoved away in some little corner, and having to stick mirrors up our asses and fly helicopters overhead.
We’re just going to, simply – we’re going to use our rights.
NS: Oh, so, in other words, you might not – you might do it without a permit.
AL: [Chuckles] We’re going to do – yeah, we’re going to do it without a permit.
We’re going to assemble and speak where we feel it’s appropriate, not where the cops or any other group feels it’s appropriate.
NS: Alright, so I’ll send your love to Jared Taylor.
AL: Well, he I’m sure knows what I think.
NS: I’m sure he does.
AL: He knows damn well there’s a reason that all of this is going on. He knows exactly what it is, and there’s a reason that he doesn’t allow his people to talk about it, and that he doesn’t talk about it himself. So, either he’s being paid to, or he’s just a coward. And there’s no third option.
But we’re going to do right; fear no man, as [the late neo-Nazi leader and National Alliance founder, William] Pierce advised.
NS: I’m sorry, what…?
AL: I enjoy your articles; I’ve read ‘em in the past. I was disappointed to find out you’re a Jew. But …
NS: [Laughs out loud.]
AL: You still do pretty good work. I’ve seen, I can’t remember precisely, but I spent at least one day a couple of years ago reading through everything you’ve written, so.
NS: That’s a lot of writing.
AL: You’ve done quite a bit. I mean, do you freelance, or…?
NS: Well, sure. I’m a homeless writer.
AL: Yeah.
NS: Freelancing is what you do by necessity, not by choice.
AL: It’s a difficult thing, I know that. Should you write on anything touchy, even if you leave the Jew out of it.
NS: [Laughs] You know, one of your readers thought he did me a favor by stating that I’m only a half-Jew. He’s mistaken. There’s no half-Jews [NS chuckles].
AL: Well, I appreciate your admitting it.
NS: Well, of course, it’s not something to admit or to hide. It’s a simple matter of fact. Either – it’s an all-or-nothing proposition.
AL: I think a lot of Jews try to hide that they’re Jews.
NS: I don’t know about that. But there, no there are a lot of people who don’t know that there’s no such thing as a half-Jew. Actually, the Nazis started that notion that you could be a part-Jew.
AL: Well, they had, what did they say, if one in four of your grandparents was, that qualified you?
NS: Oh, well, that’s not what I’m talking about. Either you have a Jewish mother or you don’t. That’s what makes a Jew. Or else you have to convert. That’s the issue of whether you had a grandparent, that’s irrelevant, unless you’re talking about your mother’s mother. That’s all that.
AL: I’m not sure that Israel sees it that way.
NS: What does Israel say?
AL: I think Israel has just that, that if you can prove one of your grandparents, even if it was not a female, you can still get in by their blood laws. And I know the Nazis at least to some degree talked to the rabbis and tried to base what they did on Jewish law.
NS: Well, that’s no, no, Jewish law is what I just said. I don’t know what Israel’s doing, but Jewish law is that either your mother’s a Jewish woman, or you have to have converted – that’s it. [This is true within Israel, as well as without, though Reform Jews perversely claim that someone who does not practice Judaism is not a Jew, regardless of whether his mother was a Jew. I say perversely, because the vast majority of Reform Jews – whose movement is reducible to Enlightenment atheism plus matzoh brei – are non-practicing.]
AL: That may be a little different from what Israel says.
NS: That’s possible, but that would be a political matter, not a religious matter, whatever they did.
AL: But you know, the main point about this here, is that we’re not going there to tie balloons, and it’s so pitiful when you read through the guest book that they have in the local paper where all the family and friends of these people respond, and they just, ‘Oh what can we do?’ these horri…, no these tragedies happen for a reason. And it’s, the reason is that the people running our society are Jews, and they intend our extermination. And they put in place these words and terms and frames and arguments, and this [unclear] safe way for whites to respond, having stupid candlelight vigils. And that’s absolutely the wrong way. There needs to be a hell of a lot of anger. And eventually, we’re going to have to physically displace the Jews. It’s just that simple.
And I don’t mind telling you that, because I’ve written that many times. I don’t know what it’s going to take to bring that about, but that’s the only solution.
NS: Well, seeing as I’m the head of the ZOG, I think that would be very difficult to pull off.
AL: [Laughs, chuckles, and coughs repeatedly.] Well, if you’re deflecting attention from the Jewish cause of this, then yeah, you’re helping ZOG, there’s no doubt about it. And that may well be what AmRen was set up to do, I don’t know, I have to judge it by its results.
NS: Well, no, no, I’m not trying to deflect anything. I mean, I’m perfectly, uh, I hadn’t planned on saying this, but since you’re talking about physically, violently displacing the Jews, you should know that guys like me are ready, willing, and able to kill to defend their own.
AL: So are we.
NS: [Laughs] O.k., just so that we understand each other.
AL: That’s the difference.
NS: Hmm?
AL: You Jews are the aggressor.
NS: The aggressor? Well, I’m an aggressive kind of guy, you know. So, you’ve read my work?
AL: Aggressor. [NS laughs loudly.] And not all whites are going to put up with it. And more and more are going to come to see that what we’re saying is correct.
NS: Well, we shall see. Thank you for your time, Mr. Linder.
AL: You bet. Good talking to you.
NS: Good luck with your rallies.
AL: Alright.
NS: Bye, now.
AL: Thanks, bye.
NS: Bye.
(Part of "The Knoxville Horror: Crime, Race, and the Media," October 31, 2007, VDARE.com)
Linder Interview II
Linder Interview III
Nicholas Stix (NS): You told me [in your email] that you’re holding the rally on May 26th.
Alex Linder (AL): Correct.
NS: So that will be Memorial Day Weekend?
AL: Yeah.
NS: And do you have any idea how many people you expect, or hope to get to show up?
AL: No, I really don’t. We’re advertising it on our forum, and wherever we can. And we are going to do some prep work to get the general public, but all are welcome, so we’ll see.
NS: Right. And do you have any idea of speakers you intend to invite?
AL: Yeah, I’m going to speak, we’re going to have Hal Turner speak, probably have Ed Fields speak.
NS: Ed Field [sic]?
AL: Yeah, and possibly one or two others.
NS: Now, I don’t have to tell you that this, these crimes have undergone a media blackout, in terms of the national media.
AL: That’s correct.
NS: How do you explain that?
AL: Well, it’s the Jewish media control. And the fact that any kind of non-white crime doesn’t fit their agenda, so they suppress it.
NS: Now, various reports have been published in, on blogs – both white and black blogs, oddly enough – which have claimed that both victims were sexually mutilated. I’m sure you’re familiar with these reports.
AL: Yes.
NS: No officials in local law enforcement in Knoxville or federal law enforcement have made these reports, to my knowledge. I’ve spoken with people, and they’ve refused to make any statements. Well, they’ve variously said they don’t know, the feds have, and local law enforcement has refused to confirm or disconfirm any of these reports. Do you have any idea where these reports have emanated from?
AL: Well, as best I can tell, they’re coming from people who are inside there who are relating it through [sighs] oh, by the time you get in a blog it’s either second or third person, but what are you gonna do? This stuff is always hushed up.
[Chuckles]. I would have to [pauses] Oh, God. I spent a couple of nights reading through everything and there’s, that’s out there, and it’s pretty clear it’s coming from the cop, investigation that they, that they sodomized ‘em, and they pissed on ‘em, and they dumped chemicals on ‘em.
NS: No, no, no. That’s not what I’m talking about.
AL: They covered it up. They cover it up.
NS: The documents, no the documents, the official documents show that they’ve been charged formally with having raped both members of the couple, the man and the woman. And with having raped the woman orally, vaginally, and anally. This is not at issue.
AL: Yeah.
NS: The issue is the charge, the claims that the, Mr. Newsom was sexually dismembered, and which would presumably be while he was alive, and that um that Ms. Christian had her breasts chopped off.
But there’s actually no apparent beef. The mainstream media outlet, the Knoxville News [Sentinel], did publish reports that the killers poured cleaning fluid down Ms. Christian’s mouth while she was alive, supposedly to get rid of DNA. So that’s not, I mean, that’s actually been in the mainstream media, the local media, of course. So, but the issue, the reports that have not been published by any mainstream media outlet are the blog reports charging the sexual mutilation of the victims.
AL: So, what?
NS: Hmm?
AL: So, what?
NS: No, I was just wondering if you had any sources.
AL: Look, you’re writing for AmRen [American Renaissance].
NS: Right.
AL: AmRen wants to focus on the crime.
NS: Right.
AL: And obsess about it. I’m interested in the systemic nature of this problem, which is why it’s being suppressed. And that goes to the Jewish control. The Jews are the ones who produce the policies that ensure that this stuff happens. That’s the important thing here. Yeah, the fact is they were, any way you want to cut it, they were murdered, they were raped, and they were tortured, a combination of those. I know [American Renaissance editor Jared] Taylor wants to get people obsessing about that but that’s not the important thing here. The important thing here is that the Jews set up the system that allows this stuff to happen. It literally facilitates it. These kind of crimes weren’t happening fifty years ago, because niggers knew they would be lynched, and they were kept out of white communities, and white communities were allowed by law to protect themselves.
Now, the Jews re-wrote the laws, and that is the main issue here. Now, I know you don’t want to say that, and I know that you are probably a Jew yourself.
NS: I most certainly am.
AL: You are a Jew, and yet you are writing for a ostensibly [laughs], a publication that, that represents white people. That’s what’s such a joke about Jared Taylor’s approach. Whites are second-class citizens at AmRen, just as they are in the broader society. It’s the Jews who set up the so-called civil rights that denied whites the free association. That’s what produces crimes like this. And Jared Taylor damn well knows that, but he won’t allow his people to say it on his Web site. So, we don’t take the same view that AmRen takes. That’s assuming that AmRen is honestly motivated, which I don’t assume personally.
NS: What do you think AmRen’s motivations are?
AL: I think it may well be just a false front.
NS: A false front for…?
AL: The Jews. The Jews are putting money into it. He’s allowing Jews to speak. He’s allowing Jews to criticize whites on a site; he does not allow whites to criticize Jews. You tell me how that’s any different from the New York Times or any other major media. Same system of taboos applies at AmRen that does everywhere else in society. And he wants his people to be obsessed about blacks and black crime. Blacks are a headless community. They’re not capable of leading themselves or organizing themselves. The Jews set up the NAACP [reader’s note: this is actually true], and the Jews re-wrote the rules so the white communities were left open to exactly this kind of crime. Which we have named a “hush” crime, ‘cause it focuses not only on the black criminals but the Jews who hush up what’s going on even while they’re trumping up the garbage allegations at Duke, and reporting on that crap for a year.
NS: [Writing feverishly.] I’m trying to keep up with you.
AL: I mean, I’ve written a bunch on our site, so if you have any problem, you’ll find what I’m telling you written there.
NS: Let me just go back here. Alright, I know you told me in your email that the Web site will announce the time and place, the exact time and location of the rally.
AL: Well, we have the time, but we don’t have the exact location or the [unclear] we’re not going to talk about it quite yet.
NS: Yeah, no, I, would imagine not. And so, I’ll just check around that time.
AL: Yeah, so if you check the week of the rally, we …. We might do it multiple places. It just depends. We want to have some access to the public. We don’t want, we’re tired of going to these events and applying for a permit and being shoved away in some little corner, and having to stick mirrors up our asses and fly helicopters overhead.
We’re just going to, simply – we’re going to use our rights.
NS: Oh, so, in other words, you might not – you might do it without a permit.
AL: [Chuckles] We’re going to do – yeah, we’re going to do it without a permit.
We’re going to assemble and speak where we feel it’s appropriate, not where the cops or any other group feels it’s appropriate.
NS: Alright, so I’ll send your love to Jared Taylor.
AL: Well, he I’m sure knows what I think.
NS: I’m sure he does.
AL: He knows damn well there’s a reason that all of this is going on. He knows exactly what it is, and there’s a reason that he doesn’t allow his people to talk about it, and that he doesn’t talk about it himself. So, either he’s being paid to, or he’s just a coward. And there’s no third option.
But we’re going to do right; fear no man, as [the late neo-Nazi leader and National Alliance founder, William] Pierce advised.
NS: I’m sorry, what…?
AL: I enjoy your articles; I’ve read ‘em in the past. I was disappointed to find out you’re a Jew. But …
NS: [Laughs out loud.]
AL: You still do pretty good work. I’ve seen, I can’t remember precisely, but I spent at least one day a couple of years ago reading through everything you’ve written, so.
NS: That’s a lot of writing.
AL: You’ve done quite a bit. I mean, do you freelance, or…?
NS: Well, sure. I’m a homeless writer.
AL: Yeah.
NS: Freelancing is what you do by necessity, not by choice.
AL: It’s a difficult thing, I know that. Should you write on anything touchy, even if you leave the Jew out of it.
NS: [Laughs] You know, one of your readers thought he did me a favor by stating that I’m only a half-Jew. He’s mistaken. There’s no half-Jews [NS chuckles].
AL: Well, I appreciate your admitting it.
NS: Well, of course, it’s not something to admit or to hide. It’s a simple matter of fact. Either – it’s an all-or-nothing proposition.
AL: I think a lot of Jews try to hide that they’re Jews.
NS: I don’t know about that. But there, no there are a lot of people who don’t know that there’s no such thing as a half-Jew. Actually, the Nazis started that notion that you could be a part-Jew.
AL: Well, they had, what did they say, if one in four of your grandparents was, that qualified you?
NS: Oh, well, that’s not what I’m talking about. Either you have a Jewish mother or you don’t. That’s what makes a Jew. Or else you have to convert. That’s the issue of whether you had a grandparent, that’s irrelevant, unless you’re talking about your mother’s mother. That’s all that.
AL: I’m not sure that Israel sees it that way.
NS: What does Israel say?
AL: I think Israel has just that, that if you can prove one of your grandparents, even if it was not a female, you can still get in by their blood laws. And I know the Nazis at least to some degree talked to the rabbis and tried to base what they did on Jewish law.
NS: Well, that’s no, no, Jewish law is what I just said. I don’t know what Israel’s doing, but Jewish law is that either your mother’s a Jewish woman, or you have to have converted – that’s it. [This is true within Israel, as well as without, though Reform Jews perversely claim that someone who does not practice Judaism is not a Jew, regardless of whether his mother was a Jew. I say perversely, because the vast majority of Reform Jews – whose movement is reducible to Enlightenment atheism plus matzoh brei – are non-practicing.]
AL: That may be a little different from what Israel says.
NS: That’s possible, but that would be a political matter, not a religious matter, whatever they did.
AL: But you know, the main point about this here, is that we’re not going there to tie balloons, and it’s so pitiful when you read through the guest book that they have in the local paper where all the family and friends of these people respond, and they just, ‘Oh what can we do?’ these horri…, no these tragedies happen for a reason. And it’s, the reason is that the people running our society are Jews, and they intend our extermination. And they put in place these words and terms and frames and arguments, and this [unclear] safe way for whites to respond, having stupid candlelight vigils. And that’s absolutely the wrong way. There needs to be a hell of a lot of anger. And eventually, we’re going to have to physically displace the Jews. It’s just that simple.
And I don’t mind telling you that, because I’ve written that many times. I don’t know what it’s going to take to bring that about, but that’s the only solution.
NS: Well, seeing as I’m the head of the ZOG, I think that would be very difficult to pull off.
AL: [Laughs, chuckles, and coughs repeatedly.] Well, if you’re deflecting attention from the Jewish cause of this, then yeah, you’re helping ZOG, there’s no doubt about it. And that may well be what AmRen was set up to do, I don’t know, I have to judge it by its results.
NS: Well, no, no, I’m not trying to deflect anything. I mean, I’m perfectly, uh, I hadn’t planned on saying this, but since you’re talking about physically, violently displacing the Jews, you should know that guys like me are ready, willing, and able to kill to defend their own.
AL: So are we.
NS: [Laughs] O.k., just so that we understand each other.
AL: That’s the difference.
NS: Hmm?
AL: You Jews are the aggressor.
NS: The aggressor? Well, I’m an aggressive kind of guy, you know. So, you’ve read my work?
AL: Aggressor. [NS laughs loudly.] And not all whites are going to put up with it. And more and more are going to come to see that what we’re saying is correct.
NS: Well, we shall see. Thank you for your time, Mr. Linder.
AL: You bet. Good talking to you.
NS: Good luck with your rallies.
AL: Alright.
NS: Bye, now.
AL: Thanks, bye.
NS: Bye.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
The FBI’s War on Richard Jewell
By Nicholas Stix
Part II of a series.
Why bother with investigating and evidence-gathering, when you can just call reporters and railroad some poor sap?
(In Part I, “Remembering Richard Jewell,” I wrote of the terrorist bombing, which killed one person directly and wounded 111, at the Atlanta Olympics in the wee hours of July 27, 1996. Via excerpted 911 transcripts, I showed the criminal incompetence of the Atlanta Police Department. And via other writers’ work, I recounted the vindictive campaign by Richard Jewell’s former employer, Piedmont College president Ray Cleere, to rob a hero of his finest hour, and to insinuate that he was instead a terrorist.)
Whispers and Shouts: Louis Freeh, Don Johnson, & Co.
Ray Cleere would later say that he felt that the folks at the FBI hadn’t paid sufficient heed to what he was saying, when on July 27, 1996 he called the Bureau’s hotline. That’s an odd complaint from a man who insisted he hadn’t said anything dramatic. In fact, Cleere set off a wave of hysteria at the Bureau and in the media.
And since leaking to the press was one of the main “investigative,” public relations, and political tools used by FBI Director Louis Freeh and his yes-men, the Bureau, inspired by President Cleere, began its own whispering campaign. An FBI official told Atlanta Journal-Constitution police reporter, the late Kathy Scruggs (and, ultimately, other reporters) of the “profile” of a “hero bomber,” who finds a bomb, so that he can be a hero.
On July 31, 1996, , Journal-Constitution reporters Scruggs, Martz, Fernandez and Walker wrote,
Wag-the-Dog Policing
The problem with the “profile” is that it didn’t exist. Rather, it was invented to fit Richard Jewell. And even then, the “profile” was inept, for Richard Jewell was not a loner.
(Six years later, scientist and biological warfare expert Steven Hatfill would be targeted in the anthrax case, and a similarly non-existent “profile” fabricated to fit him. The main difference between the Jewell and Hatfill cases is that in the latter case, a Marxist “scientist” fabricated the “profile” of Hatfill, based on a brilliant but little-watched, canceled TV show. Note that one non-FBI source from the case disagreed with me at the time, believing that the “scientist” was herself a Bureau patsy. I’ve yet to resolve that matter, though I still lean to my theory, due to the “scientist’s” penchant for contradicting herself. However, the m.o. used in seeking to railroad Hatfill was virtually identical to that used, in seeking to railroad Jewell.)
As Marie Brenner reported, with some 30,000 law enforcement personnel on hand, the Atlanta Olympics was a police convention, where lawmen heard the phony “profile” fingering Jewell directly from friends at the FBI, from colleagues who had learned of the leak from other lawmen with friends at the Bureau, or from reporters who asked them about it.
When the whispers came from an FBI official, and went into the ears of journalists at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, AP, NBC, CNN, the New York Post and other major media organs, they were soon broadcast nationwide.
One of the ironies of the media’s handling of the Jewell case is that while some journalists initially held back from reporting the FBI rumor identifying Jewell as the bomber, due to a lack of sufficient “independent corroboration,” as they began to hear the same story about Jewell from every lawman in town, soon enough, they all believed themselves to have an abundance of “independent sources.” In fact, they still had only one source, the original FBI leaker, who had spread the lie so successfully, that it was being repeated by thousands of lawmen.
What I wouldn’t give, to know the name of that FBI official.
What I do know, courtesy of Marie Brenner, is that FBI Director Louis Freeh personally ran the investigation by telephone, out of the Hoover Building in Washington, D.C.
That is not how proper FBI investigations are run.
When law enforcement officials either screw up a big case or are too lazy or incompetent to investigate it properly, yet want to hang someone for the crime, they telegraph to the whole world that the guy they are “investigating” is guilty as hell, and manipulate the public into accepting and confirming that verdict, er, judgment. Their first weapon will be the media, but they will also get interview subjects in the “investigation” to confirm interviewers’ own prejudices, by telegraphing to the subjects what they want to hear, e.g., a sinister interpretation of the most innocuous actions on the part of the suspect.
Marie Brenner describes Louis Freeh as having no patience with the work of investigation, and announcing almost immediately, pre-Jewell, regarding some drunk who’d been making threats in a bar the night before the bombing, and whom one of Freeh’s top men, Barry Mawn, had already excluded from consideration as a suspect, “We have our man.”
According to Brenner, Freeh dismissed Mawn and his other best men who were in Atlanta for the Olympics, Tom Fuentes and Robin Montgomery, from the case, and instead gave it to “Division 5,” which was run by Bob Bryant, and which is
Someone in the FBI decided, without a scintilla of incriminating evidence, that Richard Jewell was guilty, and then, working backwards from the presumption of guilt, designed a phony “profile” and “investigation” to rationalize that decision.
Brenner writes of Colonel Robert Ressler’s experience watching CNN on July 30, 1996,
With John Douglas, the since-retired Robert Ressler had co-founded the discipline of criminal-personality profiling while at the FBI’s behavioral-science unit. (The reader will have to decide for himself whether Ressler’s association with the Bureau is a point for or against him.)
Time’s James Collins quotes Michigan Law School professor Samuel Gross on wag-the-dog policing:
By “prosecution,” Gross means that law enforcement officers are violating their duty to investigate and carefully gather evidence, and have instead usurped the role of prosecutors. The National Security Division engaged in intimidation and manipulation, in order to compensate for their laziness and incompetence as investigators.
And as Collins notes, the bigger the case, the lower the standards for professional conduct typically are for law enforcement agents.
In a crime investigation, it’s alright to have a hunch that someone is the culprit; it’s not alright to assume that that suspect is guilty, and tell the world that he is guilty, in spite of a lack of any incriminating evidence.
On the telephone in D.C., Freeh micromanaged matters down to the case agents, Don Johnson and Diader Rosario.
According to Brenner, FBI special agent Diader Rosario had made a name for himself as a siege negotiator; special agent Don Johnson had made a different kind of name for himself – through aggressive incompetence, which had reportedly caused him to be exiled, via a “loss-of-effectiveness transfer,” from Albany, NY, to Atlanta. Such transfers work similar to the way in which incompetent, tenured public school teachers are shuttled from one school to another, so long as they haven’t raped or murdered anyone.
(In Albany, Johnson had decided that Mayor Thomas Whalen was guilty of some form of corruption (bribery? influence-peddling ?) regarding “tax assessments [the Mayor had] recommended … for clients of his law firm,” and went on a fishing expedition to find something on which to nail Whalen. Brenner writes, “According to Whalen, the local U.S. attorney found no evidence to support Johnson’s assertions and issued a letter to Whalen exonerating him completely, but Whalen believed it cost him an appointment as a federal judge.”)
But are FBI special agents tenured? And as the 1992 Ruby Ridge fiasco showed, not even murder is necessarily cause for the termination of an FBI special agent. Indeed, it can lead to promotions.
On July 30, special agents Rosario and Johnson visited Jewell at home, using the ruse of asking Jewell to help them make a training film at Atlanta FBI headquarters. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Jewell, the FBI had already leaked to the media that he was the Bureau’s prime suspect in the bombing.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that it is constitutional for law enforcement officers to use deception, in order to cause suspects unassisted by counsel to make incriminating statements. But it is unconstitutional to lie to a suspect’s lawyer. And since the Bureau had already told the media that Jewell was its suspect, but had not told Jewell, anything that Jewell said would probably have been inadmissible in court, anyway.
According to Jewell’s attorney, Watson Bryant, FBI personnel had lied to Bryant on July 30, in denying that Jewell was in the building. Bryant said that later that evening, when he was able to determine, through dialing *69 on his home phone, that telephone messages Jewell had recently left had emanated from Atlanta FBI headquarters, Bryant called the Bureau and ordered the telephone operator to inform the agents that they must immediately stop the informal interrogation.
One of the methods of intimidation the Bureau used in the Jewell case, and would repeat in the Hatfill case, was to openly, closely – Steven Hatfill charged that Bureau drivers “tailgated” him — follow a suspect everywhere with a caravan of as many as four vehicles, one behind the other. (In the Hatfill case, at one point in May 2003, when Hatfill walked up to an FBI surveillance vehicle in our nation’s capital, in order to photograph the driver, the latter hit the gas, and ran over Hatfill’s foot. In a measure of the Bureau’s above-the-law status, District police ticketed the hapless victim, who was fined $5!)
The media camped out 24-7 in front of Jewell’s mother’s apartment, where the now unemployed “suspect” was a virtual prisoner. (Although Jewell wasn’t formally fired, his employer, Anthony Davis, had told him not to come to work, due to the media horde that followed him everywhere. The FBI searched the apartment, confiscating Mrs. Jewell’s Tupperware and family pictures.
Marie Brenner writes,
Bucknam’s reported attitude is incompatible with a free society.
Brenner writes that Jewell’s “reverence for authority” and idealizing of “the investigative skills of the F.B.I.” prevented him from “understand[ing] that he had become ensnared in a web fraught with the weaknesses of a self-protective bureaucracy.”
(See Ruby Ridge.)
You could replace the name “Richard Jewell” with that of “Timothy Wind,” the straight-arrow LAPD cop from Wichita, Kansas, who in 1991 served himself up to LAPD investigators on a silver platter, following the Rodney King incident, in which Wind was one of the four officers who had had so much difficulty arresting a highly intoxicated, violent “motorist Rodney G. King.”
Fortunately for Officer Wind, as Lou Cannon recounted in his classic study of the Rodney King case and the 1992 Los Angeles race riot, Official Negligence, the LAPD Internal Affairs detectives interviewing him were so taken with Wind’s hayseed sincerity (a relatively new officer, he idealized the LAPD in the way that Jewell idealized the FBI) that they advised him to seek legal counsel. Conversely, the FBI agents who conducted the stealth interview of Richard Jewell had no such compassion, assumed the worst of him – though they had no evidence implicating him – and (as would also occur in the Hatfill case) took Jewell’s sincere wish to help as a sign either of stupidity or insanity.
I’m Not a Lawman, I Just Play One
Unlike the overweight Richard Jewell, Louis Freeh looked like a lawman from central casting, with a chiseled jaw, ramrod posture, and athletic build. And he had a dream resumé: Born in 1950, he graduated from Rutgers Law School in 1974; served as an FBI special agent from 1975-1981; “joined the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York as an Assistant United States Attorney” in 1981; “was appointed a Special Prosecutor by the Attorney General” in 1990; President George H.W. Bush appointed him United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York in 1991; President Bill Clinton nominated him to serve as FBI director in 1993, a position he held until he was forced out two years early, in 2001.
Although every FBI director will have his media detractors, he will almost always make some fans in the media. And yet, I have never read anything positive about Freeh’s eight-year (1993-2001) tenure at the FBI.
In the aftermath of the Jewell fiasco, the FBI rank-and-file was reportedly unhappy with Freeh’s leadership. But to draw favorable conclusions about the rank-and-file based on the foregoing would be a mistake. Consider the response of Atlanta agents to the Bureau’s relatively mild discipline of Don Johnson for his misconduct in the Jewell case, as reported by CNN on May 29, 1997.
That higher-ups were also guilty in no way absolves Don Johnson of his misconduct in the Jewell case.
James Collins had written in November 1996 of how, even after Jewell was cleared in the case, some FBI agents still felt he was guilty, even though the Bureau had never had any reason to suspect Jewell, in the first place. While the person who finds a bomb is routinely investigated, no competent lawman would equate Ray Cleere’s little exercise in character assassination with Richard Jewell’s guilt.
From top to bottom, the Atlanta FBI office was full of people who had no more conception of the distinction between right and wrong, and even less of the distinction between legal and illegal, than the Mafiosi they routinely investigated.
Exoneration and Vindication
Immediately after the bombing, when someone told Richard Jewell that he might get a book deal out of his heroics, he called an old lawyer friend he’d met on a job ten years earlier, Watson Bryant. Jewell and Bryant hadn’t spoken in over eight years.
Bryant, who specialized in real estate closings, was unknown to the Atlanta legal establishment. Once Bryant saw – via CNN and the July 30 Atlanta Journal-Constitution — that the FBI was seeking to railroad Jewell, he was a pit bull in his defense. In a 1997 interview with visiting Japanese journalism professor Ken Asano and Asano’s students, Jewell called Bryant, “my lucky strike.”
Mind you, since Bryant had no political or media contacts, his bark was considerably worse that his bite. But before anyone could figure that out, Bryant took the precaution of bringing in Jack Martin, whom he had heard was the best criminal defense attorney in Georgia, and who had connections to local U.S. Attorney, R. Kent Alexander.
If Richard Jewell was most fortunate to have a friend in Watson Bryant, he was equally fortunate that R. Kent Alexander was the local federal prosecutor. Not only did Alexander refuse to railroad Jewell without any incriminating evidence, he took the extraordinary measure of formally clearing him, in the following letter.
At the same time, Alexander also released the following statement:
Of course, that was nonsense on stilts about the publicity having been “neither designed nor desired by the FBI,” but the two statements are as good as an ordinary citizen with the “wrong” demographics is going to get from the federal Leviathan.
Jewell responded, “After 88 days of hell, it’s hard to believe that it is really over.”
Eric Rudolph
The real Olympic Park bomber is named Eric Rudolph. In October 1998, the Justice Department indicted Rudolph in the bombing. Rudolph was also indicted in the bombing of a lesbian nightclub in Atlanta, and in two abortion clinic bombings in Georgia and Alabama, respectively, in which he had murdered off-duty policeman Robert “Sandy” Sanderson, 35, and cost 41-year-old head abortion nurse Emily Lyons an eye. In addition to Lyons and the 111 wounded at the Olympics, Rudolph wounded nine in the blasts. That includes four people he wounded with a secondary bomb, aimed at first-responders, that he set off one hour after the first bomb at one abortion clinic, and five who were wounded at the lesbian nightclub, where police also found an unexploded secondary bomb aimed at first-responders. (That Rudolph called in the Olympic Park bomb twenty minutes before it exploded, claiming that it would go off in 30 minutes, may have been in order to kill as many arriving policemen as possible. Rudolph failed to figure on the incompetence and cowardice of the Atlanta PD.)
Eric Rudolph was apprehended in May, 2003. In order to escape potentially facing the death penalty, in April 2005, he accepted a plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to his crimes, in exchange for being sentenced to serve four consecutive life terms life in federal prison, with no possibility of parole. Rudolph confessed to having committed the bombings out of opposition to abortion and homosexuality.
Had the Bureau succeeded in railroading Richard Jewell, it would have had no incentive to find the real bomber, and a strong disincentive: Admitting that the bomber was still out there would have been an implicit admission that it had railroaded an innocent man.
* * *
There’s nothing psychologically or morally wrong with hating a bomber, or any other murderer. But to be hostile towards someone whom you have no reason to believe committed a heinous crime, to interpret everything he says or does (or that anyone else says about him) as proof of his guilt, and to continue with the same mentality even after he has been cleared, is to be guilty both of incompetence and of pure, irrational malice. Richard Jewell was the victim of a group hate by incompetent FBI agents and administrators who were no more than opportunistic sociopaths with badges.
Coming in Part III: Tom Brokaw and the Media.
Part II of a series.
Why bother with investigating and evidence-gathering, when you can just call reporters and railroad some poor sap?
(In Part I, “Remembering Richard Jewell,” I wrote of the terrorist bombing, which killed one person directly and wounded 111, at the Atlanta Olympics in the wee hours of July 27, 1996. Via excerpted 911 transcripts, I showed the criminal incompetence of the Atlanta Police Department. And via other writers’ work, I recounted the vindictive campaign by Richard Jewell’s former employer, Piedmont College president Ray Cleere, to rob a hero of his finest hour, and to insinuate that he was instead a terrorist.)
Whispers and Shouts: Louis Freeh, Don Johnson, & Co.
Ray Cleere would later say that he felt that the folks at the FBI hadn’t paid sufficient heed to what he was saying, when on July 27, 1996 he called the Bureau’s hotline. That’s an odd complaint from a man who insisted he hadn’t said anything dramatic. In fact, Cleere set off a wave of hysteria at the Bureau and in the media.
And since leaking to the press was one of the main “investigative,” public relations, and political tools used by FBI Director Louis Freeh and his yes-men, the Bureau, inspired by President Cleere, began its own whispering campaign. An FBI official told Atlanta Journal-Constitution police reporter, the late Kathy Scruggs (and, ultimately, other reporters) of the “profile” of a “hero bomber,” who finds a bomb, so that he can be a hero.
On July 31, 1996, , Journal-Constitution reporters Scruggs, Martz, Fernandez and Walker wrote,
Investigators now say Jewell fits the profile of a lone bomber, and they believe he placed the 911 call himself. This profile generally includes a frustrated white man who is a loner, a former police officer, member of the military or police “wannabe” who seeks to become a hero.
Wag-the-Dog Policing
The problem with the “profile” is that it didn’t exist. Rather, it was invented to fit Richard Jewell. And even then, the “profile” was inept, for Richard Jewell was not a loner.
(Six years later, scientist and biological warfare expert Steven Hatfill would be targeted in the anthrax case, and a similarly non-existent “profile” fabricated to fit him. The main difference between the Jewell and Hatfill cases is that in the latter case, a Marxist “scientist” fabricated the “profile” of Hatfill, based on a brilliant but little-watched, canceled TV show. Note that one non-FBI source from the case disagreed with me at the time, believing that the “scientist” was herself a Bureau patsy. I’ve yet to resolve that matter, though I still lean to my theory, due to the “scientist’s” penchant for contradicting herself. However, the m.o. used in seeking to railroad Hatfill was virtually identical to that used, in seeking to railroad Jewell.)
As Marie Brenner reported, with some 30,000 law enforcement personnel on hand, the Atlanta Olympics was a police convention, where lawmen heard the phony “profile” fingering Jewell directly from friends at the FBI, from colleagues who had learned of the leak from other lawmen with friends at the Bureau, or from reporters who asked them about it.
When the whispers came from an FBI official, and went into the ears of journalists at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, AP, NBC, CNN, the New York Post and other major media organs, they were soon broadcast nationwide.
One of the ironies of the media’s handling of the Jewell case is that while some journalists initially held back from reporting the FBI rumor identifying Jewell as the bomber, due to a lack of sufficient “independent corroboration,” as they began to hear the same story about Jewell from every lawman in town, soon enough, they all believed themselves to have an abundance of “independent sources.” In fact, they still had only one source, the original FBI leaker, who had spread the lie so successfully, that it was being repeated by thousands of lawmen.
What I wouldn’t give, to know the name of that FBI official.
What I do know, courtesy of Marie Brenner, is that FBI Director Louis Freeh personally ran the investigation by telephone, out of the Hoover Building in Washington, D.C.
That is not how proper FBI investigations are run.
When law enforcement officials either screw up a big case or are too lazy or incompetent to investigate it properly, yet want to hang someone for the crime, they telegraph to the whole world that the guy they are “investigating” is guilty as hell, and manipulate the public into accepting and confirming that verdict, er, judgment. Their first weapon will be the media, but they will also get interview subjects in the “investigation” to confirm interviewers’ own prejudices, by telegraphing to the subjects what they want to hear, e.g., a sinister interpretation of the most innocuous actions on the part of the suspect.
Marie Brenner describes Louis Freeh as having no patience with the work of investigation, and announcing almost immediately, pre-Jewell, regarding some drunk who’d been making threats in a bar the night before the bombing, and whom one of Freeh’s top men, Barry Mawn, had already excluded from consideration as a suspect, “We have our man.”
According to Brenner, Freeh dismissed Mawn and his other best men who were in Atlanta for the Olympics, Tom Fuentes and Robin Montgomery, from the case, and instead gave it to “Division 5,” which was run by Bob Bryant, and which is
[T]he National Security Division, a former counterintelligence unit that has been looking for a purpose since the Cold War ended. Trained in observation, division members rarely made a criminal case–their strength was intimidation and manipulation rather than the deliberate gathering of evidence to be presented in court.
Someone in the FBI decided, without a scintilla of incriminating evidence, that Richard Jewell was guilty, and then, working backwards from the presumption of guilt, designed a phony “profile” and “investigation” to rationalize that decision.
Brenner writes of Colonel Robert Ressler’s experience watching CNN on July 30, 1996,
“They were talking about an F.B.I. profile of a hero bomber, and I thought, What F.B.I. profile? It rather surprised me.” According to Ressler, the definition of “hero homicide”—a person looking for recognition without an intent to kill—perhaps emerged as “hero bomber.” “There is no such classification as the hero bomber,” he told me recently. “This was a myth.… It occurred to me that there was no database of any bomber who lived with his mother, was a security guard and unmarried. How many hero bombers had we ever encountered? Only one that I know of, in Los Angeles, and his bomb did not go off.” Ressler knew that something was off; profiles are developed from a complex set of evidence and facts derived only in part from a crime scene. The bomb had been deadly, which was not consistent with the “hero complex.” Furthermore, he wondered, where did they get the information to put the profile together that fast? He asked himself, What came first here, the chicken or the egg? Was the so-called profile actually developed from the circumstances, or was it invented for Richard Jewell?
With John Douglas, the since-retired Robert Ressler had co-founded the discipline of criminal-personality profiling while at the FBI’s behavioral-science unit. (The reader will have to decide for himself whether Ressler’s association with the Bureau is a point for or against him.)
Time’s James Collins quotes Michigan Law School professor Samuel Gross on wag-the-dog policing:
[T]here's a point at which an open investigation of who committed a crime becomes instead the prosecution of suspect X. If that happens early on in the case, the chances of making a mistake are very great.
By “prosecution,” Gross means that law enforcement officers are violating their duty to investigate and carefully gather evidence, and have instead usurped the role of prosecutors. The National Security Division engaged in intimidation and manipulation, in order to compensate for their laziness and incompetence as investigators.
And as Collins notes, the bigger the case, the lower the standards for professional conduct typically are for law enforcement agents.
In a crime investigation, it’s alright to have a hunch that someone is the culprit; it’s not alright to assume that that suspect is guilty, and tell the world that he is guilty, in spite of a lack of any incriminating evidence.
On the telephone in D.C., Freeh micromanaged matters down to the case agents, Don Johnson and Diader Rosario.
According to Brenner, FBI special agent Diader Rosario had made a name for himself as a siege negotiator; special agent Don Johnson had made a different kind of name for himself – through aggressive incompetence, which had reportedly caused him to be exiled, via a “loss-of-effectiveness transfer,” from Albany, NY, to Atlanta. Such transfers work similar to the way in which incompetent, tenured public school teachers are shuttled from one school to another, so long as they haven’t raped or murdered anyone.
(In Albany, Johnson had decided that Mayor Thomas Whalen was guilty of some form of corruption (bribery? influence-peddling ?) regarding “tax assessments [the Mayor had] recommended … for clients of his law firm,” and went on a fishing expedition to find something on which to nail Whalen. Brenner writes, “According to Whalen, the local U.S. attorney found no evidence to support Johnson’s assertions and issued a letter to Whalen exonerating him completely, but Whalen believed it cost him an appointment as a federal judge.”)
But are FBI special agents tenured? And as the 1992 Ruby Ridge fiasco showed, not even murder is necessarily cause for the termination of an FBI special agent. Indeed, it can lead to promotions.
On July 30, special agents Rosario and Johnson visited Jewell at home, using the ruse of asking Jewell to help them make a training film at Atlanta FBI headquarters. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Jewell, the FBI had already leaked to the media that he was the Bureau’s prime suspect in the bombing.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that it is constitutional for law enforcement officers to use deception, in order to cause suspects unassisted by counsel to make incriminating statements. But it is unconstitutional to lie to a suspect’s lawyer. And since the Bureau had already told the media that Jewell was its suspect, but had not told Jewell, anything that Jewell said would probably have been inadmissible in court, anyway.
According to Jewell’s attorney, Watson Bryant, FBI personnel had lied to Bryant on July 30, in denying that Jewell was in the building. Bryant said that later that evening, when he was able to determine, through dialing *69 on his home phone, that telephone messages Jewell had recently left had emanated from Atlanta FBI headquarters, Bryant called the Bureau and ordered the telephone operator to inform the agents that they must immediately stop the informal interrogation.
One of the methods of intimidation the Bureau used in the Jewell case, and would repeat in the Hatfill case, was to openly, closely – Steven Hatfill charged that Bureau drivers “tailgated” him — follow a suspect everywhere with a caravan of as many as four vehicles, one behind the other. (In the Hatfill case, at one point in May 2003, when Hatfill walked up to an FBI surveillance vehicle in our nation’s capital, in order to photograph the driver, the latter hit the gas, and ran over Hatfill’s foot. In a measure of the Bureau’s above-the-law status, District police ticketed the hapless victim, who was fined $5!)
The media camped out 24-7 in front of Jewell’s mother’s apartment, where the now unemployed “suspect” was a virtual prisoner. (Although Jewell wasn’t formally fired, his employer, Anthony Davis, had told him not to come to work, due to the media horde that followed him everywhere. The FBI searched the apartment, confiscating Mrs. Jewell’s Tupperware and family pictures.
Marie Brenner writes,
What happened to Richard Jewell raises an important question central to Freeh’s future tenure: in the midst of a media frenzy, does the F.B.I. have any responsibility to protect the privacy of an innocent man? Over the last year, this concept was broached with Bob Bucknam, Louis Freeh’s chief of staff. During the long Pizza Connection trial in the 1980s [when Bucknam and Freeh were both federal prosecutors], it was Bucknam who handed Freeh files at the prosecutor’s table. According to highly placed sources in the bureau, Bucknam’s answer was immediate: the F.B.I. has no responsibility to correct information in the public domain.
Bucknam’s reported attitude is incompatible with a free society.
Brenner writes that Jewell’s “reverence for authority” and idealizing of “the investigative skills of the F.B.I.” prevented him from “understand[ing] that he had become ensnared in a web fraught with the weaknesses of a self-protective bureaucracy.”
(See Ruby Ridge.)
You could replace the name “Richard Jewell” with that of “Timothy Wind,” the straight-arrow LAPD cop from Wichita, Kansas, who in 1991 served himself up to LAPD investigators on a silver platter, following the Rodney King incident, in which Wind was one of the four officers who had had so much difficulty arresting a highly intoxicated, violent “motorist Rodney G. King.”
Fortunately for Officer Wind, as Lou Cannon recounted in his classic study of the Rodney King case and the 1992 Los Angeles race riot, Official Negligence, the LAPD Internal Affairs detectives interviewing him were so taken with Wind’s hayseed sincerity (a relatively new officer, he idealized the LAPD in the way that Jewell idealized the FBI) that they advised him to seek legal counsel. Conversely, the FBI agents who conducted the stealth interview of Richard Jewell had no such compassion, assumed the worst of him – though they had no evidence implicating him – and (as would also occur in the Hatfill case) took Jewell’s sincere wish to help as a sign either of stupidity or insanity.
I’m Not a Lawman, I Just Play One
Unlike the overweight Richard Jewell, Louis Freeh looked like a lawman from central casting, with a chiseled jaw, ramrod posture, and athletic build. And he had a dream resumé: Born in 1950, he graduated from Rutgers Law School in 1974; served as an FBI special agent from 1975-1981; “joined the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York as an Assistant United States Attorney” in 1981; “was appointed a Special Prosecutor by the Attorney General” in 1990; President George H.W. Bush appointed him United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York in 1991; President Bill Clinton nominated him to serve as FBI director in 1993, a position he held until he was forced out two years early, in 2001.
Although every FBI director will have his media detractors, he will almost always make some fans in the media. And yet, I have never read anything positive about Freeh’s eight-year (1993-2001) tenure at the FBI.
In the aftermath of the Jewell fiasco, the FBI rank-and-file was reportedly unhappy with Freeh’s leadership. But to draw favorable conclusions about the rank-and-file based on the foregoing would be a mistake. Consider the response of Atlanta agents to the Bureau’s relatively mild discipline of Don Johnson for his misconduct in the Jewell case, as reported by CNN on May 29, 1997.
FBI agents in Atlanta rallied in support of a fellow colleague Thursday after he returned to work following a five-day suspension without pay for his role in interviewing Olympic bombing suspect Richard Jewell.
Several dozen people applauded as agent Don Johnson entered Atlanta FBI headquarters. Asked if Johnson was a political scapegoat, agent Harry Grogan said, “Yes, I do.”
The FBI suspended Johnson last week and censured Atlanta special-agent-in-charge Woody Johnson and Kansas City special-agent-in-charge David Tubbs for their roles in the Jewell investigation.
That higher-ups were also guilty in no way absolves Don Johnson of his misconduct in the Jewell case.
James Collins had written in November 1996 of how, even after Jewell was cleared in the case, some FBI agents still felt he was guilty, even though the Bureau had never had any reason to suspect Jewell, in the first place. While the person who finds a bomb is routinely investigated, no competent lawman would equate Ray Cleere’s little exercise in character assassination with Richard Jewell’s guilt.
From top to bottom, the Atlanta FBI office was full of people who had no more conception of the distinction between right and wrong, and even less of the distinction between legal and illegal, than the Mafiosi they routinely investigated.
Exoneration and Vindication
Immediately after the bombing, when someone told Richard Jewell that he might get a book deal out of his heroics, he called an old lawyer friend he’d met on a job ten years earlier, Watson Bryant. Jewell and Bryant hadn’t spoken in over eight years.
Bryant, who specialized in real estate closings, was unknown to the Atlanta legal establishment. Once Bryant saw – via CNN and the July 30 Atlanta Journal-Constitution — that the FBI was seeking to railroad Jewell, he was a pit bull in his defense. In a 1997 interview with visiting Japanese journalism professor Ken Asano and Asano’s students, Jewell called Bryant, “my lucky strike.”
Mind you, since Bryant had no political or media contacts, his bark was considerably worse that his bite. But before anyone could figure that out, Bryant took the precaution of bringing in Jack Martin, whom he had heard was the best criminal defense attorney in Georgia, and who had connections to local U.S. Attorney, R. Kent Alexander.
If Richard Jewell was most fortunate to have a friend in Watson Bryant, he was equally fortunate that R. Kent Alexander was the local federal prosecutor. Not only did Alexander refuse to railroad Jewell without any incriminating evidence, he took the extraordinary measure of formally clearing him, in the following letter.
U.S. Department of Justice
United States Attorney
Northern District of Georgia
October 25, 1996
Jack Martin, Esq.
Suite 500 Grant Building
44 Broad Street NW
Atlanta, Georgia 30303-2327
Dear Jack:
This is to advise you that based on the evidence developed to date,
your client, Richard Jewell, is not considered a target of the federal criminal investigation into the bombing on July 27, 1996, at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta. I am hopeful that Mr. Jewell will provide further cooperation as a witness in the investigation.
Sincerely,
Kent B. Alexander
United States Attorney
At the same time, Alexander also released the following statement:
In this case, the Jewells have regrettably also endured highly unusual and intense publicity that was neither designed nor desired by the FBI, and in fact interfered with the investigation. The public should bear in mind that Richard Jewell has at no time been charged with any crime in connection with the bombing.
Of course, that was nonsense on stilts about the publicity having been “neither designed nor desired by the FBI,” but the two statements are as good as an ordinary citizen with the “wrong” demographics is going to get from the federal Leviathan.
Jewell responded, “After 88 days of hell, it’s hard to believe that it is really over.”
Eric Rudolph
The real Olympic Park bomber is named Eric Rudolph. In October 1998, the Justice Department indicted Rudolph in the bombing. Rudolph was also indicted in the bombing of a lesbian nightclub in Atlanta, and in two abortion clinic bombings in Georgia and Alabama, respectively, in which he had murdered off-duty policeman Robert “Sandy” Sanderson, 35, and cost 41-year-old head abortion nurse Emily Lyons an eye. In addition to Lyons and the 111 wounded at the Olympics, Rudolph wounded nine in the blasts. That includes four people he wounded with a secondary bomb, aimed at first-responders, that he set off one hour after the first bomb at one abortion clinic, and five who were wounded at the lesbian nightclub, where police also found an unexploded secondary bomb aimed at first-responders. (That Rudolph called in the Olympic Park bomb twenty minutes before it exploded, claiming that it would go off in 30 minutes, may have been in order to kill as many arriving policemen as possible. Rudolph failed to figure on the incompetence and cowardice of the Atlanta PD.)
Eric Rudolph was apprehended in May, 2003. In order to escape potentially facing the death penalty, in April 2005, he accepted a plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to his crimes, in exchange for being sentenced to serve four consecutive life terms life in federal prison, with no possibility of parole. Rudolph confessed to having committed the bombings out of opposition to abortion and homosexuality.
Had the Bureau succeeded in railroading Richard Jewell, it would have had no incentive to find the real bomber, and a strong disincentive: Admitting that the bomber was still out there would have been an implicit admission that it had railroaded an innocent man.
There’s nothing psychologically or morally wrong with hating a bomber, or any other murderer. But to be hostile towards someone whom you have no reason to believe committed a heinous crime, to interpret everything he says or does (or that anyone else says about him) as proof of his guilt, and to continue with the same mentality even after he has been cleared, is to be guilty both of incompetence and of pure, irrational malice. Richard Jewell was the victim of a group hate by incompetent FBI agents and administrators who were no more than opportunistic sociopaths with badges.
Coming in Part III: Tom Brokaw and the Media.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Anthrax: No Progress in Battle on Bioterror – Why?
The Anthrax/Hatfill Files
By Nicholas Stix
Insight on the News
October 21, 2002
Media presentations of the investigation into the anthrax-letter attacks that last fall killed five people and sickened over a dozen others have been driven by theories, speculation and intense political partisanship. That situation has arisen due to various political forces' desire to kidnap the case in order to cause the U.S. biodefense program to be shut down, and due to a paucity of reliable, hard knowledge. The human mind hates a vacuum and ignorance is a most hospitable host to rampant speculation. Thus do we find ourselves no better informed on the one-year anniversary of the attacks than we were at the time.
With the help of anonymous FBI profilers and activist academics such as Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, the American media have been wed to the notion that a disgruntled, white male loner from within the U.S. biowarfare-defense program at USAMRIID (United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases) in Maryland stole the anthrax bacteria, secretly did the lab work all by himself and carried out the attacks, perhaps to warn the public of the dangers of bioterrorism. Baltimore Sun reporter Scott Shane has dubbed this the "bioevangelist" theory.
The anthrax found in the letters was of the Ames strain, which originated in an infected cow in Texas in 1981. Until a 1997 federal law mandated strict controls and record-keeping for the scientific use and sharing of toxic substances, the Ames strain was passed around the world by scientists via mutual cooperation, with virtually no controls or oversight.
While it is possible that a small sample of the anthrax used in the attack was stolen from a U.S. bioweapons lab and then subsequently grown into larger quantities, it is much more likely that the perpetrator obtained the anthrax from any of a multitude of foreign sources.
Dr. Paul Keim, a Northern Arizona University professor of microbiology, performed an exhaustive genetic analysis on a sample of the attack anthrax, comparing it to the same analysis of Ames anthrax samples held at U.S. bioweapons-defense installations. In Dr. Keim's study, published in the May 9, 2002, edition of Science magazine, he concluded that his results were unable to shed any light on the source of the anthrax — other than to conclude that its original source was the same 1981 Texas cow that was the source of the Ames anthrax samples at U.S. biowarfare-defense installations.
The notion that a single, renegade scientist secretly could have created the weapon has been shot down by Dr. Richard O. Spertzel, the former head of the biology section of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq. On Sept. 18, in London's Financial Times, Dr. Spertzel argued, "I've heard nothing that has changed my mind." Spertzel is persuaded the anthrax attack involved active state support: "You could not possibly make that quality of product in a clandestine fashion. It's not the sort of thing you can do in your garage or in your basement."
While some experts maintain that it would be possible for a determined individual — even a talented bench technician — to produce high-quality anthrax with one trillion spores per gram, it seems extremely unlikely that this could be done without attracting attention. A lone bioweaponeer with the requisite knowledge and skills still would have extreme difficulty transferring the process to the type of setup that could be made in a basement or remote location.
And the cost would run into the millions. The specific equipment used to produce weaponized anthrax — through the various steps of initial bioreaction through weaponization by chemical treatment, proper spore-size control and drying — likely would run to several hundred thousand dollars. Add to that sum the required ancillary equipment, including scanning electron microscopes, not to mention the multimillion dollar infrastructure.
Substituting cheaper equipment for the tools normally used by a skilled scientist would cause serious problems of "process transfer." The preceding term commonly is used in the chemical and engineering community to describe taking a manufacturing process from one site and starting it up at another site, sometimes using different equipment. It almost would be impossible to repeat the original lab process and produce the same high-quality product with a homemade set-up without hundreds of trial-and-error tests. And when the first reasonable-looking, pure anthrax powder was produced, it would be essential to test it. This only can be done by sacrificing hundreds of Rhesus monkeys — an activity that is unlikely to go unnoticed by the neighbors.
If Drs. Keim and Spertzel are correct, the authorities have wasted precious time and resources on a wild goose chase. Hopefully, the lost time has not ensured the escape from detection of the anthrax terrorists.
By Nicholas Stix
Insight on the News
October 21, 2002
Media presentations of the investigation into the anthrax-letter attacks that last fall killed five people and sickened over a dozen others have been driven by theories, speculation and intense political partisanship. That situation has arisen due to various political forces' desire to kidnap the case in order to cause the U.S. biodefense program to be shut down, and due to a paucity of reliable, hard knowledge. The human mind hates a vacuum and ignorance is a most hospitable host to rampant speculation. Thus do we find ourselves no better informed on the one-year anniversary of the attacks than we were at the time.
With the help of anonymous FBI profilers and activist academics such as Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, the American media have been wed to the notion that a disgruntled, white male loner from within the U.S. biowarfare-defense program at USAMRIID (United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases) in Maryland stole the anthrax bacteria, secretly did the lab work all by himself and carried out the attacks, perhaps to warn the public of the dangers of bioterrorism. Baltimore Sun reporter Scott Shane has dubbed this the "bioevangelist" theory.
The anthrax found in the letters was of the Ames strain, which originated in an infected cow in Texas in 1981. Until a 1997 federal law mandated strict controls and record-keeping for the scientific use and sharing of toxic substances, the Ames strain was passed around the world by scientists via mutual cooperation, with virtually no controls or oversight.
While it is possible that a small sample of the anthrax used in the attack was stolen from a U.S. bioweapons lab and then subsequently grown into larger quantities, it is much more likely that the perpetrator obtained the anthrax from any of a multitude of foreign sources.
Dr. Paul Keim, a Northern Arizona University professor of microbiology, performed an exhaustive genetic analysis on a sample of the attack anthrax, comparing it to the same analysis of Ames anthrax samples held at U.S. bioweapons-defense installations. In Dr. Keim's study, published in the May 9, 2002, edition of Science magazine, he concluded that his results were unable to shed any light on the source of the anthrax — other than to conclude that its original source was the same 1981 Texas cow that was the source of the Ames anthrax samples at U.S. biowarfare-defense installations.
The notion that a single, renegade scientist secretly could have created the weapon has been shot down by Dr. Richard O. Spertzel, the former head of the biology section of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq. On Sept. 18, in London's Financial Times, Dr. Spertzel argued, "I've heard nothing that has changed my mind." Spertzel is persuaded the anthrax attack involved active state support: "You could not possibly make that quality of product in a clandestine fashion. It's not the sort of thing you can do in your garage or in your basement."
While some experts maintain that it would be possible for a determined individual — even a talented bench technician — to produce high-quality anthrax with one trillion spores per gram, it seems extremely unlikely that this could be done without attracting attention. A lone bioweaponeer with the requisite knowledge and skills still would have extreme difficulty transferring the process to the type of setup that could be made in a basement or remote location.
And the cost would run into the millions. The specific equipment used to produce weaponized anthrax — through the various steps of initial bioreaction through weaponization by chemical treatment, proper spore-size control and drying — likely would run to several hundred thousand dollars. Add to that sum the required ancillary equipment, including scanning electron microscopes, not to mention the multimillion dollar infrastructure.
Substituting cheaper equipment for the tools normally used by a skilled scientist would cause serious problems of "process transfer." The preceding term commonly is used in the chemical and engineering community to describe taking a manufacturing process from one site and starting it up at another site, sometimes using different equipment. It almost would be impossible to repeat the original lab process and produce the same high-quality product with a homemade set-up without hundreds of trial-and-error tests. And when the first reasonable-looking, pure anthrax powder was produced, it would be essential to test it. This only can be done by sacrificing hundreds of Rhesus monkeys — an activity that is unlikely to go unnoticed by the neighbors.
If Drs. Keim and Spertzel are correct, the authorities have wasted precious time and resources on a wild goose chase. Hopefully, the lost time has not ensured the escape from detection of the anthrax terrorists.
The Anthrax Case: Hatfill Tormentor Back In Business
The Anthrax/Hatfill Files
By Nicholas Stix
October 2, 2002
Toogood Reports
She’s b-a-a-a-ck!
Remember Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg? She’s the tenured Marxist activist who from circa October 2001 until August, with the media’s consent, manipulated coverage of last fall’s anthrax attacks, in which five people were murdered and over a dozen sickened by anthrax-contaminated letters. She also engineered the smear campaign that sought to railroad scientist Dr. Steven J. Hatfill for the anthrax attacks.
On September 22, 2002, Rosenberg published a long op-ed essay in the Los Angeles Times, in which she sought to resurrect her discredited theory, according to which the anthrax killer was an insider from the American biodefense program at USAMRIID (the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases), at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland, and to take some more cheap shots at the man whose career and life she has sought to destroy, Steven Hatfill.
The motive for Rosenberg’s campaign is her desire to destroy America’s biodefense program, and thus leave America defenseless against biological attack. Rosenberg is a Marxist; as former Marxist Irving Louis Horowitz once observed, contemporary Marxists believe that anything that harms the United States helps the Third World.
Rosenberg targeted Hatfill because he opposes bioweapons protocols Rosenberg supports, and because while living in the former Rhodesia (since 1980, Zimbabwe), he had supported Rhodesia’s white apartheid regime, while she apparently supports the black apartheidists who eventually prevailed, and who have since 1980 been led by genocidal dictator Robert Mugabe.
Beginning in late December or early January, Rosenberg began spreading two main stories, the “American” and the “European” version, plus “soft” and “hard” variations, respectively.
She told American reporters that the anthrax killer was a biodefense program insider, who had sent the letters not to kill anyone, but to warn the public of the danger of biological warfare. The Baltimore Sun’s Scott Shane dubbed this the “bioevangelist” theory. Rosenberg told more gullible European reporters, that the anthrax killer was a scientist who worked for the CIA, and who carried out the attacks on Agency orders.
In her “soft” variant, Rosenberg claimed that she had come up with her own “profile” of the attacker, based on publicly available information; in the “hard” variation, she insisted that she had FBI sources.
Rosenberg has tended to pair the American and soft versions, and the European and hard versions, respectively. What the European journalists didn’t know was that the version Rosenberg was feeding them came not from “FBI sources,” but from the defunct Chris Carter TV series, Millennium.
On July 22, I advised Hatfill that if he wanted to stay out of jail, he’d better take the offensive.
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg adopted a low profile beginning about August
11. That was the same day that Steven Hatfill held the first of two dramatic press conferences, in which he named Rosenberg as one of his tormentors:
And yet, according to an August 11 AP story, Rosenberg insisted to Associated Press reporter Laura Meckler, “I have never mentioned any names, not publicly, not to the FBI, not to the Senate committee or staff, not to anyone. I have never said or written anything that pointed only to one specific person. If anyone sees parallels, that’s their opinion.”
Rosenberg made a similar denial to the New York Times’ Eric Schmitt.
Rosenberg’s denials are nonsense on stilts. She had long claimed to have a “profile,” but she didn’t have a profile, she had a person, Hatfill, from whom she derived the profile. Her reference to Hatfill as “Mr. Z,” in a June report she’d posted at the web site of Red Flags Weekly, was a transparent dodge.
The motivation for Rosenberg’s denials is transparent: She fears a libel lawsuit from Hatfill. But in the June 26 Hartford Courant, reporters Dave Altimari and Jack Dolan wrote that “Hatfill’s name came up during a [June 18] meeting between Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a biological weapons expert from the Federation of American Scientists, and staff members of Sens. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., and Thomas A. Daschle, D-S.D., both of whom were sent anthrax-contaminated letters. FBI agents were present at the meeting, sources said.”
Altimari and Dolan added, “For months, Rosenberg has been publicly prodding the FBI to take a closer look at Hatfill.” (Hatfill’s reference to the Frederick News-Post was to an article which repeated the Hartford Courant story.)
And in an August 8 story, USA Today reporters Kevin Johnson and Toni Locy wrote,
In June, Henry Kelly, the president of the Federation of American Scientists, refused to post Rosenberg’s newest report on the anthrax case, because it clearly pointed to one person. According to an August 19 web log entry written for the FAS web site by Stephen Aftergood,
Soon after Steven Hatfill’s first press conference (August 11), Red Flags, the socialist medical web site which had posted Rosenberg’s June
“Mr. Z” report, took it down. FAS and Red Flags both sought to protect themselves from defamation lawsuits by Hatfill.
In the August 3 Washington Times, reporter Guy Taylor quoted Rosenberg as telling him that on August 1, the same day as one of the FBI’s highly publicized searches of Hatfill’s home, she was visited by agents and,
The foregoing passage has a surreal quality; the main suspect of any such conspiracy would be none other than Barbara Hatch Rosenberg! And the FBI agents asking the questions knew full well of Rosenberg’s role in Hatfill’s misery – after all, she’d sought them out.
I think that the real reason for the agents’ questions, was to let Rosenberg know that the Bureau would be in charge of the spin machine that she had previously controlled.
In early September, Rosenberg announced that she had come up with a new anthrax report, but would be sharing it solely with the FBI. That was clearly another move to limit her liability.
For an indication of how little the mainstream media has changed its ways of covering the anthrax case, note that in Reuters reporter James Vicini’s September 5 article, “FBI Criticized for Failing to Solve Anthrax Case,” Vicini confounded those who criticized the Bureau for having wasted time dogging Hatfill, with Rosenberg, who was behind the anti-Hatfill campaign.
Which brings us back to Rosenberg’s September 22 L.A. Times op-ed.
While repeating her unsupported theory that a biodefense insider was the anthrax attacker, she could not resist taking swipes at Hatfill, albeit in a fashion designed to limit her liability:
The anthrax investigation has not raised any questions about “the nature and value of the work at Ft. Detrick” (read: USAMRIID), but that was a segue to an attack on Hatfill. Since Steven Hatfill did inflate his credentials, Rosenberg can get away with her weasely language. But she omitted noting that his access was to “dangerous biological agents” such as the Ebola virus, for which he is a recognized, world-class researcher.
As the saying goes, a half-truth is a whole lie.
The ultimate irony is that Rosenberg is charging a leading scientist with being unqualified to do his speciality, in an article for which she has misrepresented her own professional status. Rosenberg identified herself to the Los Angeles Times as “a research professor of molecular biology at State University of New York at Purchase.” In fact, she is a “research professor” of environmental science, a much less prestigious title. And there is no “state university” in Purchase; Rosenberg’s employer, Purchase College, is a four-year, state performing arts school, for which she neither teaches nor conducts research.
A reader might be skeptical as to how much mischief Rosenberg could have created. Rosenberg got Senators Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle – recipients of two anthrax-contaminated letters last fall – to apply pressure to the FBI. In turn, the FBI harassed Hatfill; invented a phony story about bloodhounds in order to fraudulently induce a federal judge to issue a criminal search warrant which was executed before a tipped-off media on August 1; and on August 1 sent an e-mail to Steven Hatfill’s employer, Louisiana State University, illegally ordering it to cease and desist employing Hatfill in any Justice Department-funded program, which amounted to a federal blacklisting of Hatfill, whose field is funded entirely by the Justice Department. Not only was Hatfill terminated, but his boss at LSU, Steven Guillot, was also fired for his failure to immediately violate Hatfill’s rights.
But surely scientists would know better, you ask. Consider the following e-mail I received from a scientist just the other day:
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg still holds the key to Steven Hatfill’s fate, and remains central to the media-political maelstrom that has engulfed Hatfill.
But who cares about Hatfill, anyway? According to an ABC News poll published on Tuesday, only 20 percent of Americans feel that the government is trampling their civil liberties. Everything’s fine, as long as somebody else is getting stomped on.
Hey, let’s party!
By Nicholas Stix
October 2, 2002
Toogood Reports
She’s b-a-a-a-ck!
Remember Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg? She’s the tenured Marxist activist who from circa October 2001 until August, with the media’s consent, manipulated coverage of last fall’s anthrax attacks, in which five people were murdered and over a dozen sickened by anthrax-contaminated letters. She also engineered the smear campaign that sought to railroad scientist Dr. Steven J. Hatfill for the anthrax attacks.
On September 22, 2002, Rosenberg published a long op-ed essay in the Los Angeles Times, in which she sought to resurrect her discredited theory, according to which the anthrax killer was an insider from the American biodefense program at USAMRIID (the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases), at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland, and to take some more cheap shots at the man whose career and life she has sought to destroy, Steven Hatfill.
The motive for Rosenberg’s campaign is her desire to destroy America’s biodefense program, and thus leave America defenseless against biological attack. Rosenberg is a Marxist; as former Marxist Irving Louis Horowitz once observed, contemporary Marxists believe that anything that harms the United States helps the Third World.
Rosenberg targeted Hatfill because he opposes bioweapons protocols Rosenberg supports, and because while living in the former Rhodesia (since 1980, Zimbabwe), he had supported Rhodesia’s white apartheid regime, while she apparently supports the black apartheidists who eventually prevailed, and who have since 1980 been led by genocidal dictator Robert Mugabe.
Beginning in late December or early January, Rosenberg began spreading two main stories, the “American” and the “European” version, plus “soft” and “hard” variations, respectively.
She told American reporters that the anthrax killer was a biodefense program insider, who had sent the letters not to kill anyone, but to warn the public of the danger of biological warfare. The Baltimore Sun’s Scott Shane dubbed this the “bioevangelist” theory. Rosenberg told more gullible European reporters, that the anthrax killer was a scientist who worked for the CIA, and who carried out the attacks on Agency orders.
In her “soft” variant, Rosenberg claimed that she had come up with her own “profile” of the attacker, based on publicly available information; in the “hard” variation, she insisted that she had FBI sources.
Rosenberg has tended to pair the American and soft versions, and the European and hard versions, respectively. What the European journalists didn’t know was that the version Rosenberg was feeding them came not from “FBI sources,” but from the defunct Chris Carter TV series, Millennium.
On July 22, I advised Hatfill that if he wanted to stay out of jail, he’d better take the offensive.
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg adopted a low profile beginning about August
11. That was the same day that Steven Hatfill held the first of two dramatic press conferences, in which he named Rosenberg as one of his tormentors:
According to The Frederick (Md.) News-Post of June 27, 2002, in June 2002 a woman named Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, who affiliates herself with the Federation of American Scientists, saw fit to discuss me as a suspect in the anthrax case in a meeting with FBI agents and Senate staffers. I don’t know Dr. Rosenberg. I have never met her, I have never spoken or corresponded with this woman. And to my knowledge, she is ignorant of my work and background except in the very broadest of terms.
The only thing I know about her views is that she and I apparently differ on whether the United States should sign onto a proposed modification of the international biological weapons convention. This was something I opposed to safeguard American industry, and I believe she favored.
I am at a complete loss to explain her reported hostility and accusations. I don’t know this woman at all.
In any event, within several days after Dr. Rosenberg’s reported comments in Congress, the FBI called me again at home. I was asked if these agents could look at my apartment and swab the walls for anthrax spores. I was surprised at the request. Anthrax is a deadly inhalational disease.
And yet, according to an August 11 AP story, Rosenberg insisted to Associated Press reporter Laura Meckler, “I have never mentioned any names, not publicly, not to the FBI, not to the Senate committee or staff, not to anyone. I have never said or written anything that pointed only to one specific person. If anyone sees parallels, that’s their opinion.”
Rosenberg made a similar denial to the New York Times’ Eric Schmitt.
Rosenberg’s denials are nonsense on stilts. She had long claimed to have a “profile,” but she didn’t have a profile, she had a person, Hatfill, from whom she derived the profile. Her reference to Hatfill as “Mr. Z,” in a June report she’d posted at the web site of Red Flags Weekly, was a transparent dodge.
The motivation for Rosenberg’s denials is transparent: She fears a libel lawsuit from Hatfill. But in the June 26 Hartford Courant, reporters Dave Altimari and Jack Dolan wrote that “Hatfill’s name came up during a [June 18] meeting between Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a biological weapons expert from the Federation of American Scientists, and staff members of Sens. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., and Thomas A. Daschle, D-S.D., both of whom were sent anthrax-contaminated letters. FBI agents were present at the meeting, sources said.”
Altimari and Dolan added, “For months, Rosenberg has been publicly prodding the FBI to take a closer look at Hatfill.” (Hatfill’s reference to the Frederick News-Post was to an article which repeated the Hartford Courant story.)
And in an August 8 story, USA Today reporters Kevin Johnson and Toni Locy wrote,
Rosenberg does not name Hatfill in her writings, but she has told authorities that she is referring to him.
In June, Henry Kelly, the president of the Federation of American Scientists, refused to post Rosenberg’s newest report on the anthrax case, because it clearly pointed to one person. According to an August 19 web log entry written for the FAS web site by Stephen Aftergood,
Rosenberg, a scientist at the State University of New York who also chairs the FAS Working Group on Biological Weapons, has been an outspoken critic of the FBI investigation and has publicly and privately advanced her own theories concerning who might have been responsible for the anthrax attacks.
“Rosenberg’s remarks on this topic do not represent the views of the Federation of American Scientists,” wrote FAS President Henry C. Kelly in a letter to the editor of the Hartford Courant published on July 1.
“Accordingly, the Federation declined to post on its web site a June 2002 analysis by Rosenberg that purported to identify a ‘likely perpetrator.’
“The Federation obviously encourages its members to provide officials with information and analysis that might be pertinent to the solution of a crime like the anthrax attacks,” said Kelly.
But “FAS opposes any effort to publicly identify possible suspects or ‘persons of interest’ outside of a formal law enforcement proceeding and has not published such accusations,” said Kelly.
Soon after Steven Hatfill’s first press conference (August 11), Red Flags, the socialist medical web site which had posted Rosenberg’s June
“Mr. Z” report, took it down. FAS and Red Flags both sought to protect themselves from defamation lawsuits by Hatfill.
In the August 3 Washington Times, reporter Guy Taylor quoted Rosenberg as telling him that on August 1, the same day as one of the FBI’s highly publicized searches of Hatfill’s home, she was visited by agents and,
“They kept asking me did I think there might be a group in the biodefense community that was trying to land the blame on Hatfill.... Maybe [Dr. Hatfill] was being set up. That’s my speculation of what [the agents] thought….
“I just cannot imagine that it was a bona fide conspiracy,” she said, adding that she told the FBI she had heard nothing to suggest a group was trying to frame Dr. Hatfill.
The foregoing passage has a surreal quality; the main suspect of any such conspiracy would be none other than Barbara Hatch Rosenberg! And the FBI agents asking the questions knew full well of Rosenberg’s role in Hatfill’s misery – after all, she’d sought them out.
I think that the real reason for the agents’ questions, was to let Rosenberg know that the Bureau would be in charge of the spin machine that she had previously controlled.
In early September, Rosenberg announced that she had come up with a new anthrax report, but would be sharing it solely with the FBI. That was clearly another move to limit her liability.
For an indication of how little the mainstream media has changed its ways of covering the anthrax case, note that in Reuters reporter James Vicini’s September 5 article, “FBI Criticized for Failing to Solve Anthrax Case,” Vicini confounded those who criticized the Bureau for having wasted time dogging Hatfill, with Rosenberg, who was behind the anti-Hatfill campaign.
Which brings us back to Rosenberg’s September 22 L.A. Times op-ed.
While repeating her unsupported theory that a biodefense insider was the anthrax attacker, she could not resist taking swipes at Hatfill, albeit in a fashion designed to limit her liability:
The anthrax investigation has raised questions about the nature and value of the work at Ft. Detrick and has brought to light the granting of security clearance and free access to highly dangerous biological agents to someone with falsified credentials – very disturbing whether or not he turns out to be the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks.
The anthrax investigation has not raised any questions about “the nature and value of the work at Ft. Detrick” (read: USAMRIID), but that was a segue to an attack on Hatfill. Since Steven Hatfill did inflate his credentials, Rosenberg can get away with her weasely language. But she omitted noting that his access was to “dangerous biological agents” such as the Ebola virus, for which he is a recognized, world-class researcher.
As the saying goes, a half-truth is a whole lie.
The ultimate irony is that Rosenberg is charging a leading scientist with being unqualified to do his speciality, in an article for which she has misrepresented her own professional status. Rosenberg identified herself to the Los Angeles Times as “a research professor of molecular biology at State University of New York at Purchase.” In fact, she is a “research professor” of environmental science, a much less prestigious title. And there is no “state university” in Purchase; Rosenberg’s employer, Purchase College, is a four-year, state performing arts school, for which she neither teaches nor conducts research.
A reader might be skeptical as to how much mischief Rosenberg could have created. Rosenberg got Senators Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle – recipients of two anthrax-contaminated letters last fall – to apply pressure to the FBI. In turn, the FBI harassed Hatfill; invented a phony story about bloodhounds in order to fraudulently induce a federal judge to issue a criminal search warrant which was executed before a tipped-off media on August 1; and on August 1 sent an e-mail to Steven Hatfill’s employer, Louisiana State University, illegally ordering it to cease and desist employing Hatfill in any Justice Department-funded program, which amounted to a federal blacklisting of Hatfill, whose field is funded entirely by the Justice Department. Not only was Hatfill terminated, but his boss at LSU, Steven Guillot, was also fired for his failure to immediately violate Hatfill’s rights.
But surely scientists would know better, you ask. Consider the following e-mail I received from a scientist just the other day:
I held my annual house party last night for all the people that work for me, along with their significant others. The subject of going to war with Iraq came up, as well as last year’s anthrax attacks. None of these people are news-junkies but they do follow the news. It was interesting to observe that every single one of them regarded the anthrax attacks as a closed case. I heard quotes like “Yeah, it was that guy who used to work at the bioweapons lab.”
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg still holds the key to Steven Hatfill’s fate, and remains central to the media-political maelstrom that has engulfed Hatfill.
But who cares about Hatfill, anyway? According to an ABC News poll published on Tuesday, only 20 percent of Americans feel that the government is trampling their civil liberties. Everything’s fine, as long as somebody else is getting stomped on.
Hey, let’s party!