FBI giving high priority to anti-abortion anthrax scares

Human Quest, Jan/Feb 2002 by Clarkson, Frederick

At a time when the nation Is obsessed with anthrax threats and real anthrax, the Federal Bureau of Investigation finally decided to make investigating and punishing perpetrators of the national wave of anthrax threats to abortion clinics a top priority and assigned the investigation to their counter-terrorism unit.

Anthrax threats to clinics have come in two waves since September 11. In the first, some 250 clinics received letters accompanied by white powder claiming that the recipients had been exposed to anthrax. A second wave of anthrax threats arrived at over 200 abortion rights organizations and clinics nationwide in November, in Federal Express letters. The National Abortion Federation was also evacuated in response to a bomb threat.

Abortion rights organizations that received anthrax threats included the Center for Reproductive Law. and Policy, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, and the Boston-based Abortion Access Project. The National Abortion Federation and Planned Parenthood Federation of America were falsely listed as the senders of the packages. Many of them included letters from the Army of God.

The FedExed threats came at a time when the investigators had turned their attention to domestic white supremacist terrorists as possible suspects in mailing of anthrax-laced letters to media outlets and members of Congress.

Some in the violent wing of the anti-abortion movement are concerned; this isn't a good time to be linked in the public's mind with Middle East terrorism. Ex-convict and Army of God member Joshua Graff has called for a "temporary Cease Fire in our war on the baby killers." He has expressed concern that "One or more of us has tried to capitalize on the national fear, and while I applaud the sentiment, by doing so they may well have left a deep association between us and that scum bag bin Laden."

Meanwhile Attorney General ]ohn Ashcroft, an anti-choice Republican, has refused to meet with alarmed abortion providers, preferring to delegate such matters to subordinates. In December, however, he appealed to the public for help in apprehending antiabortion militant Clayton Waagner, whom he named as a suspect in the anthrax threats. Waagner was already on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.

Right wingers suspected FBI and Justice Department sources have told reporters that the anthrax attacks on media outlets and government buildings may be the work of domestic neo-Nazi groups. In a typical account, a Justice Department official told the London Observer "We have to see the right wing as much better coordinated than its apparent disorganization suggests. And we have to presume that their opposition to government is just as virulent as that of the Islamic terrorists, if not as accomplished."

None of the envelopes containing anthrax threats has tested positive fo anthrax.

"We are going to kill...."

The October round of threatening mailings to women's health centers contained a white powder and a note that read: "You have been exposed to anthrax. We are going to kill all of you. Army of God, Virginia Dare Chapter." The envelopes had false return addresses from law enforcement agencies, including the "U.S. Secret Service" and the "U.S.

Marshall [sic] Service," and were marked: "TIME SENSITIVE: Urgent Security Notice Enclosed."

This suggests to Tracy Self, a sociologist at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and expert on the violent wing of the anti-abortion movement, that the senders have a sophisticated knowledge of clinic security matters. She says, for example, the first wave of mailings, which she has examined, are shrewdly presented, "right down to the correctness of the look of the envelopes, the clinics' names spelled out properly, nothing crude." "This is not a crazed, ragged, fiery-eyed bunch," she said in an interview. Rather, she says in light of the second, FedExed letters, they seem to be increasing in their "fluency," in clinic security. She points to "the way they are able to draw upon resources, such as getting the air bill and the account numbers to perpetuate this fraud."

"And with increasing fluency," she concludes, "comes an increasing urgency to crack this."

The FBI point man on the anthrax threat, Ruben Garcia, has met with security staff from the National Abortion Federation, Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Feminist Majority Foundation. The FBI says it Is intensifying its investigation, assigning the cases to a special unit of its domestic terrorism division and coordinating the investigation out of its Philadelphia field office.

Sophistication Is noted

Ann Glazier, director of clinic security at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, is pleased with these developments, especially since the sophistication of the Army of God tactics has grown. "Someone has the ability to carry out massive letter campaigns by mail," she said.

Glazier is concerned that many Americans don't believe that "domestic terrorists could be smart or have money. It's so much easier for our psyche," she says, "if we label them as dolts working out of a little shack in the woods, boiling-up their anthrax in a black cauldron."