The Monger type.

[Professor Rat.]

The domestic terrorist

Palm Beach Post Editorial
Tuesday, June 3, 2003

Eric Robert Rudolph's North Carolina neighbors describe him as a self-sufficient carpenter with a healthy loyalty to his anti-Semitic beliefs. The more fitting description of the man suspected in the bombings at the 1996 Olympics, two clinics that performed abortions and a gay nightclub is simple: terrorist.

Authorities say Rudolph planted the 40-pound pipe bomb that killed receptionist Alice Hawthorne and injured more than 100 at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta. He's also charged with a 1997 bombing outside an Atlanta-area clinic where doctors perform abortions. The explosions injured seven people. A month later, a bomb that investigators believe Rudolph set injured five at the nightclub in Atlanta. The next year, off-duty police officer Robert D. Sanderson was killed and nurse Emily Lyons was blinded in one eye when a bomb detonated outside a Birmingham, Ala., health-care center that also provided abortions. The license plate of a nearby truck was traced to Rudolph.

Investigators believe, according to a retired FBI agent, that Rudolph acted out of anger with the government for refusing to approve a cancer drug that he believed would have cured his father. Teachers say he wrote a paper in ninth grade denying that the Holocaust occurred. Rudolph dropped out of high school, earned an equivalency diploma, dropped out of college and dropped out of the Army. An ex-sister-in-law says he made money growing and selling marijuana.

Whatever the motive for Rudolph's hatred, he had sympathizers who say they would have treated him no differently than Dennis Malvasi and Loretta Marra treated James Kopp. In April, the married couple, anti-abortion activists, admitted that they tried to shelter and give money to Kopp, a one-time most-wanted FBI fugitive who was convicted in the sniper killing of Dr. Barnett Slepian of suburban Buffalo, N.Y., in 1998. The couple pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiring to harbor Kopp, who last month was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

Such networks hardly resemble Al-Qaeda, but they nevertheless are threats to domestic security and need to be broken up. Religious fanatics and white supremacists helped shape Rudolph's murderous beliefs against homosexuals, interracial marriage and abortion. The five-year, $24 million effort to capture Rudolph may have stopped the bomber himself, but the man investigators describe as a loner did not act alone.

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