Posted on 04/27/2002 5:36:38 AM PDT by buzzyboop
From prison, a place he is likely to call home for the remainder of his days, Clayton Waagner phoned in this account of a summer day in Florida.
After climbing the roof of a grocery store, he was able to see past the 8-foot security fence that encircles the Pensacola Community Health Center, where two doctors -- David Gunn and his successor, John Britton -- were shot to death within a year of each other in the early '90s. Clinic employees are counting on the fence to keep them out of the crosshairs.
"They think they're safe," Waagner told me. "From the roof I could lay my sight on one of the clinic workers showing up. I could have popped administrators. I could have popped the doctors. The guy that does the abortions there would have been dead."
For the 10 months he roamed the landscape, Clayton Lee Waagner, self-proclaimed anti-abortion warrior, robbed banks, heisted cars and carried a pistol, a rifle with telescopic sight and sniper's bipod, and a pipe bomb. He kept looking for a clinic to bomb, but couldn't find a way to do it without blowing up passersby. It is worth thinking about this: a safety-conscious clinic bomber. Little wonder that, in the times he says he had people in his gun sights, his nerves of steel became ordinary nerves, and those failed him.
"I kept thinking, 'Next time I'll pull it off. Next time I'll pull it off,'" he said.
Waagner places his visit to the Pensacola clinic sometime in June or July of last year. Dates and places are hazy because he traveled the country, trying to stay clear of a massive manhunt that catapulted him onto the most wanted lists of both the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service. The description he gave matches a strip center that sits across North Ninth Street from the clinic.
"The one disadvantage of this place was that directly behind the clinic is the end of a runway. So you've got to watch out for small planes," he said. His immediate target appears to have been Linda Taggart, the clinic director he had seen in an HBO documentary about anti-abortion violence.
"It occurred to me that she's probably [a] better [target] than a doctor. They shot two doctors. She got to keep hiring new ones," he said. Did he follow her?
"I even know where she goes to church," Waagner said. Around the same time Waagner claims to have stalked the Pensacola clinic, I received a letter from Paul Hill, the man who shot John Britton in 1994. He had high regard for Waagner.
"Clayton Waagner is upholding the duty to resist lethal force with force," Hill wrote. "Clayton Waagner's actions are giving credibility, urgency and direction to the pro-life movement which it has lacked and which it needs in order to prevail ... his actions proclaim the full humanity of the unborn more clearly than all the verbiage in the world." This, of course, was written around the time Waagner says he was quaking behind his gun sight and discovering himself to be a better car thief than killer.
Instead, after Sept. 11, he decided to go the anthrax route. He sent two mass mailings of powder and threatening letters to clinics around the East and Midwest, skipping New York City. Taggart got two of the mailings in Pensacola. The anthrax hoax shut down clinics around the country and Waagner reasons that a quarter of the patients didn't reschedule abortions. By his math, that means he saved more than 2,000 children.
Obviously, there is no way of figuring out just what Waagner accomplished. Even though his descriptions of the place and its surroundings check out, it is impossible to verify whether he was on that roof with a gun. His stories have proved credible in the past. He has described clinics from his 1999 travels, including people at them, and they have matched clinic employees working there. He declared that he was the sender of the anthrax threats and his fingerprint was found on one or more of the letters.
When U.S. Marshals seized a computer Waagner abandoned in a Mississippi hotel Sept. 7, it contained a list of people he hoped to kill. Linda Taggart was on it.
"I'm so glad he's back in prison," Taggart told me. In years to come, Waagner, who now gets one hour a day out of his cell, legs chained, hands manacled, a guard watching him as if he were Houdini, hopes his fingerprints will be found on new strategies for anti-abortion extremists.
"From what they're telling me, I've shown them that you can do something without killing someone. That has brought new life into the extremist groups," he said.
That's a scary message nobody has to be on a rooftop to shout.
It seems odd for him to say "extremist groups." Did someone misquote him?
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The damage done had he carried out his threats would have been very difficult to overcome.
BTW David Gunn was shot at Pensacola Medical Services at Cordova Square in Pensacola, its about 2 miles from the "Ladies Center" where Britton was shot.
Another reporter who has "filled in the blanks" to make his story fit the editorial plan.
As for the article "The Abortionist" that author interviwed me for that story but I did not make the cut. Lived in Pensacola, very involved in the abortion battle, even knew all the players But I did not come across radical enough for publication.
I don't agree with his tactics, but he saved more than 2000. Imagine the number of doctors who changed their minds about becoming abortionists when they heard the news about this incident.
But, this is not the way to stop abortion. We need to change the mind and hearts of our next door neighbors, and provide good homes to those children who are unwanted.
There was a debate about whether it is right to oppose abortion by force in First Things. And, frankly, it's very hard to find a convincing explanation for why more people are not out there doing anything they can to protect innocent lives. As I say, I still think pro-life violence is wrong, partly because of the devastating effect it would have on the movement. But although I am pretty well informed in theology and moral philosophy, I find it hard to get around the basic duty to defend your own life and to defend the lives of innocent people who are threatened with death.
Still, I conclude by saying again, "For God's sake, no violence." It will only hurt, not help. But let us all pray that this horrible situation can be resolved, because the present grim situation is simply unsustainable.
She goes to church?
I guess you would have politely asked Hitler to just stop killing the Jews.
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