Posted on 10/16/2001 7:50:26 AM PDT by Alas
Abortion Rights Group Gets Suspicious Letters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A leading U.S. abortion rights group said on Monday that 90 of its clinics and offices in at least 13 states had received envelopes containing threatening letters and an unidentified powdery substance.
Planned Parenthood (news - web sites) Federation of America said some of the letters included messages from a group called the Army of God, a militant anti-abortion group that has advocated violence against medical personnel who perform abortions.
A spokesman for Planned Parenthood, who asked not to be quoted by name, said the letters were delivered to the organization's national offices and numerous local offices and medical facilities those offices operate. Abortions are performed at many of those facilities, as well as various health services for women.
The group said there have been no reported injuries and that law enforcement officials, including FBI (news - web sites) investigators, were conducting tests on the powdery substance to determine whether it was anthrax bacterium spores.
The news comes amid a nationwide scare involving the potentially deadly bacteria that could be used as a biological warfare agent. The spokesman for the group said initial field test on the substance in letters received at two locations had come back as negative for anthrax. One of the letters had been sent to offices in Greensboro, North Carolina. The spokesman said he did not know the location that received the second letter that tested negative.
Planned Parenthood said the envelopes were mailed to Planned Parenthood offices bearing postmarks from four cities: Atlanta; Columbus, Ohio; and Chattanooga and Knoxville, Tennessee. The spokesman said he believed all the letters were received on Monday. The offices and clinics receiving the letters are located in the East Coast and Midwest, the group said. ``All of them are in the hands of various authorities around the country. As far as we can tell, they all came today in regular mail,'' the spokesman said.
Planned Parenthood said the letters had pre-printed return addresses from the U.S. Marshall's Office and the Secret Service. Some had a message stating, ``Time Sensitive -- Urgent Security Notice -- Open Immediately.'' The spokesman said he could not provide a copy of any of the letters.
``With this many incidents and with the similarity of all of the letters, this is clearly a coordinated effort that was designed to terrorize our staff and affiliates. And people have the right to know about it,'' the spokesman said. In a statement, Planned Parenthood President Gloria Feldt said: ``It is perverse that these individuals here at home, who are themselves terrorists by virtue of their actions, would seek to capitalize on the events of the last days and weeks to further their own extremist agenda. But this will not deter us from our mission of providing essential health services to women in this nation.''
``Whether a hoax or not, these are intolerable acts of terror, and every effort must be made to apprehend the perpetrators,'' Feldt added. Eric Robert Rudolph, the man charged with carrying out the fatal bombings at Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Olympics and at a Birmingham, Alabama in 1998, among other bombings, has been linked to the Army of God. A spokeswoman for the FBI national office had no comment on the investigation and referred calls to the agency's field office that handles Washington. Calls to that office were not returned.
And imprisoned.
He escaped after 4 months in jail and is a fugative in hiding right now.
I admire consistancy.
Your posts are absurd.
Abortion doctors butcher millions of babies every year around the world.
That's millions of terrorist acts against humanity. Christians _do_ respect life. But in the face of such horror, is it any wonder that 1 or 2 people a year freak out and try to take action against the deaths?
The number of people engaging in violence against abortion is so amazingly low in comparison to the encompassing vastness of the evil, that to use such activity to characterize a belief-set is despicable beyond words.
When you stand before God, I would not want to be in your shoes.
Mark W.
BTW, I am pro-life, therefore I am against slaughtering the innocent wherever they mayt be found to dwell, the womb or some obscure clinic or apartment. But you knew that, you just had to show your hateful side, eh!
Er, I certainly would if it had "mystery powder" on it!
Yes, I do trust the FBI. But "trusting" Planned Parenthood isn't the issue. In fact, what I'M saying is "wait a minute, how can you dismiss this out of hand based on how you 'feel' about it?"
I'm saying I neither "trust" nor "distrust." If the FBI got the stuff, we should hear about it presently, right?
As I say, anything's possible, but Alas is giving his opinion only. There's no "there" there.
I don't. It could well be. There are a whole host of possibilities. My point was that Alas can't simply say "oh, this was a lie perpetrated by PP." I gave another possibility, to illustrate my point. Yours is yet another possibility that illustrates that same point.
That is a great post!
It gets my nomination for post of the day!
LOL, that was great....
Can anyone that truly knows Jesus Christ imagine Him sending Anthrax, even as a hoax, through the mail, for any cause. He would die in a hail of Army of God bullets standing in the doorway of an abortion mill before he would take a single human life. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. These right-wing perverts that kill the abortionists know nothing of the God in whose name they act. They will stand for all eternity shoulder to shoulder with Mohammed Atta and his group of equally misbegotten fruitcakes. The answer is never in murder, always in conversion, however more difficult the path of the cross may be.
Another Nazi doctrine was the Big Lie; the notion that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes true. Does PP believe in that too? Well, they make big money doing abortions and they insist that they do not make money. About 10 years ago, the magazine New Dimensions, to which I am proud to have been a contributor, did a whole section on this and proved that Planned Parenthood does indeed make big money, so big that this is itself a motivation. If they lie about that, what else do they lie about?
Planned Parenthood is well-known for supporting the use of state power to shut down the free speech rights of pro-lifers through measures like the very unconcstitutional "Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances" or FACE Act, in addition to trying to use the RICO statutes against Operation Rescue. They clearly do not believe in freedom.
Now, it is a matter of record that the people who have shot abortionists to death almost universally have no prior involvement in any rpo-llife activity, and that the abortion advocates and the media know this. Yet they deliberately portray this as typical of the whole pro-life movement.
This is a long way of saying that the background of Planned Parenthood leads me to suspect that they may well have sent anthrax or something they could pass off as anthrax to themselves to try to damage the pro-life movement. They must be exposed.
First of all, perhaps you can tell me why the post offices weren't shut down in New York or Washington, where there were CONFIRMED cases of anthrax?
Next, since none of the PP offices have tested positive for anthrax yet, there is no reason to shut the post offices down.
Tom, if you want to defend the baby murdering scum at PP, go ahaead and do it, but don't pull a clinton on us.
Don't you EVER, EVER accuse me of defending abortion, GET IT?
All I'm doing here is refuting your incredibly stupid conspiracy theory with first hand evidence. I have nothing to do with the PP office, but I did get a chance to speak with the mailman, who I know personally. I know he wouldn't lie to me.
So why don't you take your silly theory and go away?
Notice the planned parenthood clinics which supposedly received these letters filled with possible anthrax mixed with powder didn't close to protect their "patients". Either they don't care then if they risk exposing their clients to anthrax or they knew there was no anthrax.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.