Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
In late 2001, antiabortion fanatic Clayton Waagner used packets of bogus anthrax to shut down scores of clinics nationwide. When he was convicted last week, the press was notably absent.
Dec 10, 2003 | Only a couple of years ago, Clayton Waagner was one of three extreme-right American terrorists on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list, a self-styled avenging angel of the unborn. In the autumn of 2001, at the apex of national fear about terrorist strikes and deadly anthrax attacks, he mailed hundreds of envelopes stuffed with white powder and threatening letters to abortion clinics and reproductive rights organizations -- all in the name of the antiabortion Army of God. Doctors, staffers, clients and their families were terrified, and hundreds of clinics were shut down. That made Clayton Waagner a celebrity, of sorts, and to some, a hero.
Waagner lost his spot atop the 10 Most Wanted lists when an alert Kinko's clerk outside of Cincinnati recognized him from a wanted poster, and in a federal courtroom in Philadelphia last week, he was convicted of threatening the use of weapons of mass destruction and other federal charges, more than 50 counts in all. The two-week trial was remarkable not so much for its verdict as for the near-complete lack of media attention that it attracted. Perhaps the conclusion was too anticlimactic, a foregone conclusion. Or perhaps it was because Attorney General John Ashcroft's prosecutors sought to make the trial not about abortion, but about "anthrax hoaxes." In a news culture obsessed with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and overseas terror threats, few reporters were there for the denouement.
Though he now faces a possible sentence of life in prison, Waagner went down without a word of regret or remorse. Acting as his own attorney, he said in his closing argument to the jury that he was "tickled" that people were terrorized by the anthrax threats. After the verdict was read, he shook the prosecutors' hands and then told the judge: "It was fun." The feds want to talk with him further about the violent antiabortion underground, but he told FBI agent James Fitzgerald, who took his original confession: "I'm still not going to cooperate."
Perhaps it's no surprise that Waagner's story is already disappearing into the deep shadows still cast by Sept. 11, 2001. But he was very much a part of that story, and the fear he created, amplified in that climate of terror, still reverberates through the culture.
Waagner was in federal custody awaiting sentencing on federal weapons and stolen vehicle charges -- none related to antiabortion activities -- when he made a dramatic escape from federal custody in February 2001. On the lam, he declared himself to be "God's warrior" and a "terrorist" in a manifesto published on the Army of God Web site. He threatened to kill as many abortion providers as he could. He robbed banks, bought guns and computers, stalked clinics, and prepared for war against abortion.
He never fired a shot, but he contributed to the terrorization of the nation at its lowest moment in recent history. He mailed or FedEx'd some 550 envelopes containing white powder to abortion rights organizations and clinics in the name of the Army of God. "You have been exposed to anthrax," each letter announced. "We are going to kill all of you. From the Army of God, Virginia Dare Chapter."
Waagner's threatening packages arrived during the same period when real anthrax attacks on media outlets and Congress killed five people. Even Ashcroft, a resolute abortion opponent, called Waagner a terrorist. The entire nation was on edge, fearful of the threat of all forms of terrorism. Indeed, in response to some of Waagner's missives, whole city blocks were evacuated. People were stripped and hosed down with Clorox by hazmat teams in protective spacesuits.
Although the victims of the anthrax threats testified at Waagner's trial, the significance of their experience was nowhere to be seen in the press coverage. On the same day that the victims testified, the news media's angle du jour was that Waagner had mistakenly sent one powder packet to a Pennsylvania antiabortion crisis pregnancy center. While this made Waagner look foolish, unreported were the extraordinary horrors of Waagner's acts of terror around the country. The trivialization of Waagner's crimes by inattention and the depiction of him as a buffoon concerns Ann Glazier, director of clinic security at Planned Parenthood Federation of America for the past 10 years.
"Some of those women [who received the anthrax threats] are still terrified," she told Salon. "They cannot talk about this without breaking into tears and shaking. So this idea that, this is a guy who sort of did this as a joke or a lark is enraging to people like me. You can look at this and see the damage."
Glazier knows more stories of the horror's impact than probably anyone, and they spill out over the phone line one by one. One wave of Waagner's mailing was infused with a chemical that sets off false positives in tests for anthrax. It took the Centers for Disease Control 10-12 hours to figure it out. Glazier spent many of those hours on the phone with the terrified.
"There was no way you could treat this as anything other than the real thing," she said. "There were women who were forced to disrobe in front of complete strangers. They were given showers and made to stand out in the cold. A hazmat team brought one woman to the hospital where the E.R. person screamed at her -- 'You contaminated the entire hospital!' Another woman took off her clothes and was given a lab coat. She went to the hospital where she was decontaminated. But when she got to her car, she realized that all of her keys, her money, her identification, were locked up with her contaminated clothes in the hospital ... Lots of people had to go through the same thing. It was terrifying and it still terrifies them."
Waagner kept the feds on the run and abortion providers on edge for 10 months until his capture in December 2001.
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