Originally, Waagner wanted to use his trial as an international media stage to put abortion on trial. He planned to use the "necessity defense," which is the argument that sometimes the crime needed to be committed to stop a different or greater crime. Waagner initially argued that if he committed any crimes, they were intended to prevent the murder of the unborn. While the necessity defense has been used successfully by women who've been subjected to domestic violence and, in fear of their lives, killed their husbands, no judge has ever allowed it as a defense in a case involving crimes against abortion providers. Waagner's case proved to be no exception.

In fact, the Bush administration's Department of Justice wanted to make certain that Waagner's trial was not going to be about abortion. He was bitterly disappointed that he was not allowed to use the necessity defense, and made a point of getting the judge to reassure him that he could appeal partly on the court's denial. Acting as his own attorney, Waagner tried to raise his issues at every turn. And while he got in his licks, "The prosecution made it their business to make sure that he was not able to do that," Glazier said. "They were totally conscious that he was going to try to go there every single minute. And he did. Prosecutors always were on their feet in a flash. And he got overruled every time."

The Department of Justice wanted to try the case narrowly on the anthrax attacks and on using the Internet to make threats. Prosecutors did everything they could to keep information about Waagner's previous incarceration, his escape and his life on the lam out of the trial. At one point, Glazier noted, prosecutors showed the jurors a photograph of the trunk of the Mercedes Benz Waagner was driving when he was captured. The picture showed the printer he used to make the letters he mailed with the anthrax threats. But it was cropped so as not to show the case of shotgun shells that was also in the trunk.

Waagner didn't do much to help himself during the trial. Neither did his witnesses. Waagner himself seemed torn between his pride in his career as a terrorist and maintaining the façade of innocence while acting as his own attorney. "It was as if he could not decide whether he was going to say he did it," Glazier observed, "or whether he would hint that he was fronting for someone else. He kept going back and forth, and the jurors' eyes were rolling around in their heads."

"He repeatedly bragged that he had been the most wanted man in America and that he was a terrorist," said Glazier, still incredulous about Waagner's performance. "It was unbelievable."

Clearly, Waagner was going to have a tough time convincing the jury of his innocence. He had given a two-hour taped confession to an FBI agent. He also made another taped confession, a bizarre episode reported by Salon at the time.

Just after Thanksgiving 2001, Waagner entered the Carrollton, Ga., home of antiabortion militant Neal Horsley, whom he supposedly tied up and held at gunpoint while confessing to the anthrax threats on tape. Horsley, best know for his notorious Nuremberg Files Web site (which crossed out the names of abortion-providing physicians after they were murdered), immediately put out the news about Waagner's confession, and his claim to have a list of 42 clinic staff who would be killed if they did not resign their jobs. Horsley's role and relationship to Waagner has been odd. He hyped Waagner's mission on his Web sites, and presented him as Waagner presented himself -- as a man sent by God on a mission to scare abortion providers out of business. He treated Waagner as capable of killing. This made Horsley a fan -- but not, as it turned out, one who would be any help in court.

Waagner's trial defense -- for which he was unable to provide any corroboration -- was that he lied to Horsley and to the FBI to throw the feds off of the scent and to "take the pressure off" other antiabortion activists.

On Horsley's tape, played for the jury, Waagner described why he sent the packets of bogus anthrax to the clinics: "What I've been doing over the last nine months in a very orchestrated manner is to give those people a chance to quit. I want to demonstrate to them how truly vulnerable they are. I put anthrax in their face, or what they thought was anthrax ... They have no security, none."

Horsley was Waagner's main defense witness, and under questioning by Waagner, Horsley talked about abortion and wept about abortion -- but then maintained that he believed Waagner had mailed the anthrax threats and that he had "the capacity to do things nobody could imagine." Looking at Waagner, he said: "You wanted to terrorize people so they would discontinue killing little babies."

Although the drama was high, the media interest in the Waagner trial was low. There was little national coverage beyond the Associated Press. The newspapers of record, the New York Times and the Washington Post, gave the case little more than a passing mention. Observers such as Dallas Blanchard, a retired professor of sociology who has written several books on the antiabortion movement, think that Waagner's conviction was "a foregone conclusion ... [and] routine." With "no potential dramatic disclosures," he says, there were few elements of political soap opera to attract the press.

The news media may have been missing the forest for the trees. There was a time in 2001 when for the first time in history three of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted criminals were antiabortion domestic terrorists. But the past year has seen a series of victories by federal agents and prosecutors against the notorious trio. Before Waagner's conviction, Eric Rudolph, the Olympic bombing and clinic bombing suspect, was captured; and James Kopp was tried and convicted for the 1998 sniper attack that killed Dr. Barnett Slepian, an abortion provider, inside of his home in suburban Buffalo, N.Y.

Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank near Boston, agrees that while the outcome was not in doubt, there was more to why the press stayed away in droves. "Once somebody claims a religious motivation for an act of terrorism," he said, "most people, including reporters and editors, become unglued." If Waagner had been a self-identified Muslim terrorist instead of a Christian terrorist, Berlet observed, "he'd have been lynched by now." Indeed, while news reports invariably note that he is a self-described terrorist, and dutifully quote him as saying so, they also studiously avoid use of the word "Christian."

"The notion of Christian terrorists is a place people don't want to go," Glazier agreed. "And the notion of there being more than one Christian terrorist is a place where people also don't want to go."

Reporters and editors often "fear to offend," added Berlet. "But if it's fair to say if we can see the religious motivations in the Taliban, we ought to be able to see them in Waagner or Eric Rudolph." He notes that although Waagner and his associates in the Army of God "represent a tiny fraction of the wider Christian right, people don't know how to make sense of it." And reporters, he says, "walk away from it."

Though Waagner's crimes fiercely exploited the fears created by 9/11, Berlet says the press has tended to diminish the crimes. For example, he says, most of the stories use the term "anthrax hoax" to describe Waagner's crimes. But "just because a terrorist threat turns out to be a hoax does not mean that it has no effect."

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