Coleen Rowley: FBI missed opportunity before Tiller murder

The one thing that doesn’t seem to be known is whether the FBI ran the standard background– criminal history check of their own FBI and any other databases that would have turned up the 1997 conviction.

The vandalism alone, despite the fact that there’s a federal statute specifically protecting the health clinics, might not have been enough but combined with the prior conviction, there would have been plenty of reason to conduct photo line-ups and possibly to conduct a “knock and talk” at least.

Additionally you have to consider the current context of massive intelligence gathering/investigation going on. Little or no factual predication is necessary to conduct FBI investigtion anymore since the prior Attorney General Guidelines were dropped. But the downside to this massive collection, which is something I and others have been warning about for a long time, is that it makes it harder to find a needle in the haystack when you keep adding hay.

By contrast, you got the FBI and other agencies launching a year-long, expensive investigation in the lead-up to the RNC while the majority of terrorists who have actually committed “acts dangerous to human life” in the last couple of decades have been right-wing loner type extremists (i.e. Kazinsky, Rudolph, McVeigh, the anthrax killer was a Ft. Detrich military scientist, etc.) Admittedly, the loner or duo type extremist is the hardest to find or prevent. See my piece on the pre-RNC investigation: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleen-rowley/why-the-rnc-commission-re_b_169124.html

A lot of people are wondering how the Obama Department of Justice will respond to Tiller’s murder and whether there will be an investigation of the larger world of anti-choice terrorist groups. There seems to be at least some “circumstantial evidence” to suggest that Roeder did not act alone in planning and committing this vile and evil act. What is the government going to do about it?

All you have to do is compare the efforts of the Task Force lead by the FBI and Department of Justice to infiltrate or spy on supposed subversive elements with the nonaction by the government under the Bush administration of real subversive terrorist organizations like Operation Rescue, Rescue America, Prayer and Action News, Army of God and I suppose others. Recently, Rachel Maddow addressed the obvious support the above pictured lunatic had from the anti-abortion movement wih respect to the vitual non-enforcement of the Federal “Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances” Act (FACE):

“As Rachel reported the FACE Act was enforced under the Clinton administration but was all but ignored once Bush took office. After the murder of Dr. Tiller the question remains as to how the Obama administration will respond. From The Washington Independent:

“As Rachel Maddow revealed in chilling detail in her MSNBC news show on Monday night, groups such as Rescue America, Prayer and Action News, Army of God and Operation Rescue Founder Randall Terry all appeared to be celebrating Tiller’s murder on Monday. And while extremists who promote violence against abortion providers could be prosecuted under state and federal law — and particularly under the federal FACE Act — the federal government in recent years has hardly prosecuted any such cases.According to statistics provided by the Department of Justice, the Bush administration brought only about two criminal prosecutions per year in the entire country under the FACE Act , and never more than four in any single year. The Clinton administration, in contrast, prosecuted 17 defendants for violations of the FACE Act in 1997 alone, and an average of about 10 per year since the law was enacted in 1994. Those cases included one against a woman in 1996 who yelled through a bullhorn to a doctor, “Robert, remember Dr. Gunn. This could happen to you …”, referring to Dr. David Gunn, the first abortion doctor ever murdered, in 1993. In another case, a man who parked a Ryder truck outside a clinic shortly after the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, where a Ryder truck had been used to carry explosives, was found to have threatened force. Stalking, arson and bomb threats are also illegal.

“Whether the dropoff in prosecutions is because the FACE Act successfully deterred crimes after its enactment or because the Bush administration wasn’t interested in prosecuting them is not clear. “The amount of activity really did drop a lot after FACE was enacted and it was beginning to be enforced,” said Cathleen Mahoney, Executive Vice President of the National Abortion Federation who was an attorney in the Justice Department until 2006. “Certainly the political will wasn’t there.””

“That’s disappointed Janet Crepps, deputy director of the legal program at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “I don’t think that the government has done enough,” she said, noting that while the Clinton administration had created a task force in the Department of Justice to coordinate responses to clinic threats and violence, during the Bush years, “we’ve heard that providers during that time would call DOJ for help and get no response.”

“Justice Department spokesman Alejandro Miyar said Tuesday that the task force still exists, and in a statement released after the fatal shooting of Dr. Tiller, Attorney General Eric Holder said that “[f]ederal law enforcement is coordinating with local law enforcement officials in Kansas on the investigation of this crime.” It remains to be seen, however, whether the government will also investigate the anti-abortion activists who threaten abortion providers and may have worked with the actual murderer.”

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/node/28677

Terrorism is the use or threat of violence for political ends. Roeder got his money somewhere. Follow the money. Follow the telephone calls.