Another Bucket of Whitewash

The April 13 guilty plea of Eric Rudolph for the bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics was met with general indifference by the ConWeb -- WorldNetDaily and CNSNews.com offered no original coverage, and NewsMax simply reprinted AP articles.

It is interesting, however, to note WND's past treatment of Rudolph. It turns out that Jack Cashill, in the midst of his discredited seven-part series in 2002 trying to prove that James Kopp didn't murder an abortion doctor (a few months before Kopp pleaded guilty to doing it, an event greeted with similar ConWeb indifference), tried to whitewash Rudolph as well.

Cashill noted that the FBI "turned its attention to Rudolph, a suspect in an earlier bombing of an abortion clinic. Why an abortion protestor would bomb the Olympics was never quite made clear, but clear to Kopp and others in the movement was why the FBI went after Rudolph. That he would one day join Rudolph on the FBI's 'most wanted' list could not have surprised Kopp."

Cashill -- who was trying to portray Kopp as a peaceful man who would never murder anyone in cold blood -- has yet to correct or apologize for that series. Indeed, he has gone on to more conspiratorial ravings; in 2004, he made a film called "Mega Fix" which blames Bill Clinton for, well, pretty much everything bad that happened in the 1990s and, of course, for 9/11. In an October WND piece (part six of eight) promoting his film, Cashill suggests that because the Clinton Justice Department got it wrong by initially going after Richard Jewell as a suspect in the Olympics bombing, they must be wrong about focusing on Rudolph as well:

Six months after the Centennial Park attack, a bomb goes off outside an Atlanta abortion clinic, and a month after that one explodes at the Otherside lounge, an Atlanta "gay" bar. This, of course, leads Clinton's Department Of Justice to pin it all, including the Olympics -- a rather novel target for anti-abortion activists -- on the mystical right-winger, Eric Rudolph.

As we all know, Rudolph has admitted his role in all three of those attacks, explaining that his rationale for the Olympics bombing was "to confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand."

Considering how wrong Cashill was about Kopp and Rudolph, we probably should expect his "Mega Fix" to have a similar disregard for the facts.

And given that WND editor Joseph Farah once described the idea that "right-wing Christians are dangerous terrorists prone to incite violence" as "slanderous, bigoted and inciteful" and insisted that the government is "actually inviting terrorist activity, encouraging it, paying for it," we won't hold our breath waiting for an apology from him for publishing this kind of factually deficient whitewash.