The Trump administration alliance of the neoconservatives and their penchant for false flag terrorist attacks and the alt-right, which has no problem with carrying out terrorist attacks and claiming credit for them, has proven to be a deadly combination.
The current spate of mail bombs targeting top Democrats, including two former presidents, and other anti-Trump individuals is a manifestation of the neocon/alt-right alliance that now controls the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court.
Sending mail bombs is clearly a favorite tactic of the far-right neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. On December 16, 1989, U.S. Judge Robert Vance, nominated by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 for the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, was assassinated by a mail bomb sent to his home in Mountain Brook, Alabama. Vance’s wife, Helen, was seriously injured in the bombing. Vance’s daughter-in-law, Joyce Vance, is a former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama and is a current commentator on MS-NBC.
Also killed in the same series of mail bombings was Robert Robinson, a civil rights attorney in Savannah, Georgia. The perpetrator of the bombings was Walter Moody, who was convicted on federal and Alabama charges of the crimes, and executed by Alabama on April 19 of this year. Moody also sent mail bombs to the U.S. Eleventh Circuit Court building in Atlanta and the NAACP office in Jacksonville, Florida. Moody was also charged with sending a tear-gas bomb that exploded at the Atlanta office of the NAACP. The FBI’s mail bombing case was code-named VANPAC.
All four bombs sent to Vance, Robinson, the federal courthouse in Atlanta, and Jacksonville were identical. The bombs recently sent to the former presidents and others were also identical, all being pipe bombs. The VANPAC explosive devices were also pipe bombs.
Special prosecutor Louis Freeh, who would later become FBI director, downplayed Moody’s ties to white supremacists and the far-right wing, choosing to describe Moody as a “lone wolf.” Freeh and federal prosecutors dismissed Moody’s claim that others were involved in the mail bombings, including the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Georgia. During the 1980s, a white supremacist group called Civilian Military Assistance (CMA) of Decatur, Alabama, was involved in assisting the Central Intelligence Agency in the covert contra war in Nicaragua being waged against the Sandinista government. The CMA also had chapters in Fort Worth, Miami, Nashville, Chicago, St. Louis, and Tallahassee. The CMA also had close ties to the KKK.
For Freeh and other prosecutors to charge a wider network with the assassinations of Vance and Robinson would have opened up the can of worms that the KKK and associated “Dixie Mafia” criminal syndicates were supporting the CIA’s covert war in Central America. Moody was made the “fall guy” by the George H. W. Bush administration, which was afraid that a wider scope investigation by the FBI might lead to the Oval Office.
In January 2011, incendiary bombs were mailed to Maryland Democratic Governor Martin O’Malley at the Governor’s Mansion in Annapolis and to the Maryland Department of Transportation office in Hanover. Two state employees had their fingers burned when they opened the envelope. The package addressed to O’Malley was opened in the mail room at the Maryland Department of General Services’ Jeffery Building in Annapolis. The perpetrator, who was never caught, wrote notes that read: “Report suspicious activity . . . total bullshit . . . you have created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Signed, X.” There are indications that the bombs’ sender or senders adhered to some sort of libertarian anti-government philosophy, another hallmark of the far-right wing.
In March 2018, Mark Conditt, a white man espousing anti-gay rights and pro-gun views, blew himself up after conducting a FedEx mail bombing spree in Austin, Texas. Two African-Americans, Anthony House and Draylen Mason, were killed by mail bombs that arrived at their homes.
Perhaps the worst case of the U.S. postal system being used to carry out terrorism was the 2001 anthrax attacks. Anthrax-laden envelopes were sent to the U.S. Capitol building, including Democratic senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, and news organizations. Five people were killed and 17 severely sickened. The attack paralyzed Congress for enough time for it to pass the post-9/11 Patriot Act, which systematically curtailed many civil liberties. The FBI’s investigation failed to treat the attack as the work of neocons wanting to blame the attack on Muslims. The anthrax letter sent to Daschle stated: “Death to America. Death to Israel.”
WMR’s investigation of the case concluded that Israeli intelligence assets in New Jersey and at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland were involved in the anthrax attacks. In addition, U.S. intelligence assets at the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground in Utah; Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio; and the National Center for Biomedical Research and Training at Louisiana State University were involved in aerosolizing the anthrax spores used in the attack. In 2008, Fort Detrick scientist Dr. Bruce Ivins was named by the George W. Bush Justice Department as the sole culprit for the attack, conveniently after Ivins reportedly committed suicide.
No sooner had pipe bombs addressed to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, former Attorney General Eric Holder, Senator Cory Booker, U.S. Representative Maxine Waters, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA director John Brennan at CNN in New York [pictured right], hedge fund tycoon George Soros, and actor Robert DeNiro been intercepted by law enforcement, pro-Trump right wingers began charging that the bombs were a “false flag” conducted covertly by the Democrats. Those echoing this unfounded conspiracy included Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and Ann Coulter.
In fact, history shows that it is the right wing and fascists who engage in “false flag” terrorist attacks using postal systems. Even the most infamous mail bomber, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber—who sent or delivered 16 mail bombs between 1978 and 1995 that killed three and injured 23, represented a form of extreme “sovereign citizen” libertarianism. Kaczynski’s views, spelled out in his “Manifesto,” are more akin to current forms of alt-right extremism with their rejection of “leftism.”
The deadly alliance between neocons and the alt-right in the Trump administration means even greater danger to the security of all Americans.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2018 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
