On August 9 Hal Turner is scheduled to go on trial in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, for allegedly threatening three federal appeals court judges in an Internet blog post. For the past several years, Turner, an Internet radio shock jock, has been one of the top purveyors of incendiary racist bombast. He has been dubbed the “Host of Hate” by the Southern Poverty Law Center and has provided the SPLC and other left-wing activist groups with a handy image to use in smearing conservatives.
The major problem for prosecutors is that Turner (shown in photo) was on the payroll of the FBI for much of the time that he was spewing his hate-filled rants across the World Wide Web and delivering speeches throughout the country to Aryan misfits. According to news accounts and Turner’s defense attorney, Turner was recruited by FBI counterterrorism agents in 2002 or 2003 and paid thousands of dollars to engage in his “white power” antics, supposedly to flush out and expose genuine racists who could pose a terror threat. His federal handlers even sanctioned an earlier threat he had made against another federal judge, Turner says. The feds acknowledge that Turner worked for them but claim they severed the relationship in 2007. However, according to Peter J. Sampson, a reporter for The Record in New Jersey, “records show Turner continued to provide tips to the FBI and other agencies until weeks before his arrest last June.”
Hal Turner has been a gold mine for groups like the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), providing the perfect stereotypical image (for them) of the white-male-as-rabid-racist. A special profile on Turner in the SPLC’s Intelligence Report for Fall 2003 describes him thusly:
A belligerent, foul-mouthed talk show host, Turner is the maestro of radio hate — a man who rants about a “Portable N****r Lyncher” machine, “faggots,” “savage Negro beasts,” “bull-dyke lesbians” and “lazy-a** Latinos … slithering across the border.” And that is just the beginning.
Turner has figured prominently in the SPLC’s steady deluge of reports about the imminent danger from the Right.
Hal Turner can likewise boast dozens of entries on the ADL’s website. An ADL press release for April 24, 2006, warns: “Extremists Declare ‘Open Season’ on Immigrants; Hispanics Target of Incitement and Violence.” The statement claims: “White supremacists and other far-right extremists are engaging in a growing number of violent assaults against legal and illegal immigrants and those perceived to be immigrants, while singling out all Hispanic Americans as potential targets.” It then quotes Turner, from his radio talk show: “Slowly but surely we are headed toward the solution that I have been advocating for years: KILL ILLEGAL ALIENS AS THEY CROSS INTO THE U.S. When the stench of rotting corpses gets bad enough, the rest will stay away.”
Although full details of the relationship between Turner and the Department of Justice/FBI may not be known for some time (if ever), the Turner case is but one of many that illustrate the serious dangers to freedom posed by government agents provocateurs. Whether or not Turner initially may have served a legitimate purpose of infiltrating and exposing genuine “homegrown” terrorist threats, there is no question that his activities and utterances have contributed to inter-racial polarization and have been used effectively by legislators and professional hate finders (such as the SPLC and ADL) to lobby for more “hate crime” laws and “anti-terrorism” measures that have greatly expanded the power of the State, while greatly diminishing the freedoms of all Americans.
OKC Provocateurs
When Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were arrested and indicted for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of the Murrah Federal Building that claimed 169 lives, the federal Department of Justice claimed that it was still pursuing “others unknown” who were involved in the terror act. Among those being sought was a “John Doe,” a sketch of whom had been circulated to all law-enforcement agencies. An extensive, multi-year investigation by The New American yielded abundant evidence that indeed there were at least several other co-conspirators involved in the bombing, including a leader of the Oklahoma Ku Klux Klan, several Middle Eastern individuals, and a foreign national from Germany.
One of the primary suspects our investigation pointed to is Dennis Mahon, the organizer and Imperial Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan of Oklahoma, and a leader in the White Aryan Resistance (W.A.R.), a violent, racist national group headed by Tom Metzger. Long before Hal Turner was spouting his venomous bile, Mahon and Metzger were preaching the gospel of hate and providing the SPLC, the ADL, and the liberal-left media with the pretext to claim the urgent need for more stringent “hate speech” and “hate crime” laws.
Mahon was a frequent resident at the Aryan settlement in rural Oklahoma known as “Elohim City,” which Timothy McVeigh visited. McVeigh also made a phone call to an individual at Elohim City (as shown by his phone records and according to testimony of Elohim City residents) immediately after confirming the reservation for the Ryder truck used in the Oklahoma City bombing. Mahon confirmed, in an interview with this writer, that he knew McVeigh and knew McVeigh to have been in Elohim City. Mahon denied any participation in the bombing, but Carol Howe, an undercover informant for the federal ATF inside Elohim City, says otherwise. According to Howe, she accompanied Mahon and German national Andreas Strassmeir to Oklahoma City to scout the Murrah Building. She says she warned federal officials of the plot before the fatal bombing. ATF and FBI documents, along with other evidence developed by this writer and other investigators, support Howe’s story. The FBI and ATF documents also support her claim that Mahon and Strassmeir were trained in explosives and were training others.
Incredibly, neither Mahon nor Strass-meir were investigated as suspects in the case, despite the pleadings of family members of victims of the bombing for the FBI to do so. They seemed to be mysteriously protected by Attorney General Janet Reno and the Clinton Justice Department. Strass-meir admitted to having met McVeigh, and it was Strassmeir who was the intended recipient of the above-mentioned call McVeigh made to Elohim City. Strassmeir was living in the United States illegally on an expired visa and engaging in activities that were clearly illegal for a foreign national, such as making and detonating explosives, training the Elohim City “militia” in firearms use and combat tactics, and carrying a concealed firearm. Yet he was allowed to remain at large for months after the bombing — and then allowed to slip out of the country via Mexico. Only after he had exited the country did the FBI develop an interest in him, and then only to the extent that they interviewed him briefly by telephone.
Dennis Mahon continued his charmed existence, somehow evading prosecution in the many criminal escapades that sent many of his confederates to prison. The inescapable conclusion arrived at by many investigators (as well as many of his former associates) is that he is a protected federal “asset.” That is my conclusion as well, especially following an incident in which Mahon left a message on my home answering machine threatening my life and my family. The FBI agents who listened to the tape and took a copy of it were quite pleased that they had “slam dunk” evidence to prosecute him for interstate phone threats, a federal crime. They were, no doubt, baffled later to find out that their superiors at DOJ decided not to do anything about it.
The usual lenient treatment given by top-level government officials to prime terror suspects doesn’t end there. Look at the case of Ali Mohamed, who is either one of the most brilliant triple agents in history, or a protected government asset and provocateur. The former Egyptian army captain was recruited by the CIA and brought to the United States, where he became a Special Forces advisor at Fort Bragg (training our Green Berets) and, later, an FBI undercover informant. For years he operated as al-Qaeda’s most important mole in the top levels of the U.S. military and intelligence communities, while simultaneously serving as Osama bin Laden’s chief of security. While at Fort Bragg, Ali Mohamed trained the terrorists who carried out the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. He also personally photographed the U.S. embassy in Kenya, taking the surveillance pictures that bin Laden used for the suicide bombing that killed 224 and injured thousands in 1998. He twice escorted al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, on clandestine fundraising trips throughout the United States to raise money for Jihad. Along the way, many people in the military, law enforcement, and intelligence suspected Mohamed and tried to have him investigated and arrested. However, he was repeatedly protected by individuals in top positions in the Clinton administration. The incredible story of Ali Mohamed is told in stunning detail in Triple Cross by award-winning author and journalist Peter Lance.
The case of David Coleman Headley, currently at the center of a major terrorism/intelligence coverup by the Obama administration, illustrates the deadly serious ongoing problems in our intelligence agencies highlighted in the Ali Mohamed case. Headley (formerly known as Daood Sayed Gilani) has pled guilty to being a co-conspirator in the 2008 Mumbai Massacre, a three-day terror spree of 10 coordinated shooting and bombing attacks carried out in Mumbai, India’s largest city. The attackers were members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group and former Pakistani military officers. Headley reportedly has admitted to scouting the locations for the attacks and providing the terrorists with video and GPS coordinates of the targeted areas.
U.S. authorities arrested Headley, but they made a plea deal with him that takes a possible death sentence off the table and prevents his extradition to India — which is inexplicable, unless Headley is a U.S. government asset. A convicted heroin smuggler, Headley began working as an undercover asset for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1998. Was he still working for DEA while helping plan the Mumbai attacks, or had he been transferred to the CIA or another agency? The evidence made public thus far supports the suspicion that Headley could not have carried out his many trips and activities without at least the knowledge of U.S. agents.
Discredit From Within
Then there are the agents provocateurs with no known ties to the U.S. government, but whose actions can only lead to an increase in government power. Recently, a number of Democratic Party activists have been exposed attempting to stage provocations that would discredit the Tea Party movement or Republican Party opposition. Here are a few examples:
• Jason Levin. Founder of the sabotage campaign known as “Crash the Tea Party,” Levin is not as subtle as most agents provocateurs. In the interest of causing more damage to the Tea Parties (as well as, perhaps, to boost his own ego), he attempted to recruit fellow leftists nationwide to join in activities aimed at disrupting and discrediting the peaceful, patriotic groups. On his crashtheteaparty.org website (which has been taken down), Levin, a public school teacher in Beaverton, Oregon, wrote:
WHAT WE WANT: To dismantle and demolish the Tea Party by any means necessary.
HOW WE WILL SUCCEED: By infiltrating the Tea Party itself!… Whenever possible we will act on behalf of the Tea Party in ways which exaggerate their least appealing qualities (misspelled protest signs, wild claims in TV interviews, etc.) to further distance them from mainstream America and damage the public’s opinion of them. We will also use the inside information that we have gained in order to disrupt and derail their plans.
• Andrew Hendricks. Another provocateur who telegraphed his plans (though in considerably less detail than Levin) is New York City hotel exec Andrew Hendricks, who identified himself on his personal Twitter.com page as “A New York City Hotelier and Liberal Urban Writer.” He also called for “crashing the Boston Tea Party express in less than 24 hours.”
• Kathy Sullivan. New Hampshire’s former Democratic State Party Chairman Kathy Sullivan has been leading the covert sabotage campaign in her state, reports NowHampshire.com. “Sullivan has been calling and e-mailing liberal activists trying to get them to attend tea parties in different parts of the state and hold signs denying the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate and make racially disparaging comments to reporters,” the website claims. According to NowHampshire.com, a Democratic Party source told them Sullivan “is absolutely obsessed with painting the tea party people as racists.”
• Maurice Schwenkler. In August 2009, as angry citizens converged on Town Hall meetings with members of Congress to express their opposition to ObamaCare and outrage over Wall Street bailouts, the Colorado Democratic Party decried a vandalism attack at its Denver headquarters. Two masked, hammer-wielding thugs smashed 11 windows and caused thousands of dollars in damage, then fled on bicycles. One of the perpetrators, however, was caught. He turned out to be Obama supporter Maurice Schwenkler, a Democrat Party activist and environmental/transgender activist who had recently worked for the SEIU, one of Obama’s most supportive labor unions. Schwenkler, who seems to have a penchant for violence and “direct action,” was also arrested in 2008 for attempting to disrupt the Republican National Convention. Nevertheless, Colorado Democratic Party Chair Pat Waak accused “people opposed to health care” for Schwenkler’s attack on the Democratic headquarters.
Alinsky’s Disciples
Saul Alinsky, the Chicago-based Marxist organizer and author of Rules for Radicals, suffered no compunctions regarding the use of agents provocateurs to discredit the opposition. Alinsky is the founding father of ACORN and dozens of other groups that provide thousands of activist foot soldiers for left-wing causes. In his admiring biography of Alinsky, Let Them Call Me Rebel, Sanford D. Horwitt recounts the elder radical’s trip to Tulane University in 1972, where students had sought his help to protest a speech by George H. W. Bush, who was then Nixon’s representative to the United Nations. According to Horwitt:
The students told Alinsky they were thinking about picketing or disrupting Bush’s address. That’s the wrong approach, he rejoined, not very creative — and besides causing a disruption might get them thrown out of school. He told them, instead, to go to hear the speech dressed as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and whenever Bush said something in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and wave placards reading, “The KKK supports Bush.” And that is what they did, with very successful, attention-getting results.
That was not the first, or last, time that a pseudo-KKK specter would be trotted out as a discrediting device.
When state, county, and federal authorities conducted the famous raid on the secret Communist Party gathering at a farm near Bridgman, Michigan, in August 1922, they captured many of Moscow’s top aboveground and underground agents, including one communist leader who was running a Klan organization for communist purposes. That purpose was to polarize the races and create civil turmoil that the communists could exploit.
Forty years later Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the KKK of Mississippi, told FBI undercover informant Delmar Dennis that he had joined the Communist Party in California in 1947 and that the purpose of his Klan agitation was to provide a pretext “for more and more control over Mississippi by Washington,” which Bowers admitted was a communist objective for America. Bowers was very likely one of the members of the Young Communist League (YCL) that staged a number of phony KKK incidents in California in 1946-47 — including the burning of a cross in front of a Jewish fraternity house — to inflame racial animosities and win support for their favored candidates, who postured as pillars of virtue by denouncing the alleged Klan terrorism.With thousands of Alinsky disciples stretching from the Oval Office to ACORN offices, there is good reason to examine all inflammatory incidents as work of agents provocateurs.
