The FBI had no problem classifying Eric Rudolph as a terrorist. I simply pasted some of his bio from Wikipedia, but reading over it SCREAMS OUT as to why Sarah Palin wouldn't call him a terrorist. The nutball right has completely taken over the GOP. I predict the flood of people from the GOP registering as independent will create an entirely new dynamic in US politics going forward. What will be left of the GOP will be the slobbering masses that are the mostly uneducated, middle class white folks and overwhelmingly middle class white undeducated group that makes up the religious nutball right. In other words, the GOP will be left with the 30 million or so people that regularly listen to Limbaugh/Fox. That would be great, because there would never be enough of them to win anything. Sarah isn't going to cross her base though, even to repudiate a terrorist per the FBI.
Eric Robert Rudolph (born September 19, 1966), also known as the Olympic Park Bomber, is an American radical described by the FBI as a terrorist[2] who committed a series of bombings across the southern United States which killed two people and injured at least 150 others.
Rudolph declared that his bombings were part of a guerrilla campaign against abortion and what he describes as "the homosexual agenda." He spent years as the FBI's most wanted criminal fugitive, but was eventually caught. In 2005 Rudolph pleaded guilty to numerous federal and state homicide charges and accepted five consecutive life sentences in exchange for avoiding a trial and the death penalty. Rudolph was connected with the white supremacist Christian Identity movement.[3] Although he has denied that his crimes were religiously or racially motivated,[4] Rudolph has also called himself a Roman Catholic in "the war to end this holocaust" (of abortion).[5]
Of the bombings Rudolph committed, the most notorious was the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta on July 27, 1996, during the 1996 Summer Olympics. The blast killed spectator Alice Hawthorne and wounded 111 others. Melih Uzunyol, a Turkish cameraman who ran to the scene following the blast, died of a heart attack. Rudolph's motive for the bombings, according to his April 13, 2005 statement, was political:
In the summer of 1996, the world converged upon Atlanta for the Olympic Games. Multinational corporations spent billions of dollars, and Washington organized an army of security to protect these best of all games.
The plan was to force the cancellation of the Games, or at least create a state of insecurity to empty the streets around the venues and thereby eat into the vast amounts of money invested.
If this was indeed the plan, it was unsuccessful. Olympic organizers did not even cancel the day's events.
Rudolph's statement did authoritatively clear Richard Jewell, a Centennial Olympic Park security guard, of any involvement in the bombings. Jewell had been falsely accused of participation in the bombing a few days after the incident, after having been initially hailed as a hero for being the first one to spot Rudolph's explosive device, for saving lives, and for helping to clear the area. When he came (erroneously) under FBI suspicion for involvement in the crime, Jewell became the prime suspect, and an international news story. Rudolph's confession vindicated Jewell.
Rudolph has also confessed to the bombings of an abortion clinic in the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs on January 16, 1997, a gay and lesbian nightclub, the Otherside Lounge, in Atlanta on February 21, 1997, injuring five, and an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama on January 29, 1998, killing part-time security guard Robert Sanderson and critically injuring nurse Emily Lyons. Rudolph's bombs were made of dynamite surrounded by nails which acted as shrapnel.
He is said to have targeted the health clinic and office building because abortions were performed there, and targeted the Otherside Lounge because it was a predominantly lesbian nightclub.
Although Federal Bureau of Prisons regulations give wardens the right to restrict or reject correspondence by an inmate for "the protection of the public, or if it might facilitate criminal activity," including material "which may lead to the use of physical violence," essays which condone violence and militant action written by Rudolph, who is incarcerated in the most secure part of ADX Florence in Colorado, are being published by an Army of God anti-abortion activist who posts Rudolph's essays on an Internet website. [27]While victims maintain that Rudolph's messages are harassment and could incite violence, according to Alice H. Martin, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama at the time of Rudolph's prosecution for the Alabama bombing, there is little the prison can do to restrict the publication of his letters. "An inmate does not lose his freedom of speech," she said.[28] However, the Department of Justice in 2006 criticized the same prison for not properly screening the mail of three inmates convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing after determining the men sent letters from the prison to suspected terrorists overseas.