Friends on “Bombers Row”

At Colorado’s ADX, Kaczynski befriended two other high-profile inmates: Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. For a time, the three were exercise buddies who occupied neighboring prison cells.

A. Correspondence with Rick Sallinger

A1. Extract of a letter from Ted to Rick — March 7, 1999

Thanks for your letter of February 17.

In answer to your question, yes, I do share exercise time with Timothy McVeigh and Ramzi Yousef....

A2. From Rick to Ted — March 17, 1999

Dear Ted,

Thanks very much for your letter of March 7, 1999. As you requested I am enclosing copies of your letters and am signing them for you.

I appreciate your confirmation that you share exercise time with Mc Veigh ...

B.

B1. From Ted to [REDACTED] — 6/27/01

... DNA evidence. I think there’s good reason to believe that innocent prisoners have been executed, but I don’t see that that is worse than an innocent prisoner’s having to serve a life sentence. Of course, the argument is ... Oh, hell with it. I don’t want to say anything serious. Not in the mood for it.

I agree with you about the death penalty being “official revenge.” I mean, it was natural for the relatives of people killed in the Oklahoma City bombing to want McVeigh to die. That’s the law of nature. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. But if they haven’t got the guts to take their own revenge, then they shouldn’t whine for the government to do it for them. I’m a great believer in self-reliance. If people want the government to do things for them, then they have no right to complain when the govt. charges them taxes or subjects them to regulations. They can’t have it both ways

Seriously, now, you don’t need to apologize for the birthday-card thing. And I do hope that things are going well for you.

C.

C1. From Ted to Dr. Sheptoski

Dear Dr. Sheptoski:

I have read your dissertation, “Ideology or Insanity? Media Presentation of Ted Kaczynski and Tim. McVeigh.” I think you are quite right in concluding that the media tended to portray me as mentally ill to a much greater extent than they did McVeigh, and that they were more apt to attribute political motivations to McVeigh than to me. Your conclusion confirms the subjective impression I had already formed from what I had read in the print media. It is obvious moreover that our society for a long time has been using the concept of mental illness to disguise certain negative value-judgments as statements of medical fact, and that the media. have played an important role in this “medicalization” process.

However, for several reasons I think your dissertation provides very little if any support for the hypothesis that “violent political protest from the right has been accepted as politically and ideologically motivated, while violent political protest from the left has been marginalized” (page 94 of the dissertation).

First, your assumption that Kaczynski was a left-wing anarchist is incorrect. The following paragraph appears in the covering letter that FC sent to The New York Times with the manuscript of “Industrial Society and Its Future” (the “Manifesto”):

“We decided to call ourselves anarchists not in order to associate ourselves with any particular anarchist group or movement but only because we felt we needed some label to apply to ourselves and ‘anarchist’ was the only one that seemed to fit. The term ‘anarchist’ has been applied to a wide variety of attitudes and about the only thing these attitudes have in common is apposition to the power of governments and other large: organizations. That certainly fits us.”

Thus, although the existing American anarchist movement is considered left-wing, there was no reason to connect Kaczynski with that movement or with any other left-wing movement.. The term “anarchist “, when used in the broad sense indicated above, certainly need not imply “left-wing”, In fact it is my recollection that during the mid-1990’s the media quoted some conservative figure as having called the militias “anarchist.”

Any notion that FC was left-wing should have been dispelled by the content of the Manifesto. On page 35 of your dissertation you say that the Manifesto “specifically criticized ‘leftists’”, which is a considerable understatement. It was obvious that author of the Manifesto despised leftists.

Of course, you could argue that the foregoing would not necessarily prevent the media from identifying Kaczynski as a leftist, since journalists are so careless about facts that they could easily have overlooked the ones I’ve just mentioned. So let’s assume that the media did indeed see Kaczynski as left-wing. Even so your data provide very little support for the hypothesis that the media treat violent political protest on the right differently from violent political protest un the left.

It is very hazardous To draw general conclusions from comparison of only two individual cases, because differences found between the two cases may be attributable to circumstances peculiar to the specific cases in question. A valid test of the general hypothesis would require, at a minimum, examination of many individual cases.

There were in fact circumstances peculiar to Kaczynski’s and McVeigh’s cases that could have explained their differential treatment by the media without recourse to the hypothesis that the media are biased against the left. For example beginning shortly after his arrest, Kaczynski’s mother and brother began giving media interviews in which. they portrayed him as mentally ill. (They lied. See the manuscript Truth versus Lies that I mentioned in my previous letter.) To my knowledge, no similar factor was present in McVeigh’s case: Hence all difference in the extent to which the media medicalized Kaczynski and McVeigh respectively, after the time when Kaczynski’s mother and brother began giving their interviews, could easily be attributed to. this factor and therefore has little if any value in demonstrating a media bias against the left.

Rather than comparing media treatment of Kaczynski and McVeigh, it would have been more to the point to compare media treatment of the American anarchist movement and of the militia movement. I would be willing to bet that if such a study were carefully and objectively carried out, it would show That, say, from 1995 to 1998, the media treated the militia movement much more harshly than they treated the anarchist movement. This would shoot down the hypothesis that the media “medicalized” Kaczynski more then they did McVeigh because the, were biased against the “left-wing” anarchists as contrasted with the “right-wing” militias.

Furthermore, even a study comparing the media’s Treatment. of anarchists with their treatment of the militias would yield no general conclusions as to the media’s treatment of the left versus their treatment of the right. It is a dubious procedure to necessarily treated them all in the same way; and it is dead wrong to lump Together all “rightists” as if the media treated all of them in the same way.

One could make a good argument That there is sufficient psychological and ideological cohesion among the various factions of the American left so that it is possible to speak of the left as a unit, though it does not necessarily follow that. The media treat all left-wing factions similarly.

But it Is nonsense to speak of “the right” as a unit, and it is certain that the media do not treat all factions called “right-wing” in the same way. The word “right”, as it is used in America today, is a catch-all term That is applied to groups that have radically different and mutually conflicting ideologies. Compare, for example, the current G.W. Bush administration with the Montana Freemen. The latter were radically individualistic and refused to obey the law or recognize the authority of the government; and I think some militias had similar ideologies. Both they and the Bush administration have been called “right-wing”, but it is safe to assume that the two groups would have no use for one another; and it is clear that they have not been Treated similarly by the media.

Thus, supposing that a difference had been demonstrated between the media’s treatment of anarchists and their treatment of the militias, one could not infer from this that there would be a similar difference between the media’s treatment of the left in general and their treatment of the right in general.

Independently of all of the foregoing, your data have little value

in showing a media bias against the left because the media’s differential treatment of Kaczynski and McVeigh could easily be accounted for by an alternative hypothesis, namely, that the media were much more interested in discrediting the militias than they were in discrediting the anarchists. Under this hypothesis, the media would have attributed McVeigh’s action to his militia-like ideology rather. than to mental illness because the overwhelming majority of Americans were horrified by the Oklahoma City bombing, and media presentation of that bombing as an expression of a militia-associated ideology would have tended strongly to discredit the militias.

It is worth noting that, in a precisely analogous tactic. Kaczynski was used to discredit the radical environmentalist movement. In his book Ecoterror: The World of the Unabomber, Ron Arnold, an extractive-industry shill and co-founder of the “wise use” movement, portrayed Kaczynski as politically- motivated rather than mentally ill, and argued that Kaczynski had derived his ideology from the radical environmentalists.

It is quite clear from Arnold’s book that he did this in order to discredit the radical-environmentalist movement. The fact that the

mainstream media did not try to use Kaczynski discredit radical environmentalism can be accounted For by the existence of significant sympathy for environmentalism in the media.

Frankly, I think the claim that the media ave biased against the left and in favor of the right is a lot of crap. The media are biased against whatever appears to be a threat to the security of the existing system, and there are at least as many threats to the system from the right as from the left. I don’t doubt that the Kind of biasing process described by Herman and Chomsky does exist, but I would argue that it is directed as much against the right as against the left.