Why is it that the progressives in this country seem to go out of their way to embrace murderers and terrorists like Bill Ayers or Mumia Abu-Jamal?
While not as high profile as the Weather Underground terrorist-turned-college-professor or the convicted Philly cop-killer, this deboinaire fellow above is convicted drug trafficker, unrepentant bomber and progressive attack dog Brett Kimberlin.
During September 1978, the Indianapolis suburb of Speedway, IN was rocked by a series of bomb blasts including one that gravely injured Vietnam veteran Carl DeLong outside of Speedway High School and another that destroyed a parked Speedway Police cruiser.
Investigators were able to piece together enough evidence that led them to the store that sold the device that was used as the timer- clerks who were able to identify Brett Kimberlin from a photo array. Kimberlin ran a vegetarian resturant called to Broad Ripple that local police believed was a front for drug trafficking.
In late July 1978, 65-year old Julia Scyphers was shot to death by a man who knocked on the door of her Speedway home. While looking for a motive, police learned that Scypher's daughter, Sandra Barton, worked at the Broad Ripple. A few weeks prior to the murder family dispute, Scyphers had expressed concern that one of Sandra's co-workers expressed an inordinate interest in her 10 year old granddaughter Julia. Police suspected that Kimberlin was involved in the shooting and had set off a series of bombs in Speedway as a distraction.
That September, a Speedway print shop notified the United States Army after a suspicious customer requested that a quantity of military ID cards be reproduced. On September 20, the customer returned wearing a security guard's uniform with a Department of Defense insignia. The customer turned out to be Brett Kimberlin and the DOD insignia was fake. An Army Criminal Investigative Divison investigator was in the shop waiting for Kimberlin and arrested him for wearing the bogus DoD badge. Local police investigating the Speedway bombings obtained a search warrant for the car that Kimberlin had driven to the print shop. In the trunk, they found traces of Tovex- the water gel based explosive used in the Speedway bombings- and four devices similar to the timers used. Although investigators felt that they had their man, they didn't immediately pursue charges because they needed to further bolster their case.
A few months later Kimberlin got himself arrested again. He was in Texas with another man, trying to rent a small airplane. Investigators down there soon found out that the men had also rented construction equipment with which they'd built a small landing strip in the desert. On the night of Feb. 16, 1979, federal agents watched as a plane loaded with Colombian marijuana approached the little airstrip. But there was a heavy fog that night and the pilot radioed that he could not land at the makeshift airport and would have to set down at real airport nearby -- but that meant he had to dump the cargo from the air. The men on the ground, and the agents observing them, converged in the desert. Nine men were arrested, including Brett Kimberlin.Although investigators couldn't conclusively tie Kimberlin to the murder of Julia Scyphers, in 1980 prosecutors charged Kimberlin with the Speedway bombings. Although the first trial ended in a hung jury, Kimberlin recieved a 12 year sentence for impersonating a DOD security guard on top of his 4 year sentence for drug smuggling in Texas. After a second trial in Indiana, Kimberlin was convicted of illegal posession of explosives while a third trial resulted a conviction for the Speedway bombings and a 50 year prison sentence.
While in prison, Kimberlin kept busy studying up on the law before fabricating stories about selling pot to then vice-president Dan Quayle and suing the Federal Bureau of Prisons for depriving him of his right to play electric guitar while incarcerated. While Kimberlin was incarcerated, Carl DeLong committed suicide due to the injuries he recieved from the bomb Kimberlin left outside of the Speedway High School.
In 1983, DeLong's widow won a $1.6 million judgement against Kimberlin in a civil suit. After serving only 13 years of his 50 year prison sentence, Kimberlin was paroled in 1994. However, his parole was revoked in 1997 after he made no effort to pay the DeLong judgement. By 2001, Kimberlin was once again released from prison.
After his release, Kimberlin involved himself with a number of progressive organizations while maintaining that he was exonerated of his crimes in a some secret and undisclosed deal with the government. Kimberlin co-founded a left leaning organization called Velvet Revolution with liberal blogger Brad Freidman, as well as another group called the Justice Through Music Project. Both organizations recieved substantial donations from singer Barbara Streisand and the George Soros-funded Tides Foundation. Some of the victims of Kimberlin's lawfare theorize that the lawsuits are attempts by the domestic terrorist to secure the names and home addresses of additional bloggers to harrass and stalk.
Since at least 2010, Kimberlin reportedly put his jailhouse lawyer expertise to not only threaten conservative bloggers with nuisance lawsuits and baseless criminal complaints, but also calling employers and families of bloggers and making thinly-veiled threats. The basis for these lawsuits? The bloggers pointed out Kimberlin's extensive criminal background, which is a matter of public record.
More disturbingly, those who have run afoul of Brett Kimberlin or Brad Freidman have found themselves on the recieving end of a malicious prank known as 'Swatting' where an anonymous individual dials 911 claiming to have murdered somebody before giving the dispatcher the victim's home address, prompting an armed response from a SWAT team. The caller generally uses Skype and remains anonymous after hiding behind anonymous IP proxies while making the call.
In his final interview before his February 2012 death, conservative web publisher Andrew Breitbart mentioned in passing a 2011 incident in which an LA County Sheriff's SWAT team was summoned to the home Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney and conservative blogger Patrick Frey in the middle of the night. A similar incident reportedly took place in New Jersey the same week. Frey, who blogs under the monicker Patterico posted audio of the 911 call on his blog.
Earlier this month, Kimberlin apparently contacted the wife of blogger Robert Stacy McCain's employer. As a precaution, McCain and his family vacated their home before a convicted bomber could come a-knockin' or send a SWAT team to his house under false pretenses. The Other McCain continues blogging from an undisclosed location after alerting the authorities of Kimberlin's attempts to communicate with him.
Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said that Kimberlin's lawfare and harassment of conservative bloggers comes as no surprise. The senior senator from the Beehive state said that he and a staffer were on the recieving end of a civil suit from Kimberlin in 1999 claiming that Hatch's office involved itself in his 1997 parole hearing.
In response to Kimberlin's escalating lawfare, harassment and attempts to stifle the first amendment rights of right-leaning bloggers and social netorking users such as The Other McCain, Liberty Chick, Patterico and Ace of Spades a number of conservatives on twitter and the blogosphere have declared May 25th as 'Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day'. Not only is this an attempt to bring the disenfectant of sunlight onto Kimberlin and his Democrat supporters in hacker group Anonymous and the Occupy Wall Street movement, but it should also raise the very valid question of why exactly Speedway bomber Brett Kimberlin is a free man.
[hat tip- The Lonely Conservative; Ace of Spades; Patterico]
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