A State Capitol Police “mug shot” of Hal Turner after his June booking for “inciting injury” of two state legislators in Connecticut
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Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, said he does not believe the claims of either Hal Turner or the FBI.
Photo by Alen Abdula/PRA
September 9, 2009
Jewish organizations and others involved in the battle against anti-Semitism are puzzling over assertions by a New Jersey blogger and broadcaster that he was paid by the FBI to make violent anti-Jewish and anti-black statements.
White supremacist Hal Turner, who works from his North Bergen headquarters, has been the subject of careful monitoring for years by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Heard on short-wave radio station WBCQ between 2000 and 2004 and more recently in a webcast, Turner espoused a white supremacist philosophy that frequently spills into hatred of Jews and Holocaust denial (see sidebar).
Turner’s extremist statements also landed him in legal trouble: He is scheduled to be tried in Chicago Oct. 5 for “threatening to assault and murder” three federal appeals court judges who angered him for ruling in favor of gun-control laws. He is being held without bail at a federal detention center in Chicago.
In addition, Turner faces an Oct. 19 hearing in Connecticut on a felony charge of inciting injury to persons after urging readers of his blog to “take up arms” and “foment direct action” against two state legislators.
He made the statement in response to legislation that would have given lay members of Roman Catholic churches more control over their parishes’ finances.
After being appointed Turner’s lawyer by a Hartford Superior Court judge, Newark attorney Michael Orozco offered an astounding defense of his client: Turner, he said, “made these vicious, sometimes anti-Semitic attacks” so the FBI could track his political enemies.
“My client was trained as an agent provocateur” who was told by “his FBI handler to ‘attack these individuals and groups,’” the lawyer told NJ Jewish News. “They would tell him, ‘Go attack this group, even go after Jewish people and Jewish organizations.’”
An Aug. 31 Internet entry on a website now being maintained as the “Family of Hal Turner Blogspot” purports to detail Orozco’s claim. It says he was recruited by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force around 2002 “to be an ‘Intelligence Operative.’”
According to the site, Tuner was “tasked” with savaging Israelis and Jewish groups, judges, and legislators in order to “flush out the ADL/AIPAC ‘moles’ within the FBI and U.S. Dept of Justice.”
“The FBI knew it had information leaks which had impaired many investigations of Israeli, Jewish, and other suspects. The FBI wanted to plug up those leaks,” the blog alleges.
Orozco told NJ Jewish News that between 2002 and 2007, the FBI paid Turner “cash in the tens of thousands of dollars.” The attorney insisted there is “tangible evidence” of their relationship. But he said such proof is “under seal by the courts because it is the file of an intelligence operative. The evidence is incontrovertible, and it is accurate, 100 percent accurate.”
In Washington, FBI press officer Bill Carter declined to comment on whether Turner had any relationship with the Bureau.
“The matter is before the courts, precluding us from making any statements about his attorney’s statements or statements by him,” Carter told NJJN. “Also, it is the policy of the FBI not to confirm or deny whether an individual provided any information or performed a service for the FBI.”
Without hard evidence of such a relationship, groups who track extremists like Turner were hard-pressed to offer comment.
Kenneth Stern, the American Jewish Committee’s director on anti-Semitism and extremism, has worked closely with the FBI for years on training programs.
“It is hard to gauge” Turner’s claims, he said, “because none of us knows what the FBI did or didn’t do, and they are not going to say anything.”
Stern said Turner’s argument that he acted at the behest of the FBI could be effective in court if it can be proven.
“If he’s saying he did it because the government asked him to do it, his lawyer can argue, ‘You can’t ask someone to do something and then prosecute them for doing it,’” said Stern, a former criminal defense attorney.
Marilyn Mayo, codirector of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League’s New York headquarters, told NJJN her organization has been keeping close watch on Turner since he began broadcasting.
“We monitor extremists, and in 2000, extremists were really starting to get into the Internet as a way to reach audiences,” she said.
But Mayo — whose organization has its own close relationship in sharing intelligence data with the FBI — would not comment on Turners’ claims regarding the Bureau.
“That is not something I have any direct knowledge of,” she said.
Chip Berlet has studied right-wing extremism for more than 20 years as senior analyst at Political Research Associates.
Berlet acknowledged that militant right-wing groups and individuals are “profoundly active” in disseminating anti-Semitism. In June, after James van Brunn was charged with murdering a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Berlet noted in a web essay that van Brunn’s website included links to White Supremacist and Holocaust denial sites. “The shooting today is a prime example of why it is a mistake to ignore bigoted conspiracy theories,” Berlet wrote.
However, Berlet said in a telephone interview, the FBI has a history “of collaborating in operations in which militant, armed right-wing groups were worked with to target the Left.”
“I don’t believe either the FBI or Hal Turner,” said Berlet. “The FBI has a long history of lying, and Hal Turner has a long history of being a thug and a vicious demagogue. Let’s see where the evidence takes us. It is not impossible that the FBI helped create this person and got him addicted to being a demagogue, then walked away from him.”
Paul Goldenberger, a security adviser to many Jewish organizations, strongly disagrees.
Goldenberg directs the Secure Community Network, which advises the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and works “very closely with the Bureau and the Department of Homeland Security.”
“Knowing the FBI as I do, I could always be wrong; nobody’s 100 percent and I’m not sitting in some FBI command center right now.
“But I would be quite surprised if Mr. Turner worked for the FBI. I know the FBI as one of the most professional, careful, and ethical law enforcement agencies in this country. Knowing how law enforcement operates and having had undercover informants work for me personally, the handling of informants is something the FBI takes very seriously.
“In a million years,” said Goldenberg, “I could never imagine the FBI compelling or recommending or suggesting that Turner become involved in even suggesting criminality.”
Orozco’s claims seem also to reference several news stories concerning Jewish groups in recent years. In 2004, the FBI set up a sting targeting two officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, who were charged with dealing in classified information. This year, the government dropped its case against the two.
In 1993, the San Francisco district attorney investigated allegations that the ADL illegally obtained police and government records on a wide array of political groups. The DA later dropped those charges after the ADL, which did not admit obtaining any information illegally, agreed to pay for anti-bigotry programs.
Getting the hate message
THE ANTI-DEFAMATION League, which has been monitoring Hal Turner’s statements since 2000, has posted these examples on its website:
March 17, 2009: “Christians are pro-Christ, jews [sic] are anti-Christ. It’s that simple and the jews prove it almost everyday with their obnoxious behavior. Jewish behavior beget hate of Jews. You’d think after 5,000 years of being thrown out of virtually every country on earth, jews would get the message, wise-up and change their behavior. They don’t. This speaks to their character — or more accurately, the lack thereof. Then again, what should we expect from a group of people that Jesus called ‘a den of vipers?’”
September 25, 2005: I guess it would be OK to bomb jewish [sic] Yeshivas that raise money for things we don’t like?!?!?!? After all, if schools are now legitimate military targets for Israel, they must then be legitimate military targets for everyone. Right? Maybe we should start drawing up lists of Jewish Yeshivas here in the United States?”
February 28, 2005: To urge followers to celebrate his birthday Turner wrote that “a full day of violence against blacks…would be a really nice thing…complete with lynchings, church burnings, drive-by shootings and bombings to put these subhuman animals back in their place.”
Sept. 25, 2002: “It is time to start killing Jews in the United States, cut their throat as they walk down the street, drive by and blast them with a shotgun…throw Molotov cocktails through their jewelry store windows and then Israel can ask us to stop…BOMB their synagogues, BOMB their businesses, let’s BOMB their homes, that’s what I SAY because maybe when these filthy Jew, mother f- - - start dying en masse here in the United States, they will pay attention over in Israel.”
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